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Dina: I was
surprised to see I hadn't seen any of this history. I had read about it, but to
actually see it, and to meet the people who came along. I was really very
nicely surprised by the hospitality of the people in Morocco, the way everyone
treated us and were really excited and happy to have the four of us there.
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Tanjila: I
had never been to Morocco before and I have actually spent a lot of time in the
Middle East. I grew up in the Middle East. I studied and traveled all over the
Middle East but I had never been to North Africa. It was very exciting for me
to go to a new Muslim country where they do speak Arabic but there is a
definite French influence, Spanish influence. And then walking around, going
into the Jewish quarters, hearing what the Moroccans have to say for
themselves, about their views towards tolerance and then walking around and
seeing how Moroccans themselves view what it means to be a Muslim and what it
means in regards to the way they dress or the way they interact with one
another or the way they worship at a mosque. It is very different from the way
I have seen people in mosques in Saudi Arabia or in Jordan or in Egypt and so
that was a very unique experience. And then in Spain, it was amazing just to go
through Cordoba and Grenada and see the remnants of this golden age of Islam
and understand that that was actually there once and see it in all its splendor
and that was amazing.
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Brie: Some
things surprised me, traveling through my territory, the fact that I was in
Oklahoma, the level of interfaith dialogue that existed, in what we consider
middle America, not necessarily from an elitist standpoint but just a cultural
perspective, I wouldn't have imagined Tulsa to be a hotbed of inter-religious
dialogue and have such a large Arab Muslim population. So it was really for me
to see and deal with my misconceptions.
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Joseph: What
surprised me? Tulsa Oklahoma was a big surprise, the producer and director
didn't tell us really why we were going there and I was unsure and tried to
speculate. Why are we going to Tulsa, Oklahoma? That was yeah, a surprise for
me in terms of what was going on there, interfaith in of all places Tulsa,
Oklahoma. That there were Muslim students in the heartland in the middle of
Oklahoma, when you think of Oklahoma, you think, I don't know, football, corn
fields, oil, that sort of thing, so that was surprising. In terms of the rest
of the program, meeting...a lot of it was not surprising. I will say that, some
of it I expected. Also in Los Angeles, I remember meeting with the Imam there
and he was saying that he definitely felt that the mosque was discriminate
there. I remember he was saying about how the mosque was colorful and it is off
a street, and the people in the local government were worried, thought there
would be accidents because it was a bright building. It was clear that if you
know they were trying to build a church, or something like that, I don't think
they would have come up with ridiculous assumptions. And I can relate that
again, where I am from in New Rochelle, we have been trying to build a new
synagogue for years, for years and years and years, and the local town you
know, has been fighting with us any way they can. From complaining about trees
that will be environmental things, birds, traffic, a lot of it is hoopla so, I
could identify with that.
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Daniel: It
is a tough question, I have spent the better part of my life traveling to the
Middle East once or twice a year, so I wasn't so much surprised by the people
of the land. What was special on this trip was the diversity of the group that
I traveled with, I had never traveled with such a diverse group and to me that
was what made this particular project unique.
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Zachariah:
I guess I was most struck by the deepness of the tensions between the two
sides. We talked to a number of different Israeli peace organizations and the
way they sort of laid out the tensions between the two were disheartening to
say the least. I felt like even though there were times to bridge the gap, that
those attempts were in themselves stunted for whatever internal reasons existed
within the organization. I guess I wanted to believe that things were better
than they seemed but I didn't come away from this experience thinking that.
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