Concern is mounting in the Netherlands as the country prepares for a film about the Koran by a far-right populist known for his hostility to Islam. It reached the point last Friday that Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende publicly appealed for restraint. A former Malaysian ambassador in The Hague has said the reaction could make the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy look like “a picnic.”

Geert Wilders, who wants to ban the Koran as a “fascist” book and has warned of a “tsunami of Islamisation” in the Netherlands, has proceeded with the film despite warnings from the Dutch justice and foreign ministers. (We blogged on this last November when the warnings came). It’s not clear when it will be broadcast, but it is expected soon. Wilders has denied reports that it will be shown on Friday Jan. 25. There is already a spoof on YouTube.

The last Dutchman who made a film critical of Islam, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by an Islamist radical in 2004. That unleashed a violent anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands. Caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in a Danish daily sparked off violent protests in the Muslim world.

With that in mind, the Dutch government has been considering the possible reaction this time around and what to do about it. According to media reports, “these include quick evacuation of Dutch citizens from Muslim countries. The government is expecting riots, flag burnings and boycotts, and has informed municipalities and police to be ready for such eventualities.” Last Saturday, about 200 Christians from various churches met in Zwolle to pray “for calm and tolerance” when the film comes out.

Ehsan Jami, a Dutch-Iranian who launched a Committee of Ex-Muslims last September, has said he is working on a film about the life of Mohammad due out in February or March.

The Danish cartoon controversy was a frontal clash of cultures, with European editors and officials saying free speech was inviolate and Muslim leaders calling for punishment for blasphemy. The Dutch prime minister tried to strike a balance between these views on Friday, saying:

“The Netherlands has a tradition of freedom of speech, religion and beliefs. The Netherlands also has a tradition of respect, tolerance and responsibility. Unnecessarily offending a certain belief or group has no place in that.” He said the government wanted “a free and unhindered debate, and respect in dealing with each other flow from both traditions, and the cabinet shall uphold both traditions and calls on everybody to do so.”

All this concern swirls around a film that nobody has yet seen and whose title is not even known. Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Muslim academic who now teaches in Rotterdam, called it “a movie-provocation about which everybody is talking while nobody knows anything!” He added: “Silence will be the best response.”

Are we headed for another head-on clash? Or do you think that Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe have moved towards better cooperation when one side feels provoked?

“Now’s the moment to say special prayers, for your family or anyone else you want to pray for,” said my Lebanese companion Ahmed. As he spoke, we caught a first glimpse of the black cloth cover of the Kaaba through the arches of the King Abdul Aziz Gate into the Grand Mosque in Mecca. I tried to remember all the people who had asked for prayers and mentally checked off their names, just in case. We picked our way through the crowds, some in the plain white cloth worn by pilgrims, others in ordinary street wear, according to their status under the complicated rules of the haj pilgrimage.

The overwhelming impression was of dazzling white marble and of arches with white plaster crenellations receding into the distance. The Saudi government has spared no expense in making this mosque, built around the focal point of daily worship for hundreds of millions of Muslims, into a monument inspiring awe and wonder among the millions who visit every year — especially those here for the first time. But the austere simplicity of the Kaaba itself, a plain stone cubic building covered in black cloth and wrapped in Arabic writing in golden silk, makes an even greater impression on visitors. Many raise their arms as it looms into sight from the edge of the inner courtyard, as if to protect themselves from some mysterious power, or perhaps to absorb some of the blessings they think it radiates.

We skipped down the marble steps into the courtyard and made our way towards the Kaaba, joining a crowd of several thousand performing the tawaf ritual – the counter-clockwise circumambulation of the Kaaba, the first part of the umra ceremony which pilgrims usually perform on arrival in Mecca. The tawaf ritual predates Islam, possibly by many hundreds of years, and its origins may be lost in the mists of time. Muslims associate the Kaaba with the prophet Ibrahim, the biblical Abraham, seen as the founder of a pure monotheism which slowly declined until revived in the 7th century by the prophet of Islam.

