Secretary Clinton hosted an Iftar dinner at the State Department on September 15. You can view the video here.

“This time of self-reflection and clarity reminds us that the principles that are the hallmark of Ramadan – charity, sacrifice, and compassion – are also values we cherish as Americans,” Clinton said. “They guide us towards good stewardship of our families, our communities, our country, and our world.”

She added, “we recognize that the relationship between the United States and Muslim communities has at times suffered from misunderstanding and misperception. But we are committed to learning and listening; to creating bridges of understanding and respect; and building stronger bonds of cooperation. We believe that there is more that unites people of all faiths than divides us.”

Michelle over at Obama Today sent me this uplifting article from our hometown newspaper about an interesting arrangement between a local Mosque and Synagogue.

Due to the growing population of Muslims in the area, there’s a need for more space for them to worship, especially during the very busy time of Ramadan. A synagogue opened their doors. From the article:

“The men roll out long prayer rugs on the synagogue floor. An imam stands up front and praises Allah. And as the faithful begin whispering their prayers in flowing Arabic, their landlord, a rabbi, walks by to check whether they need anything.”

“The prophet Isaiah said our houses would be houses of prayer for all people,” said Rabbi Robert Nosanchuk. “Now, I don’t know if Isaiah could have imagined us hosting Ramadan in the synagogue, but the basic idea is there.”

Do you think this type of interfaith sharing is the norm or just an isolated incident?

Check out the cool photo gallery.

Just in time for Ramadan, the “Islam Around the World” flickr group has been launched!

The group asks you to share your images or create new ones that complete the phrase, “Islam is…” Tell us what Islam means to you in your life, your city, your country. Please add your photographs to our group and describe in the caption box what your image is about. We’d like to share as many of these images as possible on our blog, our website and our Facebook page. If you’d like us to include your photos among those we share elsewhere, please remove any copyright restrictions and let us know how you’d like to be credited.

Join the group and upload your photos or simply send your photos in an email to: state61per@photos.flickr.com. Include in the email: the title in the subject line, the description in the body and the photo attached. Please Tag the photos #Islam. You can do that by putting “tags: #Islam” in the body of your email.

Check out this recent article on what the author calls the “Evolving Identity of Muslim Americans.” Noting the diverse background of Muslims in the U.S. (they represent over 80 countries) the author asks if it’s possible then to speak of a common identity for Muslim Americans.

From the article:

“American Muslims are defined by the saying that ‘home is not where your grandparents were born but where your grandchildren will live,’” says Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Do you think that’s true?

Eboo Patel on a Righteous American Muslim. Pew Forum explores religion and the U.S. Courts with a study on the debate over government funding for religious groups. Civil rights groups say religious garb like the niqab and hijab should be exempt from proposed Michigan rules governing what witnesses wear when testifying in court.

This is the third blog entry in a series on interfaith perspectives during Lent.

Guest blogger Cassie Meyer completed her Master’s Degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School where her work focused on social justice movements in American Christianity. She has co-taught multiple courses with Dr. Eboo Patel on interfaith leadership and interfaith action at Chicago Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary, where she is adjunct faculty. (See full bio)

“Five times a day. Five times a day?” The question came out as a gasp. “How?”

Ahmed shrugged and conceded: “I’m not great at it. It’s harder to do in America. I think I’ll probably try harder when I’m older. Still, it’s a part of what we’re supposed to do as Muslims.”

I’d been a Christian for about two years when I met Ahmed, a true, flesh and blood Muslim, mysteriously transported from Bangladesh to my small Midwestern liberal arts college. Much of my new life of faith had been spent learning as much as I possibly could about the tradition I had not grown up with – reading the texts, learning the histories, discovering the patterns of community. There are some things you can learn by reading books: Who was the Apostle Paul? What exactly was going on with the Church in Corinth? What could we make of the messiness of the psalms? And then there are the other parts of a life of faith that you can read book after book about, and still, really, have no idea what you’re doing.

A practice of daily prayer had been this for me. Prayer seemed like something everyone else had figured out, something that when I tried to figure out, I spent a lot of time staring blankly into space, or with my thoughts meandering toward what I might eat for lunch that day, or…asleep.

So the thought of praying five times a day – and that that could be a central part of how you understood and enacted your faith – absolutely terrified me. Terrified me because it inspired me. And what on earth did it mean for a conservative evangelical American Christian to be inspired by a (somewhat) devout Bangladeshi Muslim?

I asked the priest at the Episcopal church that I’d been going to if he knew of anything similar to this practice in the Christian tradition. He laughed gently and pulled a battered red book from the pew pocket in front of us. “You should explore this, Cassie,” he said, flipping through the pages and cracking the spine open to “Morning Prayer.” He pointed out the other prayers to me: the noon prayer, a simple midday breath, and the compline prayer, which contains some of the words that have become dearest to my faith (“Guide us waking, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace”). Father Patrick explained that these scripture-punctuated daily prayers in the Episcopal prayer book, The Book of Common Prayer, were based on the practices of prayer that medieval monks had practiced in their monasteries, and before that, taken from the ancient language and rituals of the early church.

