Campusalam

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How do you prevent problems of many types, including extremism of any form (such as racism)on campus? One way is to make it easy and safe for students and staff to avoid it, resist it or challenge it themselves. The most essential component of this is to build supportive networks in the university community.

Supportive relationship networks confer many benefits:
- They encourage knowledge transfer and information flow in an area in which people are generally under-informed
- The flow of knowledge and support can be in various directions. For example, Muslims can help non-Muslims to understand better the complexities involved; staff can support students with their knowledge and experience of managing difficult situations and individuals
- The trust and loyalty created when you foster relationships increase the resistance and resilience of vulnerable persons to negative influence or propaganda
- They extend your circle of influence

Influence, including influencing people to change, happens above all when powerful innate needs can be met, such as self-respect and esteem in the eyes of others, strong identity, a sense of belonging and purpose, meaningfulness, service to a higher cause.

Two variables in particular determine whether the influence (or change) is likely to be constructive or destructive:
- Is emotion whipped up or kept calm?
- Are simplistic or critical forms of thinking encouraged?

Destructive change needs the following conditions to flourish:

- High levels of negative emotion: hatred, anger, resentment, grievance. This prevents effective use of the ‘thinking brain’ and its critical thinking
- Crudely persuasive argument without subtlety or complexity – in conditions of high emotion, the more simplistic, the more effective
- Meeting some psychological, emotional, or social needs through the activity to create the ‘lure’ and motivate and thereafter embed the desired change

Constructive change occurs under the following conditions:
- Emotional and other needs are fulfilled through participation in the activity, which also reduces negative emotion
- Emotion is kept low to facilitate the cognitive skills needed to understand critically the rival ideologies or theologies
- A degree of training, however informal and tacit, in critical thinking to understand the criteria for sound Islamic belief, the authorities, the methods and the sources
- A religious ‘evidence base’ rather than manipulation to gain acceptance
- Credibility of the provider: credible Islamic knowledge but also the character and other personal features in the teacher or leader that command respect