In Africa, Religious Harmony

Here's a beautiful story from Africa about mutual religious respect between Muslims and Christians, via Whispers in the Loggia.

The senior African prelate heading into the papal senate next month is 70 year-old Archbishop Theodore-Adrien Sarr of Dakar in Senegal. Ordained a bishop at 37 and named to the capital see of the West African nation in 2000, the cardinal-designate follows his princely predecessor Hyacinthe Thiandoum, who was given his red hat in 1974 and died three years back.

What marks Sarr out, however, is his status as the top hierarch of a nation whose population is 95 percent Muslim. What's more, relations between Islam and the church in Senegal are reported to be unusually strong, cooperative and reciprocal.

As evidence of this, after his nomination was made public the cardinal-designate noted that his elevation had been sought in prayer... by one of the country's senior imams:

The Senegalese prelate disclosed hours after his nomination that Muslim cleric Habibou Tall had predicted publicly he would be made a cardinal before the end of the year.

"He said he was going to pray for that to happen," Sarr told reporters. "I know he has prayed for that to happen and I thank him for that."...

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The Cause of Bishop Claverie of Algeria

Until today, I was unfamiliar with the story of this martyr of Algeria. John Allen gives a fascinating account of a timely saint. Here's an excerpt:

In many ways, the late Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran, Algeria, who was assassinated in 1996, and whose cause for sainthood recently opened along with 18 other martyrs of a bloody civil war that left 150,000 Algerians dead, could be a prime candidate for just such a simplification.

Claverie's death was part of the carnage created by the Islamic Salvation Front, a template for radical Islamic movements elsewhere. In that context, Claverie could seem a symbol for Christian martyrdom at the hands of jihadists, a patron saint for Catholic hawks in the "clash of civilizations." This was a man, after all, fully aware of the peril that stalked him, who refused to walk away, saying, "I cannot abandon Algeria to the Islamists."

On the other hand, Claverie was also a man of dialogue down to his bones; at his funeral in 1996, Algerian Muslim mourners described him as "the bishop of the Muslims too." Hence the doves could also stake a claim to his memory, as a sort of spiritual antipode to Islamophobia and the "war on terrorism."

Fortunately, we have a firebreak against such reductionist readings of Claverie's life and death: the powerful new biography A Life Poured Out, written by Fr. Jean-Jacques Pérennès, a personal friend of Claverie as well as a fellow Dominican. The book has already been published in French and Arabic, and is now available in English from Orbis.

In a time when discussion of Christian/Muslim relations is dominated by ideology and abstract theological debate, Claverie represents an utterly different path: a life lived as a "guest in the house of Islam," not blind to the challenges and never fuzzy about his Christian identity, but relentless in his commitment to friendship. Claverie's interest was what he called the "real, living Islam," meaning people rather than theories.

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Praying for the Impossible

Quoted in full from Electroblogster:

Last year Pope Benedict VI gave an intellectual speech with a provocative challenge that Muslims ought to denounce violence done in the name of their religion. In it he recalled a dialog between a Christian and a Muslum from around 1400 that had some strong language!

The immediate and NONintellectual reaction to the speech was to create a few new Christian martyrs and generally burn and smash things.

OK. One sector of Islam heard from. Is there another?

Where are the peaceful multitudes of the "religion of peace"? Probably terrified of sector one! But were are the intellectual leaders? Perhaps we have finally heard from them...

"In an unprecedented open letter signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars from every sect of Islam, the Muslims plead with Christian leaders "to come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions."

I have been praying for the impossible... the conversion of all Muslims. Maybe it is only my foolish hope - but I do hope that this is the beginning of a better world.

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Dialogue with Muslims

From Time Magazine:

One Western leader who has made a point of listening to the concerns of the
Christians of the Muslim world is Venice's Cardinal Angelo Scola, host of the
two-day encounter at the 17th century Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute.
Scola is rapidly becoming Catholicism's most influential voice — beyond the Pope
himself — on matters related to the Muslim world. From Venice, which for
centuries has served as a bridge betweeen civilizations, the Cardinal founded
Oasis, a cultural and study center and twice-annual journal that gathers
perspectives from Catholics in Muslim countries. The initiative is both as a way
to safeguard the rights of Christian minorities, and to promote mutual
understanding between the Church and Islam.

