Tharwa Project Mission Statement

When Tharwa was still an unofficial NGO in Syria run under the auspices of a publishing house, DarEmar, it was known as the Tharwa Project and it had its own mission statement that was quite ambitious for its scope and message at the time, for a Syrian organization.

The Tharwa Project Mission Statement

The Tharwa Project is an independent initiative that seeks to provide a forum for identifying the aspirations and addressing the concerns of the various ethnic and religious minorities inhabiting the Arab World. In this, the Project seeks to foster better relations and establish a free channel for communication and dialogue between minority groups and the majority population in each Arab country and across the Arab World.

Moreover, the Project seeks to reintroduce a much needed measure of sobriety, objectivity and balance into the highly politicized and often emotional discourse related to the issue of Middle Eastern minority groups, especially those inhabiting the Arab World, and which has infiltrated even into the most respected academic circles.

The founders of the Tharwa Project do not intend to endorse any separatist claims or accountability issues. Rather, they simply want to provide a free forum for the discussion of various issues pertaining to minority rights within the context of the fifty-plus years old Arab nationalist experiment.

Special focus will be put on the often complex, and occasionally paradoxical, relation between democratization and minority rights. There will also be attempts at assessing the potential impact of such issues as the Arab-Israeli Conflict, the Barcelona Process, the rise of Islamic extremism and the recent US military interventionism in the region on the free discussion of minority issues in the Arab World.

Unsurprisingly, there will be occasions when minority issues will be discussed in the more inclusive context of the Greater Middle East, if not the Islamic World, and not only the Arab World, in order to gain a more clear perspective with regard to the situation of specific minorities, such as the Kurds, the Berber, the Christians and the Shia. Nonetheless, the focus, at least in the initial stages of the Project, will be put on the minorities of the Arab World, especially those of the “Arab Mashreq” (including the Arab Gulf States, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt) where discussion of minority rights has often been neglected.

We will also dabble from time to time with the no less important issue of the cultural contributions that minority groups make to the cultural and intellectual life of the Arab World.

In due course of time, we plan to commission special studies, polls and analyses that can help shed more lights on the living conditions of minorities in the Arab World, which could in turn help the various decision-makers involved in addressing some of the relevant problems and concerns much more effectively than has traditionally been the case.

Still, and no matter how ambitious the Tharwa Project happens to be, we understand that it only represents tentative and modest steps on the long path towards resolving the various problematic issues related to minority rights in the Arab world. The Tharwa Project only seeks to make some important contributions in this regard.

The Tharwa Project is currently being funded through a grant made by Pax Christi Nederland, a branch of an international organization that seeks to foster greater understanding and harmony among the peoples of the Middle East.  The Project has been envisioned and is being implemented by DarEmar, a Syrian organization dedicated to raising the standards of civic awareness in the Arab World.