BOB ABERNETHY, host: Amid the continuing investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing, President Obama this week spoke of the threat of self-radicalized individuals here in the US and the difficulty of identifying them. He said his counterterrorism team has discussed ways it can engage communities where such radicalization can occur. In recent years, American Muslim groups have launched their own efforts to combat extremism.

For more on this, I’m joined by our managing editor, Kim Lawton, and Haris Tarin. He directs the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Haris, welcome. The president referred to self-radicalizing. What—how does that work, and what can the Muslim community do to prevent it?

HARIS TARIN (Muslim Public Affairs Council): Well, the phenomenon of self-radicalization is where individuals who do not find a place in mainstream Muslim institutions, places like mosques and organizations, they don’t find a place for their fiery rhetoric, for their violent, extremist rhetoric, so they go online, and they listen to sermons, and they listen to individuals like Anwar al-Awlaki or Adam Gadahn or other folks who misinterpret the religion to give it a violent, violent ideology, and they fall prey to these individuals who are basically online predators, and they get influenced by these individuals to address their grievances through violence.

ABERNETHY: And then what can you do about it?

TARIN: I think what we can do, number one, is to ensure that there’s a counter-narrative, that there’s a narrative of life, of positivity, that even if you have a grievance or you have a disagreement on policy, whether domestic or international, you can address those policy grievances through civic and political engagement and change that— maybe not overnight, but eventually you have the power to change policy.

KIM LAWTON: I know the Muslim community has been trying to offer these kinds of counter-narratives. Has that just not worked, or what do you need to do differently in order to combat this online issue?

TARIN: Well, I think, you know, I said before, I think to overwhelming extent the American Muslim community has not fallen prey to this. It’s individuals who are radicalized online, but I think what needs to happen is that we need to ensure that we have a narrative that goes viral. A lot of these videos, they are very emotive. These sermons they use violence and gruesome images to tug at the emotion of young people. And so we also need to ensure that when we put out the counter-narrative it’s as savvy, it goes as viral and addresses the same issues and that we’re not afraid to address some of the same policy grievances that they address, but to make sure that the outcome is positive and not negative.

LAWTON: And how do you deal with the perception that many outsiders have that the more religious someone, a Muslim, gets, the more prone he or she is to being violent or being an extremist?

TARIN: Well, I think that notion, fortunately, is false. There’s a notion that the more religious you get it leads to acts of violence. The studies have shown that when people go through rigorous religious training and understanding, they’re less prone to violence, but that people who skip that religious understanding part and have an awakening and then go straight to politics, that’s where they become more prone to violence and twisted ideologies and perverted interpretations of the religion.

ABERNETHY: Is there a special role here for young people? I mean, the perpetrators are young. Does that invite, then, or say that the people who can best correct that are young people?

TARIN: The first thing you have to understand is a lot of young American Muslims, they deal with everything else that all young Americans are dealing with—college tuition, jobs, but there is a place for them to ensure that their peers on college campuses and youth groups are having a conversation that’s positive, that when they see a negative conversation that they step in, and they interfere and ensure that they move the conversation towards a more positive aspect.

ABERNETHY: O.K. Haris Tarin of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Kim Lawton, many thanks to you both.

TARIN: Thank you.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: It’s these kinds of images that have defined Iraq over the past decade, as America’s 2003 invasion was followed by a long insurgency against U.S. forces. Brutal sectarian violence among Iraqis followed and continues to this day in the country.

At least 100,000 Iraqis have died in the conflicts. And fears of violence and religious persecution have led more than a million and a half Iraqis to flee their country, with most settling in other Middle Eastern nations.

Thousands of these Iraqi refugees have wound up on the very distant and unlikely shores of San Diego, California, a place better known for the tanned and toned southern California good life than its connection to turmoil in the Middle East.

(to Milheer El Anny and his wife Hebba): When did you get here, may I ask?

MILHEER EL ANNY: About 42 days ago.

GONZALEZ: You got to the United States only 42 days ago?

EL ANNY: Yeah. (laughs)

GONZALEZ: Iraqis Miheer El Anny, his wife Hebba, and young daughter Jumana are trying to adjust to their new life in the U.S. after leaving Iraq and then spending a year in Turkey as refugees.

EL ANNY: We left Iraq because there was a direct risk on our lives. It is very risky, especially for us because our lives are in danger. So, for the time being we can’t go back to Iraq.

GONZALEZ: We met the El Annys in the San Diego offices of Catholic Charities, a nonprofit group which helps new Iraqi refugees resettle in the community, regardless of their faith.

MIKE MCKAY: They are what we call the unintended consequences of the war.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay is Catholic Charities’ Director of Refugee Services in San Diego. He says because of America’s long and controversial military involvement in Iraq, the U.S. has a moral obligation to help the Iraqis now here.

MCKAY: Just like we help the veterans who come home from the wars, and they have a lot of challenges, so also we have a responsibility and a need to help these folks as well.

GONZALEZ: In the early years of the Iraq War, the United States only accepted a trickle of Iraqi refugees. But that changed in 2007 when resettlement restrictions were loosened.

In the years since, more than 64,000 Iraqi refugees have been allowed in to the United States, with thousands of them coming to the San Diego area.

That migration has transformed some communities, like El Cajon, where a quarter of it’s 100,000 residents are now Iraqis, and where on some streets it’s easy to feel like you’re in the Middle East.

