Muslim Peace Fellowship
The World after 9/11

 

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Abdal-Hakim Murad, born 1960, London. Educated Cambridge University (MA Arabic), and al-Azhar. Translator of al-Bayhaqi's 77 Branches of Faith. Editor of M. Z. Siddiqi's Hadith Literature (Islamic Texts Society, 1993). Trustee and Secretary of The Muslim Academic Trust. Director, The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.

This lecture was originally delivered at Cardiff in May, 2000

Read a response from Rabia Harris, October 10, 2001
Seeing with both eyes
by Abdul-Hakim Murad

The Dajjal, as everyone knows, has only one eye. Those ulema who are concerned to understand and apply their intuition rather than simply to act as historical relay stations have sometimes interpreted this attribute as a reference to the characteristic sickness of decadent religious communities; a sickness that will necessarily be at its most prevalent as the end of time approaches. The human creature has been given two eyes for reasons of obvious biological utility: the capacity for focussing so splendidly produced by the ciliary muscles in the eyeball (a superb technology most of us never pause to give thanks for) is nonetheless not a perfect instrument for the gauging of distance. Human beings need perspective: for hunting and for fighting; and for the efficient monitoring of children. And hence we have two eyes, as the Qur’an notes, asking for our faith and our thankfulness: ‘Have We not given him two eyes’?

The Dajjal, however, has one eye only; for he is sick. He represents, in human form, a cosmic possibility which occurs throughout history, gathering momentum as Prophetic restorations are forgotten, until, for a time during the last days, he is the one-eyed man who is king. There are several esoteric interpretations of this, but one in particular is perhaps the most satisfying and profound. It points out that the latter days are the time of a loss of perspective. Distances and priorities are miscalculated, or even reversed. The name of Adam’s ancient enemy, Iblis, signals his ability to invert and overturn: yulabbis, he confuses and muddles mankind. And the Dajjal is in this sense a physical materialisation of Iblis: he is the Great Deceiver insofar as he dresses virtue up as vice, and vice-versa. Examples spring all too readily to mind. For instance: once the old were respected and admired more than the young; today, it is the other way around. Once unnatural vice was despised, now it is the only practice that cannot be criticised in the films or in polite society. Once humility was praised, and pride was a sin; today there has been a complete inversion. No longer are we asked to control ourselves, instead we are urged to ‘discover’ ourselves. The nafs is king of the millennium. Those of you who saw the Queen forced to watch the orgy at the Greenwich Dome, a celebration of mindless erotic and athletic display that had nothing to do with the man whom the Millennium supposedly marked, will know this well enough.

It is the principle of the Dajjal that brings about this kind of evil. It is an evil that is worse than the traditional sort, which was simply the failure to practice commonly-respected virtues; because the new evil yulabbis: it inverts: it turns virtue into vice. It is, in this sense, one-eyed and without perspective. The sight by which we observe the outward world is composed of information from two separate instruments. When we speak of religious understanding, we speak of basira, perception guided by wisdom. And it is characteristic of Islam that wisdom consists in recognising and establishing the correct balance between the two great principles of existence: the outward, that is, the form, and the inward, that is, the content: Zahir and batin, to use the Qur’anic terms.

The Dajjal sees with one eye. In this understanding, we would say that he is therefore a man of zahir, or of batin, but never of both. He is a literalist, or he is free in the spirit. The most glorious achievement of Islam, which is to reveal a pattern of human life which explores and celebrates the physical possibilities of man in a way that does not obstruct but rather enhances and deepens his metaphysical capacities, is hence negated. The miscreant at the end of time is, therefore, the exact inversion of the Islamic ideal.

At the beginning of our story, the balance between the zahir and the batin was perfect. The Messenger, upon whom be the best of blessings and peace, was the man of the Mi‘raj, and also the hero of Badr. He loved women, and perfume, and the delight of his eye was in prayer. The transition between moments of intense colloquy with the supreme archangel, and of political or military or family duty, was often little more than momentary; but his balance was impeccable, for he showed that body, mind and spirit are not rivals, but allies in the project of holiness, which means nothing other than wholeness.

