Dateline: September 19, 2001, Newark Star Ledger

What I wrote a year ago remains all-too-relevant today. On the 10th anniversary I am proud to have generated a great team and implemented a powerful step toward reconnecting the human family: www.911Walks.org

Date: 2001/09/19 Published in the Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest daily newspaper

We are Americans, too

Arab community and Islam are not to blame for attacks
By ANISA MEHDI

I sat on the left side of the NJ Transit train escaping New York City that Tuesday. Like so many of us, I needed to see the smoking towers with my own eyes to shake the disbelief from my senses.

Commuters, ordinarily strangers to one another, talked all the way home. The man next to me and I shared our astonishment and sorrow, wondering what the horrible events might portend. He asked why I had gone to New York that morning, and I said that, ironically, I was producing a television documentary aimed at helping Americans understand Islam better. He shook his head grimly and said, "This is going to help."

I asked why he thought everyone was pointing blame at Muslims at a time like this. "Racism," was his simple and precise response. I trembled involuntarily.

You can't tell I am Muslim just by looking at me. I do not cover my hair. My eyebrows are waxed back to dark, defined, dramatic lines, that don't shout, "I'm an Arab!" Not anymore.

Gone are the painful days of a schoolgirl called "terrorist." No one asks about the camels in my yard anymore, or about the bomb in my backpack. My friend's parents can't forbid me to play with them because now I'm grown up. Not that I ever was a threat. I was just a kid who happened to have a different background, trying to peacefully share the same American playground as everyone else.

I grew up in Queens, and there, as anywhere in the metropolitan area, people of Arab, South Asian or homegrown Muslim roots learned to steel themselves against prejudice.

Until last Tuesday I'd forgotten how much armor I'd been wearing in emotional self-defense. What started in school evolved into decades of explaining oppressed people's frustration in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran. I'd get the evil eye when I suggested that maybe people in other countries might not see our government as the same "good guy" we may consider it to be.

But Sept. 11 shattered my shields and silenced my historical clarifications. Nothing explains this. Nothing justifies this outrageous attack. We are all horrified beyond expression at the evil we have witnessed. This assault is on upright people everywhere: Muslims, Christians, Jews, people of other faiths and people of no faith.

I join Muslims all over the world recoiling in disgust that anyone could remotely associate this brutality with Islam. With Arab-Americans I weep for the children of Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq who have already suffered extreme deprivation and stand now to suffer even more. I weep for the young Americans who will be taunted and ostracized, as I once was, for crimes they would never commit.

Americans, all of us, are stunned by this act of violence.

Yes, it's imperative to find the guilty parties, try them, convict them and punish them. But it's also imperative that we do not blame the innocent and curse a whole community unfairly. The world is home to 1 1/2 billion Muslims - an estimated 7 million in this country. The overwhelming majority are good, decent people.

Islam is a faith based on peaceful submission to the will of God. Muslims are commanded to respect the faiths of others. We are instructed to do what is good and avoid what is evil. Chapter 35, verse 10 of the Quran says: "If any do seek for glory and power, to God belongs all glory and power. To him mount up all words of purity. It is he who exalts each deed of righteousness. Those that lay plots of evil, for them is a penalty terrible; and the plotting of such will be void of result."

Islam allows no excuse for the killing of innocent people.

So why are some Americans reacting so forcefully against Muslims? To take blind vengeance on Muslims or Arabs is another kind of evil that we, as Americans, have been fighting for decades. That evil is bigotry, so starkly stated by my fellow commuter in the shadow of the smoke last Tuesday.

Bigotry and racism won't help: not locally, not globally.

It will take years, perhaps generations, for all the emotional and political dust to settle from the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. For Muslims the pain and politics are multilayered. We have not only suffered the loss of loved ones but also are suddenly suspect - guilt by association. Numerous acts of violence against Muslim businesses have been reported around the country. Mobs have menaced mosques; women in traditional Islamic dress have been beaten. Many shudder with the knowledge that their homelands may soon come under attack.

I am heartened by what I've seen in many New Jersey towns: calls for solidarity among all our diverse communities and measured military response. The guideposts for action are in our great Constitution and the prayerful words of "America, the Beautiful": "Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law."

What your Muslim and Arab neighbors, your doctors, your students and classmates, coffee-shop owners and gas station attendants need now is to be embraced, not rejected. We are not the "them" or the "they" that did it. We are part of "us." We stand with other Americans. Together we can build a more stable and understanding tomorrow.