We shuffled barefoot around the four walls, pressed on all sides by men and women of many colours and languages. Men and women take part together, the men loosely cloaked in a white cloth thrown only over the left shoulder. The women cover their hair but leave their faces bare. Many pilgrims carried prayer books, some picking out the Arabic words with difficulty as they circled. Other read from texts in Urdu and languages in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

Some came in groups with a leader. The leader would prompt them on each word, which the others shouted out in unison, one word at a time. Many were praying for forgiveness, others simple words of praise for God. Wives and husbands came together, often the man standing behind the woman, holding her shoulders and trying to shield her from the crush. Pilgrims walk around seven times, joining the circle whenever they please and leaving when they are done. The circle has not been broken for years, day in, day out, all night as well, even during Friday prayers. The last interruption may have been in 1979, when rebels took over the mosque, leading to a long and bloody siege.

The first circuit seemed to take an age — actually, about 10 minutes — and I wondered how I would last another six amid the heat and the sweat and the crush. But it became rhythmic, even mildly hypnotic, and the time passed fast. Ahmed and I moved closer to the Kaaba, cutting into the narrow passage between the stone wall and the Station of Abraham, a cylindrical glass and copper case containing a block of stone with the imprint of a foot. A sea of hands reached up to touch the cover of the monument, seeking blessings. Ahmed was not inclined to go closer to the Kaaba, where the crowd was heaviest. Clerics say that in the tawaf it makes no difference how far pilgrims are from the Kaaba, as long as they are within the confines of the sanctuary.

Our tawaf done, we headed for the area behind the Station of Ibrahim for two quick prayers. The area was packed with people clambering over those praying as they moved about the courtyard. In the crush, someone trod on the small bag Ahmed was carrying, breaking his glasses. My mobile phone skidded away across the polished marble, through a forest of bare feet. For a moment I thought it was gone for good, but seconds later I caught a glimpse of it and retrieved it. As at many crowded religious gatherings, pickpockets are active at the haj, taking advantage of people’s preoccupation with their religious duties. The lower part of my white clothes had a small pocket, big enough for a passport and money but not for notebook, telephone and shoes.

We stopped for a cup or two of water from the well of Zamzam, to which many pilgrims attribute miraculous healing powers. The water flows from taps all over the mosque complex and servers ensure steady supplies of disposable plastic cups. The taste was distinctly alkaline. Many pilgrims came with large plastic containers, even of a gallon or more, and filled them to take home as gifts for their friends. A Nigerian pilgrim told me that a recent scientific study proved its miraculous powers

The next major procedure in the umra is the sa’y, a brisk walk between two small hillocks, originally in the open air but now under cover, with powerful fans to cool off the pilgrims. We thought we had started at the wrong end and would have to do eight lengths instead of the prescribed seven. But when we reached the hillock at the other end of the walkway, more than 400 metres away, Ahmed realised that the crowd had confused him. At the end of each length, as they mounted the hillock, pilgrims again raised their hands towards the Kaaba, hardly visible between the pillars of the intervening halls. I noticed with physical pleasure the small marble tiles on the sloped parts, designed for bare toes to grip on as they climb.

Compared to the tawaf, the sa’y was relaxed, but its significance was less obvious. Few pilgrims I met said the sa’y was especially inspiring. The orthodox explanation is that it reenacts a frantic run back and forth by Abraham’s wife Hagar as she sought water for her infant son, and then the miraculous appearance of the Zamzam well to meet their need. Anthropologists have other explanations, rejected by the faithful.

Our sa’y completed, we slipped around the corner where youngsters with small scissors were waiting to clip our hair. They cut about half an inch from five or six spots around our heads, enough to meet the minimal requirement. Later in the week, someone will shave our heads completely. The boys clearly expected a tip for their 20-second task but Ahmed said it wasn’t necessary. Extracting money from your ihram clothing is quite an ordeal.

Ahmed and I parted. He had come to complete the rites, but now I wanted to talk to some of the pilgrims and hear their experiences of what for many of them will be one of the most memorable events in their life. I wandered through the marble halls where families had encamped, spreading rugs and cloths of every colour and design, resting and breathing in the atmosphere of the sanctuary. Old men from India, fakir-like, wiry, bronzed and bearded, lay in their white cloths, half their upper bodies exposed. Egyptian matrons, past the 55-year threshold below which women pilgrims need the company of a male relative, sat cross-legged in groups , reading from the identical Korans which the mosque supplies to anyone who wants to borrow one.

