Namaste, Salaam Aleikum, Bonjour, Good evening every-one, good evening every-body, good evening every-soul, goodevening to you and to me, to us to them. Being invited for his panel to talk about what Jihad is all about, I realize that maybe this evening I am the outsider. What I wil tell, the story I will bring, is one story amongst others, a story about radicalisation through the eyes of a non-muslim, you could say, a non-person-of-colour, a no male, a no-terrorist. In the consensusreality we live in I am all of that NOT, but in the way I see the world, I AM all of that! In modernity we learned to think in black and white, in binary categories. I challenge you in the next 10’ to think in terms of relatedness, in seeing connection.
In a way I am muslim, I can connect to what it is to strongly
believe in something, to be passionate about words, ideas, prophets. I can
connect to what it is being devoted to. I am a woman and from this perspective,
this position in society, I can connect with the effects on my identity of
living in a society full of stereotypes, prejudices about the group I belong
to, and strong feelings of being discriminated. And although I’m not on a list of
state security of terrorists or potential terrorists, I guess, I am on the
terrorist line. I can connect to this urge to change something radically in the
situation of groups I belong to, to provoke a society that doesn’t take into
account the different position I’m on, to gather a new community around me of
believers that the planet and everyone who lives on it can only survive if we
radically change our ways of living. I am a radical rebel myself. Although
never in my life I met a deradicalisation-officer.
What I want to point out is if we want to come closer to an
understanding of what Jihad is all about, and what jhadists push to do the
things they do, even terrible terrorist attacks… we need compassion. Compassion
for those who we push away at this moment. Compassion in the definition that I
learned form a wise woman working in South Africa, Myrna Lewis, founder of the Deep Democracy method in that very difficult and challenging
post-apartheidperiod. When she talks about compassion the closest definition I
came to is: “to be gentle with the hardest parts within yourself.” If you can’t
do that work, than don’ t pretend even to have compassion for others, don’t
pretend that you can understand what is is like to live in such a situation,
don’ t try to work on issues like racism… if you don’t recognize the racist
within yourself.
And here I come to jihad and a very interesting saying that
I came across that refers to the words of the Prophet Mohammed. The prophet said
that jihad is not in the first place fighting ennemies in the outer world, but
the fight inside you. The fight between desires and feelings (fear, insecurity,
greed, not wiling to share our welfare with others) and what we truly are, who
we can be as human beings; compassionate, full of love, giving. I think it’s
time to do our own personal jihad. Working and living from a stance of
compassion and love. Knowing that Love is not such a naive or idealistic nor a
romantic idea. Love is maybe the most difficult answer to what is happening in
the world right now. Because love takes (and I quote bell hooks): “We can all
change our mind and our actions. (…) Many individuals offered their lives in
the service of justice and freedom. What made them exceptional was not that
they were any smarter or kinder than their neighbors but that they were willing
to live the truth of their values.” What
we need to live this way is a big portion of courage that we often don’t have
because it’s much more comfortable to keep the status quo. Fear keeps us in our
comfortzone. That’s why we need to encourage each other to practice the courage
to love. I’d like to tell you a story that I often tell in my trainings as
well.
“Years
ago a John Hopkin's professor gave a group of graduate students this
assignment: Go to the slums. Take 200 boys, between the ages of 12 and 16, and
investigate their background and environment. Then predict their chances for
the future.
The students, after consulting social statistics, talking to the boys, and compiling much data, concluded that 90 percent of the boys would spend some time in jail.
Twenty-five years later another group of graducate students was given the job of testing the prediction. They went back to the same area. Some of the boys - by then men - were still there, a few had died, some had moved away, but they got in touch with 180 of the original 200. They found that only four of the group had ever been sent to jail.
Why was it that these men, who had lived in a breeding place of crime, had such a surprisingly good record? The researchers were continually told: "Well, there was a teacher..."
They pressed further, and found that in 75 percent of the cases it was the same woman. The researchers went to this teacher, now living in a home for retired teachers. How had she exerted this remarkable influence over that group of children? Could she give them any reason why these boys should have remembered her?
"No," she said, "no I really couldn't." And then, thinking back over the years, she said musingly, more to herself than to her questioners: "I loved those boys...."
