Topic: Interfaith Dialogue 2: Trends and Changes within the Contemporary Religious Scene

Interfaith Dialogue 2: Trends and Changes within the Contemporary Religious Scene

Doris Donnelly
Before we officially open our session on Interfaith Dialogue, let me express my gratitude to the Jordanian Minister for the kind words from His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

One of the enchanting offerings of this majestic city of Prague is its series of stunning bridges, and if I might suggest, it is the image of the bridge that is most apropos for our concluding session on the “Interfaith Dialogue, Trends and Changes within the Contemporary Religious Scene”.

Bridges are not exclusionary. They are by their very nature signs of openness. They welcome the stranger and allow the citizen to leave. They do not restrict movement; in fact, they suggest a willingness to listen and to engage in conversation with those who bear and who bring new ideas. Many new ideas have been brought to the table during this gathering and conversations have taken place in corridors and corners, over food and drink, among speakers and attendees eager to hear and advance civilized discourse to build a future for a world that at times seems to have lost its way. We continue that conversation now.

Bridges are also signs of hospitality—and all of us who have gathered at Forum 2000 have been beneficiaries of extraordinary hospitality. I feel confident that I express a warm sense of appreciation for these remarkable days and the kindness and generosity of our hosts.

Most particularly, the image of the bridge fits hand-in-glove with the life’s work of our host, President Vaclav Havel, who epitomizes the model of the one who has built a bridge from East to West with consummate skill and peacemaking know-how. He defied the odds—those who said the river below was too tumultuous, too dangerous—and succeeded in leading a quintessentially flawless revolution of the twentieth century.

Of course, bridge builders are in critical demand today in the arena of inter-religious dialogue since religion, often regarded as healer of wounds is too often now perceived as their cause. Fortunately, we have a panel of guests committed to solving, not exacerbating religious misunderstanding.

I have a very gracious gentleman to my right, the key-noter this morning, David Martin, will go first. You can read about him in your portfolios, the information that you received for the conference. You will note that he comes with exceptional academic credentials. He is the author of 20 books. He is a professor emeritus in several places, but notably the London School of Economics. I submit he is also a bridge builder, having given us the gift of understanding secularization and its relationship with religion, as well as the interconnections of sociology and religion. In fact, he wrote the book on the subject. I want to emphasize he wrote the book on the subject, the seminal book, and he also rewrote it and updated it. He is our speaker who will frame the issues that I mentioned at the very beginning. The floor, as they say, is yours.

David Martin
Thank you very much for your very kind comment. I’m taking a bit of the original idea which has to do with culture wars, so I’m afraid that there is a kind of gear shift and I am going to talk as a sociologist, although from time to time I will try also to be a theologian.

This is called the religious and the secular, some pressure points and some alignments. It’s mainly Europe and it could even be a bit British. And I cast my comments in terms of a contrast between Western and Eastern Europe, and I begin in the West with the period of relative religious stability following the Second World War. The Catholic Church had largely abandoned its alliance with authoritarian regimes in favor of an alliance with liberal-conservative forces under the aegis of Christian Democracy with the support of the USA. Whereas the United States, with its pluralistic traditions and Protestant origins, had once seemed to the Vatican to be a problem, it was now an ally against the threat of “Godless communism”. This new alignment influenced the rapprochement with the modern world achieved by the Vatican Council in the sixties, whereby the Church abandoned its traditional demands for preferential treatment by the state, though old attitudes remained: opposition to divorce in Italy, birth control in Ireland and new reproductive technologies everywhere.

However, the sixties saw another major shift which undermined European religious and social stability. It began in the United States with a revolt against capitalist individualism in favor of self-expression mixed with utopian communitarianism. Young people condemned capitalist utilitarianism while revitalizing earlier standards of morality and aesthetics. The result was a massive fragmentation of the western cultural tradition and of its accepted standards, whether Christian or Enlightened, in favor of what some call a post-modern and even a post-secular condition. This generation is now in power in many parts of the West, particularly in its central communications systems and its educational institutions.

