Kansas University students have formed the Intercultural and Interfaith Dialog Student Association. Some of the members, all graduate students from Turkey, from left, are Fatih Alemdar, Abdullah Tazebay, Erhan Delen, Javid Aslandv, front, and Huseyin Sahiner, back.

Huseyin Sahiner loves that people in Lawrence say “hello” to him, even though they’re complete strangers.

He finds the people friendly – even if they don’t know much about his home country, Turkey, or his religion, Islam.

“I have never felt, myself, offended,” he says. “Young people don’t have much knowledge about (Islam), but they respect it.”

Still, Sahiner thinks there’s danger lurking in a lack of knowledge.

“We think that ignorance is the root cause of intolerance,” Sahiner says.

Sahiner, a Kansas University graduate student, is vice president of the Intercultural and Interfaith Dialog Student Association, a new student group that aims to promote interaction among people of various faiths and cultures.

The group started meeting in the fall and is planning to ramp up its activities in the upcoming months. It is sponsored by the national Institute of Interfaith Dialog.

Erhan Delen, another graduate student from Turkey, is the IIDSA president. He says the Muslim, Turkish students who formed the group were inspired by Turkish scholar Fethullah Gulen’s teaching on interfaith dialogue.

“The goals,” Delen says, “are to realize the commonalties between us, which far outnumber the differences, to realize that the religious and cultural diversity is the reason for richness, to bring people together around universal values and cooperate in formalizing solutions for our social and global problems.”

So far, meetings are drawing around 15 members. But Delen says the group is reaching out to other faith-based student groups to increase membership and have joint programs.

One recent IIDSA event focused on the teachings and life of Martin Luther King Jr. And Delen says food – from a variety of cultures – is always a good way to bring together people from different backgrounds.

Though Delen thinks the need for dialogue among cultures and faiths has been shown over centuries, he says the events of 9/11 made that need more urgent.

“I have witnessed the change in society after the Sept. 11 incident,” says Delen, who has lived in Lawrence for a year. “Also, I think a good portion of guilt lies upon Muslims residing in this country, because they have not been successful in expressing themselves. Of course, the biggest misconception is the association of terror and violence with the religion of Islam.”

Sahiner, the group’s vice-president, says no one involved in the organization is out to convert anyone else to his or her religion.

“We’re not promoting anybody to accept a religion, faith or culture,” he says. “We want to promote people to learn to live together.”

Sahiner says he realizes the issues of religious intolerance are far greater than what the IIDSA can address. But if he and others don’t start the conversation, he figures, maybe no one will.

“We know we can’t solve the problem with this (organization) – it’s huge,” Sahiner says. “If we can be a small drop in this place, and there’s another drop in another place, eventually it will make an ocean.”