It is March 7^th 2013. In a few short months Father Paolo Dall’Oglio will be taken prisoner by ISIS in Raqqa, right at the beginning of his mission to save others who had been kidnapped in Syria since 2011. Reporting on a conference Father Paolo had held the previous day in Beirut, the most important Christian newspaper in Lebanon, L’Orient Le Jour, quoted him as follows: “If Christians support the regime (Assad) because they fear Islamism, they will leave the country en masse. That is what happened in Iraq, it is what will happen in Syria and if no solution is found it is also what will happen in Lebanon. Christians living in the Middle East no longer understand why God sent them to live among Muslims. When one no longer finds answers to this question, then one leaves; one leaves the country. Theirs must be a spiritual and not just a social or economic answer.”

Given his kidnapping in Raqqa on July 29^th that same year, we might ask: was Father Dall’Oglio wrong? The number of Christians in Syria had already dropped before 2011, due to the harshness of social and economic life. Once 10% of all Syrians, Christians now comprise only 2%, despite the defeat of the armed insurgents. There is no talk of them returning even to Aleppo, a city from which almost all Sunnis have been deported. And yet a law was passed about two months ago, Law No. 10, obliges all Syrians to quickly report to the authorities with their land registry deeds in order to have their property rights formally acknowledged. If they do not comply, the property will be confiscated. Faced with international pressure, Foreign Minister Muhallem, who is not responsible for this law, promised that more time will be allowed; no official statement has, however, been issued on the subject.

Regardless of the number of days allowed for complying with this law, can those who have sought refuge abroad and are living in desperate conditions return home? Will they and others who have moved to other regions consider it safe to return under Assad? Is it possible that this aspect of the tragedy, which also directly concerns millions of Aleppo’s citizens does not affect those who have remained, including many Christians? What is the narrative that Aleppo is providing as far as this terrible conflict is concerned? How can one explain the fact that the most recent deportation, from the Ghouta region—which is near Damascus—took place amidst the silence of local Church leaders, in jarring conflict with the very powerful words spoken by Pope Francis? A silence broken only by a joint statement issued when the Americans took demonstrative action, bombing locations at which chemical materials were kept, an attack that the statement described as “unjustified”, unlike the almost entirely chemical firestorm that hit the Ghouta area for months?

This is an issue I have been addressing for months with a friend from Aleppo, Roger Asfar. Aleppo has played a special role in the history of the Levant, due to the city’s historical and cultural importance, and also precisely because Aleppo was the epicentre for fleeing Armenians following the genocide. The fact that so many of Aleppo’s citizens were late in joining protests confirms that the Syrian rebellion started as a class struggle; it began in rural areas impoverished by drought and in small rural towns ruined by the neo-liberal policies of Bashar al-Assad’s family. These policies, which strangled the rural classes, can be summarised by one fact: there are dozens of private banks all partly owned by someone closely related to the president, such as Rami Makhlouf, a Syrian businessman far wealthier than the far better known Saudi magnate Walid bin Talal. What narrative does Aleppo offer as far as the bankruptcy of Arab politics is concerned? Is this not the real problem?

Speaking about his city and the Christians who live there with this young friend from Aleppo who has taken refuge in the Lebanon to complete his novitiate in a monastery, I could only start by addressing what I had heard. How common are truly denominational districts, such as the most famous of all, Azizia, whereby a Christian can live and die without ever having had a Muslim friend and vice versa? A number of friends in Aleppo have often spoken to me about this and to those who know Beirut it seems very strange. Modern Beirut’s birth certificate was a petition to the sultan signed by religious leaders and noteworthy representatives from all the communities, asking him to make Beirut a provincial capital in the empire of reforms. The war that had seen Christians and Druze oppose one another on the nearby mountain, or other communities in other places, seemed to vanish from Beirut’s history and this contributed significantly to the creation of an Arab, Mediterranean, modern and Europeanised city.

It is clear that things did not go that way in Aleppo. The same war, the same interdenominational bloodshed powerfully affected co-existence in Aleppo. In addressing the subject, Roger wishes to contextualise it in a more important past, between the end of the 18^th and the early 19^th centuries, therefore starting from the serious persecutions suffered by Christians. “There really were persecutions and it would be irresponsible, or perhaps suicidal, to deny this in the name of an ideology of dialogue or reciprocal respect, because nothing of value can be based on a denial of the factual, historical truth. Obviously the narrative issue concerns everyone”, he says. Speaking for himself about the Christian narrative, he continues: “Starting from the extremely serious denominational clashes on Mount Lebanon in the second half of the 19^th century, in particular those of 1860, the persecution of Christians in Aleppo can be described as the first sign of what was to come. Churches were burned down, as were diocesan offices and the homes of Christians in the terrible massacre of 1850 in Aleppo.” Roger wants to contextualise these events more broadly. He goes on to say: “Just as is it inadmissible to deny that this was a persecution, it is also a mistake to see it out of context. Those tragic events should not wipe from our narrative the period of good governance under Ibrahim Pasha, especially regarding us [Christians], or important episodes of solidarity and friendship shown by Muslims during those tragic days. In our narrative there are no references to names, groups or families that offered protection, aid and hospitality to the persecuted and one could say that that such defence was heroic considering that there were human lives at stake and great danger.” It is in this sense that Roger wants to caution against “selective remembrance”. In his words: “If one does not also remember that [Muslim humanitarianism], one reaches the point of what I call selective remembrance, which also concerns another very important event in Aleppo’s history, Black Sunday in 1936. It was traumatic, also because memories of 1850 were still fresh in the community, but later on it was established that the battle that took place at the market on that Sunday was started by one of our own Fascist-styled armed militias known as the White Emblem. When that militia was disbanded it was established that its members were in touch with various secret services, in particular the French, and no doubt the French Mandate must have made some calculations.”

These are important considerations that Roger does not express in the name of ideological do-goodery. They are instead a historical reconstruction of events that allows one to understand, to exchange views and therefore to co-exist. As applies to many others, dialogue is established between real human beings, not between the leaders of different communities. It was for this reason, also, that Father Paolo Dall’Oglio liked to call it religious and not interreligious dialogue. The Baathist regime instead has always believed that only the dialogue between leaders was legitimate, plausible and acceptable. “One of the first things done in Baathist Syria in the ‘60s, was to take control of all Christian schools. A later judgement handed down by the judiciary imposed respect for educational autonomy, but Hafez al Assad’s regime put an end to all that, stating that if it applied to Catholics “it should also apply to all hostile religious institutions”. It was thus that a conflict was created in order to protect the regime. “Let us use a recent example”, Roger begins. “Everyone knows that in our community it was feared that the regime wished to confiscate land that belonged to the church. Rumours said that they wished to create a party school there. So, two authoritative representatives of our episcopates went to speak to Assad, as President of the Republic and as President of the Baath Party, but he very simply answered that he could not overrule a decision made by the judiciary; it was impossible. The land however had to be expropriated by the state, and seeing it was a woodland area, it was dealt with by the Ministry of Agriculture that then handed it over to the Party. This is what really happens, but in our narrative, the regime ‘protects us’.”

According to Roger Asfar, it is only the word “protect” that explains what has happened more recently. “Following the assassination of a head of the secret services who had been working for some time in Aleppo, many Christians wrote on Facebook expressing words of great appreciation, praise and admiration for him. And yet he was a terrible man”, Roger explains. He goes on to tell the story of a fellow citizen, a Christian who fled to Germany, who wrote, “that man tortured me, and you know that just as he tortured me he also tortured others!”. However, Roger recalls “there were poisonous answers. Are we a ferocious people? No. Obviously there is the great burden concerning everything that jihadist groups have been capable of doing after being set up insanely in Syria. And then there are the horrors with immense consequences, such as the Russian Air Force’s and the Syrian Army’s indiscriminate bombing of homes, schools and hospitals. The civil fabric has been lacerated and we live in the glory of fear; that is the truth. Why is it that no one returns to Aleppo? There are now perhaps a little over 6,000 Christians in Aleppo, none compared to the over 160,000 of a just a few years ago. One might ask why.”

Roger looks around and I am already thinking about the known presence of extortionist groups, about compulsory military service, about armed robberies. “When a bishop takes office at the head of a diocese”, he tells me, “one of the first things he discovers is the manner in which authorisations are requested, seeing that any small job must be authorised, as happens all over the world.” Roger continues by highlighting Syria’s distinct circumstances: “In Syria, however, one must proceed as follows; authorisation requests presented to the relevant authorities are necessary but also useless; it is the informal permission from the security services that is decisive. Either they approve, or everything is blocked for centuries, whether it is restoration work, a change in what the location is used for, or modernisation.”

Roger goes on to explain the implications of this: “It is obvious that in this manner one establishes a relationship; the more the interlocutor becomes powerful within the services, the more the bishop will be able to answer the many needs his parishioners present to him, the many petitions he receives every day. It is this mechanism that explains why the regime secretly decided to kidnap two bishops from Aleppo who vanished five years ago.” The dangers of this, he notes, are for those who grow too powerful within these relations: “Those permitted to improve their position and notoriety, within certain limits, are officials working for the services, the mediators who facilitate the establishment of a relationship, not the bishops. And Johanna Ibrahim, one of the two kidnapped bishops, had become too respected; he had good relations within the country and abroad, his name had become authoritative and therefore he was feared.” Roger wants to add a cautionary note to his explanation: “It is this that tells us that one must not be excessively Manichean. No world consists only of great personalities, like Johanna Ibrahim, and therefore there will be some who allow themselves to be compromised by the regime due to weakness and others who instead will try and compromise the regime with the needs of the population; and some who suffer silence to offer aid and other who will do so for other reasons. What is serious is the context. Denominationalism, tribalism and Mafioso styles have no idea of the meaning of “citizenship” while others know perfectly well what ‘protection’ means.”

Translated by Francesca Simmons

Credit: Delil souleiman / AFP

L'articolo Christians in Syria: escape, decimation and fear of Assad’s return proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

From July 9^th to July 11^th, 2018, Casablanca, Morocco, hosted an important international conference on Sources of Pluralism in Islamic Thought. This is a topical subject, but above all one worthy of being debated with the wider public, whose perception is that Islam has been a never-changing monolith with no internal differentiations since the days of the Prophet Muhammad.

The conference was organised by ResetDoc – Dialogues of Civilizations of Milan (director Giancarlo Bosetti), by the King Abdul ‘Aziz al-Sa‘ud Foundation for Islamic Studies in Casablanca and the Granada Institute for Higher Education and Research (directed by Mohammed Ben Salah) and speakers included about thirty scholars, mainly from the Islamic world, as well as a few European and American ones.

It was not hard to prove how there are multiple roots of pluralism in Islamic thought, ranging from the caliphate’s cosmopolitanism to the normative diversification of religious law, from the environmentalism of some Islamist movements to their traditional roots and to the (mainly unknown) political function of mysticism or Sufism.

The speakers therefore addressed subjects ranging from the hermeneutic problems of classical theologians and philosophers (we would call them “medieval”) such as al-Farabi (died 950), Averroes (died 1198)  and Ibn Taymiyya (died 1328), to European Islam’s more strictly current issues. In this last case, the conference addressed above all the space that must be reserved to traditional religious authority within a non-traditional context or even a non-Islamic one, as well as educational systems in contemporary pluralistic societies.

Issues concerning the individual in relation to community holism, of particular importance in Islam, were also addressed, as was the inclusion and exclusion that involves European Muslims who are a minority, as well as religious minorities in Muslim countries, as were problems concerning the thorny issue of the training of imams.