The cultural shift of the sixties occurred against a longer -term cultural background informed by varying versions of the Enlightenment and by particular views of scientific advance as hostile to religious faith. And although a humanistic and rational Enlightenment forged alliances with science, science was also promoted as an imperious ideology undermining the shared assumptions of humanism and of religion alike. The sixties generation simultaneously rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the technological reason they associated with science. On “green” issues this generation sometimes adopted a neo-pagan pantheism.

So complicated vectors of conflict were set up, and old alliances became confused. Those alliances had taken many different forms: German Idealism and Romanticism, French rationalism, and Anglo-American pragmatic empiricism. These different forms looked back to very different Enlightenments, even though the French Enlightenment proclaimed itself definitive, and motivated radical opposition to the Catholic Church in Latin Europe and Latin America. In Protestant Germany, Britain and America modest Enlightenments and Christianity could co-exist and inter-penetrate, as they certainly do in the United States. Arguably, it was the totalitarian strain in the French Jacobin tradition that led to the secular totalitarianism of the Russian Revolution and engulfed Eastern Europe after the Second World War.

The passionate righteousness and relativistic attitudes of the sixties led to equally paradoxical consequences with regard to multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, like secularization, is simultaneously a description and a prescriptive ideology. When the prescriptive elements of multiculturalism and secularization combine together they result in secularism rather than mere secularity, and so they exalt a monocultural ideal to which other cultures are expected to conform, on pain of excommunication.

Let me explain. Initially the quite modest reality of multiculturalism was deployed to undermine a majority culture animated by a diffuse Christianity and attached to national traditions. Christianity and national traditions alike were condemned as guilty of oppression, imperialism and violence. Such a prescriptive secularism mandated extensive re-education of populations through its dominance in the upper echelons of the education system, and, to some extent, of the bureaucracy. Prescriptive secularism, with a multicultural agenda, was imposed by the elite to the detriment of previous cultural traditions. At the same time, these elite declared that nothing was forbidden or sacred. In the arts this meant denying the validity of the very secular canon which the liberal elite had previously espoused. It was self-destructive, particularly since the transgressive gesture depends on the maintenance of some sacred against which to transgress.

However, with the emergence of Islam as part of the multicultural ensemble, concern for minorities at the expense of majorities, including Christianity, mutated into an older alarm about religion in general as a regressive force, but of gender, modern science, violence and individual freedom of choice. The result was yet another confused vector of opinion, since Christianity was by now, and Protestantism especially, implicated in the inward and individualistic assumptions of European liberalism.

The complexities of these genealogies do not matter here, because the (selective) resistance of Islam to western values, which the liberal elite once applauded, now became a manifestation of the inherently backward nature of religion, per say. An older militant Enlightenment re-emerged, bolstered by a scientism based on an ideological construction of the relation between faith and science in the course of the nineteenth century. The concept of fundamentalism was used to cover both conservative Evangelical Protestantism in the United States and militant Islamic resistance to western liberal imperialism. So, the notion of multiculturalism, which might have buttressed the concept of different and multiple modernity, reverted to a triumphalist assertion of secular liberal criteria of modernity as public policy. So, no sooner had the Catholic Church engaged in aggiornamento than the partisans of secular liberalism adopted their own cultural triumphalism.

Here I come to some pressure points between secularism and religion in the West. One is the idea of unlimited self-realization, including transgressive assaults on the sacred. These assaults Christianity has had to learn to endure patiently, whereas Islam does not, as the case of the Danish cartoons shows. The affaire foulard in France is different because wearing the hijab offends republican insistence on the privatization of religion, though it is precisely modern, autonomous Muslim women who wear the hijab to affirm cultural identity. Here French secularism is exactly the reverse of American pluralism, since in America the separation of Church and state means that all religious bodies have a right to “free exercise” and to put their point of view in the public sphere. The French position, echoed also in Kemalist Turkey, makes sense given French and Turkish history. What causes trouble is the attempt to impose mandatory privatization throughout a very variegated Europe.

