Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran has apparently left diplomacy behind in his past life. The cardinal is now the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, and as such, Pope Benedict’s point man for relations with all non-Christian religions except for Judaism.

From 1975 to 2003, Tauran was often a tight-lipped Vatican diplomat. He did his job so well he ended his previous life as Secretary for Relations with States, effectively the
Vatican’s foreign minister and number three position in the Secretariat of State.

When he left that job, the Frenchman was briefly Archivist of Holy Roman Church and kept a mostly low profile.

But since September of last year, when he was named to a position in the inter-religious dialogue department, he seems to have undergone a metamorphosis. He has been more outspoken. In the initial response to the “Common Word” dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars, he seemed unusually firm but it wasn’t clear that this might be a trend.

Then in March, in a breakfast meeting with journalists, Tauran did not pull his punches when speaking of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. He said Williams had been “mistaken and naive” for suggesting that some aspects of Sharia law in Britain were unavoidable.

Even though he was indirectly speaking of one area of his expertise — Islam — he was in a certain way “invading” another Vatican department’s turf since relations with Anglicans is the domain of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity — headed by German Cardinal Walter Kasper. In fact, Kasper’s department did not find out that Tauran had criticised Williams until his comments were already in the British media.

“That’s just Tauran being Tauran,” one Vatican official commented.

Tauran did it again this week with a straight-talking interview with terrasanta.net, a website which specialises in Holy Land affairs. He said what many in the Vatican and beyond had felt for a long time — that the world is obsessed with Islam, that such an obsession is holding Christian dialogue “hostage”, and that in the world of religious dialogue, there should not be first-class religions and second-class religions.

With no help from computers, Cardinal Tauran has apparently entered his own form of second life. Vive la difference!

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah looks determined to get his proposal for an unprecedented Muslim- Christian-Jewish dialogue off the ground. A three-day conference in Mecca to discuss this ended with a soaring declaration of goodwill and benevolent intent. Saudi media reported that Muslim clerics from around the world had supported the call and confirmed that dialogue with other faiths was legitimate in Islam.

The official Saudi Press agency said the meeting recommended holding “conferences, forums and discussion groups between the followers of the prophetic messages and relevant civilisations, cultures and philosophies to which academics, media and religious leaders will be invited”. Given the gazillions Riyadh must be earning with oil at $140 a barrel, it may not be long before we see all sorts of petrodollar-funded “dialogue sessions” being held here and there.

Interfaith dialogue is a good thing, but the recent rising chorus of calls for more such talk hasn’t just emerged out of a vacuum. There is already a decades-long history of dialogue sessions that essentially exchanged pleasantries and generated warm feelings but did little to actually reduce misunderstanding and mistrust. The latest generation of initiatives — for example the Common Word consultations and the “Painful Verses” book we’ve blogged about here — takes the disappointment with earlier efforts as its starting point and aims to tackle the issues that earlier dialogues tended to avoid.

So where is King Abdullah on the timeline of interfaith dialogue? Up there at the cutting edge? Or a decade or so behind the times? It’s hard to say if we only have some official reports of his comments to go by. But there are a few red flags popping up in the mostly positive reporting, suggesting that whatever he comes up with may not amount to real progress.

For example, the Sunni-Shi’ite harmony message supposedly sent by the presence of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani looked a lot thinner when journalists looked beyond centre stage. “Some Shi’ites said that, despite the presence of Iran’s Rafsanjani, few of their number were invited to the Mecca meeting. None came from Europe or North America and one from Saudi Arabia’s own Shi’ite minority which complains that it is given second class status,” our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond wrote.

Riazat Butt, religion correspondent for the Guardian, covered the conference and heard one of the classic Muslim views that goes against Abdullah’s position and turned some non-Muslims off dialogue with the muftis years ago. She wrote: “Abdullah’s understanding of interfaith dialogue differs from the one held by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al al-Sheikh, who said dialogue with other religions was a way to bring non-Muslims into Islam. The cleric, who is the highest official of religious law, told the delegates that converting people to Islam was the ultimate goal of dialogue, a point made several times. “It is the opportunity to disseminate the principles of Islam. Islam advocates dialogue among people, especially calling them to the path of Allah.”

The grand mufti also contradicted Abdullah on dialogue with Jews, who the king has suggested could come to Saudi Arabia for talks on what would be an unprecedented visit. As Butt (right) wrote, “Several clerics, including the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, said it was almost impossible to talk to them because of the situation in the occupied territories. ‘How can you negotiate with someone who is against you all the time? They seem to be against us in every way so I don’t know how we’re supposed to have dialogue.’ Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he would only talk to Jews who denounced Zionism and he urged Muslims to talk to Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. His impromptu speech, lasting 15 minutes, garnered the loudest applause, proving his popularity among fellow clerics even if the west views him with suspicion.”