Hat tip: la nouvelle theologie

Dialogue with a Muslim Friend

In the January issue of Traces, a booklet was included titled Broadening Reason. One instance of that dialogue the the Pope called for in his famous Regensburg address happened in Milan on October 26, 2006. Two fascinating talks are offered there, one by Wael Farouq, Professor of Arabic Language and Philosophy in Cairo, as well as the response by Fr. Julian Carron, Professor of Theology and President of Communion and Liberation. A summary of this event is available online.

The occasion was an introduction to Fr. Giussani's book The Religious Sense in Arabic translation. Farouq discussed the importance of experience in knowledge and started his talk with the point that friendship is a way to understanding. The "religious man", Farouq said, is different for Fr. Giussani because he is not one "who shows off his morality or who lives in a heaven far removed from the reality of this world." This is what Farouq experienced with friends at the Meeting in Rimini.

That experience of friendship challenged him to face the problem of the Pope's lecture at Regensburg in a different way. Instead of succumbing to prejudice, he decided to "enter directly into a reasonable and critical relationship with this reality and this lecture."

Farouq searched his own Islamic tradition to find resonance with this reasonableness of religion. He quoted the philosopher Al-Kindi (801-873):

Those who they who have gone away from Truth. They nourish an enmity for philosophers so as to defend the false roles they have taken on without deserving them, only in order to stand out and to make 'commercial use' of [exploit] religion, while they are without religion. Because whoever would make commercial use of something would be selling it, and whoever would sell something, then it would not be his. And whoever exploits religion has no religion. It is right to discredit from faith whomever sets things in opposition to true science, calling [science] unbelief.

A final section is very interesting and discusses the difference in the conception of Arab reason as opposed to the European. Farouq points out that agricultural communities place a strong emphasis on "place". For the nomads, however, belonging is attached instead to the tribe. Words that would indicate a fixed location in Western societies instead suggest a passage for the Arabic mind. Memory becomes the "instrument and container of knowledge". Whereas for the West morality comes from knowledge, for Arabic reason, morality is conserved in memory and knowledge comes from that tradition of values. He explained:

[T]he function of reason would be to prevent man from committing evil and to incite him to do good. In this context, the summit of art is poetry; the art of the voice (which is also a movement in time), and the society's memory.

The booklet is well worth the $3.00, plus you get the current issue of the magazine Traces. For a copy, write to: The Human Adventure Corporation, 420 Lexington Ave. #2754/55, New York, NY 10170; ask for Traces 2007 No. 1.

Difference in Unity

This week Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice (also of CL) was New York for the promotion of his Oasis journal, an endeavor of religious dialogue. He also had a session at the United Nations. John Allen covers the story with an interview at his weekly column. Scola underlines the need for identity combined with mutual respect during a time of unprecedented movement of peoples. Here's an excerpt:

You've talked about the "hybridization of cultures" going on today.
Isn't there a risk of syncretism implied -- what the pope has called a
'dictatorship of relativism'?

In the first place, for me it's decisive that we be aware that we're
speaking of this hybridization, this 'cross-breeding,' as a fact that's taking
place. It's not an idea or a hypothesis. There are more than 200 million
immigrants at this moment in the world, and scholars who study this phenomenon
say there are two billion people who face the possibility, or perhaps the
necessity, of immigration in the coming years. This is a historic process
without precedent. We have to enter into this process and accompany it.
Obviously, the risk of syncretism is very strong. For my part, I believe we can
overcome this risk on two conditions. The first is to be well aware that any
process of 'mixing' is always one of great suffering, as the elemental
experience of mixing of races demonstrates. People suffer in their own skin this
reality; in English, the pejorative term 'bastard' expresses the fact. In a
sense, we have to 'purify' this process. The second condition is to always have
the courage to depart from the elementary experience of the human person,
holding on to the great principle of difference in unity. It's clear that I
can't play around with religious syncretism, but I can't avoid certain facts.
Ten years ago in Italy, the problem of Islam didn't exist. Now it does. This
risk of confusion, which leads some Christians to say 'one religion is as good
as another,' is here to stay. So we have to confront it critically, with the
principle of unity in difference. The key word, I think, is 'witness.' We have
to run the risk, but with awareness of what we're doing.

Hat tip Crossroads.