Pressure points also arise from the gender revolution in North America and Western Europe. The Fathers gathered at Vatican II could only carry aggiornamento so far, avoiding issues of the rights and roles of women, notably birth control. Religions carry forward a template of social survival, and so have laid stress on fertility while treating the feminine as a dangerous and irrational expression of the sensual. The abandonment of this template will take time. Meanwhile, the contest between the right to life and a woman’s right to control her own body continues to focus that problem.

In the East the gender revolution and the “turn to the self” are maybe less advanced. Moreover, under the conditions of secular totalitarianism, religion emerged simultaneously as an expression of conscientious humane resistance and of national resistance to foreign domination. This national resistance to foreign domination drew both on liberal ideals of national self-determination and on traditions of religious nationalism fostered in response to Hapsburg imperialism and Islamic imperialism under the Ottomans. However, with the fall of communism, some communist elites shifted their ideological location, and used religion instrumentally to foster nationalism. Religious elites, some of them penetrated by the authorities in the communist period, were sometimes happy with this, most notably in Serbia and in Russia itself. All this, and the accompanying corruption in some countries, is anathema to liberal elites in the West.

Here I take Greece as my example because it was for a long time the only Orthodox country in the EU and had not suffered a period of foreign-supported communist domination. There is an interesting contrast here between Catholic Ireland in the Northwest and Orthodox Greece in the Southeast, because in Ireland a Church traditionally bent on enforcing its moral norms on the whole population encountered the animus of a new political generation nurtured in the sixties and seventiesand the consequences of prosperity under the EU. The influence of the Church waned. In Greece, by contrast, the Orthodox Church made little attempt at control in the moral sphere but raised the flag of religious nationalism both in relation to Turkey and to the EU. This religious nationalism in many countries of Eastern Europe is wary of the gender revolution and parts of the human rights agenda, for example, an open religious market. Nor has anti-Semitism entirely disappeared.

Two points in conclusion. The concept of civil society includes a positive role for the churches in the public sphere, since their ethos complements the rational bureaucratic provisions of the state. Though religious schooling can be controversial, the disciplines and motivations fostered by religion are much sought- after by an otherwise secular population. On the other hand there is a demand that religions adopt the liberal lingua franca. This restriction came into focus with the debate over the preamble to the EU constitution.

The second point concerns a tension between religion as the faith of a people in a place and religion as diaspora and as international voluntary association. In a globalized society there are tendencies towards religion as diaspora and as a portable identity realized in an international voluntary association. The example of the United States shows that once religion no longer seeks a monopoly or enforcement of its norms by the state, churches have every right to present their particular priorities in the public sphere.

Doris Donnelly
Someone wrote in a review of Professor Martin—one of Professor Martin’s books—that it was magisterial. Actually, this address to us, fifteen minutes' worth, is also magisterial. It has concisely surveyed the lay of the land with regard to the subject at hand today, and we’re very lucky that we’re going to have it in print or on the internet someday soon.

Our next speaker is Professor Shlomo Avineri, professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and director of the Institute for European Studies in Israel. I have to say that all of the people on the panel here have been visiting professors at all of the major universities all over the world. Professor Avineri, in particular, at Yale and Cornell in the United States, also in Australia at the National University there, at Oxford, at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC, and it just goes on and on, and all of his awards go on and on. But I do want to say parenthetically that I’ve never met him before until this meeting, but one of the things that I’ve noticed about Professor Avineri is that all kinds of people gathered around him for his wisdom and his counsel, his advice. If there is any gift needed in bridge-building, it is the gift of friendship. And to my mind, and from what I saw, Professor Avineri exudes friendship. Across borders, across gender, across religion as well. So it is a particular privilege that I introduce someone who I now count as a friend—Professor Avineri.

