Dialogue with Islam (Roberto and Rita)

Roberto and Rita came to talk to us about dialogue with Islam. It was probably my favourite session – we were all so impressed with their knowledge, balance, respect and honesty. Roberto is Italian and from 1980-2008 was in the Focolare in India. Since 2008 he has been in Rome at the Centre for Interreligious Dialogue. Rita is Lebanese and was in the Focolare in Jerusalem, and then in Jordan. From Jordan she travelled frequently to Iraq. She has just arrived at the Centre for Interreligious Dialogue. These notes are rather lengthy and disjointed, but I felt that what they had to say was really important, and inspired me to pray for the people of the Movement, Christian and Muslim, trying to live mutual love in very difficult circumstances.

They started with a question that had been put to them, namely, ‘Where do the extremist currents within Islam originate?’

Roberto turned the question around and said that we need to start by looking at the problems we create for others. He gave several pointers – my notes are not the most coherent, but capture some of these thoughts.

Within the Focolare Movement interreligious dialogue dates from Chiara’s meeting with leaders of other religions at the Templeton prize-giving in London in 1974. When everything seems to be falling apart we should try to see it as the birth of a new world, not the destruction of the old. We need to have the perspective that everything leads towards good. We should look to the world that will emerge, formed by the centuries of history that have gone before. Christianity and Islam have always had a problematic relationship. There have been people who have looked for dialogue and those who have opposed it. The recent events in Paris over Charlie Hebdo are nothing new. Someone had sent Roberto a cartoon from the 1950s depicting a holy Christian crushing the head of Mohammad. Because Islam allows polygyny, Muslims were regarded by the Church as impure. There were earlier efforts to establish schools of Arabic so that Christians could dialogue with their Muslim neighbours, but these did not survive. The Caliphate in Cordoba, southern Spain (Al-Andalus) gave rise to a golden age of culture and learning, with Muslims, Christians and Jews. It flourished from the eighth to the eleventh century and was based on mystical Sufi Islam.

The mosque of Cordoba, built on a Christian Church,
which was in turn built on a Roman temple.

Within Christianity the view that there is no salvation outside of Christ is taken out of context when applied to people of other religions. The phrase originally referred to apostate First Century bishops, not members of other religions. Most branches of Christianity and Islam are exclusivist, so dialogue will always be difficult.

The Second Vatican Council document nostra aetate, which deals with the Church’s relations with non-Christian religions, was something of a turning point in Catholic attitudes to Islam and other members of non-Christian religions. It refers to one God, maker of heaven and earth who speaks to all human beings. The document tries to promote social justice and freedom for all people. It was written over 50 years ago but is still relevant today. John Paul II went to Morocco and spoke in Rabat. Benedict XVI had a more problematic relationship with Islam but he also visited mosques.

We need to understand where our attitudes concerning religion in Western Europe come from, and to be wary of imposing them on others. The experience of the Reformation taught us that religion can cause wars and tare societies apart. As a result we privatised religion and took it out of the public sphere. The Enlightenment and increased laicisation in Europe that further separated religion and public life. We try to export this model not realising that it is intrinsic to our Western Christian experience, but doesn’t work in Asia or the Islamic world. What started off as a necessary distinction between religion, politics and public life became a separation. This in turn became an ideology (as we can see with the Charlie Hebdo affair). We don’t realise how much part of our DNA this is as Westerners, even within the Church.

When we speak of religious fundamentalism we shouldn’t immediately think of other religions. It is part of Christianity. American Pentecostal fundamentalism was taken up by other religions. While the Ayatollah Homeni was promoting a religious (anti-Western) revolution in Iran, Pope John Paul II was also filling squares in the name of religion. (The World Youth Days Pope John Paul II promoted are some of the largest Christian gatherings the world has known).

More recent immigration into Western Europe has brought people of different cultures into contact with one another. Europeans were not prepared for this and are fearful of this encounter. Roberto thanked the Volunteers of Lampedusa in Southern Italy who have been so active in welcoming refugees crossing from Africa. With the crumbling of the communist world, the West was looking for a new enemy. The energy crisis led to the scapegoating of Islam and the recent Gulf Wars. Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world but we don’t have the same geo-political interests there. Religion is pitted against a geo-political reality (oil).

The main message of Roberto’s presentation is that we should look to ourselves first before blaming the other. This is not to excuse extremism, or pretend that there is an easy solution or that dialogue is ever easy. The West is not, however, blameless.