 

The Companions manifested many aspects of this extraordinary wholeness, the traditional Islamic term for which is afiya, and the proof of whose accomplishment is the presence of adab. The luminosity of the Prophetic presence reshaped them, so that where once there had been the crude, materialistic egotism of the pagan nomad, there was now, barely twenty years later, a unified nation led by saints. It seemed that the crudest people in history had suddenly, as though by a miracle, been transmuted into the most refined and balanced. The pagan Arabs seem almost to have served as a preview of the temper of our age, and the man who came among them, unique among prophets in the unique difficulty of his mission, is the alpha amid the omega, the proof that an Adamic restoration is possible even under the worst of conditions, even in times such as ours.

The superb human quality of the Companions is one of the most moving and astounding of the Blessed Prophet’s miracles. Receiving alone the burden of revelation, and bearing virtually alone the responsibilities of family and state, he maintained such sanctity, humour, and moral seriousness that his world was transformed around him. Had you spent all that is upon the earth, you would not have reconciled their hearts, the Revelation tells him; but Allah has brought reconciliation between them. The political unification of Arabia, itself an unprecedented achievement, was only made possible by the existence of a spiritual principle at its centre, which melted hearts, and made a new world possible.

The Companions, as the most perfect exemplars of the Islamic principle of seeing with both eyes, were, as the saying goes, fursanun bi’l-nahar, ruhbanun bi’l-layl: cavalrymen by day, and monks by night. They united zahir and batin, body and spirit, in a way that was to their pagan and Christian contemporaries extraordinary, and which, in our day, when balance of any sort is rare, is hard even to imagine. Their faces radiated with the inner calm that comes of inner peace: ala bi-dhikriíLlahi tatma’innu’l-qulub: ‘it is by the remembrance of Allah that hearts find peace.’

Among the Companions’ own miracles was the creation of an astonishingly new language of beauty. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built while many Companions were still alive, triumphantly announces the divine will to save humanity through a new religious order. Under Islam, the world was made new. The war on the flesh, manifested in the new and strange shape taken by Christian celibacy, was at an end. The Sunna, emerging as a barely imaginable climax of human flourishing, became the ideal for the ancient world; an ideal all the more impressive for having been achieved.

When Islamic civilisation was buoyant, everything touched by the hands of believers turned to gold. The Dome of the Rock is probably the world’s most beautiful building, the subject of countless studies by astounded art historians. Through its octagon, the square outline of the ancient Solomonic temple is resolved to a circle, and thus to the infinity of heaven. It announces the supremacy of the Muhammadan moment, the time out of time when the Station of Two Bows’ Length (qaba qawsayn) was achieved. No earlier religion had preserved the memory of so exalted and so purely spiritual a climax to its story, as a mortal man ventured where even the highest angels could not step.

And yet he returned to earth; and this is the secret of the Sunna’s majesty. He had been redolent in the splendour and power of the Divine presence, but he nonetheless returned to the lower ranks of the created order, to reform his people. Not because he preferred them, but because he loved them. He had seen with his purified heart, as the Qur’an reveals: The heart did not deny that which it saw. He bore a truth which hitherto they had only dimly intuited: the core of the human creature is the heart, and the heart is the locus of a vision so transcendent that even the Revelation speaks of it only allusively: He saw, of the signs of his Lord, the greatest.

When we take on the Sunna, and reject flawed patterns of behaviour which have been shaped and guided by the ego and by fantasies of self-imagining, we declare to our Creator that we accept and revere the profound revelation of human flourishing exampled by the Best of Creation. Every act of the Sunna which we may successfully emulate declares that our role model is the man who had no ego, and to whom Allah had given a definitive victory over the forces of darkness. Modernity holds out lifestyle options centred on the self, and on the lower, agitated possibilities of the human condition. Every word of every magazine now breathes the message of the nafs: explore yourself, free yourself, be yourself. Buy a Porsche to express your identity; dress in a Cacharel suit to make a statement about yourself; be seen in the right places. The result, of course, is a society which pursues happiness with great technical brilliance but which puzzles over spiralling rates of suicide, drug abuse, failed relationships, and ever more aberrant forms of self-mutilation. It is a society in denial, a society in pain.