They all looked too preoccupied for conversation so I headed back towards the Kaaba, thinking that perhaps I should take a closer look at the Black Stone, the mysterious possibly meteoric rock, now fragmented, set in the eastern corner of the building. Though the religious authorities disapprove of superstitious or idolatrous activities, they have not been able to persuade some pilgrims, especially simple villagers, that the stone is just a stone, as the Caliph Omar reputedly said.

I slid back into the circling crowd, easing my way slowly towards the wall of the Kaaba as we circled. After close to two circuits, I found myself in reach of the southeastern face of the cube, alongside men pressing themselves again the stone. A space opened and I stepped in, laying the palms of my hands against the wall for just a few seconds. I glanced to the side and saw the faces of my neighbours. One was shedding ecstatic tears, one was kissing the stone, one had taken off his embroidered cap and was rubbing it up and down along the surface of the wall. Down the line, another man had his prayer rug crumpled in his hand like a giant rag and was polishing the Kaaba with it as he chanted.

I moved along the wall towards the stone, half a side away, squeezed in the sea of heaving bodies. As we started to wheel around the corner, just three determined bodies stood between the stone and me. I tried to squeeze in for a closer look but my neighbours were stronger than me and the force of the crowd was more than I could hold back. We all swung around and the stone was gone.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has an op-ed piece in the New York Times called “Islam’s Silent Moderates” today asking why moderate Muslims have not protested loudly against the “teddy bear case” in Khartoum and the Qatif rape case in Saudi Arabia. She makes some good points, especially asking why the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has not said anything. The OIC is quick to defend Islam and Muslim countries when the criticism comes from the outside, including from her.

Then she wrote:

For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

“Why are the Muslims silent?” has been a mantra of many Western critics since at least the time of 9/11. It comes up fairly regularly after Islamist attacks or egregious cases of human rights violations in the Muslim world. It’s true that many Muslim leaders have avoided speaking out. But there have also been quite a few Muslim condemnations of terrorism that seem to have gone unnoticed. Something has been changing on this front and it has been evident these days. Hirsi Ali has either missed it or does not want to mention it.

Ramadan issued a clear statement over a week ago denouncing the Saudi rape verdict, the teddy bear verdict and the sacking of Pakistan’s supreme court justices. The secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Muhammad Abdul Bari, said the move to try Gillian Gibbons was “a disgraceful decision and defies common sense”. Two British Muslim peers flew out to Khartoum to negotiate her release.

This is not to say whether Ramadan or the Muslim Council of Britain are “moderate” or not (although the MCB made a “moderate” decision last week by voting to take part in the UK Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration after boycotting it for several years).

But these leading Muslims did speak out quite clearly and the Muslim peers defended a fellow British subject. On the other side, there was silence from the OIC and most of the Middle East.

So have some moderate Muslims, at least in western countries, been speaking up after all? Could the problem be that western critics of Islam haven’t been listening? Please give us your impressions.

——————

P.S. I noticed two days after posting this blog that Rod Liddle at The Spectator has made the same point about the way British Muslim leaders spoke out clearly in defence of Gibbons and against the Sudanese charges. His article starts on a very different track, arguing that Gibbons was released “far too soon.” She would surely disagree there. Anyway, Liddle then went on to say: “But — whisper it quietly — some considerable good may have come of the whole shebang. The most unequivocal and persistent protests about Ms Gibbons’s arrest, back home, came from Britain’s self-appointed guardians of Allah, the Muslim groups. Including the Muslim Council of Britain. Note the word ‘unequivocal’. They protested loud and strong and without those previously ubiquitous caveats always beginning with the conjunction ‘but …’. As in ‘We condemn this outrage entirely, but you have to understand that….’ This time there were no buts, just condemnation.”