In Western Europe as well as in Italy, the subject of training imams is particularly felt due to fears arising from the possibility that religious preachers could spread radical messages. This problem has been addressed in a book by Mohammed Hashas, also the main scientific organiser of this conference, and was discussed at a special round table.

In spite of frequent references to hermeneutic methodologies, discussed, however, at a rather general than more specific level, what surprised me most was the lack of in-depth discussions concerning the Qur’an as revealed Book. Of course the Holy Book was mentioned, especially during the first session of the conference when Asma Afsaruddin spoke of the enhancement of religious dialogue in the Islamic tradition, while Shabbir Akhtar addressed the relations between Western Christianity and Islam, but is never emerged at the centre of the debate.

This absence implies a degree of ambiguity regards to both the problem of the pluralism of Islamic thought’s sources and the problem of its reform and advancement. While on the one hand, as a religion, or rather as an ideology, Islam, being founded on a “Book”, cannot avoid textual references to revelation, on the other it is evident that religious reformism differs from reform of religion.

Religious reformism implies that those implementing it should maintain a solid reference to religion. Reform of  religion can instead reach the point of doing without it and become transformed into a more or less disguised secularism. It is useful to consider a few examples. One of the subjects discussed at this conference involved the modernism and reformism (islah) that engaged the Muslim world in the 19^th and 20^th centuries as a reaction to the challenge coming from the West, which had colonised and subjected to its dominium most of the Islamic lands.

The issues of modernism and reformism have been enlivening the debates of Muslim intellectuals for at least 150 years, if not more, at a political-institutional level, considering that the West had, so to speak, exported to the Muslim world the modern state, the parliamentary system and capitalism, as well as at a cultural and intellectual level, considering that the concepts of nationalism, secularism and democracy had not previously been processed by Islamic thought.

Hence a pivotal figure of modernist reformism such as the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905), an active promoter, among other matters, of a renewal of the traditional educational system used by the al-Azhar Sunni University, became the bone of contention between those, like the Tunisian Professor Mohammed Haddad who presented his most recent book in Casablanca and exalts him as a secularist ready to renounce religion so as to be able to pursue reform (but that would no longer be religious reformism), and those like Tariq Ramadan (not present at this conference), who considers him the source of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist thought.

Moving to the world of Iranian Islam, the ideas of a reformer of religion such as ‘Abd al-Karim Soroush, hyperbolically and mistakenly defined in the West as “the Luther of Islam”, is opposed by a religious reformer such as the Iranian Mohsen Kadivar, who presented at this conference the Shiite perspective of pluralism, and who in his works accuses Soroush of minimising both the Qur’an and the figure of the Prophet.

I cannot effectively see how it is possible to be a religious reformer, as Soroush claims to be, doing so without the foundations of religion. Luther reformed Christianity but he did so on the basis of the Bible. One cannot therefore see how Islamic religious reform can do without the Qur’an. It is interesting to observe that Kadivar opposes the Khomeinist regime although he is extremely active in promoting Shiite reformism.

This briefly summarised debate reflects a substantial uncertainty experienced by contemporary Islamic thought, locked between the opposing tensions of modernity and tradition. It is my impression that a balance has not yet been achieved between the vision of those who, rightly aspiring for modernity, find it difficult to reconsider their legacy (turath in Arabic), and those who, locked in a pen of what has been called (by Mohammed Arkoun, d. 2010)) “pensable”, hence the inflexible exclusivity of tradition, are no longer capable of thinking the unthinkable and thus all that is outside the pen of tradition such as democracy and historicity.

Such dialectics are characterised above all by Arab thought, one that seems to be experiencing the most problems in pulling itself out of the swamp. At this conference, three constitutive nuclei of contemporary Islamic thought effectively emerged: the Arabic; the Shiite, mainly Iranian, and the Asian.

Having mentioned the stalemate that Arab Islamic though appears to be experiencing, the Iranian school of thought is in turn processing new paths regards to the decisive discrimination represented by Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, as Kadivar’s reflections show. Asian Islamic thought exhibits syncretic characteristics that, in a sense, distance it from the historical foundations of Muslim culture and the Arab-Persian nucleus of that culture.

So while Thailand’s Imtiyaz Yusuf encouraged interreligious dialogue with the Buddhists, Amin Abdullah from Yogyakarta University defended the possibility of a harmonisation of Islam with the pancasila, the still founding principle of the Indonesian constitution (bearing in mind that Indonesia is the Muslim country with the largest population having 240 millions believers), which acknowledges the unity of all religions under an abstract, while simultaneously vague and imprecise, divine principle (din ilahi).

In the past, such syncretism has led, in India for example, to hybridisations between the indistinct principle of the Brahman and the powerfully personalist idea of monotheism centred on the worship of the Unique God, Allah, with frankly disconcerting results. It seems to me that this attitude paves new ways for religious research while simultaneously distancing itself from the founding Qur’anic nucleus.   

The issue involving the reform of Family Law in Morocco, discussed above all by Nouzha Guessous from the University of Casablanca, paid due “political” homage to the country hosting the conference. The Mudawwana law, approved in 2004, has in fact profoundly affected male-female relations in the Maghribi country and provided, a so-to-speak “pluralist” answer to Shari‘a Law, although the academicians who took part in this debate actually avoided passing circumstantial judgement on the effects of the application of a law that is without doubt modernising.

All in all this conference was per se evidence of Islam’s varied characteristics. Pluralism is certainly the prerequisite not only for interreligious dialogue, but also for internal reform processes that look to the future and not to the past in a global and therefore inevitably “open” world. I believe, however, that pluralism cannot imply a loss of a religion’s founding characterisations , nor in general those of any ideology.

Pluralism therefore must not become, à la Hegel, a “night in which all cows are black”, but, on the contrary, maintain clear individual specificities, especially theological ones. The dialectics intrinsic in the written foundations, set out in Books (be such books the Torah, the Gospels or the Qur’an) that are now in a sense “closed” because prophecy has been definitively interrupted and humanist plurality questions the identity of religions, of Christianity no less than Islam of Buddhism.

Dialectics also  encourages a rebalancing of the theoretical elements of religions, and of all ideologies, including the hyper-secularist ones (I believe that French-styled laicité is a religion, a religion with no God but nonetheless with the same “extremist” effects and implications), with a view to avoiding all radicalisms, not only Islamic but also Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindus etcetera.

Photo: NARINDER NANU / AFP

L'articolo New Roads of Islamic Thought proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Berkley Center, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and ResetDoc are pleased to invite you to the “Exiting Violence: The Role of Religion”conferences.

October 11-12, 2018 

Location: Berkley Center Third Floor Conference Room

L'articolo Exiting Violence: The Role of Religion(s) proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Why did political Islam fail? And why did political Islam in Turkey, which started as a rising star turn into a political monster? Why did the Arab, Muslim awakening with its good intentions end in a death and why did political Islamists become killing machines?

All these open questions necessitate deeper understanding and scholarly work, says political scientist Cengiz Aktar.

Text Editing and Production: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Video: Andrea Martella – Salvatore Caruso
Video Editing: Andrea Martella

Venice 2018 

L'articolo The Fiascos of Political Islam proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Recognition of our religious diversity and plurality should be the fundamental task of toleration, says Josè Casanova from Georgetown University lines up the three principles:

1. Each person has the right to her own religion. The State should recognize each and all religions of its citizens

2. The secular and neutral State protects the rights of individuals to their religion, to all religions

3. Mutual recognition of religions and abandonment the old concept of true religion versus false religions.

Text Editing and Production: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Video: Andrea Martella – Salvatore Caruso
Video Editing: Andrea Martella

Venice 2018 

L'articolo The Principles of Religious Pluralism proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Moroccan, Maghrabi, Mediterranean, African—and then, also, Arab–Muslim. This is how Loubna Bensalah — activist and lecturer in communication at the Mohammed V University in Rabat — defines her identity. It is, then, a polished, magnifying glass through which the gender issue in her geographical area of reference, North Africa, can be caught and interpreted.
ResetDoc met her in Milan, during “I walk with her: 2000 km on foot, in Morocco and Tunisia, talking with women”, an event coordinated by the Italian center for peace in the Middle East, Cipmo.

In 2016, Loubna Bensalah walked a thousand kilometers across her country, Morocco, to better understand herself and her fellow citizen women. In 2017, she traveled another thousand kilometers to discover Tunisia. In 2018, she transformed these marches from personal encounters into collective ones, naming the project: “Kayna [I exist and act, in the Maghreb Arabic dialect, ed]—To conquer public space through women’s marches”.
The need to deepen the question of the condition of Moroccan women has arisen in Loubna from personal experience, as she herself tells ResetDoc.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

«It is enough to be a woman in Morocco to understand that things are not going well. We do not have the same rights as men. Little by little—first when I was at school and then when I began my professional career—I became aware of this disparity. And so, I began to ask the people I was interacting with professionally and in the society: Why am I treated differently than a man? Why can a man do things that a woman cannot? In short: why is the male gender chosen? I am indefatigable; I will continue to pose these questions until I have a convincing answer. Up until now, none has been forthcoming and so I keep digging, looking for answers”.

Walking on foot, from village to village, is the concrete symbol of that search and also of the indefatigability your quest for answers?

«Walking for me is a philosophy of life. It is what allows me to reflect, it is a personal need. But, if we pay attention to the illustrative models of the past, we realize that the great philosophers—the prophets, men of thought—have always wandered great distances on foot. The brain, I always say, should never move faster than the legs. Five kilometers an hour is the ideal pace—to watch, to think, to process and to really get in touch with yourself. Also, what sense would it have to arrive in a particular village by car? The locals, seeing me arrive on foot, are immediately interested and open to dialog. And they generally invite me home to learn more about why I have come».

After the first glances and smiles, it is time for questions. What generally is the first question people ask?

«The first thing they usually ask is if I am married. And since I am not, the next one is: “But does your father know?”. In short, any Moroccan man or woman who sees me backpacking, walking alone, is interested in the opinion the male authority closest to me has of my journey. For everyone, in principle, it is an inconceivable thing [to hike alone]. Then, the women congratulate me for my courage and declare they would never be able to do it, both for reasons of physical resistance and for reasons of personal safety. Yet, when my project has become inclusive of other women, many have succeeded. In groups of 20, [before they know it] they have covered 20 kilometers with me, chatting, reflecting, observing».

The awareness of one’s physical resistance as a first step toward emancipation?

«Exactly. These women take care of many children every day, of the house, of their loved ones. This is work that takes a lot more energy than 20 kilometers of walking, but they are not aware of their own stamina and strength. My inclusive march is designed for this purpose: when will a woman succeed in defending herself and asserting her rights? When she recognizes her own ability to do it. Since childhood they [men] explain to us that we are fragile, that we need the protection of a man, that we are the weaker sex, and in the end, they convince us it’s true».

What is the role of religion in this social representation of female frailty?

«Religion is distorted according to the patriarchal structure of the society: where is it ever written that a Muslim woman cannot work outside the home? Or that you have to take care only of your husband and your children? I do not consider men to be the enemy, let me be clear. Men and women are victims of a social model that does no good for either.
And the affirmation of my rights as a woman does not take anything away from male rights».

The choice to call your project “I walk with her”, in English, suggests a desire to universalize the message.

«Yes, I think that with different nuances the battle for women’s rights makes sense everywhere. In the whole Mediterranean and in the whole world. Because when you too stop fighting for women’s rights, taking for granted those rights already acquired, then you will begin to lose ground».

Are there any specific aspects that you recognize in Moroccan women?