After having a front-row seat at the Mecca meeting, Butt was quite sceptical about the prospects for Abdullah’s initiative. But the attention this idea has been getting at the Vatican and among Jews shows there is a lot of official interest in it. If the Saudis start organising these interfaith talks, do you think they will actually produce more than nice words? Will they reflect what Saudi clerics actually think?

There were interesting words on interfaith dialogue from Mecca and Rome today and London yesterday. Efforts to improve contacts and understanding among the main monotheist religions have been gaining steam recently and we’re starting to see some concrete steps. But, as a meeting in Mecca showed, the road ahead could still be quite rocky.

The Mecca meeting, organised by the Saudi-based Muslim World League, is supposed to draw up guidelines for the inter-faith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah says he wants with Christianity and Islam. “You are meeting here today to say to the world with pride that we are a fair, honest, humanitarian and moral voice, a voice for living together and dialogue,” the monarch said in a high-minded speech.

But former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the few prominent Shi’ites at the conference, rained on his parade with broadsides against the United States and Israel. But he also said: “To have a dialogue with other religions we need to start talking among ourselves. The call needs to be directed at ourselves first of all, and all the sects need to agree on shared points. As a Muslim and a Shi’ite … I say the things we agree on are many.”

That may have been a reaction to a statement this week by a group of independent Saudi clerics saying that Shi’ites, including Lebanese group Hezbollah, were posturing against Israel to hide an anti-Sunni agenda.

On the same day Abdullah spoke, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said his Vatican department for inter-religious dialogue was drawing up its own guidelines for Catholic dialogue with non-Christian religions. He told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) the guidelines for priests and lay people would be based on the Ten Commandments, which he called “a kind of universal grammar that all believers can use in their relations with God and their neighbour.” This approach neatly links Christians with Jews and Muslims such as the “Common Word” scholars who’ve called for a dialogue based on the principle of love of God and neighbour.

In London, Lambeth Palace issued a statement on Tuesday about an ecumenical meeting that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams convened on June 1-2 to discuss ways to deepen Christian-Muslim dialogue. More than 40 participants discussed the “Common Word” initiative and “what degree of consensus might be possible as we look forward,” he said. The list of participants shows most of the Christian churches addressed by the “Common Word” letter were present. The statement said: “Delegates at the Consultation were heartened by the great variety of initiatives, some by Muslims and some by Christians, that were taking place at many different levels - many with a well-established track record. A great emphasis was placed on the need to ensure that the results of these encounters were more widely disseminated and influenced the education and formation of young people. The Archbishop agreed to take forward further work, particularly in response to A Common Word.”

There have been several other stories about interfaith dialogue recently, including the following:

• Cardinal Tauran gave a speech in London last month where he said: “There is a change of climate [in interreligious dialogue] now. It is more open minded, there is greater cordiality.” Here are reports in The Times and the Guardian and the speech text in Zenit.
• Tauran also attended the sixth Doha Conference of Interfaith Dialogue in May.
• French bishops issue a document on dialogue entitled “How do Christians and Muslims speak of God?” (here in French). Rev. Christophe Roucou, the bishops’ conference specialist for relations with Islam, comments in this La Croix interview (in French).

Pope Benedict was “particularly satisfied” with the topic of a meeting this week held between Vatican and Iranian specialists on inter-faith dialogue, according to a statement just put out by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. That shouldn’t be any surprise. The statement copied below shows his trademark topic — the compatibility of faith and reason — was prominent at the three-day session. He has been stressing this for years, with some success (as during his recent U.S. visit) and some misunderstanding (as in his Regensburg speech). With another Catholic-Muslim meeting due later this year, with delegates of the Common Word group, we can expect this issue to stay front and centre in inter-faith dialogue.

That the Iranian delegation agreed with the statements on faith and reason shows they did not see the contradiction between them in Islam that some observers read into Benedict’s comments in Regensburg. They also agreed that “faith and reason are intrinsically non-violent,” a message Benedict said he meant to get across there. Another point agreed on here — that both Catholics and Muslims should promote respect for religious beliefs and symbols — seems to have the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad as its background. One can’t read too much into one meeting but it seems that dialogue is moving ahead despite some occasional setbacks.

I can’t help but notice the different emphasis here from what the popular Egyptian preacher Amr Khaled said this week about the protests against the Danish cartoons.

