Bridging The Divide Between The United States And The Muslim World Through Arts And Ideas: Possibilities And Limitations

June 6th Lunchtime Keynote Speech

Karen Brooks Hopkins, President of Brooklyn Academy of Music, delivered the keynote speech during lunch on June 6th. She welcomed participants and thanked Mustapha Tlili, Andrea Stanton, and the staff at the New York University Center for Dialogues. She began by mentioning the very moving Muslim Voices opening event the previous evening — the concert that featured Youssou N’Dour. She described how the intensity of his music resounded with the power of love and the glory of his faith.

Brooks Hopkins then turned to President Obama’s June 4th address to the Muslim world, quoting a portion that she believed resonated with the conference and the overall festival’s objectives:

Human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self–defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.5

The subtitle of this conference is “Possibilities and Limitations,” she recalled; working toward a shared progress means realizing that artistic and cultural exchanges can only take us so far. Colonialism, gender issues, post—World War I and Cold War politics are a few of the major historical tensions that have hampered this progress and that cultural exchange can only go so far in addressing.

President Obama’s Cairo speech also included a fervent call for respecting one another. Learning about Muslim culture can be used as an entry point to achieving this mutual respect. With over 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, does it not make sense to learn more about them? This festival cannot possibly convey the scope of Muslim artistic achievement, but it does show the American public that the Muslim world is large and diverse, and makes major intellectual and creative contributions to global civilization.

Brooks Hopkins noted that she stood before the audience thanks to a very specific type of art — the satirical cartoon, a powerful form not only in the West, but in the Muslim world as well. Before 2006, she, like many Americans and Europeans, knew little of the Muslim world beyond what she read in the news. But in early 2006, art and politics came together in a big way when a now–infamous series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was published in Denmark’s Jyllands–Posten newspaper. The international reaction to them brought decades of political turmoil, ignorance, and disrespect to a head.

As the cartoon crisis unfolded, Brooks Hopkins traveled to Kuala Lumpur for the NYU Center for Dialogues conference on “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” On the final evening, she dined with Tlili, whom she had met there for the first time, and Stephen Heintz, President of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Discouraged by the obvious strain between Muslim and Western participants, they concluded that since nothing else had “worked,” why not give the arts a chance? Later on, as they began taking the idea of a Muslim arts festival more seriously, The Asia Society became the third partner, bringing further depth, expertise, and a policy–oriented perspective. Muslim Voices was born.

Three years later, the lack of mutual respect and sense of common humanity persists. President Obama called upon the Muslim world to abandon stereotypes of America as a “self–interested empire” — to instead view Americans as diverse individuals who share values with the Muslim world. It is incumbent upon those in the West to do the same: to learn about and respect the multiplicity of societies and belief systems in the Muslim world.

What better way to “giving each other a face” than to participate collectively in arts and culture — a means of personal expression and source of joy for so many people around the globe? Unfortunately, Brooks Hopkins noted, while all can agree that culture is meaningful to people individually, it remains an undervalued diplomatic tool.

Brooks Hopkins mentioned a recent New York Times article about Palestinian youth finding sanctuary in Western classical music. Two long–standing activists in this area are Argentinean–Israeli musician and composer Daniel Barenboim, and the late Palestinian–American cultural critic and literary theorist Edward Said, who together founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, whose members include Israeli, Palestinian, and other Middle Eastern youth. On the orchestra’s website, Barenboim writes: “[For the orchestra, it] is not necessarily a question of accepting the narrative of the other, let alone agreeing with it, but rather the indispensable need to accept its legitimacy.”6

For an example closer to home, Brooks Hopkins cited a recent conversation with Chuck Davis, Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s DanceAfrica, which has been performing annually at BAM since 1977. While the DanceAfrica artists were rehearsing at BAM in May, several Muslim Voices musicians came to BAM to get a feel for the space. They began improvising together, transcending their different cultural and artistic traditions through the universal language of music.

For Brooks Hopkins, these examples illustrate the powerful effect that cultural diplomacy could have toward legitimizing “the other.” When over 2,000 audience members watched the Youssou N’Dour performance, they set politics aside and shared in something that was above all human. She urged the conference participants to see this festival not as the culmination of three years of effort, but as a mere starting point. Participants must find a way to seize the moment, which marks a turn in the damaged political relationship between the West and the Muslim world, and find concrete ways to infuse it with the respect and humanity that President Obama called for.

In conclusion, Brooks Hopkins called on participants to join together to convince elected officials, community leaders, journalists, bloggers, and educators to support cultural diplomacy. This discussion must include artists, and must encourage funders and donor institutions to advocate for programs that collectively reach every age group and social sector. Policy makers must be persuaded not to dismiss the arts either as elitist or as “fluff.” The arts alone will not rectify a long history of colonialism and political disputes between the Muslim world and the West. But programs that foster respect and a greater understanding of one another, when executed in the spirit of collaboration and equal footing, will help create a more equitable playing field for these broader debates.

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