Classroom in Afghanistan where boys and girls would learn together, with a curriculum emphasizing peacemaking

One of my favorite things to do is wander around a school and see how teachers and students have decorated their classrooms. Beyond the basic academic stuff like maps, history charts, word drills, homework assignments, art projects, etc… many classrooms also have posters talking about how everyone should treat each other, character messages, encouragement to work hard and reach out when help is needed. The picture on the left is from my visit to Afghanistan. It was an amazing school that had a central theme of peacemaking in its curriculum. On Saturday March 20th 2010, I got to poke around inside a Muslim children’s school much closer to home in Santa Clara California and was thrilled with what I saw there.

At the Granada Islamic School in Santa Clara County, on practically every wall I looked at, there were signs, posters, and other artwork extolling sharing, peacemaking, nonviolence, charity, love, kindness, and friendship, and along with many of these messages were quotes from the Koran or other sacred and historic texts as the basis for why these were important virtues and values.

So why is this a story? Why is this worth posting? If I had walked into a Catholic school or a Hebrew school, or a Friends (Quaker) school, or most other private and public schools, I would expect to see messages like these on the walls.

It is a story, I think, because there are many Americans who would probably be surprised to see these themes playing such a central part of what an Islamic school emphasizes. I was not surprised, but grateful to once again be reminded of the many ways in which people of all faiths (and humanists/atheists) share very common values and goals. And given the reason I was there that day, I felt even better about my plans for that day. I was at the Muslim Community Association where the school is hosted to speak on a panel for American Muslim Voice’s annual peacemaking convention. Our topic was about building multifaith trust. I’ve done quite a bit of interfaith/multifaith work over the past decade, and have met some incredible people doing extraordinary things, but more often than not, it is the very ordinary that sparks the best feelings in my soul.

Walking around that school, I wasn’t surprised by the messages I saw, but instead felt a warm glow building up inside me. A few hundred people would be attending the convention, with many of them coming at 4pm to attend the various panels. It was exciting for me to know that for some of those attending, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Unitarian Universalists among them, it would be their very first time inside a building dedicated to Islamic teaching, community services, and worship. What a great first introduction!

I’d like to share my written remarks from the panel I was on, although I’ll point out that I deviated from them somewhat. I want to share them, though, because the key message I gave is so important to the way I believe we can break down fear and distrust of the other. A key to doing that is stepping outside of our comfort zones, stepping into the unfamiliar, allowing ourselves to be a little uncomfortable (or very) so that we can learn something new. Mosques and Muslim Community Centers and schools across the country often invite local people to come in and check them out, look around, attend a workshop, share a dinner. You don’t have to go all the way to Afghanistan like I did to step into an Islamic classroom. You can probably find one just a few miles away.

Sholom Aleichem.

My name is Craig Wiesner and I’m the co-founder of Reach And Teach, a peace and social justice learning company.

In 2002, I was honored to be a confirmation partner with a young man I had known since he was a child at First Presbyterian Church Palo Alto. As a Jew, having him choose me to be his partner through the Christian confirmation process was very special. We explored important questions of faith over several months, culminating in each of us writing our own statements of faith, which we shared around a fireplace with all the other confirmands and their partners one evening. Both of us had come to a strong belief that God was calling on us to take a path of nonviolence, which for Jay meant becoming a conscientious objector, should a military draft ever be restarted. For me, a former soldier, I felt a calling to stand up for people who were being oppressed in a new nonviolent way, even if it meant risking harm to myself, even death.

In the car on the way home from that night of sharing, I wondered in what concrete ways I might be called on to act out my beliefs. I didn’t have to wait long. A few days later, I received a call from Global Exchange, saying that two rabbis had cancelled out of an interfaith peace delegation to Afghanistan. Would I be willing to go?

My life-partner Derrick, my friend David Mineau, and I all joined the delegation. To prepare for the trip I read a lot of Karen Armstrong’s work. She’s written a lot about the major religions in our world, what they have in common, as well as their historical disputes. Through her work I learned that the Prophet Mohammed, may God bless him and grant him peace, had said that Muslims should be welcoming to people of the book, referring to the books that Jews, Christians and Muslims share in common, the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels and the Koran.

My family was deeply opposed to me making this trip, fearing that Muslims hated Jews, and that as soon as they found out I was Jewish, I’d be in trouble. They’d given me the same warning about “people from the south” when I joined the Air Force. They were wrong way back then, and wrong again. But, I have to admit that I was very nervous about going to Afghanistan, given the violence that was their daily bread for so many years.

On our first full day in Afghanistan we went to meet with a Muslim charity group. We drove to their compound, which was protected by a huge gate and had an armed guard outside. Once inside, Iftekhar Hai, a member of our delegation, put his arm around my shoulder and ushered me towards a group of people and loudly proclaimed “I want you to meet my friend Craig. He is Jewish! And here are my other friends, they are Christians!” The frightened part of me expected swords to come flying at us. But instead, people put their hands on their hearts and said “Welcome” and someone said “All people of the book.” Then someone showed us where cookies and tea were being served.

We experienced the same thing everywhere we went. One very poignant moment was when we visited a mosque that had recently been bombed by the United States. Despite there being giant holes in the walls and rubble scattered about, the mosque was still a very active place. In one corner, a group of young boys was studying the Koran. They were rocking back and forth and reciting from the book. It looked so familiar to me. This was how we were taught to read the Torah when I went to Hebrew School as a child. I walked over and sat down next to one boy. When he noticed me his rocking became even more animated. A teacher, noticing this scene, walked over to us and interrupted the boy’s chanting. “I have a question for you!” he said. The boy listened. “What are the books that we study here?” The boy answered, “The Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Koran.” The teacher smiled. “Very good. And this man is a Jew. What do we call Christians and Jews?” “People of the book!”

If a child in a bombed out mosque can learn that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are “people of the book,” sharing key beliefs in compassion, charity, nonviolence, and hospitality, then we should all be able to learn that, and start to trust each other.

A key difference, I believe, between people who live with great distrust of the other, great fear of the other, and those who are less afraid, who have great trust, is whether or not they allow themselves to step outside of their comfort zones. People who travel outside the country, or even just outside the community they spend the most time in, learn about other people. They learn about what makes us different but they also learn about the many ways in which we are the same. In that learning, you come to trust the other.

Getting there, though, is hard. Some of us have to be willing to take what feel like small to huge risks. To put ourselves in uncomfortable places like a mosque in Afghanistan, or a church in East Palo Alto, a Muslim Community Center in Santa Clara, or a synagogue in San Francisco, and we have to go there ready to put our hands on our hearts and say “peace peace peace” and then listen, learn, and then share what we’ve heard and learned so that others might become less afraid. God created a wild diversity of humankind so that we would get to know each other and rejoice in our differences. If we approach our interfaith work with that in mind, we can heal this hurting world, so that more and more people can live with less fear and cause each other much less sorrow.

May peace be with you.

(I look forward to questions and comments.)