At the end of February 2015, I had the opportunity to attend the Wheatley
International Affairs Conference (WIAC) hosted at Brigham Young University
(BYU) in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference examined the intersectionality of
religion and world affairs, with a particular focus on the Middle East this
year. Throughout the course of five days, 20 BYU students along with 40 students from universities all over the nation came together to create policy
recommendations on a variety of issues concerning this region of the world,
ranging from the Arab-Israel conflict to Gulf security and political development. As a Health Care Management and Policy major, I didn’t have much
exposure to Middle Eastern affairs within the academic setting, but I had a
strong background in Islam, and I was ready to learn as much as I could in the
following week.
As each group received their roundtable topic, I found that
my group was titled, “Understanding the Role of Islamic Religion in the
Contemporary Middle Eastern Conflicts: Exacerbating or Mitigating Factor?” This
was intriguing to me, as I discovered we would be looking at how religion
impacts political, social, and economic factors that affect the Middle East
today. As I sat down with my group the first morning, we looked at the variety
of contexts within which Islam is used: as a prescription for practices, a
rulebook for adherence, or justification for radicalism. My group used the
latter of these to springboard into several conversations regarding the use of jihad in Islam, a word literally meaning
“struggle” but interpreted more commonly as a “holy war.” We talked about ISIS,
an extremist group based primarily in Iraq and Syria, to construct several of
our arguments in how religious discourse could prevent conflict instead of
initiating it, and as I began to learn more and more about the rise of this
group to promote an all-encompassing Muslim caliphate, I couldn’t help but
recognize the power of religious dialogue to combat these issues in our present
day society.
This led us to the objective of our conference: creating a
policy recommendation for the problems we foresaw with our topic. With respect
to ISIS, foreign fighter recruitment efforts through social media outlets
presented a concern, with the extremist organization’s primary target strategy
involving the use of religious jargon. As a result, my group created a
two-pronged approach: the first, a social media campaign to empower moderate
Muslim voices, coupled with a cyber security program that would inform youth on
online recruitment methods and better prepare them from falling into the trap
of radical group extremism, like ISIS. Both of these components were
complemented with a social strategy we learned about called social investment, or the need to invest
in personal and business relationships to encourage alienated members of
society to feel like they are part of a community and valued in the group they
identify with most. This was an interesting concept, and it was this very
element of our proposal that strengthened our case for a future policy
initiative.
By the end of the conference, I was shocked. Just five days
ago, I couldn’t have told you about the five major concerns facing the Middle
East today, and here I stood presenting to sixty students on anti-ISIS
recruitment through social media and cyber security channels. The amount of
knowledge I gained was incredible, and it was useful that I could take what I
had learned to try and better something in our society that we found
concerning. This showed me a level of personal growth, and moreover, a
deepening passion for international affairs.
At the end of the conference, senior fellow Dr. Fred
Axelgard from BYU provided us with some closing remarks, including commending
us on a job well-done and explaining to us the work remaining for the future of
international affairs. Despite the fact that our policies were not going to be
used by anyone in the future, he ended his speech with a quote I will never
forget. He said, “I hope you’ve enjoyed this conference and learned from it,
from one another, and about what you do not know for the future. And my only
hope is that one day, you too, like me, will use those tools to have a love
affair with the world.” That quote made me realize the value of the work we had
just done and how it set the stage for the future of foreign policy. Maybe I
hadn’t solved a worldwide crisis in those five days, but I sure had come one
step closer to having my own love affair with the world, and that was something
I couldn’t complain about.