The comments show quite a few readers don’t agree with Liddle, which makes it all the more interesting that he decided to highlight this aspect of the story so strongly.

Two Dutch politicians seem to be doing their best to stir up a controversy with Muslims. The far-right MP Geert Wilders says he wants to make a film for television about the Koran. Ehsan Jami, an Iranian-born local councillor who launched a Committee of Ex-Muslims in September, plans a film called “The Life of Mohammad.” Both are due to be ready early next year.

Shades of the bloody protests over the Danish Prophet Mohammad cartoons and Theo van Gogh’s murder for his film “Submission”…

Are we in for another “free-speech-versus-blasphemy” (or, to put it more bluntly, “West-versus-Islam”) clash?

Wilders, who has compared the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and called for it to be banned, says he only wants to express his opinions. “It is not my intention to offend people. I just want to illustrate my opinions, which I have expressed as a member of parliament,” he said. “If people do feel offended, that is a shame, but it is not my problem.” The Dutch justice and foreign ministers have met him to discuss the risks to himself and Dutch interests abroad if he makes the film. Jami says his film will “stir up more dust than the Danish Mohammad cartoons,” according to an interview with him in the Amsterdam daily De Telegraaf. “I show how violent and tyrannical Mohammad was. This man murdered three Jewish tribes, killed people who left the faith and married a 6-year-old girl, with whom he had sex when she was 9 … I will give 50,000 euros to anyone who can refute these facts.”

Is this a train crash just waiting to happen? Has anybody learned anything from the Dutch and Danish cases? Should anybody take precautions to prevent a clash — and if so, who should take which ones?

The Rome trip’s over and it’s back to other interesting religion topics — like Islam in Turkey.

The evolution of Islam and politics in Turkey is one of the most interesting recent developments in the Muslim world. One of the most interesting writers following this is Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul journalist who is deputy editor of the English-language Turkish Daily News and regularly posts his TDN columns on his blog The White Path. Some of his articles require familiarity with today’s Turkish political scene, but his latest is an informative stand-back guide to how “Turkey now nurtures an interpretation of Islam that is in harmony with modern values such as democracy, liberalism and capitalism.”

Akyol’s blog flags the article as “Turkey’s Veiled Democracy [A Must-Read Article].” It’s published in the November/December issue of The American Interest (here it is in PDF). In it, Akyol surveys the emergence of modernising trends in Islam during the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the secularist Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the rise of modern “neo-orthodox” Muslims who formed the governing AKP party.

A fascinating aspect is the changing place of religion in Turkish politics in recent years:

“… a survey entitled “Religion, Society and Politics in a Changing Turkey”, carried out in 2006 by political scientists Binnaz Toprak and Ali Çarkoglu, revealed that not only is religiosity thriving in Turkey; it is also moving away from political Islam. In response to the question, “Should there be political parties based on religion?” the percentage of respondents answering “yes” has dropped from 41 to 25 percent in the past seven years. Moreover, demand for “a religious state based on sharia” has dropped dramatically from 21 percent to 9 percent. Only 2 percent support harsh sharia measures such as stoning. Turkish Islam is flourishing, but not as an obscurantist or anti-modern movement—just the reverse.“

Another point he makes is the influence of a Muslim middle class in Turkey. Many militant Islamists combine Muslim religious thought and Third World liberation politics. The religious vocabulary might be from the Koran, but the political vision owes much to the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon and his 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth. Akyol notes the socialist slant of political thinking in the Islamic world in the 20th century and then writes:

“The rise of an Islamic entrepreneurial class is a remarkable phenomenon, marking the beginning of a new stage for Islamic civilization. Most people understand religion not only according to its textual teachings, but also according to its function within their everyday social environment. Islam’s social environment has been feudal, imperial and bureaucratic in the past and present for the most part. Now, in Turkey and in a few other Muslim counties such as Malaysia, Islam is being transformed into a religion of the middle class and its rational, independent, individualist ethos. Anyone who thinks this social transformation won’t change religion knows nothing about the sociology of religion.”

