I am proud to announce the first release of Nurani, Meedan’s platform for cross-language scriptural discussion for Muslim and Christian scholars managed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, a programme of the Faculty of Divinity.

Nurani is a cross-language open source platform for inter-religious dialogue developed by Meedan. The goal is to facilitate improved understanding between different faith communities and between speakers of Arabic and English.

Nurani achieves this by enabling users to share and discuss scriptural and commentary texts from their faith traditions in two languages – Arabic and English – and annotate important terms and concepts from these texts and dialogues into a cross-language glossary. Test dialogues are already taking place behind the scenes, and there are exciting plans afoot for a forthcoming series of  dialogues that is public.

The platform, which is powered by open source technology developed by Meedan, was designed primarily for scholars taking part in an established practice of inter-faith dialogue developed by the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme over the past ten years called Scriptural Reasoning. The goal of Scriptural Reasoning is not to reach consensus, but rather to explore how we read texts and so better understand each other.

At Meedan, we paid close attention to Scriptural Reasoning in developing the site and talking extensively to prospective users about what they needed from it.  As part of this, I was lucky to observe a three-day academic Scriptural Reasoning forum in Cambridge and a civic Scriptural Reasoning group attended by 80 participants in the city. We also held test dialogues – synchronous and asynchronous, annotative and threaded – using a variety of existing software.

From these experiences, many of the key features of Nurani were developed:

• the discussion page, for example, features a palette of text passages gathered by a moderator at the top of the page, imitating the Scriptural Reasoning text packs used in face-to-face settings;
• the prominent attention to profile images is designed to help build trust and give users the sense they are seated around a table;
• the Nurani glossary was designed to encourage discussions around the precise meanings of important terms, and their differences in different languages and faiths, as observed in live Scriptural Reasoning;
• discussions are facilitated by a moderator who invites users and puts a time limit on the discussion, as in Scriptural Reasoning workshops and symposia.

We are also grateful to the many people in the field who we consulted about their motivations for using a site like this, including Grand Mufti of Egypt, Cairo Sheikh Ali Gomaa, Sheikhs Amr Wardani and Mahmoud Shabieb at Dar al-Iftaa, Cairo, internationally recognised translator Tarek Ghanem, Director of the  Woolf Institute for Muslim-Jewish Understanding Yousef Meri, AUD scholar and Tafsir translator Feras Hamza, University of Toronto and Al-Azhar trained scholar of fiqh Ahmed Saleh, and Tarek Elgawhary, former adviser to Ali Gomaa and Director of the Coexist Foundation’s US office.

Nurani was initially conceived of as a platform for dialogue around the A Common Word initiative (hence the colour scheme of the brand) and so supports bi-lateral Muslim-Christian discussion.  However, given CIP’s focus on the three Abrahamic faiths more broadly, we expect to develop other instances of the platform under different branding for different configurations of language and faith communities. For example,  we expect to replicate the technology under the branding of ScripturalReasoning.org for three-faith Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue, particularly civic dialogue, in the near future. Because the technology is modular, it can accommodate  many different configurations of discussions flexibly.

The long term goal is a federated system of discussion fora (Nurani, ScripturalReasoning.org and others run by new partners) drawing upon a common textual resource (the library).  The next phase in this vision is to be funded over 18 months by a UK Research Council Digital Economy Grant with two new developer positions to be hired at Cambridge with project management, design and strategy provided by Meedan.

Under this grant, we aim to develop the world’s first inter-faith library with available translations, including scriptures, commentary texts and other primary religious literature. Not only should users of Nurani and other fora built from the Meedan stack be able to draw seamlessly on this library for citations and translations, but visitors to the library itself should be able to see published discussion content alongside the appropriate passage. Additionally, glossary terms should provide dynamic concordance of references and linkages across the faith traditions for comparison and exploration. We think it’s a powerful vision for taking our users on a new journey of discovery and learning. To learn more about this please contact gweyman [at] meedan.net.

We hope you will soon have the chance to explore Nurani discussions and take part yourself. If you would like to be considered for a future dialogue series on Nurani or ScripturalReasoning.org send an email to cip@divinity.cam.ac.uk.

We are grateful to all the hard work and commitment of Kairm Ratib, Chris Blow, Zeinab Samir, and Andrea Burton in the development of Nurani.

A mockup of how the Nurani Library might look, developed by George Weyman and Chris Blow.

What is the relationship between translation and intellectual production? It is not obvious, you might think. Translation, by necessity, does not provide new insights but rather makes existing knowledge available in another language. If everyone spoke English it would not really be an issue.

Picture courtesy Hishaam Siddiqi on Flickr under CC license Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivativeWorks

At Meedan we do think there is a deep link. Let me try to explain why with some tidbits from the recent Arab Thought Foundation annual conference, FIKR9, that we were lucky to attend.

