Jan 2010 : The Lingua Franca Foundation is proud to present a special club….

by the children for the children

Founder : Zacharia                             co-Founder: Maryam

“we want to make the world a better place for little people like us.” 

This one’s for the children

Now, it is Dr Naif Al-Mutawa himself who is the invited speaker of a new TED talk about his own creation.

In this funny and fascinating conference, Dr Al-Mutawa shows how American superheroes were inspired by biblical myths and values, christian archtypes that resonated with the American society positive values.

He created the 99 with the same kind of idea in mind.  In fact, the superheroes embody the 99 attributes of God, Allah : mercy, generosity and so on.  For instance, Jabbar, The Powerful; Noora, The Light; Darr, The Afflicter; Jami, The Assembler; Widad, The Loving; Fattah, The Opener, etc.  So far, not all of the 99 characters have been unveiled.  Each of the 99 is living in a different country which makes the series a kind of universal story.

Another link with Western culture is the recruits Dr Al-Mutawa brought in his project : these are all aknowledged artists in the comic books industry.  There is Fabian Nicieza, writer of the X-Men and Power Rangers ; Dan Panosian, characters creator for the X-Men ; Stuart Moore, best known as the writer for Iron Man; June Brigman, illustrator for StarWars and Supergirl; Ron Wagner,  illustrator for Batman and DareDevil; and, last but not least, John Mc Crea, who was an inker for the late Spiderman…  No wonder if the drawing looks so familiar to the superheroes series readers !

What is fascinating in this series, is the combination of different cultural elements : the characters are Allah’s attribute, but the Noor Stones (the “Light” Stones, in Arabic) are the ones which chose you and not the opposite, and that’s what Dr Al-Mutawa calls the “King Arthur element of the story line”.  The medium itself, the comic book, is a Western form of art and the chosen artists are mainly of Western origin or background.  If the values conveyed in this series are inspired by Islam, they are actually universal : generosity, knowledge, tolerance, freedom.  Who on earth would deny such a set of values ? (Perhaps some extremists, who are likely to be found everywhere, in whichever society…). 

Amazingly, Dr Al-Mutawa’s the 99 readers include President Obama  who praised the the importance of these characters in spreading tolerance and open-mindedness.  He said about the 99 , as a response of his Cairo Speech to the Muslim World : “I have to say, perhaps the most innovative response was from Dr Naif Al-Mutawa, from Kuwait. [...] His comic books have captured the imagination of so many young people with superheroes that embodied the teaching of tolerance of Islam.”

The 99 are now a 26 episode animated TV series and Kuwait built a theme park called The 99 Village Theme Park.

But for Dr Al-Mutawa, the importance doesn’t lay in publishing success. Being responsible of a training program for the survivors of political torture in Bellevue Hospital (New York), he knows what intolerance means.  And for him, it is the spreading of positive elements about Islam and the understanding between cultures that matters.

You can download your free copy of the first episode, THE 99 Origins, just by cliking here.

it’s time for us to reveal

 The Safety Net Project is a program associated between Lingua  Lingua Franca Foundation and Hotel Abadi Sdn Bhd (Hotel Abadi Melaka) to promote safe and harmonious ‘win-win’ international exchanges as well as diversity between nations. This project aims to deal with domestic violence against women from abroad and to help them to integrate in the welcoming country or to go back safely to their country of origin and to inform local authority, potential partners and contributors of the current situation and what plans for improvement. It is also a discussion platform for future collaboration from both sides to promote and maintain the durability of the project.

 “  Somebody you know may need these information badly. The speakers are people with first hand experience on the subject, and have worked with people with similar predicaments. The lesson from their experience is that some problems can be prevented, and it is best if you are prepared before making that big decision! Read the brochure to find out more! “

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To enable you to be from where you are  to where you want to be, you have move. Yes! Move. Move from one side to another, and one place to another. Just, literally…move.

