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Thank you for inviting me to join you this evening. It is inspiring to be here among people devoted to giving of themselves to help others in the most fundamental ways-- “to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.”
That kind of tolerance and genuine charity are what we need most desperately in the world today.
Charity — we know it means love of our fellow human beings.
It is that kind of love that drew me, at the very beginning of my political awareness, to march with Dr. Martin Luther King in Washington.
It was that kind of love, the language of the heart, that allowed me, as an untrained, inexperienced, volunteer teacher to communicate with struggling students in Harlem ghetto schools in New York in the 60s.
It was that kind of love that guided me toward one of my original career goals — in the Peace Corps.
And it was that kind of love — along with a more personal kind — that led me to take a leap of faith, and join in marriage a man who shared that ideal of human charity.
My husband and I were drawn together by a mutual devotion to public service, of giving back to society.
In my case, it was crystallized by the first real adult conversation I had with my father, when he had recently given up a lucrative career in the private sector to head the FAA under President Kennedy.
He confided his worries about failing to make ends meet on a government salary, but he also shared with me that he was far more fulfilled in public service than by merely achieving for himself.
In my husband’s case, his sense of responsibility to others grew naturally from his Muslim faith and Hashemite heritage as senior direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and his position as King, leader and father-figure to the entire Jordanian family.
The sources were worlds apart.
The feeling was the same.
You’ve probably heard of the phrase “the clash of civilizations” It first appeared in an essay by Samuel Huntington in the summer of 1993, describing what the author saw as looming, inevitable strife.
Today the phrase has become shorthand for a complicated history and a multi-faceted conflict.
To deny a cultural aspect to the differences between the Middle East and America, of course, would be plainly wrong; but to reduce the clash to simplistic formulations is to miss an important opportunity for the kind of deep understanding that would invite the first steps to rapprochement.
As someone with roots in both East and West, who has spent most of her adult life trying to build bridges between Arab and American culture, I have come to phrase the debate differently – not as a clash between Islam and Christianity, or between East and West, but between the forces of intolerance and the forces of understanding.
In my work with the United Nations and human rights groups, I have time and again seen that the clashes that impede progress begin with those who insist their way is the only way; who paint the world in black and white.
No one culture has a monopoly on either virtue or intolerance; such qualities are not apportioned geographically, or by religion.
Advocates of compassion and peace can be found in all houses of worship.
I should know — my Grandfather was an Eastern Orthodox Christian Arab who emigrated to the United States and converted to Christian Science when he married my Grandmother.
I was raised by my parents to find my own path, and converted to Islam when I married.
But I also know that a great gulf exists between those who are genuinely willing to listen to and empathize with others, and those who are not.
The greatest oppressors are those who feel entitled to impose by force their idea of what is right.
The greatest injustices in human history occur when people believe so strongly in their own ideology that they are willing to hurt others in its name.
The ideology can be one of self-preservation and lust for power, as with dictators. It can be paternalistic, viewing the oppression of women, minorities, and the otherwise disenfranchised as “for their own good.”
Or, it can be a so-called defensive policy that targets all dissent as a threat that must be dealt with preemptively. All of these arguments have been used in one way or another to justify injustice and conflict.
Faith, we all know, remains one of the most compelling wellsprings of human action, and so, tragically, the justification for political coercion is often cloaked in the language of religion.
We have seen how the perverted actions of a violent fringe have hijacked the great faith of the prophet Muhammad (PBUH) for its own ends.
And yet Islam has no monopoly on radical fundamentalism.
Sadly, Christianity, too, has been used as a pretext for “Holy War” — not the Salvation Army’s war on want and despair, but violent conflict from the Crusades a thousand years ago, to “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans in the last decade.
Jewish extremists also use violence to further their distorted aims; one of them killed Itzhak Rabin for daring to contemplate peace.
As you know all too bitterly here, terrorist threats in America come far more frequently from Aryan-rights fanatics spouting twisted Christian dogma than from Arabs or Muslims.
But to single out a religion because it is used as a cover for evil is exactly the kind of black-and-white thinking that gives rein to the abuse in the first place.