Near and Middle East

The international conference on interreligious dialogue held Wednesday 16 July in Madrid is good news in that it brought together the high representatives of the three Book religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to jointly proclaim their will towards dialogue and mutual comprehension. The conference was the intitiave of King Abdallah II of Saudi Arabia, a country embodying the most severe Islamic doctrine, Wahhabism. This paradox explains itself by Abdallah’s will to change the kingdom’s image, tainted by the 2001 terrorist attacks of which the majority of culprits were Saudi. At the end of the Madrid Conference, participants called for the organisation of a special session of the United Nations General Assembly dedicated to interreligious dialogue. At a time when relations between religions are too often the pretext for tension and nearly violence, such an initiative deserves recognition.

Friday 28th saw Dutch MP Geert Wilders publish his much talked of short-film on Islam called ’Fitna’. Whether the film itself is bad news is up to each person to decide. Content-wise the film does not differ from the hateful and intolerant words that are pronounced every day all over the world by radical and marginal groups but also by high level political figures in different shapes and figures - whether they are Christian, Muslim or nationalist. This is no news so why make it into news? Because the terrible news is the publicity that the film has received in media all over the world and the reactions that the film has caused. Indeed it is unusual that a Western MP displays such a lack of class. So why bother? Instead of asking for a UN-resolution that prohibits “insults on religions”, as the Organisation of The Islamic Conference has done, and in this way partly prove Wilders’ right in his critics, then prove him wrong. Right now, we are all losing.

The Grand Mufti of Syria came to address the European Parliament last week and sent a message of peace hardly compatible with Huntington’s “clash of civilisations”. Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun delivered his speech in Strasbourg as part of The European year for intercultural Dialogue. He insisted that the concept of culture was not divisive because there is only one culture, “the culture of mankind”. The spiritual leader rejected the very concept of holy war saying that only peace could be considered holy. He insisted on the importance of education stressing that clashes only happened "where there [was] ignorance, terrorism and backwardness”. He concluded by praising the European Parliament as an example of the miracle of the European Unification process which had managed to overcome two World Wars. He went on to ask MEPs to contribute to the creation of a universal Parliament to complete that process as, in his words, “the world is one”. These admittedly overenthusiastic words are nonetheless rather refreshing in an era of generalized pessimism and resignation and might have inspired a few MEPs not to give up just yet and building an ever closer union.