This summer, Americans and many Muslims around the world are marking the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech and its call for a more inclusive approach to relations between the United States and the Muslim world.
This fresh deal won’t fully emerge next month or next year, but it serves as a springboard in many quarters: large grants are on offer now through the National Endowment for the Humanities to build cultural bridges with the Muslim world, a conference will be held at the Alexandria Library on the power of the arts and sciences as platforms for cultural diplomacy, and new policies are coming out of the State Department, Congress and the White House.
Infected by their spirit, we are working hard to make sure that we keep on producing quality material. This summer, we are taking three new films into development. We are ramping up our other activities, too. Although we are nonpartisan, we welcome any policy statement coming from the West that recommends respect for the Muslim world. Our organization has been working for a decade to foster peace and cooperation, advocating the age-old wisdom that knowing one another better is the first step to productive collaboration—locally, regionally, and globally.
A century and a half ago, articles were appearing in the popular news denigrating Islam and taking wholesale swipes all Muslims, based on the reported behaviors of a few. Nothing much has changed in that regard. Then and now, when Americans think of Muslims, the most extreme conclusions leap to mind. Most often, these “views” derive from images and sound bites amplified by the 24-hour news cycle and the Blogosphere. The fear they instill leads to unconscious stereotyping, stunts interpersonal relationships, feeds societal distrust, and even skews the formation of national foreign policy. The only real difference is that, today, American society is various enough to support producers willing to counter these received opinions and tell a more accurate story.
Our work is designed to dispel the confusion our media foists on mainstream society daily. We do this in a number of ways, each of which I am proud of being attached to. As film producers, we offer mainstream broadcasters first-rate programming. We have produced seven feature-length documentaries and three new films underway, as well as fresh experiments on new web platforms.
We continue in this work because we know that the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims are a diverse and complex global population that plays a productive part in every society, including our own.
Some believe armies will change the world. Others say that a new set of rulers will finally save us. I believe that helping people see and understand each other better is the key to transformation. The power of education remains the surest path to peace.