For the Iraqis who come to the United States, they’ve traded the violence and desperation of their own country for the relative peace and prosperity of the United States. But for many it can be like traveling between two worlds and that creates its own problems.

MUHAMMED: My name is Muhammed, and I’ve been in the United States since 2009 as a refugee.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed is like many in the Iraqi expatriate community when he requests that we don’t reveal his identity. He fears it could put family members back home at risk, either from militants or criminal gangs.

MUHAMMED: They kidnap one of your family, thinking that because you are living in America you are a millionaire or something and asking for a ransom. That happens many times.

GONZALEZ: Muhammed says he was forced to leave Iraq. He says just because he was an English teacher, militants thought he was working with the Americans. Many Iraqis who worked with the U.S. military or private contractors as translators have been killed.

MUHAMMED: They start targeting teachers, educated people. So we received a threat note to leave or you will be killed.

GONZALEZ: And why did so many Iraqis, like Muhammed, choose to come to San Diego? Well, many of them had family connections here because of an older, established Iraqi community that’s been in the city for years.

That’s especially true for Iraqi Christian Chaldeans, who have put down deep roots in San Diego.

Local Chaldean churches, along with mosques and groups like Catholic Charities and the International Rescue Committee offer aid and orientation to the Iraqi refugees.

INSTRUCTOR: …By using the three techniques at least. Apply online. What else? Networking.

That help often comes in the form of classroom instruction, where the newly arrived Iraqis learn survival skills for everyday life in America.

Erica Bouris is a resettlement manager for the International Rescue Committee in San Diego.

ERICA BOURIS: We provide cultural orientation. We help with housing and, you know, making sure that kids are immunized, kids enroll in school, those are the kinds of things that we are doing with folks in the first couple of months.

GONZALEZ: Really nitty-gritty things?

BOURIS: Very nitty-gritty things. Absolutely. Get your driver’s license. Do you know how to take the bus? We just saw in the class practicing how to write a check. Do you know how to pay your rent and pay your bills?

GONZALEZ: Some institutions which try to help the refugees, such as San Diego’s most prominent Iraqi Christian church, acknowledge providing assistance has stretched resources.

Father Michael Bazzi is the church’s pastor.

FATHER MICHAEL BAZZI: We used to have them coming to us a thousand, two thousand every year, three thousand every year, and lately, more than five thousand people. And I established here a committee to show them how to live as Americans here, and we have many committees that take them to the schools and to, you know, insert them into American society.

GONZALEZ: Although grateful to be here, many Iraqis complain that settling in the United States has been difficult, especially when it comes to jobs. According to Catholic Charities, only about a third of Iraqi refugees find employment during their first year in the United States. Anecdotally, the refugee agencies say long term unemployment or underemployment continues for most of the Iraqis. Muhammed blames the refugee resettlement process for many of the Iraqi community’s problems.

MUHAMMED: We didn’t get any orientation about life in America or even the law, so we were lost. It’s not about the person himself. It is about applications and system software that you have to fit in. It doesn’t matter what your life was. But for me no one can sit and talk to you.

GONZALEZ: Mike McKay of Catholic Charities empathizes with the Iraqis.

MCKAY: They have very conflicted feelings. They’re grateful about being out of harm’s way and have a chance to start a new life and seek the American Dream. But at the same time, not unlike the Hebrew people who left the slavery of Egypt, when they got in the desert, they said, “Oh, Lord, Moses, why did you bring us here? Take us back. Life is too hard in the desert.”

GONZALEZ: For the El Annys, freshly arrived in this country, the choices and freedoms America offers is both confusing and exciting.

EL ANNY: These 42 days, it’s like introducing for a new world because the system here is different than the system in the Middle East, especially the option things. Here in the United States, everything, there are options.

HEBBA: There are many options.

EL ANNY: Yeah. Many options. Everything, there are options.

GONZALEZ: A little fear at times, do you feel a little fear?

EL ANNY: Sometimes we feel fear. Yeah, sometimes. But, you know, with all the support we have, things will be fine, I think.

GONZALEZ: When we left Catholic Charities, the staff were preparing for new refugees from Iraq at the airport in the coming days.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in San Diego.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: At Thursday’s interfaith service, local religious leaders prayed for the healing of their city in the wake of the attack.

CARDINAL SEAN O’MALLEY (Archdiocese of Boston): We must overcome the culture of death by promoting a culture of life, a profound respect for each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God. And we must cultivate a desire to give our lives in the service of others.

LAWTON: Within moments of the bombing, clergy and faith-based groups mobilized to do what they could to help. As victims of the bombing were brought to Tufts Medical Center, Interfaith Chaplain Mary Lou Von Euew was on site to offer counseling and prayer. She says one injured woman expressed what many were feeling.

CHAPLAIN MARY LOU VON EUEW (Tufts Medical Center): She said “the hardest thing about this is that some human beings can treat other human beings like this. I just don’t understand it.”

LAWTON: Indeed, Von Euew says, after a tragedy like the bombing, clergy often hear age old questions about the nature of good and evil, suffering and the existence of a loving God.

VON EUEW: You know most of the time people deep down inside aren’t asking for an answer. They’re asking for you to fight and wrestle with the questions with them. We truly believe that God is with us when it happens, so we’re not suffering alone, that we have someone with us who loves us beyond all measure.

