Dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam
by Thomas Michel
excerpts
In the Catholic Church, our commitment to engage in dialogue with Muslims goes back to the time of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The Council is made up of the Catholic bishops from all over the world, together with the Pope, who presides over the Council, and is the most authoritative body in the Catholic Church.
In one of its decrees, the document Nostra aetate, the Council speaks, for the first time in history of the Catholic Church, about Muslims.
It calls on Catholics to have "respect and esteem" for Muslims and lists the many grounds for which this respect is due. First and foremost is the fact that Muslims worship the One and only God, just as do Christians, and like Christians, Muslims seek to do God's will in all things.
The document goes on to list prayer, almsgiving and fasting, three pillars of Islamic practice, as further reasons why Christians should respect Muslims.
Finally, the statement concludes by acknowledging that in the course of history, Christians and Muslims have not always lived in peace, but have in various times and places engaged in enmity, conflict and at times even warfare.
But it calls on both communities to move beyond the past to cooperate with each other in four key areas of modern life: in working for peace, liberty, social justice, and moral values.
This decree of the Second Vatican Council is important because it shows that for Catholics, having respect and esteem for Muslims is not simply the personal choice of a few individuals, an element of Christian faith which one can take or leave as one wishes, but is a part of how the Catholic Church understands what it means to be a Christian today.
It should note that as a Catholic I am most knowledgeable about the roots of dialogue in the Catholic Church, there have been parallel developments in other Christian Churches, especially in the members of the World Council of Churches.
If there were no follow up, no genuine effort to build mutual understanding and cooperation with Muslims, one could claim that the statements of these Churches, like the decree Nostra aetate, were really only a kind of public relations, similar to the way that movie stars and other public figures will kiss and profess great affection for those whom they really dislike.
But we can point to a tremendous development in the years since the Second Vatican Council. Our present pope(in 2002), John Paul II, has met with Muslims over 60 times, more than all previous Popes put together. For 13 years I worked at the Vatican's Council for Interreligious Dialogue as Head of the Office for relations with Muslims, and I can testify that the efforts of dialogue on the part of the Catholic Church have been sincere and real.
Dialogue needs two willing partners; otherwise, one would have a monologue. I know that other speakers on this panel are far better prepared than I to explain the roots of dialogue in the Islamic tradition.
I will limit myself to pointing out, mainly to my fellow Christians, that Muslims have not always been in a passive state of waiting to be invited to dialogue, but have often taken the first initiative.
In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for example, where I have lived for many years, we had a very active faith-discussion group, at the initiative of Muslim colleagues in the Islamic colleges, already some years before the Second Vatican Council.
Bediuzzaman Said Nursi: a Muslim teacher who advocated dialogue
... Long before the Second Vatican Council, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1876-1960), one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the 20th Century, advocated a dialogue between true Muslims and true Christians.
The earliest statement of Said Nursi concerning the need for dialogue between Muslims and Christians dates from 1911, more than 50 years before the Council document, Nostra aetate.
Said Nursi was led to his view about the need for Muslim-Christian dialogue from his analysis of society in his day. He considered that the dominant challenge to faith in the modern age lay in the secular approach to life promoted by the West.
He felt that modern secularism had two faces.
On the one hand, there was communism that explicitly denied God's existence and consciously fought against the place of religion in society.
On the other, there was the secularism of modern capitalist systems which did not deny God's existence, but simply ignored the question of God and promoted a consumerist, materialist way of life as if there were no God or as though God had no moral will for humankind.
In both types of secular society, some individuals might make a personal, private choice to follow a religious path, but religion should have nothing to say about politics, economics or the organization of society.
Said Nursi held that in the situation of this modern world, religious believers - Christian as well as Muslim - face a similar struggle, that is, the challenge to lead a life of faith in which the purpose of human life is to worship God and to love others in obedience to God's will, and to lead this life of faith in a world whose political, economic and social spheres are often dominated either by a militant atheism, such as that of communism, or by a practical atheism, where God is simply ignored, forgotten, or considered irrelevant.
Said Nursi insists that the threat posed by modern secularism to a living faith in God is real and that believers must truly struggle to defend the centrality of God's will in everyday life, but he does not advocate violence to pursue this goal. He says that the most important need today is for the greatest struggle, the jihad al-akbar of which the Qur'an speaks. This is the interior effort to bring every aspect of one's life into submission to God's will.
As he explained in his famous Damascus Sermon, one element of this greatest struggle is the necessity of acknowledging and overcoming one's own weaknesses and those of one's nation. Too often, he says, believers are tempted to blame their problems on others when the real fault lies in themselves - the dishonesty, corruption, hypocrisy and favoritism that characterize many so-called "religious" societies.
He further advocates the struggle of speech, kalam, what might be called a critical dialogue aimed at convincing others of the need to submit one's life to God's will.
Where Said Nursi is far ahead of his time is that he foresees that in this struggle to carry on a critical dialogue with modern society Muslims should not act alone but must work together with those he calls "true Christians," in other words, Christians not in name only, but those who have interiorized the message which Christ brought, who practice their faith, and who are open and willing to cooperate with Muslims.
In contrast to the popular way in which many Muslims of his day looked at things, Said Nursi holds Muslims must not say that Christians are the enemy. Rather, Muslims and Christians have three common enemies that they have to face together: ignorance, poverty, dissension.
In short, he sees the need for dialogue as arising from the challenges posed by secular society to Muslims and Christians and that dialogue should lead to a common stand favoring
education, including ethical and spiritual formation
to oppose the evil of ignorance,
cooperation in development and welfare projects
to oppose the evil of poverty,
and efforts to unity and solidarity
to oppose the enemy of dissension, factionalism, and polarization......