Making contact is like building a bridge. It connects you from one end to the other. Once you cross the bridge, there is no turning back. Along the way, you will encounter little stops that either help you build a bigger picture of what you want to construct or just simply destroy what you hope to build. It’s as simple as that. If your journey helps you to build and contruct, then once you implement all the information, you are able to lay down some structure later. These structures will help you re-build your global-view plans so that you can narrow them down to more concrete measures and whence, you manage to see what you can and cannot accomplish.

Using this concept, I decided to extend the Foundation’s bridge to another continent; initiating new projects so that the Foundation can continue to pursue and develop its goals. Knowing I will find new territories, I packed my bags; along with the toys donated by the kids4kids club for the needy children, off I went to the country with the oldest rain forest in the world. The moment I touched down at the international airport, I realised that this country has a lot of potential. Upholding their slogan, Truly Asia; Malaysia is not only enriched with multinationals and culture, but also considered as one of the well-developed countries in the Asian continent.

During my stay in Kuala Lumpur, I have engaged with several types of crowd; from business to politics, and  journalists to hotel management. Between us, I could see that we have one thing in common: to make contact and to expand our bridges. We share the same vision: to expand our horizons and to globalize our mission. We want to reach out beyond our borders and we want (and hope) to do it together.

One of the main cores of the Foundation is education.  The Foundation wishes to establish an international learning network to connect and get the best out of both worlds. The Foundation strongly believes that education plays an enormous role in stripping the veil of ignorance and naivety, thus assist our evolving mind to be more responsible and productive. Connecting two worlds by creating a bridge and a platform would be a big project for the Foundation – such project can only be achievable through constant networking and getting international partners for full-time involvement.

Another project is to introduce one of our activities to the Asian audience – The Safety Net Project. This special project has been under experimental in the Netherlands since the middle of 2009 and we are hoping to launch it officially somewhere in Kuala Lumpur. The Foundation hopes that the meeting with a few relevant and motivated people will be fruitful and the project will be introduced to the public in the up coming months. The project is targeted mostly for women audience and how to exercise prevention and educating women their rights, responsibilities and capacity. The Foundation is promoting safe international exchanges between the West and East; and by trying to connect both worlds, women from all over are able to participate in a programme to learn to grow out of naivety and being motivated at the same time.  

Besides trying to make proper introduction about the Foundation’s activities, I have taken the opportunity to launch our first international exchange project. Kids4kids club (a club formed by the Foundation) has been active in collecting toys for the needy children since January 2010 and my journey to Malaysia has enable me to deliver the hard work the children have poured into to make this charity project a success. I have brought more than 20 kilos worth of toys to be distributed to several needy children from everywhere in West Malaysia.

Doing charity work is part of the Foundation’s establishment. I wish that this charity project will always exist and continue throughout the existance of Lingua Franca Foundation.

Because of this great interest, the Foundation has created a club for kids – which one of the objectives is – to also initiate such project among children.  It is also another approach to reach out to all types of children despite their nationality, race and religion. What more of a better way than children reaching out to other children? They can learn to encourage and support each other – giving hand to-hand guidance – while having fun together and getting to know one another more thoroughly and put aside their differences to find a common ground between them so that they can live in a more harmonious way.

So, there it is! It’s now OFFICIAL ! The Stichting Lingua Franca Foundation is now a member and supporter of the Piccolingo Campaign. For your information, the Piccolingo Campaign is an initiative from the  European Union under Education and Culture DG.

Marco Bertolini, the co-Founder of Lingua Franca Foundation, has been appointed as a supporter  for the Piccolingo Campaign for Belgium from PICCOLINGO.

I sincerely hope that after reading this article, many women take serious action in protecting themselves and those who they love and care, and also informing and alerting other women to be more aware of what is truly out there…

Men may say that marriage is a trap. But sometimes it is the woman who is trapped. NOOR AZURA AHMAD (writer for Her World) uncovers the emotional angst of a repressed wife.

heart in chains

Elisa*, 37, snuggles contentedly against Giovanni*, her husband of two months, and declares, “I SO love this man… NOW I understand what love is all about.” Looking up coyly at her husband, she admits to  spritzing on perfume and dolling herself up just before he arrives home. “I’m smitten.” She manages to look sheepish while grinning from ear to ear. Giovanni laughs heartily, evidently pleased with her confession. Squeezing Elisa gently, Giovanni, or Khalid* as he is also known, gives her an affectionate peck before leaving us to this interview. Knowing that we would be delving into a painful period in her life, Elisa braces herself for the inevitable.

