wfn.org | [ACNS] Archbishop visits al-Azhar al-Sharif in Cairo

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

ACNS 3882     |     ENGLAND	|     13 SEPTEMBER 2004

Archbishop visits al-Azhar al-Sharif

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revd Rowan Williams - speaking at
one of Sunni Islam's most revered centres of learning - has urged people
of faith not to use the name of God to justify violence and injustice.

In a lecture delivered at the al-Azhar al-Sharif Institute in Cairo,
Archbishop Rowan said, "The greatest challenge today for our world is
how to react to circumstances in a way that is faithful to God's will."

He added, "So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his
neighbour of another faith following the ways of this world instead of
the peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of
the one God we look to...Once we let go of justice, fairness and respect
in our dealings with one another, we have dishonoured God as well as
human beings.

"We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another - our people,
our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to
act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to
us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves
in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living
God who always requires of us justice and goodness."

On Christian-Muslim relations, Archbishop Rowan spoke of the important
scope for better understanding, "...despite some of our differences, we
can, in the light of our belief about Almighty God, together make
certain affirmations to the world about the way to peace and justice for
human beings."

He cited the bloodshed in Russia, "It has been impressive to hear in
recent days the strength and clarity with which so many Muslim nations
and Muslim leaders have condemned the unspeakable atrocities in Beslan.
The common commitment of Muslims and Christians, as of all people of
compassion, hope and intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this
context."

In a British context, the Archbishop highlighted plans for practical
solidarity between faith communities when under threat: "...we hope a
Christian community will give support to local Muslims if a mosque is
attacked, and Muslims may do the same for local Jews if a synagogue is
attacked or a cemetery desecrated, and Muslims and Jews will stand
alongside Christians when they are abused and attacked. We pray that
this willingness to stand alongside each other will be shared in other
nations."

The Archbishop was speaking on the third anniversary of 9/11 and
following a regular September meeting in Cairo of the Dialogue between
the Anglican Communion and al-Azhar al-Sharif, which was being set up at
the time of the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001.

Other engagements scheduled for the Archbishop's weekend visit to Egypt,
included meetings with senior political and religious leaders, preaching
at the Anglican cathedral in Cairo and laying the foundation stone for a
Christian-run community health centre.

ENDS

The full text of Archbishop Rowan's lecture now follows:

11 September 2004

I am very deeply moved by the honour of being invited to address you in
this place, as a guest and, I hope, as a friend. It is some twenty five
years since I first visited this great city and al-Azhar mosque; and I
can remember my wonder and delight at the quality of its buildings and
the atmosphere of dedication and calm reflection expressed in the very
stones of the walls.

I am here as a Christian, to speak to you of some of those matters which
both unite us and divide us. In the world as it is now developing, it is
of the most central importance that we as Christians and Muslims
understand one another better. I am delighted at the continuing
commitment to this process that has been shown here, a commitment
evident in these last few days. And better understanding means
understanding our differences as well as our common vision. In these few
remarks, I want to meditate a little on the greatest theme of both
Muslim and Christian faith, the doctrine of God; and I want to suggest
how, despite some of our differences, we can, in the light of our belief
about Almighty God, together make certain affirmations to the world
about the way to peace and justice for human beings.

If I understand the doctrine of Islam correctly, its most important
conviction can be expressed in the word tawhid. God is one. No being is
associated with God as a second reality deserving of worship and
obedience. God has no need of any being outside his own eternal and
self-sufficient life. In these words, I do no more than repeat some of
the most luminous and uncompromising words of the Qur'an, which I give
in the new translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem.

'God:
there is no god but Him,
the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful.' (al-Baqara 255)

'He is God the One,
God the eternal.
He fathered no one nor was he fathered.
No one is comparable to Him.' (al 'Ikhlaas 1-4)

This last text reminds the Christian that this great affirmation of the
uniqueness of God is what has always caused Muslims to look with
suspicion at Christian doctrines of God. Christian belief about God as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit appears at once to compromise the belief
that God has no other being associated with him. How can we call God
al-Qayyuum, the Self-sufficient, if he is not alone? So we hear in
al-Baqara 115-117,

'The East and the West belong to God:
wherever you turn, there is His Face.
God is all pervading and all knowing.
They have asserted, "God has a child."
May He be exalted! No!
Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him,
everything devoutly obeys His will.
He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth,
and when He decrees something, He says only "Be," and it is.'

The belief that God could have a son is, for the faithful Muslim, a
belief suggesting that God needs something other than himself and is
subject to the processes of limited bodies by 'begetting' a child. How
can such a God be truly free and sovereign? For we know that he is able
to bring the world into being by his word alone.

