Creating Buddhist-Muslim Spaces


who wants to join a space for buddhists and muslims (“and their friends”)? we would like to re-shape the discourse that is pushing the burgeoning lethal and toxic oppositional relationship, especially in southeast asia. what is going on there is really not about “religion”, but for a lot of people it is easy to fall into that trap, especially since Islam has such a bad rep globally and because people don’t seem to know much about the history of relationships between buddhism and islam, other than the dynamiting and destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. some people seem to think that muslims somehow deserve what is happening in Myanmar, etc. because we are such “bad” and inherently violent people.
we want to shape another way of understanding and living the buddhist-muslim connections; we want to hold a space for mutual support. we want to move beyond a way of thinking that says that “all buddhists are ‘good’ and peaceful, all muslims are 'bad’ and violent”. we want to subvert that paradigm: we want to extirpate the rôle that Orientalism plays in setting up that sort of toxic binary.
we would like to examine the histories of our intersections and interactions; we would also like to create space for muslims who include buddhist spiritual practices in their lives and buddhists who have muslim spiritual practices and for others who have other forms of mixities between islam and buddhism.
anyone interested?