Here is the final communique (my emphasis of main points):

• 1. Faith and reason are both gifts of God to mankind.
• 2. Faith and reason do not contradict each other, but faith might in some cases be above reason, but never against it.
• 3. Faith and reason are intrinsically non-violent. Neither reason nor faith should be used for violence; unfortunately, both of them have been sometimes misused to perpetrate violence. In any case, these events cannot question either reason or faith.
• 4. Both sides agreed to further co-operate in order to promote genuine religiosity, in particular spirituality, to encourage respect for symbols considered to be sacred and to promote moral values.
• 5. Christians and Muslims should go beyond tolerance, accepting differences, while remaining aware of commonalities and thanking God for them. They are called to mutual respect, thereby condemning derision of religious beliefs.
• 6. Generalization should be avoided when speaking of religions. Differences of confessions within Christianity and Islam, diversity of historical contexts are important factors to be considered.
• 7. Religious traditions cannot be judged on the basis of a single verse or a passage present in their respective holy Books. A holistic vision as well as an adequate hermeneutical method is necessary for a fair understanding of them.
• The participants expressed their satisfaction with the level of the presentations and the debates as well as the open and friendly atmosphere during the colloquium.
• The participants were honoured and pleased to be received at the end of the colloquium by His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who was particularly satisfied with the choice of the theme and the venue of the meeting.
• The next colloquium will be held in Tehran within two years, preceded by a preparatory meeting.

Update: links to reports with more background by Reuters, Catholic News Service, AFP (in French) and L’Osservatore Romano (in Italian, with picture).

The Magdi Allam baptism and debate about Catholic-Muslim relations in its aftermath continue to make waves. Here are a few interesting points that have come up in recent days:

• At www.chiesa, a well-informed multi-lingual blog on the Roman Catholic Church, vaticanista Sandro Magister says the Vatican is more interested in an inter-faith dialogue proposed by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah than the one it has just begun with the Common Word group of 138 (plus) Muslim scholars. Magister notes that L’Osservatore Romano published stories on “two instances of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam, demonstrating how this dialogue is showing promising developments precisely during the days of the controversy over the baptism of Allam, administered by the pope.” He adds: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear. In the judgment of the Church of Rome, the dialogue with Islam is not limited to the follow-up to the letter of the 138 – one of whose leading exponents, Aref Ali Nayed, has directed extremely harsh criticism against the pope for having baptized Allam – but is developed in multiple areas, some of which it believes are more promising than others.”

• Our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond, looking at Abdullah’s call, wrote in an analysis,“the king is seen in Saudi Arabia as a well-intended reformer whose plans for change have largely been foiled by hardline clerics and their allies within the Saudi royal family.” One glaring example of this disconnect came recently in the Shura Council, a quasi-parliamentary body that has refused to support efforts by many Islamic countries to have the United Nations draw up a global pact on respecting religions and their symbols. This pact is one of the top diplomatic goals for many Muslim countries these days, including Saudi Arabia. One of the main supporters of this pact is the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which is based in and heavily financed by … Saudi Arabia!

• That same www.chiesa post cited above included a long analysis by Pietro De Marco, a professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Florence and at the Theological Faculty of Central Italy. In it, he rejects in detail the criticism expressed by the leading Common Word signatory Aref Ali Nayed and offers an interpretation of the baptism as Pope Benedict offering to help Islam to “seize the opportunity to exit critically from itself, to open itself to the dimension of the universal and to come back to itself as a reflectively renewed Islam.” This sounds like the invitation to dialogue that Pope Benedict offered in the Regensburg speech better known for his controversial use of a Byzantine emperor’s quote criticising Islam.

• Magister’s point about Catholic-Muslim dialogue proceeding on several fronts is interesting, even if we’re not so sure Abdullah’s proposals will get anywhere. The fact the Vatican is still pursuing the Common Word option was made clear in the reply that Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi gave to Nayed’s criticism. Check out the full text to see an excellent example of how to reject criticism yet keep all doors open to further dialogue.

• Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, the Egyptian Jesuit who is one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam, has a long analysis on Asianews.it of Allam’s conversion. In it, he notes that both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions and adds: “The pope’s baptism of Magdi Allam is not an act of aggression, but an exigency of reciprocity. It is a calm provocation that serves to make us sit up and think. Each one of us must live as a missionary, attempting to offer to the other the best of what one has encountered and understood.”

• The National Catholic Reporter’s John Allen interpreted Pope Benedict’s message as follows: (1) For a pope committed to reawakening a strong missionary spirit in Catholicism, receiving a high-profile convert during the Easter Vigil is a symbolic way of making the point, (2) Allam’s baptism can also be read as a statement of solidarity with Muslim converts to Christianity around the world and (3) the episode illustrates an important wrinkle to Benedict’s personality — stubborn indifference to the canons of political correctness. Read more here.

