Hasta La Gadget!

Pakistan, which faces the challenge of terrorism at home, seems ready to join the Saudi-led coalition against the Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen. On Monday, a senior Pakistani government official indicated that the country would send troops to the Kingdom. Though Pakistan’s defense minister denied the claim that a decision about military support had been made, he arrived in Saudi Tuesday to decide the next steps. And late last week, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s office vowed that any threat to Saudi Arabia would “evoke a strong response” from Islamabad. But joining the Saudis in their latest war would polarize Pakistan, which is home to several Muslim sects. Pakistan would also incur the ire of its neighbor, Iran, with whom Pakistan’s Shiites — about 20 percent of the population — maintain close ties.

Although Riyadh and Islamabad have been close allies for decades, part of Pakistan’s problem with Islamist radicals stems from Saudi funding for religious schools that teach a fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine. Pakistan is still paying the price for its initial involvement in the Afghan proxy war between the United States and the former Soviet Union in which Saudi Arabia played a critical role. Support for the Afghan Mujahedeen during the 1980s encouraged extremism, terrorism and sectarianism in Pakistan, changing Pakistani society significantly. Involvement in a new, distant war in Yemen is unlikely to have a different result on Pakistan’s internal cohesion.

By the time I moved out of Pakistan in 1997, the country was witnessing a surge of sectarian killings. Extremist Sunnis, inspired by puritan Wahhabi teachings, were targeting educated Shiites, forcing them to emigrate. Extremist groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi targeted Shiite doctors, engineers, lawyers and professors. This was the result of sectarian hatred taught at Saudi-funded madrasas originally set up to recruit and train foot soldiers for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan’s intelligence service had used the madrasas to recruit fighters to fight in Kashmir against India and to support the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The madrasas were attractive for poor Pakistani families who weren’t able to send their children to schools or even to feed them daily. One-third of Pakistan’s nearly 200 million people live below the poverty line, subsisting on less than one dollar a day per family. Madrasas provided children free housing, food and clothing alongside religious education. According to the inspector general of Punjab police, hundreds of religious seminaries in Pakistan, especially in Punjab province, are foreign funded.

The curriculum of these madrasas conformed to puritanical Saudi Wahhabi beliefs, disregarding the religious syncretism of the India-Pakistan subcontinent. Many madrasa students imbibed hatred towards sects other than the Wahhabis, which later manifested itself in sectarian attacks. Saudi Arabia’s concern after 1979 about Iranian influence also played a part in encouraging extremist attacks on Pakistani Shiites. The Wahhabis consider Shiites as heretics while the Saudis also tend to see them as allies of Iran.

The rationale for Pakistan’s involvement in the Saudi-funded Afghan war during the 1980s was similar to the reasoning currently being offered for Pakistani involvement in the conflict in Yemen. The Saudi-Pakistan relationship has been close and rests on mutual dependence of the two countries’ elites. Pakistani troops were stationed in the Kingdom during the 1980s to protect the royal family. Prime Minister Sharif and his family lived in Saudi Arabia during their years in exile from 2000-2007.

Despite being armed with nuclear weapons, Pakistan is perennially cash-strapped. The Saudis have traditionally been generous in supporting Pakistan with hard currency. They have also paid for expensive weapons for the Pakistani military from other countries (usually the United States). Over a million Pakistani expatriates work in Saudi Arabia and their remittances are critical for Pakistan’s economy. Last year, Riyadh gave a $1.5 billion loan to Pakistan to overcome a hard currency shortage. At the Saudis’ request, 2,500 Pakistani retired army and police officials joined Bahrain’s anti-riot force in cracking down on the Bahraini Shiite uprising.

The Pakistan military, as well as civilian leaders like Prime Minister Sharif, see partnership with the Saudis as beneficial in economic and military terms. Saudi backing has also been important for advancing Pakistan’s strategic objective of maintaining military preparedness against India, a much larger neighbor, and wresting the disputed territory of Kashmir from it through an insurgency.

For their part, the Saudis got a chance to spread their version of Islam through the wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Close ties with Pakistan, the world’s only Muslim-majority country with nuclear weapons, helps the Saudis stake their claim as leaders of the Islamic world. The Kingdom holds Islam’s most sacred sites and sees only Iran as its rival in speaking for the world’s Muslims.

The spread of Wahhabism in Pakistan has been detrimental to Iran, because it advanced Saudi interests and exacerbated anti-Shiite sentiment in the region. Relations between Pakistan and Iran have suffered several setbacks beginning with the assassination of Iran’s consul-general in Lahore, murdered by SSP terrorists and accentuated by killings of Shiite pilgrims headed to Iran near the Pakistan-Iranian border.

By siding with Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Pakistan is in danger of being sucked into a conflict driven by sectarian factors. Iranian-backed Shiite rebels in Yemen are deployed on the border close to Riyadh and that has created shockwaves throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But the instability in Yemen poses no direct threat to Pakistan’s security or other critical interests.

By getting involved in the Yemen conflict, Pakistan risks sectarian conflict at home in addition to being drawn into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East. Pakistan has paid a heavy price due to terrorism, losing some 30,000 lives over the last two decades. Pakistan’s interests might be better served by working on better diplomatic relations with neighboring countries, especially Afghanistan and India, and focusing on eradicating the growing radicalization within its society. Entering a distant war for Saudi Arabia will do little to help Pakistan’s already precarious condition.

Pictured from left: Nadia Roumani, Edina Lekovic and her daughter, and Elica Vafaie.

