Much of the scholarship on religious movements in Israel/Palestine has focused on Islamist movements like Hamas or Islamic Jihad or the Gush Emunim, the ideological Jewish settler movement, groups usually seen as problematic for peace and justice efforts, based on exclusivist principles or claiming divine right to the land. However some scholars, like Yehezkel Landau, Marc Gopin and Mohammed Abu-Nimer have documented the positive role that religion can play in peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians (and particularly between Jews and Muslims). A growing literature examines the role of Christians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict although much of this focuses on evangelical Christian Zionists and their support for Israeli policies as a result of millenialist beliefs rather than Christian efforts for peace and justice. In March 2010, the Ramallah Friends Meetinghouse will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Although the Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) presence in Palestine pre-dates the meeting, the meeting house has provided an institutional anchor to the local Quaker community and a focal point for Quaker visitors from around the world when they pass through the Holy Land. Quakers are known for their testimonies emphasizing peace, equality, and social justice, and their work in Palestine has reflected those beliefs even as their activities have changed over the decades. For many years the Quakers ran a preschool in the Amari refugee camp, and in 2005 they established the Friends International Center in Ramallah (FICR) to provide a space for hosting groups and conducting programming related to Quaker concerns. Although there have been a few efforts to document the history of the Ramallah Friends Schools, these are limited, and nothing has been written on the Ramallah meeting house, or the Quaker community in Palestine more generally. This paper will draw on oral interviews collected at the centennial celebration with current and past members of the Ramallah meeting as well as FICR reports and publications spanning the five years of its existence to investigate the impact of the Quaker community on peace and justice efforts over time. The interviews and reports will be placed in the context of socio-political changes that have occurred in Ramallah over the past century, especially since the signing of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, as well as the literature on religious movements and peace.

This paper attempts to interpret the Crusades in terms of what was said about them by the first Muslim scholar to come to terms with the Mediterranean-wide counteroffensive directed by the Latin West against Islam. This scholar is the Damascene jurist 'Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami, who wrote the Kitab al-Jihad (1105), "one of the most remarkable works ever composed on this subject" (Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History [Princeton, 2006], p. 139). Al-Sulami has recently been disparaged as presenting the crusading enterprise as a "grander scheme of conquest" than it actually was so that "by presenting the crusades as more systematic and opportunistic than they actually were," he would be able to increase "the magnitude of the threat" and "effectively [frighten] his listeners into action." According to this view, al-Sulami acted much like George W. Bush did before the war in Iraq, hyping the threat so that his war would find approval. Al-Sulami does not speak hyperbolically of the Crusaders but views them objectively and with a great deal of understanding. Surprisingly, he does not begin with the Jerusalem Crusade, as do so many modern accounts of the Crusades. Instead, the Jerusalem Crusade is presented as the final conclusion of a long development that started in Sicily with the Norman conquest (1060-91), proceeded on to Spain, and finally reached Syria. Al-Sulami views the military thrusts by the Latin West in these regions, not as self-contained discrete campaigns, but as "three different fronts . . . in which the same fight between Christianity and Islam was being waged." The fundamental problem faced by al-Sulami was how to rehabilitate Islam in the face of repeated defeats. He identifies the crisis as a religious and a moral problem that can be remedied by moral reform. If the terrible losses being inflicted on Islam are due to the discontinuation of jihad and the disregard of religious obligations, Islamic society can be set right and the losses reversed by inculcating the duties of jihad and the religious obligations of Islam. Al-Sulami offers a tripartite plan for the revival of Islam: religious reform, followed by political action to achieve unity of effort on the part of the Muslims in Syria, the Jazirah, and Egypt, and finally military action "to obliterate all traces [of the Franks]."

At the 2010 MESA Conference I propose to present the sixth chapter of my dissertation, "Muslim Life in Central Asia, 1943-1991", which focuses on social and religious history, as well as state policy towards religious communities and institutions, in the context of Soviet Central Asia. The chapter, "The Muftiate on the International Stage", discusses the international relations of the legally recognized Soviet Central Asian muftiate from 1944-1988. It covers the impressive scope of the organization's global ties during these four decades, with in-depth discussion of various aspects of its international project, such as the Hajj, its ties with the Central Asian diasporas in India and Saudi Arabia, its relations with religious, cultural and political figures in the decolonized nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and its surprisingly ambitious agenda in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. The contribution also features an intensive focus on the muftiate's relations with the Soviet government, and the political justification for its engagement with overseas entities. Broadly speaking, the chapter argues that the Islamic scholars employed by the muftiate, as well as the Soviet bureaucrats monitoring them, justified the international project as an anti-colonial propaganda initiative targeting the influence of global capitalism, but, more substantively, used it as a way to justify the existence and even vibrance of Islam in what was meant to be an atheist society, the Communist-ruled Soviet Union. My chapter relies exhaustively on correspondence in state archives in the republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, that has not to my knowledge been used in any work of scholarship before, Western, Soviet, or post-Soviet. These materials are in the Persian/Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek languages. I hope to present this chapter to an interdisciplinary audience in Middle Eastern Studies, in particular because the sources present a rare opportunity for substantively exploring connections between Soviet Central Asia and the Arab world in the twentieth century. My discussion highlights educational ties and scholarly exchange between Central Asian 'ulama and their counterparts at institutions such as Al-Azhar and the Islamic University of Madina (among others), and also highlights the muftiate's engagement of the previously unknown and unstudied Turkestani diaspora in Saudi Arabia. This exploration of connections between the Middle East and Central Asia in modern times makes use of newly available archival collections unknown to prior scholarship, and makes an argument for bringing Soviet Central Asia back onto the stage of Islamic and world history.