It takes a 17-hour flight and two or three taxis through the unfamiliar streets of Amman, Jordan, to arrive here, a nondescript grey building. W. Timothy Pownall, assistant director of the Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution at the Pepperdine School of Law, and his partners in the PACIS Project are ushered into the office of a bearded, turbaned man in his mid-60s — the secretary general of the international leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He could easily field dress an AK-47 blindfolded, Pownall thinks, as he faces a man who considers a Westerner his enemy.
“Why do you want to meet with me?” the man asks. “Why do you want to engage with the Muslim Brotherhood?”
Pownall’s response is direct and simple. He looks him in the eye and says, “Politics has made enemies of us. Yet my faith says that I am supposed to love you. And I can’t love you without knowing you.’”
The man’s response is to weep.
“No one, especially from the West,” he says, “has ever spoken to me that way.”
Skeptical introductions turn into late-night, two-hour conversations over coffee when Pownall and his colleagues approach Middle Eastern leaders with the simple but powerful objective of getting to know them.
That’s the PACIS Project. PACIS, Latin for “of peace,” aims to strip away the politicization of religion in the Middle East and get to the heart of the matter: faith. Through faith-based diplomacy, the project intentionally brings personal faith into the conversation to unlock opportunities for connection and reconciliation.
After Pownall was introduced to faith-based diplomacy by the Straus Institute’s Abrahamic Reconciliation Seminar in Cyprus in 2007, he was moved to collaborate with the Rev. Brian Cox of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy and Michael Zacharia to form the PACIS Project in International Faith-Based Diplomacy through Straus in 2008.
While it’s difficult to quantify the effects of faith-based diplomacy, its real power lies in forging relationships between perceived enemies, changing entrenched perspectives and holding “each other accountable to the highest and best of our faith.”
The members of PACIS go only where they are invited, and their respectful but authentic technique has earned them continual invitations on the political, diplomatic side and on the religious side of the discourse in the Middle East, Pownall said.
In fact, they’re exercising their philosophy on the ground in the Middle East right now. Pownall left the United States yesterday to meet his colleagues for a one-week tour through Amman, Cairo and Tel Aviv, and they’re slated to participate in 16 high-level meetings with political and religious officials during their stay.
“The process that we engage in is plenary and then small-group discussions with leaders of other faiths,” Pownall explained. “And yet at the end of that process, we still then get together over a cup of coffee or a meal. It’s part of getting to know people, not only in terms of their religious perspective but their world vision, how they view the world and their place in their own society.”
And their approach is bringing an often excluded element to track two (unofficial) diplomacy. Faith is generally seen as the source of conflict in the Middle East, but for PACIS, it’s the solution.
Inspired by Jesus’ peacemaking process in Matthew 18, PACIS’s innovative take on diplomacy emphasizes an “on the ground” approach to helping polarized communities steeped in identity- and religion-based conflict.
Their work was recognized last month by the Association for Conflict Resolution at its annual conference, where Pownall accepted the Peacemaker Award on behalf of PACIS.
But at the end of their short mission, the PACIS team will get on a plane and fly home. Consequently, they aim to encourage grassroots movements in the Middle East that will be the work of citizens claiming peace initiatives as their own responsibility. “What I hope is that PACIS will be the catalyst for creating popular movements around the notion of faith-based reconciliation,” Pownall said.
“Once a popular movement begins, it’s hard to stop it. Voltaire said that there’s nothing as strong as an idea whose time has come. And we believe that PACIS is in the right moment.”
Pownall anticipates significant shifts in the leadership of the Arab world following the Arab Spring. “Those shifts are both moments of danger and of opportunity,” he said. “It is our hope that PACIS will steer those popular movements towards the opportunity rather than the danger.”
These changes, he hopes, will replace staid leaders with younger visionaries ready to break new ground in resolving conflict. According to Pownall’s vision, the PACIS Project is laying a foundation for the younger generation to bring resolution to the disputes of its predecessors.
Bringing a vast background and knowledge in the mechanics of negotiation to the table, PACIS members are seen as nonthreatening, nonaligned, credible agents of peace with whom skeptical parties are willing to engage in conversation.
“And that’s all we ask,” Pownall said. “Where we go in our conversations is the heart of the matter: You say you’re for peace, you say your God is a God of peace. It’s the same thing over here, and yet you guys are lobbing grenades over the fence at each other. Why is that? By the way, help us understand the faith, the intellectual content of why that’s OK to do that in light of what we understand to be your peace tradition. And that is an engaging question. Maybe our efforts should be in aligning our faith with our actions, or our actions with our faith, on both sides of the fence.”
This discourse can result in nonviolent resolution because, PACIS contends, the peace traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths are remarkably similar. The problem with diplomatically arranged peace treaties, like the Camp David Accords, is that the general population has been silent in their creation and has not been “socialized for the idea of what peace can be or what it would look like.” PACIS attempts to reverse the process and infuse peace into the fabric of daily society. But to affect durable change, the dialogue must begin at the bottom and spread upward.
