The call last week by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for an interfaith dialogue has provoked outraged reactions from Saudi Islamists and praise from Saudi liberals. Saudis of all persuasions were taken by surprise when Abdullah made his announcement, which met with a quick and positive response from religious leaders abroad. The Vatican was said to be especially interested in this idea because Abdullah made a groundbreaking visit to Rome and met Pope Benedict last November.

But one report in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot went to the nub of the matter — will Jewish rabbis be able to visit the bastion of Sunni Islam and home to Islam’s two holiest sites? That would be big news. As the Israeli daily reported it, the Saudi grand mufti, the official government spokesperson on religious affairs, had begun sending out feelers to Israeli rabbis to attend some meeting in Riyadh at an unspecified date.

Well, the report made it into English and led to the mufti, Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al al-Sheikh, issuing a carefully-worded denial. “The mufti clarified that what was published in some newspapers and news agencies saying that he had called on a group of Israeli religious scholars to take part in a religious reconciliation conference in Riyadh is devoid of any truth and has no basis,” the Saudi royal-owned paper Asharq al-Awsat reported on its front page on Wednesday. “He said: ‘I hope everyone will check facts before reporting things’.”

The report did not reject the idea of such a dialogue, which the mufti would hardly oppose since he is a representative of a government that now officially wants to hold an interfaith conference. All he did was say that, up to this point, he had not asked any Israelis to come to anything. So he might in the future, but we’ll have to wait and see on that.

In an indication of the diametrically opposed constituences the mufti must consider, Islamists commenting on web sites were exultant that he had refuted the reports. “We all know that the Jews are people of lies and slander. So it’s no surprise they would claim the mufti did such a thing. Therefore, we have to be careful about what the newspapers and agencies are saying,” one user on Saha.net wrote. “It is well-known that the mufti rejects dialogues of religion since he has said before in sermons that they are empty and amount to concessions,” another said.

Meanwhile, Saudi dailies with liberal leanings are trumpeting the positive attention the king has won for Saudi Arabia abroad. “CNN describes the king as a history-maker,” al-Watan said on Wednesday in a front-page headline, adding: “Global support for the king’s initiative for a dialogue of religions.”

The king is seen in Saudi Arabia as a reformer but one who has been outmaneuvered by the powerful religious establishment and their allies in the royal family. The interfaith conference call may be a kind of trial balloon launched to see what kind of reaction it gets in a country where liberals and religious conservatives are engaged in an ideological struggle for the future of Saudi Arabia.

There is no end to modern speculation trying to explain how some ancient event in the Bible may have happened. Here’s the latest, picked up by Jeffrey Heller, editor-in-charge in our Jerusalem bureau:

The biblical Israelites may have been high on a hallucinogenic plant when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai, according to a new study by an Israeli psychology professor.

Writing in the British journal Time and Mind, Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University said two plants in the Sinai desert contain the same psychoactive molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.

The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an “altered state of awareness”, Shanon hypothesised…

Read the whole story here. For Shanon’s article “Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative
Hypothesis,” click here.

What do you think of this kind of speculation? Does it make a serious contribution to understanding faith? Or make the speculators seem like they’re straining science to explain — or explain away — miracles?

It’s been less than a month since an underground movement of gay Orthodox Jews in Israel went online and already tens of thousands of people have visited their Web site.

The site is called HOD (for Homo’eem Dateem or Religious Homosexuals), a play on the Hebrew word hod for glory. It’s the first to cater to gay men living in Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish minority, where homosexuality is viewed as a sin and people are often scared to admit publicly they are gay, fearing harassment or banishment.

Of course, not all of the online visitors fit into that category, said Rabbi Ron, one of the site’s creators. The site was flooded after local media reported on its inception and Ron, a gay Orthodox rabbi who asked that his last name not be mentioned, was interviewed on Israeli radio.

The Web site, written mostly in Hebrew but with pages in English as well, was the first of its kind and broke the taboo of discussing homosexuality from within the ultra-orthodox sector.

“Our main goal is to bring the religious gay community, as well as rabbis and leaders of the religious communities, relevant information and articles concerning our issue,” HOD says in its English-language section. “This way, we hope to reduce the hate towards homosexuals in the religious society. Moreover, HOD is your place to publish your opinions, stories and anything else you wrote related to this issue.”