«Every reality has a different cultural identity, of course. Having said this, it is necessary that every conquest be achieved without external intervention. With the rhythm and local social strategies. For example, if we talk about family law and the possibility for women to receive the same portion of inheritance, there is a specific verse from the Qur’an that imposes a disparity. The modernization under way in Morocco and Tunisia is the result of internal debate, and this is how it must be. Laws are changing because the societies of these countries are making a personal internal journey while remaining Muslim».

What influence did you get from political activism that in the Maghreb and Mashreq led to the “Arab Spring”?

«I did not participate in anything during the Arab Spring. I was a little under 20 [years old] and did not even know what was going on in the other North African countries in general. I was a victim—yes, I say that quite deliberately—of the total disinformation applied at that time in the region. Everything seemed fine. I was part of a cultural rather than an economic elite, and I studied at university without being interested in politics. The social and historical baggage in our countries is such that we have zero relation to politics: this attitude is passed on to us by our parents. I did not believe in demonstrations or social claims».

Yet you believe in the initiative of the individual to change society from below. What does it mean today to be an activist, a woman of Moroccan culture?

«My identity, our identity is the result of overlapping layers: I am Moroccan, Maghrabi, Mediterranean, African. And then, finally, also Arab–Muslim. With these unequivocally Magrebian personal features, with this baggage of history, traditions, culture, I walk for my rights and those of other women, meeting their glances, eye-to-eye, as we move forward».

Photo: ABDELHAK SENNA / AFP

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L'articolo How to Conquer Public Space in Morocco through a Feminist March. An Interview with Loubna Bensalah proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

ZHONG defines tolerance doing one’s utmost and putting oneself in the other’s place, which is similar but different from tolerance in Western tradition and SHU means acting according to your heart. This concept of toleration combines the practice of toleration with the attitude of tolerance, says Pei Wang from Beijing’s’ Tsinghua University.

The Tao of ZHONG and SHU is not only a combination of rhythm and emotion but also a combination of unity and diversity when it comes to politics.

Text Editing and Production: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Video: Andrea Martella – Salvatore Caruso
Video Editing: Andrea Martella

Venice 2018 

L'articolo Confucius’s Virtues of Zhong and Shu: Concepts for Toleration and Tolerance proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

The Qur’an offers pluralism for other religions, as in verse 5 – The Al-Ma’idah: “God created diversity, wanted us to create diversity and is asking us to do good deeds together, eat together and have intermarriages between Muslims and specially people of the book”.

Islam calls for unity within diversity says Nayla Tabbara, co-founder of the Lebanese Adyan Foundation for Solidarity, Diversity and Human Dignity.

Text Editing and Production: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg
Video: Andrea Martella – Salvatore Caruso
Video Editing: Andrea Martella

Venice 2018 

L'articolo Islamic Pluralist Theology and other Religions proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Casablanca School and Seminar Speakers: Coming Soon

L'articolo Speakers Casablanca proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Casablanca Seminars
Tolerance in Mediterranean Societies: History, Ideas and Institutions
International Conference

10-20 July, 2019

Reset Dialogues On Civilizations in partnership with the King Abdul-Aziz Al Saoud Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences is organizing the second edition of the International School and Seminars in Casablanca.

The rapid technological development and digital means of communication that shape current world affairs and relations have not always been used as a means of understanding and dialogue among different cultures and traditions. Physical migration flows due to poverty, conflicts, or civil wars have given rise to discourses of hatred, extremism, and discrimination around the world, East and West, North and South. A number of Muslim majority societies in particular and Muslim minorities in different contexts have been facing such situations of migrations and conflicts, which has necessitated revisiting the historical and institutional heritage of these societies as a way of confronting these serious challenges, which have trespassed borders and confront all traditions and cultures alike.

The second edition of Casablanca Seminars goes on with its aim of understanding of and among traditions to examine the fountains of tolerance in especially Islamic contexts from theological, philosophical, historical, socio-anthropological and institutionally juristic-legal perspectives. Comparisons with non-Islamic traditions, with which Muslim majority or minority societies interact, are also studied.

Program (Coming Soon)

L'articolo Program Casablanca proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

L'articolo Comparative Secularism – Towards an Intercultural Lexicon proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

A month before the European elections, the international political debate has shifted to the Netherlands. There, the far-right rising star Thierry Baudet has declared his aspiration to lead the Dutch delegation to Brussels by striving for first place at the 23 May vote. What is less under the spotlight are the effects of this heavy shift to the right on the once balanced and centre-oriented political scene in the Netherlands and on Dutch society as a whole. The most evident such consequence is that minorities, non-western immigrants and their descendants have started to organize political parties to defend themselves from the rising anti-migrant rhetoric, nowadays embraced by an increasing share of the population.

The most vocal of the new “migrantenpartijen” is Denk, which will run candidates in the European elections. Its declared aim is to become the first party devoted to the interests of new Europeans to ever gain seats in the European parliament. Like any first, this mission will be difficult for the party to achieve. However, the absence of a threshold in the Dutch electoral system and promising recent polls — which have Denk neck-and-neck with “50plus”, another small potential new entry — may see the party succeed in its dream of leading the charge for minority inclusion in the European parliament.

How did we get to the point in which Dutch politics is so polarized that the parliament contains both the far-right anti-immigrant Forum voor Democratie (FvD) and a pro-migrant party like Denk? To answer this question, we must step back to 2002.

The Dutch Labour Party and Socialist Party shift on minority groups

Suddenly, at the beginning of the millennium the idyllic picture of a Scandinavian-style country of “compromise and tolerance” was shattered by the murder of Pim Fortuyn—an eccentric, openly gay, conservative politician, and declared enemy of a multi-ethnic society. This was a time when criticizing multiculturalism was generally not accepted by Dutch mainstream society. The death of Fortuyn paved the way for the rise of the populist Geert Wilders and his personal war against Islam. But more generally it has boosted a gradual shift in the entire political spectrum towards more conservative and ethnocentric positions.

The Dutch Labour Party (Partij voor de Arbeid, PvdA) and the Socialist Party (Socialistische Partij, SP) were once favoured by migrant workers, in particular those with a Turkish or Moroccan background. In the last 10 years, however, both parties have turned their back on minorities. To retain electoral support they have shifted significantly, leaving behind traditional internationalist solidarity for a more electorally convenient focus on native Dutch interests and embracing a less tolerant approach towards Islam.

In a country where 1 million out of a total of 18 million citizens are Muslim, this shift among the left-leaning parties has been perceived by non-western migrants and their descendants with a growing sense of distress. Just as the murders of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and film director Theo van Gogh in 2003 are seen as turning points in a rising Islamophobia in the country, 2014 marked another critical juncture. On 13 November of that year, the formal fracture of the Netherlands’ multi-ethnic society occurred when Tunahan Kuzu and Selçuk Öztürk — two PvdA MPs of Turkish background — were expelled by the group.

The expulsion was the culmination of a fierce internal debate sparked by a report stating that 90% of young Dutch-Turkish were supportive of ISIS. The expulsions (or resignations — neither the PvdA nor the Denk founders can agree who made the first step) of the two MPs were so explosive because they did not come about because of any particular political or policy disagreement but simply based on their minority identity.

The report’s findings — which were actively promoted by the PvdA leader Lodewijk Asscher, back then minister of Social Affairs — turned out to be overestimated and its credibility was called into question. Yet Asscher stood firm in his criticism of the apparent failure of integration and many have seen this as a clear statement of the position the party, once the most “Muslim friendly” in the country.

On the other hand, Kuzu and Öztürk, both born in Turkey, were aware of the huge potential of the “migrant vote” at a time of turmoil time — Wilders was making massive gains, Mark Rutte’s liberal VVD was embracing anti-migrant rhetoric, and other left-wing parties abandoning internationalism to focus on mainstream Dutch voters.

Denk as the multi-ethnic response against “white privilege” in the Netherlands

Instead of resigning from the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch lower house, the two MPs founded their own party, naming it “Denk”— a word that means “think” in Dutch and “equal” in Turkish — to mark its roots in the migrant community. They cast their movement as antiracist, multi-ethnic, and anti-colonial presenting a programme with a strong stance on the left but with loud rhetoric against “white privilege” and institutionalized racism in the Netherlands.

Many academics, like Floris Vermeulen of the University of Amsterdam and an expert on the “migrant parties” phenomenon, see Denk as a direct consequence of the crisis of the traditional parties and the rise of populists movements like of Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) and Baudet’s FvD.

At the March 2017 general elections, Denk became the first migrant party in Europe ever to see representatives elected to a national parliament. Kuzu and Öztürk were returned as MPs and were joined by Farid Karzan, born in Morocco. Denk’s three MPs have since piqued nationwide and even international interest. The reaction by mainstream politics and the national press has been, in general, negative.

Wilders accused the party of being “agents” of Turkish President Erdoğan because of rumors that the party has been actively supported by the Diyanet, a powerful Turkish state agency responsible for administering Turkish-Muslim religious communities in Europe. The Telegraaf, the main national paper, has labeled Denk a “product of failed integration”.

The Netherlands’ so-called “Turkish party” does not merely appeal to “Nederturks” (and, indeed, is rejected by Dutch-Kurds and anti-Erdoğan Dutch-Turkish). It has attracted support also from a large share of the Dutch-Moroccan community and many native Dutch disaffected with mainstream politics. But it also underlines the radical transformation a country once considered a world example for diversity and cohabitation of cultures has undergone.

In Dutch major cities, minority parties are rising

Now in its fifth year, Denk is one of the most successful examples of a “mijgranten partij”, with a permanent national structure and elected representatives in several provinces and every city with a substantial minority population. But it is not the only one in the Netherlands to represent Dutch citizens with a migrant background. Big cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag all have local minority parties, mostly representing the fragmented and complex Muslim communities.

In Rotterdam, a former Green-left (Groenlinks) councilman with Egyptian roots, Nourdin El Ouali, founded “Nida”, which in Arabic means “vote” and “unity”. The party — a Muslim inspired movement with a progressive stance on social issues and LGBTIQ-friendly positions — has been represented in the local council since 2014. This unusual combination has seen Nida gain much support among younger generations with a migrant background; Nida has also seen a representative elected to the Den Haag City Council.

In the “city of peace and justice” as the de facto capital has labeled itself because of the international tribunals it hosts, political fragmentation is so thick that three parties with an agenda for Muslim voters are competing: Nida, the Party of Unity (Partij van de Eenheid) and the Muslim Democrats (Islam Democraten). The three each hold a seat in the council and often represent the interests of different Mosques and Islamic cultural centres.

In Amsterdam, where Denk attracts virtually all Muslim votes, yet another “migrants party” has appeared on the scene, this one representing the black community. Bij1, an explicitly feminist party, gained one seat at the last municipal elections. It was founded by Sylvana Simons, a Dutch-Surinamese TV actor, with a programme focused on decolonization and the rights of the black community, especially women.

For many, the rise of the “migrantenpartijen” is a worrying signal: as non-western minorities represent 13% of the population in The Netherlands the main risk is that a relevant part of the country gets more marginalized from the mainstream society. However, mostly relying on activism and identity, the migrant parties have managed to mobilize people who have never been involved in politics before. They have directly challenged the concept of “integration”— holding it out as a neo-colonial tool of native-born to force assimilation — replacing it with the idea of “acceptance”.

Denk now leads the way. And if its position in recent opinion polling holds up, it will likely fulfill its ambition of becoming the first migrant party ever to gain a seat in the European parliament.

Photo: MARCO DE SWART / ANP / AFP

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Gandhi was suspicious of many things modern, including modern Hinduism: a new, 19th century religion, sharply demarcated from others, and a fitting rival of Islam and Christianity. Why? Because he viewed himself as a sanatani, an adherent of a way of life that started long, long ago but, unlike the ancient that is dead and gone, continues to live today.