Yet these anxieties do not belong only to Muslims. Egypt was, in the
first centuries of the Christian era, the location of great debates on
just such matters. Indeed, without the contribution of Egypt, Christian
theology would have been infinitely poorer, for many of the greatest
minds of that period were natives of Alexandria. And one of the great
concerns of these thinkers and their successors was this: if Christians
say that the eternal Word and power of God was fully present in Jesus,
son of Mary, can we avoid saying this in such a way as to imply that God
is subject to a physical process, or that God has a second being
alongside him? These Christian sages believed as strongly as any Muslim
that God was self-sufficient and free, and that he could not be affected
or limited by physical processes and did not act as a physical cause
among others. They say quite explicitly that when we speak of the father
'begetting' the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that
this is a physical thing, a process like the processes of the world.

Those Christian thinkers and their successors developed a doctrine which
tried to clarify this: they said that the name 'God' is not the name of
a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother
and a place that they inhabit within the world. 'God' is the name of a
kind of life - eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing
nothing. And that life is lived eternally in three ways which are made
known to us in the history of God's revelation to the Hebrew people and
in the life of Jesus. There is a source of life, an expression of life
and a sharing of life. In human language we say, 'Father, Son and Holy
Spirit', but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him, or
three gods of limited power. Just as we say, 'Here is my hand, and these
are the actions my one hand performs', but it is not different from the
actions of my five fingers, so with God: this is God, the One, the
Living and Self-subsistent, but what God does is not different from the
life which is eternally at the same time a source and an expression and
a sharing of life. Since God's life is always an intelligent and
purposeful life, each of these dimensions of divine life can be thought
of as a centre of mind and love; but this does not mean that God
'contains' three different individuals, separate from each other as
human individuals are.

And Christians believe that this life enters into ours in a limited
degree. When God takes away our evildoing and our guilt, when he
forgives us and sets us free, he breathes new life into us, as he
breathed life into Adam at the first. That breathing into us we call the
'Spirit'. As we become mature in our new life, we become more and more
like the expression of divine life, the Word whom we encounter in Jesus.
Because Jesus prayed to the source of his life as 'Father', we call the
eternal expression of God's life the 'Son'. And so too we pray to the
source of divine life in the way that Jesus taught us, and we say
'Father' to this divine reality.

But in no way does the true Christian say that the life and action of
God could be divided into separate parts, as if it were a material
thing. In no way does the true Christian say that there is more than one
God or that God needs some other in order to act or that God promotes
some other being to share his glory. There is one divine action, one
divine will; yet (like the fingers of the hand) there are three ways in
which that life is real, and it is only in those three ways that the
divine life is real - as source and expression and sharing. It is
because of those three ways in which divine life exists that Christians
speak as they do about what it means to grow in holiness.

And the Christian also says something which may again be a source of
disagreement. God is a loving God, as we all agree; but, says the
Christian, God does not love simply because he decides to love. He is
always, eternally, loving. His very nature, his definition is love. And
the interaction and relation between the three ways in which God lives,
the source and the expression and the sharing, is eternally the way God
exists. The three centres of divine action, which we call Father, Son
and Spirit, pour out the divine life to each other for all eternity, a
sort of perfect circle of giving and receiving. And the only word we can
use for that relationship of pouring out and giving is love. So as we
grow in holiness, we become closer and closer in our actions and
thoughts to the complete self-giving that always exists perfectly in
God's life. Towards this fullness we are all called to travel and grow.

Now these are difficult matters, and the greatest minds of the Christian
Church have always found them hard to put into words. But what I wish to
say to you today is simply that the disagreement between Christian and
Muslim is not, I believe, a disagreement about the nature of God as One
and Living and Self-subsistent. For us as for you, it is essential to
think of God as a life that has no limit, as a life that is free. God is
never to be listed alongside other beings. All through the centuries
that we call the Middle Ages, Christians, Muslims and Jews thought alike
about this, and our greatest philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina,
Maimonides and others, all worked to make this clear. They would all
have agreed that only if God is alone and needs no other is he worthy of
our complete worship and devotion. God is not a being who is like us,
only greater and more powerful. If God were like us only much greater,
we might worship him out of fear instead of giving him free obedience
and love. But the true God's freedom is infinite and he can never be
limited by any definition. When we have used up all the names that human
language can find for him, we shall have spoken true things of him, but
never expressed the whole truth which is hidden from created minds. And
so we adore him in trust and thankfulness but we accept that we shall
never have him in our grasp.

Together we can acknowledge these things. And it is sad that sometimes
an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking has led Muslims and
Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of God that does not recognise
the oneness and sufficiency of God, or that we worship something less
than the One, the Eternal. In our conversations with Muslim friends, we
Christians are rightly challenged to think more deeply, to think as our
Egyptian Christian fathers did, about the unity of Almighty God.