LAWTON: Rabbi Yitzhak Korff, Chaplain for the City of Boston, is helping to oversee counseling for first responders.

RABBI YITZHAK KORFF: It’s important that these people understand once they have fulfilled their duty to the citizens, the people they are serving and protecting and saving and making to feel safe and secure, they need to face any feelings that they might be having as well.

LAWTON: He says many of the victims and first responders are still in shock and will deal with theological questions later. Even then, he says, there will be little ultimate satisfaction.

KORFF: The macro answer is, we don’t know God’s plan. I don’t know of anybody that God’s called and said, “Here’s the deal.” And so there’s an unknown. And prayer and meditation can help bring a sense of calm.

LAWTON: Muslims in Boston, and across the US, were quick to condemn the bombing. Imam William Suhaib Webb of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center says all the members of his mosque felt the attack.

IMAM SUHAIB WEBB (Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center): They felt very violated, and they felt the sacredness of the city was violated and that the trust of our populous was violated, so there was a sense of wanting this person to be caught and subjected to justice.

LAWTON: Webb helped organize the interfaith prayer service and urged his congregation to donate blood and find other ways to serve those who are suffering.

WEBB: Reminding people of God’s wisdom then also reminding that we are not allowed to use his wisdom to be placid or inactive. We have to go out and help and work and be positive and stay involved.

LAWTON: Some faith groups found unusual ways to offer help. Lutheran Church Charities dispatched its K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry.

TIM HETZNER (Lutheran Church Charities): People many times, all ages, will talk to a dog before they will talk to a person.

LAWTON: The ministry took the specially-trained dogs to Boston hospitals to visit victims and their families, and set up a petting station at a local church. Ministry leaders had also taken the dogs to Newtown, Connecticut after the school shooting.

HETZNER: Whether it’s a bombing or a shooting or divorce or death, whatever happens in life, which life throws stuff at us, they bring the mercy and the compassion of Christ and comfort to people that need to work through whatever it is they’re facing.

LAWTON: Rabbi Korff says the bombing had a profound spiritual impact on the city.

KORFF: We rely on a sense of knowing if I do this then this is what’s going to happen. And so, that’s what gets upset, what upsets the balance in these critical incidents, and that’s what needs to be restored as quickly and as easily as possible.

LAWTON: He and other religious leaders urged the community to come together in grief and then move forward with a new sense of hope. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We want to talk now via Skype with Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, right in Copley Square in Boston, where the bombs went off. We are old friends. Sam, welcome. What can a pastor say to his people at a time like this, a terrible time like this, and what are people saying to you?

REV. SAMUEL LLOYD (Priest-in-Charge, Trinity Church): I think the pastor first needs to acknowledge what a trauma this has been and listen carefully to what people are saying and what I hear a lot is a sense of the fragility of people’s lives and their sense of how vulnerable they’ve been. And so what I have been doing and will continue to do as I’m with my community is to remind them of the core convictions of a power behind all of life that is sustaining us and our faith in a God who goes with us even in the toughest of times and promises always to bring healing beyond the crisis at hand.

ABERNETHY: What about the old questions of where was God in this and how could God have permitted so much suffering? Are you hearing that at all?

LLOYD: I’m not hearing it as much as I did after 9/11. It’s more people’s sense of fragility but when those questions come they always invite an explanation of the fact that we are people who’ve been given extraordinary freedom, we in this human race, and with that comes the enormous possibility of love and delight and also the kind of terror we’ve seen.

ABERNETHY: And also comes the ability to do terrible things.

LLOYD: That’s right. To do unimaginable damage and yet that’s never the last word.

ABERNETHY: People around the country are being told by officials and pastors to pray for the people of Boston. What do you suggest we pray for?

LLOYD: Prayer is an enormously important gift in this time because it binds all of us together as a country. I think it’s a great gift that people are praying for the people of Boston. I’d ask them to pray for courage and strength as we continue to make our way through a time of trauma. I’d ask for them to pray for a sense of our own connectedness to each other. And I’d ask them especially to pray for the magnificent police, law enforcement people, medical people and first attenders who have done an amazing job and continue to be doing crucial work. They are a model for us all.

ABERNETHY: But the thing I’m interested in, that the primary thing that you’ve been hearing is fear and what do you say about how faith can cope with that?

LLOYD: Well one of the first things I say is that fear loves isolation and what we need to do is be in touch with each other so I’m encouraging my community to text and email and call people they know and love and care about, get together as they can because we are reminders to each other of the faith we carry and the trust we’ve known and the love we’ve known through the years that gives us the courage to continue on in what we’re doing. The second thing I do is I try to send them even back to their old scriptures where the psalm for this Sunday is the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want and I’m sending everyone back to be reading that day and night these days to be reminded that there’s someone holding us.

ABERNETHY: Anything good that you see coming out of the response to this terrible thing?

LLOYD: You know, amazing, there’s been immense good. It’s just, just as when the sky is at its darkness we can see the most light. In this dark time, we see the love and care that emerges. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Mr. Rogers said in response to 9/11. Someone asked him what his advice was and he said keep your eyes on the helpers and if you look at the helpers, you’re seeing this a story of enormous courage and compassion and devotion that makes you proud to be a Bostonian and proud to be a human being and grateful for a God of love working through all of this.