A frequent argument about Islam in western countries is that it cannot reform and is not compatible with democracy. Akyol makes a strong case for the opposite. Are the people arguing that Islam is inherently undemocratic watching what is happening in Turkey? Do you think it shows there are more options within Islam than the ones usually seen in the news?

The cautious Vatican reaction to the dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars has prompted one of the signatories to question whether the top Catholic official for relations with Muslims understands Islam. More specifically, Aref Ali Nayed has asked how Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran can say that a serious theological dialogue with Muslims is not possible because they will not discuss the Koran in depth. This debate (discussed in an earlier post here) is dense and highly specialised. But it may be at this level that this unprecedented dialogue could take off or fail to ignite.

Nayed, a former professor at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome and main spokesman for the 138 scholars, flatly refutes Tauran’s view. He says Muslims have always interpreted the Koran and studied it both historically and linguistically. Their methods were even the forerunners of the “historical-critical” method that Christians use with the Bible, he says. Protestants began applying this “higher criticism” to the Bible in the 18th century and Catholics accepted it only in 1943, making them latecomers to this exercise in Nayed’s view. I am no specialist on these details and will need to hear reactions from Christian theologians.

Readers interested in Nayed’s argument can read it on the website of Islamica magazine or read Cindy Wooden’s story for the Catholic News Service on it. I’ll just quote the crisp conclusion:

“Unfortunately, Cardinal Tauran’s statement turns out to be based on ill-founded ‘Islam versus Christianity’ ‘contrast tables’ developed and advocated by some ‘Islam experts’. Rather than unilaterally declaring the impossibility of theological dialogue with Muslims, Cardinal Tauran would have been wiser to ask Muslim scholars themselves as to what kind of dialogue they feel is possible, from their point of view. To unilaterally pre-determine what is possible and not possible for the other, on behalf of the other, is one sure way of achieving closure in matters dialogical.”

Until we get the Vatican’s official reaction to the Muslim scholars’ letter, we won’t know exactly how it plans to answer this criticism. But comments made by Pope Benedict before and after his election in 2005 strongly hint he has a well-developed view of the difficulty of holding a theological dialogue with Muslims. Fr. Samir Khalil Samir S.J., an Egyptian-born Catholic expert on both faiths who welcomed the dialogue appeal despite some reservations, published this long and detailed analysis of the Pope’s views on Islam in Asianews.it in April 2006.

Joseph Ratzinger is an old-school German professor and they don’t give in lightly. He was so opposed to blurring the differences between faiths that he criticised Pope John Paul’s spectacular Assisi inter-faith summit in 1986. But Pope Benedict found a way to pray with Mustafa Cagrici, the mufti of Istanbul, in the Blue Mosque last year. Are we hearing echoes of Goethe’s Faust (Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust — Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast) or should we look to another poet to explain this?

While we’re on the subject, Benedict and Saudi King Abdullah will meet at the Vatican next Tuesday for the first talks between the head of the Catholic Church and the monarch who is custodian of Islam’s holiest site of Mecca and ruler of a kingdom that follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam. Benedict has frequently noted the lack of religious reciprocity in some Muslim countries that bar the construction of Christian churches even though Western countries allow mosques to be built on their territory. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are not allowed to visit Mecca. Other religions cannot build houses of worship. Christians can’t even own a Bible. Abdullah’s visit will give Benedict the opportunity to repeat his complaint about the lack of religious freedom to the man whose country is regularly listed — as here by the U.S. State Department– as among the world’s worst offenders.

Tauran, by the way, is not the only one cautious about the Muslim scholars’ dialogue appeal. The British weekly The Spectator gave it a less-than-enthusiastic review.

An unprecedented call from 138 Muslim scholars for better Christian-Muslim understanding had a Warholesque 15-minutes-of- fame in most media last week. Their letter to world Christian leaders got covered widely in English-speaking media (including by Reuters) and much less so in many European countries, possibly because the news conferences presenting it were in London and Washington. Some reactions from Christian leaders were included in the reporting that day. The following day, the reaction from the Vatican — the main addressee of the letter that represents more than half of Christianity — made for another story (here is our report and the original Vatican Radio report in Italian).