It was a completely different way of praying than anything I’d learned so far; I’d been taught that prayer should be spontaneous, Spirit-driven, unhindered by pages and text. It should be that, certainly, sometimes. Yet there was something comforting about letting the written rhythms lead me, and that though praying alone I was also somehow praying within the resonance of many other Christian voices before and behind me. I thought of Ahmed, the longing I felt when he described his daily prayers, that Muslims around the world said the same words in the same ways across time zones and country lines. Maybe he had helped me find my way home.

This Lent, my practice has been to return to The Book of Common Prayer, return to a daily practice of liturgy and guided prayer in words that Christians have been praying, in varying incarnations, for centuries. Instead of rolling out of bed five minutes before I need to rush to work, I wake up early enough to sip a cup of coffee, and whisper into the stillness of my kitchen the words of the morning prayer rite. It’s fitting that I’ve returned to this practice while observing Lent with a group of Muslim, Christian and Jewish colleagues from the Interfaith Youth Core, where as I did with Ahmed, I learn to delve deeper within my own tradition as I watch them explore theirs.

I want to be clear: I believe that something fundamentally different is being done when Ahmed and I pray; that something fundamentally different is enacted when I fast and when my Jewish colleague Sam fasts. We do a disservice to the richness of our traditions and the depths of our convictions if we pretend otherwise, and we falsify the truths on which our faiths rest if we pretend that real differences and disagreements don’t exist. And yet my prayer practice is that – a practice, a discipline – because I watched the ways a Muslim practiced his faith, and began to ask new questions about what it means to follow the One who’s path of death and resurrection I seek in the Lenten season.

I’m not the first Christian to make this discovery: it’s rumored that the practice of daily prayer in Saint Francis of Assisi’s Rule was drawn from the friar’s own peaceful interaction with Muslims during the Crusades. Francis didn’t become any less Christian when he saw someone else’s devotion and sought to translate it into what he knew as truth.

So there are the truths that we know and the truths that we act; at the end of the day, Jesus was still my savior, and he was still Ahmed’s prophet. At the end of the day, my prayers still sound very different from Ahmed’s. But if I have any sort of prayerful discipline, if I have any sort of prayerful practice, it’s at least in part due to the strange discovery that I could desire to know my own faith more deeply from watching someone else practice his. And thereby begin to find my way home.

Guest blogger Becca Hartman received her B.A. from Northwestern University where she studied Philosophy and Religion. Before joining IFYC, she interned with the African Religious Health Assets Program at the University of Cape Town to map the impact of Faith-Based Organizations on the public health needs of Sub-Saharan Africa.

I’m one of those freedom-loving American Baptists. You know, freedom of conscience, freedom to encounter the divine directly, freedom to read scripture and interpret for myself with the appropriate tools, freedom to worship what, when, and as I choose. My sense of this radical freedom is rooted in the boundless love and grace of God and of the Jesus who came to loose us from the many shackles we (willfully or forcefully) sport.

I am also free to envy. I work at the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a Chicago-based international nonprofit organization that is building a global movement of young leaders committed to the ideal of religious pluralism. That means that I have the good fortune of working with people from different religious and philosophic traditions. It was first in school at Northwestern University, then abroad in South Africa that I really got involved with interfaith work. The beauty of religions’ practices, the depth of their stories, the history of their rituals, the vibrancy of their communities, and the truth in their teachings - they have always captivated me. They are a testament to the abundance of the divine that I seek to follow.

But I admit that since I first encountered religious diversity I have been covetous of my neighbor’s religious practices.

When I studied in Durban, South Africa, I lived with a wonderful, proudly Christian Zulu family. I have rarely felt the spirit in the way that I did in their house church just a couple of doors down, surrounded by singing voices that raised my consciousness to another plane altogether. And next door to ‘our’ home was an older Muslim couple. I had the blessing of living with my host family during Ramadan, which in South Africa is boiling hot with many daylight hours. Every day this family would go to work and return, all the time refraining from food and water. And every evening after sunset, when I caught them at just the right time, hanging clothes in the back of the house, they would offer me fresh veggie samosas to share in the breaking of their fast. As the sun was setting over a massive hillside of RDP government houses, the wind would pick up, and we would flip through pictures of our families together.

The next time I encountered Ramadan so fully was my first year at IFYC. I observed my Muslim colleagues (friends, really) refraining from water and food and ill-thoughts from sun-up to sun-down. Inspired by their devotion and the shared practice among Muslims around the world, I decided that I would focus on this practice and revitalize the tradition of fasting within mystical and some of mainstream Christianity. I decided to fast for Lent last year.

