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It may not be superfluous to start with a word of caution and critical assessment of what has been achieved, or attempted, in recent Christian-Muslim dialogue initiatives. We need to warn, but also immunise ourselves, against the contamination of such initiatives by the culture of suspicion. More often than not, Muslims are asked, not always in a subtle way, to distance themselves from those who have perpetrated indiscriminate acts of violence claiming to defend Islam and Muslims. Muslims are invited, sometimes in an unfriendly manner, to prove their innocence and that of their religion from the crimes committed by a minority of their co-religionists.

In many dialogue initiatives of the last few months, it is noticeable that suspicion accentuated the temptations of globalism, essentialism and culturalism.

It has become difficult to discard the resonating effects in many parts of the world of a discourse on the global confrontation between Christianity - or the West - and Islam. In short, misinterpreting or exaggerating the role of religions in the relations among and within nations marks attitudes and perceptions of various local tensions or conflicts, leading to their aggravation. Local relations between Muslims and Christians are significantly affected by the propagation of a globalist discourse.

Historically specific or culturally, politically and religiously diverse, the situations of Muslims in relation to non-Muslims remain, in the eyes of many, essentially the same. Many do not seem to be willing or able to recognise plurality, avoid precipitated comparisons and refrain from amalgamation. At best, the search for intellectual rectitude is dismissed as luxury.

For their part, a mix of advocates of secular or Christian cultural supremacy and liberal proponents of the respect for other cultures, emphasise the distinctiveness of what is labelled as the Islamic culture. However, their exaggeration of the status of culture and its role in explaining personal and collective behaviour is less perceptible when they reflect on their own situations. Culturalists do not see the world except in terms of a never-ending difference. In previous times, western secularists, not only historians and sociologists of religion, searched for an essence of things religious common to all. In emphasising similarities between religions they tried to discredit the Christian claim to uniqueness. Today, the emphasis of many, anthropologists and others, is on difference. 

These considerations, if seen also from the perspective of the last thirty years of practical experience in Christian-Muslim dialogue, confirm the importance of “setting the agenda” together. Christians and Muslims were often invited to take part in reflecting and acting on an agenda set unilaterally, largely by Christian partners but, at times, by Muslim ones. Whenever it was desirable or possible to set the agenda in a common effort, dialogue was conducted on the basis of a minimalist or parallelist assumption. In both cases, divisive issues, within both religious communities and between them, were largely avoided.

Our attempt to set a common agenda owned by Muslims and Christians is not meant to suggest that statements such as “there will be no peace among nations unless there is peace among religions” and “wars in the name of religion are wars against religions” are irrelevant but to articulate together a few important questions, not shying away from the thorny issues of our time. These questions need to be formulated in a manner that facilitates speaking, at the same time, together and to each other.

Mutual learning and interpreting each other

For years, the importance of mutual learning was affirmed. In the process of thinking their approach to Islam, many Christians accepted that much of what has passed for “objective scholarship” was not free of ideological bias.

Those who committed themselves to dialogue saw the beginning of a new understanding based on a reciprocal willingness to listen. They also became aware of the requirement of being willing to question one’s own self-understanding and being open to understand the others on their own terms. A number of churches, theological faculties and other educational institutions have taken the initiative of promoting the knowledge of Islam and the Muslims. A number of similar efforts have recently been undertaken in some Muslim institutions. These have not developed without shortcomings and difficulties. Some of them arise from the limits and ambiguities of educating Christians about Islam by informed fellow Christians, somehow on behalf of Muslims. Others relate to the possibilities and challenge of inviting Muslims to educate Christians about Islam in a way that speaks to them and does justice to the plurality of ideas and approaches within the Islamic community.

Today, it is not uncommon to hear decision-makers, specialists or self-appointed specialists, journalists and others, articulate a simple - and even simplistic -discourse, risking generalisations or surrendering to political expediency. It may be necessary to remind ourselves, in the context of education or that of public information, of the costly obligations of intellectual rectitude, moral integrity and the concern for communicability. We are before a patient, but urgent, task of learning about each other, interpreting one’s own tradition as well as each other’s.  Christians who know Islam and Muslims who know Christianity, through scholarship and dialogue, need to work, not only on behalf of each other as the opportunities arise, but with each other.

Redressing media images and rectifying perceptions are, to be sure, the fruits of dialogue. At the same time, they make possible an authentic dialogue. In the present context, those who seek to hold in balance religious otherness and common humanity tread a narrow path. The globalized and consumer culture works at reducing differences. Nationalist and communalist self-assertion tends to magnify them.

Religion, society and state

The way in which Christians and Muslims perceive each other’s understanding of the relation between religion, society and state recurs significantly. With a varying measure of subtlety, many Christians depict Islam, and not just Islamism, as a call to theocracy. Parallel to that, many Muslims regard Christianity as a spiritual religion preoccupied with the life after. In other words, the former attribute to Islam an amalgamation of political power and religious authority. They fail to recognise that while a separation between religion, society and state is not conceivable from an Islamic perspective, distinction between the realms of religion and politics is possible. The latter view Christianity as a religion that draws a radical separation between the two realms.

