One example is often cited by Kjell Magne Bondevik, an ex-prime minister of Norway who is also a Lutheran pastor and a veteran of the inter-faith scene. In 2005, a Danish newspaper published a dozen cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which triggered protests across the Muslim world, in which more than 200 people were killed. There was a rise in social tension inside Denmark, not only between Muslims and others but within different segments of Denmark's Muslim minority. The trouble nearly spread to Norway when a Norwegian Christian paper reprinted the drawings. But Norway had a well-established set of relationships between Lutheran pastors and imams; that helped to keep tensions under control. That same Norwegian network faced a much harder test in 2011 when a disturbed young man massacred 77 people, mouthing Islamophobic slogans and protesting among many other things over Pope Benedict's softness towards Islam. Unspeakable as it was, that tragedy did not poison inter-communal relations in Norway; the existence of sturdy networks must surely have helped.
So wouldn't it be a good idea if the crisis-management capacity of religious leaders right across the world was equally solid? During the cold war, people slept fractionally better at night because they knew there was a "hot line" which American and Soviet leaders could use if tension, or apparent preparations for war, seemed to be getting out of hand. This reduced the chance of a global conflict starting by mistake.
The parallel doesn't quite apply to religious leaders because they don't normally have armies or weapons at their disposal. But things they do and say can either lead to an upsurge of violence or help to bring peace. Often the leaders themselves are not the best judges of how their words and deeds will be received. So from that point of view, cordial relations between the leaders of the world's faiths are surely a desirable thing, and of concern even to people who have little concern with faith as such.
Some cordial ties were on public view last week at two spectacular Christian ceremonies: the inaugural mass of Pope Francis on March 19th and the installation of Justin Welby as head of the Anglican Communion two days later. Yahya Pallavicini, one of Italy's leading Muslims, was in Rome for the papal festivities and later presented the pontiff with a book on Islamic mysticism. Among the colourfully dressed congregation attending the rites at Canterbury Cathedral, the heart of English Christianity, was Faisal bin Muaammar, an envoy of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah; he too was blessed with a personal meeting with his Christian host.
One of the Saudi visitor's reasons for being in England was to spread news of a new and very well-connected agency in the field of inter-faith encounter, recently established in a fine historic building in Vienna. Its prime mover is the Saudi monarch, who in 2008 invited 500 Muslim scholars to Mecca to win approval for the idea of an international dialogue with other faiths and cultures: such an idea can only be put into practice outside the kingdom, given that domestically, Islam has a monopoly on public religious practice. The other co-founders of the KAICIID Dialogue Centre are the kingdom of Spain and the Austrian republic, with the Holy See as an observer. Among the first projects will be joint work by Christians and Muslims to promote child welfare in Uganda. Senior representatives from the main world religions (both Asian and Abrahamic) make up a board of directors.
If people are a bit perplexed by the alphabet soup of institutions in this field, that is understandable. Here are just a few of them. The Alliance of Civilisations was founded in 2005 by the prime ministers of Spain and Turkey under the aegis of the UN; it deals more with culture than with religion, and it has the ethos of a UN agency. The new Saudi-backed centre has the glitz of a monarch-to-monarch affair, with Spain's King Juan Carlos prominently involved. The Common Word is an explicitly theological initiative which has another set of blue-blooded connections; it was launched by the Royal House of Jordan in 2007, and it involved Muslim scholars issuing a challenge to Christian leaders to engage in dialogue on the subject of love. Religions for Peace is an older NGO, launched in Kyoto in 1970 and now operating in New York; it is collaborating with the new Saudi-backed centre. The World Economic Forum, based in Davos, Switzerland, started a set-piece dialogue about Islam and the West after the 9/11 terror attacks. It was first known as the C-100, then it morphed into the the C-1, and more recently the World Dialogue Council. I told you it was confusing.
The reality behind these worthy institutions is in some ways simpler. A number of distinguished figures from the world's major faiths pop up in most of them: they include Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington DC, and Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia. These gentlemen know each other very well, and they have become efficient transmitters of the concerns of their respective faiths. The challenge, says Alistair McDonald-Radcliff, the Anglican director-general of the World Dialogue Council, is to "draw into the encounter people who are opposed to these encounters."
Such sceptics are not necessarily bigots or fanatics. A lot of decent religious people might have reservations about spending too much time on deliberations where they were continually urged to stress commonality, and play down difference, at the risk of compromising integrity. If inter-faith encounters make it impossible to have a robust theological debate, or to speak frankly about issues of religious freedom, they will risk bottling up problems rather than solving them. But not all the players in the inter-faith scene are noted for endless emollience. Lord Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, is an active promoter of inter-religious dialogue who has also spoken bluntly about areas of disagreement between his faith and Islam. In any case, getting people together without forcing them to lose integrity is exactly the challenge facing the organisers of these multiple and richly overlapping talkfests.
Source: The Economist
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