Dr Akbar Ahmed Shares
Prize for Interfaith Dialogues
By Matt Getty
School
of International Service (SIS) Professor Akbar Ahmed and Judea
Pearl, the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, have won
a $100,000 Purpose Prize. The new award, created by Civic
Ventures, a think tank supporting social innovation, recognized
Ahmed and Pearl’s ongoing Muslim-Jewish interfaith dialogues.
Since 2003, their program, titled “Daniel Pearl Dialogue
for Muslim-Jewish Understanding Featuring Akbar Ahmed and
Judea Pearl,” has brought Ahmed and Pearl ’s candid
conversations on faith, culture, violence, and tolerance to
12 cities in the United States, Canada , and England . Both
Jewish and Muslim leaders have praised the program for helping
bring together Pakistani and Israeli dignitaries. Sources
as disparate as the popular Muslim magazine Emel and the chief
UK rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, have praised Ahmed’s contribution.
Sacks called him “a role model of supreme grace and
dignity.”
“Initially, it was just two people talking, but now
it is much more than that,” Ahmed said of the dialogues,
adding that in Toronto the Pakistani ambassador invited Judea
Pearl and other Jewish leaders to dine with him and extend
the cultural exchange beyond the formal event. “People
respond to it in a very personal way,” Ahmed said. “They
can see that there’s no agenda there. They see that
it’s spontaneous and therefore
honest . . . It gives people hope.”
Ahmed, who holds American University’s Ibn Khaldun Chair
of Islamic Studies, hopes to use his portion of the prize
to build on his mission of promoting peace and exchange between
Islam and the West. “I want to create a group of younger
people to carry on this momentum,” he said. “It
can’t be a one-man job.”
He got a start on that last spring when he took his interfaith
dialogues to Pakistan for the first time in eight years, bringing
with him AU sophomore Frankie Martin and freshman Hailey Woldt.
“It was amazing to see how friendly and open everyone
was,” said Martin about the trip. In one instance, he
recalled meeting young Muslim men praying for terrorist attacks
on US citizens. After they’d talked for a while, he
explained, they had a new attitude toward America and called
Martin a friend.
“This is how change happens,” said Ahmed.
Though he called the Purpose Prize a “huge personal
honor,” Ahmed is more impressed with its symbolic value.
“To give this award to a Muslim reflects very positively
on America,” he said. “It will make my work much
easier when I go out and talk to people who feel that Islam
is under attack by the West.”
As his next step in that work, Ahmed plans to travel to Pakistan
with Pearl . “I’m going to take Judea Pearl to
Karachi,” he said, calling the trip a “psychological
hurdle” they must cross to one day build a Daniel Pearl
Center for Understanding Between the West and Islam in the
city where Daniel Pearl was killed.
Civic Ventures created the Purpose Prize to recognize individuals
over 60 and “help society achieve the greatest return
on experience.” Five others, ranging in age from 61
to 75, also earned the award. Though Ahmed, at 63, sees much
of his work still ahead of him, he’s already focusing
on what the award will help him leave behind. “If I
can pass on some of my experience and see that the next generation
is ready to carry on this work, then I’m OK,”
he said. “Otherwise it’s just restricted to me
alone.”
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