Shlomo Avineri
Thank you so very much for this kind and slightly embarrassing introduction. I am very happy to be here in Prague and share the podium with my colleagues and especially with Shirin Ebadi. Prague is a city of exquisite bridges and extraordinary legends of miracles. For an Iranian and Israeli to share a podium is today little less than a miracle, and I hope it will help in building yet another bridge.

Let me also express my thanks to the Jordanian Minister for the kind words from His Royal Highness Prince Hassan bin Talal of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Prince Hassan, as well as his late and lamented brother, King Hussein—descendants of the Prophet—have shown to many of us in Israel that bridges can be built, not only across the Vltava but also across the Jordan. I would appreciate it if the Minister could convey the thanks of many people in Israel, as well as my own personal thanks, to HRH for what he has been doing and will no doubt continue to do in bringing peace between Jews and Muslims, between Israelis and Arabs. It is an arduous task, but Prince Hassan has shown how it can be done, with deep religious commitments on one hand and an equally deep commitment to tolerance and universal values.

I should mention that I speak here today as a political scientist who is Israeli and Jewish, but basically as a secular person, who is nonetheless linked to the Judaic tradition. If I do not pray at a synagogue—and I don't—it is the synagogue, rather than the church or the mosque, in which I do not pray. While I revere churches and mosques and like to visit them, I revere them in the way I revere the pyramids and other examples of human architecture and human wisdom. The synagogue, on the other hand, is an expression of a tradition to which I belong historically, though I may not live up to its commandments. It is a conscious decision on my part not to pray at a synagogue, while it never crossed my mind whether I should or should not pray at a church or a mosque. What I will say, therefore, comes from the point of view of a social scientist, aware of his heritage, yet not from the inside of a religious tradition or in the spirit of theological disputation.

Professor Martin was right in his basic contention earlier regarding the Enlightenment view of religion, and I would like to take this as my point of departure. The enlightenment project, mainly under the impact of Protestantism, has basically misunderstood the role of religion in human history. The Enlightenment, as originating in Europe and North America, and later in its attempts to universalize its message, starts from the premise that religion is basically a private matter and therefore can be compartmentalized from the public sphere and divorced from it. Hence the idea of the radical separation of religion from politics.

While I understand the historical context in which this view emerged in Europe after centuries of murderous religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, this seems to me to be a wrong reading of history and of human behavior. For at the end of the day, religion and the state both vie for a role in the public sphere, and cannot therefore be as neatly and as totally separated from each other as the Enlightenment project maintains.

Let us take an extreme example—that of abortion. So that there should be no misunderstanding, I should mention at the outset that I believe that on basic moral grounds women should have the right to decide on pregnancy and abortion as part of their human autonomy and that there should be no legal bans on abortion. Yet, on the other hand, if there are people who, out of their religious convictions, believe that abortion is murder, then—while I strongly oppose their view and its legal consequences—there is no way in which one can banish these people from expressing their views in the public sphere. Hence, they obviously have every right to translate their views into supporting anti-abortion candidates in elections and opposing pro-abortion candidates and legislation. That I personally oppose their views is irrelevant to the fact that what is their religious belief cannot be banned from the public discourse – nay, has a place in the public sphere as one of the legitimate positions on an issue which is by its very definition a complex moral dilemma. Therefore, private, religious views about abortion will inevitably became a bone of contention in the public sphere.

Similarly, the issue of head scarves, the hijab. The issue has obviously numerous aspects— feminist, problems of parental authority (and coercion), etc. But to suggest that this is merely a private affair and has no place in a public institution (be it a school in France or a university or government office in Turkey) just overlooks the fact that religious beliefs cannot be segregated into merely private space. If a woman believes (and I do need to state that I obviously I disagree with this view) that her religious convictions make her feel that she is naked, or unprotected, if she does not cover her head—I can see no reason not to allow her to follow her beliefs in the public sphere as well as in the privacy of her home: it is obvious that her feeling that she needs to be protected is certainly stronger when she is in public than in her own home. While I understand the historical contexts of French and Turkish legislation in this respect, they are wrong because of what is an erroneous and schematic ideological distinction between the private and the public which totally misunderstands and misrepresents religion as it has evolved historically.

