OUR local shops in Hendon, northwest London, present a picture of multifaith harmony. A few doors down from the Jewish baker — whose specialities include kosher bhajis — comes the halal butcher, with a large “Medina Cola” poster in his window.
Muslims and Jews are often astonished at the resemblances between their religions. For instance, the saying that saving a life is equivalent to saving the world is common to both. The Arabic for charity, sadakah, is almost identical to tzedakah, the word for it in Hebrew.
But the development of fraternal feeling between Britain’s 275,000 Jews and 1.5 million Muslims faces an obstacle: the fallout from conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Passions have been running especially high this year. In February, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the Board of Deputies of British Jews met to pledge co-operation against any legislative threat to halal and kosher meat. But in April an annual interfaith award was withdrawn at the last minute from Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the MCB, when it was learnt he had accused Israel of genocide and “ethnic cleansing”. The award is significant because it is sponsored by the charitable foundation of British Jewry’s premier interfaith activist, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, a co-founder of the Three Faiths Forum to promote dialogue between Christians, Muslims and Jews.
A couple of months later the visit to London of the Muslim cleric Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi provoked even greater furore, with Jews outraged over his previous justification of Palestinian suicide bombers and the MCB blaming his hostile media reception on a “smear campaign orchestrated by the Zionist lobby”.
But for all the political tensions, dialogue between the two communities continues. In his Jewish New Year message, televised tomorrow, the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, will highlight the importance of peaceful relations between the faiths by showing footage of a joint visit to a Muslim and a Jewish school in London by Judea Pearl, father of the American journalist murdered in Pakistan, and the Muslim academic Dr Akbar Ahmed.
Tomorrow also, Muslim and Jewish pupils will be elegantly crafting the word “peace” in Hebrew and Arabic at a calligraphy workshop at the Courtauld Insitute in London. The event is organised by the Maimonides Foundation, one of the first charities set up to support Muslim-Jewish dialogue and chaired by the leading collector of Islamic art, Professor David Khalili, a Jew originally from Iran. Professor Khalili has championed art as a “universal language” which can transcend barriers, but the foundation has also used football to build bridges — its soccer summer training scheme for Muslim and Jewish boys has run successfully for a number of years.
For the Maimonides executive member Dr Khalid Hameed, there is a golden rule for good dialogue. “Leave politics out of it. There are so many trouble spots in the world that if all of them were superimposed on the communities in Britain, life would become impossible.”
But keeping politics out may be easier said than done. One member of a synagogue delegation invited to a local mosque reported being met by the imam, who served refreshments but then explained that they couldn’t enter the mosque itself because if they were spotted, “it might cause an incident”.
Other groups, however, are learning to negotiate their differences. “There have been some testing times in the Middle East,” said Mohammed Azam, a founding member of the independent East London Three Faiths Forum, “But we’ve managed to weather the storms.”
An accountant who is on the executive of the Ilford Islamic Centre in Essex, he has, at times felt doubts about dialogue himself. “When Sheikh Yassin and Dr al-Rantisi (the Hamas leaders assassinated by Israel this year) got martyred, that was a big shock. It made me think ‘What’s the point?’ After a couple of days, you have to get up and go on,” he reflected. “In 2002, when the (Palestinian) uprising was at its peak and suicide bombs were going off everywhere, it must have been upsetting for Jewish friends. But they have kept faith in the Three Faiths Forum.”
According to Dr Richard Stone, the Jewish co-chairman of Alif-Aleph UK, there is evidence of growing contact between Muslims and Jews at the grass roots. He says the search for understanding may fare better in small groups rather than through the official representative organisations, which find it “difficult to avoid the politics of the Middle East”. Alif-Aleph UK has engaged a Muslim and a Jewish undergraduate to chart the links between younger members of the two faiths in Britain. One of the researchers is 21-year-old Urmee Khan, who is about to start her final year of politics and parliamentary studies at Leeds University.
“I came to the project slightly cynical. I thought it was too easy for it to be a feel-good thing,” she said. “But I was completely unprepared for the amount of dialogue going on.”
The eldest of six children from a family in Redhill, Surrey, she had never met a Jew until she arrived in Leeds — a favourite campus with Jewish students. Now she is convinced of the merits of making common cause, especially in view of some of the challenges of secular society. “We’re both minorities here and we have to look out for each other,” she said, “because religion is under attack.”
Simon Rocker is a journalist at the Jewish Chronicle. Dr Jonathan Sacks will deliver his Jewish New Year message on BBC One tomorrow at 11.15pm