Rita shared some of her experience as a Middle Eastern Christian. The Middle East is the birthplace of the three great monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Christianity dominated the area until Christians were displaced (or converted) in the seventh century, following the birth of Islam in Saudi Arabia. This was followed by the founding of the Caliphate, and establishment of the Ottoman Empire. Christians now form only 4% of the population of Jordan, but account for 25% of the economy of the country. Middle Eastern Christians generally have higher than average levels of education and income. 1948 saw the establishment of the State of Israel. This came as a shock to the Arab peoples of the area and there are still one million Palestinians displaced into refugee camps in Jordan, the Lebanon and Syria. This is still a very open wound.

There is a long-standing tension between the more moderate Hashemite tribes in Syria, Iraq and Jordan (whose monarch is still from the Hashemite royal line), and the Wahhabis, a revivalist movement that arose in the Eighteenth Century, which allied itself to the House of Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia. It is an austere, extreme form of Sunni Islam, whose followers are also known as Salafi’s. The Muslim Brotherhood is a more recent version of Wahhabism. They look to the use of violence in the early days of Islam, when it was defending itself against pagan Arab tribes, and replicate this in their modern-day struggles. Ideology, poverty and ignorance, together with manipulation by political and economic forces, create a fertile ground for those looking to violent forms of Islam today. We should not forget that these extremist groups cause great suffering to fellow Muslims, who are their main victims. In Iraq and Syria the intellectual elites have been killed and exiled. In Algeria 20 Christians were killed, but 110,000 Muslims, all in the name of Islam.

Roberto then talked about the Muslims within the Movement. We can look back to Chiara’s reception of the Templeton Prize for Religion in London in 1972 as the beginning of our inter-religious dialogue. We were donated a former convent in Algeria. A French teacher in Algeria who knew the Movement, and later the focolarine also, became friends with one of the students, the son of a local imam. At first there was distrust, with the Muslims afraid that these Christians were there to proselytise, but gradually a deeper relationship grew up. With the civil war it was too dangerous for foreigners to stay, and the Muslim friends and members of the Movement took things ahead. Muslims and other observers at the General Assembly in September made an important contribution in opening the Focolare out to other perspectives.

Another step in our relations with Muslims was Chiara’s friendship with the Black American Muslim leader, W.D. Muhammad, who invited her to speak in the Malcolm X mosque in New York. This friendship between the African American Muslims and members of the Focolare Movement in the USA has continued, and 25 members of the black Muslim community are coming to Rome to visit Chiara’s tomb.

In Macedonia, and some other Eastern European countries, members of the Catholic and Muslim members of the Focolare work closely together. There are joint primary school projects in Macedonia for Christians and Muslims, in an attempt to build a more integrated future for the country.

Rita then went on to talk about the tragic eviction of the ancient Christian communities, which date back to the first centuries of Christianity, from the Plains of Nineveh in Iraq. Most of the Christians, around 100,000, had been forced to flee their villages and their ancient Chaldean churches were destroyed, by IS (ISIS). Many fled to Mosul, the ancient city of Nineveh, only to be killed or forced to flee once more. They included many members of the Movement. What had taken two thousand years to build was destroyed in a single night. One of our people there was a volunteer with two small children and a new baby. They had to flee in the night without food, clothes, papers or anything else, and walk to Kurdistan. In Mosul some Muslims risked their lives to help their Christian friends and neighbours. The volunteers there showed great heroism and love, opening their homes to these refugees. Many had fifty or more people in their houses. One volunteer gave up even his bed, sleeping in the car. Another had a new house, just finished. She was looking forward to living there, and then thought, ‘I look forward to going to the Mariapolis in order to love, but now the Mariapolis has come to me’. She welcomed more than 40 people into her home. 

In Jordan where Muslims form 90% of the population many of our members are Muslim. They are very faithful to the Ideal and live a very deep reciprocal love. When they saw what had happened in Iraq in the name of Islam, some said that they felt ashamed, but they wanted to help and made the communion of goods to help the Christian refugees. This collection of goods spread to their friends and neighbours. Only a great love can give hope in the face of a great suffering. We need to remember that God is also the Lord of history.

Two Muslim theologians who are members of the Movement are translating the writings of the Focolare into an idiom that can be lived by Muslims. They want to hear Chiara without mediation, but there are ways of translating other concepts into an Islamic form.