Growing up my family always ‘took on’ something for Lent, a practice that I find meaningful, which is a way of living from a place of abundance. It is with a heart of gratitude that we would take on extra volunteering, vow to acknowledge and thank someone new every day, write a letter to loved ones, etc. This Lent, I wanted a different practice to jolt me from my comfortable ways and to live into a new insight. Yet in my emulation of my Muslim colleagues, I was missing a vital part of the devotional experience. During Ramadan, Muslims break the fast at sundown and celebrate with prayer and a shared meal. In my attempts to ‘go-it-alone’, I was depriving myself of the joy that comes in relationships and communal celebration. Lent didn’t go so well last year.

This year, I am grateful for the participation of many friends at IFYC. Eight of us – varieties of Christians, Muslims and Jews - are taking a day of the week and fasting that day, according to each one’s chosen practice. Together we are fasting throughout Lent, journaling our thoughts and experiences in a collective book, and occasionally breaking the fast together. In the coming weeks, they will share their thoughts with you as well as we each reflect on what this interfaith Lent means to us. Thus far I am simply grateful for this community.

Guest Blogger

R Gustav Niebuhr

Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University

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R Gustav Niebuhr is Associate Professor in Religion & the Media at Syracuse University in New York. With over a 20-year career in journalism, most recently at the New York Times and, prior to that, at the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion.

Earlier today, I received an e-mail from a former student, telling me she would be performing classical South Indian dance in an upcoming student festival. Her plans seemed fully appropriate, as the festival will celebrate Diwali, a major Hindu holiday, organized at my university by the Hindu Student Council.

The announcement got me thinking: What, these days, should we call an American religious holiday? To many people who associate the United States with its largest faith group, the answer’s easy–Christmas. Well, yes, December 25 marks the day Protestants and Roman Catholics celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. But although those groups do, when taken together, make up a solid majority of the American population, Christianity has never been the sole religious identity to be found within America’s spiritual landscape. After all, Jews have been part of the American scene for more than 350 years.

My university (and many other educational institutions, too) shuts down to allow Jewish students to observe Yom Kippur, the 24-hour period of fasting that is the holiest day in Judaism’s calendar. And we recognize Eid ul-Fitr, which concludes the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a time of dawn-to-dusk fasting that for Muslims forms one of their faith’s Five Pillars, which set it apart from all others. There are students and faculty who celebrate other days vital to their faiths, for example, in Buddhism, Sikhism, Native American traditions.

None of this makes Syracuse unusual. Other educational institutions exist (and other cities, too) in the United States where other traditions are observed, or where there are considerably larger groups to do the celebrating. In each case, there lies an opportunity to feel a connection to a wider community. Protestants and Catholics who celebrate Christmas (along with Orthodox Christians, too, on a somewhat different calendar) know they do so with Christians worldwide. Jews in Syracuse who mark the High Holidays know their counterparts in Europe, Russia, Latin America and Israel are doing the same.

If I needed to be reminded of this, it came earlier this week through a colleague with deep connections to India, who was thinking about Diwali, and, in particular, how people in the Indian state of Bihar might face the challenge of fully celebrating it. Diwali is a multi-day festival involving the kindling of lights to remind celebrants of the victory of good over evil. Because important elements of the festival traditionally take place in the home, my colleague said, she feels a particular concern for the estimated millions rendered homeless in Bihar by massive floods several weeks ago. Based on material she showed me, a relief effort is underway for those families, but one that, like so many, could probably use more help. For my colleague, the imminent arrival of Diwali, here in the United States (now home to at least 1 million Hindus) as well as in Bihar, makes it all the more possible to be conscious of other people’s plight. In the holiday itself lies a global connection.

Guest blogger Ola Mohamed is a senior at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill studying Political Science and International Studies. She is interested in how Muslim youth from different backgrounds deal with issues of integration and identity in the United States. A native Egyptian, Ola enjoys learning about Middle Eastern history and has traveled to Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Working with the UNC Muslim Students Association sparked Ola’s interest in interfaith work. In her free time, Ola enjoys working on community-based projects, ice-skating, hiking, traveling, eating almost any kind of fruit and developing her photography skills.

This Sunday morning had the appearance of most others: serene and uneventful. I go downstairs to see if the kitchen has yet come to life. The rest of the house is quietly contemplating summer’s end; the kitchen slumbers as well. I go back up to my room, and highlighter in hand, I delve into political theory. The previous Tuesday marked the beginning of my senior year at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

The kitchen comes alive when my mother awakens. “Does anyone want to help their mother for ten minutes?” This is my mom’s indirect, yet direct, way of asking for help. I think about this for a minute and trek down the stairs.