• Allam has defended his conversion and baptism by the pope in another long article in his newspaper Corriere della Sera.

• There have been comments on various Catholic blogs criticising the media coverage (by us and others) of the Allam baptism. The Catholic Church can baptise anyone it wants, they say, so stop making such a fuss about it. We haven’t had much of that in our comments sections but here’s an example of that argument from another blog. Anyone writing this is either wilfully playing naive or is actually naive. We never said Allam should not be baptised — we have no dispute with the Church’s right to do so. What we did was quote others, Catholics as well as Muslims, who questioned whether it had to be done with such publicity. Saying this event didn’t deserve the headlines it got shows a basic misunderstanding of both how the news media work and how the Vatican works.

The dust had hardly settled from the Magdi Allam baptism story when Saudi King Abdullah announced he wanted to promote dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews. The World Council of Churches came out with its endorsement of the Common Word dialogue appeal after consulting member churches (many of which have already responded positively). And the World Economic Forum issued a study that says, among other things, that fewer than 30% of Muslims and Christians polled thought the other faith was sincerely interested in better understanding and cooperation. What’s going on?

The first thing to say is that these all seem to be different developments. We’ve already covered the Magdi Allam baptism story. That incident looks like a bit of unexpected turbulence that should calm down now that Common Word signatory Aref Ali Nayed criticised the Vatican for it and L’Osservatore Romano said the baptism was not a hostile act towards Islam. For more on this, see Nayed’s statement, his El Pais interview today (English, Spanish) and the L’Osservatore Romano editorial (Italian).

King Abdullah’s comments popped up in the Saudi press on Tuesday. He has been making positive comments and taking interesting steps such as his November visit to the Vatican and a recently announced plan to retrain Saudi imams to preach moderation. But what this latest statement really means is still unclear. It is not connected to the Common Word initiative, which has some Saudi signatories but otherwise no link to Saudi Arabia. It is not clear whether the Saudi religious establishment, which is usually more conservative than the royal family, has signed on to this. And it is not clear whether the foreign Muslims who Abdullah says he wants to lead to dialogue with Christians and Jews really want to be that close to a Saudi project. It is certainly interesting to hear the Saudi king speak of inter-faith dialogue, especially when he includes Jews in it, but there are still a lot of question marks over this plan.

The World Economic Forum report “Islam and the West: Annual Report on the State of Dialogue” was actually unveiled back in January, but the annual Davos summit — with all its politicians and business leaders — is not exactly a place where religion takes centre stage. So the World Economic Forum has turned the spotlight back on it again with a symposium in London. Here’s our original story and the PDF of the full report.

This dialogue activity is going on while there are continuing protests about the reprinting of the Danish “turban bomb” cartoon of Mohammad and a countdown to expected protests about an anti-Islam film by Dutch MP Geert Wilders. It makes it hard to talk about “Christian-Muslim relations” when they’re going in opposite directions at the same time.

The nascent Catholic-Muslim dialogue sparked by the “Common Word” initiative was never going to be easy, even under the best of circumstances. There is a lot of suspicion, misunderstanding and different agendas to deal with. And then there are the surprises that can come seemingly out of nowhere and blow the effort off course, at least temporarily. One of these was the baptism of the Egyptian-born Italian journalist Magdi Allam by Pope Benedict that popped up by surprise on Saturday evening and highlighted some of the twists along the path of inter-faith dialogue.

The most surprising part about Allam’s baptism was not that he converted. He has been living in a traditionally Catholic country for 35 years, is married to a Catholic, is close to the lay Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, has long been highly critical of radical Islam and says he was never an especially pious Muslim. The surprise was that the Vatican would make it such a prominent event. There was a second surprise, too — the fact that Allam published such a hard-hitting declaration about his conversion, his view that Islam is intrinsically violent and that the Catholic Church has been too timid about converting Muslims. We quoted from the Corriere della Sera original on Sunday, but now the Catholic news agency Zenit has provided an English translation.

Reporting from Rome, the Paris daily Le Figaro had an interesting detail. It wrote on Monday that Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and as such the Vatican’s point man for relations with Islam, had not been informed about the Allam baptism before it happened. If this is true, it suggests some behind-the-scenes Vatican politics on how to deal with Muslims. It would seem that Tauran should have been informed on a need-to-know basis — this is, after all, his area of responsibility — but somebody didn’t do it.

We don’t know if the Vatican knew Allam would publish such an outspoken article on Sunday. Several Church sources have said off the record they were surprised and put off by its polemical tone and said it effectively drowned out the weak Vatican efforts to play down the baptism. Whether it was planned or not, Allam’s article became part of the whole story. As will his subsequent comments, as in an interview in today’s Il Giornale.