A second point I would like to discuss comes out of some comments made by Mr. Zogby, though I may take a different route than the one taken by him. In the debate in the last decade, and especially after 9/11, about Islam, it is erroneous and wrong—both historically and morally—to discuss these issues by referring to religious texts rather than social texts.

Let me explain. Religious texts are not only ambiguous and open to rival and contradictory interpretations—and these interpretations have changed over time. The point is that when you take a quote—be it from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament or the Koran—you can always find the opposite quote in the same holy book. So as not to embarrass anyone, I would refrain from giving examples. Let me just mention the argument which has been made repeatedly in the last years and which serves as the theoretical under-pinning of so much of the case for the “Clash of Civilizations”, that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Those who make the argument quote passages of the Koran which seem to support their claim. On the other hand, apologists for Islam come with counter-quotes. This is useless and beside the point.

The reason for this is simple: a similar argument could be made about every religion—if one looks at holy texts. Certainly the argument could be made regarding Christianity (and Judaism). One thing about which the Papacy and a secularist like Mazzini would have agreed on in the 1850’s would be that Roman Catholicism and democracy are irreconcilable, and the 19th century Papacy made it at that time even a cornerstone of its doctrine with ample quotes from the Bible and the Church Fathers. Anyone looking at it in the 19th century context would agree that Catholicism and democracy were deeply and irreconcilably antagonistic to each other. Today, on the other hand, Christian Democratic parties are one of the three pillars (next to liberalism and social-democracy) of the European democratic scene. None of the biblical texts have changed; social and historical contexts have been transformed.

The same applies to Islam. Am I saying that just as mainline Catholicism has changed in a real political sense its attitude to democracy, that the same will necessarily happen in Islam? No, because I am not a deterministic and I do not believe in universal laws of developments that apply everywhere and under all circumstances. What I am saying is that what happened to Christianity may happen with Islam, and Shirin Ebadi here is an example of this potential. Whether it will happen or not will depend on a multitude of contingent factors—social, economic, political. The question is historical, not theological. Hence, both those who stereotype Islam negatively by quoting some Koranic texts, just as those who idealize it uncritically by quoting alternative texts, are—to my mind—wrong and irrelevant. Development will depend on human agency, on social movements, political parties and leaders. One can only hope that forces similar to those that helped reconcile Christianity with democracy would be operative in the Islamic context. I am not sure. I can only hope.

It is also for this reason that the thesis of the Clash of Civilizations is so wrong. Yes, there is today a battle being waged,– but it is not between Islam and the West, but within Islamic societies themselves. Just as Christianity is not—nor has it ever been - a monolithic entity, the House of Islam has many rooms. If there is a chance that the more extreme, xenophobic (and occasionally murderous) trends of Islam will be defeated, this will happen only if more moderate forms of Islam will prevail, not as an outcome of external forces that will “defeat Islam”. Like Christianity, Islam should not be “defeated”. It can—and should—confront modernity just as Christianity did and transformed itself in the process. And this can be achieved only by Muslims, not by outsiders telling Muslims what they should do or forcing them to follow what is considered normative in the West.

Finally, two specific challenges—one to Europe, the other to Muslims and both relate to the presence of Muslims in Europe today.

It took European nations some time—and the Holocaust was a central signpost in a tragic history—to accept Jews as equal citizens in their midst. There was a long road from mere tolerance to equal citizenship. Sometimes equal citizenship depended on what was politely called “acculturation” (it had also other, less polite terms as well), that Jews should stop dressing differently, should stop using their own language or jargon, should “reform” their religious practices to conform to the more “enlightened” practices of Christian or post-Christian society—in other words, to stop being “others”, to stop being so photogenically different, in short, to look and behave “like everyone else”. It took European society some time to realize that such conditionality was basically hierarchical, triumphalist and not egalitarian.