Ineradicable diversity

Central to this seemingly everlasting Hindu imagination is its deep plurality, reflected in its acceptance of the co-existence of three basic ethical forms: one dependent on multiple gods and goddesses, one on a single god, and one even entirely independent of god, gods and goddesses (truth-seeking). For Gandhi, this religio-philosophical plurality is the inevitable and healthy destiny of humankind. “There is endless variety in all religions” and “interminable religious differences,” he said. “Some go on a pilgrimage and bathe in the sacred river, others go to Mecca; some worship him in temples, others in mosques, some just bow their heads in reverence; some read the Vedas, others the Quran… some call themselves Hindus, others Muslims…” For Gandhi, there is not only diversity of religions but also diversity within them. “While I believe myself to be a Hindu, I know that I do not worship God in the same manner as any one or all of them.”

Given the inescapability of deep religious diversity, he argued, “the need of the moment is not one religion for the whole of human kind, but mutual respect, equal regard and tolerance of the devotees of different religions.” This moral-practical attitude of equal regard for all religions is entailed by an epistemic grasp of the deeper, more fundamental unity of all religions. “The soul of religion is one, but encased in a multitude of forms. Wise men will ignore the outward crust and see the same soul living under a variety of crusts.”

The basic reference of all religions is the same: God or Truth. “All religions are true and all have some error in them and that whilst I hold by my own, I should hold others as dear as Hinduism and make no distinction between them.”

Inclusive monotheism

Gandhi’s inclusive (belief in one God that encompasses all gods) rather than exclusive (belief in only one True God, while holding all others as false) monotheism flows directly from Indian ‘polytheistic’ traditions, a trait they share with other religious traditions of the ancient world (Greek, Latin, Pre-Islamic Arab religions). The implicit theology of these religions allows for translation of gods.

In virtually all cultures of classical antiquity, each god performed a function based on his cosmic competence — gods of love, war, knowledge, or craftsmanship. Likewise, each god embodied an entity of potentially cosmic significance — gods of fire, rain, earth, time, sun, moon, sea or there were primal gods who create, destroy, preserve and so on. Virtually, every god or goddess in one culture could be related to gods and goddesses of another culture. For example, the goddess Parvati of one Indian regional culture is related to the goddess Durga of another region by viewing both as benign and fierce forms of one primal goddess, Devi. This way differences — benign/fierce — continue to be viewed as irreducible and yet translatable. This is a theology of recognition in which the gods and goddesses of each culture are recognised within the background of a common semantic universe.

One feature of inclusive monotheism then is that “all worship the same God although under different names”. Gandhi illustrates this by a striking verse from the Guru Granth Sahib in which Nanak says that God may be called by the name of Allah, Rahim or Ram. Such an ecumenical perspective permits multiple attachments. If different names refer to the same god, then why not embrace all?

Two more things follow. First, “to revile one another’s religion, to make reckless statements, to utter untruth, to break the heads of innocent men, to desecrate temples or mosques is a denial of God.” Second, “it is wrong for anyone to say that his God is superior to that of another’s. God is one and the same for all. At one level, there is a fundamental unity among all religions and precisely because of it they must be regarded as equal. If so, movements of conversion or purification are pointless. ‘The real Shuddhi movement consists in each one trying to arrive at perfection in his or her own faith.” In such a plan, a person’s character is the only test. “What is the use of crossing from one compartment to another, if it does not mean a moral enhancement?”

Toleration and respect

For Gandhi, respect and toleration were related, and virtually indistinguishable. This might appear strange. To ‘tolerate’, in the classical 17th century meaning of the term, is to refrain from interference in the activities of others even though one finds them morally repugnant and despite having the power to do so. Here one puts up with, even suffers the morally reprehensible activities of others. At best, the powerless other escapes interference of the powerful because the latter shows mercy towards them. This is hate-based toleration — I hate but still tolerate.

Gandhi’s ‘toleration’ is different. How? Parents often put up with the blemishes of their children which they would not suffer in others. We choose to overlook a fault in our spouse, lover, or close friend that we would not excuse in others. We might endure differences with fellow citizens because we value fraternity. In short, we tolerate some disagreeable beliefs and practices of persons or groups because we identify with many of their other beliefs and practices. In all such cases, we put up with dislikeable states of others even if we have some power to do something about them simply because we have love or love-like feelings for them. Others are tolerated not despite hate but rather because they are loved — I love, so I tolerate. This is Gandhi’s love-based toleration, entirely consistent with respect.

Unlike the mainstream, hate-based conception of toleration that presupposes that oneness with significant others is achieved by abolishing the radical other, by eliminating plurality, for this second, Gandhian conception, oneness is attained by accepting all radical others as equally significant because they variously manifest one supreme being. Thus, to tolerate is to refrain from interfering in the life of others not despite our hatred for them, but because we love them as alternative manifestations of our own selves or because we deeply care for some basic norm common to all of us. We may not be able to be what they are, we may even dislike some of their beliefs and practices but we recognise that they are translations of our own selves or of god within each of us. This, Gandhi believed, binds us together in a relationship of lasting affection.

Gandhi’s religious vision encouraged multiple attachments, multiple belongings, and multiple religious identities. Is it not time that we challenge the idea of religion as an exclusive monolith, one for which the highest achievable social ideal is an opportunist, morally dubious hate-based toleration and recover the deep pluralism and love-based toleration at the heart of Gandhi’s religious vision? Indeed, as religious rivalry, conflict and violence intensify, can we afford not to?

This article was first published on The Hindu on the occasion of  the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi

(Photo by N. Nanu / AFP)

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On August 13^th 1961 Berlin discovered the existence of the Wall. That day all connections between the two sectors of Berlin, East and West, were stopped, in compliance with decisions made by the communist regime. Under the astonished eyes of the population on both sides, an insurmountable barrier began to take shape, accompanied by an order to fire on anyone who tried to cross it.

March 1992. In a famous article published by the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote, “What has happened in Eastern Europe in recent years would not have been possible without the presence of this Pope, without the great role that he has played on the world scene.” These words awaken us, reminding us for how long that system was respected and even glorified by many. So remembering what John Paul II did is important, not for the anniversary, but so as to understand it. What did he do? With fear and glorification in mind, we discover that John Paul II had the strength to say “the king is naked.”

The challenges of a new Pope

It is strange. It is precisely this hypothesis that provides topicality to the work of the Polish Pope, and we see this more clearly when dwelling on one detail that brings him closer to today’s Pope Francis. The pontificate of John Paul II had in fact just begun when, in Assisi, an interlocutor told him not to forget the Church of silence. He replied that that Church no longer existed, because ever since he had been elected it had spoken through his voice. The pontificate of Francis also began with a similar invitation.  Sitting next to him during the 2013 conclave, when it became clear that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was about to become pope, Cardinal Claudio Hummes said to him, “Do not forget the poor.” Shortly afterwards, speaking from the balcony, the Pope who came not from the east but from the south announced his name, Francis, as if to say that from that moment on the poor would speak with his voice.

This does not mean that two very different popes should be perceived as being similar. However, thirty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, this leads us to understand that yesterday’s wall lives on in today’s walls.  Wojtyla and Bergoglio have both pointed out the nakedness of various monarchs, but it is precisely the peripheries of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a living challenge to widespread globalization, that, thirty years later, have led us to the heart of the urgency expressed by John Paul II.

As a son of the East, Wojtyla wanted a compact Church, as a son of the global south Bergoglio wants a multifaceted one. But diversity does not prevent what is new from making us better understand the old. For example, nowadays we know everything about the crimes of the Soviet system. But what about us and our relationship with that system? Why did we consider paramount Wojtyla’s material aid to Solidarnosc, that is to say the Vatican funding although it was mainly American? This may be the case for anyone who remembers that in Yalta, Stalin is said to have asked how many divisions the pope could provide, even though we now perceive that aid, that funding, as the most problematic legacy for the Church. But is that the point? Or does this not prevent the appearance of another story?

A historic journey

Let us proceed in an orderly manner. As soon as he was elected, Pope Karol Wojtyla began to think about his first trip to Poland. Instructions arrived quite soon and his collaborators informed the authorities in Warsaw that the new pontiff intended to visit the country in May 1979 for the 900th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Stanislaw. It is said that the Holy See immediately specified that a two days visit would have been sufficient. The Poles, obviously, did not know how to say no, even though they wanted to.  And so the Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) at the time, Leonid Brezhnev, dismissed his Polish counterpart, Edward Gierek, telling him to do as he thought best, provided he did not complain about the consequences. The warning had its effect and Warsaw presented a great many requests to the Vatican, among which the imperative to move the date. According to a reconstruction published by Spanish ABC news, the central point was “no May, no commemoration of Stanislaw”. Only a later date would be acceptable.

The Holy See allowed time to go by and then indicated that it wanted to change the date, asking only for the visit to be extended by another four days. The agreement was therefore finalized and the greatest risk seemed to have been avoided. Obviously police and intelligence, surveillance and espionage operations involved half of Europe, from Frankfurt to East Berlin, from Moscow to Warsaw, with the Stasi, the police and other services involved in every possible way.

There were also very many infiltrators among the pilgrims and John Paul II was more aware of this than anyone else, well before he landed in Poland on June 2^nd, 1979. That day, in Warsaw, he asked the Holy Spirit to descend and renew the face of the earth, adding only the word “this”:  “renew the face of this land.” Those words did not really add anything, but they changed everything.  There in Warsaw, a Polish Pope could say what everyone was thinking, but that no one dared say. Did the wall of fear come down at that moment? Probably not for everyone, probably not forever; but it showed everyone the missing window. Before material support was provided to Solidarnosc, the fact worth highlighting is precisely this; walls crush people for as long as one allows them to be frightening.  That thought meant believing that the journey was not over.

Patience and dialogue

Wojtyla’s choice was not based on the calculation of realpolitik or realism, but they placed him at the service of the principles and interests of the people. Proof of this can be found in the Wojtyla-Casaroli pairing. It was Casaroli, who in the days of Paul VI had developed and managed the famous “ostpolitik”, the policy of patience and dialogue with regimes of the East. It was he who in 1979 was chosen by the Pope as the new Secretary of State. Prudence at the service of courage, and not the opposite was at the basis of the approach used by John Paul II and this would not have been possible without Cardinal Agostino Casaroli. This because the fear and glorification persisting at the time confirmed that the great “Wojtyla novelty” was his refusal to accept out of self-interest the giant with clay feet.

History has provided us with so many examples of this, from Kissinger onwards there have been so many indications that the political world considered it impossible to change things in the East. A challenge was excluded because nobody wanted to take action from the exterior. And what about from inside?

This realism overlapped with political judgments unaware of the power of time (i.e. of processes) with respect to space (i.e. power) that was considered sealed. In 1989 Helmut Kohl had stated that neither he nor his interlocutor would live long enough to see the German unification, a unification that took place the following year.

John Paul II broke from within what seemed unbreakable from the outside and he did it with Cardinal Casaroli next to him, because while the pastor had to think of his flock, the head of state had to look for new diplomatic relations with Soviet bloc countries. This incontrovertible fact is proved by what he said in his first speech to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, when he expressed the desire to once again see in the Vatican diplomats from those countries that once had relations with the Holy See. This was an explicit reference. It is in this context that material aid provided to Solidarnosc made sense. Not instigating an uprising but believing in a process.