Rabbi Ron told the Jerusalem Post the site aimed to break down stereotypes and foster dialogue: “We want religious people to know that we want to adhere to Halacha. But we also want them to understand that a homosexual is born the way he is and has no choice … Judaism’s main emphasis is on actions. We understand that, and we are not asking rabbis to permit anal sex or to make any changes in Halacha. We just want basic understanding.”

HOD is not the first website aimed at religious gays, Itay, one of the founders of the site, explained to Ynet : “Up to now the only website catering to the religious gay community was Atzat-Nefesh (here in Hebrew and English ), which was basically run by straight people that publicly stated that a religious person cannot be gay. They tried to ‘turn’ gay religious people straight, which is something that we know cannot be done. We try to help people reconcile their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation.”

This month, Israel’s attorney general ruled that same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children that are not biologically connected to either parent. The decision expanded the legal rights of gays and lesbian couples in Israel, where the Rabbinic Court has jurisdiction over marriage. Haaretz quoted a religious cabinet minister as calling the ruling “shocking and disgusting”.

The creators of HOD take a pragmatic approach in their attempt to gain acceptance from ultra-conservative religious leaders. By breaking taboo, they hope to gain awareness, which is the first step towards acceptance, Rabbi Ron said. Once that is done, maybe they can tackle the issue of making orthodox Jewish law less stringent, he said. The Web site declares: “You cannot ignore us any longer.”

For an example of how India often struggles with its secular ideals, especially in election years, look no further than Andhra Pradesh. The chief minister Y.S. Reddy has decided the large southern Indian state will subsidise pilgrimages for Christians who want to travel to Israel.

This kind of subsidy is not new. The central government has for years offered subsidies to Muslims wanting to join the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca. New Delhi even has a special haj air terminal for Muslims, who account for about 13 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population. Tens of thousands travel every year from India.

But the latest announcement has sparked debate in India over whether it further eats into the country’s secular ideals.

“The government has undermined Indian secularism once again,” said one India’s leading newspapers, the Times of India. The Indian constitution says there should be no discrimination on religious grounds. It is broadly intepreted to mean that none of India’s religious groups, whether majority Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs, should ever dominate. That secular identity was the pride of many of the country’s founders 60 years ago after independence.

The debate is now focused on what kind of secularism should exist. Should there be the kind of separation of church and state as in France, where the idea that religion should be kept out of public life is strong? Or should India make compromises by appeasing minority faiths to ensure religious harmony?

The original argument for subsidies for Muslims, who are among the poorest members of Indian society, was that it helped them go on the haj many could not otherwise afford. It’s still controversial, though, and even one of India’s school text books has a chapter titled “Should a secular state provide subsidies for the Haj pilgrimage?”

But critics say the latest move over Christians was a cheap populist trick ahead of state elections this year. While Christians account for only 2 percent of Andhra Pradesh’s population, that’s still 1.2 million people.

Subsidies like this have long been criticised by India’s main Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has asked why Hindus, who account for about 80 percent of the population, don’t get subsidies to visit Hindu temples. For the BJP, the current secularism in India is another word for “appeasement of minorities”.

Defenders of the move argue that India’s secularism is much more loosely fitting, as highlighted by the controversy last month when the French government awarded an exiled Muslim woman writer in India with the Simone de Beauvoir Prize. That prize met with silent disapproval from the Indian government, worried the award could incite Muslim groups. It showed how the Indian government is reluctant to speak publicly of lofty secular ideals — ideas the French loudly defend — if it means upsetting a religious group.

The debate this time round has also come down to politics and electoral votes. As the Times of India’s Ronojoy Sen pointed out, those opposing the subsidies to Christians should also oppose the haj subsidy. But no political party, even the BJP, has ended that.

With 13 percent of India’s population, that’s a lot of Muslim votes to lose. Especially in an election year.

Karen Armstrong, the best-selling British writer and lecturer on religion, has given a long interview to Reuters in Islamabad after addressing a conference in the Pakistani capital. A former Catholic nun who now describes herself as a “freelance monotheist,” she has written 21 books on the main world religions, religious fundamentalism in these faiths and religious leaders such as Mohammad and Buddha. Her latest book is The Bible: A Biography. The short version of what she said is in the Reuters story linked here. We don’t publish the Q&A text of our interviews on our news wire, but we can do it here on the blog.

Q:You were last in Pakistan in 2006. What brought you back this time?