The students, after consulting social statistics, talking to the boys, and compiling much data, concluded that 90 percent of the boys would spend some time in jail.
Twenty-five years later another group of graducate students was given the job of testing the prediction. They went back to the same area. Some of the boys - by then men - were still there, a few had died, some had moved away, but they got in touch with 180 of the original 200. They found that only four of the group had ever been sent to jail.
Why was it that these men, who had lived in a breeding place of crime, had such a surprisingly good record? The researchers were continually told: "Well, there was a teacher..."
They pressed further, and found that in 75 percent of the cases it was the same woman. The researchers went to this teacher, now living in a home for retired teachers. How had she exerted this remarkable influence over that group of children? Could she give them any reason why these boys should have remembered her?
"No," she said, "no I really couldn't." And then, thinking back over the years, she said musingly, more to herself than to her questioners: "I loved those boys...."
And by the way, by telling you this, I’m not saying that we
musn’t invest in Brussels: in the poor housing, in working opportunities, in
high quality education. We must definitely, because never before Belgium had
such low marks on the report: 60% of youngsters in Brussels are unemployed, 28%
of them move out of schools unqualified, Th everage income in Molenbeek is 40%
lower than in the rest of Belgium, the PISA studies showed that the inequality
in society is reproduced through our education, there is etnostratification
going on massively, there’s a cut off in expenses for health and education and
we spend more money than ever if you look at it worldwide to safety and to
weapons. In Belgium we don’t have a proper supportsystem for people who suffer
from trauma. We have amazing caregivers on this point and some of them highlyskilled
people, but they are all working in organisations where they work with money
from temporaray projects having no guarantee that they can continue their work.
So traumatised people are walking through the streets and their is a fairly big
risk that one day some of them will explode. Certainly when you mix this up wit
all the prejudices and discrimination that we find in our society.
A topic where we rather don’t talk about so easily in
Belgium. ‘We ‘have the feeling that we already invested so much in ‘Them’ that
it would be unfair if they call us now ‘racists’, we are believing so much in
our valuesystem of treating everybody equal, that we cannot accept that this is
not daily reality. Discrimination is often not recognized. And more about this
from a psychological viewpoint we know now that even if you are not personnaly
affected by discrimination if there exists discrimination you will experience
the effects of it: effects as: 1. feeling a victim/feeling unempowered , 2. The
selffulling prophecy, 3. frustration-aggression, 4. Strong segregation and
relying only on your ingroup 5. Overassimilation. All these reactions, these
patterns, we can find in de minoritygroups and are causes for radicalisation. I
find them voiced by my students in the superdiverse classes I teach in Antwerp.
Let’s look at some further research here. Berry e.o. studied
acculturationstrategies. He looked at 2
dimensions: the degree of wanting to stick to your cultural heritage and the
desire to have intercultural contacts and participate in the new society. He
found out that there were 4 acculturation strategies: I will focus on two of
them. The first is integration: 82 % of the people of minority groups in Belgium
reported that was their strategie. And if we look at separation: people who
choose to rely on their cultural heritage and not having contacts with the rest
of society, this was only 10%. But: if we look at the research Hutnik did, where
he looked at identitypatterns: he asked people whether they identified with
their own group or the majority in society, we got whole others numbers: 10%
chooses integration and 80% separation. Let’s go to the majority group now and
see how they look to acculturations from their viewpoint.
Van Beselaere did a survey amongst 16-17 yearolds and asked them what they thought
about acculturation of minority groups: they reported that they saw only 8% of
the people who where integrated, and 77% of the people who live separated. If
they asked the youngsters whether they would like to have contact or whether
they liked to stay in their own group: only a percentage of 60 wanted contact,
40% didn’t want contact at all. So the
majority group in fact had a lower desire to meet others than vice versa!!! OliviaRutazibwa confirms this: as she says: “Let’s have the intercultural dialogue,
but I’m not so sure if the majority is waiting for it.” The survey also pointed
out that these numbers differed in relation to the level of schooling of these
youngsters had . He found out that opposing to the hypothesis, the youngsters
inde ASOschools, the general education were
,opposing of the youngsters in BSO and TSO less positive about acculturations
of minorities. The conclusion we can make here is that exposure to difference,
having friends and discoveeing we’re at some points same-same, make us more
open to live in a superdiverse society.
