Vision
Our vision is to help build a world in which pluralism and peaceful tolerance are embraced and put into practice.
Mission
Our mission is to empower, embolden and encourage individuals primarily from the business sector in the Western world and South and Southeast Asia (where the four countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world are found) to become advocates for pluralism and peaceful tolerance, and to foster an international community that shares those values.
Strategy
Our strategy is to create opportunities for thoughtful engagement, candid exchange, and fruitful relationships.
- Conferences and dialogues that assemble business and other leaders to explore and identify courses of action for furthering pluralism and tolerance
- International fellowships that offer exchange programs to emerging leaders
Our strategy also includes cultivating and expanding a geographically diverse network of individuals who take part in our programs or share the values of peaceful tolerance and pluralism.
- Interconnection of participants during and across programs
- Support of ongoing engagement and dialogue through communications technologies
Our Underlying Philosophy
The fundamental tenet of the Foundation is that no religion is or should be a monolith approaching the others with deep enmity. Each is a mixture of many different trends and attitudes. Neither Muslim nor non-Muslim gains from unmitigated hostility and aggression toward, or simple ignorance of, the other. Although the ideologues and the radical forces on both sides seek to deny it, there are many devout Muslims, Christians and Jews who are moderate. Being a moderate is not being weak or indecisive. But we will call them the "majority" because we are convinced that non-ideological and mainline believers are in fact the majority in Muslim and non-Muslim communities.
We concur with Fareed Zakaria's comment in his article "True or False: We Are Losing The War Against Radical Islam":
Britain, the United States and most other countries have not found it easy to address the root causes of jihad. But clearly, they relate to the alienation, humiliation and disempowerment caused by the pace of change in the modern world -- economic change, migration from Third World to First World, movement from the countryside to the city. The only durable solution to these ongoing disruptions is for these people to see themselves -- and most important, the societies they come from and identify with -- as masters of the modern world and not as victims. How to open up and modernize the Muslim world is a long, hard and complex challenge. But surely one key is to be seen by these societies and peoples as partners and friends, not as bullies and enemies. That is one battle we are not yet winning.
The objective of our first program, the business cooperation program, is to engage business sector private citizens from the the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds in addressing these issues.