ABERNETHY: Reverend Samuel Lloyd, the priest-in-charge at Trinity Episcopal Church, in Copley Square in Boston. Sam, many thanks.

LLOYD: You’re welcome, Bob.

LUCKY SEVERSON: This would have been an unlikely occurrence only a few years ago: 80 clergy and lay leaders from a broad range of religions across the U.S., converging on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress about climate change and protecting the environment. They are all part of a national organization of faith leaders known as Interfaith Power and Light, or IPL, which was founded by the Reverend Canon Sally Bingham, an Episcopal priest.

REV. SALLY BINGHAM (Interfaith Power & Light): We started out asking congregations to respond to climate change. And as more and more religions got involved, we realized what we were actually doing was bringing religions together where they could all agree on something. There were Hindu, Baha’i, Mormons, Catholics, evangelicals, Protestants, Jews, Muslims all agreeing with each other, we are the stewards of creation.

SEVERSON: Altogether there are now over 14,000 houses of worship in 40 states connected to IPL. Places like Adat Shalom Congregation in Maryland. Fred Scherlinder Dobb is the Rabbi and he says religion is deepening his congregation’s concern for the environment.

RABBI FRED SCHERLINDER DOBB (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation): Ultimately love of the creator and love of that which God has created are one and the same. If you don’t love creation what does it mean to say that you love God who so loved creation?

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid is the director of a Washington area group called Green Muslims, made up of young professionals like herself—she’s an urban planner.

SARAH JAWAID (Green Muslims): It’s an issue that isn’t a priority for a lot of the communities that we see. Mosque leadership, you know, they’re just now starting to talk about it. You see it more and more on university campuses, but it’s a recent, recent phenomenon.

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says she became a priest because God called her to speak out on the environment when no one else was.

REV. BINGHAM: They’re afraid to get into the pulpit and talk about something that they really don’t know a lot about. But how can you sit in a pew and profess a love for God and then watch, sit back and watch creation be destroyed?

SEVERSON: These Pennsylvania IPL members are practicing what they preach. They bicycled 200 miles from State College, Pennsylvania to Washington, stopping at churches along the way. They are here to lobby Congress to strengthen environmental laws. Jon Brockopp is a professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State.

JON BROCKOPP (Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light): If you talk to people about their major faith experiences, something like 90% of people will think of something that happened to them out in the woods, on a mountain somewhere, somewhere along the beach. There’s something about the natural environment, the environment around us right now, that really speaks to people and speaks to us of a higher power.

SEVERSON: The Green Muslim board members meet once a week to discuss teachings from the Qu’ran and Hadith about protecting the earth. Sarah says the prophet Muhammad was a tree hugger literally because he actually hugged a tree after he heard it wailing.

SARAH JAWAID: It just showed so much about his character as a compassionate being and it helps me be more compassionate and to really live more lightly in this world.

SEVERSON: They also get their hands dirty, working at a local farm, cleaning up parks and renting out reusable dinnerware.

JAWAID: We started renting out reusable dinnerware as a way to get individuals to lessen their waste during Ramadan. And so instead of wasting a bunch of Styrofoam, we actually take our tableware and we’ll take it home and wash it. We had about 600, 700 people over the month that were using it and that’s a lot of waste that was reduced.

SEVERSON: They say it’s their faith and scriptures and not their politics that drive their views on the environment.

RABBI DOBB: Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verse 19. It’s a law in wartime about not cutting down the enemy’s trees even when it could give you military advantage and perhaps even save combatants’ lives. If we’re not allowed to cut down a tree that belongs to the enemy under such direct circumstances, how much more should we not allow trees to be felled simply for the convenience of the international economy.

REV. BINGHAM: Very often we have a bigger impact with a congregation by talking to them about, “Do you want to save money on your energy bill?” And very seldom does a congregation say, “Oh no.” They usually say yes, how do we do that?

SEVERSON: A number of houses of worship that belong to IPL combine their purchasing power to buy cheaper electricity from renewable energy at rates which can amount to huge savings especially for larger churches. IPL also encourages utilizing renewable energy like the solar panels on the roof of the Adat Shalom Synagogue.

RABBI DOBB: We have saved many thousands of dollars over the course of eleven years running this building because of passive solar technology, because of sensitive lighting we put in place. It absolutely keeps operating costs down. So if you make an investment in something like a really efficient boiler, it makes a tremendous difference.

REV. BINGHAM: We are asking our congregations to serve as examples to the community, and the hope is that when the religious leader can tell his or her congregation that they’re saving money on energy that people will say, “Oh, I’ll go home and we’ll do some of these same things in our homes.”

SEVERSON: Reverend Bingham says in the beginning of her ministry she faced a lot of resistance.

REV. BINGHAM: I was accused of promoting world government. I was called a communist. I was accused of taking a political issue into the pulpit which was highly against anything Americans believe in, merging church and state. But I haven’t. That hasn’t happened in the last 5 to 6 years.

SEVERSON: There’s still pushback from some churches and groups with religious and political connections like the conservative evangelical Cornwall Alliance.

CALVIN BEISNER (Founder of Cornwall Alliance): (from Resisting the Green Dragon video, produced by Cornwall Alliance) “The religious and political environmental movement, what we call the Green Dragon, has become one of the greatest threats to society and the church in our day.”

