Muslim and Jewish students forge friendship network

Sara Amin-Nejad, an Iranian-born Muslim studying pharmacy at Manchester University, has never experienced any hostility from a Jewish student. But she has never met one either.

That was why she signed up to be part of a new team, being launched tomorrow at the House of Lords, of 18 Muslim and Jewish students working as "campus ambassadors" at 10 universities around the UK to bring people from the two faiths together.

"I thought it would be a really good opportunity to meet new people," she says. "I've never had the chance to speak to a Jewish student before."

The idea is that the team of students will act as role models for good inter-faith relations. They will receive monthly training sessions in leadership, strategy and conflict resolution and be expected to organise activities on their campuses, such as art and drama projects, and volunteering in the community, that involve Muslims and Jews working together.

The scheme is being run by the Coexistence Trust, a London-based charity dedicated to improving relationships between Muslim and Jewish students. Set up in 2005 as a parliamentary network to combat Islamophobia and anti-semitism, its focus changed three years ago to concentrate on universities.

"We thought that while the parliamentary side was important, we should focus on the next generation, and universities were where we could find the new generation of leaders," says Shahnaz Ahsan, manager of the trust.

The charity also runs Campus FaithHub, which encourages Muslim and Jewish students to leave their university bubble and volunteer together in the local community, as well as a scheme in which they get together to discuss religious texts.

Universities have recently come under the spotlight as potential hotbeds of extremist activity. Three years ago, they were issued with government guidance advising them to address Islamic extremism. Last year, after the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a former student at University College London who was accused of attempting to blow up a plane destined for the US, a working group was set up to look at how universities can prevent violent extremism while protecting academic freedom.

But the Coexistence Trust stresses that this is not its focus. Instead, it is about promoting constructive dialogue between students who are open to learning more about each other, but do not have the opportunity.

"We have found there are pockets of students who want to be working together and are quite excited when they see there is an external organisation supportive of what they are doing," says Ahsan. She hopes it will "set a new tone of respectful debate on campus and avoid the polarisation we have seen in recent years".

That is not to say that the students involved in the scheme wear their faiths – or cultures – lightly. The ambassadors include Abid Khan, a part-time Imam, and Yuval Jacob, who last year completed a 10-month pre-army leadership course living in a kibbutz in southern Israel.

Jacob, who is now in his first year of a chemical engineering degree at Imperial College, says the leadership course gave him a chance to find out more about his roots. He has spent most of his life in Germany, but his grandfather had left Germany for Israel in order to escape the Nazis shortly before the second world war.

As part of an Israeli family, he says he always feels connected to the news, but it was not until he spent time in Israel, and saw the sites of conflicts, the crater left by a suicide bomber, that he understood fully what it means for two communities to be at war with one another.

"What makes me interested in the ambassador programme is that I also know the other side," he says. "The side of friendship."

While in Israel, coming across someone who is Muslim would present a point of conflict, he says, having been brought up in Europe, he takes it for granted that he will have Muslim friends – and he does. Here, he argues, the two communities can be easier in each other's company because they are more detached from the political issues that have historically divided them.

Ibrahim Khan, a first-year politics, philosophy and economics student at Oxford – and standup comedian – also makes the distinction between political and social divisions.

While he argues that it is important for Jewish and Muslim students not to shy away from discussions about the Israeli/Palestinian situation, he says it is important for them not to conflate it with their own relationships.

Khan, who was part of a young Muslim advisory group set up under the last government to help guard against extremism, is one of two campus ambassadors who are hafiz, a term used for people who have memorised the Qur'an.

He took the view that if you have a set of values you want to live your life by then the best way to do that is to know those principles by heart. In the process, he says, he learned how far the scriptures supported interfaith co-operation.

Now he wants to have a chance to study the Jewish scriptures. "It would be nice to have more knowledge of Judaism as a religion and separate that from the political situation," he says.

Underlying this, and the other projects run by Coexistence, is an understanding that Muslim and Jewish cultures have much in common.

Rebecca Usden, another ambassador who is studying politics at Cambridge, says: "If you look at the two religions, they look quite similar in many ways and have a lot of common ground. There are definitely ways to counter conflict by looking at these similarities."

She became involved in interfaith work as a student because having been to a school where Jewish and Muslim students mixed easily, university was a bit of a culture shock. "There was so little dialogue between the two communities," she says. "It isn't that there is hostility, it's just that they are not that good at communication."

Amin-Nejad agrees. "The Muslim students I know tend to mostly hang out with groups of other Muslim students," she says. "Most don't know anything about Jewish religion or culture and what they do know is from their parents. A lot of it isn't even true and they don't make the effort to change that."

Yet she argues that the best place to start changing attitudes is at university, when people can be brought together and prejudices challenged, and that can have a knock-on effect for wider change.

"At the moment there is a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication and a lot of prejudice, and often it is between people who have never met," she says. "Once you show people you can be friends – not just co-exist but be friends – then others will follow."