The art of open dialogue

Last week, I logged on to the website of my hometown newspaper and found an article with two words as the grim headline: "Mosque Burns." That mosque, located just an hour away from my home in Florida, had a room which was doused with gasoline and set ablaze by an unknown arsonist, leaving a community of Muslims without their local place of worship.

Just one week before this event, our campus saw an incident in which an anti-Semitic sketch with a swastika was scrawled on a blackboard in Bloomberg Hall.

Discrimination is an ugly thing, not merely because it attacks a people of a particular race or religion. Discrimination imposes the label of "victim" upon a community and creates the psyche that one is a target. The legacy of discrimination may be even more displeasing, engendering concepts such as collective responsibility for injustices that have gone unaddressed, culminating in a constant battle over seemingly irreconcilable differences.

Perhaps this view is too cynical. As you might have guessed, the choice of these two opening hate crimes was not haphazard. Muslims and Jews face discrimination in America and abroad, as do many other minority groups. But some may argue that the similarities between Muslims and Jews end there. From this point, they are divided on all issues: Israel and Palestine, Ishmael and Isaac, Bush and Cheney — you name it, they're bound to disagree.

But irrationality is sometimes difficult to recognize ... a thousand Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?

This semester, I have became involved in Princeton's first Muslim-Jewish Dialogue, launched by the nonprofit educational organization Abraham's Vision and administered by Muslim Chaplain Khalid Latif and the Center of Jewish Life's Rabbi Julie Roth. About 20 Muslim and Jewish students meet weekly to discuss perceived and actual differences between the two religious groups.

The dialogue took off over spring break during the group trip to Spain. As we were ushered around medieval Spain's great Muslim and Jewish monuments, testaments to a time when Muslims and Jews lived in peace under Muslim rule in Andalusia, our own sense of the present unrest could not be pushed aside.

The first night of our stay in Spain, we took our first step to discuss the tension between Muslims and Jews. What was the point of this dialogue? Does dialogue produce any results? Would we have to compromise on controversial topics? The opinions were divided, as proved to be the case for most of the trip: Some said they came to Spain to discuss the Israel/Palestine issue, others wanted to dicuss the theological intricacies of the two Abrahamic religions, while yet others wanted to learn about a time when Muslims and Jews lived in peace.

Luckily, each topic was addressed to some extent, both formally and informally. Whether in a dark Madrid cafe, on the bus trips through mountainous landscapes or in the lobbies of our hotels, we engaged in dialogue.

I remember one conversation we had on our last day in Spain. Four Jews and four Muslims sat in the "conference room" at the back of our bus and launched into a discussion on the "Muslim perspective" on Israel's right to exist. Voices were raised and tempers were held at bay, but the discussion reinforced for us the most important lessons we had learned through dialogue.

Those lessons cannot be addressed in one column, but they can be introduced. Firstly, our debates had to be approached in a respectful way. We accomplished this by forming friendships free of religious or political differences. When we debated, whether we were angry or enlightened, we had that sense of trust that can only be found when two people enter a dialogue knowing that though they may be divided on the debate's topic, they are allied in their quest for understanding. This leads to another lesson we learned, that understanding does not mean agreeing. Especially in our theological discussions, we did not seek agreement and compromise.

But perhaps the most important thing we learned was how to approach the concept of the "other." Asking one person about the Jewish or Muslim "perspective" was often an unfair request — diversity of opinion existed in our group of 20, and it certainly exists with all the Jews and Muslims in the world. We discovered that stereotypes run deep and die hard. Topics such as Muslims and terrorism and Jews and the media suffered from the problem of attributing a one-dimensional quality to a mass of multidimensional people. Several people were insulted before we understood how best to approach these sensitive topics.

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I've learned that Muslims and Jews have more in common than the unfortunate crimes sometimes directed at them. While the trip to Spain trip not produce peace plans or flowery sentiments of "oneness," it did create a dialogue which continues on campus. It is to Princeton's credit that a core group of Muslim and Jewish students can walk around campus and greet each other without animosity.

The goal is to see how this will affect us and others around us in the future. The hope is that it spreads, but hope can only go so far without some help from conscientious actors working to make dialogue a reality. Sarah Dajani is a sophomore from Seminole, Fla. She may be reached at sdajani@princeton.edu.