7 May | 2012 | Subject Middle East & North Africa (MENA)
Entitled In It Together - Muslim/Christian Relations: Co-Operation not Conflict, the event was organised by BibleLands and the guest speaker was HRH Princess Badiya Bint El-Hassan of Jordan. The respondent was Professor David Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University.
Some readers might perhaps not be aware that Princess Badiya hails from the Jordanian Royal Hashemite Family and that she supports practical work to promote inter-faith and cross-cultural understanding. Moreover, her father - HRH Prince Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan - is one of the towering figures in interreligious dialogue and perhaps also one of the foremost thinkers across the world.
The talk was both encouraging and vivifying. Speaking 'simply' as a Muslim woman, and bringing into it her own vignettes and stories as well as her sense of discernment, humour and infectious laughter, Princess Badiya's paper was - perhaps not unexpectedly - strongly supportive of Christian-Muslim dialogue as she enumerated a host of reasons why the followers of those two great monotheistic traditions should talk to each other rather than at each other. But she was also disarmingly candid about the negative stereotypes of Islam in the West - some of them fomented by the rapacious attitudes of extremist Muslims whose deeds or words colour negatively a global religion that is neither monolithic nor homogeneous.
Having appreciated this talk as another good foundation for interreligious acceptance, and having also listened to the effusive endorsement the Princess gave to the work of BibleLands in the Middle East, I would like to draw momentarily upon my own experience in this field and suggest small ways in which such dialogue could be enhanced in the future so long as we all remain committed to a genuine desire to see collaboration taking root across our different cultures and boundaries.
In his own six footnotes during the response, Dr David Ford referred to A Common Word that was addressed to Christian leaders worldwide by 138 Muslim scholars in October 2007. This is certainly not the sole document in the field, but it is a key one and many churches - from the Vatican to Lambeth Palace - have already engaged with it. However, I would encourage its further incorporation into our respective ministries since it might well help clothe the richly constructive thoughts Princess Badiya shared with us few days ago. After all, does such a document not affirm that Christians and Muslims inter partes are "in it together" and that the less delinquent choice surely ought to be cooperation … not conflict?
As I was listening to Princess Badiya's talk at St James's, my mind strayed for a few seconds to the alleged pronouncements last month by Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who was quoted as saying to a Kuwaiti NGO that all churches should be destroyed in the Arabian Peninsula. Given such distressingly regressive statements that defy even the Almighty, the contrasting talk by Princess Badiya was nothing short of a renewing sign of hope for me … as I am sure for others too!
The author of this reflection has participated in many interreligious fora and was previously also member of the Trilateral Interreligious Forum (Jewish, Christian & Muslim) in Jerusalem.
© Dr Harry Hagopian | 2012 | 7 May