FEMALE NARRATOR: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “Its twisted view of the world elevates nature above the needs of people of even the poorest and most helpless. With millions falling prey to its spiritual deception. The time is now to stand and resist.”

REV. BINGHAM: It’s complete nonsense. I mean, you can go into scripture and find that God put Adam in the garden to till it and to keep it and we are the gardeners. We have not done a very good job and I would dispute anything that is behind the Green Dragon.

SEVERSON: The Cornwall Alliance produced the Resisting the Green Dragon series and sent them to churches around the country.

BEISNER: (from Resisting the Green Dragon video) “The average poor household spends a much higher percentage of its budget on electricity and other energy sources than does the average middle class or wealthy household. That means when we raise the price of energy, we are hurting the poor more than we hurt everybody else.”

SEVERSON: Dave Hunter takes a view opposite of the Cornwall Alliance video. He thinks the poor, particularly in others countries, will be hurt the most if something is not done about climate change.

DAVE HUNTER: If we don’t do anything about climate change the people who are going to be hit most by that are the people who have the least. And so to me that becomes a moral issue.

RABBI DOBB: Climate change is going to cause food scarcity, the likes of which we have never seen.

SEVERSON: Just outside the Adat Shalom Synagogue, the congregation has built and is expanding an organic garden where members are taught how to grow their own vegetables and donate part of what they harvest to food pantries. Rabbi Dobb says observing the Sabbath or Shabbat as God did after he created the earth is one way to help preserve it.

RABBI DOBB: One day in seven is of course Sabbath and that is a day of just being, not of doing. It’s a stepping back from the rat race of production and consumption and as Jews it’s our most special time.

SEVERSON: Sarah Jawaid thinks the cluttered and polluted world around us is a reflection of what’s going on inside ourselves, and that the best way to find ourselves is in the quiet and beauty of nature.

JAWAID: When I pray, I feel the most connected when my prayers are outside or when I’m thinking about a natural setting, things like that. I feel God’s presence in those moments. I mean, He’s everywhere all the time and different parts of the faith speak to different people, but that speaks to me.

SEVERSON: On Capitol Hill, lobbyists from Interfaith Power and Light are becoming a fixture.

REV. BINGHAM: Even if they don’t persuade them in that meeting, they may be able to next time. If we can point out to skeptical legislators that this is a real issue, it’s not going away, they have a moral responsibility to serve the American people, and if the American people want climate legislation and want clean air and clean water, they’ll come around.

SEVERSON: She says if enough houses of worship join the effort, Interfaith Power and Light will become a force of nature. For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington, DC.

On an average night more than 2,100 Syrians cross the border into Jordan, seeking refuge from the violence and instability in their own country.

It’s the new normal, the head of a large humanitarian aid organization working in the Za’atari refugee camp told me recently. “We’ve come to expect several thousand refugees each night.”

March 15 marks the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution. According to the United Nations, in those two short years more than 70,000 Syrians have been killed and over 3 million have been uprooted from their homes. Some 2.3 million are internally displaced, and another million are refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt.

Bedouin Hospitality

According to the Jordanian government, more than 400,000 Syrians now live in Jordan, a country of only 6.5 million people with a long history of welcoming refugees. Because of the harsh desert climate, the Bedouin have long offered a minimum of three days of hospitality to anyone who passed by their tents.

“The house is always opened to guests,” says Dr. Kamal Abu Jaber, the former foreign minister of Jordan and son of a Jordanian Bedouin father and Palestinian mother. “Once you eat bread and salt together you are bound together as family.” To call a Jordanian “generous,” he adds, is the highest compliment.

Well over half the population of Jordan is made up of newcomers who arrived during the past 60 years. Jordan has opened its arms to 2.7 million Palestinians (the original refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars, and their descendants); half a million Iraqis; thousands of Somalis, Sudanese, and Libyans; and now hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“It’s a miracle that this poor country can do this,” says Abu Jaber.

Za’atari Refugee Camp

In early March, I visited the sprawling Za’atari refugee camp only six miles from the Syrian border and just outside the northern Jordanian city of Mafraq.

All new Syrian arrivals in Jordan are brought first to Za’atari. Those few who are fortunate enough to find a Jordanian citizen to sponsor them are free to leave the camp, which is surrounded by a high fence and guarded by Jordanian security. Others must stay in the camp.

The camp is now home to as many as 140,000 Syrians. No one seems to know the exact number. The situation is fluid and volatile by anyone’s definition. There are frequent protests and riots.

Photo: ACT Alliance/Paul Jeffrey

According to aid workers, many of the refugees come from middle-class households and are quick to express frustration about the camp’s limited services and fragile infrastructure. In spite of heroic efforts, U.N. and aid agencies are simply not able to keep pace with the thousands who arrive daily.

Za’atari is in the middle of a high-altitude desert that is cold and wet in the winter and stiflingly hot with sand storms in the summer. Newcomers live in tents. Eventually families are transferred to small one-room “caravans.”

The main street of the camp is packed with pedestrians and lined with vendors selling fruits, vegetables, household supplies, and even washing machines.

Eighty-eight-year-old Um Omar (names have been changed for security reasons) welcomed us in her 10-foot-by-15-foot caravan with no furnishings except mats on the floor. She served us tea, with heaping plates of bananas and oranges.

