wfn.org | ACNS Inaugural meeting of the Christian-Muslim Forum

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

ACNS 4099     |     LAMBETH	|     25 JANUARY 2005

Inaugural meeting of the Christian-Muslim Forum

Photographs for this item are available here:
http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/articles/40/75/acns4099.cfm

Archbishop of Canterbury: Remarks at a reception to mark the inaugural
meeting of the Christian-Muslim Forum 24th January 2006

Prime Minister, friends it's a very great delight to be able to welcome
you here on this, I hope, historic occasion.

Although today is overshadowed very seriously for all of us by our great
loss in the death of Zaki Badawi earlier today, this event also helps to
focus something of what we might hope for in the work of this forum.
Because one thing that certainly could be said of Zaki was that he
managed to make Islam ordinary and expected, a part of the British
scene. Someone who was a spokesman for an important and recognised
element in the British community overall. Someone who spoke, you might
say, for Muslims as citizens of this country.

And in a way that is part of the agenda of the forum, as it evolves.
We're looking for conversation and co-operation between two communities
of faith that will remind the whole of our society that faith is a
perfectly normal activity for human beings, indeed those of us who are
committed would say that it's the most normal activity you could
possibly imagine. And instead of being an eccentricity, practised by
slightly weird British people and very very strange foreigners, it's
just something that belongs in the fabric of civic life in this country
and which makes, I dare to say, an irreplaceable contribution to the
civic life of this country.

We are not people of faith because we want to make a contribution to
civic life; we are people of faith because we believe that what we
believe is true. Nonetheless, we need to say in a society that's both
sceptical and chaotic at the moment, that the commitments of faith to
human dignity and liberty are essential to the life of a healthy
society. I think that the presence of the Prime Minister with us here
tonight is testimony to the fact that this is something increasingly
recognised in our public life. What we do here in terms of Christian
Muslim co-operation and conversation, is part of two wider pictures. One
of them, as you've been reminded, is the picture of interfaith
co-operation overall. The new forum takes its place alongside other more
established networks which seek to promote understanding and
co-operation. But the other wider picture is the international one, and
it's very interesting to look back at the last decade or more in which
this forum has been growing to maturity, and see how it takes its place
alongside a whole international programme, working for understanding and
co-operation.

My predecessor put in place a number of vitally important initiatives in
this respect, it was he who began the work which has led to the
establishment of this forum. It was he who oversaw the beginnings of the
dialogue that we continue between the Church of England and al-Azhar in
Cairo. It was he who, of course, saw through the formation of the
Alexandria declaration with the hopes that that provided of religious
communities in the Holy Land contributing to reconciliation there.

And that international situation is something which becomes more and
more evident and immediate to us in this country, day by day. As our
whole world evolves the old idea of nation states with impervious
boundaries becomes more and more improbable and unreal. We are all
involved like it or not, in global conversations and exchanges. Our
political habits, our religious convictions are no longer to be seen as
local peculiarities, they are part of one story across the world.

Just before Christmas, my wife and I spent a week in Pakistan. A very
eventful week where I think it is fair to say we were worked to our
limits and almost beyond, but a week, which opened up any number of
conversations, opened any number of doors, with repercussions here.
Before we went we asked both Christian and Muslim Pakistani communities
in this country what they might want to hear from Pakistan when we
visited there. When we were in Pakistan, we were repeatedly questioned
about what was happening in Christian Muslim dialogue in this country.
And that was a very vivid reminder at all sorts of levels, of the
interlocking world we live in. And one phrase which sticks with me from
that encounter in Pakistan was something which came out in one of the
several meetings we had with Ijaz ul-Haq, the minister for ethnic
minorities and religious affairs in Pakistan. He spoke of how easy it
was to pursue dialogue and friendship at the level of elites, 'Now,' he
said, 'now we must take this to the villages'. Well, we may not have
villages in the United Kingdom that are quite like villages in Pakistan,
but the principle is the same.