###

Groundswelling

On September 6 an inspired audience sat in the Greene Space at WNYC, as Valarie Kaur and fellow panelists Hussein Rashid, Ari Wallach and Beth Zemsky laid out a foundation for a hopeful new social movement for the 21st century. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re already pumped, primed, and part of it … Certainly the 9/11 Walks project embodies it … Auburn Seminary, hosting of the event, took the brave step of naming it something: “Groundswell.” Kaur is the project director as it is conceived by Auburn.

The event was an opportunity for the audience, mostly from the “progressive left,” to learn how to make something of “collective intentional action,” as Zemsky, a social change strategy expert explained. It was a chance to c

onsciously frame a conversation for the future that goes beyond “rights” and “tolerance” to an age of welcome and partnership. It is a time for turning “campaigns” into lasting aspirational world views. It is also a time to include faith.

“Our generation, the Millennials,” said Kaur, “doesn’t see ourselves as black or white, Asian or American, Muslim or Sikh, straight or gay.” (I, who am of another generation with more years here deeply appreciate that sentiment, yet I wonder, who DO they see? We all see someone. Is it possible simply to see character and qualities like honesty, honor, intelligence and humility?)

I went to the microphone at the appointed time, and spoke of the 9/11 Walks. ”We are one way to connect with another person. we are decentralized. We ask people to ‘see no strangers,’” I said, referencing key points made by Hussein, Wallach, and Kaur respectively. ”And we are motivated by the enlightened longings and bold visions expressed here tonight. But we’re responding to one thing more that hasn’t been mentioned. Fear. An underlying fear of another, the other, existing today that makes all of our efforts essential. Fear of Muslims, fear of “crusaders,” fear of terrorists, fear of drones and fighters jets, fear of cyberattack, fear of occupation, fear of physical and cultural annihilation, fear of flying, fear of worshipping false idols, false leaders, and false pretenses. We, the 9/11 Walks, are taking our small steps as an act of hope and courage to make a mark of kindness on the face of fear. What else do YOU see as possible. What else can people do, what else can we do to face and diminish fear?”

One good answer was to make sure to tell your story to another and to hear the other’s tale, too. That makes the other person multi-dimensional.

Another good answer was to keep hope and your aspirational world view front and center.

What do YOU think we can do? We are already on this Walk together … Share what you think.

In synagogue speech, Anisa Mehdi recalls historic ‘compatibility’|

Originally published in the New Jersey Jewish News, March 30, 2011

Muslim journalist: ‘Use our common ground’

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

March 30, 2011

A Muslim journalist called on a Jewish audience in Livingston to “use our common ground as Muslims and Jews to make something positive in history out of something others will certainly use to spew hate and fear.”

Anisa Mehdi, founder and president of Whetstone Productions, a New Jersey-based production and consulting company, was guest speaker at Temple B’nai Abraham on March 22.

In an hour-long address, followed by a half-hour question-and-answer period, the award-winning reporter and filmmaker suggested that Judaism and Islam, as well as Jews and Muslims, had much in common despite centuries of hostility.

“Back to the basics,” she said. “Adam, Noah, Joel, Jonah, Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Isaiah, Elijah — all of these are considered prophets of Islam to Muslims and they are all mentioned in the holy book, the Koran…. We share values of education and respect for our parents, giving charity, and fasting.

“Islam, like Judaism, is a system of laws and rules — some of which we wrestle with, some of which we take at face value, and some of which we need to reinterpret so they are relevant to today,” she added. “The Protestant Reformation took a long time and was very bloody. I’m not sure this will be any different.”

Venturing into what she called “tricky territory,” Mehdi spoke of historic violence between Jews and Muslims.

“We have the right things and the profound faith that we share, but we also have very complicated politics, and these are the things that need to be discussed,” she said. “We have a long history of compatibility.”

She referred to the “great poetry, mathematics, exploration” by both Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain, as well as persecution and banishment by the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks coming up in September, she suggested a new Muslim-Jewish alliance in America “to create a productive future. We need friends,” she said.

“We can use your support because you know what it is like to be persecuted and to be a minority that is unfairly targeted.”

After her talk, Mehdi fielded questions about what some audience members suggested was a dearth of moderate Muslim voices.

“My heart breaks when I hear the anti-Muslim sentiment in this country,” said one woman in the audience. “Why aren’t there more moderate Muslims speaking out against some of the things that fundamentalists do and say?”