       

By taking on the Sunna, a human being accepts a deep and total reorientation. For the Sunna is not one lifestyle option among many, simply an exotic addition to the standard menu. The Sunna tears up the existing menu by defying its assumptions. By living in the Prophetic pattern one pursues a paradigm of excellence that demonstrably brings serenity and fulfillment, and hence silences the babble of the style magazines. Living in credit, knowing one’s neighbours, and holding the event of the Mi‘raj constantly in view, confers membership of Adam’s family of khalifas. Living in debt, chasing mirages, and serving the nafs, renders the human being a definitive failure. We can be higher than the angels, or lower than the animals.

The Sunna, as the uniquely efficient vehicle of human improvement and illumination, hence embraces every aspect of man. Outward serenity is impossible without inward peace; and inward peace, conversely, is impossible when the body is behaving abusively.

The Muslim, who sees with both eyes, and hence sees the modern world for what it is: a naive victim of the oldest of all illusions, which is the belief that human flourishing occurs when the needs of the outward are met, and that inward excellence is nothing but the vague myth of intangible religion, is hence truly Muslim to the extent that he rejects imbalance. Loyal and loving adherence to the details of the fiqh will change to obsessive and neurotic behaviour when the inward meaning of the sunna is absent. Hence the Dajjal is often an exoterist. But he may be an esoterist also, when he falls prey to the fatal myth that religion is about inward perfection alone, and that this can be achieved even when the outward conduct is deeply flawed by a failure to be shaped by a pattern of courteous human life manifested by the supreme figure of a more contemplative and dignified age.

In our times, thanks to a dajjal-type lack of perspective, some Muslims are suspicious of the traditional talk of a zahir and a batin. It seems too esoteric, mysterious and elitist. The word batin itself appears faintly heretical: one thinks of extreme antinomian groups such as the medieval Ismailis, for instance. And yet the concept is purely and entirely Qur’anic, and was never controversial among the classical ulama.

In fact, an important part of the healing that the Qur’an offers can be found in its insistence that religion includes, and unites, an outward and an inward dimension. Let me give you some examples, which no-one in his right mind could describe as controversial. For instance, Allah says: Wa-aqimi’s-Salata li-dhikri: ‘and establish the Prayer for My remembrance’. He tells us that the prayer is not an arbitrary command, a set of physical movements which earn us treats in the hereafter. It has a wise purpose, which is to help us to remember Him. The believer at prayer is not just offering his physical form as a token of submission to the divine presence whose symbol is the Ka‘ba. He, or she, is worshipping with the heart. The body of flesh bows towards the Ka‘ba of stone; while the invisible spirit bows to the invisible divine. Only when both of these take place is worship truly present.

Another example: Allah says: ‘Fasting is prescribed for you, as it was prescribed for those who came before you.’ Why? ‘La‘allakum tattaqun’ - ‘that you might learn taqwa.’ Fasting has a zahir and a batin, an outward and an inward. And neither is of any use without the other. As a hadith says: ‘Many a fasting persons gains nothing from his fast, apart from hunger and thirst.’ In other words, without a batin fast, an inward fast, the fast is only formally, mechanically correct. It is like a body without a spirit, which is nothing more than a corpse. The one who fasts, or prays, or performs any other religious act, without his spirit being in it, is like a zombie, whose mind and spirit has gone away from the body, to another place. And this is not how Allah wants us to be when we worship Him.

Another example. Regarding the sacrifices on the day of Eid al-Adha, Allah says: ‘Their flesh and blood will not reach Allah; but the taqwa that is in you reaches Him.’ Without correct intention, and presence of mind, in other words, without a proper disposition of the batin, the sacrifice is just the killing of an animal. In a sense, it is worse, since a slaughter that did not pretend to be religious would at least be sincere; whereas one that purports to be for God, but in its inner reality is not, is a kind of hypocrisy.

