“Christians and Muslims routinely mistrust, disrespect and dislike each other, if not popularly and actively rubbish, dehumanize, demonize, despise and attack each other.”
Hmmm … this doesn’t sound like your usual speech at a conference on Christian-Muslim dialogue.

“With such an explosive mix, popular religious conflicts, even unto genocide, are lurking around the corner.” Um, er … the gloves are really off.

“God forbid, a few more terrorist attacks, a few more national security emergencies, a few more demagogues, a few more national protection laws, and then internment camps, if not concentration camps, are not inconceivable in some places.”

The speaker was Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, sponsor of the Common Word project, at the opening of a public conference of 150 Christians and Muslims meeting at Yale University to discuss love of God and love of neighbor as the core principles of the world’s two largest religions.

Instead of speaking about love, however, his remarks focused mostly on the hate and violence he fears could erupt if the two faiths do not reach a better understanding of each other. Two other quotes give a further glimpse of his fears:

• The Holocaust of six million Jews, then the largest religious minority in Europe 65 years ago and still in living memory, is something that Muslims in the West now should contemplate as seriously as Jews do.
• This is the stage where Hutus and Tutsis, both Christian tribes by their own confessions, were at in Rwanda before the popular genocide by machete of nearly a million people in 1994. How much easier would it be for Muslims and Christians who have been fighting for over a millennium and have viewed each other with the deepest suspsicions since St. John of Damascus to slaughter each other?

See our news report here. Excerpts from Ghazi’s speech are on the next page.

Reactions to the speech were mixed. Several participants said it echoed fears widespread in the Middle East. Some thought it was overdone, but others felt it was a sober assessment of what could happen if … One pointed out it was hard to dismiss the possibility of violent religious strife when one of the leading figures at the conference is Bosnia’s Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric. Although he kept the meeting amused with his witty speech, his mere presence is a reminder of the murder of an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in July 1995.

Relations between Christians and Muslims are often in the news these days. What’s your opinion about the state of understanding or tension between them?

Arab Media and Society has published an English translation of the Arab League’s Satellite Broadcasting Charter approved by Arab governments at a meeting in Cairo in February, along with contrasting opinions of the charter widely criticised by advocates of media freedom. In essence, the charter incorporates restrictions which most Arab governments already apply to their own terrestrial broadcasters and to satellite broadcasters which operate from their territory. But the governments have tended to give the satellite broadcasters a little more freedom than they allow terrestrial broadcasters, most of which are state-owned.

The operative clauses for religious broadcasting are clauses 9 and 10 of article 6:

9. To comply with the religious and ethical values of Arab society and maintain its family ties and social integrity.

10. To refrain from insulting God, revealed religions, prophets, mazhabs (religious sects), and religious symbols.

As with several other clauses prohibiting certain types of broadcasts, the bans are stated in the broadest terms, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. But until the governments start to apply the charter to satellite broadcasters under their jurisdiction, it will be hard to predict what practical effect it will have.

For more on this charter, check out our reporting on the charter and reactions from Arab satellite broadcasters and Human Rights Watch.

Rising tension between Christians and Muslims in the Arab world have come out in the open with the expulsion of foreign Christian charity workers from Jordan and the conviction of a Catholic priest in Algeria. Although the cases seem different, the background is similar. Evangelical Christians have been increasingly active in the Islamic world, doing charity and development work and also seeking to convert Muslims. The missionary part is usually a crime in Islamic countries and local authorities — rightly or wrongly — often suspect the charity part is a cover for this proselytism. This sets the stage for clashes over religious freedom, national laws, Christianity, Islam and modernity — an increasingly frequent mix in a globalised world. It also has serious effects on the long-established but fragile Christian communities living in those Muslim countries.

In Jordan, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said this week that Christians had come to Jordan under the “pretext of charitable and voluntary activities, but they had violated the law by undertaking preaching activities and were expelled”. This followed a long report by Compass Direct News, an agency that focuses on persecution of Christians around the world, that Jordan had “deported or refused residence permits to at least 27 expatriate Christian families and individuals in 2007, a number of them working with local churches or studying at a Christian seminary“.

One report said those involved were from the United States, South Korea, Egypt, Sudan and Iraq. “It is puzzling that certain small groups with a few hundred members and which are foreign to Christians in Jordan and to the history of Muslim-Christian relations, permit themselves to speak in the name of Christians and act as protectors of Christianity as if it were in danger,” it quoted the Council of Churches, the highest Christian body in Jordan, as saying. AsiaNews says: “According to the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, the group of eight missionaries was distributing Christian material among the Bedouins to the north and east of the capital Amman.”

The Catholic Archbishop of Algiers Henri Teissier told William Maclean, our chief correspondent for North Africa, that increased activity by evangelical Christians in Algeria had caused problems for Catholics. “For the last two years, we have serious difficulties made for us by the Algerian administration every two or three months,” he said this week. “I think it’s due to the fight against the proselytising by evangelical groups … We are not responsible for this evangelism. But the administration continues to take measures against us … (Evangelicals) have arrived in Africa. And the first to have suffered from the actions of these groups are Catholics.”

Teissier was commenting on the case of French priest Pierre Wallez, who was given a suspended one year prison sentence last month for praying with Christians in western Algeria in a place not authorised for religious worship. The Christians were illegal migrants from Cameroon based on the border with Morocco, part of a shifting community of mostly Ghanaian, Nigerian and Cameroonian migrants who have been visited by Roman Catholics priests in the area for years.

Wallez was convicted under a two-year-old law that limits non-Muslim worship to specific buildings approved by the state. The law, which also forbids proselytism, was prompted by what officials have described as an increase in the activities of Christian evangelical groups. Complaints by government officials about the alleged conversion efforts have reached a crescendo in recent weeks.

Algerian observers say conversion among Muslims there is a marginal activity rooted in a mistaken belief among some Algerians that Western countries will more readily issue them visas if they have converted to Christianity.

These tensions have arisen before in different countries around the Muslim world and they’re sure to come up again. Do you think it’s right for Christians to go and break laws in Islamic countries to convert Muslims? Or is the question whether Islamic countries should have laws against conversion and missionary work in the first place?

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?