There’s one thing you have to say about the World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace — when they disagree about something, they don’t mind saying so. The final session of their third conference in Paris on Wednesday was the stage for an exchange of dramatic charges and counter-charges abut the perennial problem of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The atmosphere was tense in the UNESCO conference room where the 3-day session took place and several participants spoke up to calm down their more agitated colleagues. Since this was the only session the media was allowed to witness, it would have been easy to conclude that the imams and rabbis needed to seek peace among themselves first before preaching it to others.

(Photo: An imam in Berlin, 3 Aug 2007/Fabrizio Bensch)

But there were actions that spoke louder than words in the hall. Several participants were frowning as the finger-pointing progressed. Others turned to the nearest participant of the other faith to chat. At one point, a rabbi in his Hasidic black hat and coat walked over to an imam wearing a karakul hat, embraced him warmly and sat down for a lively talk. A television camera would have had a field day contrasting the words and the deeds in evidence there.

(Photo: A rabbi in Debent, Russia, 17 Sept 2007/Thomas Peter)

At the news conference ending the session, the organiser Alain Michel announced there had not been enough time to agree on a final resolution — a sign of a serious disagreement, as any reporter who has covered summit meetings could tell you. But he proceeded to say the meeting had agreed to set up a steering committee that would work out joint statements whenever there were major acts of violence in the name of religion. Names of the committee members were read out and all seemed to be satisfied that this was progress. Here is my news report about the meeting and here’s the official programme.

When it came to question time, I couldn’t help asking how they expected us to think of them as imams and rabbis for peace when they fought so much during the debate. Several got up to defend the meeting, saying they had made progress and it was only natural that there should be tension when it came to Israel and Palestine. Several participants came up to me afterwards, during the lunch, to give their view on why the meeting was more constructive than it seemed to be.

(Photo: Yahya Hendi)

The question elicited several nice quotes. “The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom,” said Yahya Hendi, the Palestinian-born Muslim chaplain at Georgetown, a Catholic university in Washington. “Blunt talk is not against the process, it’s part of the process,”said Rabbi Tsion Cohen of Shaar-HaNegev in Israel, who added that his community was near Gaza and often got hit by missiles from there.

A rabbi and an imam — both from outside the Middle East — pulled me aside to say basically the same thing about their respective sides. There’s a Middle East view and an international view (the rabbi called it the “diaspora view”) at discussions like this, and the occasional Middle Eastern clash is hard to avoid.

Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said that freewheeling session would have been better at a different time. “It’s not a bad thing if you do that at the beginning of the program. People feel they got it off their shoulders, they made their point and they get on to more practical things,” he said. Despite the programme, the meeting worked, he said, because it showed that imams and rabbis can meet and work with each other, contrary to a general impression many people have that they are fundamentally opposed. “It is not only possible but imperative for Islam and Judaism and their leadership to live in mutual respect.  That’s the real significance of this meeting.  Tha’ts the message that needs to get out,” he said.

(Photo: David Rosen)

Imam Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, an Italian Muslim leader, participated both in this meeting and in the Common Word conference with Catholic experts at the Vatican last month. He told me the imams and rabbis should keep their focus more narrowly on religious issues and not politics, as he said the Common Word group did. “We want to be involved in politics but not follow a political agenda,” he said. “We have to stick to our role” (as religious leaders). That last quote echoed a comment made by a rabbi during the open discussion.

(Photo: Yahya Pallavicini)

Rosen made another interesting point. Opening the conference on Monday, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade invited the imams and rabbis to hold their 2009 congress in Dakar. Wade is the current president of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and an interfaith meeting hosted by him could draw some high-level participation from across the Muslim world.

There are quite a few dialogues between imams and rabbis going on in different countries but they don’t seem to be that well known. We’ve written about some of them here. Are you surprised to hear there may soon be joint Jewish-Muslim declarations denouncing terrorism? Do you think they will succeed in doing this?