 What was it that marked the beginning of this process? There had been the rejection of the Hungarian model in which the Church led by Cardinal Lékai effectively stood by the regime in exchange for being left in peace. Commenting on a speech made by the Polish Primate Wyszynski before the conclave that explicitly referred to the Hungarian primate of the time, Wojtyla said, “It’s the worthy response to the pusillanimity of Cardinal Lékai.” And what had he said to Wyszynski? He said that the Soviet system was not fate, but a reality experiencing a crisis. And it was thus that when the old and in every sense tired Cardinal of Prague, Tomàsek, showed himself incapable of continuing to fight and therefore in spite of himself ready to distance himself from the critical ferment caused by the regime of Charter 77, he received private letters and encouragement from the Pope until the new beginning with Charter 77.

Words that matter

Another connecting element was the constant work done within and by the world of diplomacy. The three visits to Poland before the fall of the Wall, in 1979, 1983 and 1987 were the main confirmation of this and the person who expressed it better than all others was Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, after the 1987 visit: “Only his words could prevent a civil war.” Exaggerations? Professor Andrea Riccardi has provided information on this subject that really explains a great deal. Riccardi in fact reported a Soviet opinion that compared Wojtyla’s visits to a return home of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Two aspects thus appear; the first concerns fear, which compared to the not too distant days of Yalta and sarcasm about the Pope’s divisions, had moved to the Soviet camp. Thanks to this comparison the Soviets fully comprehended the importance of the work done by the Church. The second aspect was the Soviets’ ability to understand to what extent the mobilisation of millions of people is really difficult to keep under control. Eduard Shevardnadze was not exaggerating.

John Paul II’s three visits to Poland before the fall of the Wall were therefore at the heart of a historical season that certainly did not end with those three trips. This crucial chapter, the passage from resignation to transformation, cannot be said to be fully narrated without taking into account dialogue and evident internal contradictions. All this involved Gorbachev, Jaruzelski and the Patriarchate of Moscow.

The first element, dialogue, can be well understood reading the words Wojtyla said to Gorbachev during their first meeting in the Vatican, “The efforts you are making are not only of a great interest to us. We share them” ,as well as others attributed to Wojtyla by the expert on Polish issues, Tad Szulc, and addressed at General Jaruzelski in 1983, during the Pope’s second pilgrimage to Poland. “General, do not take offence. I am not opposed to socialism, but I just want it to have a human face.”

Professor Andrea Riccardi expressly mentions this in his biography of John Paul II, saying, “Was the Pope thinking of an evolution of socialism towards democratic forms?” It was Jaruzelski who, in 1990, allegedly told Cardinal Casaroli that, “Time has taught us humility. It has taught us sensitivity for universal values.” All this goes together with another aspect of the issue, the one we called “contradictions.” In fact, it concerns the Christian world itself and is visible in Wojtyla’s 1987 portrayal of the policies of the Patriarchate of Moscow, an extremely important link in the complex Eastern mechanism. This is what he said to Andrea Riccardi on the subject that same year, “The Russian Church’s problem is Caesaropapism. Now, as in the days of the tsars, the same mentality continues. That is why they always and in every way depend on the state. Of course they too have had their martyrs. And so many! But they cannot say this and talk about it. And then there is the idea of a third Rome that is still after all alive; that of making the Church of Moscow the new Rome. Caesaropapism is the problem.”

So to reread the story of the role played by Karol Wojtyla in the fall of the Berlin Wall thirty years later, after having deluded ourselves that we were witnessing the end of the era of Walls, means discovering that memory deceives us if it doesn’t help understand that those years have not yet passed. Those who rejoiced in the fall of the Wall of yesterday, today perhaps rejoice in erecting another… while the Caesaropapists are always very powerful, now also in the Catholic world.

Photo: DERRICK CEYRAC / AFP

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A renowned professor of international relations, Cengiz Aktar has worked for both the UN and the EU. Most importantly, he’s been one of the closest Turkish intellectuals to Hrant Dink, a journalist of Armenian descent assassinated in Istanbul back in 2007. It was on that occasion that Mr. Aktar his appeal: a demand for forgiveness by Armenians for the collective indifference of his own country to the Great Catastrophe suffered by Ottoman Armenians in 1915.

Mr. Aktar, in 2013 already you argued in an interview with Reset DOC that the problem for Turkey was Mr. Erdoğan, not his party, the AKP. Was it him who created this explosive Turkish mixture by combining his own authoritarianism with the already authoritarian nationalism in Turkey?

I remember very well what I told Reset on that occasion and I would like to start from there because as we know things change, but it is worth remembering that at the beginning of the millennium the AKP was a truly reforming party, it was a political party with a collegial leadership and in fact the first years led to unthinkable reforms, much more than those of Ataturk. Even then, however, we saw that in Mr. Erdoğan there was an authoritarian tendency, and so what was feared then, today has become reality, the picture has changed, and we are in an authoritarian system. For me the best analysis of the relationship between masses and power is that of Hannah Arendt: since there is no totalitarianism without the consent of the masses, the most serious finding is that such a system derives from the consensus of the masses, a consensus that exceeds the political one. Just like the one Erdoğan recorded in the subsequent elections. What is emerging dangerously and evidently, is a totalitarian magma that is made of religious ideas and nationalism. Let’s look at the recent, terrible developments on the Syrian front, the Syrian war waged mainly against the Kurds. The choice of war made by Mr. Erdoğan has a consensus of 80% of the Turks, maybe more. And those who follow him don’t all support what is called political Islam, they don’t all choose his idea of ​​Islam, they may not even be Muslims in reality, but they are nationalists. Here we can say today that political Islam in Turkey has succeeded in adopting the totalitarian political attitude of the Twentieth Century nationalists of the Union and Progress party. There too, the journey was long but led to the genocide of the Armenians, with a vision that included racism.

It is that vision that was and still is today at the base of the ethnic-religious cleansing that is invoked as it was in the name of homogeneity. Let’s look at the results back then. The Ottoman complexity has disappeared and Turkey is the most religiously homogeneous country in the entire Middle East: even in Iran, Muslims are not 99% of the population like here. But the homogenization (of which the Christians paid the price) today is no longer enough, it must be sectarian, thus discriminating against the Alevis (ten million non-Sunni citizens) and the Kurds (non-Turks). They are the two great inhomogeneous people left in a country that had chosen the path of a language and religion to feel homogeneous and continuing along the same road must tighten the cords and move on to sectarian homogeneity, that is Sunni.

We are here at the Kurdish question. Could there be the danger that speaking generically of the Kurdish question, in terms of solidarity with the Kurds, endorses the idea of ​​supporting another ethnic state, which is perhaps not what is intended to be?

But how else to do it? How can one otherwise express solidarity with a population that certainly needs it? It is a political duty. Perhaps the important point to stress is that here we support the experiment of Rojava, which is not a Kurdish state, but an experiment of federal self-government that includes Turcomans, Arabs, Assyrians and many others. That of Rojava was a non-ethnic experiment and in my opinion, it is first and foremost this plural character that has irritated many here and certainly Mr. Erdoğan, who thinks and reasons politically in terms of a One Man Show. The example we tried to experiment in Rojava is the political attempt to create what we would call the experiment of a dignified life, a road that has no alternative in all the countries of the area that are ethnically and religiously complex.

In this regard, how was the Declaration on Human Brotherhood of Abu Dhabi, signed in February 2019 by Pope Francis and by the imam of al-Azhar Sheik al-Tayyeb, acknowledged by Turkish Islam and the Turkish society? Your idea of Rojava is indeed their idea of states founded on common citizenship, in the name of a secular law, with which to feel like brothers in the same country. It is another idea of what a nation is, going far away from the Ottoman idea of millet: “people” are not religious ethnic groups, but territorial.

I don’t think I disappoint or surprise anyone by answering that what happened in Abu Dhabi for the Turks and for Turkish Islam is as if it had not happened. No one has talked about it here. It will not be surprising because it is known all over the world that one of the countries with the highest percentage of Muslims in the world, Turkey, does not have a single known Muslim thinker or theologian. They do not participate in conferences, meetings or dialogues because they are not interested – they are parochial, isolated. At the time of the Ottoman Empire this was not the case and so it is clear that this is the result of the Kemalist revolution, it is a product of the nationalization of religion by Ataturk. Even the laity in this country is parochial, even the laity have not grasped the value of Abu Dhabi. A “normal” Turkish layperson never challenges the Kemalist dogma of language and “nation” as a basis for the State, which now integrates with the idea of ​​a confession thanks to Mr. Erdoğan. Take the main opposition party usually defined as secular, the CHP. Someone there may be ready to change the underlying ideology of the party, but the litmus test is international politics and I exclude disagreements over Mr. Erdoğan’s foreign and nationalist policies. The proof is that they support him in this new Syrian war. As you know, right now, the United States voted to recognize the Armenian genocide. I know that Turkish nationalism has done everything to prevent this outcome. And in the coming days, I can swear to you that no one will criticize the loud official voice of Turkey that will come against the United States for this decision.

Photo: @gozlukluf

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On Egnatia, a congested street that cuts the center of Thessaloniki horizontally, Greece’s second-largest city, packed buses are the norm at any time of the day. Between the Arch of Galerius and the bottle-shaped Aristotelous Square, buses pass no less than five churches, and in front of each one, it is usual to see passengers, not only older generations, crossing themselves before getting back to their conversations, their thoughts, or their struggle to avoid being squashed by the crowd. Orthodox icons above the windscreen next to the driver are also common, along with Greek flags. Clearly, religious sentiment is still a thing for the Greeks.

The 2018 attempt to enshrine religious neutrality in the Constitution provoked a fracture within the Greek Church between its leader, Archbishop Ieronymos, who sponsored the deal, and the rest of the Holy Synod, the Council of Metropolitan Bishops resulting in a final rejection of the deal. After last July’s national election, which brought the center-right New Democracy (ND) back into power concluding the SYRIZA era, the Church can count on a more friendly government, but its position remains precarious: the years of the economic crisis have not left the Church unaffected.

Whenever religious matters come up in the Greek political debate, citizens respond with high levels of polarization. Two decades ago, when the socialist government led by PASOK set out to remove religious affiliation from identity cards for privacy reasons, Aristotelous Square could not contain the multitude gathered around the then-Archbishop Christodoulos to protest the bill – which was eventually approved.

That was not the last time the Church meddled in matters without strict religious relevance. During the bargaining process that led, in June 2018, to the much-discussed Prespa Agreement between Greece and the country now known as the Republic of North Macedonia, the Church adopted a radically critical stance against the SYRIZA government. The Church was worried that once the name deal was ratified, the former Yugoslavian country would reinforce its claim on the “Church of Macedonia”.

But the reasons why the Church was critical of the Macedonian deal were not strictly ecclesiastical, as the Holy Synod made clear by declaring that the Church has “fought since antiquity for the Greekness of Macedonia with the blood of its clergy and its words”. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras pushed the deal through, and paid the price at the polls: he lost the European and the national elections last May and July, respectively.

Orthodox “Greekness” and Western modernity

Greece is the fourth most religious country in Europe, second only to Romania among the 27 members of the European Union, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. 49% of Greek adults declare themselves “highly religious”. But Orthodoxy in Greece is not simply about metaphysical beliefs: it is about being Greek.

The identification between religion and “Greekness” dates back to the establishment of the modern Greek State after the revolution against the Ottomans. To increase its symbolic legitimation, the State did not hesitate to put the Church under its institutional control. The autonomy of the Church of Greece from the Constantinople-based ecumenical patriarchate was thus established in 1833.