In fact we could say that the zahir without the batin leads fatally to nifaq. If we are not enjoying the divine presence during our worship, if our minds are elsewhere, if we have switched on a kind of autopilot, then we are practicing rusum: outward forms, a husk without a kernel. To any visible or invisible onlooker we are proclaiming by the outward form of the act that we are worshipping God; but in our inward reality we are doing nothing of the kind. Riya’ - ostentation - is possible even if we are alone. Even if we know that no-one knows we are praying, or fasting, we can still commit riya’. How? By showing-off to ourselves. By going through the motions of the prayer, we gratify our own self-image as pious, superior people. To the extent that the prayer lacks a batin, that will be a mortal danger. Even if our minds are concentrated on the meaning, our souls may be disengaged. And to the extent that the prayer, or the fast, or the Hajj, or the qurbani, does have an inner reality, we will be less interested in showing-off to ourselves, in taking the nafs as our real qibla. The act will lead us, we will not lead the act.

This is what sayyiduna ‘Umar, radiya’Llahu ‘anhu, meant when he said: ‘The thing I fear most for the safety of this Umma is the learned hypocrite.’ When asked how one could be both learned and hypocritical, he said: ‘When his learning does not go beyond verbal knowledge, while his heart remains untouched.’

Another example, from the Qur’an - and remember, this teaching of the interdependence of zahir and batin is purely Qur’anic. ‘And they give food, for love of Him, to the poor, the orphan, and to captives. We feed you only for the sake of Allah; we desire for no reward or thanks from you.’ Here the revelation is insisting that charity, too, becomes ibada only when it has an inward reality as well as an outward form. And that inward reality is not primarily mental: as in ‘Fine, it’s zakat time, bismi’Llah, I make the intention to do this for Allah’. That is only the most basic requirement. The passage states that charity is to be done ‘ala hubbihi - out of love for Allah. That requires far more than the simple silent formulation of a niyya. It can only be achieved when one’s heart is in it, since love, hubb, resides in the heart, not the mind. Charity without love is heartless.

Hence part of the brilliance of the Qur’an is its insistence that Allah is not worshipped by outward forms; but that He has established certain outward forms as a context within which we can do ibada: since ibada, as an expression of devotion and servitude to our maker, reposes in the heart. A disposition of the heart is always true; a disposition of the body may be true or false.

The Qur’an’s message is unmistakeably that the human creature is a composite whose dimensions must be brought into harmony with each other if our Adamic possibility as true worshippers may be realised. So ours is a religion of zahir and batin. Our enemies see only the outward forms, and assume that this is hypocrisy, ‘Pharisaic formalism’. Some use the traditional New Testament language by which St Paul attacked Judaism: ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.’ In fact, this is a common theme of a certain kind of traditional Christian criticism of Islam. As such, it clearly represents the borrowing of an even older theme in Christian theology: that of antisemitism, as a weapon which will serve in the battle against the Saracen. Muslims, inconveniently, are not mentioned in the Bible, but some Christians have instead used the anti-Law polemic of Paul as a stick with which to beat Muslims, by situating us in a Biblical context. It is evident, however, that this will not serve. There are some Muslims, it has to be admitted, whose preoccupations are mainly or even exclusively with outward form - a Pharisaic Islam, we might say - but that is not the way of traditional Muslims. For traditional Islam has always cultivated in a rich and profound way the inner dimensions of faith. Most of our poetry, for instance, is about the batin, not the zahir. If Islam was as they suppose, then most of our poetry would be about wudu, or the rules for inheritance. But it is not.

I hope that the Qur’anic insights I have cited are quite enough to explain why the traditional ulema of Islam speak of the religion’s having a zahir and a batin. Shaykh Shahidullah Faridi, the great English saint of the 20th century, put it as follows:

‘If it is necessary to observe the outward ordinances of the faith, it is equally necessary to develop within ourselves those qualities which are their soul. These two are complementary and one cannot exist in a sound state without the other.’