“Pope questions interfaith dialogue,” read a headline on a New York Times report this morning. “In comments on Sunday that could have broad implications in a period of intense religious conflict,”, it wrote, Pope Benedict said that dialogue between religions was impossible. Before noon, a New York rabbi was urgently appealing to Benedict XVI not to “abandon dialogue between faith communities.”

Readers following the recent upswing in interfaith contacts will recall the last time Benedict’s relations with other faiths were in the news was when he warmly received Islamic scholars on Nov. 6 in Rome and spoke of Christians and Muslims as “members of one family: the family that God has loved and gathered together from the creation of the world to the end of human history.” How could he now suggest that talks across faith lines are useless?

(Photo: Pope Benedict greets Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric at the Vatican, 6 Nov 2008/Osservatore Romano)

If these readers wonder what’s going on, they’re not alone. We’ve been getting queries from contacts asking how to read a letter written by Benedict that was published in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera on Sunday and got almost no coverage other than in the New York Times. What’s going on is that the Gray Lady has confused the philosophical precision of a German theologian and the real-world pragmatism of the Roman Catholic Church. That theologian, better known as Pope Benedict, restated his definition of interreligious dialogue in the letter to Italian politician and philosopher Marcello Pena. As the NYT reported, he said that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible.” In theological terms, added the pope, “a true dialogue is not possible without putting one’s faith in parentheses.”

The operative phrase here is “in the strict sense of the word.” If you define the word “dialogue” with the precision Benedict uses here, it means“an exchange of ideas or opinions on a particular issue, esp. a political or religious issue, with a view to reaching an amicable agreement or settlement” (my emphasis). But religions believe they possess the ultimate truth, so no compromise is possible there. This is the context for his statement that dialogue is not possible “without putting one’s faith in parentheses” – i.e. ignoring these fundamental differences.

But the world doesn’t always work according to philosopher’s definitions and the word “dialogue” has a looser everyday meaning of a “conversation between two or more persons.” When journalists write about interreligious dialogue, we tend to use this looser definition that most readers would understand. That’s the way Benedict himself used it when, addressing a delegation of the Muslim Common Word group during their meeting with Vatican officials, he said “I pray that the “Catholic-Muslim Forum”, now confidently taking its first steps, can become ever more a space for dialogue, and assist us in treading together the path to an ever fuller knowledge of Truth.”

(Photo: Pope Benedict and Rabbi Arthur Schneier in New York, 18 April 2008/Max Rossi)

That doesn’t sound like someone who wants to cut off talks with other religions. Actually, when Benedict says interreligious dialogue “in the strict sense of the word” is impossible, he’s not ruling out dialogue with Muslims, Jews and others as defined by the more popular use of the word. He’s being the German professor he’s always been, meticulously careful to draw intellectual distinctions even if they seem like hair-splitting to the typical newspaper reader. Don’t forget he’s writing to another philosopher, one with whom he’s already published a book about religion in today’s Europe called Senza Radici (Without Roots). He’s not starry-eyed about interreligious dialogue, especially with Muslims, because he thinks it can lead to a blurring of the very distinctions he’s trying to make. Deep down, he also thinks Christians ultimately can’t discuss theology with Muslims because their views of God are too different. But even his point man on Islam, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, told me the recent Catholic-Muslim Forum ended up “doing theology unintentionally” and came to some important practical agreements.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardo explained as much to the NYT, saying the pope’s comments seemed intended “to draw interest to Mr. Pera’s book, not to cast doubt on the Vatican’s many continuing interreligious dialogues. “He has a papacy known for religious dialogue; he went to a mosque, he’s been to synagogues,” Father Lombardi said. “This means that he thinks we can meet and talk to the others and have a positive relationship.”

Even if a strictly-defined interreligious dialogue was not possible, Benedict said in his letter, it was important to have an “intercultural dialogue which deepens the cultural consequences of basic religious ideas.” This brings him back to a distinction between religion and culture that he tried to make visible two years ago when he folded the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue into its culture ministry. It didn’t work out very well — other religions felt it downgraded their faith to an anthropological phenomenon — and he had to separate them again. That he’s trying to make the distinction again probably says more about his intellectual rigour than his diplomatic skill.