Today, Europeans realize that true equality means you accept Jews as they are and as they see themselves. The same should apply to Muslims as well. I do not plead for multiculturalism, – but for acceptance of the “other” as they see themselves. One has to accept the legitimacy of difference. This is not always easy, but just as it took some time for Europe on both the social, not only the legal, level, to apply it to the Jews, the time has come to apply it to Muslims in Europe. And just as not seeing “the Jews” as a danger to Europe was a pre-condition for the true equality of Jews in European countries, so talk about “the Muslim danger” is not acceptable. Fighting terrorists and murderers, of whatever stripe and religion, is one thing. Muslims are not a danger. They are people.

There is an equal challenge to Muslims in Europe. Traditional Islamic thinking made a dichotomic distinction between Dar al-Islam (“The House of Islam”) and Dar al-Harb (“The House of War”). Historically, most Muslims have lived in Dar al-Islam, which was at war, in one way or another, with Dar al-Harb.

Today a novel situation exists, with millions of Muslims living outside the historical Dar al-Islam in Europe. The question is: is contemporary Europe Dar al-Harb, the House of War, i.e., not only the Other, but also the Enemy?

Some innovative Islamic thinking would be needed here, and I realize it is not easy. But if Muslims will continue to view Europe as Dar al-Harb, the voices which call in the West for a Clash of Civilizations will be greatly strengthened.

These are not easy challenges on both sides. They involve basic paradigm changes of Oneself and the Other. They also involve realizing that tolerance is not necessarily loving the other. It may entail feeling unease, even “suffering” the other, as the Latin root of “tolerance” (tolere—to suffer) suggests. But it must entail respect—on both sides.

Doris Donnelly
Lots to think about... Mohamad Bashar Arafat, President of the Civilization Exchange and Cooperation Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland.. And I want to emphasize Baltimore even though Imam Arafat travels all over the world like the rest of them. He has localized his efforts, his mission in Baltimore, for the most part. He has served as Chaplain at John Hopkins University. He is the president of the Islamic Affairs Counsel of Maryland. He has taught at Roman Catholic seminaries, Saint Mary’s, a major seminary in the United States. He has taught at the University of Maryland, he has taught at Goucher College, which is also in Maryland, and at another Roman Catholic institution there, Notre Dame College. He is interested in sharing education with regard to Islam with young people, college aged people and beyond.

Mohamad Bashar Arafat
I thought to start in the following way after listening to what was said a few moments ago.

When I was the “Campus Imam” at John Hopkins University, a Catholic engineer used to come to me to ask questions about Islam since he was about to marry a Muslim girl from Pakistan. After a couple of months of coming back and forth, he said: “My mother noticed that I was interested in Islam so she called her priest and told him that her son is considering converting to Islam, and is that ok?” At that time she did not know anything about Islam. The priest said: “You do not have to worry. Islam is like the first Protestant religion that broke away from Catholicism!” I thought that was an interesting and humorous perspective. If you look at the way Muslims view Jesus and the position of Martin Luther, we have a lot to talk about.

As you can see from this story, I would say “metaphorically” that we need many Martin Luthers to continuously reform what has been said previously during many different times and what might not be suitable for today. That could be applicable across the board.

I am saying that and steering away from my prepared notes in response to the earlier presentation, representing the Jewish perspective, when Shlomo Avineri spoke about Dar Al Harb and Dar Al Islam, which means the House of War and the House of Al Islam. This is an opinion of some scholars during certain historic eras and certain times, but it has nothing to do with what the Koran or Prophet Mohammad himself said.

Two months ago I was in the Philippines conducting a program through the U.S Embassy in the Mindanao region. Perhaps you have heard about the clashes between Muslims and Christians and the continuous efforts of the Muslims in that area to have an autonomous region. Midway through my program, one of the Muslims asked me: “Are you Muslims in America intending to have your own state?” To me, this question represents the mentality of someone who has never traveled outside of his own land and is speaking “innocently” through his own cultural experiences and from his own pain stemming from the continuous conflict.

