I will end this paper with a comparative analysis of Interfaith work in New York, with an emphasis on Muslim engagement based on personal experience. The intention is to shed some light on the impact of Islamophobia in its various forms, as well as other factors such as culture and technology.

Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, interfaith partnership and cooperation have expanded in New York City, both on a leadership level and as a grassroots movement linked to volunteer service and social justice initiatives.  Many participants tend to be politically progressive, at least on some issues, and evangelical Christian, Orthodox Jewish and Salafi Muslim communities generally opt out.

Islamophobic backlash has continued, even increased in recent years, fueled and funded by particular media and political interest groups. Backlash is sustained by geopolitical tensions and outrage over the rise of ISIS, the rise of a reactionary right wing populism, and widespread misunderstanding of Islamic norms. (CAIR, 2016)

The perception of Islam as an existential threat has spread in Europe, as well as the USA, framing a punitive and reactionary response to the presence of a large minority population of Muslims. Anti-Muslim movements have also spread in India, home of the world’s largest Muslim minority of 150 million, as well as Thailand and Sri Lanka. This xenophobic trend is also apparent in certain areas of the former Soviet Union and China. Political leaders have been scapegoating Muslim minorities in the name of religious purity, a non-pluralistic understanding of national identity, and national security claims.

In New York City, security concerns have “trumped” other lines of attack, though parallel efforts have also been made to reframe traditional standards of modesty as gender oppression and an affront to freedom. Mosques and other Muslim organizations have had to withstand smear campaigns on social media and in the tabloid press, along with extensive surveillance by competing law enforcement agencies.

In this context, interfaith dialogue and cooperation have provided an important opening into social acceptance, allowing Muslim leaders and activists to emerge from enforced isolation and at least from time to time transcend the status of “victim” through collaborative civic action. Interfaith activities include efforts to build trust through text-based discussions on shared values; socializing during religious holidays; the creation of safe, neutral spaces such as association for mutual support among diverse neighbors; and service projects to feed the hungry, to advocate for peace, environmental protection and other social justice concerns.

To illustrate (if not map) the local landscape of interfaith engagement, I will briefly describe two projects I have been affiliated with. Both can be understood as responses to the 9/11 attacks.

The first project is an interfaith collaboration on 9/11 disaster response, at first known as the NYDRI partnership affiliated with the New York City Council of Churches, and then superseded by New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS)[15]. One problem with the initial iteration was a misunderstanding of the diverse and decentralized nature of Muslim leadership, which led to some unnecessary exclusions. The second version, led by Peter Gudaitis from the Episcopal Church and characterized by a high degree of professionalism, proved far more inclusive. NYDIS partnered with city agencies to ensure that vulnerable individuals and groups (including undocumented immigrants) would not all through the gaps in relief services. NYDIS convened an “Unmet Needs Roundtable” that provided 5 million dollars in relief to diverse community members, whose needs were presented by case workers from a variety of faith communities. NYDIS also supported chaplaincy services and addressed “Disaster related backlash.” After reducing its staff, it again re-animated services in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, giving over 8.5 million in assistance.

I was a NYDIS board member from its inception, representing Islamic Circle (ICNA Relief USA) with its long track record of disaster relief. After leaving ICNA at the end of 2005 I represented Muslim Consultative Network for several years, and briefly assisted NYDIS community data projects after Hurricane Sandy. Throughout this period, I saw the positive impact of inclusion along with faith leaders from more organized faith traditions and more highly resourced national programs. Despite pressure on some partners, notably Jewish American organizations, to disengage from Muslim groups, trust building and good governance practices allowed the collaboration to continue.

From 2005 to 2007 the “Livingroom Project,” an effort to foster relations among leading Jewish establishment organizations and NYC Muslim civil society, ended in disappointment and even some acrimony. Such gaps were widened in 2007 during media attacks on close Muslim colleagues such as Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of the Kahlil Gibran school, when dialogue partners failed to defend her publicly or to openly challenge the lies and misrepresentations. Interfaith response to the 2010 attacks on Park 51 (the so-called “mosque at ground zero”) was better but still mixed. Reports in 2007 concerning faulty and overbroad police analysis of Muslim radicalization were followed by revelations in 2011-12 concerning the extent of police surveillance on New York City-based Muslim leaders and community institutions.  Relations with the arbiters of New York City political and cultural power suffered.

In the face of this dynamic, Muslim leadership in New York has divided into two camps. The more politically accommodating camp emphasizes engagement, while the more activist camp prioritizes principle. One might discern a convergence of social justice-minded African American imams and Arab activists on one side, and diverse immigrant strivers on the other. However, the political and personality differences are not neat opposites. Nor is one camp more socially or religious conservative than the other. Nevertheless, at least on a leadership level Muslim intra-faith relations have stumbled over the strategic choice between “speaking truth to power” and the tradition of showing respect and building alliances on both sides of the political aisle. Five years on, this breech has not been healed.