But there is a practical consequence of this belief about the One Living
God. If God is truly not a part of the world, truly self-sufficient,
then his will never depends upon how things turn out in the world. We
cannot work out what is just and good simply from what seems to work,
from what the world finds successful or easy or popular. What is good
and just is rooted in eternal truth, in the nature of God, who is what
he is quite independently of what the world is and what the world
thinks. The world may tell us that we should behave in such and such a
way - that we should seek only to make and keep money, that we should
break our promises, that we should take revenge and show no mercy, that
we should take our pleasures where we like. Sometimes behaviour of this
sort seems to bring success in the world. But the believer knows that no
amount of worldly success can make bad things good, because nothing in
the world can change the will of God, who is beyond all change and
cannot be affected or weakened by any other being. So we hold to our
calling to virtue and generosity and justice whatever may happen, even
if, today and tomorrow, it does not make our life easy and comfortable.
We struggle in our interior, spiritual battle, to be faithful to God's
will.

The greatest challenge today for our world is how to react to
circumstances in a way that is faithful to God's will. Undoubtedly,
greed and revenge affect all of us. We feel that we want to defend
ourselves in the way that a person without faith or hope or love would
understand - in anger and bitterness and unforgiving cruelty. But when
we act in such a way, we show that we do not really believe in a God who
is living and self-sufficient. We do not believe that God's will is
enough; we act as though the circumstances of this world could so change
things that cruelty and fear could become the right tools with which to
defend ourselves.

So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbour of
another faith following the ways of this world instead of the peaceful
will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of the one God
we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who will himself see that
justice is done. Once we let go of justice, fairness and respect in our
dealings with one another, we have dishonoured God as well as human
beings. I am deeply grateful that it was once again in this country that
Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the
co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the Alexandria
Declaration together, with its commitment to respect for the rights of
the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for justice, and its refusal of
terror and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us
today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to resist
settlement!

There is no doubt that the present violence throws a deep shadow over
conversations between the West and the Muslim world. Three years ago
today, I was one of those who shared just a little in the terrible
experience of the events in New York. I was in a building just a short
distance from the World Trade Centre that morning, and for a while I and
my colleagues were trapped there; we were among those fortunate enough
to be able to get out of the area just as the second tower collapsed,
and we saw at first hand something of the nightmare and the suffering of
that day.

On the day after, I was asked by a journalist for some of my reactions.
I said that when someone spoke to us in the language of hatred or abuse,
we had a choice about what language we might use to reply. So when
someone 'spoke' to us in violence and murder, we could choose what we
should do. We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another - our
people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not
forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible
acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we
imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our
belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness.

So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent
revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that
person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way
the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may
say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no
safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice
can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way
that honours God and God's image in others, and that does not offend
against God's justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge
and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the
One Living and Almighty God.

This is why it is important to be clear about the God we worship. There
is, as you will have seen, a great difference between what I as a
Christian must say and what the Muslim will say; but we agree absolutely
that God has no need of any other being, and that God is not a mixture
or a society of different beings. And if we are committed to this God,
we shall be able to do justice and act rightly even when the world
around us expects us to follow its own violent ways.

And just as I have said that Christians have sometimes spoken carelessly
about God and led others to think they believe less than they truly do,
so all of us, Jews, Muslims and Christians, have sometimes spoken
carelessly and let people think that we live by the same standards as
those who have no faith or love, appearing to encourage violence and
terror. If we look back to the Alexandria Declaration, we see how it is
possible for all of us, in the light of our conviction about God, to be
committed to something different from the world's ways; there we find a
promise to approach each other with respect and patience and to turn
away from open battle, even when we feel threatened by each other. There
too we find the common commitment not to use the name of God to justify
violence and injustice. It has been impressive to hear in recent days
the strength and clarity with which so many Muslim nations and Muslim
leaders have condemned the unspeakable atrocities in Beslan. The common
commitment of Muslims and Christians, as of all people of compassion,
hope and intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this context.

In our own country, we have recently conducted a process in which
Muslims and Christians together have listened to the concerns and hopes
of many local communities, and we are now hoping to set up a national
forum in which the anxieties of Muslim communities may be expressed and
freely discussed. And we have also been discussing how each of the
religious communities in Britain should react when any one of them is
under threat or open attack - so that we hope a Christian community will
give support to local Muslims if a mosque is attacked, and Muslims may
do the same for local Jews if a synagogue is attacked or a cemetery
desecrated, and Muslims and Jews will stand alongside Christians when
they are abused and attacked. We pray that this willingness to stand
alongside each other will be shared in other nations.

We believe that in such local ways we can, despite our disagreements,
show to the world a different standard of behaviour, one that is worthy
of the all-powerful and self-sufficient God we worship, worthy of him in
a way that crusades and terrorism and oppression are not. All of us need
to be able to repent before God for our errors and for the ways in which
we are enslaved by a greedy and fearful world. But as our Christian
scriptures say, we must not be conformed to this world but transformed,
with our minds renewed (Romans 12.2).

If we truly understand the nature of our God, our minds will be renewed.
We do not only teach truths about God, we allow those truths to change
our lives. May we all find the strength and the courage from Almighty
God to honour him by seeking peace together in fairness and respect and
thanksgiving for each other.

'To be one of those who believe
and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.' (al-Balad 17).

And as Jesus says in our own Christian Scriptures,

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they will be shown mercy...
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.6-7, 9).

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