That was evident in the response that Aref Ali Nayed of the “Common Word” initiative gave to the Allam story on Monday. Nayed, who is director of the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, said he consulted several other signatories of the dialogue appeal before issuing the statement. One of the first things to note is that he treats Allam’s conversion as a personal decision and says “It is God who will judge him.” I didn’t expect “Common Word” signatories to denounce Allam as an apostate deserving death, but it’s worth noting the absence of any such comment because that traditionalist view is the one that’s probably best known to non-Muslims.

That said, Nayed turns to the baptism itself:

As for the Vatican’s deliberate and provocative act of baptising Allam on such a special occasion and in such a spectacular way, it is sufficient to say the following:

1. It is sad that the intimate and personal act of a religious conversion is made into a triumphalist tool for scoring points. Such instrumentalisation of a person and his conversion is contrary to the basic tenets of upholding Human Dignity. It also comes at a most unfortunate time when sincere Muslims and Catholics are working very hard to mend ruptures between the two communities.

2. It is sad that the particular person chosen for such a highly public gesture has a history of generating, and continues to generate, hateful discourse. The basic message of Allam’s most recent article is the very message of the Byzantine emperor quoted by the Pope in his infamous Regensburg lecture. It is not far fetched to see this as another way of re-asserting the message of Regensburg (which the Vatican keeps insisting was not intended). It is now important for the Vatican to distance itself from Allam’s discourse. Should Muslims take the high-profile Papal baptism as a Papal endorsement of Allam’s discourses regarding the nature of Islam (which happen to coincide with the message of Regensburg?

3. It is sad that Benedict XVI chose to make the basic message of his religious discourse during the special occasion of Easter into a quasi-Manichean one with motifs of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, ‘darkness’ being assigned to the ‘other’ and ‘light’ to the ‘self’. It is also sad that the idea of ‘peace’ expressed in that discourse reduces to the bringing of the ‘other’ into the fold through baptism. Such Roman totalitarian discourse is most unhelpful.

The whole spectacle with its choreography, persona, and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions, and plans of some of the Pope’s advisers on Islam. Nevertheless, we will not let this unfortunate episode distract us from our work on pursuing “A Common Word” for the sake of humanity and world peace. Our basis for dialogue is not a tit-for-tat logic of ‘reciprocity’, it is rather a compassionate theology of ‘mending the in-between’ for the sake of the Love of God and Love of neighbor.

Some pretty raw nerves on display here (plus an apparent misunderstanding about the Easter Vigil service, at which the motifs of darkness and light are a permanent feature in many Christian churches, not just a choice by Benedict this year to dramatise Allam’s baptism). Another sore point appears at the beginning of his reaction, when Nayed mentions the fact that Allam attended Catholic primary and secondary schools in Cairo before studying in Italy. He adds:

The fact that Allam was given Catholic communion at a very young age under the influence of his early Catholic teachers seems to indicate that he was Christianized in childhood. As a result of his early Catholic schooling, he is reported to have never upheld or practiced the tenets of Islam. The case of Allam reminds us, yet again, of the legitimate concerns of many Muslim scholars regarding the abuse of the trust that sometimes happens when Muslim parents, because of economic or other factors, send their children to Catholic schools. What happens to children, including Muslim ones, in Catholic schools is a matter that must be discussed as part of addressing ‘Human Dignity’ in upcoming discussions. The use of schools for proselytizing is one of the important issues to be discussed.

There are many Christian schools in developing countries, often leftovers from the colonial era, and many Muslim families send their children there because they think they’ll get a better education than in state schools. The late Benazir Bhutto, for example, attended “convent schools” named after Jesus and Mary in both Karachi and the hill station Murree. When I lived in Pakistan, I met several other Muslims who had attended Christian schools and spoke fondly of the nuns who taught them, but never converted. Allam’s example is probably quite rare, but it has clearly pointed to an issue that remains sensitive.

Anyway, if Benedict was placing conversion on the agenda for the first Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting due in November, Nayed here is putting proselytism there too. These issues might be seen as two sides of the same coin called “religious freedom.” Or they might not be. Whether they remain separate agenda points or get joined may be a barometer of how this dialogue progresses.

One last point — all this focus on the Vatican position shouldn’t obscure the fact that “A Common Word” was addressed to all Christian churches and many Protestant churches have been more positive in their responses. When I asked Nayed about this, he said: “We’re preparing for our meeting in Rome in November, but we also have several other meetings in coming months.” In July, “Common Word” representatives will meet at Yale University with theologians from Yale, Harvard and Princeton divinity schools (mostly Protestant, including evangelicals, with a few Jewish scholars as well). A meeting to discuss scripture is planned at the University of Cambridge divinity school in October, then comes Rome in November and Georgetown University in Washington in January (a mixed group to discuss religion and world politics). Sometime in the spring, they plan a meeting on prayer and meditation with Orthodox Christians at the site of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River.