A: There is a really poignant hunger here, as well as in other parts of the Muslim world, to hear a friendly Western voice speaking appreciatively of Islam. It is a sad thing for me that this should be such an unusual event, but given the precarious state of relationships between so-called Islam and the West it seems something that is important to do.

Q: Pakistan seems to be a crucial place for the future of Islam at the moment. How do you see the impact of events in Pakistan in terms of developments in Islam as a whole?

A: Pakistan is on the frontier of this present struggle, in a sense. It’s right on the border there, with Afghanistan. It’s a country born of displacement. I think it’s not so much important for the future of Islam as important for the future of the world. What happens here will be very decisive in how the so-called war against terror proceeds in other regions. This is, after all, a frontier that that has for years cooperated with the West and is now reaping a grim harvest for that cooperation from its extremists.

It is a nuclear power. And it is a country born out the horrendous events of the partition of India, with a really difficult question to ask: How do you become a secular Muslim state? If there are no Muslim symbols in your country, why on earth are they here? Interestingly enough, the kind of conversations I have about this topic remind me very much of conversations I had in Israel, another secular state born out of displacement and tragedy. Israeli friends who are adamantly secular have said to me that if there are no Jewish symbols or no Jewish feel to this secular state, then what on earth are we doing here?

Q: At the moment, many Western politicians seem to take a quick fix approach to Pakistan: give full support to President Musharraf, close down the madrasas, send in troops into the tribal areas. Do you thing these policies can be effective against something as hard to grapple with as a religious movement?

A: Well, I’m not sure that this all is religious, to be perfectly honest. Some of this trouble up in the tribal areas is much more to do with tribal honour than it is to do with Islam per se. But I think military force is never an answer. Surely we have learned this just by looking at what has happened in Iraq and in the Middle East. There the military option has opened up a can of worms and another set of disasters. I think what we need to do is not do this short-term business of supporting one politician one day, another politician another day, busing somebody else in as our own candidate chanting the word democracy, as though it was some kind of saving mantra, when what is needed is a much longer term view, a less self-interested view, less of an ability to just use a country to further our Western policies in a region and (rather) see what is actually good for the country as a whole.

It would have been a first. The imam of Rome’s mosque was due to visit the city’s synagogue on Wednesday, but unexpectedly called off the meeting on Tuesday, citing unspecified logistical problems. Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni visited the mosque in 2006, so Imam Ala Eldin al Ghobashy would have been returning the compliment. It would have been an important symbolic step forward for inter-religious dialogue, right in the Vatican’s backyard.

Di Segni told journalists there had been “alarming signals from Egypt” indicating opposition to the visit among Islamic scholars there because of Israel’s recent blockade of the Gaza Strip. Italian newspapers said the signals came from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the leading centre of Sunni Islamic learning. Muslim leaders in Rome denied any intervention from abroad and blamed the delay on “excessive interest in the visit”.

Di Segni has said he hopes logistical problems were “the only motives that determined what we hope is a temporary delay”. We reported the reason given by Abdellah Redouane, secretary general of the Islamic Cultural Centre attached to the mosque, because that’s how he explained the decision. We’re trying to find out more, but this kind of story is notoriously difficult to nail down.

Regardless of whether al-Azhar was involved or not, there is a widespread suspicion among Italian journalists that the Middle East conflict has once again been “imported” to Europe. Look at the headlines — “Islamic veto, imam won’t go to synagogue” (Corriere della Sera), “Veto on imam, Roman Jews say it’s serious foreign interference” (La Stampa), “Roman Jews saddened by imam, the stop is serious foreign interference” (La Repubblica).

What do you think? Do some Muslims in Europe let inter-religious tensions elsewhere, such as in the Middle East, get in the way of better relations with other faiths in Europe? Or is this just an impression that headlines like those cited above create?

Should public bus companies in Israel be allowed to run “kosher” routes where women passengers must sit in the back and are frowned on for wearing trousers? Israel’s High Court is expected to decide this week on a case brought against them by women who say they have been “bullied in the name of God” on these buses for not following the ultra-Orthodox custom of separating men and women in public.

The controversy has been bubbling for several years. It started when the public bus companies introduced the “mehadrin” (strict kosher) lines to compete with private companies who introduced separate seating in buses that passed through ultra-Orthodox areas. My feature today interviews angry women passengers and defenders of the system.