Um Omar came to Za’atari from Dara’a five months ago, along with two grown sons, who carried her across the border, and a gaggle of grandchildren. Dara’a is where Syria’s revolution began in March 2011, when several young boys were arrested for painting graffiti about Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

Um Omar’s grandchildren do not go to school because it is too far away from their caravan. Indeed, the camp is so massive that many residents no longer live within easy walking distance of schools, medical facilities, or other services. Her son, Omar, fears that the Syrian regime might fire Scud missiles at Za’atari because it is so close to the border.

Urban Refugees

But contrary to popular images, the vast majority of Syrians in Jordan do not live in refugee camps. Most arrived before Za’atari was opened in late July 2012.

These “urban refugees” live with Jordanian families or rent small rooms or apartments in cities like Amman, Irbid, Mafraq, and Zarqa. Sometimes three or four families live in an apartment with only three or four rooms.

More than 75 percent of the Syrian refugees in Jordan are women and children. Many arrive traumatized by the violence they have witnessed in Syria. In addition to feelings of isolation and trauma, refugees express fears about meeting their current needs and uncertainty about the future.

Some 316,000 Syrians have registered or are in the process of registering with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), qualifying them to receive rent assistance, medical care, access to Jordanian public schools, and other humanitarian aid.

Yet as many as 100,000 Syrians have chosen not to register, some out of fear that there will be reprisals from the Syrian government.

Humanitarian Responses

The UN and aid agencies estimate it will cost $1 billion to cover the costs of Syrian refugees in the region just for the six months from January to June 2013.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an international humanitarian agency of Anabaptist churches, partners with local agencies in Jordan to distribute shipments of MCC relief kits, school kits, and blankets; dispense infant milk powder, diapers, and children’s shoes purchased in local markets; and provide non-formal education and psychological-social support to the refugees.

Since 2005, MCC has also partnered with Caritas Jordan, a humanitarian nongovernmental organization affiliated with the Catholic Church, supporting an innovative HIV- and AIDS-awareness project, a revolving loan fund for low-income Jordanian students, and distribution of school kits and milk powder to vulnerable families.

With tensions increasing between Jordanian host communities and an increasingly diverse and vulnerable group of Syrian refugees, Caritas has added a peace-building component to its services, training teams of Syrian refugees and Jordanians to work together to provide an effective response to the crisis.

Another key role for MCC is to share stories and needs of the refugees in the United States and Canada. Many refugees are eager to share, but do not wish to have their pictures taken or to give their full names, fearing the Syrian regime will retaliate against them.

Still Working with Refugees

Caritas Jordan was established in 1967 to respond to the refugee and humanitarian crisis caused by the Six-Day War in neighboring Israel-Palestine. Some 45 years later, it is still working with refugees. Guided by the vision of affirming the dignity of every human, with a special concern for the poor, Caritas offers services to Christians and Muslims.

“We look at the refugees’ needs and try to answer it,” says executive director Wael Sulieman.

Caritas Jordan works closely with local churches, often using parish facilities as distribution centers. The organization has registered more than 75,000 Syrian refugees at its centers in Amman, Husson, Irbid, Madaba, Mafraq, Ramtha, Salt, and Zarqa, doing family needs assessments before distributing humanitarian assistance and providing medical and educational resources.

Caritas tries to avoid duplicating services provided by UNHCR. “Our work with the vulnerable Jordanian families has never stopped,” says Sulieman. “Nonetheless Caritas gives a helping hand to any refugee community who needs help, beginning with Palestinians in the 1960s, Iraqis in the 1990s, and now with Syrians.”

The Burdens of Hospitality

Such hospitality has its costs.

Whether or not they work for humanitarian organizations, “Jordanians are heavily involved in serving and hosting the Syrians,” says Wafa Goussous, director of the Initiative of the Heads of the Orthodox Churches of the Middle East. “With the heavy load that Jordan is taking, part of the load is definitely carried by its citizens.”

The influx of refugees is straining Jordan’s budget and infrastructure and, in some cases, increasing social tensions between the refugees and Jordanian host communities. Some Jordanians have begun to complain about rising food and housing costs they believe are linked to yet another wave of refugees. Jordan’s Economic and Social Council recently reported that the cost of hosting the refugees for the past 18 months exceeded $833 million, representing about 3 percent of Jordan’s gross domestic product.

More than 29,000 Syrian children are enrolled in Jordanian public schools at a cost of $19.8 million. Still, some Syrians report being turned away from public schools due to overcrowding. And according to MCC partner Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), many Syrian families cannot afford to send their children to public school kindergarten, for which the fees have not been waived.

Photo: ACT Alliance/Paul Jeffrey

But many refugees don’t simply want hand outs. When one JRS staff member recently encouraged a Syrian woman to register with UNHCR so she would qualify for a range of benefits, she responded, “I don’t want 50 Jordanian dinars (about $70 US) from UNHCR. I want to work!”

The need for employment has strained the Jordanian economy as well. So far 38,000 jobs have been offered to Syrians, contributing to growing unemployment rates in Jordan. Some wealthier Syrians are moving their businesses to Jordan, creating stiff competition for Jordanian companies.

“Syrians are managing to cut production costs by operating from apartments, hiring refugees, and avoiding taxation,” garment factory owner Ebrahim Hadad recently told The Media Line.  “Syrians are welcomed; this country is comprised of refugees,” Hadad continued. “However, they are hurting our businesses. I am unable to compete with them.”