So Rabbi Marc Schneier, who saw the NYT wrote that Benedict’s comments “could have broad implications in a period of intense religious conflict,” should probably not be too concerned. Schneier is very active in interfaith relations and just led the innovative “Weekend of Twinning of Mosques and Synagogues” in North America. His father, Rabbi Arthur Schneieir, received Benedict in his synagogue last April. In a statement he issued, Marc Schneier put his finger on the confusion by saying “let’s not get lost in a word game.”

The Reuters back story here is that our Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella and I both saw the letter in Corriere della Sera on Sunday morning and thought Benedict wasn’t saying anything new. By late afternoon, though, Phil called to say other correspondents were asking him what we thought of the letter. We agreed Benedict was just repeating a philosophical distinction without making a practical difference and left it at that. I thought it was so marginal that I didn’t mention it in a story on Monday on interfaith dialogue based on a recent interview with a Muslim scholar. Later in the day, after we got Schneier’s statement from New York and another large American Jewish organisation called Phil asking what to make of the NYT report, we decided to spell out how we read this letter. It still didn’t merit a news story — non-news doesn’t make news — but the blog’s a good way to explain how we handled it.

Does this make you more sceptical about what you read? If it doesn’t, it should. Dialogue among major religions — especially with Islam — is tackling the profound differences between the faiths and these debates can’t always be reduced to sound bites.

UPDATE: John Allen now has an English translation of the letter.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, has made statements in the past that made him sound quite sceptical about the value of a theological dialogue with Muslims.

(Photo: Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran)

That wasn’t what I found when I interviewed him last Saturday at his office on Via della Conciliazione, just down the road from St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject was the Catholic-Muslim Forum he had just hosted on Nov 4-6 between a Muslim delegation from the Common Word group and Catholic delegation of Vatican officials, Catholic Islam scholars and bishops from western and Muslim countries.

The Common Word group, he said, could become a “favoured channel” for Vatican contacts with Muslims, even while it retains other channels of dialogue. While he still had some reservations about the group’s approach because of differences he sees in ways of reading scriptures, he was quite positive about the actual dialogue itself. “In discussing the love of God, we were doing theology unintentionally,” he said. That jibed with a point that Muslim delegates made during the session itself. “I thought they didn’t want to discuss theology but we’ve been doing that from the start,” University of Cambridge Islamic studies lecturer Tim Winter remarked halfway though the conference.

The cardinal said he felt the most important part of the final communique was item number 5: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” The public part is the key, since that could help Christian minorities in Muslim countries. It could also help Muslim minorities in western countries, which is why Muslim delegation head Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric persuaded the doubters in his ranks to accept it. Several Muslim delegates told me they most appreciated the next item, which reads: “Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule.” Tauran had more to say about this in the interview.

Tauran also said there were now too many different Christian-Muslim dialogues and he saw a risk that they could start tripping over each other. Here’s my news story on the interview.

Edited Q&A of Tauran interview: Due to some software glitches, you need to do the following to get to the second page of this post — click on the headline, then click on the page number “2″ below.  Page 2 includes Tauran’s closing remarks at the end of the conference.

Pages: 1

Saudi Arabia’s ban on churches on its territory is a thorny issue that loomed over the Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting this week in Rome. Some Catholics say the question of religious freedom for minority faiths in Muslim countries is so important that the Vatican should insist on strict reciprocity in such interfaith talks. 

(In photo: St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church opens in Doha on 15 March 2008/Fadi Al-Assaad)

However, more believe it is not a good idea to make the dialogue hostage to a single issue, so it did not become a dealbreaker here. It did get discussed in the closed-door talks, which delegates said were quite lively at times, and it was referred to in the final declaration. Cynics may say nothing was resolved, but there are interesting nuances that could lead to change.