Personality differences played a role in this rift. However real differences in opinion and ideology emerged regarding the proper relation to US government authority. Distrust arose regarding motives of those who positioned themselves close to police and seemed to agree with the need for widespread surveillance. In 2012 one party organized a boycott of NY Mayor Bloomberg’s annual interfaith breakfast,[16] to protest his support for problematical NYDP policies. While this attracted media interest, especially for the first year of the boycott, the other camps continued to attend the event, as did the overwhelming majority of multi-faith leaders from around the city.

Some Muslim leaders and activists understand their traditions as being essentially in opposition to worldly power and secular authority as well as Western foreign policy choices.  This perception has resulted in a strategy of maintaining borders with other communities, along with a focus on hate crimes and defending Muslim interests during a time of attack. Interfaith cooperation is not ruled out– but is preferred if instrumental to social justice aims.

I am also a member of the Flushing Interfaith Council[17], which developed as an outgrowth of the Flushing Interfaith Unity Walk. The Walk itself is based on the Children of Abraham Interfaith Peace Walk, founded in 2004 by Rabbi Ellen Lippman and Debbie Almontaser in order to build bridges of understanding among Brooklyn residents in different neighborhoods. The concept is an adaptation of the open house model, with visits, discussion and snacks at diverse houses of worship along the route. In 2010 the Brooklyn-based Walk ended at the site of a proposed mosque in Sheepshead Bay that had attracted anti-Muslim protesters, and Walk participants gave out flowers to the angry crowd.  To serve the borough of Queens, the Flushing Walk started in 2009 and has largely escaped controversy, as it adapts the interfaith model to include a more highly diverse and largely Asian community including the many Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists of Flushing. While it has reached out to this diversity for the Walk and other activities, at the same time, the Council has remained anchored by the participation of “peace church” members—Quakers and Unitarians.

In the borough of Queens, Flushing, NY is also the location of the 1657 Flushing Remonstrance, a founding document of religious liberty in the US. At the time, Peter Stuyvesant, then Governor of what was then the New Netherlands, had formally banned the practice of all religions outside the Dutch Reformed Church. Baptists and Quakers were arrested for their religious practices in the Flushing area. In response, a group of English residents came together to sign the Remonstrance, a call for toleration of not only Quakers but “Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam.”[18] Supporters were subsequently imprisoned in harsh conditions and one English man John Bowne was exiled to Holland, though he spoke no Dutch. The crackdown eventually backfired on Stuyvesant when the Dutch West India Company sided with the dissidents.

Celebrating this heritage, in 2013 the Flushing Interfaith Council updated the Remonstrance to address anti-Muslim and anti-Left surveillance policies in New York City. Translated into 11 local languages, the new document addressed Mayor Michael Bloomberg directly with grievances related to surveillance and stop and frisk policies.[19] The Council continues to show solidarity with Queens Muslims, who have been targeted with hate crimes and even Murders in 2016. In summer of 2016 the Council sponsored Muslim writers’ talks and a reading group. The Pluralism Project at Harvard has recognized Flushing interfaith Council’s “promising practices” for its innovative link to Flushing’s important heritage of pluralism.[20]

Besides these two examples the New York cityscape of interfaith engagement includes agencies and programs affiliated with the United Nations (such as the Alliance of Civilizations, Religions for Peace, Temple of Understanding) as well as local alliances between houses of worship and even student clubs. Most centrally, since arising in1997 out of Rev James Parks Morton’s inspired interfaith programming at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the Interfaith Center of New York has provided seminars and training on a variety of social issues for “clergy, religious teachers, lay leaders, social service providers, and anyone playing a leadership role to serve their faith communities.”

In New York City, Union Theological and other seminaries, Tanenbaum Center of Interreligious Understanding, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding (FFEU), Center for Ethnic, Religious and Racial Understanding (CERRU) Interfaith Worker Justice, and Intersections International all intersect in programming with faith community members.

Several of these NGOs have pushed back against the spread of Islamophobia, supporting national initiatives such as “Shoulder to Shoulder.”[21]   There have also been a number of advocacy campaigns organized not only by Muslim organizations such as CAIR and MPAC and Soundvision, but production of resource kits such as My Neighbor is Muslim, a seven-part study guide produced nationally by Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, and the Peace and Unity Bridge curricula prepared by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Vermont.[22] In September 2016 the Unitarian Universalist Church (UUSC) also included a “Muslim Solidarity Event” in their action project attached to a Ken Burns film about Unitarian efforts to save people from the Nazis. The implicit linkage was historically resonant. It is too early to know how many will use these resources.

Despite the charged atmosphere continuing throughout the 2016 election season, there is clearly continued solidarity with Muslims, both shallow and deep, among faith communities. But again, as in Burma, Muslims lack the resources and organization and perhaps the will to take a leading role in interfaith relations. Muslim leadership style is still largely of the “charismatic” type, which builds personal connections but does not delegate or develop lasting institutional capacity. Many of the same people are heavily involved in interfaith dialogue but cannot or do not bring in new participants. There are quite a few more good Muslim speakers than good administrators to obtain grants and sustain involvement. Mosque attendance is not high, and even if they embrace religious identity in a strong way, immigrant young Muslims especially reject the ways of their parents.

