FaithWorld

INTERVIEW – Church abuse scandal can hurt other faiths – Mufti

Paul Taylor

Apr 15, 2010 06:42 EDT

A scandal over the sexual abuse of children by priests could harm the credibility of other religions as well as Roman Catholicism, a senior European Muslim leader says.

Mustafa Ceric, the spiritual leader of Bosnia’s Muslim majority and a key figure in Christian-Muslim dialogue, told Reuters he hoped Pope Benedict would act decisively to tackle the paedophilia problem and prevent further harm.

“The Church is going through a very difficult time and I wish the current pope will be capable and up to the challenge that he is put in,” the grand mufti of Bosnia said in an interview on Wednesday. He stressed his reluctance to comment on what he called an internal matter for the Church.

“It is unfortunate not only for the Catholic Church but for any religious association, and the damage to the moral credibility of the Catholic Church is going to have consequences on the credibility of other religious communities as well.”

Ceric, who has met the pope and championed Muslim interfaith dialogue with Christians and Jews, also warned against exaggerating the extent of the child abuse issue.

“I hope that the current pope will be able to grasp this problem with courage, with moral clearness, but at the same time I hope that exaggerations that are now against the Catholic Church and the pope will not go too far to make double damage,” he said, adding: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Read the full interview here.

GUESTVIEW: From “security” to compassion – a needed shift for Obama gov’t

Reuters Staff

Feb 19, 2009 12:34 EST

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Libyan theologian Aref Ali Nayed is a senior advisor to the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a leading signatory of A Common Word.

By Aref Ali Nayed

Being held in the early days of the Obama presidency, this year’s U.S.-Muslim World Forum in Doha last weekend was particularly luminescent with rays of hope. One was the very fact that its host, the influential Brookings Institution think-tank, invited faith leaders to discuss how to improve the dreadful state of relations between Washington and the Muslim world. The basis for discussion was A Common Word, an appeal by 138 Muslim scholars to Christian leaders to join in a dialogue based on the shared commandments to love God and love one’s neighbor.

That a theological and spiritual initiative is of keen interest to policy planners is indeed a fresh ray of light.  Basking in that hopeful light, moreover, I had the rare privilege for a Muslim theologian of listening to the U.S. CentCom Commander General David Petraeus expound there on a “network of networks” that constituted a “security architecture” for our Middle East region.

General Petraeus argued that security can only be achieved through a multi-layered and multi-faceted network of networks that involved training, tooling and equipping, information sharing, and infrastructure building.

I very much liked the talk of a network of networks and indeed agreed with the need for training, tooling, information sharing and infrastructure building. Alas, I had to keep reminding myself, while looking at the elegantly uniformed speaker, that it is a military network of networks that he was advocating and that all those nice-sounding activities pertained to matters military. It turned out that I very much liked the structure of what General Petraeus was proposing, but definitely not its content!

The training we truly need is training in compassionate dialogue between all of us and in compassionate living amongst each other. The tools and equipment we truly need are those of compassionate communication and understanding. The information sharing we truly need is the honest sharing of, and witnessing to, our loftiest ideals and values and the cooperative shedding of dark stereotypes and caricatures of others. The infrastructures we truly need to build are infrastructures of public and shared spaces in which we respectfully appreciate and cherish each other just as we stand firmly rooted in our respective traditions.

“Obama was elected by God” — Bosnian Grand Mufti Ceric

The Grand Mufti of Bosnia thinks the election of Barack Obama as American president is a gift from God that could help foster greater international tolerance of Muslims. “I believe that Obama is a divine sign to humanity,” Mustafa Ceric told me in an interview in Sarajevo. Americans “think that they have elected him, but I believe that he was elected by God.”

“Barack Obama is one of these most noble goods of our time and our civilisation, that is why I think he is a gift of God,” he said. “At the moment we feel a trend to change. Whether this change will be really in practice and life, we need time to see.”

Sometimes called one of the world’s most liberal grand muftis, Ceric is considered a voice of moderation with an international reputation. He is active in dialogue with other faiths and discussions of how Islam can integrate into European societies.

Bosnia may be the European country where this integration is most evident. The call for prayer from Sarajevo’s hundreds of mosques wafts over cafes where alcohol is served in abundance and young couples cuddle in a mix of East and West traditions that has long characterised the capital. Women wearing headscaraves walk in the old quarter alongside others with revealing tank tops and uncovered flowing hair.

Yet the post-Sept. 11, 2001 atmosphere has impacted the image of Muslims everyone, from Bosnia to Indonesia. Ceric blames former U.S. President George W. Bush for fuelling further suspicions by using charged words such as a “crusade” against terrorism. The Republican president “will be remembered for creating a sort of Islamaphonia,” said Ceric, who was educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo before receiving a doctorate at the University of Chicago.

Even with tolerance embraced by Obama, the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are likely still to face stigma, the Grand Mufti said. “We are going to live with Islamaphobia for the rest of our lives, with the same way Jews are living with anti-Semitism from time to time,” he said.