The final declaration had this to say: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” Having Muslim delegates sign up to a statement that non-Muslims should be able to worship publicly in Muslim majority countries, i.e. have their own churches, is an important step. This is clearly aimed at Saudi Arabia, where the rights of other faiths are most clearly limited. A Catholic delegate told me some Muslims did not like the final part about practising religion in private and public but their delegation head, Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, reminded them that this passage could also help minority Muslims who want to build mosques in Western countries. This is an interesting example of how the globalisation of Islam is starting to influence the traditional Muslim world.

Bishop Paul Hinder, the Abu Dhabi-based apostolic vicar of Arabia, said he sensed some change on the churches issues as well. Saudi Arabia bans the public practice of any other religion on its territory, arguing that it is holy land for Islam because the Prophet Mohammad was born there and the two most important mosques are located there. However, there are about one million Catholics in Saudi Arabia, mostly labourers from the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka, and they have no church. After the public session of the Catholic-Muslim Forum on Thursday, several journalists gathered around Hinder to ask his view of the meeting, the declaration and the outlook for Christians in Saudi Arabia. Here are some quotes:

(In photo, Bishop Hinder at left, Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric in white turban at right, 11 Nov 2008/Alessandro Bianchi)

“There is hope that things can change and even get better. It’s not the case that we have nothing on the Arabian peninsula now. We have possibilities (to worship) in many (Gulf) countries, even if they are limited. There is one country where that’s not the case, but there are signs that that could change. I think that such declarations can give a boost and a motivation. I know there are Muslim colleagues in all countries are working to make this situation change, from my point of view for the better.”

The Swiss-born bishop, who has been in Abu Dhabi for almost five years, said he told Muslims at the conference about the difficult conditions the foreign workers live in — and not just Christians.

“I had comments from Muslims who said it touched them to hear what we said about the workers of Philippine, Indian or Sri Lankan origin there. It’s not only a question of religion, it’s one of social justice. You have to go look and see for yourself. They live in labour camps. They are almost kept as slaves. They’re in a situation almost like animals. That hurts us, not only for our Christians. I’d like to see more justice and human dignity for everyone. The question of practising any religion is important. I have asked leaders in our region why, if you think of building cinemas, theatres, sports facilities, mosques and shops inside these labour camps, haven’t you yet had the idea that maybe the others — the Christians of different denominations, the Hindus or Buddhists — have a spiritual need to worship together and that one should prepare the necessary places? I have said this and I think it has been understood. Obviously, I don’t think that when I get back there in a week, they will be building chapels in labour camps in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. But we now have this final document that helps and motivates. There are people who take what we say seriously. Things are moving, even in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes it’s better not make too much noise. Telling people what to do in a loud voice prompts resistance right away. If we negotiate patiently, there is much more comprehension for what one thinks.”

Pope Benedict’s famous Regensburg speech has haunted Catholic-Muslim relations since it was delivered in September 2006. Muslims were insulted by his quoting of a Byzantine emperor saying Islam was violent and irrational and have complained about the speech ever since. The “Common Word” group of Islamic scholars that met Benedict and Catholic officials at the Vatican this week grew out of an initial response by Muslims to that speech. So what role did the Regensburg speech play at those unprecedented talks?

None, according to the Catholic delegation head, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran (left). It was not mentioned a single time in the talks, he told our colleagues at I.Media, a French agency reporting on the Vatican. “Nobody ever spoke about Regensburg,” he said. “It’s a closed affair and the pope has already explained that issue very well.” The pope has expressed regret at any misunderstanding of his speech but not apologised for it as some Muslims urged him to do at the time.

Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric (right), head of the Muslim delegation, was also asked whether Regensburg was now a closed chapter. “There are certain things you should remember but also put into historical context,” he told journalists after the delegations attended an audience with the pope. “Some people say from conflict and misunderstanding comes understanding.”