Human identity is complex and multilayered, but political and popular discourse about race, economics, religion and gender often oversimplifies. Funding follows trends of popular interest, such as Black Lives Matter, but does not always directly empower those most directly impacted.

In 2008 Kusumita Pederson observed, “Certainly the most striking and important feature of the interfaith movement today… is the growth of interfaith activity at the local level. This is the greatest contrast to the movement’s early decades, and it seems to signal a new phase.” This has been true in New York City as seen in the many local initiatives since 9/11. Some local efforts are more “visible” than others. In any case, this grassroots aspect now complicated by the social distortions of new technologies. With the rise of social media so much “dialogue” now place takes online, with a million strangers in isolation. New York social life is now very heavily mediated, and selling a story, a narrative, a claim to power, is part of the competitive capitalist economy. (Pederson, 2008)

Of course, smart phones are spreading in Burma as well. Will facebook-based social media projects such as the new My Friend Campaign[23], which celebrates friendships between Burmese of different ethnic groups, succeed in building a culture that celebrates all equally? Is this the “interfaith peacebuilding” of the future? Or will cellphones become weapons in the hands of mobs intent on violence, as has already happened? (Baker, 2016, Holland 2014)

Xenophobia and mass displacement create a vicious cycle. While mass roundups of “illegals” are discussed in the USA, and implemented in Burma, the insecurity promoted by this discourse affects everyone. Along with scapegoating vulnerable social groups, the current challenge to religious and ethnic pluralism is a symptom of a larger cultural and spiritual displacement related to global capitalism.

In the year 2000, Mark Gopin observed, “If you dare to move a religious culture, or any culture for that matter, to a completely new economic or political construct, such as democracy or the free market, do not move the top without the bottom, the bottom without the top, or even just the middle, unless you are prepared to cause bloodshed…Religious culture is not just run from the top down. In fact, there is a remarkable power that is diffuse, which is precisely why leaders are so constrained.” (Gopin, 2000, p 211)

Gopin then also adds to his warning- to embrace a broad-based process of change; not to move one religious or ethnic group without the other; and never make a conflict worse by reinforcing one religious or cultural group over another, “especially by means of financial investment.”

Unfortunately, the United States -and the international community as well—have done exactly that as part of foreign policies for many generations, and certainly have continued in the years since Gopin wrote those words. One legacy of these foreign interventions is deep mistrust, still very much impacting interfaith relations in New York today, most clearly in relationships between Muslim and Jewish organizations claiming to represent the wider community’s interests. Muslim and Arab fears of cooptation and even integration run deep. Jewish insecurity and existential concerns are also complicating factors. And African American experience of slavery and marginalization looms ever larger. The pervasive media around us allows these issues to be discussed at great length. But as noted, it may just as easily re-traumatize, marginalize and politicize.

But what do we do when we “do interfaith?” Is it always part of the solution, and not the problem? Mana Tun observed that in Burma, participants in interfaith dialogue use the English word “interfaith” as a loanword. Does that suggest Baptist peacemakers in Burma are importing and imposing theories of dialogue that issue from the Orientalizing, neo-colonial gaze of the Western missionary? Does that suggest that Burmese (or local New York) leaders that embrace peacemaking opportunities are opportunists? No; it is possible to keep in mind Gopin’s warnings about well-meaning interference in community dynamics but take to heart the creative and crucial human exchange that takes place in dialogue when labels and preconceptions are discarded.

In fact, in New York City most grassroots interfaith engagement has been entirely theory free. The value of theory may come later, when a second generation is trained to carry on the dialogue, allowing new trainers to be more aware of group dynamics and theories of change.

Partners open themselves to new possibilities. Despite the fraught nature of my experience of Jewish -Muslim dialogue in New York, one of those dialogue partners has remained a friend and recently formed a Jewish coalition to advocate for the rights of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. Because of empathy with the displaced and the demonized minority, whose experience mirrors the Jew’s nightmare in 1930s Europe, Jewish Alliance of Concern Over Burma (JACOB) has signed on almost 20 mainstream Jewish organizations to advocate for the persecuted Muslims.

We may face the future of globalization (and its discontents) with hope or deep misgiving. Either way, there is strength in working together for a common cause. Along with sympathy for the stranger, and other vulnerable human beings, religious partners share deep horror at the apparent nihilism of terror attacks aimed at civilians, including categories of fellow human beings that are not always fully embraced by religious communities, like LGBT men and women. Because diverse religious communities now face an urgent need for many intra-faith adjustments and accommodations between the “top” and bottom” of leadership, along with agreements to disagree and to compartmentalize on such social issues, the next phase of interfaith engagement promises to be highly complex– but with new opportunities for shared compassion.