Curious Neuroscientist: Building bridges between Muslims and Jews through neuroscience

The newspaper had images of bombs and rockets falling on Beirut, desperate people trying to escape, faces of sadness. On days like this I feel hopeless--that it’s all getting worse, and there is nothing I can do. Yet, as I looked around me in my classroom in the Cluny abbey at a French village near the Swiss border, I could count around 30 graduate students who a few days ago had traveled from Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, etc., sitting together, waiting for me to teach them about the brain.

I could see that a few of the ladies were wearing head scarves, and some of the guys had donned yamakas. Here, they were not separated by a security wall. Rather, they were sitting next to each other, having coffee and tea. The 10-day course had housed them in dormitories so that a Jewish girl from Haifa was sharing a room with a Muslim girl from Tehran. At lunch, some got kosher meals, and some vegan, but they ate together, at the same table.

The idea of the course was born in 2015 during a conversation between two friends taking a walk in Jerusalem, Yonatan Loewenstein, a professor at the Hebrew University, and Ahmed El Hady, a professor at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. They imagined a summer school where Jews and Muslims would come for a few days and learn about the brain, and then leave having also learned a little about each other. They scraped together the funds from the Simons Foundation, and from an anonymous donor in the UK, and began organizing the course with the help of David Hansel and Carole Levens, both at the CNRS, Paris. They named the course NeuroBridges.

But the organizers paid a price for their efforts. Ahmed got emails with pictures of blood on it, calling him a traitor. Yonatan had a paper that was in review for over a year, the reviewer trying to punish him. Academia is full of calls for disengagement and boycott. But the saddest thing for the organizers was not these petty retributions. Rather, the Palestinian students who were accepted in the course, and had planned to come, then canceled at the last minute.

I was one of the handful of scientists that had come to help. Curious about how the students felt about their experience, I probed them at our meals, asking them to tell me what had surprised them.

One student said, “After I applied and got accepted, I looked at the schedule and got a bit scared. I thought it might be overwhelming, spending so much time in such close quarters with people that I didn’t know. Almost every waking hour! I thought for sure I would need to have some time apart. But now, after a week of being together, I realize that my roommate is like a sister that I never knew I had.”

Another student said: “I wear a headscarf both here, and in Iran. But when you’re in Iran, wearing a scarf signifies to others something about your political beliefs, that you are supporting the government. Maybe here in France it’s the same way. But I’m not trying to send a signal about which side I’m on. I cover my hair because it’s a personal statement between myself and god. When I mentioned this to my roommate, it surprised her.”

A young lady turned and said: “When I was a kid, I would read the Koran, but one day I came across a verse in which in the matters of inheritance, boys were given much more than girls. I felt uneasy. The god that I loved did not quite love me back.”

The young lady sitting next to her, from Tel Aviv, smiled and said, “That’s exactly how I feel!”, “You see, two years ago I got married, but not in the official way. I didn’t register with the ministry of religion and didn’t perform the ceremony in a synagogue. You see, getting married that way made it so that, if god forbid, I came to ask for a divorce, I will have to do it in an official setting where they usually humiliate the woman.”

In that classroom, looking up at their beautiful faces, I thought that rather than diving into the lecture, I read them a quote from St. Augustine, who some 1700 years ago wrote: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”