Ceric, who survived the four-year siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, explained how such a major Muslim complaint did not become a central issue here. During the Bosnian war, he said, he often complained that western Europe had betrayed Bosnian Muslims but, he said, nobody did anything. But he got a hearing after the war when he outlined “a vision for truth, peace and reconciliation”. So, he said, the Common Word group wanted to avoid the negative. “We have no complaint, we have a dream,” he said.

Ceric said this idea of having a dream came from Martin Luther King’s famous speech. At one point, however, he spoke of him only as Martin Luther. “Now, there’s someone who really did have a complaint,” one delegate joked as he corrected Ceric’s slip.

The Catholic-Muslim Forum ended on Thursday evening on an upbeat note. After two days of closed-door talks and an audience with Pope Benedict, the delegations held their only public session of the conference (right) to present a joint communique and answer some questions.

The final declaration (full text here) had a series of interesting points that show progress in the dialogue among the experts involved. They will need some unpacking in the real world before we know how much real progress has been made. Here are some of the points with some quick observations in italics:

• 2. Human life is a most precious gift of God to each person. It should therefore be preserved and honoured in all its stages. (interesting common pro-life slant here. Any joint initiatives coming up here?)
• 3. Human dignity is derived from the fact that every human person is created by a loving God out of love … he or she is entitled to full recognition of his or her identity and freedom by individuals, communities and governments, supported by civil legislation that assures equal rights and full citizenship. (this means support for minorities, whether they’re Christians in Muslim countries or Muslim minorities in the West, on the basis of both faiths and not just secular notions that can be contested as foreign to a certain culture)
• 4. We affirm that God’s creation of humanity has two great aspects: the male and the female human person, and we commit ourselves jointly to ensuring that human dignity and respect are extended on an equal basis to both men and women. (that’s pretty clear)
• 5. Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public. (no mention here of conversion in Muslim countries)
• 6. Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule. (this refers in the same sentence to the Catholic concern for churches in Muslim countries and the Muslim concern about caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. Any linkage there? )
• 8. We affirm that no religion and its followers should be excluded from society. Each should be able to make its indispensable contribution to the good of society, especially in service to the most needy. (this one also cuts both ways, like item 3)
• 10. We are convinced that Catholics and Muslims have the duty to provide a sound education in human, civic, religious and moral values for their respective members and to promote accurate information about each other’s religions. (that education aspect will be important)
• 11. We profess that Catholics and Muslims are called to be instruments of love and harmony among believers, and for humanity as a whole, renouncing any oppression, aggressive violence and terrorism, especially that committed in the name of religion, and upholding the principle of justice for all. (Western critics often say Muslims don’t denounce terrorism enough, even though many do that they don’t notice. Could this boost that visibility?)
• 14. We have agreed to explore the possibility of establishing a permanent Catholic-Muslim committee to coordinate responses to conflicts and other emergency situations and of organizing a second seminar in a Muslim-majority country yet to be determined. (this is the crisis management option I mentioned a few days ago)

The final session was actually quite strained, with testy questions and answers, which led some journalists to ask whether the positive signals we’d been getting did not really reflect the mood in the private talks. Several participants, including senior Muslim delegate Seyyed Hossein Nasr who was in the middle of it all, denied that was the case. As all present could see, the strains emerged when Monsignor Khaled Akasheh, the desk officer for Islam in the Vatican’s interfaith department who was moderating the session, tried to stop Nasr from answering questions put to him. Another curious decision was to let a relatively low-ranking delegate, a lay professor from Paris named Joseph Maila, answer questions for the Catholic delegation rather than delegation head Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran or another senior Vatican official.

More on this later…

The news at the Catholic-Muslim Forum today is that there is no news.  No news in the MSM (mainstream media) sense. Nobody’s walked out of the talks, there have been no enormous blow-ups, outrageous charges, etc. It would take something like that for a story about interfaith dialogue to have any luck in the MSM on the day after Barack Obama was elected U.S. president. In fact, several Catholic-Muslim Forum delegates I spoke to today first mentioned how pleased they were at Obama’s victory across the ocean before they got around to talking about their meeting here.

