Getting An Inside View Of Pakistan

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**This is a true story**


After nine months of living in Pakistan, not far from the troublesome Afghan border, Josh White has enjoyed the cooler climate and familiar comforts of his parents’ home in northwest Corvallis since returning a week ago.

But the passion in White’s voice as he describes his travels abroad leaves no doubt the 1997 Crescent Valley High School valedictorian will be stockpiling frequent-flier miles for years to come.

White is eager to go back to Central Asia to build bridges between cultures, governments and religions as “an American, a Christian and a global citizen.”

“During my time in Pakistan, I drank countless cups of tea and ate a lifetime’s worth of mutton sitting on the floor of people’s homes and listening to them share how they see the world. It was eye-opening,” he said. “I found them to be the most hospitable people I’ve ever met.”

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Relational diplomacy

White’s journey to Pakistan began the summer before earning his bachelor’s degree from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., in 2001. As an intern in the relatively new Office of International Religious Freedom in the State Department — the result of President Bill Clinton’s signing the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 — he began to interact with religious minorities from around the world.

When the first director of the office, Ambassador Robert Seiple, left the government to establish a similar, faith-based organization called the Institute for Global Engagement, White was invited to join him. He’s been working with the institute ever since.

“Religious freedom is an absolutely fundamental human right and is the cornerstone of other freedoms,” he said. “We are Christians, which informs our worldview, but we’re not a proselytizing organization. We advocate on behalf of people of all faiths as a reflection of the human dignity God has given to every person.”

Politics enter the picture, he explained, because a country’s policy toward religious minorities can have a huge impact on its social stability. Governments care about security yet often don’t appreciate the role that religious minority groups can play in contributing to peaceful environments.

A year ago, IGE invited the senior elected official of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani, to Washington, D.C., to discuss legislation being proposed by his ruling MMA party, a coalition of six Islamic groups that had won the 2002 election on an anti-American platform.

IGE knew religious minorities in the region were concerned about the Hasba Bill, which would incorporate more of Islam’s Shari’a law.

White spent a lot of time with the chief minister in formal meetings and in more casual settings. They ate ice cream together on the National Mall, toured the Jefferson Memorial and took the chief minister’s sons to the Smithsonian.

The two became good friends, and when provincial leaders invited IGE to visit Pakistan a few months later, White was among those who went.

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Open doors

The October 2005 visit led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the chief minister and IGE, opening the door to continued cultural exchanges and more open dialogue between Muslims and Christians.

When Durrani invited White to stay in Pakistan awhile, he eagerly accepted. As the guest of the provincial leader and the ruling Islamist party, he was able to go places few foreigners get to see and spend time with senior politicians and influential Islamic leaders. He even accompanied the chief minister and a leading mullah on a pheasant-hunting trip in the remote tribal areas.

During his time in Peshawar, he also experienced the province’s devastating earthquake, protests against U.S. air strikes and riots over the depiction of Mohammed in a series of editorial cartoons in European newspapers.

White interacted with the local religious minorities and tried to encourage positive relationships between them and Islamic leaders. He also set up a scholarship program for students in a remote area that borders Taliban strongholds.

“As Americans and as Christians, we want the Pakistani people to know that we’re not just interested in their country for the ‘war on terror,’ but that we genuinely want to come to know them and contribute something positive to their country,” White said.

“I studied some Quran while in Pakistan,” he added, “but I am most interested in seeing religion lived. In Pakistan, people talk about religion all the time — how Allah has blessed them, the challenges of being a good Muslim and the problems facing the ummah, the global Muslim community.”

Pakistan, the sixth-most-populous nation in the world, was the first modern state to be founded on religious principles, White explained. It has the second-largest Muslim population behind Indonesia and is governed by Islamic law. And yet there are wide variations in how the law is applied in different regions of the country.

“As in Christianity, there is a diversity in Islam, especially on secondary points of interpretation,” he continued.

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Looking ahead


White heads to The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., in August to work on a master’s degree and continue his work with IGE. But while he’s home he’s glad to share the importance of understanding what’s happening in Islamic countries and the complexity of issues related to minority rights and religious freedom.

“Personal interaction is so important,” White said, adding that people who actively seek out others who are different from them will often find a lot in their worldview and attitude toward life that’s very familiar.

Americans have a wonderful history of being able to accept people who believe differently than they do, he said.

“I think one of the great gifts of America to the world is the tradition of religious freedom. We can disagree and yet still live together in a peaceful way,” he added.

White said he’s been surprised that, even after 9/11, policymakers in Washington, D.C., have been so slow to study the role of religion in foreign policy, but he hopes to address that in the future by continuing to research the interaction of religion and politics.

“If anything, religion is going to play a larger role rather than a diminishing role in international affairs,” he said. “Helping Americans get a more genuine picture of the rest of the world — that’s something that’s really on my heart.”