“Why does it seem like we don’t hear from these moderate Muslims?” interjected Rabbi Clifford Kulwin. “Is it that we are not hearing, or is it because it is not happening?”

“It is there and we’re not hearing it,” Mehdi insisted. “Every time there is a suicide bombing in Iraq on the Muslim side or in Israel, where Jews die, there are condemnations of that act of terrorism by imams and leaders of Muslim civic groups and individuals. They are automatically and regularly condemned, these acts of terrorism,” but mostly ignored by American media.

Later, in an interview with NJ Jewish News, Mehdi acknowledged that tension between Palestinians and Israelis “has been a biggie and will remain until there is a solution.”

“Will we ever see a solution?” she was asked.“Absolutely. I think it might be a two- or three-state solution with Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel, not because of political differences between Hamas and Fatah, but because they are geographically separate — unless there is a giving of territory that connects Gaza and the West Bank.”

Her tone was optimistic.

“It will eventually get better. The Hundred Years’ War ended. We are now allies with Japan, even if the United States committed the worst act of terrorism and the only act of nuclear assault on this planet,” she said, referring to the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Anything is possible.”

Mehdi, whose reportage specializes in religion and the arts, has appeared on PBS’ Frontline, ABC News’ Nightline, and National Geographic Special. She is a resident of Maplewood and a flutist with the Livingston Symphony Orchestra.

SIDE BAR

Speaker’s family honored Thomas

One subject that was not raised at Anisa Mehdi’s March 22 appearance at Temple B’nai Abraham was a “courage in journalism” award her family presented to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

The $1,000 prize was given to the 90-year-old Thomas at a Nov. 18 dinner organized by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“The story of Helen Thomas, like my father’s, is one of integrity, vision, boldness, and unflagging determination,” Anisa Mehdi said in an AADC release announcing the award.

The event took place six months after Thomas said in a videotaped interview at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the White House that Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, and the United States. The comments cost the Lebanese-American reporter her job as a columnist for the Hearst Corp.

Mehdi’s family and the AADC presented Thomas with the 2010 M.T. Mehdi Courage in Journalism award after Thomas wrote that “I deeply regret my comments” and before a Dec. 2 speech in which she said the White House, Congress, Hollywood, and Wall Street “are owned by the Zionists.”

Asked by NJ Jewish News why her family presented Thomas with an award months after the correspondent made comments many considered anti-Semitic, Mehdi responded in a March 29 e-mail: “The Mehdi family honored Helen Thomas…in recognition of her long and laudable career in American journalism. Her personal comment at the White House Jewish Heritage Celebration last May does not invalidate 57 years of superb, professional journalism.”

Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of Temple B’nai Abraham said he had not been aware that Mehdi’s family had presented the award to Thomas.

“I don’t know if having this information ahead of time would have altered our decision to invite her,” said Kulwin. Nevertheless, he said, Mehdi “was informative, engaging, and absolutely thought-provoking. In any case, when we invite somebody to Temple B’nai Abraham to speak and share their views with us, we don’t require or expect that everything they say will be pleasing to our congregation. That is not how one learns.”

— ROBERT WIENER|

Anisa podcast

My March 1 keynote address for Women's History Month is now a podcast of Raritan Valley Community College. You can hear it here: Will the Revolution be Feminized? Arab and Muslim Women in the Public Sphere.

"Going to Church and Mosque in Algeria," Encore of NPR Commentary

I wrote and read this commentary for National Public Radio in 2005 after conducting documentary film research in Algeria and France. I post if for you now in honor of the Trappist monks who stayed put in a dangerous time and place out of love and respect for their Muslim friends and neighbors -- who also stayed put for the monks.

A feature film on the lives of the monks, "Of Gods and Men" by Xavier Beauvois, is France's submission to this year's Academy Awards. I'm still working on my documentary, hindered not by content but by funding. My film goes well beyond the sacrifice of the Trappists to the extraordinary outreach across religious lines their friends and family have undertaken in the wake of their tragic deaths.

The story is immediate and important.

July 19, 2005

Commentator Anisa Mehdi has the story of Christian de Chergé, a Trappist monk in Algeria in the 20th century.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

Here's a story about Roman Catholics in Algeria from commentator Anisa Mehdi.

ANISA MEHDI:

Algeria is no stranger to the church. The fourth century theologian St. Augustine was born in what is now the eastern edge of Algeria and wrote his famous confessions there. Christians have been in the area ever since. When the French colonized Algeria beginning in 1830, they brought along Catholic monks to prove to the local Muslims that they, too, had religion.

