It was 15 years ago when we first submitted a grant proposal to the Social Science Research Council to implement Muslim Voices, a multi-media and public-facing academic initiative to dispel the harmful stereotypes in North America around Islam and Muslims by exploring the religion’s diversity across the world. Within three years we accomplished podcasts, videocasts, blogs, publications, conferences, workshops, community events, and a major social media presence. We had tens of thousands of hits on our videos and comments on posts, over 125K followers on X, and we have won multiple awards for this work.
Yet, clearly, there remains much work to do.
As we reflect back on all this, we are not even sure we can say we even made a difference, and that is not easy to admit. Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and profound forms of discrimination remain, and many of the boundaries we tried desperately to transcend have been rebuilt. Yet, we initiated so many conversations, integrated various perspectives and opinions, and we certainly created a forum where individuals can come together and have their voices heard in civil and meaningful ways. This was always the goal for Muslim Voices. In fact, it was our process and our product. We facilitated dialogue after dialogue, the inclusion of identity after identity, and a mix of viewpoint after viewpoint. This became not just our method but our objective, to create open and academically grounded conversations with people of different backgrounds, to pierce the social and religious seals that too often keep us separate, that which can prevent us to see through the eyes of others.
We were quite conscious that we were up against socio-psychological tendencies to keep ourselves apart, to separate ourselves from others, and to maintain rather than challenge our visions of the world. We recognized the need for our audiences to take that emotional leap from sympathy to empathy, and we came face to face with the difficulty of this process. We experienced how isolated our identities remain, or perhaps how little we allow the true intersectionality of our identities to inform the way we think about the world.
We encountered many senses of self and world views that were concentric circles, like Matrushka dolls, where our sense of caring and responsibility is at the core of our realm rather than at its extremities. If we are to start to care for others and see the world through other’s eyes, we must chip away at how we envision ourselves within the world as individuals embedded in scales of belonging.
Perhaps it does not help that many of our cultures are so individualistic in orientation where ideas of self-reliance and independence prevail. In societies like these, we must work diligently to maintain the closeness of family bonds, because it does not always come as naturally or organically. Does this make it more challenging to see others: to build emotional relationships with people who do not share similar backgrounds, who speak another language, wear different clothes, or who look and act differently? What is it that makes us look at anybody as not us? As not you? Why are our identities and thus our senses of responsibility so localized? Why, still, 15 years later, are we still not seeing ourselves in others?
So, while we accomplished so much, and while we have tons of superior resources to educate and get others to challenge the boundaries through which we see the world, there is still so much we must do. We must look inward as much as we look outward. We must learn from the past and look to the horizon. We must not define the world in categories or concentric circles. Rather, we should see us and the world as one. We should see ourselves in difference and the difference in ourselves. We should not always side with comfort over discomfort, and we must avoid simplifying who we are to reductionist identities.
We are global, we are complicated, we are human. That is what drives us every day. That is what the Muslim Voices project always aimed to explore. Our beauty. Our diversity. Our complexity. The good, the bad, and the ugly. That is humanity. That is what makes us tick. Recognizing this is the first step, a major step, to stepping into difference rather than running from it.
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