A few weeks ago I asked those who were attending the Shabbat morning service that day to complete a questionnaire about the impact of Religion on Politics that a student at Brighton University had drawn up as part of an undergraduate research project. A half dozen people duly did so; a larger number read the questionnaire and decided not to – and I received quite a few comments about it: There were a lot of leading questions about Islam – and several of you wondered what the research was all about.

I was also puzzled and scribbled lots of questions down around my answers. In my very cordial email exchanges with the student, I explained that the reason so few questionnaires had been completed was those who had picked it up had come up with more questions than answers. I offered to meet with her, so that she could understand better where we were coming from, and I could find out where she was coming from.

That meeting took place two days ago, at the end of Thursday afternoon. I met a delightful young woman in her twenties. As I expected she did not know much about Judaism and Jewish life. But contrary to other expectations I had not managed to banish, she turned out to be a Sudanese Christian, who had come to England as a refugee in 2001 with her parents and siblings – in flight from persecution. As we talked it became very clear why her research into ‘The Influence of Religion on Politics’ concentrated on Islam. Like Jews here in England, she had grown up within a minority community. But unlike Jews in England, she and the other members of her minority community experienced overt discrimination.

I was very impressed by this young woman. Six years ago, she arrived in this country at the age of twenty, a stranger from a dangerous place, without one word of English. Since that time, she had not only learnt to speak and write English, she had taken her GCSEs and an Access course that had enabled her to go to university. She didn’t know anything about the Jewish people to be sure – except that she believed that we were a force in the world and wielded a great deal of power in the United States… but she was open to learn. I showed her around the synagogue, explained about Jewish life in general and Liberal Jewish life in particular, and she was happy to receive some reading material: our leaflet and magazine, the pack of Liberal Judaism leaflets on different topics, and a copy of ‘Affirmations of Liberal Judaism’, which explains the common ground we share with other streams of Judaism, and where we differ. She was very pleased to hear that she would be welcome to attend a service, and, showing an awareness of the assumptions people might make when they saw her – a brown-skinned stranger – asked me if she should bring her student card with her as identification. She also offered her passport and other official papers. I told her that the student card would do the trick, but that she needed to be prepared to answer questions at the front-door. Once inside, I assured her, she would be warmly welcomed.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, for one thing, she is planning to attend a Shabbat morning service. But there is another broader issue here. I struggle – and I’m sure many of you do, too – with how to make sense of all the different manifestations of Islam in the world today. I have participated in dialogue with Muslims for over twenty years – first as a student at the Leo Baeck College, where a week long Jewish Christian Muslim encounter in Germany each spring is an integral part of the rabbinic programme. I have visited mosques, observed regular worship and Sufi meditations. Indeed, I am attending an interfaith meeting at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Worthing this coming Tuesday evening and I shall also be travelling to the Islamic Centre in Markfield just north of Leicester, on July 1st to participate in a two-day residential of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim dialogue group I’ve been a member of for the past 13 years. Incidentally, Imam Sajid, whom many of you know, is also a member. I am very aware of the strong historical links between Jews and Muslims, the similarities between Islam and Judaism, and the connections between Hebrew and Arabic. I have participated in study sessions on the Koran led by Imams and students of Islam, who also introduced me to Islamic teachings about compassion, justice and peace. I am very clear that Muslims are as diverse as Jews and Christians, and that Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, embraces a spectrum of different approaches, and also – like, Judaism and Christianity – is challenged by the conflict between its major strands: In the case of Islam, between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites. I am also extremely conscious that our society is saturated with Islamophobia and that Muslims, individually and collectively, are often on the receiving end of offensive comments and acts perpetrated by ignorant prejudiced non-Muslims – indeed, I speak out against Islamophobia, as I speak out against ant-Semitism.

But – and it’s not a big ‘but’ – the reality is that there is something else going on as well. It has become usual recently to distinguish between Muslims and Islamists – the extreme, fundamentalist forces within Islam that we see in action in various ways in different places in the world today. Islamists have been responsible for imposing a rigid, totalitarian form of Islam on their fellow Muslims in Iran and Afghanistan. Islamists have been radicalising groups with grievances against totalitarian regimes in North Africa and Saudi Arabia. Islamists in the form of Hezbollah have been doing Syria and Iran’s work in Lebanon. Islamists have intervened in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, bringing their extremist version of Islam to the Palestinian people – a people that in reality encompasses Muslims, Christians and those committed to a secular agenda. In fact, the Islamists among the Palestinians have been so successful in transforming Palestinian politics that last year Hamas won a democratic election in the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, it is less well known that Palestinian Christians have been taking flight in droves – to the extent that a place like Bethlehem, once a centre of Palestinian Christianity, has now got a Muslim majority. And when we turn to the global arena, it is clear that Islamists have not just been at work in the troubled Middle East: they are engaged in fermenting terror on an international stage, and have succeeded in bringing that terror to places as far apart as New York, Bali and London.

