Experts promote interfaith dialogue at Rome's EGIC

 ROME — Experts from the three Abrahamic religions argued for the importance of interfaith dialogue in times of crisis during a conference last week at the Euro-Gulf Information Centre’s Rome headquarters.  

 The Christian, Jewish, and Muslim experts agreed during the conversation, which the EGIC held under Chatham House Rules, that individual faith and interfaith cooperation are both particularly important in an age of increased polarization and persecution.

 The Jewish expert said that freedom of religion and belief is not one of the essential foundations for interfaith dialogue, but also a basic human right — which, she said, we take for granted today. 

 Warning of ideologies and regimes seeking to limit that right, she referenced “pervasive ideologies” like Nazism and Marxism and referenced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church and the rise of political Islam in her discussion of “political dictatorships” which have led to war and persecution for thousands across the globe.  

 The expert called education the antidote to persecution, polarization. She stressed the importance of studying world history in order to educate the younger generations about the dangers of the past. Ignorance is “the worst blight of humanity,” she said. 

 To close her remarks she offered a mini-history in interfaith cooperation, beginning with Cyrus the Great, who in 539 B.C. granted the people in his empire the right to religious freedom. 

 “Every human being deserves to be treated equally with dignity and respect,” she said.  

 The Christian expert described successful interfaith dialogue as, by definition, a difficult interaction. “I don’t like lovely, nice conversation,” he said. 

 In his remarks he focused largely on the interlinked ideas of religion and security. He said that many governments’ expectation that a growing economy would lead to a population’s abandonment of religion — “the élite don’t see the point in religion,” he said — were misinformed. Religion “won’t disappear,” he said. 

 Instead of waiting for its disappearance or treating religion as “a threat to the state,” governments should celebrate and value religion for the diversity it brings to their nations, he said. 

 “Rather than treating young Muslims as national security threats,” for example, Italy’s government should consider their contribution to the “pluralism” of Italian society — and ensure the protection of minorities’ fundamental rights. 

 The Christian expert ended his remarks with the same theme with which the Muslim expert began his: Rome’s importance in a discussion of interfaith dialogue. 

 Rome should be the “world capital” of interreligious cooperation, the Christian expert said; Rome could its “nexus,” said the Muslim expert. 

 Interfaith dialogue provides all parties with the chance to “know each other better, and to know themselves better,” the Muslim expert said. 

 He then discussed interfaith dialogue on an international level. He warned of a “tendency to accuse” interfaith dialogue of failing and causing crises, especially because “because “religion is misused and abused by political powers.”

 Citing the 2019 Document on Human Fraternity, written by Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, as an example of progressive interfaith dialogue on an international scale, the expert stressed the importance of working past differences to move forward, focusing on peace, social justice, and freedom. 

 Closing the discussion, he stressed that “human dignity should be protected and promoted.”

 During a round of audience questions the experts spoke again about the importance of education — including education in healthy scepticism, the Jewish expert said, noting that “criticism is being killed” — dialogue as a means to avoiding radicalisation, and the importance of “friendship.”