One of Algeria's outstanding 20th century monks was also from France. In the 1850s, Christian de Chergé was a lieutenant in the French army fighting against Algerian independence. During that time one of the local Muslims he befriended died protecting him. No one would forget such a sacrifice, least of all the pious Christian de Chergé.

After Algeria won independence in 1962, de Chergé became a Trappist monk. He begged to be posted in Algeria. Father Christian spent the rest of his life learning Arabic and studying Islam. In 1972, he traveled from his Algerian monastery to Italy to study at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome. Did you know there even was one? De Chergé dedicated his ministry to building faith together with Muslims. He and his brothers at their tiny monastery tucked away in the Atlas Mountains welcomed Muslims for discussions, retreats and cultivation.

They weren't out to cultivate Christians. They were cultivating honey, vegetables, fruit trees and friendship.

Neither the Catholics nor the Muslims in these gatherings tried to convert the other. Instead, they tried to sow an understanding of the Word of God, to search together for God's will, to create as best they could a model of behavior for the kingdom of heaven. It didn't work. Hell came instead. A merciless civil war terrorized Algeria in the 1990s, and in March 1996 some faction in that bitter war kidnapped Father Christian and six of his brother monks. Two months later only their heads were found. Their funeral was held at the magnificent cathedral of Our Lady of Africa high on the cliffs of Algiers overlooking the Mediterranean. The archbishop of Algiers and Muslim religious leaders, French diplomats and Algerian politicians all attended; so did thousands of ordinary citizens.

Family and friends of the martyred monks are continuing their work, pursuing dialogue in both Algeria and France. Christians and Muslims worldwide must keep moving toward friendship following the lead of these Algerian monks and the late pope, John Paul II. They don't have to believe each other's theology. They just need to uphold the essential codes they share: to show mercy, be just, give charity, love one another and love God.

BLOCK: Anisa Mehdi is producing a documentary film about the monks and Muslims of Algeria.

Copyright © 2005 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved.

RVCC tells stories of women during Women's History Month

Anisa Mehdi, keynote, March 1, 2011, 7-8:30pm

BRANCHBURG — The stories of women from around the world will be told during events for Women's History Month at Raritan Valley Community College.

From women in Egypt and Sierra Leone in Africa to local women who graduated from RVCC, the college's March programs include a wide range of experiences and perspectives.

The programs are all free and open to the public.

They center on the theme "Our History is Our Strength: Celebrating the Centenary of International Women's Day." International Women's Day is a global event, first celebrated in 1911, that grew out of demands by women, labor unions and socialist organizations for better rights and working conditions for women worldwide. It served as the germ for the eventual proclamation of Women's History Month by the federal government in the 1980s.

RVCC's programs include appearances by award-winning filmmaker/journalist Anisa Mehdi; Sara Flounders, co-director of the New York-based International Action Center; and Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier."

Here are details about each event:

7 to 8:30 p.m. March 1, RVCC Atrium (lower level, College Center), Opening day ceremony: "Will the Egyptian Revolution be Feminized? Arab and Muslim Women in the Public Sphere," presented by Anisa Mehdi; respondents: RVCC professors Brandyn Heppard, philosophy; Jacqueline Skole, communication; Ronald Tyson, English; and Andrea Vaccaro, ESL. Mehdi is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and filmmaker who served as artistic director of "Documentary Voices: Pulling Focus," an initiative launched in Dubai in July 2008, and as producer/director of the National Geographic special "Inside Mecca."

1 to 2:30 p.m. March 16, RVCC Conference Center (Room C), "The Role of Women in the Creation of World Peace," presented by Sara Flounders; respondents: RVCC professors Charlie Bondhus, English; and Saulo Colon, sociology. Flounders, who identifies herself as a grassroots organizer, has spoken at universities and high schools and on numerous broadcast networks.

My Iraq, His War: International Herald Tribune February 12, 2011

I.H.T. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

My Iraq, His War

By ANISA MEHDI

Published: February 11, 2011

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MAPLEWOOD, NEW JERSEY — I was in a supermarket picking up greens, beans and rice for dinner, reflecting on that fateful night in January 1991 when the United States began bombing my father’s homeland and I found out I was pregnant with my first child.

