November 2, 2002	Saturday	Sha’aban 26,1423

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WASHINGTON, Nov 1: Season’s greetings in Arabic calligraphy welcome the visitors to this site. Another corner displays 11 beautiful pictures of mosques in the United States. Yet another corner offers the religious landscape of the United States in English, French, Russian and Spanish languages.

The Web site that offers all this is run by a secular institution — the US State Department — which is running a $15 million campaign to befriend Muslims in the US and abroad.

The campaign coincides with the advent of Ramazan, beginning next week. The department hopes that a message of peace sent during this month would help improve relations with Muslim nations, some of which are often hostile to the US.

As part of the campaign, supervised by Charlotte Beers, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, the department has prepared four television commercials aimed at providing a better understanding of Islam in America.

Each about two minutes long, the ads explain “what kind of a society we are, how we treat people,” says the department’s spokesman Richard Boucher.

He said the US was under no illusions that the ads would stop suicide bombers by showing Muslim militants that the US was tolerant of their religion.

“But there are an awful lot of people who need to know more about the US,” he said. “What they think they know about the US is based on distorted images and rumour ... and that it’s good for us to tell them our story.”

The spots feature a doctor, Elias Zerhouni, the Algerian-born director of the National Institutes of Health; a Libyan-born baker, Abdul Hammuda of Toledo, Ohio; a Lebanese-born teacher, Rawia Ismail of Toledo; and a medic with the New York Fire Department, Farouk Muhammad.

They were produced in conjunction with the Council of American Muslims for Understanding, a nonprofit, nonpolitical group which aims at providing a better understanding of Islam in America.

One of the articles on the Web site deals with the general misconceptions about Islam in the West, particularly in the US.

Making a distinction between Islam as a religion and culture, and the politics of various Muslim groups, the article points out that “to say that Islam is responsible for terrorists is just as incorrect as the assertion that Christianity produced the Nazis.”

Quoting Bernard Lewis, a retired professor of Near East studies at Princeton University in New Jersey, the article says that there’s an “enormous amount of shared heritage, shared belief and shared customs” between the Islamic and Western cultures.

“There are still significant numbers, in some quarters perhaps a majority, of Muslims with whom we share certain basic cultural and moral, social and political beliefs and aspirations,” Lewis said. “Remember, we are talking about one and a third billion people; about more than 14 centuries of history; and about an enormous diversity of differing and often even conflicting traditions within the same larger culture.”

Another article on the State Department’s website quotes a Muslim-American leader of an Islamic think tank as saying that problems such as terrorism and violence plaguing the Muslim world have “only one way out — democracy”.

Radwan Masmoudi, the executive director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Democracy, says that the Muslim world is in a state of disarray because of confrontation between extremist religious movements that see themselves as the “defenders of Islam” and authoritarian political regimes that claim to be “defenders of modernity”. Masmoudi says authoritarian attempts to impose Islam or modernity are dead ends.

Yet another article tells the readers that Islamic financial institutions are expanding in the US to meet the needs of a growing American Muslim population.

“The Islamic banking investment and financial management market is growing at a rate of 15 per cent per year, currently operates in 75 countries and accounts for around $200 billion,” the article said. “Nearly one-quarter of all Islamic financial institutions are working in countries that do not have Muslim majorities, including the US.”

On the right-hand corner, the State Department’s Web site has the picture of a stamp issued by the US Postal Service on Sept 1, 2001, which says: “Eid Mubarak,” or “May your religious holiday be blessed.” The Eid stamp was re-issued on Oct 10, 2002.