After much anticipation, a Muslim delegation representing the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam finally came to the Vatican. The five-member delegation held two days of meetings on March 4-5 with the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue to prepare the groundwork for the meeting of representatives a larger delegation.
Both sides decided to establish the “Catholic-Muslim Forum,” the start of a permanent dialogue between the two religions, and hold the first meeting in November. It will include an address by Pope Benedict.
This is the joint statement on the meeting.
While the highlight of the meeting and a news conference are found in the Reuters story of that day, here are some interesting additional comments from the news conference by the Muslim delegation which give useful insight into their point of view:

Prof. Dr. Aref Ali NAYED, Director, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center, Amman, Jordan:
“By the end of the meetings, we emerged with a permanent structure that will ensure that the Catholic-Muslim engagement and dialogue continues into the future to work out issues and to work out an exchange of opinions about important matters. So, we together established something which is called the Catholic-Muslim Forum, which will be meeting every two years, one year in Rome and the subsequent meeting will be in a Muslim country, either Amman, Jordan or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, or Indonesia and there will be alternation. This structure ensures that this is not just a momentary, exciting event but a process that begins with love of God and love of neighbour and continues to build upon this main theme that we gather around to address real issues that concern humanity today.”

NAYED in answer to a question on the assertion by some Catholic officials in the past that theological discussion with Muslims is not possible:

“I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding which was clarified through the two-day meeting. Some people said that in our previous calls for the dialogue to be theological and spiritual , some people interpreted that as escaping from social and political issues. We clarified that we did not mean it that way, what we meant was that addressing social and political issues should be rooted in the revelation of God and in the theological teachings of our two communities, that we cannot just do social-political discussion devoid of theology, that our social-political doctrine and preaching is based on our revelation and our tradition and our theology and we gave that clarification and it was well taken.”

NAYED on the long-term hopes for the Forum:

“The forum will go on for years and I’m sure that we will address more and more issues and more and more difficult issues as we go along.

NAYED on the aftermath of Pope Benedect’s Regensburg speech:

“You see, this whole initiative is about healing. It is about healing the wounds of a very pained and in many ways destroyed world. We have cruelty all over the place, we have wars, we have famines, we have massacres, we have terrorist acts, we have torture, we have people who are kidnapped.”

“For some Muslims the (wounds of the pope’s Regensburg lecture) are not completely healed and there are some Muslims who are boycotting the Vatican, and some important Muslims and some important bodies of Muslim scholars still feel offended by that quite deeply. We, just because we are part of this initiative, does not mean that we are not hurt by this. However, we must not only dwell on the negative but also dwell on the positive. There have been some recent positive moves by the Vatican which are much appreciated.”

“We don’t like to dwell on the negative. We would like to dwell on the positive because we need hope. We need to build up trust rather than mistrust. We have systematically replied to the claims that were made in the German lecture, both at the individual level by various scholars and also collectively in a paper signed by 38 Muslim scholars and we take those replies to stand because there has not been any substantial reply to such comments. We feel that scholarly discussion and claims should be met with scholarly response rather than with violence or agitation or anything like that. We feel that we are in a healing process. We were treated with dignity and respect these two days in Rome and our delegation was treated with the utmost courtesy and we appreciate that and we want to build on it.

Dr. Ibrahim KALIN, SETA Foundation, Ankara, Turkey, on how the Forum will blend in with other initiatives and whether meeting only every two years will be enough:

“You have to keep in mind that this is one of the many ongoing initiatives and channels of communications between Catholic and Muslims. This is not the first initiative nor will it be the last one. A number of initiatives are already underway … but this one will probably be with a new impetus because it will involve the highest authorities in the Vatican and on the Muslim side it also represents a major consensus, being able to bring 138 leading Muslim scholars from every single major Muslim countries, from Africa to Asia, from the Arab world to Europe and the United States, and the number of signatories has gone up to about 240. That means there is growing consensus among the Muslim scholars and religious leaders to deal with this issue, so in that regard, we will see how things go, but we believe that this is a good start.”
NAYED on what they hope to achieve at the November meeting and if they are truly representative of world Islam:

“When you are in a dark cave and in a very dark place, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel or from above is extremely important for keeping your spirits up and for getting you out of the darkness you are in. Humanity today suffers tremendously from cruelty, it suffers tremendously from violence, from disrespect, from torments. We need signs of hope, so when you ask what we are trying to achieve by meeting the pope and not just the pope but other religious symbols like (Russian Orthodox Patriarch) Alexiy or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the evangelical leaders of the United States, we want the sight of these leaders with our leaders together, standing together in love of God, love of neighbour, so that we have signs of hope that the religious communities can a help to get humanity out of the cruelty cycle that it is in rather than being a cause for cruelty cycle.”