Shahidullah Faridi himself, like virtually all the educated converts to Islam in this country, was attracted to the religion primarily because of its inner riches. Those Muslims who today spend most of their time talking about shari‘a, and regard the batin as peripheral, are unlikely to make many such converts: there is no reason why sensitive, educated people should be attracted to the husk, if the kernel is so well-hidden that it might as well not exist. They may even, by wild, merciless and hikma-less behaviour, repel thousands.

Zahir and batin are the terms I have used. They are concepts clear from the Qur’an. There are other terms which convey roughly the same distinction. For instance, the terms shari‘a and haqiqa. Outward act, and inward state. Again, the distinction is Qur’anic. According to Imam Abu Ali al-Daqqaq, it can even be derived from the Fatiha. Allah asks us to say: iyyaka na‘budu wa-iyyaka nasta‘in: ‘You we worship’: this is shari‘a; and ‘You we seek for help’: the divine response, which is from haqiqa. The pairing of the principles gives us this fundamental distinction: the initiative from man, which is shari‘a, and the generous outpouring from Allah, which is haqiqa.

Imam al-Qushayri makes a still more subtle point. He says:

‘Know that the Shari‘a is also haqiqa, because He Himself made it obligatory. And haqiqa is also shari‘a, because the means of knowing Him were made obligatory by His command.’

In other words, this bifurcation, indicated in the Fatiha, which we repeat every day without pondering its depths, is in reality two sides of one coin. Shari‘a is not Shari‘a without haqiqa; because without an inward reality and an approach to Allah the outward forms are useless; and haqiqa is nothing without shari‘a, because shari‘a is the set of forms by which haqiqa can be known. Each is sound only when it points accurately to the other.

Imam Abu Bakr al-‘Aydarus, rahmatullahi ‘alayh, explains it in terms of the Qur’anic verse: ‘Those who strive in Us, We shall surely guide to Our ways.’ He writes: The ‘striving’ is the Shari‘a, and the active response to its injunctions, which will cause one to be led to His ‘ways’, is in turn a reference to the Haqiqa

Imam al-Qushayri drives home this vital point by saying: ‘Every shari‘a which is unsupported by haqiqa is unaccepted. And every haqiqa which is not controlled by shari‘a is unaccepted.’

Imam al-Haddad, in one of his most famous poems, says:

Wa-kullun ‘ala nahj al-sabili’s-sawiyyi lam

yukhalif li-amrin akhidhan bi’sh-shari‘ati

Wa-inna’lladhi la yatba‘u’sh-shar‘a mutlaqan

‘ala kulli halin ‘abdu nafsin wa-shahwati

‘All of the righteous were on the straight path,

never violating any command, holding to shari‘a

For truly, the man who does not follow shari‘a,

Is in every case the slave of his nafs and his own desires.’

Imam al-Ghazali, rahmatullah alayh, spent much of his life making this point, in some very sophisticated ways. Let me read to you his very passionate defence of this Qur’anic principle:

‘f you are educating yourself, take up only those branches of knowledge which have been required of you according to your present needs, as well as those which pertain to the outward actions such as learning the elements of prayer, purification, and fasting. More important however, is the science which all have neglected, namely, the science of the attributes of the heart, those which are praiseworthy and those which are blameworthy, because people persist in the latter, such as miserliness, hypocrisy, pride and conceit, all of which are destructive, and from which it is obligatory to desist. Performing these outward deeds is like the external application of an ointment to the body when it is stricken with scabies and boils while neglecting to remove the pus by means of a scalpel or a purge. False ulema recommend outward deeds just as fake physicians prescribe external ointments [for virulent internal diseases]. The ulema who seek the akhira, however, recommend nothing but the purification of the nafs and the removal of the elements of evil by destroying their nursery-beds and uprooting them from the heart.’

A key component of the Ghazalian agenda is the restoration of balance between outward and inward. And the Imam himself realised that the balance comes about primarily through cultivating the inward. For a balance, which is the true meaning of al-sirat al-mustaqim, is a subtle thing, and requires wisdom, and wisdom only exists when the soul is illuminated.