“We need all Americans to be civically engaged. The issues we’re all facing are too big for any of us to sit on the sidelines. We need get people out in the community, not just to the polls to vote or to run for elected office or attend environmental rallies, but to be inspired by their faith and pursue their passions. In order for us to do that, we need the funds to be able to invest in human development as well as policy change. Because both will ultimately move the needle of greater public understanding and civic engagement.” – Edina Lekovic

I sat down with three extraordinary women leaders in the American Muslim community to discuss identity, charitable giving and civic engagement. I was seeking to better understand the needs of a community I knew little about. I wanted to understand the role philanthropy plays in their culture and the role philanthropy can play to integrate American Muslims into American civic life.

The California Community Foundation (CCF) has been working to build relationships and partner with the American Muslim community in Los Angeles County for the last several years. It is one of the most diverse populations, consisting of Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian, African American, Latino and Asian Pacific Islanders, who contribute greatly our region.

Edina Lekovic is public affairs consultant at the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Nadia Roumani is co-founder and director of the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute (AMCLI) at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the Walter and Esther Hewlett Design Fellow with Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; and Elica Vafaie is project director of the One Los Angeles, One Nation initiative at CCF.

Each comes at her work from unique perspectives:

Edina, originally from Montenegro and raised Muslim, studied at UCLA, where she started on a spiritual journey after being exposed to young Muslims actively practicing their faith. “When I realized that what I understood about Islam growing up through film and television screens was not what I read in the Quran… it made me find an intersection between my spiritual life and my professional life.”

Nadia, of Syrian descent, was working in international development when in 2004 she partnered with the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture on a study on young Muslim Americans. This led her to doing interviews with Muslims across the country, many in Los Angeles: “It was a moment where I made a kind of personal shift, ‘why am I doing all this international work when my own community is struggling in my backyard?’ And in Islam there is this idea you help those closest to you, in your vicinity, and then you work your way outward. That was what led to launching AMCLI.”

Elica is Iranian-American and has worked in diverse civil rights and social justice movements. Following the tragic events of 9/11, she worked on a variety of cases and issues involving the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities, then came to CCF in 2012 to lead One Nation: “To me, it’s about civil rights, leadership building, civic engagement and movement building. As an Iranian-American having worked in this space, I have a great deal of respect for the community work and leadership, trust and understanding.”

The size and diversity of the American Muslim community is complicated to quantify. There are many estimates out there depending on the methodology and source, including Pew Research Center’s 2.75 million American Muslims, which is generally considered to be a low figure; 500,000 estimated in Los Angeles, from the Council on American Islamic Relations; and 77 countries represented.

Unlike the Bay Area, New York and Chicago, there have been few philanthropic investments in Southern California, despite the size, strengths and needs of the population. Here’s an excerpt from our interview on the topic of advice to the world of philanthropy to engage this community:

John: There are many foundations that aim to help the full complement of Americans. Yet, they are not aware of the opportunities to engage American Muslims. Until we did our research and outreach, I had no idea how important and underfunded this community has been. What’s your advice to the philanthropic community about how to invest in and how to advance the American Muslim community and its needs?

Elica: Any foundation that has a mission to be responsive or inclusive of diverse, marginalized or vulnerable populations or that funds access, social justice or advancing rights, should be including and working with AMEMSA communities. They should be supported alongside other emerging and growing populations such as the Latino, API or the LGBTQ communities. One of the strengths of the One Nation Initiative has been to use a broad frame to the philanthropic work. Key organizations such as the ILM Foundation, Council on American-Islamic Relations-L.A., South Asian Network, AMCLI, etc. advanced a policy issue or leadership development or organizing that best fit their community base. Engaging the community in broad policy or broad civic engagement or education work is an opportunity most foundations can take.

Nadia: I would say, and not because we’re sitting in this office, I would model CCF’s approach to One Nation, because the truth is that most foundations are taking one of two approaches. One is a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) or security lens, where you’re basically saying civic engagement is the methodology for countering violent extremism. That lens sets up a troubling scenario where any non-civically-engaged Muslim is a potential terrorist threat. The second tends to look at us as an underleveraged pool of resources that can be brought into strategies that are already in place, but without thinking about the unique ways those issues impact this community. It’s more about mobilizing them for their assets but not building their capacity in the long run. CCF took a different approach. They asked, how do you engage this community on the issues they have prioritized? How do we enable them to show up and shape the issues that matter to them as full participants, engaged, inspired and rooted in their unique faith experiences? And that takes time, it takes long-term investment, it takes capacity building, it takes a lot of patience. And the more that can be elevated as a model, I think it will show the amazing benefits versus doing it from one of these other two frames.

Edina: While I was initially more excited about project funding, what my lesson has been is that the capacity-building funds have gotten us further, because it gave us the ability to go through a strategic planning process that we hadn’t been able to afford to do and it gave us a renewed ability to bring in development staff. Most of the organizations in our community are still at the capacity-building stage. So I think being willing to fund on that side and being able to work with organizations to bring them to the table.

Like everyone and every community, American Muslims should be asked, engaged and accepted. We get into habits and assumptions about our communities. Change creates gaps in our vision and knowledge. We have to re-learn, unlearn and discover what we do not know and who is left out of our work. We need to question stereotypes, media myths and our own biases. This is the heart of what I learned during our conversation. This is the core of the challenge for American Muslims.

As Edina exhorted, we need all facets of the community to be engaged if we have any chance for change and a stronger common good. Foundations should ask themselves: Who are we leaving out? Who is not included? Whose voice is lost in the conversation for change? What ideas are we losing?

We all lose if we do not engage all people who want to pursue their passions, their faiths and the American dream.

John E. Kobara is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the California Community Foundation. You can follow him on Twitter @jekobara.

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