I told him, “If anyone hears you or me talking about that in America, they will laugh at us”. Why should I have my own autonomous state if I am able to live comfortably all over the United States, I’m accepted, and I am part of the society? Additionally, I said: “When are you going to start thinking beyond the issue of an “autonomous region” of Mindanao? You are supposed to live all over the Philippines; you are part of Southeast Asia. God didn’t create you and me to live in an Islamic “cocoon,” but He created us to be part of the human family all over the world.

The challenge today for the Muslims who are living in the West is to have imams who are trained to deal with issues facing Western societies and who know how to apply Islamic teachings. You cannot just quote one verse from the Koran and say, “OK, here is the answer” without understanding the situation and circumstances of the individual or the group.

The Koran was not revealed on the Mountain of Light in Mecca in one night. It was revealed over 23 years and responded to gradual changes in the society, events and circumstances surrounding the life of the Prophet and the people of his society. So here’s where the knowledge of the revelation of the Koran and the “reasons” for the revelation of each verse are so important. When someone is becoming a Muslim today, it is different than someone who has been a Muslim for 20 years or their whole life.

The issue of alcohol and how it was forbidden in the Koran within a process over almost fifteen years is the best example. I am talking about the word of God and how it accommodated change.

Some imams in the West have been trained in one school of thought and, probably, not in Western society. Today, courses on cultural diversity, pluralism and interfaith have to become part of the curriculum, especially if these imams are going to care for the needs of Muslims living in the West. In my opinion, these are important courses and should be taught even if the imams are going to remain in their region teaching the locals. I feel this way because we are living in a global village today. The word of God always accommodated the condition of the society and helped the community to grow on all levels.

I would like to mention here that one of the issues the Muslim community is suffering from today is not because of what happened ten or twenty years ago, but because of something that happened almost 200 years ago when the Ottomans separated the study within the schools and institutions to what is now referred to as “religious knowledge” and “secular knowledge”.

In Islam there is no separation between the two. When you read the Koran, it talks about the entire universe and calls each human being “Khalifa”, meaning the vicegerents and representatives of God on this earth, who should establish God’s law of justice and development in the universe.

You have to study the whole earth! This is why I am stressing the need to distinguish the difference between the life of certain Muslims and the guidance of the Koran. Some Muslims read the Koran today only for rewards and spiritual growth, which is fine, but actually the Koran is telling the believer to study the patterns and secrets of the universe and how it is running so you enjoy and benefit from both worlds - this life and the hereafter.

As we are talking about change, we are told in the Koran that the Prophet himself had to go through some uneasy situations when he was instructed by God to bring change to certain “cultural practices”. He found himself concerned about how the people were going to react. One example of that was when the prophet wanted to marry the divorcee of his “adopted son” Zayd. The Koran wanted to let the people know that adopted sons are not like your “biological” sons and they should be called by their correct and appropriate last names. My point here, without discussing the details of the story due to time constraints, is that the Koran wanted to change that concept and described the concern of the Prophet regarding what the people were going to say about him and how very uncomfortable he was. The Koran also instructed the Prophet to go ahead with the change and to fear God more than the people. This is a challenge for all people today, who are trying to bring reform to certain issues, which are different than the cultural norm or what people are accustomed to.

While among some Muslims the word secularism means the rejection of the belief in God, the Muslim societies experienced respect for different views when it comes to the interpretation of the religious texts and that resulted in the existence of many “Mathahib” or schools of thought throughout Islamic history. People followed different Mathahib, but the interesting thing is that in the Islamic courts there used to be “Judges” for each school of thought, especially when it came to “Al Ahwal Al Shakhsya—Personal Matters” like divorce, marriage and inheritance. At the same time, there used to be special courts for Christians and Jews living in the predominately Muslim communities, which enabled them to adhere to their own “authorized and recognized” laws according to their own religious beliefs.