Behind me at the checkout counter was a man in camouflage fatigues and boots, clean cut, in his late 20s: an American soldier home on leave. His jacket listed Iraqi cities — Baghdad, Kirkuk, Fallujah and Mosul. He waited, chatting with a comrade in civilian attire.

My heart clenched as soon as I saw him. From gullet to gut tremors took me over as they have every time I think about the war. Twenty years later my complicit inner American still wrestles with my enraged inner Iraqi. “It was bad enough with Saddam Hussein,” one voice says. “I was against it! I’m sorry,” says another. “You’re not the Mongols; you’re the great democracy! End it!” “It’s out of my control.”

My father was born in Karbala and finished high school in Baghdad. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Dad never lost the accent that set him apart from the fathers of my friends. He complimented the girls in my class who gained weight — a sign that they had enough to eat at home. (The girls, of course, were mortified.)

My dad, M.T. Mehdi, spent his life defending Palestinian rights. His motherland only became an issue for him during his last years.

We visited Iraq a long time ago: my blonde, blue-eyed mom and her three dark-haired daughters meeting my father’s mother for the first and only time. Baghdad’s perfumed evening air met my Scheherazade-inspired expectations; the bustling book market, the clanging copper souk, the world’s sweetest mint tea, and the girls in jeans and tee-shirts all spun a wondrous, unexpected reality.

That was before Saddam Hussein took power, before the devastating war with Iran, before ’91 and decades of sanctions pummeling the population into purgatory; before foreign forces cleared the way for sectarian violence and a reign of terror by criminal opportunists. Before kidnappings for ransom became all-too-common. Before American soldiers were picking off people in the street from helicopters hovering above as if Iraqis were digital images in a video game.

My younger daughter’s best friend and her family fled Baghdad. Her fondest childhood memory is sitting around a coal stove in a once-luxurious home, all the curtains drawn, eating melted chocolate on bread.

When I saw the man in fatigues my heart began to race.

I tried to hold my tongue, but the inner Iraqi and sympathetic American conspired against it. A snide tone came from my stopped-up throat, like steam from a pressure-cooker.

“Have you been to Karbala?” I jerked my chin toward the list on his coat. It was an accusation, not a question.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. Here, at a supermarket in New Jersey, a stranger was talking to him about a place on the other side of the world, and it wasn’t a pandering “thank you” for defending our nation.

“My family is from Karbala,” I persisted, adding a touch of defiance.

That surprised him even more. There was nothing uniquely Iraqi in my appearance: dark curly hair, a jacket, slacks. I sound like I was born in the U.S.A., which I was.

The biggest surprise, however, was mine. He took a breath and said very gently, “No, I haven’t been there. But I hear it was a beautiful city once.”

My heart missed a beat. That’s not what I expected. Entitlement from a soldier, sure. Scorn, maybe; nonchalance at worst. There was none of that in his voice and no pity either. Only kindness.

“Yes it was,” I confirmed, remembering the gilded dome of the Shrine of Hussein, the rich brocade enveloping his tomb, the detailed, glittering mosaics, the chandeliers and the peaceful courtyard shaded with palm trees. My face twitched into something like an upturned smile and I looked away, my eyes beginning to sting and something salty suddenly rising in my throat.

I paid for my groceries and nodded goodbye. He nodded back. As I left I he turned to his buddy. “No one should be there,” I heard him say. “War is hell.”

Anisa Mehdi is a journalist and filmmaker living in New Jersey. She was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar in Jordan.

Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam

On January's final weekend I'm giving a talk at the University of Richmond's Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art.

The exhibition, Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, has been in the works for several years. I got started on it long before the Fulbright at the invitation of Professor Virginia Raguin of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. In contrast to the many interfaith conjoinings of Islam with Christianity and Judaism, this program expands beyond theology to participation, hence the exploration of a practice: pilgrimage. What sets this collection apart from other, "high art" amassings of religious art work and iconography, is the inclusion of very personal items -- souvenirs, memorabilia, maps, treasures that remind a person of her extraordinary journey. A wristband. A canteen. A few stones gathered en route. Scraps of writings. Connecting these pieces across time are canteens 1000 years old and centuries-old boxes for carrying trinkets home. You'll also see some books and glorious calligraphy as are now on display at the New York Public Library's well-received Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

It's interesting to me how religion, faith, spirituality and seeking are perhaps less pariah subjects than even a decade ago. We are learning to look with respect and curiosity at other people's ways. I am all for the multi-lateralism of society. Appreciation breeds far less destruction than disdain.