Sahar Taman’s Story
My family was among the first Muslim families to immigrate to the U.S. in the 1970s and the only Muslim family in the rural Wisconsin community I grew up in. Through my high school and college years I felt a painful need to be able to communicate about my religion, my Arab culture and the complexity of the politics and society of the Middle East that I understood as an insider and were so misunderstood around me.
It was not until my mid-forties when I had the opportunity to final bring the East to the West and vice versa through my work in citizen diplomacy focused on dialogue of " What is Religion?" and " What is Society?" As Project Director of the Religion and Society Program, a program I had the honor to design, develop, and implement, more than 70 citizen diplomats from seven Arab countries and from many parts of the U.S. immersed in each other's worlds to experience and learn about Islam, Judaism, and the vastness of Christianity not just in dialogues, but in experiencing each other's worship, participating in each other's events and meeting those who they would have never had the chance to meet either in the United States or the Arab world.
The Religion and Society Program, sponsored by the National Peace Foundation in partnership with the Islamic Society of North America, early on, before the current thinking to do so, brought in religious actors as citizen diplomats; religious leaders, community leaders, professionals whose work stemmed from a religious perspective. Many of these grassroots advocates testify that the engagement transformed them, some said " life-changing". These activists faced real challenges to engage with Muslims or Jews or Christians or those of other faiths, including opposition from their communities and many times fear and harassment from security forces or from hate groups. Some circumstances were extreme and some citizens lost jobs or even landed in jail for their courage just to discuss religion in their societies. Our citizen diplomacy was carried out as experiential workshops which were programmed to reach deep into U.S. communities and Arab societies and take people directly into small Arab villages or towns in rural America or deep into the heart of cities beyond the tourism, to meet people who had never seen a Jew or Muslim or a Christian woman pastor, or a Shia cleric or a Muslim with a face covering conducting a lecture, or many other " Others," and created thousands of authentic experiences with citizen diplomats who are defined not only as the traveler citizen but the hundreds of citizen diplomats who hosted them.
For four years I had the pleasure, the honor and responsibility to lead a team of the finest culturally competent activists in making 2nd Tier Diplomacy happen beyond the traditional reach of American foreign diplomacy. As an outcome of these experiences I solicited essays by the citizen diplomats, edited and published a book of 36 essays in, Reflections and Experiences of Religion and Society, as testimonies to personal transformations and a solid proof that Citizen Diplomacy works. My hope is that those who read these stories will be inspired to become Muslim or Jewish or Christian Citizen Diplomats.
Please visit this website for full publication, Reflections and Experiences of Religion and Society.
(Photos is a community development youth group in an Egyptian village sharing their work with American citizen diplomats.