The crisis of the modern world is a crisis in both zahir and batin. It takes different forms amidst the ruins of different civilisations. In what was once the Christian world, zahir has been lost or even turned on its head: homosexual marriages in church, the approval of the lottery by bishops, and other symptoms of collapse. The symptoms are more advanced in formerly Christian countries than elsewhere, because, as St Paul believed, Christianity has no shari‘a. It is always reinventing itself as something that can be believed, as T.S. Eliot put it, and nowadays this inevitably takes place under pressure from secular ethics. In the Islamic world, there are also deep problems. But these arise not through lack of shari‘a as such, but through a lack of balance between outward and inward. Much Muslim revivalism today focusses on the outward, and appears to regard the inward as of secondary importance. The result is wild behaviour and consistent failure, for Allah proclaims in the Qur’an that the success in the world of religious communities depends on their spiritual condition. He does not change us until we change what is within ourselves. The failure of any Islamic movement is decisive proof that that movement has not gained the required inward harmony, wisdom and spiritual depth.

The modern world therefore offers, in mad abundance, both of the Dajjal’s aberrations. There is preoccupation with form, and there are also, in increasing varieties, a preoccupation with ‘spiritualities’ which require no irritating moral code. In the West, New Age spirituality is replacing Christianity as the faith of many young and educated people. It promises a typical Dajjalian deceit: the gifts of the spirit may be had without paying a price, or changing one’s treasured ‘lifestyle’.

The Sunna is the Dajjal’s great enemy in the modern world, because it rejects both of his promises. No human being can flourish on the basis of pure Law, or pure physical satisfaction, or of spiritual practices devoid of implications for society and personal conduct. For us, religion is about integrity and completeness. And yet, there are no grounds for complacency. The Sunna itself is today a contested concept. A materialistic world necessarily influences the forms of religion which grow within it; and some Muslims today adopt forms of Islam that define the Sunna in a one-eyed way. Either such advocates are pure esoterists, with a cavalier attitude to the formal duties gifted by revelation; or (and this is among mass-movements more frequent) they mutilate the Sunna by minimising or even negating its inward dimensions. Any following of the externals of religion which is not made profound, compassionate and wise by an active and transformative spiritual life, will be a mere husk without a kernel: abrasive, hostile, self-righteous, lashing out at the innocent, and thriving on schism and controversy.

May Allah enable us to open both our eyes, and hence to see things in due proportion, and to respond in a way that brings reconciliation, light, and wisdom among the descendents of Adam.
Uri Avnery: member of the Jewish underground fighting the British, twice wounded in Israel's wars with the Arabs; political organizer; Knesset member; publisher; journalist; founder of "Gush Shalom," Israel's Peace Bloc; and recipient of numerous international human rights and peace awards, will speak in five cities: Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Washington, DC. to press for a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The focus of Avnery's presentations will be the imperative for Israel to reject an imposed military solution and support a diplomatic solution with security for two-states of Israel and Palestine.

Uri Avnery was born in Germany in 1923 and emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1933 when Hitler rose to power. He joined the Jewish underground, The Irgun in 1938 to fight against the British colonial regime. After three years he left in protest against its anti-Arab attitudes and terrorist methods. In 1948 he was a member of an Israeli commando unit and was wounded twice on the Egyptian front.

In 1950 after leaving the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz Avnery founded a mass circulation news magazine, Haolam Hazeh which he served as publisher and chief editorial writer during all of its 40 years. It was similar in style to Time magazine and Der Spiegel magazines, and a mouthpiece of aggressive political opposition, with exposes of political and economic corruption and proposals for a radically different national policy.

The magazine proposed a modern, liberal state of Israel belonging to all of its citizens, irrespective of ethnic, national or religious roots.

The chief of the Israeli secret service in the 50's later testified that the Ben-Gurion establishment considered Uri Avnery and Haolam Hazeh as "Public Enemy No.1." This might explain why its editorial offices and printing facilities were bombed several times. Avnery was ambushed and both his arms were broken after he criticized the infamous Kibieh massacre in 1953. In 1972 arson destroyed the offices of Haolam Hazeh. In 1975 he survived an assassination attempt.