The other reason the Forum has “no news” is that what’s happening seems like mostly good news, which by the usual MSM definition (see above…) is no news. These pioneering talks between Muslim signatories of the Common Word manifesto and Vatican officials and Catholic Islam experts moved ahead on their second day with what participants said were open and useful discussions. “The discussion is not getting derailed where it could get derailed, if someone wanted to do that,” one delegate said.

That’s interesting, because today’s topic — human dignity and mutual respect — was the natural place for a strong stand by those Catholics who want this dialogue to focus on reciprocity, or giving minority Christians in Muslim countries the same rights as Muslim minorities in western countries. Actually, the talks got around to that topic late in the first day of talks yesterday and the debate apparently got quite spirited. Both Catholics and Muslims told me it was lively but respectful, a useful face-to-face exchange of what is usually only said about the other. Let’s see what the final communique on Thursday says about this.

The delegations also discussed the more philosophical issue of how each religion handles the threat they see in secular modernity. The world’s two largest faiths can easily discover how much they have in common (along with other religions) when they get together to discuss what they see as the godlessness of modern times. As one delegate told me, the Catholic side defended the legal separation of church and state, what Pope Benedict would call “positive laïcité.” The Muslim side made a difference between a secular state in the American mold and a militantly secularist outlook, such as France’s decision to ban headscarves from state schools.

There was some discussion of practical measures to take going forward, such as drawing up lists of recommended books about each religion for teachers to use for courses about the other faith. There was also a suggestion that the Common Word’s use of the first two commandments as common foundational doctrines of Christianity and Islam might be expanded to cover all ten commandments. That could open up an interesting discussion about what’s called the Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage. Again, let’s see what develops here.

One Muslim delegate noted that Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Catholic delegation, had said before the talks that theological discussions with Muslims were quite difficult. But, he said, the Catholic delegates got straight into debating theology with the Muslims. “They very much want to be in a theological discussion, not just in another polite bridge-building exercise,” the delegate said. “Europe is in a state of religious apathy, some of which arises because people see us in dispute. We could do each other a favour if we get along. It could be an argument against atheism.”

Thursday will be an active day, with an audience with Pope Benedict in the morning and a public session at the Pontifical Gregorian University in the afternoon where the final communique will be read out. It has to be said that the audience looks in advance like a missed opportunity, because it will be a highly choreographed papal encounter during which Benedict will deliver a prepared speech and two Muslim experts will present their views. There will be no debate, no discussion, no dialogue to tease out the implications of what a speaker has just said.

Now a prisoner of Vatican protocol, the man who as Cardinal Jospeh Ratzinger used to hold (and hold his own in) public debates with agnostic and atheist philosophers cannot engage in an open debate. I have no doubt it would be a fascinating exchange to listen to, but apparently it’s not the done thing for a pope to venture into uncharted waters like that. So, unless he tosses his text aside at the last minute and speaks off the cuff , he will simply read out his prepared speech, listen to his guests’ and then end the audience. The baroque Vatican ceremony is probably all any of you will see of this meeting on TV or in news pictures, if the media are ready to look further afield on Day Obama +2. But the most important part will be in Benedict’s text.

By the way, the Catholic-Muslim Forum is getting a lot of attention in one newspaper, the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano. It rated a front-page analysis on Monday, just before the three-day talks opened. It’s the long article on the right in the JPG image above. The headline reads “A choice for the future” and the text is available here in PDF (in Italian).

(Photo: delegation heads Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran (l) and Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric (r) chat at the start of the Catholic- Muslim Forum on 4 Nov 2008 at the Vatican/ pool photo provided by Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano)

Any thoughts that the first Catholic-Muslim Forum here in Rome might blur fundamental differences in the interests of harmony dissolved on Tuesday when the Vatican side opened the discussion with a clear presentation of the Christian teaching that people can only approach God through Jesus Christ. There was hardly a better way to show the gap that separates the Christians and Muslims who have embarked on the “Common Word” dialogue process. The Muslim side naturally disagreed and said this radical focus on Christ closed off all options for salvation to Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and any other non-Christians. What followed, delegates to the closed-door conference reported, was not a clash but a discussion described as cordial, respectful and aimed at a better understanding of how each side understands the concept of God’s love for humanity. “There were some sceptical Catholic comments before this meeting, and the opening presentation was classic Christian doctrine, but there were nuances in what different Catholic delegates said in the discussion,” one Muslim delegate said. “The best part is the openness,” another said. “There is an aspect of mutual respect, which is what we need.”