In general, Christians tend to assume that in Islam the state is not just an emanation of the community but is constitutive of it. Some of their Muslim counterparts associate secularism and contemporary Christianity. They point to the fact that Christianity, namely in the West, after having defended theocratic state models retreated, and later abdicated, before secularisation. Moreover, in the course of their adjustment to the historical process that lead to the privatisation of religion, some Christians engaged in self-secularisation and legitimated that theologically.

These mutual perceptions were blurred further during the last few months. Today the assumption that we live in a secularised, and secularising, world does not meet universal approval. A leading sociologist of religion goes as far as affirming that in present times the world, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever was and in some places more so than ever 1.

To be sure, modernisation has had great secularising effects, more in some places than others. But it has also provoked powerful movements of counter-secularisation. Certain religious institutions have lost power in many societies but old and new religious beliefs and practices find their expressions, sometimes in an explosive manner. Conversely, religiously identified institutions play social and political roles even when fewer numbers of people believe or practise the religion that such institutions represent. In some extreme cases, people fight in the name of religions in which they ceased to believe. There are conflicts between communities that have a religious past but their religious content is of no relevance. Religions that in which people have little, or no, faith continue to define communities in which they have much faith.

It is therefore essential, when reflecting, as Christians and Muslims, on the role of religion in politics, international or national, to distinguish between political movements that may be genuinely inspired by religion and those that use religion as a convenient legitimisation for political agendas based on quite non-religious interests.

Religion and culture

Dialogue on religion and politics is inseparable, in today’s world, from that on religion and culture. The contemporary western world has been largely self-defined as secular and Muslims gradually perceived it as such. But the mounting tendency to emphasise its historical and cultural identity and portray it as Christian or Judeo-Christian, does not go unnoticed. Non-western Christians can often be identified culturally with the West and sometimes, in spite of their affirmed cultural and religious difference, suspected of political allegiance to Western powers, even if they do not enjoy nor expect any support from them. It may seem to matter much less than a few decades ago that many Christians were major actors in anti-colonial independence movements and continue to be strong critics of western dominance.

In the Muslim world, ideological thought patterns represent the West as selfish, materialistic and dominating. In the West, the equivalent thought patterns perceive Islam as irrational, fanatical and expansionist.  In the age of global communication and migration, these thought patterns, in the variety of their subtle and not-so-subtle expressions, foster antagonism.

It is true that the issue of Islam and the West is more complex and more contingent upon contemporary concerns than either proponents and opponents of culturalist politics would imply. Many of the problems, such as foreign hegemony and intervention, terrorism and international threats, are confused and exaggerated. But they have become real issues although they are, in the main, relating to power of states, the treatment of migrant and minority groups and the balance of forces within many developing societies.

But it is not less true that the end of world-wide ideological confrontations, and the globalisation of Islam, has favoured the re-emergence of perceptions where Islam and the West exist as subjective, imaginary constructs, which influence the way each sees the other. This is exacerbated by a paradox of globalisation. The development of consumerism and planetary televised entertainment has produced unprecedented cultural homogenisation and uniformisation. But the more individuals, and peoples, look alike the more they need to affirm their differences. In many societies, people face the perspective of allying the “worst of two worlds”: a culturally homogeneous world and one where seeking identity and community goes the way of hostility towards the other. 

Co-citizenship and human rights

The principles of co-citizenship, equality, the rule of law and human rights have been in the heart of the “dialogue of life” between Christians and Muslims. Their universality was often affirmed, not withstanding differences in approaches and emphasis. In many situations, the co-operation of Christians and Muslims in upholding together these values gave significance to dialogue and put its credibility to test.

Today, these issues need to be addressed, theoretically and practically, with renewed vigour and all over the world. The idea of co-citizenship deserves to be reaffirmed as the basis for genuine dialogue and co-operation between Christians and Muslims. Co-citizenship is the encounter of persons as equal actors in society and polity who, while influenced by culture, religion and ethnicity, cannot be reduced to the roles assigned to them in the name of communal identities, loyalties and perceived interests.

In a dialogue of co-citizenship, Christians and Muslims become aware that human rights should not be implemented selectively, instrumentalised in the context of external domination or used by one group of people against another.  For people of faith, it is crucial to affirm the indivisibility of human rights, to reconcile individual rights with those of communities and stand by the victims whatever their ethnic or religious identity.

Thus, human rights advocacy should not be conditioned by confessional solidarity, no matter how legitimate. In this vein, the call for reciprocity in the treatment of minorities can be ambiguous and is therefore misunderstandable and problematic. It is true that the spirit of reciprocity for some calls people of faith to “excel each other in good deeds”. But in other cases, the logic of reciprocity, borrowed by religious communities from states, favours a world view opposing an Islamic Ummah with Christendom, both imagined, each having a ramification in the “abode” of the other. In their great diversity, minorities can unfortunately be perceived as victims or hostages rather than actors in their respective societies. Their ability to act as bridge-builders between religions and cultures is thus severely jeopardized. Such a role of mediation, that many of them continue nevertheless to play, is put at risk by when human rights violations are addressed selectively. 