If anything has made itself evident through these interactions, it’s that actions convey faith. Pownall understands that the path to salvation in which he believes and in which the man from the Muslim Brotherhood believes are doctrinally incongruent. So, instead of approaching religion from a theological soapbox, Pownall seeks to model Christ in his behavior, simple and honestly. And faithfully modeling Jesus’ behavior is disarming; it disrupts the social scripts people expect from one another and opens them up to relationships with people they would’ve previously considered enemies.
“What I’ve come to understand more deeply is that God is not a Christian God, He’s not a Muslim God or a Jewish God, God is God,” Pownall said. “It’s our environment and our orientation that create political understandings of faith. And yet for us to understand each other as children of God and to be graceful towards one another, understanding our own imperfections and our frailties has caused me to be significantly less judgmental and more deeply convinced of my faith at the same time. Our challenge is to share what we see as truth while being open to hearing what our partners across the table understand as their truth.”
“[The warring parties] are acting out of fear, rather than love. Those are the options when you boil it all down. Either you operate out of fear, or you operate out of love, in my view. Love is risky, because you have to establish relationship and you have to make good on your aspirations. But it’s easier to do in concert, and the conflict in the Middle East is among brethren. They have so much in common, more than they have difference, including in religion.”
Their work was recognized last month by the Association for Conflict Resolution at its annual conference, where Pownall accepted the Peacemaker Award on behalf of PACIS.
But at the end of their short mission, the PACIS team will get on a plane and fly home. Consequently, they aim to encourage grassroots movements in the Middle East that will be the work of citizens claiming peace initiatives as their own responsibility. “What I hope is that PACIS will be the catalyst for creating popular movements around the notion of faith-based reconciliation,” Pownall said.
“Once a popular movement begins, it’s hard to stop it. Voltaire said that there’s nothing as strong as an idea whose time has come. And we believe that PACIS is in the right moment.”
Pownall anticipates significant shifts in the leadership of the Arab world following the Arab Spring. “Those shifts are both moments of danger and of opportunity,” he said. “It is our hope that PACIS will steer those popular movements towards the opportunity rather than the danger.”
These changes, he hopes, will replace staid leaders with younger visionaries ready to break new ground in resolving conflict. According to Pownall’s vision, the PACIS Project is laying a foundation for the younger generation to bring resolution to the disputes of its predecessors.
Bringing a vast background and knowledge in the mechanics of negotiation to the table, PACIS members are seen as nonthreatening, nonaligned, credible agents of peace with whom skeptical parties are willing to engage in conversation.
“And that’s all we ask,” Pownall said. “Where we go in our conversations is the heart of the matter: You say you’re for peace, you say your God is a God of peace. It’s the same thing over here, and yet you guys are lobbing grenades over the fence at each other. Why is that? By the way, help us understand the faith, the intellectual content of why that’s OK to do that in light of what we understand to be your peace tradition. And that is an engaging question. Maybe our efforts should be in aligning our faith with our actions, or our actions with our faith, on both sides of the fence.”
This discourse can result in nonviolent resolution because, PACIS contends, the peace traditions of the three Abrahamic faiths are remarkably similar. The problem with diplomatically arranged peace treaties, like the Camp David Accords, is that the general population has been silent in their creation and has not been “socialized for the idea of what peace can be or what it would look like.” PACIS attempts to reverse the process and infuse peace into the fabric of daily society. But to affect durable change, the dialogue must begin at the bottom and spread upward.
If anything has made itself evident through these interactions, it’s that actions convey faith. Pownall understands that the path to salvation in which he believes and in which the man from the Muslim Brotherhood believes are doctrinally incongruent. So, instead of approaching religion from a theological soapbox, Pownall seeks to model Christ in his behavior, simple and honestly. And faithfully modeling Jesus’ behavior is disarming; it disrupts the social scripts people expect from one another and opens them up to relationships with people they would’ve previously considered enemies.
“What I’ve come to understand more deeply is that God is not a Christian God, He’s not a Muslim God or a Jewish God, God is God,” Pownall said. “It’s our environment and our orientation that create political understandings of faith. And yet for us to understand each other as children of God and to be graceful towards one another, understanding our own imperfections and our frailties has caused me to be significantly less judgmental and more deeply convinced of my faith at the same time. Our challenge is to share what we see as truth while being open to hearing what our partners across the table understand as their truth.”
“[The warring parties] are acting out of fear, rather than love. Those are the options when you boil it all down. Either you operate out of fear, or you operate out of love, in my view. Love is risky, because you have to establish relationship and you have to make good on your aspirations. But it’s easier to do in concert, and the conflict in the Middle East is among brethren. They have so much in common, more than they have difference, including in religion.”