“It all began when I was studying in the UK. I met Pieter* through a pen pal programme organised by a student’s association. He was studying in the Netherlands, working on his doctorate. We actually wrote to each other the old fashioned way – using pen, paper and stamps.” Elisa always thought of him as a friend, but Pieter’s writing became increasingly personal. Friends pointed out that Pieter was definitely interested but Elisa played it cool.

Coming from a troubled family, Elisa did not witness much affection between her own parents. After they divorced, Elisa stayed with her mother but she understood her father better. Her mother opposed her relationship with Pieter but Elisa didn’t care. She had no interest in the rich boys her mother kept throwing her way.

Elisa and Pieter finally met in person when a friend dragged her along on a trip to Amsterdam. Pieter put them up in his apartment and accompanied them sightseeing. The very next day, he took Elisa to meet his parents. After that, they visited each other occasionally and kept in touch via telephone. Soon, both of them graduated and started working. Two years later, he asked her to marry him and she accepted.

“The truth is, I never really loved him. But he was there and it was the logical next step, so I said yes. Three days before the wedding, I left town. Somewhere deep inside, I didn’t want to marry him. But when I came back, he begged, and I relented. I think my father saw Pieter’s true nature. After the wedding, he specifically asked Pieter to take care of me.” His promise was just words, however.

Apparently that somehow caused some sort a chain reaction since, mysteriously out of the blue, she suddenly told me that she (and other colleagues) are in the process of trying to propose some sort of programme to develop children’s mind from birth till they are 4 years old.

Unfortunately we had to cut our conversation short due to appointments we both had to attend (but at different location with different people), but now it gives me a very strong impression that people do think the idea of teaching children and exposing them to new methods of learning, or a new language, etc. is extremely important in order to maximise the potential of the child’s mind and to gear it up to its fullest capacity. I have to say; I got excited! And I fully support this notion.

I have seen that plenty of kindergartens (pre-school) here are making groups therapy for little children to stimulate communication skills. This is mainly because the society is fully mixed structured with people coming from every part and everywhere on the planet. Not only that, mixed couples are considered very common nowadays that you can easily see the result of such mixed relationship walking and running practically almost everywhere.

Verbal communication not only derive from one source – I mean – not coming from only one language. There is no such thing as one language or the ‘master’ of all languages. If you are only capable of mastering just one language, the chances of you flying out of your nest are next to zero. You have clip your wings entirely.

Since plenty of children globally know more than one language since birth , it is important to keep encouraging them to continue using and practicing multiple language on a daily basis. This helps to stimulate the fluency of the language, and the importance of knowing how to use the language in the correct manner and grammar. Some parents tend to put one language above the other as being the dominant language. They stress the point that the dominant language has more significance compared to the other.

As a matter of fact, each language has its own unique identity. Nobody could claim that his/her language is superior to the other. Knowing and having the skill of mastering more languages enable all of us to better understand and respect one another despite of all the differences that exist in this world,  thus,  help us to live prosperously with each other.

Multi-lingual children are the children of the future. These children should be given the chance to blossom in the most cherishable fashion, therefore the future that we would like to create could be very fruitful at the end.

Shereen El Feki, half Egyptian, half Welsh, is observing these side effects of globalization. “Her passion lies in the many projects in which she is involved which aim to better understand, and surmount, the social challenges facing Arabs, particularly young people”.

In this video, published by Ted India, she is showing some examples of these borrowings.

But Shereen El Feki is not only talking for TED India, she also publishes a crosscultural website, called Meedan - town square, place of gathering, probably the best Arabic equivalent to the Greek word Agora – where internautes can exchanges texts and opinions both in Arabic and in English.  She is not alone.  Meedan is built by a non profit organization based in California and the texts are produced by a international team of volunteers in places as remote as “Amman, Damascus, Cairo, Casablanca, Bethlehem, Beirut, London, Portland, Pozan, Brussels, Toronto, and Armonk“.