On a more specific note, many of the interests of Christian minorities cannot be safeguarded and promoted except in conjunction with those of the Muslim majorities among whom they live. Upholding the rights of Christians in the Muslim world, in a way that is seen as a form of foreign intervention pretexting their protection, reinforces the perception that they are alien in their own countries or disloyal to them. Defending the rights of Christians in opposition to their Muslims co-citizens and neighbours, with whom they share culture and national identity, may aggravate the suspicion of majorities towards minorities seen as an instrument of a real or potential threat instigated by powerful forces.

De-globalizing tensions and conflicts

While relations between Muslims and Christians are strongly influenced by local and regional histories, they are increasingly impacted by world developments. It is mostly in situations where uncertainties of change begin to be felt, that mistrust and mutual apprehension can build up between communities.

When communities are identified exclusively or even exaggeratedly by their religion, situations tend to become more explosive.  Christianity and Islam carry, in region-specific ways, deep historical memories. They may appeal to universal loyalties that can be seen, in certain societies, as a cause of tension or conflict. But quite often, they are not more than an intensifying feature of disputes whose main causes are outside religion.

There are cases where a conflict in one place, with its local causes and character, is perceived and instrumentalised as part of a conflict in another. So enmities in one part of the world spill over into situations of tension in other regions.  An act of violence in one place is used to confirm stereotypes of the “enemy” in another place or even provoke revenge attacks elsewhere in the world. It is not uncommon to see people, unable or unwilling to fight those who caused their anger, look for substitutes and easily find them. What is otherwise a remote conflict becomes a local problem. Neighbours hold each other accountable for the wrongs attributed to their co-religionists elsewhere. Unless they are prepared to dissociate themselves publicly from those with whom they share a common faith, they are accused of complicity with them. 

It is therefore crucial to offer a prospect counteracting processes, which tend to globalise conflicts that involve Muslims and Christians. In other words, it is necessary to “de-globalise Christian-Muslim tensions” as a vital step towards resolving them. Attention to the specific local causes of conflicts helps to identify solutions to be found, first and foremost, in addressing those local causes.  This is not possible unless the leaders of both communities refuse to be drawn into others’ conflicts on the basis of uncritical response to calls for solidarity among adherents to one faith.  It is only in applying common principles of peace, justice and reconciliation that parties to local conflicts are helped to release Islam and Christianity from the burden of sectional interests and self-serving interpretations of beliefs and convictions. Christian and Islamic beliefs and convictions can then constitute a basis for critical engagement with human weakness and defective social and economic orders, in a common search for human well-being, dignity, social justice and civil peace.

In responding to these necessities, Muslims and Christians learn that Christianity and Islam are not two monolithic blocks confronting each other. In dialogue with each other “they understand justice to be a universal value grounded in their faith and are called to take sides with the oppressed and marginalized, irrespective of their religious identity. Justice is an expression of a religious commitment that extends beyond the boundaries of one’s own religious community. Muslims and Christians uphold their own religious values and ideals when they take a common stand in solidarity with, or in defence of, the victims of oppression and exclusion”2

Violence and religion

The problem of violence and its legitimation in religious thought and in the practice of religious communities was discussed, episodically and often indirectly, in Christian-Muslim dialogue. In the eyes of some Christians, it was too divisive an issue to be dealt with in what continued to be a fragile process of building trust and mutual understanding. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the divergence between Christian and Muslim positions was overstated. Today, the relationship between violence and religion is the object of a renewed attention, directed primarily at the Muslim approach to the problem. In some circles, there seems to be an impatient tendency to look for an explanation of the recent criminal attacks in the scriptural and canonical foundation or justification of violence. Thus, the non-religious factors determining symbolic and historical violence are not adequately examined, let alone exhausted, before addressing the religious dimension. One example is the way the issue is discussed in reference to the Israeli state violence dispossessing the Palestinians and occupying their land, on one hand, and the violence of Palestinian resistance, on the other hand. The “anatomy” of terrorism is privileged over its “genealogy”. When some people hold traditional religious education responsible for spreading a culture of hatred, they fail to see that it is not the traditional religious values that lead people to violence but their loss, without much in counterpart, which explains frustration, grievance and revulsion. Violence cannot be explained by ancestral hatred, for ancestral hatred is reinvented and even fabricated in the context of confrontation and violence.

It is only after examining the root causes of violence in their present reality as well as in their respective histories, that Christians and Muslims can credibly reflect together, and share each other’s internal discussions on issues like jihad, just war and martyrdom. Thus, dialogue on violence will not be caught in criticising, on one hand, the theological inconsistency of those who consider violence to be legitimate as defensive or as a last resort and, on the other hand, dismissing the pacifist utopia of those who choose to overcome violence through non-violence.

It remains true that the challenge before Christians and Muslims goes beyond these considerations. They need to learn from each other and discover, in local situations and at the world level, ways of holding together, without illusions but not without tensions, striving against injustice and making peace.

Geneva, January 2002

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