The story has now faded from the headlines but it’s one of those developments that cry out for a next step. The Muslim scholars invited their Christian counterparts to a dialogue, so the ball is in the Christians’ court. More specifically, it’s in the Vatican’s court. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest and most centralised branch of the Christian family. The Muslims also have a bone to pick with Pope Benedict, who just over a year ago gave his famous Regensburg speech that implied Islam was violent and irrational. That sparked off violent protests in the Muslim world and, in turn, inspired 38 Muslim scholars to write a first letter in October 2006 that denounced that violence, asked for a dialogue (which Benedict had suggested in Regensburg) and questioned his understanding of Islam.

The latest letter is a follow-up, with a far larger group of signatories and the more ambitious goal of engaging in a theological dialogue with Christians. The wealth of Koran and Bible quotes cited and the argument that Islam agrees with the heart of Christian teaching — to love God and neighbour — showed these scholars want a long and serious theological discussion with Christianity.

The question now is how the Vatican will respond. Soon after his election in 2005, Pope Benedict downgraded the Vatican department dealing with Islam by folding it into the Church’s culture ministry. Muslim leaders complained that this meant he wanted to deal with Islam as a culture and not a religion. After the Regensburg fiasco, many apologies and a fence-mending visit to Turkey, the pope did an about-face in May 2007 and re-established the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue as a separate dicastery (department). But instead of restoring its former head, Islam expert Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, he picked former diplomat Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran to run it.

Even as they presented the appeal in Washington, Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr (a signatory) of George Washington University and U.S. Islam expert John Esposito of Georgetown University seemed sceptical about the Vatican’s willingness to actually follow up on this invitation. According to the transcript of their news conference, Nasr said “Most of the response that has come from the Vatican, after the Islamic protest and all of these things, has been diplomatic, not theological. The very first meeting in the Vatican [after Regensburg] was with Muslim ambassadors. These are people appointed as ambassadors, many of whom know nothing at all about Islamic issues. What is being evaded all the time are those underlying differences in belief that then cause the political and social differences to manifest themselves on the surface. We have to be honest enough to tackle that, and not to hide it in the closet.”

Esposito agreed: “I think that you do have a strong school of thought in the Vatican which does not seem to believe that there can be a theological dialogue with Islam. It’s based on what I regard as an old theological position, and it’s a position with which I was raised. Before I did my work for the last 35 years on Islam, I was trained as a Catholic theologian. In those days, the whole approach was that because Islam says that the Prophet is the final prophet and has the final revelation, therefore there can’t be any theological dialogue. It seems to me we’ve moved beyond that, at least we ought to move beyond that. But this is one of the questions that has arisen, and it has not been answered during this papacy. The response to Regensburg did not answer that.”

Another possible stumbling block stands out in the Muslim letter. The first section on the love of God argues that both Islam and Chrisianity make this their first commandment. That’s fine. But the letter quotes several suras from the Koran stressing that “there is no god but God, He Alone, He hath no associate, His is the sovereignty and His is the praise and He hath power of all things.” This is the doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God, that is fundamental to Islam and differs from the Trinity (three persons in one God) in Christianity. The signatories signalled they wanted to avoid the centuries-old disputes about this by not citing the most important sura for this doctrine (sura 112 –Say: He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.). But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t come up.

It would be interesting to see if anyone on the Christian side takes the initiative to work out a consensus of opinions about Islam, maybe a reply to the Muslims’ letter. An invitation to actual discussions would be even more interesting. Some Protestants might be ready to give this a try, but the Vatican famously “thinks in centuries” and could turn out to be the slow boat in the convoy on this.

Here are texts of the letter in English, Arabic, French and Italian.

Some further reactions to it:

Anglican Communion — Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
Church of England — Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali
World Council of Churches — General Secretary Rev. Samuel Kobia
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson (also president of the Lutheran World Federation)
Evangelical Alliance — General Director Rev. Joel Edwards
Arab News (Saudi Arabia) editorial
Gulf News (Dubai) editorial
Muslim Council of Britain — Assistant Secretary-General Inayat Bunglawala
National Review Online (U.S.)