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More Information about the Muslim Leadership Initiative
Why MLI?
What are the Institute's goals in creating the program, and what are the goals of its Jewish and Muslim leadership?
The Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) is a programmatic experiment to build Muslim-Jewish relations in North America that enable individuals and communities to encounter the other authentically, with neither avoidance of complicated differences nor litmus tests for participation. The Shalom Hartman Institute embraced MLI because of a confluence of interests of both the Institute and the program’s Jewish and Muslim co-creators.
From the perspective of the Muslim leaders of the program, there was a self-interest in building deeper relationships with the Jewish community in North America, borne of a sense that many such relationships were adversarial (in the form of Jewish Islamophobia and Muslim anti-semitism) or superficial. The hypothesis behind the program was that in order to engage more meaningfully with the American Jewish community, the Muslim American community had to develop a deeper understanding of the role of Israel, Zionism, and Jewish peoplehood in contemporary Jewish identity. The assumption that Israel could be divorced from the conversation limited from the outset the pool of prospective Jewish allies and conversation partners, created suspicion between the communities as to the "acceptable" parameters of the conversation, and generated deep misperceptions in the Muslim American community about the depth of the role of Israel in contemporary Jewish identity. MLI and its educational journey (described in greater detail below) offered an opportunity to break new ground in Muslim-Jewish relations in America.
The Shalom Hartman Institute was driven by self-interests as well. At the Institute, we believe deeply in the intimate connection between Judaism, the State of Israel, and the Jewish people, and we believe that a relationship to Israel constitutes a meaningful feature of a contemporary Jewish identity – both for Israel's citizens of course and also for world Jewry. We are concerned about the ways that these features of a rich integrated identity are being divorced from one another, including in campaigns that minimize and disparage the Jewish people’s historical and religious relationship to Israel. The Hartman Institute seeks to tell this story and to enrich the conversation with our Jewish partners, and we seek to expand this conversation to leaders in other faiths.
Second, the Institute has a long-standing commitment to religious pluralism as a core feature of what it means to have a sincere religious identity in the modern world. We believe that a commitment to pluralism provides a counterweight to the ways in which religious fundamentalism in all our religions demands chauvinistic loyalty to one's own faith and people and the demonization of the other. Our efforts at building cultures and conversations that foster religious pluralism seek to take seriously the full commitments of peoples of faith, which include political loyalties as well; and MLI was an effort to build the most robust possible interfaith encounter between Jews and Muslims by allowing for the complexities of political identity to constitute a central piece of the conversation. Building authentic relationships across religious borders cannot come with the expectation that the other will set aside what he or she regards as essential features of their religious identity.
Finally, both the Institute and the founders of the program are invested in reducing conflict and building more effective collaboration between Jews and Muslims in America specifically, where the Institute has a significant presence. North America may well be the only place today where conditions allow a better relationship between Jews and Muslims than anywhere else in the world. These relationships are, we believe, in the interest of both Jewish and Muslim communities, and empower Jews and Muslims to work together to improve the broader conditions for American democracy and the treatment of minorities. America should constitute a pilot site for a much more profound and promising theological and political relationship between Jews and Muslims that could have benefit for our broader communities.
We are straightforward about our self-interests – as Jews and Muslims – in entering into this relationship, and we have been candid with each other throughout the program. We have also been clear throughout that MLI is an experiment, which in turn has allowed the program to evolve as we learn from successes and failures. Top
What is the Shalom Hartman Institute?
What is SHI's educational methodology, and why is SHI a valuable partner and host for Muslim leaders to engage with the Jewish community?
The Shalom Hartman Institute is one of the leading centers for research into major questions facing the Jewish people, and for educational programs for leaders and change-agents in the North American Jewish community and in the State of Israel. The Institute has enormous reach among North American rabbis, who the Institute engages through field-leading robust, rigorous, and well-attended programs for continued rabbinic education; in Hillels on college campuses across North America; in the Jewish education system throughout the State of Israel; at major conferences and gatherings of North American and Israeli Jewish leaders; and through media, publications, and leadership convenings. The Institute is concerned with a wide but limited set of major religious and political questions facing contemporary Jewish and Israeli life, born of the confrontation between tradition and modernity, and including the meaning and value of pluralism, Jewish peoplehood, and the questions facing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
SHI's educational methodology is rooted in a deep commitment to the power of ideas and an equally deep commitment to education for its own sake, and not as an instrument for an advocacy agenda. In the work of education for its own sake, the instructor may enter with strong views on an issue but has a moral obligation to help the student understand how s/he formulated their views, and to indicate that the instructor’s views represent a reading – and not the only possible reading – of the material they are presenting. In this model, the instructor must also anticipate the possibility that the unexpected will happen and must be comfortable with unpredictable outcomes. Education for the sake of advocacy intends to lead the student to a particular conclusion and therefore manipulates the material and the pedagogy toward the inevitability of that conclusion.
