“You can’t fight terror only by drones and by killing”

Mohamad Bashar Arafat stands outside the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, MD.By Hannah AllamWith his trim, gray-flecked beard, crisply ironed clothes and genteel demeanour, Mohamad Bashar Arafat hardly cuts a controversial figure.Yet his public appearances draw visceral reactions — from hearty welcomes to sneering disdain — depending on how the audience views a Muslim cleric who for a decade has worked with the US State Department as a quiet, informal envoy to the Islamic world.Through public diplomacy programmes, Arafat has travelled to at least 26 countries in a role he sees as his patriotic duty as an American and his religious duty as a Muslim imam. His roots in Damascus, where he was born and studied before emigrating in 1989, make for a third facet to that role now as diplomats, congregants and friends ask him, “What should the US do about Syria?”Detractors, on the other hand, would prefer he keep his answers to himself. They regard him as, at best, a token and, at worst, a sellout — an apologist for the invasions, occupations and drone strikes that define recent US policy in the Muslim world. At nearly every public event, in the United States and abroad, there are whispers and sometimes even chants: “FBI imam!” “Spy!”At some mosques he’s been told, point-blank, “You’re not welcome here.”The State Department sent him to Tanzania in 2007 — at the height of bloodshed in Iraq — but cancelled a first appearance when an angry mob blocked his car from driving up to the mosque where he’d been invited to lead prayers. The next day, with a Tanzanian police cordon outside, Arafat appeared at another event and again was greeted with boos when he arrived. This time, he took the stage and launched into his signature response to Muslims who charge that he’s being used by the US government to detract from bad policy.His counterargument comprises verses from the Qur’an and parables from the life of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) — all delivered in the friendly, even tones of a preacher who’s out to convince audiences the world over that the most effective way to work for improved US relations with the Muslim world is through dialogue between policymakers and the public.“You have to understand that being an American doesn’t mean I have to agree with every aspect of my country’s foreign policy,” Arafat told the crowd in Tanzania, he recalled one recent day. “But we can talk and we can express our views in a civil way, a democratic way. And that’s how we make a change.”In hours of conversation, at the Pentagon’s Iftar dinner in the holy month of Ramadan, at a public event at his mosque in Silver Spring, Md., and over tea at the year-old office of his Baltimore-based nonprofit, the Civilisations Exchange & Cooperation Foundation, Arafat never wavered from his belief that his best hope of changing the perception of Muslims is by working closely with the US government.His close partner in this work is his American wife, Kimberly, with whom he has four children. He has another three children from a previous marriage that ended in divorce.“It’s not really fair to focus on the bad — certain aspects of foreign policy or certain aspects of American society — and not show also the good things happening in America,” Arafat said. “And that’s our responsibility as Muslims in America, to tell these stories. We have 8 million Muslims living in America, and they have certain privileges you won’t see anywhere in the Arab or Muslim world.”He also acknowledges weaknesses in US engagement with the Muslim world — an overreliance on drones over dialogue, for example. He said he’d never received talking points from the State Department during his US-sponsored travels and that, on more than one occasion, he’d differed publicly from his embassy hosts. He pointed out that he was doing interfaith work on his own for a decade before the 9/11 terror attacks, which spawned a demand for moderate American Muslim voices as a counterweight to extremist vitriol.“Fighting terrorism requires also discussion with hard-liners on the ground, to have these debates. You cannot fight terrorism only by drones and by killing. You have to have discussion and you have to have dialogue, and that’s something that requires funding,” Arafat said. “I said once in Washington — it was 2003 — if you can spare the money of one F-16 and spend it on these public diplomacy programmes, you will have way more results than only fighting.”The 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon put radical forces under worldwide scrutiny, and Arafat said it was time to work even harder on two fronts: improving Islam’s image in the West and curbing the spread of extremism in their communities.His earlier interfaith work had laid the foundation for the first part; Arafat was introduced to State Department officials in 2002 through a Roman Catholic cardinal friend he’d done interfaith panels with for years.