LAHORE: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ So goes Rumi’s well-known couplet. For Dr Riffat Hasan nothing is more inspiring at present.

“In Rumi’s vision of Sufism, beyond the religious tradition, all believers become equal,” she says. “There is only unity; no otherness,” she tells Dawn in an interview.

For decades Dr Riffat has been living in the United States, and she has taught religious studies for 33 years at the University of Lousiville in Kentucky. She has seen ups and downs in the acceptance of immigrants in the US, although Kentucky she says is like a haven for people of all kinds. But now with US President Donald Trump, things may change in many places.

Although it is not as if the masses support any kind of racism, because only about one third of the voters came out to vote and many of these were the ‘white supremacists’ belonging to Middle America, most of whom were blue collar workers and many of whom had lost their businesses and jobs mainly during the Bush regime.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were heavy on local economy and many lives were lost abroad. Barack Obama, says Dr Riffat, tried his best to revive the cracked economy and could only succeed to an extent.

Trump, in order to satisfy his voter base, took to propagating the alienation of some of the immigrants, especially Muslims and Hispanics. The alienation of African Americans and the Native Americans also rose.

For Dr Riffat Hasan, who is a PhD in Iqbal’s Philosophies, and a leading scholar of the Quran who has interpreted the position of women in Islam differently, this treating of Muslims as the ‘other’ is not new.

“The Muslims have always been the other since 7 AD when they invaded Spain. That was when they split the ruling world of Christendom, because in Europe at that time, there was internal conflict between Catholics and Protestants.”

That is why Dr Riffat does not believe that it was actually 9/11 that made a difference. The word ‘Islamophobia’ was first coined in 1991 by the Runnymede institute of UK when they did a survey on ‘Attitudes Towards Islam’, revealing a set of stereotypes that people had of Islam and Muslims. (However a counter survey after this, of the Muslims themselves ended up in dispelling these stereotypes.)

The same has been the case in the US, especially recently, and this rising Islamophobia has forced many progressive thinkers and activists – including non-Muslims of different descents – to unite and fight off bigotry.

“The Jews for instance have sided with us on this in context of the fact that they themselves have been stereotyped and treated terribly throughout history,” she says. “There are Christians and Buddhists too who support us.”

Thus the Salam Network was formed. Partly though it was in response to a lack of discussions on certain topics by the Muslims who were running large mosques and working for the welfare of their own communities.

“They talk about things like how long was the Holy Prophet’s beard, what he wore, but if you want to hold a discussion about the woman’s position in Islam, they wont talk about it,” she says. “They backed out of holding the Salam Network’s first conference. We ended up doing it in a Buddhist Centre.”

The network is meant to bring everyone on the table to engage in discussions, so that they can gain knowledge about what she says Islam is actually all about.

“We show solidarity for activism on the streets, but education is equally important if not more. Dialogue is important. The origin of dialogue began in the 1930s between the Catholics of France and Protestants of Germany and look where they are now. Look at where the Jews and Christians are after there was a dialogue between them after the Jew massacre in Germany. Why can it not happen between Islam and other religions?”

The place which Rumi describes in his couplet is where Dr Riffat wants to reach through the Salam Network. It is a ‘movement’ more than anything, she says. “We want this to catch on, to spread,” she explains.

“From one place to the other, one country to another.”

And while she speaks of how she wants non-Muslims to understand about Islam, she also speaks of how there are ancient documents found by a Christian researcher she knows that still hang in churches across the Middle East.

“This was about six years ago when the researcher saw the words of the Holy Prophet on message boards – some of them ancient – hanging in churches where he had promised to protect and to befriend the non-Muslim communities of places where the Muslims had conquered,” she says.

“There are Caliph Umar’s words too. All these point to the fact that Islam or the early Muslims did not in fact want any kind of war between the other religions.”

But does the same need of knowledge also apply to Muslims? The answer is yes.

“While we are telling the non-Muslims in the US that Islam is a religion of peace, here in Pakistan it is very disheartening to see what Muslims are doing themselves,” she says. “When Islam propagates peace, it is so paradoxical to see lynches against the Ahmadi or the Christian community. We ourselves are so uneducated we need to understand our own religion. This happens when you are caught up in irrelevant issues and not talk about topics and issues that really matter,” she says.

Back in the United States though she says with the coming of Trump, one thing for certain has been positive: with so much bigotry out there, the forces of liberalism have united. “Now it is not so much as we want to educate them about Islam, it is more that they themselves want to learn about it. And when they do learn about the history and its tilt towards peace they are really sometimes taken by surprise. Then it is our moment of pride and we feel the network can truly achieve something big.”

Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2017