IRUSA’s Christina Tobias-Nahi on Refugees, Faith, Rights, and Protection:“it’s an actual sin to separate family.”
by Zana Sahyouni
“Whoever causes separation between a mother and her child, God will separate him from his beloved on the Day of Judgement” (Tirmidhi).
From August 19–22, IRUSA CEO Ahmed Shehata and Director of Public Affairs, Research, and Advocacy Christina Tobias -Nahi attended the G20 Interfaith Forum, where they spoke amongst a panel of faith-based leaders to discuss the challenges and opportunities that religious communities face.
At the conference, Christina Tobias-Nahi spoke on the panel, Refugees, Faith, Rights, and Protection. In this session, Tobias-Nahi discussed the challenges of rising forced migration through a religious lens, with advocacy for humanitarian action at global level and active, creative support at community levels. The different forms this takes, and common lessons will be explored, taking specific examples of response and setting them both in the context of UNHCR approaches and G20 responses.
“Most recently, [IRUSA has] begun to do reception and resettlement in the US, over the last decade,” Tobias-Nahi explained, when asked about the role of Islamic Relief USA.
“Religion and migration are closely connected, religious affiliation can influence whether people leave home, where they move, and how they’re received when they arrive. So Islamic Relief USA, knowing that, actually worked on our own guidance document…around the rights of forced migrants within our faith tradition looking at scripture.”
Guided by faith, IRUSA is using its knowledge in their resettlement program. Tobias-Nahi explains that, “Islam has a strong heritage of forced migrant protection, stemming from the original teachings of the Quran and historical examples taken from the lives of the great prophets. It even has stern commands on the importance of seeking refuge if one is facing persecution, as well as the duty of providing asylum to those who need it, so both the rights of those who are departing and the duties incumbent on the host populations receiving them.”
“So, if I can go back a little bit in history, some of this comes in the life of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), who is the last prophet believed in within our faith tradition, and he and a hundred of his companions were persecuted and had to seek refuge and they actually sought that in an interfaith way, with the Christian King Nigas, and so that’s kind of where some of this context is taken with, and then about a decade later a much larger group of them also migrated to Medina.”
Within this context, Christina Tobias-Nahi also shared an interesting fact about the connection between Islam and forced migration.
“So on this, there’s actually a fun fact. I’m not sure if everyone knows but we obviously have the Western calendar, but within the Islamic faith, sometimes you will see that there is also an Islamic calendar. Does anyone know what the Islamic Calendar started with? So fun fact, the Islamic calendar did not begin with the birth of the Prophet, or even when the revelation was revealed, but it actually began with this migration.”
This fun-fact shared by Tobias-Nahi, highlights the significance of forced migration within the Islamic faith. She continues by explaining that, “One of the things I really wanted to emphasize today because we kept hearing throughout the last few days is the concept of forced migration. Within the Islamic tradition and within the Arabic language this concept of ‘forced’ is not used as much because we do not want to imply that they are a helpless victim of circumstance, but rather who has taken an active choice to preserve their life as per the command of God.
“This understanding confers more agency and dignity upon these people and their families. There’s a Quranic verse… that the persecuted are not only promised a safe refuge if they seek it, but that they will also find lands of plenty.”
Most importantly, Tobias-Nahi shares that, “there are a lot of commandments around the duty of not only protecting and giving safe conduct, but once these people have arrived, that you must treat them as if they are citizens within your land and that gives them inherent equal protections including protections of not being returned to their countries of origin, the right to dignity, the right to freedom of religion, because its also compulsory for the state actors and the state authorities to protect even non-Muslims who are in need of sanctuary that would come into these lands.”
When asked about the challenge of giving refugees their rights in the same way that Islam asks, Tobias-Nahi continuously explained the lack of political will.
“The challenge then is to take these rights and the dignity that’s conferred on these people and how do you put it into practical application today in the modern world with all the challenges and lack of political will.”
She emphasized that, “In the larger sphere, I would say the challenge we grapple with the most…is political will. That is our challenge to all of us and that we will give back as a recommendation to the G20 certainly. We have what we call the Three P’s: Politics, Policy, and Phobias. With a name like Islamic Relief USA, we certainly face islamophobia in many of the contexts and countries where we work, especially in some of the European countries as well as the US, and as an entity that is pursuing becoming in its own right a refugee reception and resettlement agency.”
Tobias-Nahi explained that there are currently only 10 resettlement agencies within the US, and they are all either Christian, Jewish, or secular, despite the fact that the majority of refugees coming in are Muslim. She explains that because of this, “we have been working for a number of years to enter that space with all the particular challenges that presents with disinformation in the media and Islamophobia.
Tobias-Nahi explained that “Islamic Relief USA is a humanitarian, development, and advocacy organization. A lot of our programs are advocacy as well. For example, re-skilling refugees that come or making sure that their education and certifications might be transferrable is a very long process in Virginia, which is where we are, and where we actually have a shortage of medical doctors, especially in some of the rural areas, and we’ve been able to work with local government in order to take some people who are coming in that already have some of these training and skills in their home countries and be able to move them.”
“ Which comes to that question of political will…even if the national government has an interest in refugees, even if there are these numbers, there are capacity issues and then there are the local level governments that might not be as receptive, so you might be getting refugees in some areas and not into other areas and I think that’s somewhere we have to work in terms of education.”
When asked how we can unburden the non-government organizations (NGOs), Tobias-Nahi explained that, “It is really important, as we’re building these coalitions, we’re looking at all the stakeholders that can play a part and bringing them together. And then particularly one of the things that we’ve been doing, there’s many universities in the United States where they have social work programs and these students, these young people, want to be culturally and religiously competent and we have a group that comes every summer, they just visited us a week or two ago, and they go around to all different faith-based organizations that are servicing refugees to learn more about our communities so I think this is a wonderful thing to see because they are of many faiths themselves.”
Lastly, Tobias-Nahi reiterates the issues of political will. She states that, “we are an organization where our refugee work is only a small fraction of what we do. Most of our work is overseas, and global humanitarian development work, and I think that political will also needs to be focused a lot on livelihood programs. It is actually trying to support people and families in the places where they are so that they don’t have to cross borders and become refugees, but they can stay and have the means to support their families in their home countries and in places…so that is actually our priority number one then the refugees would be secondary.”
Learn more by watching the discussion below:
