Iraq’s state television channel Iraqiya plans to broadcast Friday prayers from both Shi’ite and Sunni mosques, a novelty in a country where until now Islamic services were only shown on sectarian channels. That kept the two neatly separate. Rather than take either side, Iraqiya avoided broadcasting Friday prayers after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. But it began today with a live transmission from the Sunni Umm al-Qura mosque in Baghdad.

Station manager Nawfal Abd Dahash told Reuters in Baghdad: “We will start doing live broadcasts from mosques from both sects. This is to enhance national unity and to prove that there is no difference between Shi’ites and Sunnis.”

The broadcast came from the Baghdad neighbourhood of Ghazaliya, which until a few months ago was a stronghold for al Qaeda Sunni Islamists. It also came at a time when Sunni communities in many parts of Iraq are taking up arms to drive out the Islamists.

“Now is the time to heal the deep wounds made by this seditiousness and the conflicts that stemmed from this sedition. It is a time for forgiveness,” said Ahmed Abdul-Ghafour al-Samarrai, a Sunni Muslim cleric who led the Friday prayers.

“The time of revenge has gone. I call on each Iraqi person to be a like a doctor and heal the wounds of others because the wounds are deep and the pain is huge and the blood is still flowing,” he said.

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.

Two general elections on Sunday made it an interesting weekend on the religion&politics beat in Europe. Put simply, a pro-Catholic party lost in Poland and an anti-minaret party won in Switzerland. There was no link between the two votes and religion was not the main issue in either. But the faith factor was in the air and it highlighted two trends at the crossroads of church and state in Europe.

Poland’s Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski lost his election despite strong support from the powerful media empire of right-wing Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose outlets include the controversial Radio Maryja that critics call xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech , Poland’s president, have enjoyed support from older Poles and many clerics because of their fervent Catholicism. But Jaroslaw’s government got mired down in infighting and picked fights with the European Union, Germany and Russia. The Polish bishops, sensing the Church was being used for political purposes, told priests not to use the pulpit to endorse any candidates.

The Polish Catholic Church played a major political role before 1989, standing as an alternative to the Soviet-backed communist government in Warsaw. Since then, however, democracy, economic growth and European Union membership have changed the country profoundly. The close ties between some conservative political parties and the Catholic Church faded in most of Europe years ago and are fading now in Poland, even while a majority of Poles still attends church regularly.

A different trend was at play in Switzerland, where a party that campaigned against minarets on mosques and pledged to kick out “black sheep” (immigrants who commit serious crimes) became the biggest group in the Swiss parliament. The Swiss People’s Party (SVP) will not take over the government because the Alpine republic has a consensus- based system that ensures no one party exerts too much influence. But its populist leader Christoph Blocher can be expected to continue the campaigns against minarets (and mosque building in general) and against immigrants. This time, the religion concerned — Islam — is perceived to be on the rise.

The tougher line on building mosques has emerged recently in several countries, especially — but by no means exclusively — in the German-speaking ones. A dispute over a planned mosque in Cologne goes on (here local media reports in German) and the head of the Evangelical Church in Germany, the main Protestant body there, recently asked whether a series of mosques planned around Germany amounted to a concealed “claim to power” (Machtanspruch) by Muslim communities.

Building mosques has become a hot topic this year in several European countries. One of the issues is whether foreign funds, mostly coming in from Middle Eastern states without any official supervision, might be used secretly to build or finance mosques preaching radical Islam.

The French government has come up with an interesting way to handle this problem by creating a semi-official Foundation for Islamic Works. It is meant to take in donations from home or abroad and distribute them among the different organisations in the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM). Its books would be open and inspected by the state, ensuring the whole procedure is transparent. This would not stop donors from contributing directly, but it should limit it, officials say.

The foundation was actually announced in March 2005 but political rivalries leading up to last May’s presidential election put it on hold for two years . The foundation’s board has now held its first meeting.

The political wrangling behind the foundation says a lot about the active role the French state plays in dealing with Islam in France. Could this be a model for other countries?