Since then, the Church has often acted as a secular actor able to shape social consent, and its connection to the Greek national identity has been portrayed as a timeless truism. In spite of its ideological influence, however, the physical presence of the Church has been less dominant. The State has unilaterally taken over 96% of the assets the Church had accumulated during the Ottoman domination. The wages and pensions the State pays to the clergy signal the lack of financial self-sufficiency of the Church.

As for its ideological stance, the Greek Church is not simplistically hostile to the West, although European integration, with Greece being the first Orthodox member of the European Community, joining in 1981, has often been portrayed as a steamroller likely to annihilate the authentic Greek identity.

Orthodoxy has been critical towards western modernity, but not openly opposed to it: “First Greek Orthodox, then Europeans!”, screamed the crowd during the rally against the exclusion of religious affiliation from ID cards back in 2000. Even now, most Greeks keep considering themselves pro-European, while still being Orthodox.

In its own way, Greek Orthodoxy is trying to cope with the secularization of society and with European integration. Even during the hardest moments of the crisis, the Church put the blame on the Greek ruling class rather than on the international creditors. In 2015, Archbishop Ieronymos, usually less assertive than his predecessor Christodoulos when it comes to political matters, declared himself in favor of the bailout plan imposed by the IMF and its EU partners.

“Rather than in opposition to Western European modernity, the Orthodox Church of Greece is in many ways its offspring,” says Sotiris Mitralexis, teaching fellow at the University of Athens and expert on State-Church relationships in Greece. In fact, the autonomy of the Greek Church has been established by the state apparatus. The Church’s most controversial elements in particular, such as nationalism and occasional racism, stem from its modern genealogy. And when the time of the decision comes, the Church adopts a pro-European stance, mainly in alignment with the State.

Delaying secularization

In spite of its attempts to cope with the changing times, the Church is often accused of feeding an over-traditionalistic, nationalistic discourse. Historically, the Greek Church has been closer to right-wing political forces; this also was the case during the years of the military junta that took power in a coup d’état in 1967 and replaced the existing Church hierarchy. When democracy was restored in 1974, most of those religious officials who had cooperated with the dictatorship were neither persecuted nor displaced.

In more recent years, the Church has been ambiguous in its stance toward the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn (GD) party. While some Orthodox officials condemned the GD’s racist discourse and violent methods, no official stigmatization has come from the Church, even when the neo-Nazi party embraced the defense of Orthodoxy as a pillar of its propaganda. The lack of a clear stance against the party contributed to the “normalization” of the GD.

The Church’s conservatism has also occasionally delayed the introduction of much-needed reforms. Such is the case with cremation, legal in Greece since 2006 but steadfastly ostracized by the Church. Religious authorities have repeatedly opposed the construction of crematoriums, despite the fact that graves in cemeteries are owned only for a limited number of years before exhumation, and that the crisis has made it increasingly necessary for many Greeks to have a less expensive and yet respectful way of taking care of their dead.

The Church has reiterated it sees cremation as no different than waste recycling and still refuses to hold funerals for those who are cremated. The country’s first crematorium (privately owned) came into operation in Ritsona, two hours away from Athens, in late 2019. Until very recently, according to ERT, around 4,000 bodies were sent from Greece to Sofia, Bulgaria to be cremated each year.

As for civil unions, for years the Church has opposed the extension of this privilege to homosexual couples, which was approved by the parliament in 2015. Even more controversies were raised by the gender ID bill, which allows citizens to self-identify as male or female from the age of 15. The Synod stated that the law would increase mental disturbances.

Homophobic and racist voices among Orthodox hierarchs are particularly problematic because the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ is recognized as the country’s prevailing religion by Article 3 of the Constitution. Freedom of religious conscience, however, is guaranteed to all groups. Also, in financial terms, state support is not exclusively directed to the Orthodox Church, but also to the Muslim minority in Western Thrace. Nevertheless, life for Muslims in Greece is not always easy; the construction of the first Mosque in Athens has been delayed for years, also due to the opposition of Church officials. The Greek capital city still does not have a State-funded mosque. The first one is set to open next summer.

Many share the conviction that in order to reduce the influence of the Orthodoxy, Church-State financial and institutional ties must be loosened. Proposals for an institutional divorce have been put forth since the 80s by the socialist PASOK, and more recently by SYRIZA, but no explicit initiative for a full separation has been taken until now.

Equating the appeal of Orthodoxy to its ties to the State, however, is a mistake, as Sotiris Mitralexis explains: “There is a widespread erroneous belief that the Orthodox Church has a strong influence on society because it is State-sponsored, while the truth is that institutional and legal aspects have very little to do with the symbolic power of religion”.

Would a divorce help secularize society? Quite the contrary; once not tied to the State anymore, the Church could gain broader freedom of advocacy, while its appeal to society would still be intact. It would gain incentives to claim its share of the public sphere in opposition to the State. What is usually referred to as a separation could turn out to be a liberation for the Church. According to Mitralexis, it is the Church that should fervently desire a full separation from the State, and it is the State that has a number of counterincentives.

The tentative deal

Most Church hierarchs, however, do not see an institutional separation from the State as an opportunity. When, in 2018, the SYRIZA-led government finalized a proposal to enshrine in the constitution the “religious neutrality” of the Greek State, while still paying clerics’ wages, fierce opposition came from the Synod, as well as from the Istanbul-based ecumenical patriarchate, which includes the Church of Crete, the Church of the Dodecanese and parts of Northern Greece under its jurisdiction.

The deal sank after the Synod voted against the terms Alexis Tsipras and Archbishop Ieronymos had preliminarily agreed on. As for the constitutional reform, the switched balance of power that emerged from the July 2019 elections allowed ND to dismiss the proposal for the religious neutrality of the State.

In the Church’s opposition to the deal, hostility towards SYRIZA has played a major role. Breaking with tradition, most SYRIZA members of the government decided not to take the religious oath and blessing of the Archbishop at the moment of their inauguration.

SYRIZA and the Church came ever more into conflict after the clash on the reform of religion lessons. In 2016, the then-Minister of Education and Religious Affairs Nikos Filis wanted to turn the confessional character of religion at school into something closer to “religious studies”. Filis was expelled from the government after a reshuffle, and his successor Kostas Gavroglu adopted a less aggressive stance towards the Church.

Regardless of the hostility to the left, the Church does not seem eager to face an institutional separation and a progressive change in the framework of clerics’ wages and pensions. The Greek State started to contribute to the salaries and pensions of the clergy in 1945, but only since 2004 the State has been paying them in toto. In 2013, the salaries and pensions of the clergy – around 200 million euros per year – were incorporated into the national budget.

With the proposed deal, rejected by the Synod, Tsipras counted on scratching 10,000 clerics off the state payroll, making room for as many new hires in the public sector. The State would have started paying a yearly sum to a fund managed by the Church and used exclusively to pay the clergy’s wages and pensions.

The Church’s precarious finances

The tentative deal was also a way to settle the dispute over the Church’s property assets. Of the 4% of ecclesiastical property that was not confiscated by the state, most is still blocked by bureaucratic obstacles. Property ownership in Greece is a controversial matter, due to the lack of a modern land registry.

When it comes to the Church assets, additional property controversies with the State are ongoing since 1952. Despite the expropriations, the Church is still believed to be the second-biggest landowner after the State; but in the absence of a clear legal framework, its assets cannot be commercially exploited. By keeping the institutional relationships and the wages framework unaltered, most clerics believe they are protecting the economic stability of the Church. But such stability is not to be taken for granted.

“There is much disinformation in the Greek public debate about this issue. Church hierarchs are formed within the state mentality and fail to see potential problems, in the tacit conviction that nothing will ever change. Yet, things are already changing in practice, both on the legal and on the financial side” Sotiris Mitralexis explains, insisting that the inertia of the Church when it comes to discussing possible changes is self-defeating: especially after the crisis, there is no guarantee of financial sustainability for the Church in the long run.

In spite of its tragic impact on the weaker parts of Greek society, the economic crisis was an opportunity for the Church to show its social importance. When the economic and the migration crises hit, parishes and charities multiplied their efforts to provide food, shelter and medical assistance to those in need.

But the crisis hit the Church hard: rental incomes shrank, along with the dividends of assets held by the Church in the Bank of Greece; the introduction of a property tax (ENFIA) as part of the austerity measures increased taxation of the Church at the moment of highest financial need. The clergy is also subject to the same provisions imposed by the memorandum in terms of public servants: for every five retirements, only one new cleric can be appointed.

These developments add up to the financial precariousness of the Church and seeking the exploitation of its remaining property assets might be the only viable solution for the future. This would require cooperation with the State and a willingness, on both sides of the bargaining table, to look at the longer-term and not only at short-term electoral advantages and the defense of existing privileges.

The continuation of the current salary regime is not to be taken for granted, were a new crisis to hit. Complete financial independence, on the other hand, is unlikely to be achieved by the Church of Greece, even if it could start exploiting its property assets.

The Tsipras-Ieronymos deal would have included formal recognition that Church assets were confiscated with no appropriate reparations made, and the yearly sum the government would have started to pay to the Church was meant to be a refund.

But Orthodox hierarchs feared that any change in the institutional relationship with the State would disrupt the Church’s privileges, while in Tsipras’s plan to hire thousands of public servants right after scratching the clerics off the state payment rolls, many saw the latest in a long series of clientelist moves in Greek politics.

New Democracy: modernizers or traditionalists?

It is unlikely that any significant development will take place in the next years. During SYRIZA’s government, opposition to the ruling coalition and adherence to the Church’s views often became one and the same for the opposition party New Democracy and its leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

When ND won the national elections last July, the newly appointed Prime Minister Mitsotakis and most of his fellow ministers opted for the religious oath. While ND’s leader presents himself as a modernizer and a liberalizer, his discourse – along with that of the more traditionalist components of his party – has often been winking at the more conservative fringes of Greek society. Church-State relationships are thus likely to remain as they are.

As for the secularization of society, it should probably be pursued with other means than an institutional separation. «When governments try to forcefully impose a secularist agenda, they risk triggering the opposite effect», Mitralexis argues, adding that if Greek politics was to do something to ease a more inclusive society, instead of directly meddling with the Church’s political discourse, it could do so by showing friendship to the most moderate voices of Orthodoxy, projecting them as a counterexample to the reactionary ones.

According to a 2018 survey carried out by Dianeosis on behalf of World Values Survey, distrust in political institutions is high in Greece. Only around 30% of Greeks say they trust the Hellenic Parliament at least “enough”, and the European Union does not perform any better. The Church is among the most appreciated institutions, and as such it could keep providing a sense of togetherness, while also filling the gaps of the State in terms of social protection. As long as its hierarchy marginalizes discriminatory voices and discourses, instead of sponsoring them, Orthodoxy is bound to continue playing such key cohesive role.

Photo: ARIS MESSINIS / AFP

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L'articolo Stronger than Politics: The Resilience of Orthodoxy in Greece proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

The renowned Tunisian scholar Mohamed Haddad traces the history of the reformist movement and explains recent events related to the Islamic religion in Muslim countries and among Muslim minorities across the world. In scholarly terms, he evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of theological-political renovation, neo-reformism, legal reformism, mystical reformism, radical criticism, comprehensive history and new approaches within the study of Islam.

The book brings to life the various historical, sociological, political and theological challenges and debates that have divided Muslims since the 19th century. The first two chapters address failed reforms in the past and introduce the reader to classical reformism and to Mohammed Abduh. Haddad ultimately proposes a non-confessional definition of religious reform, reinterpreting and adjusting a religious tradition to modern requirements. The second part of the book explores perspectives on contemporary Islam, the legacy of classical reformism and new paths forward. It suggests that the fundamentalism embodied in Wahhabism and Muslim Brotherhood has failed. Traditional Islam no longer attracts either youth or the elites. Mohamed Haddad shows how this paves the way for a new reformist departure that synthesizes modernism and core Islamic values.

