More than 80 young Jewish and Muslim leaders from 35 countries traveled to Bratislava, Slovakia, for the third annual Muslim Jewish Conference, a five-day summit that ended July 13. Among the handful of American participants was Komal Ahmad of Berkeley.
A recent graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Ahmad was an active member of the campus Muslim community. She is also the president/CEO and a co-founder of Bare Abundance, a nonprofit that aims to relieve hunger by redistributing excess food from restaurants and social functions to low-income populations in the East Bay.
She founded the enterprise with a Jewish student, Jacquelyn Hoffman, and both the Cal Muslim Student Association and Berkeley Hillel were early supporters.
Going into the conference in Bratislava, Ahmad remarked, “I hope to convince some Muslims, even if I cannot change their minds completely, to be open to empathizing with the Jewish perspective, so that they will be more willing to talk in earnest and begin the dialogue that is critical to understanding, respecting and teaching one another,” according to a press release put out by conference organizers.
Afterward, in an interview with j., the Pakistan-born and Las Vegas–raised Ahmad said, “It was one of the most incredible gatherings of people I’ve ever seen in my life.”
She added: “From the opening exercises, in which we named and tried to break down stereotypes we had about our own people … to hearing all these different speakers, and talking about how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shouldn’t be our common denominator when there’s so much we could accomplish if Jews and Muslims work together. It was incredibly powerful and emotional.”
Participants at the conference were encouraged to develop collaborative projects to bring back home. Ahmad joined up with participants from Israel and England and is in the planning stages of a five-day “Women 2 Women” conference and leadership training meeting for women business leaders, to be held sometime in 2013.