Read our news story on the meeting here.

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the top Vatican official for relations with Islam and source of several sceptical Catholic comments since the Common Word was launched just over a year ago, reiterated the Vatican’s commitment to dialogue with the Muslims.

There’s a news blackout on the closed-door meetings until after the delegations meet Pope Benedict on Thursday, so off-the-record comments from delegates are all we have to go on for the moment. But it seems the Forum has got off to a good start. Wednesday could turn out to be more difficult because the Vatican has insisted on a frank discussion of religious freedom, which naturally brings up persecution of and restrictions on Christians in Muslim countries.

Among the published comments by delegates before the meeting began was one from Tariq Ramadan entitled “Why I’m going to meet the Pope.”

Imagine you’re asked to examine a problem through a funnel but not told which end to look through. Some people will look through the narrow end and get a wide-angle view of the problem. Others will look through the wide end and get a narrow focus on certain parts of it. Both will be looking at the same problem, but in different ways.

This image came to mind after I spoke to members of both delegations in advance of the Catholic-Muslim Forum that starts today in Vatican City. Both sides are looking at the same problem – how to really improve understanding and cooperation between Christians and Muslims – but from different points of view. This doesn’t have to deadlock the talks – I don’t think either side wants that. But it does complicate things…

A kind of news blackout has been imposed on the closed-door talks on Tuesday and Wednesday, with only the official spokesman for both sides – Cardinal Tauran and Ibrahim Kalin – supposed to make any statements. In the run-up to the talks, the Catholic side has been quite active. Tauran spoke to La Croix and Vatican Radio in French on Monday, his deputy Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata to Vatican Radio in Italian and the Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir, an adviser to the Catholic delegation, wrote a comment on Asianews.it (here in English). Kalin spoke to Reuters in advance – see our news story here – but the other Muslim delegates told me they could not be quoted.

Things will change on Thursday, when the delegates have a short audience with Pope Benedict (to be broadcast by in-house television to the Vatican press room) and then hold a public discussion session at the Pontifical Gregorian University that afternoon.

(At left, Common Word delegates Ibrahim Kalin (l) and Sohail Nakhooda in Rome).

As for that funnel analogy, who’s looking through which end? The Common Word delegation seems to have grabbed the narrow end and peered through it, thus getting a broad view of the challenge of deeper Christian-Muslim understanding. The Vatican side seems to have focused on issues within the Common Word manifesto, looking with two eyes through the wide end to zero in on specific questions. This is a rough analogy and not meant to criticise either position, since both perspectives can enrich the other. The broad view can help both sides to make progress despite differences on specific points. The narrow view can help clarify details of certain points in the Common Word manifesto. Of course, this is only the first meeting of this Catholic-Muslim Forum, so they are only starting to discuss the issues.

Another intersting development fits into the funnel analogy. The Common Word approach has been to unite as many Muslim leaders and scholars as possible, in line with the Islamic concept of seeking consensus within the decentralised faith. The Catholic approach couldn’t be more different – centralised and hierarchical, with the highpoint of the Vatican meeting being the papal audience organised down to the last detail. The latest example of this came last week when Libyan theologian Aref Ali Nayed, one of the leading figures in the Common Word group, won support from more than 460 Islamic organisations around the world gathered at a general conference of the World Islamic Call Society in Tripoli. The conference’s final declaration said: “The Conference declares its support for the ‘A Common Word’ initiative, and expresses its appreciation for the positive responses to it. It further calls for working through that initiative in order to widen the scope of mutual understanding and cooperation between Muslim and Christian institutions.”