Mohamed Haddad is a Professor at the University of Carthage. Islamologue and Holder of PhD from the University of Sorbonne. Major specialist in Reformist Islam, author and translator of more than twenty books, engaged agent in the inter-religious dialogue.

English translation by Sarya Baladi.

Table of contents

1. Introduction: The Missing Reform…………………………………………1

Part I  Classical Reformism: The Birth and Decline of a Paradigm

2. A Muslim Reformist: Muhammad Abduh………………………………15

3. The Paradigm of Reform………………………………………………………49

Part II  Perspectives for Today’s Islam

4. What Is Left of Classical Reformism?…………………………………….81

5. New Tracks…………………………………………………………………………99

6. Epilogue: What Reforms for Today?……………………………………..135

7. Postscript: When Islam Awakens: Problematizing the Idea of Reformation (Islah)
by Mohamed Arkoun ……………………………………………………………..157

Check out the book on the publisher’s dedicated page

L'articolo Muslim Reformism – A Critical History: Is Islamic Religious Reform Possible? proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

May 21^st is the date on which we remember the 1996 massacre of the monks of Tibhirine, in Algeria. In remembering Tibhirine on this occasion, I intend to connect that massacre to the kidnapping of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, not only because of the vision shared by those who lived in the monastery of Tibhirine and those in the Mar Musa monastery, but also because of similarities in the ideology of followers of the Syrian Baath party and those of Algeria’s National Liberation Front. All this is not just about the role played by intelligence, by generals or the repressive apparatuses or the Soviet Union as the guiding lights in both countries following military coups in Damascus and Algiers.

The original Baath Party was founded by a Christian Arab, a man trained in the Marxist Left in France and the bearer of a vision of pan-Arabism as the world’s great proletarian movement against the imperialism of wealthy states. From this position it was then possible to progress to a vision of isolation from a corrupt and unjust world. Such a vision justified the siege culture with which the military persecuted all dissent. The Algerian experience followed a very similar path, confirmed by the 1966 bilateral agreements between the Baath party and the Algerian FLN. Salah Boubnider, at the time a member of the executive secretariat of the Algerian Front, spoke of this in great detail.

The military deviation only emphasized the transformation of the socialist vision into persecution of all dissent and this could only hide an agent paid by the outside world and working for its corruption. It is this isolation from the corrupt world that will help us understand the real reasons for which we were unable to understand the massacre of the Tibhirine monks and the expelling and later kidnapping of Father Paolo Dall’Oglio. All this despite one of the Algerian victims, Father Luc Dochier, telling one of the few people continuing to seek the truth, his fellow missionary Armand Veilleux, that, “If we were to die, be aware that it was not the Muslims, but those wearing regular uniforms.” It was he, the doctor of the Tibhirine group, who knew that the fact that he treated everyone was not appreciated by the Algerian regime’s secret services.

And what about Father Paolo? If the plan drawn up and approved by Kofi Annan allowed free expression of political dissent in Syria, why did the Syrian regime demand the local Church in which he operated to remove this fervent critic of the regime? One can however assume that the bishop did not want to engage in a quarrel with the regime in the name of peace and quiet. One could envisage the same quiet life, imagining what moved the steps of the Bishop of Algiers, Henri Teissier. It was only the tenacity of a great Italian reporter, Valerio Pellizzari, after many years and thanks to an interview with a Western diplomat who had been in Algeria at the time of the massacre and had access to those with real power but now lived in Finland, revealed that not only had it been a helicopter belonging to the Algerian secret services that had attacked the monks by mistake, but also the bishop’s conduct. “The local authorities had at least one authoritative external supporter who agreed with their version of the facts. Henri Teissier, archbishop of Algiers and an expert on the Islamic world, had from the beginning adopted a very cautious and prudent line regards to Tibhirine. He did not agree that the coffins should be opened or that the monks should be buried at the monastery. He did not want to damage relationships established over many years of patient work between the Catholic Church and the Algerian government, while the civil war that erupted after 1992 still raged.”

It is necessary to be clearer. That mistaken and casual government action had torn the victims to pieces as a witness had told Pellizzari. “The monks’ bodies were riddled with shots and for this reason, at the time of the funerals, only their heads were placed in the coffins. The authorities instead immediately spoke of “remains found”. And they would have continued with that ritualistic and deceptive formula if a monk, Father Armand Veilleux, at the time Procurator of the Cistercian Order, had not insisted on saying a last farewell to his confreres and obtained the reopening of the coffins. However, a French coroner had already seen those bodies and was well aware that the bodies were not presentable and had reported the matter to his superiors. Those battered corpses would reveal to everyone who had fired on seven unarmed men. This because those bullets could have belonged only to the regular army, they were certainly not supplied to the Islamic guerrillas, who often resorted to using knives when on their bloody raids, organizing fake checkpoints using the uniforms of the gendarmerie or parking car bombs in the most crowded streets.”

Not investigating matters and maintaining good relations seemed to be the same rationale that must have been followed in Syria when, despite the peace plan signed with Kofi Annan, a decision was made to expel the Roman Jesuit. Then, in 2013, there was the kidnapping. Anyone who has dealt with Paolo’s kidnapping, even just reading a single newspaper article, knows that he was kidnapped after going on his own will to the Islamic State headquarters in Raqqa when Islamic State still did not have control of the city. But we cannot be sure that it was the Islamic State that kidnapped him.

Many rumors immediately claimed that he had left that ghostly palace on July 29^th and was then approached by a car in Clock Tower Square. Then he disappeared. What should one think? I don’t know, but Maadab al Hassoun, one of the commanders of the Free Syrian Army who unfortunately only briefly defeated ISIS in Raqqa in 2013 and now lives in France, wrote a book published by the Raqqa Post in which he speaks of the Syrian intelligence general Abid Nemar Salamah, very close to the two men who led the Islamic State in Raqqa from 2013 onwards, Abu Luqman and Abdul Rahman Faysal Abu Faysal. Al Hassoun’s book states that in 2013 this Syrian intelligence general operated directly in the ISIS headquarters, the one Dall’Oglio is said to have visited on July 29^th, 2013. Imagination? It could of course be imagination, although we do know that the Salamah operated precisely in that part of Syria, having been until 2016 at the head of the very important Air Force intelligence, the heart of the regime in Aleppo. And his work was considered satisfactory, since he was then promoted deputy commander and brought back to the capital, Damascus. This is a hypothesis that many refuse to take into consideration, but we do know that the nuns of the convent of the Syrian town of Maalula, famous because they still speak Aramaic there, were lodged in the villa of a businessman linked to the regime, the Christian George al-Haswani, when they were kidnapped by jihadists. This businessman then ended up on several blacklists because he was thought to have played the middleman role on oil deals between ISIS and his main client, the regime in Damascus. After their release, the nuns were unable to speak of the matter for years.

To seriously navigate meanders one must follow the very few reliable sources, in the Algerian case as did the only Italian journalist who addressed the matter with rigor and passion for many years. Valerio Pellizzari, in his very careful investigations also analyzed better than others all that Father Armand Vellieux remembered, who also in 2008, guaranteed that the secret services were also at the origin of the kidnapping, taking the monks to their base in Blida. It was there that after being interrogated, they were entrusted to the men led by Zitouni. And who was he? He is the emir of the GIA, the Armed Islamic Group, which, a week after the crime had claimed responsibility for killing the monks with press release number 44. The author was the same one as for the previous press release number 43, famous for having been withdrawn as the Koranic quotes it contained had been wrong. It was not strange that Emir Djamal Zitouni should be confused as his cursus honorum had been very fast, after coming into contact with Algerian intelligence when he was just a poultry merchant and then rising to the position of Emir of the GIA. This is a detail that clarifies why he waited a week to claim responsibility for a crime he probably had not committed. But this is not enough to explain the kidnapping. Why had the monks been kidnapped?

This question has three answers. The official one, requesting France for an exchange of prisoners and money; the secret one, because the regime needed the terrorist monster so as to legitimize its existence, and then the complex one, which, looking beyond headlines, was seeking the strength of nihilism and its ramifications; a modern Janus destroying many lives. In fact, one would be wrong to believe that terrorism does not exist in a dimension of its own and one not deviated from intelligence, just as we would be wrong not to see that intelligence is determined to use it and do so very successfully. What has helped Assad more than Islamic State so he can be perceived as the lesser evil? Did Tibhirine not achieve the same objective? But this is not enough, we must address the nihilistic issue.

One can see the authentic dimension of religious terrorism or jihadism thanks to Father Dall’Oglio in his book “Anger and Light”. Paolo had accepted the difficult task of seeking the release of some Syrian Christians, probably kidnapped by a jihadist group for extortion purposes or perhaps only out of religious hatred, or because they were considered complicit with the regime. While searching for them, the Italian Jesuit speaks of having arrived near Homs and writes with his natural vehemence – but also with indisputable logic – about the rebel city with its churches of course, bombed first by the besiegers and then by Assad’s army. His testimony is strangely still not quoted today, and many still believe that the city was bombed by the same people who were under siege. The story goes on, until he finds the jihadists with whom he negotiated the release of the Christian hostages. The prospects were immediately encouraging, but when the tribal channels that he followed led him to the end of the road, Paolo came face to face with the armed militias holding them, and then of course he also spoke of his own fear. But it was fear that allowed him to find the words to speak to that man; that key is called the book of the Apocalypse, the common hope that one day justice will triumph … That language made dialogue with the armed man possible, ending with the terrorist’s words: “You have touched my heart”. Paolo trusts his, believes in the promise made by his interlocutor: the hostages will be freed. And that is what happened. But 2012 was also the year in which nihilism emerged in Syria.

That year, the Syrian revolution had shown incredible popular strength and a total lack of leadership. The world, on the other hand, had shown a great lack of human solidarity. This because the cloak of the ‘clash of civilizations’ had a compact fabric and unlike what happened to Dall’Oglio, fear cannot lead us to understand one another, it only knows how to make us impenetrable.

A great Syrian intellectual, Yassine al-Haj Saleh, who spent over a decade in Assad’s concentration camps, understood many things in those years, the most amazing of which was that imprisonment had freed him from rigid ideologies. From the Syrian camp, where he deserved to be followed more closely in his chronicles, he immediately warned us that the mixture was producing a new Nihilism. And he told us that we too should have noticed it, looking more closely, because, knowingly or unknowingly, someone wanted to warn us …Until 2011, none of us had heard of the Syrian town of Kefranbel, but since 2011 all Western newspapers have spoken about it because of the large banners written in English and displayed in this small town. But they were not a game to capture the attention of the media, they were road signs, warning us about the new directions taken by history. After the first months of the people’s revolt, the song of the revolutionaries “Oh God, you are all we have”, which began at the end of summer 2011, should have already made it clear that mistrust in humankind rather than trust in God was rising. But when on October 14^th 2011, Kefranbel’s young people showed the world a sign saying “Down with the regime and the opposition!” Down with the Arabs and the Islamic community! Down with the Security Council! Down with the world! Down with everything!” according to Yassine al-Haj Saleh we should have understood that the time for nihilism had come.

Explaining this does not apply only to Syria, but within the Syrian context it means taking note of the complexity of a revolution at its unarmed but also fragmented beginning, due to the fragmentation created in Syrian society and on it by a regime devoted to the old law of ‘divide and rule’. This fragmentation is combined with the insurgents’ lack of qualified, authoritative leadership, two factors that determined the failure of the Free Syrian Army. But all this must not overshadow the strange but real relationship that exists between nihilism and Islam.