So it is not in our heads that we will change the world, it
is in our hearts and hands: in truly meeting each other and stop projecting all
the otherness in the other, but recognising the other is in me! Youngsters radicalise,
because we don’t own the radical voices in ourselves but project them onto them.
And they become more radicalised than they even were. They take upon a role
that is bigger than them. I don’t talk about terrorism here, these are people
committing crimes in the first place, and even there you can say in a way the
same, but let’s stay for a while with those so called radicalised youngsters.
The more we portrait them as radical, the more we push for example islam away
in our society, put a ban on headscarves, don’t answer even the letters they
write to search for work,… the more we push them towards radicalisation. The
more we would own our own radicality, the lesser they will have to show radicality.
We can do this by truly owning what is valualble for us and strive for it, we
can do this by protesting what goes wrong in society, we can do this by
exploring what’s the pain we have with religion in our lives. As long as we don’t
do our homework properly, others will have to do it for us. So I make a plea
here to recognize the differences and have the conflict with each other rather
than pushing it away. If you hide a little fish in the sea, soon it becomes a
whale. We share a lot being human beings: there is only one human race, we share
a lot of values, maybe priorirising them differently, we are in a way
same-same. And, at the same time, we
musn’t forget that we look at the world sometimes from a very different
perspective or view. Let’s make room for those different voices! They can bring
us a lot of richness and maybe solutions to questions we cannot tangle now in
this part of the world. Immigration has a meaning and it had so in every
revolution for mankind.
Let’s move to my practice. I am a trainer in diversity. I
try to contribute through my work to what is needed in our society that is in
transition. And if you allow me I’d like to tell you about two courses that I
teach. The first one is Deep Democracy. It is a theory and pratice an
decisionmaking and conflictresolution
where the minority voices are heard and even more stronger are recognized
as important gateways to tap into the wisdom or potential of a group. It is proven
in a lot of studies already that in our brain we are only using a small part of
the potential wisdom. I think it’s the same in our communities and in society,
we can tap a lot more out of the sea of human energy. And this is needed. This
world is on a turning point, a third revolution that will be bigger that the
agricultural or industrial revolutions we had. A selfsustaining society will
grow if we learn to trust on each other, taking every voice in account, if we
dare to be selves-in –connection with
others. To learn this I developed a specific course. I called it ‘Inburgeringscursusvoor autochtonen’, translated: integrationcourse for the autochtonous people.
Why I designed this course was the insight I had that in a superdiverse society
as we live in now, you cannot stay with fossile thoughts about one group
adapting to values and norms of another group. For everyone, for every human
living in a community integration is a task. And maybe this is not so evident
for people who call this society theirs. But even they have to face that their
society will never be the same again. So in this course we handle feelings of
fear, discomfort, anxiety and sadness. We honour this feelings and transform
them into curiosity to know more about otherness in others and in myself, in
being aware of white pirvileges and looking at microchanges with major effects,…
An African saying goes like this: it takes a village to
raise a child: we have a collective responsability to give these radical voices
in our society, those youngsters who lost grip on taking part in a community
again shelves where they can stand on, places where they can belong to, a story
of a community where they do take part in!
We can learn them to love the place where they live. And to feel
compassion for Belgians, because they are Begians too. We should do this work
together: in neighbourhoods, in schools, in footbalclubs, in mosks, in
workingplaces, in public places as well as in our private contacts with people.
Pass this sense of belonging. If you belong to a community, you become loyal to
the people who live in it. Because you become me and they become us.
I’m aware that this is in a way a different story, but I
connect with my colleagues and their analysis also. There is no single story to
tell about Jihad. I’m a pedagogue, I do this work connecting people because I
strongly believe, and as a mother of tree I cannot than be than a believer,
that this planet earth can be a place of love and peace for all. A message that
in fact every religion on earth is teaching us.
And so I want to end with an old Sufi poem:
Come, let us be friends for once
let us make life easy on us
let us be lovers and loved ones
the earth shall be left to no one.
