c. 2008 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ More than two years after a lecture by Pope Benedict XVI provoked outrage across the Islamic world, Muslim and Catholic leaders on Thursday (Nov. 6) ended a three-day summit to pursue closer relations between their two faiths.
The official theme of the meeting was “Love of God, Love of Neighbor.” But not surprisingly, the talks also addressed the same controversial issue _ religious violence _ that had prompted Muslim and Christian leaders to beef up their dialogue.
“The discrimination and violence which even today religious people experience throughout the world, and the often violent persecutions to which they are subject, represent unacceptable and unjustifiable acts, all the more grave and deplorable when they are carried out in the name of God,” Benedict told participants in the “Catholic-Muslim Forum” on its last day.
Tariq Ramadan, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who took part in the summit, said, “I think these are fair points. No Muslim should avoid speaking about this.”
It was September 2006 when Benedict, speaking at the University of Regensburg, Germany, quoted a medieval emperor’s description of Islam as “evil and inhuman” and having been “spread by the sword.”
The statement sparked Muslim protests worldwide, some of them violent, including the murder of a nun in Somalia and the burning of Christian churches in the West Bank and Gaza. Benedict later expressed his “regrets” and met with ambassadors of Islamic countries to soothe ill feelings.
The incident inspired two open letters to the pope from an international group of Muslim scholars and clerics, which in turn elicited the Vatican’s invitation for this week’s meeting.
The forum issued a final declaration that renounces “any oppression, aggressive violence and terrorism, especially that committed in the name of religion,” and affirms respect for “choices in matters of conscience and religion.”
In defending the rights of “religious minorities,” the document also rejects “any form of mockery or ridicule” of “their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred.”
That is apparently a reference to satirical cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, first published in a Danish newspaper in 2005, and later reprinted around the world. Violent protests against the cartoons included attacks on Danish embassies in several Muslim countries and led to dozens of deaths.
Establishing an emergency mechanism to defuse such controversies in the future is one goal of improved dialogue with Christian leaders, said Ibrahim Kalin, a professor at Georgetown University who served as spokesman for the Muslim delegation to the forum.
At Thursday’s formal presentation of the declaration, participants emphasized the harmony that characterized their discussions. But during the question-and-answer period, references to current conflicts reminded those present of the powerful tensions that still afflict relations between the two faiths.
When a man in the audience spoke passionately about the “genocide” and forced conversions of Christians in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, the response from a Muslim seminar participant was sharp.
“All the terrible genocide of Christians in the Middle East is a very, very small number compared to the genocide of Bosnians in the middle of Europe,” said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor at George Washington University.
Christian communities were tolerated for centuries in Iraq and other Muslim countries, but are today collateral victims of violence caused by the West, Nasr said, pointing specifically to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
“Muslims are being killed by powers who are nominally Christian,” Nasr said. “I’m extremely sad that this anger now spills over onto the heads of Christians.”
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