I’m late. My mom has already finished half the task she wanted one of her children to do. “I’ll finish,” I offer. I start scooping shredded onions seasoned with salt and pepper into freezer bags from a massive plastic bowl. “Yes! This is great,” my mother exclaims. “This is how I prepare for Ramadan.” I tightly seal the bags of shredded onions and stack them in the freezer. Now each bag is ready to go for making Egyptian-style dinners quickly, and my mother doesn’t have to think about food all the time during Ramadan.

Fasting everyday from dawn to dusk during the ninth Islamic lunar month of Ramadan is one of the main tenets of Muslim practice. The month is historically significant because Muslims believe that Ramadan was the month in which Muhammad (peace be upon him) began to receive revelations of the Qur’an from God through the Archangel Gabriel. Fasting Ramadan serves a spiritual purpose as well. Fasting from food, drink, disgraceful actions—such as foul language—and sexual relations frees the practicing Muslim from the distractions of this world and transplants him or her into a spiritual sphere of reflection. Self-discipline, Muslim children are taught in Islamic Sunday school, nourishes spiritual growth. Fasting is not starvation, its conscious and purposeful self-deprivation, and many Muslims will tell you that the euphoria of breaking a fast after hours of patient hunger has a sweetness of its own: hard to describe, easy to feel.

For me, preparing for Ramadan is about revisiting and reflecting on these verses and ideas. It is human nature to forget, and since fasting is about spiritual renewal, it is important to renew one’s understanding and intention.

It is Monday, August 18 when I walk down the familiar hallway of Murphey Hall. Five Muslim Student Association (MSA) board members are waiting. Classes had not yet started and, as President of the UNC MSA, I had convened the board for two meetings. I hoped to death they didn’t already resent me for it, but I had little choice. Ramadan was starting in two weeks. There was a lot to be done.

The UNC MSA has an active Ramadan agenda. Ramadan for MSA members means iftars (dinners breaking the fast) on every Wednesday and Thursday. Ramadan is always packed to the brim with service and interfaith events as well. Fasting on an individual level may be refreshing to the soul, but fasting is also aimed at getting Muslims to empathize with the poor and reach out to others. In the spirit of these ideals, MSA hosts an annual fundraising event, the Triangle MSA Iftar, with the Duke and N.C. State’s MSAs. In 2005, the event raised over $18,000 for the victims of the South Asian earthquake. This year’s money will go to an orphan drive.

MSA also hosts Islamic Awareness Week in the campus’ student center, where they hand out brochures on topics like ‘Women in Islam’ and ‘Islam 101.’ A few courageous female students agree to wear a hijab (headscarf) around campus and record their thoughts in a journal, as part of the successful “A Walk in My Hijab” initiative started a couple of years ago. MSA also holds another interfaith-service event, Fast-a-thon, in which non-Muslim students pledge to fast for one day. For every person who pledges to fast, MSA asks local businesses to donate money to the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. Last year, over 470 students pledged to fast and $2,200 was donated to the food bank.

I have been on the MSA board for two years. All of a sudden, however, I was responsible for overseeing all of these events. For the first time in my life, preparing for Ramadan didn’t just mean packing onions in freezer bags or happily revisiting the verses in the Qur’an about why we fast on a lazy afternoon. Preparing for Ramadan this year meant preparing for a community of over 200 students. It meant coordinating sometimes agonizing details for numerous iftars, large speaker events and inter-organizational meetings.

As Ramadan races ever-closer, I come to a reassuring realization. Preparing for Ramadan is not about stocking on food, but the culture of food is very much a part of Ramadan. Ramadan would not be the same to me without apricot juice, dates and oven-baked Egyptian dinners. Likewise, Ramadan is not exclusively about spiritual meditation, but Ramadan without reading the Qur’an and reflecting on its beauty in prayer would definitely not feel like Ramadan. Ramadan is also not all about MSA iftars and campus events, but Ramadan without a sense of community and without a passion to share its spirit with the poor would be a Ramadan lacking life. Thus, preparing for Ramadan is all of these things together. It is preparing the soul, the family and the community for a month of deep connection, reflection and renewal with Allah.

Every time I turn on the TV, I feel as though I’m presented with a million choices: what channel do I want to watch (there are too many to count), should I buy this detergent or the other (who cares), does my toothpaste really work or is the one sparkling on the commercial better (probably exactly the same), do I want a snack? (I really shouldn’t).

But these silly choices pale in comparison to the big choices we face each day about where our lives are heading, our families, and our careers. For some people who practice a religion, faith helps them make important decisions through prayer, or religious considerations. Others may never consider religion in their decisions. The video clip below presents one man’s story (remember Riaz?) of how his faith led him to make choices that changed his life.

So my question to you is: Is it a good thing to use faith to help you make decisions? Why or why not?

Read more about this film documentary directed by Yoni Brook and co-produced with Musa Syeed.