The template for a Shalom Hartman Institute class is that the scholar/teacher will frame an issue for discussion, provide a set of texts drawn from the classical tradition and/or the canon of modern scholarship and ideas, provide an analysis of the material based in his/her disciplinary competency, and then lead a discussion of the implications of the material for the originally formulated issue. Many of our programs, including MLI, include hevruta-style study of the source materials, in which small groups of participants – often together with a trained facilitator – encounter the source material directly and so are able to formulate more effective questions and challenges to the use of the materials by the presenter.
MLI faculty is drawn from the core faculty and scholars of the Shalom Hartman Institute in both Israel and North America as well as guest lecturers, representing a wide array of disciplines, ethnic backgrounds, and political leanings; throughout the program, we have rigorously maintained a commitment to gender balance in our faculty, and have ensured that not only are MLI participants exposed to different ideological, religious, and political viewpoints, but that those different viewpoints are often on display in the same sessions in the forms of debates and arguments between different lecturers. The educational goal of the program has been to provide participants with as in-depth and honest an understanding as is possible of the meaning(s) of Israel to the Jewish people, which means making clear the sources of dissent and disagreement among the Jewish people about the meaning of Israel.
Our program and our method overtly and explicitly leave open and unanswered what conclusions the participants draw from their encounter. We do not measure for agreement; we measure for the clarity of how we express our views, and for whether they have been clearly understood. Nevertheless, in the climate in which we operate, many on the right and left reject the very legitimacy of complexity as relates to Israel-Palestine and accept as legitimate only loyalty to particular political expressions. In this climate there is a widespread assumption that any educational program is a coded advocacy program. We believe that in presenting a wide diversity of Jewish attitudes and ideas about Israel, in modeling internal Jewish disagreement about the meaning of Israel to the Jewish people and about Israeli policies, and in offering educational methodologies that privilege the curiosity of the learner over the fixed curriculum, we have designed a program that honors the true intent of education. We are including sample program courses and source sheets, and sample itineraries (coming soon) to provide examples of our methods and our approach.
A core question Muslims ask in deciding whether to engage this program – knowing the Institute's ideology and understanding its methodology – is whether they feel it is important to hear and understand the best articulation of the inner struggles and beliefs of the Jewish community in how they relate to the State of Israel and questions of Jewish peoplehood and identity. We believe that if the only conversation partners that a community has among members of another faith tradition or among adherents to a different political narrative are those who share the same political loyalties, then it is not meaningfully engaging with the other; it is merely finding allies to its own particular political cause. There are faith communities who believe that the American Jewish community and the United States are drifting away from Israel, and that that drift can be easily exploited for political gain. We do not share the belief that such a drift is inevitable or desirable, and it concerns us when interfaith efforts are predicated on one community’s fractiousness. We believe that the most powerful relationships that can be built between Muslims and Jews will emerge from efforts by the mainstream members of both communities to understand and appreciate the political and ideological loyalties of the other, and not through efforts to exploit each other's perceived communal weaknesses. Top
Who Speaks for MLI?
What happens when the moral and ideological gaps between the Institute and participants come to the surface because of political realities? How do participants navigate the tensions that arise as a result?
The Shalom Hartman Institute houses dozens of scholars, researchers, faculty members and facilitators who both participate in collaborative research efforts as well as produce their own autonomous intellectual outputs. The Institute has no formal editorial policy for the ideas that emerge from our research center or in the form of written pieces or courses taught by our scholars and has no ideological or political red lines or litmus tests through which we police our boundaries. We encourage our scholars to use their public voice to promote and debate ideas and we actively discourage rhetoric that involves personal attack or the demonization of the other. We have some core ideological commitments, and many of our scholars are committed to these principles and want to produce ideas within these frameworks; but of course some of our scholars are committed to some and not others, and we invite them to be meaningful contributors in the arenas where they can express themselves with sincerity and integrity. There is no spokesperson for SHI, we do not take partisan political positions on behalf of the Institute, and no scholar, fellow, or staff member speaks for the Institute on matters of ideology.
Our programs invite leaders and change-agents into this process of study in the hope that they will take what they learn at Hartman and use this knowledge in advancing quality leadership that is informed by ideas and ideals. We want the leaders who graduate from our programs to use their platforms in the ways that are appropriate to their skills and capacities. Sometimes we offer workshops for our program participants to sharpen their competencies in the arenas of leadership – op-ed trainings, sermon-writing workshops, curriculum-design conversations – but we do not hold alumni of our programs accountable to particular or uniform programmatic, performative, or ideological deliverables. Our theory of social change imagines that the world changes more slowly, and the change we seek for the world is not encompassed in the quick change of political loyalties or the advancement of a particular political program.
MLI aims to leverage its educational program to build stronger relationships between North American Jews and North American Muslims. For that reason, the Muslim leadership of MLI recruits individuals with significant leadership platforms and/or leadership potential, as expressed in a variety of fields. MLI leaders also aim to recruit for ethnic, religious, political and geographic diversity, as well as for curiosity and capacity to engage in a rigorous academic program. The Institute has been only passively involved in the recruitment of participants, which was led by the Muslim staff and leadership of the program; and needless to say, the Institute set no litmus tests or other ideological or political demarcations around the recruitment process.
