Voice of reason captivates conference

James Reinl, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: August 01. 2008 12:49AM UAE / July 31. 2008 8:49PM GMT

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT // Seasoned scholars turn for counsel to Sheikh al Habib Ali al Jifri.

The respected director of Abu Dhabi’s Tabah Foundation – who has won over a generation of disenfranchised Muslims from all corners of the globe – is credited with helping to shape opinion in the Muslim world and delivers straight-talking sermons that showcase his skills as a poet-philosopher, religious scholar and political theorist.

He argues for women’s rights, warns about climate change and condemns suicide bombings.

Habib Ali, 36, was dubbed “the mercy warrior” by the British Muslim magazine Q-News for his provocative brand of pacifism, a style that helped him to steal the show at this week’s debate between top Christian and Muslim scholars at Yale University.

Jordan’s Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal introduced him as among the “top 10 most popular Islamic preachers”, while the leading academic Joseph Lumbard said “nobody can shape Muslim public opinion with his capacity”.

He has a pious pedigree, having trained with tariqa spiritual masters in Yemen’s respected Wadi Hadhramaut from childhood.

“This conference is much deeper than getting a bunch of people to agree they are against extremism and terrorism,” said Habib Ali. “We are trying to rebuild bridges. To create a space where true people of religion can come together and recapture the knowledge of faith from those that are trying to take over.”

The leading scholar was among the 138 senior Muslims to sign a letter addressed to Christendom’s leaders that sought to ease tensions after Pope Benedict XVI ignited controversy with references to Islam in a 2006 speech.

The document, A Common Word Between Us and You, spawned a series of seminars for Christians and Muslims to discuss theological similarities that started in Yale this week and will continue later this year in Cambridge and the Vatican.

The controversy surrounding the pope’s speech is not the only time Habib Ali has spoken out during periods of religious strife. On September 11, he was driving past the Pentagon towards New York only minutes before hijacked jets began striking their targets. While condemning such outrages, the scholar flaunts his trademark iconoclast rhetoric, holding up a mirror and inverting hackneyed western criticisms and prejudices about the Islamic world.

“We are against all forms of terrorism, whether they be done on an individual basis or on the level of countries,” he said. “Just because we are against suicide bombers killing innocent people does not mean we endorse certain countries using American Apache helicopters to kill innocent civilians.”

When cartoons caricaturing Prophet Mohammed appeared in European newspapers, Habib Ali entered the maelstrom, flying to Denmark to tell advocates of free speech why Muslims were aghast at the images.

“There is no absolute freedom of expression in any nation and there are always red lines that cannot be crossed,” he said. “There may be very noble reasons for some European countries to have strict rules about freedom of expression relating to the Holocaust, because they are very intent that such horrors do not happen again in their midst.

“But we can draw an analogy with the possibility of an upcoming holocaust, which began with the genocide of more than 200,000 Muslims in Bosnia. Statistics show that Islamophobia is increasing exponentially in Europe. There are good reasons to include these issues in the sphere in which freedom of expression is limited.”

So how did Yemen’s brightest scholar end up running a religious foundation in the UAE, which has fielded criticism for importing shopping malls and glitzy hotels from the West? Once again, Habib Ali replies with an answer that one could not easily predict.

“There are elements of big business and individuals with certain materialistic tendencies, but, at the same time, I have found Emirati society to be very spiritual,” he said. “The people of the Emirates have a strong connection with their spiritual sides, but there is a great challenge for the next generation to keep this tradition alive.”

Although the scholar has, at times, ruffled the feathers of Arab officials, he won the confidence of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan when the nation’s founding president ran a series of scholarly meetings.

“He welcomed me in ways that I didn’t expect, and told me this was my homeland, not my second country,” said Habib Ali, describing shared beliefs that led to the creation of the Tabah Foundation for Islamic study in 2005. “I’ve been in the Emirates for seven years now. None of the officials have tried to influence what I say. They leave it up to me.”

There is a space in which Habib Ali’s spiritualism and the UAE’s oil-rich economic optimism meet harmoniously: a shared belief that Arabs and Muslims need not be eternal dependants.

“We cannot become slaves to the natural reactions of being human. Anger is natural in a human being, but we must realise that our anger, when it becomes uncontrollable, can overtake us,” he said.

“This makes it easier for those that oppress us and occupy our land to control us. We need to stay away from anger and focus our attention on developing our intellects and our abilities. We do not want to live as dependants upon the rest of the world. We need to make our own cars, produce our own clothes and build our nations.”

jreinl@thenational.ae