Are the Saudis truly champions of dialogue?

The Muslim world is showing increasing signs that it wants to engage others in dialogue. Greater tolerance is increasingly visible in Muslim countries, signs like the opening of a new church in Kuwait or one in Qatar, greater openness towards the Vatican, the letter signed by 138 Muslim scholars to Benedict XVI, the creation of a joint Islamic-Catholic commission; Saudi King Abdullah’s visit to the Holy See.

More signs of openness and tolerance have come from the Saudi monarch himself like the intra-Muslim meeting in Makkah (4-6 June 2008) and the inter-faith conference in Madrid (16-18 July 2008) as a start to inter-faith dialogue, one that includes Jews as well.

Dialogue seems to be the order of the day in a religion that since 11 September 2001 and the attack against New York’s twin towers has come to be regarded by the general public as the most intolerant religion. What is going on? Here is the analysis of Islam expert Fr Samir Khalil Samir.

I am certain that all these signals mean that something is changing and there are political and religious reasons for it. In this case the union between the two is not necessarily a bad thing.

First of all, religion has become an important factor in international politics. The whole world is in turmoil; all sorts of shocks seem to be produced by religion or anti-religious atheism. Whatever the case may be, religion is challenging past ideas and positions.

Let us take the collapse of Communism. It was a shock that pushed many people to ask themselves whether religion was the opium of the masses or its opposite, namely that ideology was the real opium of the masses. We also see this in China, thanks to news reported by AsiaNews for example, and the reaction and differences in the world over the issue of Buddhism in Tibet, over Nepal or Myanmar. In India fanatical Hindu and ultranationalists groups are pitted against other (Christian and Muslim) communities . . . .

Islam’s new image

In Europe Islam has unsettled the way Europeans look at religion. In France everyone was untroubled by French secularism based on the dogma of the absolute separation between faith and life with religion as a private affair. Now people realise that the link between faith and public life is still strong in Islam and this undermines some certainties in modern secularism. Along with this “discovery” has come religious fanaticism. For political and cultural reasons this has manifested itself with an unprecedented level of violence that was never reached in the past in the Muslim world.

Plus interest in the Muslim world has to do with its numbers since a billion and more people have a huge weight on world politics and demographics.

Similarly, there are pressures and violence in the Jewish world as a result of the collusion between Zionism and politics. Likewise among Hindus Hinduism and Indian identity are seen as one and the same.

Correcting Islam’s (bad) image

For years now in the Muslim world, at the meetings of the Arab League, at those of the World Islamic League, endless debates have focused on violence and terrorism in order to assert that neither has anything to do with Islam, that Islam is a religion of tolerance, etc.

Yet at the same time ministers from Muslim countries have claimed that their main task is to fight this same terrorism rooted in fundamentalism (the literal, de-contextualised interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, i.e. the traditions associated with the prophet) and in Muslim religious radicalism.

Unfortunately, all decisions taken so far have not led to a decline in terrorism, which remains alive and well; perhaps because one of the causes of Islamic radicalism is precisely that corruption, dictatorship and social injustice are so pervasive in Muslim politics. This might explain why Muslim political leaders, especially presidents a