“The mainstream that I’m talking about represents 95-97 percent of humans who call themselves Muslims so if we can achieve peace amongst that community and the counterpart, that itself will give great hope and will also help us deal with the issue of extremism and violent minorities. Part of the amazing sort of negative dialectic is that by focusing on the negative all the time we make the negative grow. What we need is to refocus on the positive and the good so that the good can grow among us”.

KALIN:

“Muslims and Christians make up about 55 percent of the world and there will be no peace in the world unless there is peace between these two communities.”

NAYED on the structure of Islam:

“We believe that it is very important not to see the distribution of authority in Islam as a weakness. Some people say ‘you have a problem, you don’t have a pope.’ On the contrary, we feel that we are very strong even though we don’t have a pope … Islam functions perfectly without a centralised figure because of this phenomenon of distributed authority. It is God who meant it to be for us this way … “

Preparations are under way for a planned visit to the Vatican by representatives of the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam. This group of Muslim scholars and leaders got to be known as the “138″ because that was the number of initial signatories, but the total has grown to 221, so that label is a bit confusing now. Anyway, veteran vaticanista Sandro Magister informs us that five Muslim representatives were at the Vatican early this week to start preparing for the visit expected to take place in the next month or so. One interesting aspect is simply the geographical mix of people involved — they come from Turkey, Britain, Jordan, Libya and Italy.

Discussion of this initiative continues apace.

The conservative U.S. Catholic author George Weigel argues that the”Common Word” authors “seemed to be trying to change the subject ” in their statements about the planned dialogue because they did not address what Pope Benedict cited as discussion points when he addressed the Roman Curia in December 2006. In that speech, Benedict said Muslims and Christians had to “counter a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of the community and from public organizations” and “welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognise these also as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion.”

In his weekly column, the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican expert, John Allen, has a long interview with Father Thomas Michel S.J., one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam. Allen notes two interesting points Michel makes:

• Michel said: “It’s about time that somebody moved the conversation off geopolitical conflicts and onto faith questions.” Although some Vatican officials have argued that inter-religious dialogue ought to be seen as part of a broader dialogue among cultures, Michel said he doesn’t share that view. “Religion is already too often relegated to the status of folklore, of being a mere artifact of culture,” he said. “Muslims are making us all aware that if we’re not talking directly about God and religion, we’re not accomplishing anything.”

• I asked Michel to comment on one issue certain to surface in any Muslim-Christian conversation: “reciprocity,” or the insistence that if Muslim immigrants in the West receive the benefit of religious freedom and protection of law, Christian minorities in the world’s 56 Muslim-majority states ought to get the same deal. “We have to be careful,” Michel said. “Reciprocity is not a gospel value, but something that comes out of diplomatic and trade negotiations.” It was entirely appropriate, Michel said, to insist that Muslims treated minorities fairly. On the other hand, he said, respect for human dignity could not become a bargaining chip.

Sohail Nakhooda, editor-in-chief of Islamica magazine, kept the focus on what Muslims and Christians have in common. He made two interesting points about that in an interview for the Venice-based journal Oasis :

• “The document definitely caught people by surprise, particularly the naysayers in both religions who prefer to keep complete theological distance to legitimise their polemics … the document generated dialogue within and between communities. Its aim is not to whittle away differences in doctrine or, say, soteriology, but it is more about a recognition that we need to retrieve and learn to appreciate shared history and shared theological principles.

• “What is innovative and seminal about ‘A Common Word’ is that it starts from unity and moves to difference, rather than from difference to unity. It began with unity, that is, with what both communities shared deeply. That unity, or sharedness, was to be the basis for difference. This is an altogether different way of approaching the problem of intercultural relations and of plurality; it preserves their religious and cultural identities; it enables each to come together on solid theological grounds whose basis are in their own scriptures and which both share. They may disagree, and naturally they will, but when dialogue is based on the dual principles of love of God and of neighbour, it will ensure that they always leave as friends and that their disagreement does not escalate into all-out conflict.”

It’s interesting to see some people such as Weigel pointing to a large gap between Christianity and Islam and others like Nakhooda stressing what links them. Which approach do you think is more realistic or has more chance of fostering understanding?

Just because an issue has disappeared from the headlines doesn’t mean nothing’s happening with it. The “Common Word” appeal by 138 Muslim scholars for a dialogue with Christianity kept us busy late last year. It looked like the issue would rest until a Muslim delegation goes to visit the Vatican around March. But more comments keep coming up that add to the debate.