But many refugees with fewer resources report that they are often exploited by Jordanian employers and made to work long hours at low wages because they do not have work permits. Some married Syrian women work at low-wage farms. Syrian male heads of household in Amman are reported to work in low-wage jobs as bakers, construction workers, and security guards. According to Caritas Jordan, Syrian youth are often spotted as street peddlers, beggars and market helpers, instead of attending school or summer camps.

Balancing the needs of Jordanians and refugees is critical. In order to reduce tensions between refugees and the resource-stretched host communities, the Jordanian government now requires 30 percent of international humanitarian aid be made available for vulnerable Jordanian families.
And hospitality is not without risks.

Jordan has long had a reputation as one of the most stable countries in the Middle East. But some analysts say ferment is growing. They fear that the new influx of Syrian refugees might push Jordan’s tottering social stability over the edge.

Others fear that groups like al-Qaeda will infiltrate the refugees and attack targets in Jordan. There are also reports of skirmishes on the Syrian-Jordanian border, as Jordanian forces help refugees enter the country and the Syrian regime responds.

Still, Jordan continues to follow an open-door policy and provides health care and access to public education for Syrians who register with UNHCR.
Some Syrians express optimism that they will be able to return home soon. Others believe it will take many years, just as has been the case with Palestinians and Iraqis still living in Jordan.

“They all wish the fighting in Syria will end tomorrow,” says George Akil, a program manager for Caritas Jordan. “They are all eager to go back to their homes once the fighting ends.”

While some Jordanian officials hint that they may eventually close the border, Dr. Abu Jaber, who now heads the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies, disagrees.

“There is no way by our tradition, our culture, or our religion that we can close the door,” he reflects. “How can you close the door when women and children are suffering and without food?”

But with thousands of Syrians continuing to arrive every night, and with UNHCR estimating that 660,000 Syrians will be in Jordan by the end of 2013, it will take another miracle for this small country to absorb them all.

J. Daryl Byler is a regional representative for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC),  based in Amman, Jordan. He blogs at cindydarylbyler.wordpress.com. MCC implements disaster relief, sustainable community development, and peace-building projects through local partners in 60 countries.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: New York has been called the most secular city in America. But don’t tell that to Tony Carnes. He has made it his mission to systematically document all the religious sites in New York’s five boroughs, as he puts it, block by block, alleyway by alleyway. He and his team of freelancers have found a lot to document.

TONY CARNES (Editor and Publisher, A Journey Through NYC Religions): New York is experiencing a religious surge.

LAWTON: The project is called “A Journey Through NYC Religions.” Since they began in July of 2010, Carnes and his team have visited nearly 6,500 houses of worship and other religious sites. He estimates that’s more than 70 percent of them. They interview, photograph, videotape, even draw, and post their articles and other material on their website, nycreligions.info. Carnes says he launched the project because he believed a vital part of New York life was being given short shrift.

CARNES: I noticed two things: one, that religion was really booming here in the city, and I also noticed it wasn’t covered very intensively.

LAWTON: Carnes says for his team each visit, or journey, should be an adventure.

CARNES: A classic journey is we just go cold and we try to perfect a…sort of like a foreign journalist parachuting in a land and making a real sync with people and really getting into the story all in one day. Now if we find something that’s really interesting, we would go down in deep, and we’ll come back.

LAWTON: On this weekend, we followed along as they focused on the historic neighborhood around Eldridge Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In the late 1800s, this was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, where many Eastern European immigrants worked in the garment industry and lived in crowded tenements. In the 1920s, new legal restrictions curtailed Jewish immigration and the neighborhood slowly became a center for Greek immigrants. Then, New York’s famous Chinatown began spilling over and the street took on a distinctly Asian character. Today, Latino families are moving in, as are Muslims from Asia and Africa.

CARNES: People’s faith paths come from all over the world and flow into Eldridge Street from the head of it and then go on down to the end and you have the history of world religions. Right here.

LAWTON: Our first stop, a Saturday morning service at the Buddhist Association of New York, where monks and nuns in the Mahayana tradition are chanting the Lotus sutra. Many of the people here are Fujinese-speaking Chinese immigrants, but after talking with some of the leaders, Carnes and his associate, Christopher Smith, learn the temple is reaching out to people from other backgrounds as well. When they visit a site, “A Journey”’s reporters begin with a set list of questions they ask everybody.

CARNES: What’s unique about this place? If you came to me and you said, “Tony, you should come to our congregation because…” Well, what’s that’s because? How do you impact your neighborhood or your network of people?

LAWTON: After the Buddhist temple, Smith heads over to the Aasafa Islamic Center, to catch a Qur’an memorization class for young immigrants from Bangladesh. Smith is a former bond trader on Wall Street who left business to attend seminary. He now interns at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He says visits like this enhance his faith practice.

CHRISTOPHER SMITH: Learning the scriptures is important in many walks of faith, and it’s a struggle for me as a Sunday school teacher. But to see kids dedicated to studying the scriptures on a Saturday afternoon is inspiring.

LAWTON: Carnes encourages his freelance reporters to practice a philosophy of journalism he calls “sympathetic objectivity.”

CARNES: We start off with sympathy right up front. We do move to objectivity, but we tell our reporters, who are from all different walks of faith, as long as you do that you can write, cover anybody you want.

