Campusalam

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- Be willing to listen, and listen until you really understand
- Demonstrate your understanding by reporting and responding to their views accurately and without distortion
- Find or create common ground and a shared, higher purpose you all commit yourselves to
- Don’t just pursue your agenda: listen to and deliver on their concerns and needs. Be as concerned about the issues that damage and threaten them as you are about the issues that threaten security, the university’s reputation, etc.
- Maintain an atmosphere of respect, equality, tolerance, and openness
- Be worthy of trust: deliver on their concerns, be even-handed, keep promises, and where you can’t deliver on their expectations, tell them and explain why
- Ask for their help and support: demonstrate in action your trust and respect
- Create and follow through on providing benefits to partnership
- Provide support, encouragement, and resources for their social supportive infrastructure, special needs or events
- Back them when they need it; verbally or through provision of support such as help from welfare or student support officers, External Relations departments in case of negative media coverage, informal advice from a development officer on their fundraising efforts for good causes, etc.

Case Study:
At university I had a friend of mine who I thought cared very little about the welfare of his Muslim ummah. He always came late with his red tracksuit bottoms, earrings, bumping to our class on international relations, and showed little interest in the subject. In his last year in university I saw him more in the prayer room which I thought was very positive. But he showed more and more distress with the ‘Eurocentric approach’ of the teachers, and one day in the seminar class he confronted the teacher aggressively. He said that everything we read is biased and Islamphobic. All the books are written by Jewish Zionists, he claimed. The teacher in my opinion handled the situation badly and ordered him to leave the seminar. She didn’t engage with him in any meaningful way at all. After that seminar he dropped out of the class and I hardly saw him.