That means that the World Islamic Call Society, one of the largest international Muslim organisations, will link its dialogue with the Vatican – which goes back to 1976 – with the Common Word group’s efforts. That brings more coordination to the confused landscape of interfaith talks now going on. Those looking through the narrow end of the funnel will see a broad consensus building while those looking through the wide end will focus on specific points and ask how deep the agreement on them really is. But these are not “either/or” propositions, they’re “both/and.” Finding the balance is the challenge.

Tuesday’s talks will be about theological issues arising from the Common Word’s claim that both religions share the core teaching of love of God and neighbour. Roughly speaking, this is the Muslim approach and some Catholic experts mistrust it because of fundamental differences between the faiths. Wednesday’s meeting will focus on human dignity, a catchword for the religious freedom issues the Catholics want to talk about.

Both sides stress the need for these talks to produce some practical results that prove they’re worth all the effort being made. Once again, they show the two sides looking at the issues from somewhat different perspectives. Kalin told me the Common Word group would like to see a crisis management plan worked out so Catholic and Muslim representatives could confer at times of tension, for example during a controversy over the Danish Prophet Mohammad cartoons or the persecution of Christians in Iraq, and make joint statements that might help calm the situation, he said. At the Cambridge meeting last month, Rev. Christian Troll S.J., a member of the Vatican delegation this week, suggested that the Cambridge Iner-Faith Programme could form a Christian-Muslim working committee to evaluate complaints from Muslims and Christians about violations of religious freedom.

Let’s see what comes out on Thursday.

November will see an upswing on the interfaith dialogue front with two high-level meetings highlighting different approaches to the challenge of fostering better understanding among the world’s major religions.

The first will be the meeting of the Common Word group of Muslim scholars with Pope Benedict and top Roman Catholic experts on Islam next week (Nov. 4-6) at the Vatican. This will be the third conference initiated by the group, following sessions at Yale University in July and the University of Cambridge this month where Muslim and Christian religious leaders and theologians discussed in detail what unites and separates them. Being the supertanker of the Christian world, the Vatican has turned more slowly towards this theological dialogue than the smaller Protestant churches. But it has agreed to institutionalise the dialogue in a Catholic-Muslim Forum and give it a gesture of approval with a papal audience. Let’s see what comes out at the end of the talks next Thursday.

Here is my curtainraiser on the meeting.

The week afterwards, on Nov. 12-13, Saudi King Abdullah will be at the United Nations in New York to promote the interfaith dialogue that he launched in Madrid last July. This effort is much wider — the Madrid meeting had not only Christians and Muslims but also Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and people of other faiths. It seems like more of an official diplomatic offensive, especially with that U.N. connection. Reflecting that, the White House has announced that President George Bush will join Abdullah at the talks. There are reports that Israeli President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni might attend. One might be tempted to write the whole thing off as another talking shop, but an international body like the United Nations may be the right forum now for Abdullah to continue one pioneering aspect of this effort — his outreach to Jews. Several rabbis attended the Madrid meeting and Abdullah has said he wants to hold an interfaith conference in Saudi Arabia. That would have to include Jews if this whole project is to be taken seriously. Watch that space.

All this focus on better understanding between the world’s two largest religions looks like it is overlooking the third Abrahamic monotheism, but it’s not that simple. The Catholic Church has been talking a lot with Jews lately, most of it over the still open wound of the Pius XII papacy and his stand during the Holocaust. The Vatican was on the defensive on that one and Pope Benedict hinted on Thursday he would freeze the sainthood process for his wartime predecessor. At the same time, he told the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations that “dialogue between cultures and religions must more and more be seen as a sacred duty incumbent upon all those who are committed to building a world worthy of man”. While it wants to keep a sharp focus on Christian-Muslim issues, the Common Word group has also included rabbis in its discussions, especially when dealing with reading scriptures. The Vatican also plans another meeting with the International Jewish Committee in Budapest on Nov. 9-12.