Catholics and Muslims, Unite!

Just on the long side of a year since Pope Benedict XVI's inflammatory comments regarding the Islamic faith, a group of Muslim scholars has presented a charge to the Vatican to open a theological discourse between the two faiths.

One of the chief concerns of these Muslims is that the Vatican refuses to recognize differences of belief between the two faiths, effectively dismissing Islam as inconsequential and simply a nuisance to contain. From the article:

“Most of the response that has come from the Vatican, after the Islamic protest and all of these things, has been diplomatic, not theological,” said [Seyyed] Hossein [Nasr, an Iranian Muslim scholar at George Washington University]. “The very first meeting in the Vatican [after Regensburg, see first link] was with Muslim ambassadors. These are people appointed as ambassadors, many of whom know nothing at all about Islamic issues.

What is being evaded all the time are those underlying differences in belief that then cause the political and social differences to manifest themselves on the surface. We have to be honest enough to tackle that, and not to hide it in the closet.”

Though I'm not positive of all the ramifications and manifestations of current Muslim-Catholic discourse, I am fully supportive of opening a discourse between any "conflicting" faiths.

In another interesting comment, John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University said:

“I think that you do have a strong school of thought in the Vatican which does not seem to believe that there can be a theological dialogue with Islam. It’s based on what I regard as an old theological position. In those days, the whole approach was that because Islam says that the Prophet is the final prophet and has the final revelation, therefore there can’t be any theological dialogue. It seems to me we’ve moved beyond that, at least we ought to move beyond that. But this is one of the questions that has arisen, and it has not been answered during this papacy.”

I'm in complete agreement with both of these gentlemen throughout the article, as they pinpoint some of the main issues facing Muslims as they're viewed negatively from the perspective of many Christians, and as it seems, the Vatican itself.

However, my main concern with the type of language they're using generalizes Christians too much, which is a slippery slope. Most American Christians (and even many American Catholics) probably would not appreciate being lumped into the same category of belief as the Vatican. Yet, this call for discourse is important across the board — not just between Catholics and Muslims, but across all boundaries of whatever people consider religious belief. Understanding each other's spirituality would go a long way to mitigating many of the social and political issues on a macro level, and can curb mutual hatred and xenophobia (if people actually want that) on a micro level.

In the end, though, this article specifically is directed toward the rift between the face of the world's largest religious sect and the world's fastest growing religion, Islam. Clearly, the relationship between the two organizations is significant, and there has to be some jumping off point.