At no point did SHI or MLI intentionally empower any alumni of the program as official or unofficial ambassadors of the program. Some MLI alumni are individuals with extraordinary reach and leadership platforms, and as a result that they are seen as representatives as MLI; this perception is false . The alumni community has been the site of vibrant debate about the public voice and representation of the program; from the Institute’s perspective, the fact that some alumni speak in louder voices than others is evidence simply of the diversity of the alumni community, and not an intentional effort to amplify some voices over others. Many alumni are involved in applying the lessons they learned from the MLI experience, and/or working to strengthen Muslim-Jewish relations, in ways that are much less publicly visible, but no less impactful.
At no point has SHI ever assumed it would speak on behalf of MLI alumni. MLI provided an opportunity for the ideas of SHI scholars to get a good airing in the classroom, and to be debated, accepted or rejected. Just as SHI never set an editorial policy, standards, red lines, or expectations on how alumni might emerge from the program and speak about either MLI or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a result, neither did we anticipate that anyone would assume that the opinions of an SHI scholar as expressed in public should reflect implied assent by MLI alumni. The pluralism inherent in both the faculty of the Institute as well as among our program participants testifies to the Institute's commitment to open discourse and to being a place for deep engagement with ideas. To suggest that the Institute seeks to imprint its ideas on its participants is to misunderstand our core educational and social change methodology.
SHI fully expects that participants and alumni of the MLI program will continue to disagree with the majority of SHI faculty on core historical, political and moral issues regarding Israel-Palestine, and certainly with respect to Israeli policy. Our hope is that the program offers our participants a broader and deeper understanding of Israeli and Jewish perspectives on Israel, so that continuing disagreements are substantive rather than polemical, allowing us to pursue the engagement over our disagreements more effectively -- and ensuring that Jewish-Muslim relationship-building does not become derailed by the failure to manage our differences more effectively.
We recognize that some participants may reach a 'breaking point' when they conclude that differences between us are too vast to navigate, or when they conclude that they no longer want to be exposed to the ideas raised by the MLI program. We regret when this happens, but we are grateful when these participants reach their conclusions as a result of an honest process, and when they recognize that they are not "complicit" or accountable for association with the Institute in spite of our differences. Top
Why is MLI an “imbalanced” program of study for Muslims of the Jewish tradition and Israel and not a balanced encounter?
Why is there a disproportionate emphasis on the Israeli narrative and not balanced with the Palestinian narrative?
The Shalom Hartman Institute houses MLI in response to a stated need by Abdullah Antepli, and echoed by many participants and alumni, for a deeper understanding of the meaning of Israel to the Jewish people. The Institute is a field leader and an ideal partner and provider on this issues. The Institute’s foci since its inception have included a serious scholarly reckoning with the ways in which the creation of the State of Israel has transformed and challenged historical Jewish self-understandings in the realm of theology, politics, and law, as well as a deep engagement with the challenges of what it means for Israel to try to be both Jewish and democratic, an articulation of a morality of the use of power and the exercise of war, and the meaning of Jewish peoplehood in an age of nation-states and diasporas. The overwhelming majority of Institute programs are designed for Jewish audiences to wrestle seriously with these questions; the MLI program was expressly designed to provide Muslim leaders the same curriculum of “internal wrestling” as the Institute offers to Jewish audiences. In this respect, from an educational perspective, MLI has entailed an act of trust on our part – that our internal struggles as a people can be educationally useful to another group of people seeking to understand us and build bridges to us, even though understanding the same complexities could be leveraged more cynically to undermine the integrity of Jewish communal identity.
The Shalom Hartman Institute is not competent in the discipline, nor committed to the mission, of teaching Palestinian narratives. We do confront ‘dual narratives,’ but more from the perspective of what it means for our community to reckon with the narrative of “the other” and to be in relationship with “the other” – moral obligations we take seriously – and not because we position ourselves as ‘balanced’ between these two narratives. We are rooted firmly in the narrative of one community, and we do our best to interrogate the moral foundations of that narrative and to then articulate its best versions – even if that narrative sits uncomfortably with current political realities.
Accordingly, we have built an educational program that is rooted in our competencies. At the same time, all MLI trips include time with Palestinians and in Palestinian territories, because to understand the State of Israel participants need some exposure to the diversity of experiences and perspectives of Palestinians, both inside and across the Green Line. Many MLI participants have spent time in separate educational and activist experiences with Palestinians in Palestine, and the experience of MLI is complementary or supplementary to those experiences – and not intended as the entirety of how one is meant to encounter the people, ideas, and conflicts across Israel-Palestine.
MLI remains an educational program for Muslims with hopes and consequences for future Muslim-Jewish relations in North America; but it is not in itself a dialogue program. From the beginning of MLI, we have hoped that there would emerge a credible institution to create a reciprocal program for Jewish leaders to study Muslim and Palestinian narratives and self-understandings. That program would be initiated by the Muslim community; and we, in turn, would be prepared to cooperate with such a program once it is created. Top
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