On the Muslim side, more scholars continue to sign the appeal, bringing the total up to 221 so far. More statements of support have come in from Christians as well. Three Christian responses stood out this month and highlight some potentially difficult points to discuss:

Fr. Daniel Madigan S.J., a leading Catholic expert on Islam not heard until now on the appeal, has published “some initial reflections” in a new online journal called Thinking Faith. A few excerpts:

…A Common Word forms part of a larger project, focused in Jordan, to develop an authoritative consensus on what it means to be Muslim in our time. … In media terms, such reasoned and scholarly voices may be no match for the sabre-rattling diatribes that make for good television, but they deserve to be taken seriously and given the widest possible diffusion…

… the letter does open itself to a reductionist reading-one that Christians might want to examine more closely-when it says in part III, “Thus the Unity of God, love of Him and love of the neighbour form a common ground upon which Islam and Christianity (and Judaism) are founded.” There has been a slide from the unexceptionable affirmation earlier in the paragraph that the obligation to love God and one’s neighbour is a common element in the sacred texts of our traditions, to the more questionable claim that the dual commandment of love is the foundation of all three…

…Christians are assured in Part III that Muslims “are not against them and that Islam is not against them.” Then come the conditions (stipulated in Q 60:8): “so long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.” … The letter’s reassurance that Islam and Muslims are not against Christians entails a fairly major conditional clause. This is surely an important focus for our continuing dialogue with the group of 138 and other Muslims…

Another Catholic expert on Islam, Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J., seems to get more critical about A Common Word the more he reads it. His latest analysis, called “Benedict XVI’s improbable dialogue with 138 Muslim scholars,” examines statements made since his initial positive reaction to the news of the appeal. Some excerpts:

…between February and March, personalities of the Vatican curia and of the Islamic world will meet in Rome to establish the procedures and subject matter of this dialogue. But it’s possible that all this work will go right down the drain. It seems to me, in fact, that the Muslim personalities who are in contact with the pope want to dodge fundamental and concrete questions, like human rights, reciprocity, violence, etc, to ensconce themselves in an improbable theological dialogue “on the soul and God”…

…(Prince Ghazi ibn Talal) reaffirms his commitment to collaboration on the theological and spiritual level. And there is an ambiguity here: Islam, more than Christianity, blends the theological with the political, and even with the military. And here they claim to speak only of the theological. …But honestly, this distinction cannot be made: the human and social consequences of theological positions cannot be avoided…

…In the modern state, the common foundation is expressed with the universal declaration of human rights, of freedom of religion, etc . . . In dialogue between Christians and Muslims, too, these must be taken as the basis of dialogue; otherwise we will achieve nothing. In the past, many Muslim theologians have rejected the universal declaration of human rights, and have drafted an “Islamic” declaration, accusing the “universal” one of being only “Western”. But this denies that there can be universality, and therefore denies that we can have common principles. This is the foundation of the conflict between the Islamic world and the West, or the rest of the world…

…the letter of Prince Ghazi seems to say, instead, that human rights are not important, and are only a political question. Only theological dialogue is of interest. But what good does it do to talk about the one God, if I do not recognise that man has an absolute dignity in the image of God? That freedom of conscience is sacred, that the believer has no more rights than the non-believer, that man has no more rights than woman, etc?…

…It must be affirmed that man comes before religion: respecting man comes before respect for religion. This is the Christian approach…

On the Protestant side, R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has criticised U.S. Christian leaders for welcoming A Common Word with a full-page ad in the New York Times that asked for forgiveness for the Crusades. Some other evangelical leaders have also criticised the ad.

Mohler says about the letter:

…I think it is confusing. Now, I want to be very clear: We should have nothing against a conversation. But I don’t think this is the way to get into the conversation. I didn’t sign the letter because I don’t understand how you apologize for the Crusades. I am sure that all kinds of sin went on with the Crusades on both sides. But I am not going to apologize for the Crusades because I am very thankful that the Muslim effort to reach a conquest of Europe was unsuccessful…

…We [Christians] understand God to be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We understand God to be a Trinity of three co-eternal persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And we understand that Islam’s first statement about God is that He is one and that He has no Son. So, you can’t talk about the same god… The disagreement over Jesus Christ is no small thing…

As for more detailed Muslim reactions, Fr. Samir says: “I have seen just a few articles in Arabic, in the Arab and Islamic newspapers. None of these analysed the content of the letter of the 138.”

Is there any discussion going on in the Arabic-language press or elsewhere in the Muslim world? Can anyone point us towards a serious discussion of the issues there?