Reporting in Israel occasionally throws journalists into the middle of the tension between deeply religious and secularist Israelis. I live in a broadly secular neighbourhood of Jerusalem and drive a car, so have never taken the “kosher” buses. The first time I went to Mea Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox area of Jerusalem, I took care to wear loose clothing with long sleeves that seemed sure to pass the modesty test. But I hadn’t realised trousers were a no-no too. The placards nailed up around the area listing exactly what clothing was out of bounds soon made that clear.

So I’ll ask a woman for a quote, I thought. When I did, though, she shook her head and pointed to her husband. He grabbed his young son’s hand, shielded his eyes and swept past me with his long black coat.

Feeling more self-conscious by the minute, I tried talking to a few more men and women with a male colleague at my side. No one would answer my questions. Our Israeli cameraman Eli laughed and suggested he do the interviews on my behalf.

“Next time,” he added, “wear a skirt.”

Apologies aren’t easy, especially for the infallible.*

During his visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, President George Bush saw aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken by American planes during World War Two and was quoted as saying: “We should have bombed it.” This presented an interesting challenge to the Pope’s daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. Critics have long accused Pope Pius XII of failing to help Jews during the Holocaust and his successors of failing to say mea culpa in apology. German-born Pope Benedict heard the same in May 2006 after he avoided the issue during a visit to Auschwitz. So how should the Vatican daily report what looked like an indirect apology (the first of its kind?) by the U.S. president?

The Sunday edition showed the way. L’Osservatore, a once-bland broadsheet livened up under its new editor Giovanni Maria Vian, invited the Jewish historian Anna Foa to write a front-page commentary on “The Missed Bombing” (text in Italian). She writes: “A president of the United States, George W. Bush, has admitted publicly what many historians and a part of public opinion have been saying for years: that in 1944, the Americans should have bombed Auschwitz.” Foa noted that, as early as 1942, information about the death camps had reached “the Red Cross, the neutral countries, the Holy See, the chancelleries of the Allies. Many of these reports were not believed at the time. But in 1943, all governments knew.”

Bombing Auschwitz could have slowed or stopped the slaughter there, especially of the half a million Hungarian Jews deported in the summer and autumn of 1944, but the Allies did not do it. Not because bombing would not be useful, Foa writes, but for “a more general reason: saving the Jews did not have priority in the overall management of the war.” Bombing the train tracks leading to Auschwitz or even the gas chambers themselves “would have broken the silence that settled over the death camps, given the war an incomparable ethical motivation and forced all of Europe to know” what was happening there.

“Now, at Yad Vashem, an American president has accomplished the same gesture that brought Willy Brandt to his knees in the Warsaw Ghetto: saying “mea culpa”. Brandt for the crimes of Nazi Germany, Bush for the mistaken choices of his country.”

The Roman orator Cicero often gave examples in threes. Has this Roman historian left out a third “B”?

(* Yes, bloggers, I know the pope is not supposed to be infallible all the time, only when he speaks in matters of faith and morals. But who can deny that Auschwitz is a moral issue? A question for Catholic theologians — if Benedict apologised, would he be speaking in matters of morals and therefore infallibly?)

Italians have a wonderful phrase they use when things don’t work out as they had hoped: “It was better when it was worse.”

That was the thrust of controversial comments about the Catholic Church’s relations with Israel by Archbishop Pietro Sambi, currently the Vatican’s nuncio (ambassador) to the United States and formerly the papal envoy to the Jewish state.

Sambi, who was nuncio in Israel from 1998-2005, could not have been clearer about his discontent: “If I must be frank, relations between the Catholic Church and the state of Israel were better when there were no diplomatic relations.” That was the opening salvo in a long interview in Italian with www. terrasanta.net, an on-line publication of the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land.

After decades of work, Israel and the Vatican reached a fundamental accord in 1993 and established full diplomatic relations, the next year. But even when the long-awaited historic ties were forged, complex legal and financial issues about the status of the Catholic Church and its properties in Israel were left hanging on a promise and a prayer to sort them out as soon as possible afterwards.

Sambi indicated that the Vatican should have looked harder before it leaped: “The Holy See decided to establish diplomatic relations with Israel as an act of trust, leaving to promises the commitments to later on regularise concrete aspects of the life of the Catholic communities and the Church (in Israel).“

Juridical questions were ironed out in a 1997 agreement but work on financial and tax questions as well as issues of visas for foreign priests are still dragging on.