LAWTON: Carnes is open about the fact that he’s an evangelical Christian. But he denies that “A Journey” is a covert effort to convert people. He says the project has affected his own practice.

CARNES: I think I’ve had a really a spiritual transformation. I still am a believer in Jesus and, you know, and an evangelical Christian, but to me it’s a journey of my own faith. “A Journey” has made me more free to listen to people, and that may sound like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty big.

LAWTON: He says he wants people to value what sets them apart.

CARNES: We believe that people don’t have to give up their faith to relate to others. We want to say you can talk about your differences. You do things differently, and that’s pretty interesting, and we want to show how interesting things are.

SMITH: Pluralism doesn’t have to mean that everybody comes to the same conclusion eventually. It can mean in a vibrant city like this that there’s many experiences that coexist, sometimes on one street or even in a block.

LAWTON: “A Journey’s” members say they’ve been amazed at how open various houses of worship have been for them. But sometimes, they do strike out. At the end of a long day of journeying, the team often reconvenes at a neighborhood restaurant to debrief. For recent college graduate Chloe Nwangwu, this has been an opportunity to see how what she learned in school works out in real life.

CHLOE NWANGWU: It’s very easy to sort of speak for or assume certain things about religious experiences, but you know, unless you actually go out and get the word on the street you can’t really speak to that.

LAWTON: “A Journey’s” firsthand reporting often turns conventional wisdom on its head. For example, in the fall of 2010, when protests erupted over plans to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero, media outlets and political leaders made certain assumptions in talking about the controversy.

CARNES: Everybody said there were, you know, 99 mosques in the city. Well, the problem with that figure is we had visited 170 mosques. We knew that that was just nonsense.

LAWTON: “A Journey” now has 230 mosques on its list.

Sunday morning in the Eldridge Street neighborhood is a vivid picture of how religion in New York continues to evolve. Carnes and his team begin at St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church, where the priest is doing the rituals to prepare for the worship service to come. This used to be a synagogue. St. Barbara’s thrived after its founding in 1926. Now only a few Greek families still live in the parish, although many come back to worship here on holidays.

A few blocks away, the New York Chinese Alliance Church has become one of the establishment congregations. There’s a traditional Protestant service upstairs in Mandarin, and an English service led by the youth downstairs. A few blocks beyond that, Lamb’s Church illustrates even more changes. The evangelical congregation is holding worship in three languages, English, Spanish, and a simultaneous translation into Mandarin. Pastor Gabriel Salguero, who is president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, says religion is often an underestimated part of the city’s life.

REV. GABRIEL SALGUERO (Lamb’s Church): Faith leaders are thought leaders just like Wall Street and the government; we are one section that influences thought and the direction of the city.

LAWTON: The final Sunday stop is where it all began, the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue, once the jewel of the neighborhood.

MATTIE ETTENHEIM (Eldridge Street Synagogue): People coming through these doors when it was built 125 years ago were living in very small apartments; it was very dirty and very crowded out those streets here, and as you came in here, you really transitioned into another world.

LAWTON: By the 1960s, the building had fallen into disrepair. But after a $20 million restoration project, the synagogue has become a museum, preserving the history and offering programs to help Jews from other neighborhoods explore their traditions, such as this special event to celebrate Tu B’Shevat, the New Year for trees. “A Journey’s” members say New York’s religious diversity is playing out in similar ways throughout the U.S.

SMITH: I think we’re a microcosm of intense interaction, but it happens in a healthy way across the country.

LAWTON: And Carnes says he hopes documenting the challenges, celebrations, and uniqueness of New York religion can be a model for elsewhere.

CARNES: On many things, they’re not goning to agree on everything, but to live with each other, value each other, to cherish each other and to say, well, in these areas where we do agree we can do something for the sake of the city, and if we can do that here in New York, then I think we actually have a paradigm that can work in Cairo, have a paradigm that can work in Mumbai.

LAWTON: I’m Kim Lawton in New York.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The fabled Saharan city of Timbuktu has been designated a world heritage site, largely because of its priceless collection of Islamic manuscripts dating back to the 13th century. The international community was outraged by reports that the departing militants had ransacked a major library and torched it, destroying some of the documents. Outside experts spent the week trying to confirm what had happened. At the University of Cape Town, Professor Shamil Jeppie leads a project to study the texts. He says the majority appear to have been saved.

PROF. SHAMIL JEPPIE (Univ. of Cape Town): The manuscripts were moved out of Timbuktu, we are told. This is the latest news from Timbuktu, that 25,000-odd manuscripts were actually quietly moved in the past nine months from Timbuktu to the capital.

LAWTON: Timbuktu was considered an ancient seat of Islamic learning. Its collections include texts on theology, math and science, as well as history and politics. When militants took over the city last April, they imposed a strict version of sharia law and began destroying historic sites, including centuries-old Sufi shrines that they deemed to be idolatrous. Many scholars fled the city, but before they left, Jeppie says they apparently hid what manuscripts they could.

JEPPIE: The images we see of manuscripts damaged and burnt and so on are very few, very few, maybe as many as two thousand. That is bad enough, but not the kind of damage and destruction we heard of previously.

LAWTON: Jeppie hopes scholars can now get back to their work in Timbuktu, uninterrupted by violence. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.