Throughout all this time all branches of the government and army maintained a total economic boycott against the paper.

In 1965 he was responsible for starting a new party whose goals were separation of state and religion; equality for the Arab minority, Oriental Jews and women; support for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and an Israeli-Arab alliance throughout the whole region. Called "Haolam Hazeh" it astounded the establishment by winning a seat on the Knesset, at that time a unprecedented feat for a completely new party.

By 1974 Avnery established secret contacts with senior PLO officials. By the summer of 1975 Avnery called for the creation of an Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace which by December officially took over the still secret dialogue.

In July of 1982 Avnery crossed the lines at the height of the battle of Beirut and publically met the leader of the "enemy" Yassir Arafat with whom he has met since many times.

In 1992, Avnery called for the election of Yitzhak Rabin, and later supported the Oslo agreement. Soon afterward, frustrated with many of the government's acts and omissions in moving towards peace he was responsible for the formation of Gush Shalom, the Peace Bloc which has become -- together with the women's peace movement in Israel -- the leading (and often sole) voices in Israel calling for the creation of the state of Palestine in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the release of all Palestinian prisoners, the dismantling of all settlements and the recognition of Jerusalem as the joint capital of both states.

When the al-Aksa Infifada broke out at the end of September, 2000 after the failure of the Camp David summit, much of the Israeli peace camp collapsed. Gush Shalom was one of a very small number of peace groups that risked unpopularity by daring to maintain its view that a just peace is not only a moral solution, but the only pragmatic one. Avnery eloquently advocates his views in a regular column in Ma'ariv, Israel's second largest newspaper. In particular, he works to dispel the notion that "Barak offered the Palestinians almost everything, but they turned him down." Due in no small part to the challenge of Uri Avnery and his words, mainstream Israeli peace groups are slowly beginning to resume their activity.



Uri Avnery's American tour is sponsored by
the Northern California office of the American Friends Service Committee
(AFSC) and the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California

AFSC is a Quaker-based organization founded in 1917 that received the Nobel Peace Prize for its work with refugees after the Second World War. The Resource Center for Nonviolence has worked for a quarter of a century for a diplomatic resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other tour sponsors include the Fellowship of Reconciliation, AFSC Middle East Committee, Muslim Peace Fellowship and Jewish Peace Fellowship.


Data and contact addresses:
Boston: October 10 -- 14; contact: Hilda B. Silverman; ph 617-661-7490; hildasil@email.msn.com

Chicago: October 14 -- 17; contact: Steven Feuerstein; ph 773-454-8397; fx 773- 262-8138; steven@stevenfeuerstein.com

Philadelphia: October 17 - 19; contact: Kathy Bergen, American Friends Service Committee; ph 215-241-7019; kbergen@afsc.org

New York City: October 19 - 22; contact: Scott Kennedy, Resource Center for Nonviolence; ph (831) 457 - 8003 / fx (831) 423 - 8716, kenncruz@pacbell.net or: Allan Solomonow, American Friends Service Committee; ph (415) 565 - 0201 x 26; asolomonow@afsc.org or: Ben Remple, Middle East Program, Fellowship of Reconciliation; ph (845) 358 -4601 / 4775; or: Jewish Peace Fellowship (Joyce); ph (845) 358 -4601 / 4775; jpf@forusa.org

Washington, D.C.: October 22 - 27; contact: Josh Ruebner, Executive Director, Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel (JPPI); office ph: 202-423-7666; home ph/fx: 703-685-7666; josh@jppi.org / jruebner@hotmail.com; http://www.jppi.org; or: Helena Cobban; hcobban@aol.com

GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 -
http://www.gush-shalom.org/


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Copyright ©2001 Muslim Peace Fellowship. All rights reserved.
Muslim Peace Fellowship
Rabia Harris, Coordinator, mpf@forusa.org
The Muslim Peace Fellowship is part of the Fellowship of Reconciliation network