“The next thing I know, there’s a phone call from the State Department saying, ‘Can we speak with you?’” Arafat recalled.In no time, he was giving talks to diplomats who were heading to the Muslim world and advising a then-fledgling State Department programme called YES, for youth exchange and study, which brought teenagers from throughout the Muslim world to study in the United States. Arafat’s group helped administrators, students and host families navigate thorny issues such as attending church, wearing the head scarf and dealing with Christmas.A couple of years later, he also began to travel abroad under State Department auspices, through a programme for international speakers that’s administered through US embassies.The State Department didn’t respond to queries seeking comment on Arafat’s work. But his visits have received high praise from State Department officials, whose descriptions of his programmes are included in once-classified diplomatic cables that were published by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Cables mentioning Arafat came from embassies throughout the Arab world, but also from Indonesia and Austria, among others. The correspondence also supports Arafat’s recommendations for US funding of education and exchange programmes.A 2005 cable from the US embassy in Manila said Arafat’s interactions with Filipino Muslims showed “a tolerant, progressive vision of Islam.” There was a cable describing in detail the showdown at the mosque in Tanzania, where protesters blocked Arafat’s car. Instead of deterring US efforts there, the 2007 cable said, the incident “only reinforced the importance of our sustained outreach to promote religious tolerance and understanding between the US and Tanzania’s Muslims.”And a 2005 cable from the US embassy in Cairo described plans for al-Azhar University, one of Islam’s most influential learning centres, to host Arafat as “the first embassy-sponsored speaker in recent memory to deal directly with religious extremism.” The visit exceeded expectations, according to a follow-up cable.“In purposeful, persuasive Arabic cadences, Bashar preached respect for Christianity and Judaism, promoted a positive view of Islam in America and called for increased exchanges between the United States and the Islamic world,” the cable read. “Media coverage was overwhelmingly positive, and rural religious students flocked to him like a rock star.”The second part of Arafat’s post-9/11 strategy — combating extremism from within the community — is proving trickier. The problem is that he’s a reformist, and calls for new curriculums in seminaries, where, he complains, the teaching of jurisprudence has barely changed “in hundreds of years.” He wants Muslims to travel widely, learn different languages and move beyond superficial contact with the West.“Come inside America and hold forums with churches, with synagogues, with mosques, on a grass-roots level, because those are the people who are going to call their congressman and those are the ones that are going to bring those issues to Washington,” Arafat said. “This has been our weak point throughout our recent history. Our politicians in the Arab world always come to Washington, but they don’t have programmes on the grass-roots level to educate the average American.”Particularly controversial is his view that Muslim interfaith work should expand beyond just fellow “people of the book,” as Islam deems Christians and Jews. Arafat’s eye is on Asia, home to some of the world’s fastest-growing economies but also to religions that other imams shun because they consider them polytheistic or idolatrous. Arafat said that this meant Muslims would be left behind with the rise of China and other Asian superpowers.“Really, today, it’s hurting us, this idea that they are infidels, not Muslims. Guess what? They’ve been non-Muslims since the time of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him),” Arafat said. “But I want us to grow with them, know them and also compete with them. How can we have a better Nokia, a better Samsung?”He speaks easily and at length about his travels throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. But he becomes reticent and guarded when the topic is closer to home: the war in his native Syria.Partly out of concern for his relatives in Damascus and partly because the topic is so sensitive, Arafat doesn’t like to offer his opinions on the conflict there, which has continued for more than two years with a death toll of more than 100,000.What he will say about it is that he’s “completely against the way those extremists have been operating in Syria.” He’s referring to Al Qaeda and affiliated jihadists who, in his appraisal, took an indigenous protest movement and turned it into something far more dangerous to Syria and the world. He advises Syrians, he said, to “make sure that the solution remains within the Syrian people.”The war has spiral.ed so far out of control that even Arafat, whose career is built on dialogue between rival forces, worries that it’s too late to talk. There are times, he said, when he can’t make it to the end of battlefield videos or bring himself to look at photos of the carnage.He returns to his mantra: If it spares lives, work within the system to change realities, and don’t expect an overnight success.“Even if it takes longer, it’s worth it. Today we’re not properly interpreting death. We teach so much dying for the sake of Allah, but we don’t teach living for the sake of Allah,” he said. “The Qur’an taught us both, but, unfortunately, a lot of people today teach one way. They teach how to die, but not how to live, peacefully, how to coexist, and to change peacefully. And slowly.” — McClatchy Washington Bureau/MCT