This is not about elites, this is about ordinary people talking to each
other in ordinary circumstances and working together on the needs and
the challenges that face us all. The challenges that are represented by
an educational system which is not always easy for minorities. The
challenges represented by international affairs, the challenges by the
gulfs that open up between young people and their elders in all areas of
our community, the challenges of sustaining our commitment to family
life and its values in a culture that again doesn't always seem to
affirm them very clearly.

But all that, of course, is to present a rather negative picture, and in
taking it to the villages, I wouldn't want us to think that we were
primarily concerned about damage limitation and reacting to crises. We
want to uncover for one another, and in one another, and for the wider
world; that richness of humanity which faith contains, and that, too,
was something affirmed very powerfully in many of our encounters in
Pakistan before Christmas. In spite of the very deep tensions there are
there, in spite of the sufferings endured by a Christian minority there,
often harassed and persecuted by ignorant neighbours, in spite of the
sense of vulnerability that Pakistan, like the rest of the Muslim world
feels, in our world generally today, the willingness of people to engage
with one another, take risks with one another, even there, was hugely
impressive and inspiring. And we came back from that visit with a real
sense of enormous possibilities in Pakistan, barely yet beginning to be
realised.

Well, our challenges and our possibilities are both extreme in the world
as it is, but the other thing which was said to me in Pakistan more than
once and which I am happy to repeat here, is that we have to get out of
any remnants of a mindset which thinks in terms of a clash of
civilisations. That rhetoric does the rounds every so often, it depends
on indifferent history, over bold projection and, generally, mutual
ignorance. We can do better than that, and the Muslim Christian Forum
here in Britain is designed to help us do better than that, to think not
of a clash of civilisations, but of a shared religious humanism in the
proper sense of the word 'humanism', a commitment to the dignity and the
liberty of human beings made to serve God. Human beings who find their
fullest freedom and the deepest joy in the service of God, and who in
sharing that together, have something to offer to society around which
nothing else can offer. It's a very ambitious vision with which to begin
the work of the Forum, but I think that is where all those involved want
to start. And they would see it as I've said not only as something for
this country, but as something which ought to be making a contribution
to a global challenge.

It's easy to talk about these things abstractly so I'll end by quoting
to you a story I came across recently from a most unlikely quarter. The
book I'm reading from is an excellent book by Brian McClaren, an
American Evangelical, pastor of a large independent church in the
Washington DC area. The sort of Christian pastor who arouses a certain
amount of anxiety in the breasts both of Muslims and of more liberal
Christians, not to say columnists in some of our newspapers. The book is
entitled, though, 'A Generous Orthodoxy' and it ahs a long and
extraordinarily moving chapter on his approach to people of other
faiths. Towards the end of this chapter McClaren quotes from another
writer from the same background telling a little story about an
encounter in the Washington DC area not long after September 11th. One
day my daughter saw a woman walking towards us covered in a veil and
asked the inevitable 'What's that, Mummy?' 'Emma,' I answered, 'that
lady is a Muslim from a faraway place and she dresses like that and
covers her head with a veil because she loves God. That is how their
people show they love God'. My daughter considered these words, she
stared at the woman who passed us, she pointed at the woman and then
pointed at my hair and further quizzed 'Mummy, do you love God?' 'Yes',
I said, 'I do; you and I are Christians and Christian ladies show their
love for God by going to church, eating the bread and drinking the wine,
serving the poor and giving to those in need. We don't wear veils but we
do love God'.

After this Emma took every opportunity to point to Muslim women during
our shopping trips and telling me 'Mummy, she loves God'. One day we
were getting out of our car in our driveway at the same time as our
Pakistani neighbours. Emma saw the mother beautifully veiled and pointed
at her and shouted 'Look Mummy - she loves God'. My neighbour was
surprised, I told her what I had told her what I had taught Emma about
Muslim ladies loving God, while she held back tears this near stranger
hugged me saying, 'I wish all Americans would teach their children so,
the world would be better'.

That perhaps is - as simply as that - what we have to teach; that,
perhaps, is what the Muslim Christian Forum by the Grace of God can
achieve, thank you for being with us this evening.

(c) Rowan Williams 2006

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