Disappointed by the world, angry with the Arabs, with the Security Council, stunned by the silence of their brothers in humanity, many find jihadist violence as the perfect vehicle for expressing their nihilism. It is a shattered nihilism, divided into groups and still smaller groups that find their mantra in violence for the sake of violence. This aspect makes this terrorist nihilism culturally compatible, and therefore able to be infiltrated, by regimes that have similarly withdrawn from the corrupt world. It is here that the stories of Islamic State and the GIA in Algeria become infiltrated by secret services.

Let us try to imagine a body divided into three parts: the true jihadists are like the man in whose heart Paolo Dall’Oglio entered; steeped in apocalyptic lessons they dream of approaching Armageddon, the final battle, the one that will bring God’s justice and peace to earth. In their vision, time does not flow, but breaks like waves on the cliffs. Each impact will result in a stronger impact, until the final battle. So their words are not aimed at winning the battle, but to extend it, to broaden it, so as to lead us, speeding up the path, to the final battle. For those who like me who do not know Islam, this deviation is difficult to grasp due to the phonetic similarity between the word “martyrs” – shuhada – and “witnesses” – shahada. But we should be more concerned that the word “martyr” occurs 55 times in the Qur’an , but only on 3 or 4 of these occasions is it used in the sense of witness. The Koran then condemns any form of suicide (4, 29-30), making our interpretative reduction of “holy war” – the inner effort known as jihad – very difficult to understand.

This does not mean that the Islamic-apocalyptic vision (not the only one) has increased and has a history both in Sunni and Shiite circles. Nowadays this story is joined by the story of a nihilistic mass capable of adapting it to the Islamist model, especially the Sunni one, not by nature, but by de-structuring it. In fact, this discourse abolishes all cultural, traditional and political mediation, thus touching the deeper elements of nihilistic destruction. No to culture, no to politics, no to traditions built by people over the centuries. The world down below, the dunya of a certain Islamic theology, a world that is distant or rejected by God, is also a world without God, which must be destroyed in order to bring God back there. The two forms of violence, although separate, daughters of disconnected visions, can both be understood. The nihilists who make them the black banner of jihadists, are fascinated by the global nihilism of Islamic State. They remember those young Russians who in 1862 shared Petr Grigorevic Zaicnevskij and his “Proclamation to Young Russia” with which he called the people to conquer power through violence, shedding streams of blood. In that proclamation one read, “kill them in the squares should these pigs dare to show themselves in public, kill them in their homes, in the streets of the cities, kill them even in the villages! Remember that anyone who is not with us is against us and that all enemies must be exterminated!” And finally we have the other form of nihilism, that of the regime, of regimes, equally true and sincere, but that attracts other extremisms, in particular the red and brown ones, because of its challenging characteristics, brought from the world to the corrupt world, without bowing to any religious standards.

Yassine al-Haj Saleh wrote pages of great relevance and importance on this subject. Reading them, one comes to think that the design of new jihadist leaders really knows how to look far, to final victory, but taking into account the present and the need to keep nihilists tied. They long for violence and destruction. That thirst will be functional to the plans, which however need to advance in a reality in which they are provided by intelligence agencies. We have said that the dominant culture also clearly appears to be nihilistic, therefore there is a common feeling in diversity. And it is here small stories, such as that of Emir Zitouni, are useful. Let us take him as a model for a poor infiltrator, starting off as a poultry farmer he finds himself a leader. Obviously this becomes possible because the apocalyptic objective has nothing to do with the war on regimes, in Algeria, in Syria or Iraq, but there are concrete interests at stake that demand people who will dirty hands. Let us make an example, one that dates back to 2003. At the time Damascus had to bog down the marines in Iraq, because if they had been organised they would have continued their march on Damascus. Who else could they turn to, to stop the Marines? When Saddam’s followers and the jihadists enlisted by Assad met in American prisons in Iraq, the Islamic State was born. They could coexist, the real enemies for the religious wing, as in many other stories, are the “internal” ones. The story seems identical to itself in Algeria, with the clash between the GIA and the Islamic Salvation Front, and in Syria with the conflict between Islamic State and the Free Syrian Army. Like the more widely known Muslim Brotherhood, these forces do not definitively reject earthly mediation, be it political, cultural and traditional. So the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Salvation Front, the Free Syrian Army, are the real enemies, the internal ones, because in the end they would limit the clash, and would not expand it. But the secret weapon of terrorists lies in the persistence of the violence of regimes, which weaken the real enemy, the Islam of the people and its openness to the world, shattering things, giving radical Islam the strength of a sense of guilt with which it destroys traditional communities and continues western public opinion’s readiness to show solidarity thereby making the nihilistic phenomenon unstoppable.

This deviation concerns and has concerned the Sunni world, but in Syria we cannot address the subject without also considering the other less contagious jihadism that is a deeply Shiite heresy. Less known, this form of jihadism brought the most extreme forces of Khomeinism to Syria, imbued with its apocalyptic vision. Apocalyptic Shiite martyrdom has been explained by few and I believe it is worth reading one of the best sources available to us, the Lebanese professor Antoine Courban.

“In the context of jihad, martyrdom would be a real way of allowing believers to join the alpha and the omega points, to go directly from life down here to that of the afterlife, without experiencing the stages of death, without interrupting the continuity between time and eternity, between the contingent and the transcendent, between the relative and the absolute, the visible and the invisible, between the sensitive world (molk) and the intelligible world (jabarût). Here we are fully entering an intermediate time, a “time between times”, as Leili Echghi says. Spiritual literature calls this place Malakût, an Arabic term the literal meaning of which is “kingdom”; however, it is understood as the world of ideals reminding one of Plato’s ideas… Malakût is the place of events not set within a sensitive space-time reality. It is the place of the Imam, it is an inter-world world (here we refer to the well-known Shi’ite theory of the hidden Imam who will return with Jesus at the end of time, Editor’s Note.). […] The place of Malakût is a psychic moment distinct from chronological time and a snapshot of eternity. It is the world of daydreams, in which “pattern homologies” collide and merge, released from each other, dissolving to then reappear and can have more than one identity. Ayatollah Khomeini, author of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, used to say, “There is no difference between Malakût and here”. With this statement, it is undoubtedly necessary to understand that the revolution has already taken place in the inner world, that Malakût is already there and that no one needs to go there anymore. In other words, the Islamic revolution flooded the world with the divine and completed a process involving the total spreading of immanence. It opened history to the direct immanence of the divine through revolutionary violence that nothing can absorb more than putting an end to time itself. This is the reason for which revolutionary violence is also a source of expectation, hope and desire for the epiphany of the messianic entity that would restore order to the world and return it to its original fullness after having purged from violence all that contaminates it and alters its purity.”

We are at the end of a journey that has taken us among the heresies of apocalyptic Islam and the new nihilists, a journey that touches on frustrations and does not justify talking about terrorism without a cause, but justifies an idea of ​​the uses and abuses of Islam, a religion that a fervent Muslim, Professor Muhammad Sammak, adviser to the great imam of al Azhar and secretary general of the Spiritual Islam Summit called “the religion that believes in all religions.” Islam believes all biblical prophets, calls Jesus the Messiah, the new Adam, Word of Truth, defines Mary the first among all women, believing in her virginal motherhood. How did Paolo Dall’Oglio and Christian de Cherg, prior of Tibhirine, refer to this Islam?

I found great similarities in the story of the Trappist friar born in Algeria to a French family and who returned to Algeria to devote himself to that land and its people and the story of Paolo Dall’Oglio, born in Rome and who left when he was very young, not to go and study Arabic but to become an Arab. The Roman Jesuit said many surprising things, even describing himself in the title of a book as “Faithful to Jesus, in love with Islam.” This meant that such love was enlightened by his loyalty. It is a complex book about eschatology, filled with philosophical and theological obstacles, and summarized in an article about the Algerian monk Christian De Chergé, in which the Muslim Soufiane Zitouni quotes him as follows: “Then one day, all of a sudden, he asked me to teach him to pray, Mohammed (who lived in the village of Tibhirine) got into the habit of coming to have a regular chat with me. He was a neighbour. We also have a long history of sharing. I often had to cut things short with him, or spend weekends without meeting him, when the guests became too numerous and absorbed my time. One day he found the right formula for getting back to me and requesting an appointment: “It has been a long time since we dug our well!” The image has remained with me. We use it when we feel the need to talk in depth. Once, as a joke, I asked him the question: “And what will we find at the bottom of our well? Muslim or Christian water?”

He looked at me, slightly amused and a little distressed: “What? We have been walking together for so long and now you ask me this question! … You know that at the bottom of that well, what we will find will be God’s water.” In these lines of a book entitled “Theology of Hope”, De Chergé speaks of the theology of dialogue of a Jesuit who I do not think he met. It is not surprising that they attacked those two men, and even less surprising that it is hard to understand which nihilists attacked them, those belonging to regimes or others? Unfortunately, we don’t really want to understand this point. Regimes, as Paolo explained to me several times, do not protect Christians, they use them as shields to protect themselves. Perhaps they use them to organise massacres, as in Egypt, to then blame the perpetrators, hence the terrorists. Thus, after invoking for centuries the overcoming of the system involving the protection of religious minorities, Christians are now calling for the protection of the extremist regimes. Obviously they did not like being told by Father Paolo with great simplicity – simplicity that is worth more than entire encyclopaedias addressing Eastern issues – that Christian monasteries in the land of Islam are the best proof that there is no better protection than being good neighbours. His kidnapping ended in silence because of this and De Chergé explains all this in his spiritual testament.

“My death, obviously, will seem to prove right those who so quickly treated me as naive or as an idealist. Now tell me what you think of that. But these people must know that my most excruciating curiosity will finally be rewarded. God willing, I will now be able to immerse my eyes in those of the Father, to contemplate with Him His children of Islam as He sees them, all enlightened by the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the gift of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to establish communion, playing on differences.” I am sure that Paolo saw them lit by the same light, disliked by many Muslims who are trapped in a theology that, as the great Muhammad Sammak says, does not know how to show them Islam as a religion that believes in all religions. These are different ways of digging the well that leads to God’s water.

Photo: FAYEZ NURELDINE / AFP

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L'articolo State Plotting, Islamist Nihilism. The Real Story Behind the Tibhirine Massacre proviene da Reset Dialogues on Civilizations | a venue for all tribes.

Thursday, June 11, 2020 | 12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. EDT

Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and Reset Dialogues on Civilizations.

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While the global COVID-19 pandemic forces us to maintain physical distance, it is more important than ever that we remain socially connected and in intellectual conversation. As part of this effort the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs is organizing the Global Religious and Secular Dynamics Discussion Series, featuring online public conversations on our contemporary global condition between renowned sociologist José Casanova, a Berkley Center senior fellow, and prominent scholars and intellectual friends.

The series’ inaugural event will welcome philosopher Charles Taylor for a conversation with Casanova about Taylor’s seminal work A Secular Age (2007) and the divergent religious dynamics that can coexist within our global secular age. They will discuss the global crisis of democracy, the resurgence of exclusionary populisms and self-enclosed nationalisms, and lessons from the global pandemic about us as humans in our contemporary global condition. They will also look specifically to the Catholic tradition, examining the concept of a Catholic modernity, the multiple rites controversies, and the opening they might offer not only to multiple modernities, but to multiple Catholicities and to a global Church made up of many diverse local churches.

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L'articolo Global Religious and Secular Dynamics: A Conversation with Charles Taylor proviene da Reset DOC.