With the focus of media interest centred on Islamist terror, and on the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, until recently we heard very little about the regime in Sudan – the regime from which that Christian Sudanese student and her family fled in 2001, when the world first began to wake up to radical Islam. How many of us understand what is happening there? I had very little idea until I read, ‘Darfur. A Jewish Response’, prepared by a young Jewish woman called Hannah Weisfeld, and published a few weeks ago by the Pears Foundation. Packed with relevant Jewish teachings and suggestions for action, the booklet also provides a useful summary of the unfolding horror. As with Armenia, almost a century ago, when genocide was the Turkish government’s response to the rebellion of an oppressed people, the Sudanese government and its henchman, the Janjaweed militias, have responded to the rebellion of the impoverished, socially excluded groups of Darfur against the government in Khartoum, with a campaign of slaughter and rape, resulting in mass death and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees. As we try to comprehend the scale of the violence against the Darfuri people, how many of us have thought about why the Darfuris rebelled against the Sudanese government in the first place? How many of us are aware that long before the current terror, the Darfuris suffered persecution and discrimination simply because they are African?

Let me quote now from a letter prepared by Nikki Levitan and her colleagues at the Pears Foundation. That letter is available here at the synagogue, in the Montefiore Hall, for you to sign and send to your MP. It calls on MPs to raise questions; it calls upon the British government to act; it is also a vehicle for each and every one of us to express our condemnation of the Sudanese regime and to show that we want Britain to play its part in coming to the aid of the people of Darfur:

For the past four years, Arab militias, with support from the Sudanese military, have burned more than 3,200 villages. Rape is rife and bombing of civilians from the air has been a common occurrence. Conditions of life impossible for human survival have been imposed on the African population. Over 2 million have fled their homes. Those displaced in Darfur are unable to leave their temporary camps for fear of attack. They are reliant upon aid, the delivery of which is hindered by insecurity.

Tony Blair has talked tough saying he is considering a no-fly zone yet his words are belied by the actions of his Government. The Home Office’s insistence on returning Darfuri African asylum seekers to Sudan tells Khartoum we do not care what it does to Darfuri Africans. Constant reference by the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for International Development to civil war and the misdeeds of the rebel groups diminishes the Sudanese Government’s overwhelming responsibility for the atrocities committed in Darfur.

Sending the right message to Khartoum is crucial. I would ask you to challenge the Home Secretary on the Home Office policy of returning Darfuris to Khartoum. There are around 1,000 Darfuri African asylum seekers in the UK. Why can a wealthy country of 60 million people not give them refuge?

 

Britain can do something. Each one of us can do something – and we can begin by raising our awareness. Knowing a little about the genocide against the people of Darfur is not enough. As it happens, Sudan is a religiously mixed country. Muslims – mostly Sunni – who constitute 75% of the population, have dominated the national government since independence in 1956, but the regime in Sudan is not Islamist, and has become less extreme in recent years – restricting the imposition of Shari’a law to the Muslim-dominated North. The main axis of conflict is ethnic rather than religious. Nevertheless, discrimination against the 10% Christian minority has been endemic, and it is Muslim Arab militias, who are currently inflicting terror on African Darfuris, who represent the other 15%, and who largely practise traditional indigenous religions.

So, we need to distinguish between Muslims and Islamists. But that’s not all: The deeper issue we need to address concerns how we inform ourselves about Islam, and, indeed, about complex societies like Sudan, which most of us know very little about. We need to take urgent, immediate action on behalf of the people of Darfur. We also need to develop a more sophisticated awareness of the most troubled ‘hot-spots’ in the world today. Just as urgent, we need to acknowledge that Muslim life is plural and begin to disentangle the complex differences between: the experiences of minority Muslim communities in countries like Britain and France; the policies of the variously Muslim and Islamist regimes, both Sunni and Shi’a – both in Arab lands and in other regions; and the actions of the vast array of radical Islamist insurgents and their particular struggles. If the world is going to respond effectively to the tyranny and violence perpetrated by Islamists, it is essential that we do not fall victim to Islamophobia. As Jews, after all, we know only too well, where such fear and ignorance leads. May we be among those who challenge prejudice and oppression in every place and who work to foster pluralism, justice and peace throughout the world. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Brighton & Hove Progressive Synagogue – Adat Shalom Verei’ut

23rd June 2007 - 7th Tammuz 5766