For many at FIKR9, the idea of making intellectual production available in Arabic was a matter of pride. Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, containing within its breadth a vast resource of human scholarship and innovation through the ages. Arabic is a language so intimately connected with the intellectual history of Islam and the modern sense of shared cultural affinity within what Prince Khalid Al Faisal, President of the Arab Thought Foundation, refers to as Al Umma Al Arabiya (the Arab Nation).

There was real concern from many quarters about the dearth of intellectual production on the web in Arabic, not least Jordanian social entrepreneur Maher Kaddoura. Google estimates that less than one percent of all web content is in the language – a widely quoted figure at the conference. ICANN’s Middle East officer
recently predicted that the next twenty million web users in the region will speak little or no English – a warning perhaps that Arabic speaking users risk being trapped in a tiny corner of the web, unable to contribute to global intellectual production. When you factor in the wide disparity in cheap access to good internet, the web will have contributed to global knowledge gaps, rather than helping to alleviate them.

So this is the first point – translation is a pressing duty of those interested in increasing access to knowledge around the world. Societies are not going to learn English en masse at a rate capable of checking these growing knowledge imbalances. Instead, we need methods for scaling translation.

The other issue is to do with the value of translation itself. It would be a reasonable premise to suggest that in periods of high intellectual activity, societies invest in translation. Why? There is evidence to suggest that access to diverse perspectives enables better intellectual outputs. To quote Clay Shirky, it’s not how many people you know but how many kinds of people you know. He cites Ronald Burt’s research into the way in which a major US electronics firm was able to generate new ideas. When the company piloted a scheme to harvest ideas from across the company, the managers in charge were more impressed by ideas generated by people whose social networks included employees from outside their department. In other words, access to diverse networks and forms of knowledge improves our ability to innovate.

Ed Bice suggests this is the critical question of the digital age: the extent to which the internet will ‘increase the network diversity of information exchange or whether, given free choice to create our own channels and refine our information networks, we will evolve distribution structures that narrow our networks, and subsequently, narrow our thinking.’

Translation increases network diversity and it reduces knowledge divides. All of this also increases the likelihood of Arabic users contributing more content in Arabic, for three reasons: first, there is more intellectual output to build upon; second, Arabic users know that their Arabic content can be translated into other languages; and third, Arabic-speaking users who see other Arabic-speaking users writing in Arabic are more likely to contribute in Arabic themselves. And the beautiful thing is we now have a model for doing it at scale without too much cost.

Translation today can be conducted cheaply and to high quality by a combination of machines and humans. Automated translation can provide a first draft which can be edited by one or many individual translators working together on small chunks of text – much like a Wikipedia page entry. Translation revisions show the lineage of the translation, and help alert moderators to problems or vandalism. And the fun part is that each translation contributes to the improvement of the automated translation – so you can continually translate more, and better. The humans focus increasingly on the really hard bits.

The list of organizations working on this model is wide, and Meedan is in the thick of it. If we want to make the web more polyglot, and increase the amount of Arabic content in the next ten years, we need to put energy into the tools to make scaled social translation a natural and intuitive publishing gesture on the web. This is not to suggest that professional translators are going to be out of a job any time soon – quite the reverse, the more we translate content the more demand there will be for the services of translators with real expertise for the most difficult translation problems. But respect for the translation profession should not be a straitjacket into which we put the vision of a polyglot web.

At FIKR9, Tom Trewinnard and I took part in a social media roundtable with some of the best thinkers in the region’s emerging social media landscape. We put these arguments to the group and suggested that to be effective, our number one priority was to enable intellectual production to circulate more freely. The nub of the challenge then is to enable scaled social translation; to make translation of small pieces of text a normative publishing gesture on the web for those who have the skills.

This really depends on our being able to make minimum interventions into existing social practices on the web, to build upon existing social behaviours for sharing content, and to create solutions to the problem that harness the incentives that have infused social services such as Twitter with global community activity – our collective desire for social recognition and our eagerness for human contact premised on cooperation.

This was originally posted on the Meedan blog.

Earlier this year, I was invited to sit in on a theological gathering at Cambridge University.  With few expectations about what I was to experience, I turned up on the first morning armed with a pen and paper, and a cup of fresh coffee. Over three intense days, I watched scholars from as far afield as Asia, North America, the Middle East and Russia pour over passages of scripture in small mixed faith groups.  Although the academic surroundings were familiar to me, I was to be exposed to a form of shared study that I had never witnessed before.

The study group was taking part in a form of inter-faith discussion called Scriptural Reasoning (SR).  It involves members of different religious traditions meeting together in small groups to discuss extracts from their sacred or authoritative texts together.  Texts are selected by members of each faith, and questions are posed from right round the table as part of a shared effort to unravel meaning from these abundantly layered texts.  A moderator keeps the discussion on track and introduces new topics.