All this is also made possible by a new translation technology called Machine Translation (MT).

“Meedan’s mission is to further global understanding and tolerance through technology. At Meedan, we think the web can play a big part in bringing people together to help heal mutual enmity and distrust.So we aim to increase the number of cross-language interactions on the web between Arabic and English speakers.”

You can see this beautiful project by clicking here.  Don’t miss this new bridge between civilizations… Nowadays, the opportunities to bring Arabic and English talking people together are so scarce…

minaret

The entire world was  abashed when the results of a poll against the construction of new minarets in Switzerland have been published.

The extreme right party – Swiss People’s Party (SVP) – launched such a gross campaign against the minarets, using posters showing a woman with a burqa facing a Swiss flag covered with missile-shaped minarets, that everybody expected a defeat of the populist party.

But inf fact a majority of 57.7 % voted for the ban of minarets construction in Switzerland.

The Swiss People Party clearly exploited the irrational fear of “extensive islamisation” of the country and wanted to stop the Muslim tsunami…

But what tsunami ?  There are 400.000 Muslims in Switzerland, out of a total population of 7.739.000 inhabitants. Most of them work and are perfectly integrated in Swiss social life.  There are about 400 mosques in Switzerland and… 4 minarets!

So, people voted mostly against a fantastical fear, against a thread that merely doesn’t exist.  They attacked the symbol of a ghost, the ghost of winding up in an alien invasion…

But the result is a wider gap between communities and broader misunderstanding.  Muslims are sad and disappointed : they believed their Swiss neighbors trusted them.  They discover that it is so easy to trigger an irrational fear among normal populations…

The Swiss themselves are astonished.  They expected the proposal to be wiped away as a dirty cloth.  And yet, a majority of them heard the poisoned discourse of an extremist party and followed it… Some even said “I am ashamed to be Swiss today”.

Who knows at what extend the trust between the communities has been broken ? Who can tell to what extreme will the next moves be ?

The limits of direct democracy

How was this possible ?

The Swiss 1848 federal constitution defines a system of direct democracy which includes the right to organize a referendum on a topic, as long as they gather 50.000 signatures within 100 days (find more in this Wikipedia article).

That’s what happened with the minarets.  The Swiss People Party gathered the sufficient number of signatures and proposed the ban against the future construction of minarets.

This also shows the limits of a direct democracy.  The results of a referendum are highly dependent of how the question was asked and the topic presented to the voters.  In this case, it was a fearful and hateful  campaign that triggered the all process.  And the results are a shameful blow to the religious freedom of 400.000 people in a country which  has been  boasting about its religious  tolerance for centuries…

But, is a democracy that legally denies freedom of religious practice still a democracy ? When a democratic state denies its fundamental values in such a way, is it still a democratic state ?

Political reactions

In Switzerland itself, politicians are rather annoyed and you can see they don’t feel at ease about this vote (see the reaction of Micheline Calmy-Rey, Swiss Foreign Minister on this Guardian Video).

Abroad, reactions vary : the democrats are astonished and don’t understand why a centuries old democracy such Switzerland came to vote this way.  Populists and extreme right parties , such as the Lega Nord in Italy, are already taking the opportunity to promote such hatred and exclusion at home…

The United Nation warned the Swiss authorities even before the ban was proposed, arguing that it was an obvious discrimination, calling it “an unjustified restriction of religious freedom.  Now, legal expert of the UN are examining the legal issues of this election.

In this video of a TED India Conference 2009, he is explaining how myths can shape our vision of THE World and My World and how we can understand each other.  Through the story of Alexander the Great and a gymnosophist, 326 years before Christ, he analyzes how their beliefs about life and death shaped their thoughts and feelings.  This is a great intercultural lesson with loads of humor…

But ancient myths can also provide resources to understand our modern world and the cultural conflicts that prevent business people around the world to work together…

Find more on Devdutt Pattanaik’s home page.