In words that were unusually blunt for a diplomat, Sambi said: “You can’t buy trust at the marketplace, it has to be consolidated with respect for accords that have been signed and fidelity to to one’s word.” In another section of the interview he lamented postponements of meetings by the Israeli delegation, the delegation’s lack of power to negotiate and what he called an absence of political will in Israel.

The whopper was perhaps this one: “The kind of trust one can place in Israel’s promises is there for everyone to see!“

Perhaps Sambi was so unguarded in venting his frustrations because the interview was given to what is a rather internal publication of the Franciscans. Perhaps he never expected it to spill over into the mainstream media.

But it was noticed.

The Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, Oded Ben-Hur, told Catholic News Service he was surprised by the comments, “especially coming from our good friend, Archbishop Sambi.“

The Vatican put out a statement (here in Italian ) saying Sambi’s words reflected his “thought and personal experience” and that the Holy See hoped for a “rapid conclusion to the important negotiations already in progress.” While some saw this as the Vatican distancing itself from Sambi, a more careful reading would perhaps be that the Vatican fully supported and appreciated what Sambi had said and done. After all, few Vatican diplomats have more personal experience in relations with Israel than Sambi.

The delegations are next due to meet December 12-13. Diplomats here are wondering whether Sambi spoke so bluntly on purpose, to push things forward. Do you think relations will be helped or hindered by these comments?

Any foreign correspondent who ever covered the old Soviet bloc remembers how the official press seemed to print only news-free communiques and bland official photos. Scanning newspapers like Pravda or Scînteia or Neues Deutschland, the skilled reader looked for subtle changes from the norm as hints of possible shifts in official thinking. Once a slight deviation was sighted, readers would watch to see if it was just a flash in the pan or whether it became a normal feature.

That style of reading came to mind when L’Osservatore Romano published on Sunday what may be its first article ever by a Jewish writer. With its columns of papal speeches and discretion about internal Church issues, the Vatican daily has an unmistakable stylistic likeness to those old party organs. Not in content or purpose or inspiration, I hasten to add (hold the emails, I’m not saying the comparison goes that far). But as newspapers go, it’s as daunting as those other papers and its regular readers develop the same keen sense of small differences. So what does this change mean? Is the official voice of the Catholic Church opening up to views from other faiths? Will Muslims, Hindus or others follow?

The article was a review of a new book Brutti Ricordi (Ugly Memories), an Italian translation of two essays by Israeli academics Anita Shapira and Ephraim Kleiman on the departure of the Palestinians from Israel in 1948-1949 (review here in Italian). The author, Anna Foa, is a history professor at La Sapienza University in Rome. “The byline is not the only significant element,” writes veteran Vatican watcher Sandro Magister of L’Espresso magazine. It was also interesting, he said, that the book dealt with the dispute in Israel about whether the Palestinians left in 1948 “of their own will or were forcibly banished by the victorious Jews.”

Corriere della Sera Vatican correspondent Luigi Accattoli asked the Vatican daily’s new editor Giovanni Maria Vian whether this was the first Jewish author published there. “It’s hard to say, given that our newspaper has a 146-year-long history. There may have been exceptional cases of hospitality, but this is probably the first time that a Jewish voice has been invite to provide a cultural article,” Vian answered. He said he wanted to cover cultural issues more broadly, inviting “authoratative voices of various backgrounds” to contribute. He also plans to have more women writers and beef up the paper’s Internet site.

For more on this unique newspaper, check out a recent entry on Magister’s www.chiesa site (in English this time!) reprinting a witty article “The difficulties of “L’Osservatore Romano” that Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini — the future Pope Paul VI — wrote in 1961. It’s down the page, below a portrait of Vian. Two short excerpts:

One will notice immediately that “L’Osservatore” does not speak, for example, of theatre, sports, finance, fashion, judicial trials, cartoons, puzzles… or of anything that would seem to capture the curiosity, if not always the interest, of the so-called general public…

Even when the headline page is not in Latin, one cannot always say that it provides enjoyable reading. Edifying, yes; but no one blames the respectable newspaper if it cannot serve as entertainment, unlike the many other papers that make for amusement and relaxation. And we will say nothing of the page, as ostentatious as can be but full of the usual roundup of Vatican events, which may provide the pleasure of an incomparably grandiose spectacle, but not without a certain suspicion that one has seen all of this before…