Ed Bice, Meedan CEO, talks with former Academic Director of CIP Dr Nick Adams and Prof Bob Gibbs, director of Jackman Humanities Institute during meetings in Cairo, May 2010.

As I was to learn, SR is a practice rich in possibilities.  SR done well allows participants to explore their authoritative texts in new ways, to learn to explain them, and to better understand the practices of reading those texts by which their judgments are shaped. The aim is not to convert your co-participants or show how one faith is superior, but to come away both a more learned, confident, and articulate member of your faith tradition and a citizen more aware of the lived traditions of other faiths. As Mike Higton, academic director of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, has argued, this is a practice with a potential for ‘transformational impact’ where religious commitment and commitment to shared public discourse are often assumed to be opposed.

In SR there are no pacts, no signed statements of consensus at the end of a meeting, in fact in the meeting I witnessed there was virtually no tangible outcome bar short meditations the participants wrote in a closing exercise. Rather there is more understanding and a sense of stronger friendship.   Through shared study, Scriptural Reasoners learn what Nick Adams has described as ‘collegiality’ – a kind of cooperative civility that can transform relationships and plausibly provide a bulwark against religious hostility.

Since 2009, Meedan has been working with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme to explore ways to take these forms of scriptural study online so that the resulting dialogues can be more sustainable, more accessible and more polyglot.  We have done lots of hard work, conducting countless consultations and research interviews, designing tools and building partnerships. But most importantly here, I want to think about the ways in which the approaches of SR could provide a lesson for other kinds of cross-cultural interaction.

I want to ask the question, what are the ingredients of a successful cross-cultural encounter? In SR there is something on the table – scripture – and a shared acknowledgement that the participants have broadly similar relationships to their respective scriptures (ie. These scriptures are sacred and need to be treated sensitively – although it is worth pointing out that SR participants do not assume that the meaning and function of these scriptures are equivalent across the different faiths).  Everyone at the table also signs up to a broadly common approach to the discussion (ie. Scriptural Reasoning with a facilitator guiding the interaction).  Beyond that, there is a recognition that there will be disagreement (conducted in a civil way).

Could these approaches – civility, shared interest, and a common approach to shared study – be applied to other forms of dialogue entirely? Could you, for example, bring citizens with extracts from their respective constitutions into dialogue? Could you have a set of baseball enthusiasts sit down with a set of football enthusiasts, and study sections of their rulebooks?  Or what about exploring canonical histories of common events?

This brings me to news.meedan.net – Meedan’s attempt to re-think how we collaborate in ‘writing the first version of history’. If you have different linguistic and cultural communities sharing their narratives as events of common interest are happening, you can begin to build a tapestry of understanding. Searching for sources, annotating links and commentaries and engaging in conversations is a form of shared study that demands civility and sensitivity.  We may never end up with agreement, but we may end up with better quality disagreement, collegiality and a sense of common understanding.

As the sole London-based member of Meedan’s far flung team (we have developers in Damascus, Amman, San Francisco and Portland, not to mention our team of editors and translators across the Middle East), I was glad to have some company last week when some of my colleagues dropped in for a visit.

King's College, Cambridge courtesy of inkelv1122 on Flickr.

The occasion was a two-day gathering at the University of Cambridge with the academic partners behind our inter-faith project. We are working on a multi-year project with the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme to develop cross-language approaches to inter-faith study and discussion online.  It is a very exciting project which has the potential to provide new directions not just in models of inter-faith engagement, but in the digital humanities too.

A view of the inter-faith platform discussion page in English with model content provided by Mike Higton. Note this is work in progress.

We were joined at the meetings by members of CIP’s core staff, including the world renowned director of the programme, Professor David Ford, as well as scholars from a series of other key partners: Sohail Nakhooda, inter-faith research fellow at Kalam Research and Media; Director of the Jackman Humanities Institute, Professor Robert Gibbs; Professor in Foundations of Information at the University of Toronto, Brian Cantwell Smith; Director of Development for the Cambridge Abraham Project and former Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC, Michael Wakelin; and former academic director at CIP, Dr Nicholas Adams.

The meetings provided us with an opportunity to show the platform development to date (due for a more formal release in early 2011), explore use cases and discuss the next phase of development of the tools. We paid particular attention to the cross-language tools we hope will set this platform apart in the field: the glossary, the discussion and annotation tools, and the text library.

The aim of this work is to bring texts to life through shared study.  Scholars will be able to explore and learn about practices of reasoning across different faiths in a collaborative environment.  If you would like to learn more or contribute suggestions, contact me on Twitter.

Taken from the Meedan blog.