That respect for different opinions among Muslims enriched the Islamic Library and none of the “Khalifs—Rulers” during the Islamic history was able or allowed to force all the Muslims to follow one school of thought because of the respect for “Ijtihad—individual opinion of a scholar”.

Based on that “Ijtihad,” I see that those who are living in America today or those who are living in the West, in general, are going to bring reform to the Muslim world.

Today when I travel to countries like Egypt and see the young generation watching satellite channels from all over the world, I see a gap between the younger and older generation, which is quite evident.

I would like to end by quoting a verse from the Koran, Chapter 49—Verse13: “O People, We created you from male and female and made you nations and tribes that you may know one another, Truly the most honorable of you by Allah is the most righteous and God is well acquainted with everything you do.”

Based on this verse, I feel that Muslims, who live in a multi-cultural West and interact with all societies, are going to bring reform to the Islamic world. There are many Western values that go side by side with Islamic principles and values. If these communities keep in mind the wisdom of the Koran of gradual growth and different stages, they will bring enlightenment to the entire Muslim world.

Doris Donnelly
Professor Martin started us off with pressure points. We’re going to end with Tomáš Halík, also a professor here at the Charles University in Prague, who is going to move us into the future. Professor Halík is a sociologist, a philosopher, a psychologist and a theologian, so he crosses many bridges. But he has also recently crossed a very important bridge in the United States of America, and that is the bridge to have his books, his many books, which are best sellers here in the Czech Republic and also in Poland, now translated and almost available for publication in the United States. Next year, when you gather together here in 2008, there will probably be an announcement that Doubleday will be publishing two of his books, so they will be available to the English market as well as you very fortunate people in the Czech Republic and you very fortunate people in Poland who have been able to read them all along. So it is a pleasure to present to you Tomáš Halík.

Tomáš Halík
Thank you, Doris. I will try to answer your difficult question, the question about the future, and I have some remarks regarding the lecture of Professor David Martin about secularization and secularity. But let us think about the future. You have mentioned my books, Doris. I am seeking in my books the paths of compatibility and productive coexistence of Christian faith and secularity—how to steer a course between the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of equally intolerant secularism. I’m not seeking a compromise at any price. I think that the fact that a Christian faith and secularity have cohabited in Western history for so long in various forms of continuity and conflict means that it is possible to think of them as two sides of the same coin that needs complementarity and correction. I think that faith and critical thinking, faith and doubt, are like two sisters—they need each other, correct each other, support each other. Faith without critical thinking can lead to fundamentalism, to fanaticism, entrusted doubts. Reason without faith, without this basic trust, could lead to cynical pragmatism.

I think there is a great chance for Christianity today. Christianity has the possibility to communicate with two worlds that are divided: on the one hand there are the traditional religions—especially Islam—and on the other hand the secular world. Christianity has much in common with both these worlds through the common Abrahamic heritage with Judaism and Islam and also the experience of the post-modern secular world. Christianity could communicate with both and help the communication between these two divided worlds of today.

Is there a chance, any hope for the future? I think a Christian theologian wrote recently: Jews, Christians, Muslims and atheists are agreed that they do not believe in gods. The God we—Jews and Christians—believe in is not one of the gods of this world. Our shared service to this world lies also in our determined refusal to serve or adore the false gods of this world. And Muslims' creed begins with the words: “There is no god but God.” This is something we ought to say together and out loud to every corner of the globe: God is not in the storm or in the earthquakes of racial, ethnic, political or religious hatred and intolerance! God is only in the “still, small voice—among the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God" God is not in the destructive power of violence but in the waves of solidarity with those who suffer. I think it is the path to the future. Thank you.

Doris Donnelly
I am grateful to our panelists for their attention to the time that allows conversation to continue. It is conversation, especially discourse in a setting like this, that will advance the peace that we so desperately covet. I thank you all for your thoughtful attention and especially to our awesome panelists for their words of wisdom and hope.