The Problems

I will very briefly sketch the major causes of tension. They are well known. On the Western side you have fear of terrorism; a loathing of religious coercion; suspicion of the unfamiliar and deep historical misunderstandings. On the Islamic side you have, first, Palestine. Despite the denial of certain parties, Palestine is a grievance rooted in faith (since Muslim holy sites lie occupied); after all Muslims ought to know what they themselves are upset about. To deny that is a kind of racism. Then you have Western foreign policy; wounded pride arising from the colonial experience; poverty and unemployment; illiteracy; ignorance of true Islam and of the Arabic language; social and political oppression, and a technology gap. On both sides you have vast centrifugal forces unleashed by fundamentalist and extremist movements, and by missionary activity. These far outweigh the centripetal forces set in motion by hundreds of interfaith and intercultural centers all over the world and by world governments (e.g. the Spanish-Turkish "Alliance of Civilizations"; the Russian "Dialogue of Civilizations"; the Kazakh "Dialogue of Confessions"; the Amman Message; the French Atelier-Culturel; the British Radical Middle Way; the Malaysian Islam Hadari etc. etc. and the umpteen "declarations" of "this or that city"). The fundamentalists are better organized, more experienced, better coordinated and more motivated. They have more stratagems, more institutes, more people, more money, more power, more influence.

I am reminded of the words of W.B. Yeats:

Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ the ceremony of innocence is drowned. / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.

The Goal

Our goal is very simple. We must avoid a greater worldwide conflict between Muslims and the West, and we must resolve all our current crises. Then we must find a modus vivendi to live and let live, to "love thy neighbour"; this idea must be expressed from within our religious scriptures. It must then be applied everywhere. I would like to emphasize here that getting secular, Westernized Muslim academics together with Westerners to accomplish this cannot work, because: "Man does not live by bread alone, but from every word that issueth from the Mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). Moreover, secular modernists command no following in the Islamic street, and on the contrary their promotion creates popular outrage that drives the moderate traditional majority of Muslims into the embrace of the fundamentalists. The 9-11 Commission report, the current Rand Report and everyone who subscribes to this approach are just wrong. "Love thy neighbour" is in all our scriptures in different ways: let our authentic, traditional religious authorities bring it out for us. If we do not let the orthodox voice of our religions speak for peace, our religions risk being misused and manipulated to move us towards conflict. 

THE CHALLENGES

Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s — but especially since 9-11-2001 — hundreds of bodies all over the world have been engaging in interfaith and intercultural dialogue; in peace-making and in "bridge building". This is good, but their efforts are not coordinated; are continuously duplicated; are ineffective and are often at odds with each other. If the C-100 could make a religiously authentic ecumenical "constitution" or even a "mission statement", and then get it adopted everywhere-and through it lead the coordination of world dialogue activities-then that would have a tremendous impact, God willing. It would give clarity and focus to the various well-intentioned but uncoordinated efforts. This, I think, is the first challenge, and it starts with a statement of purpose for the C-100 themselves.

The second challenge is "trickledown". We have outlined our own Amman Message Initiative's strategy for "trickledown" on www.ammanmessage.com. I wish to add here only that the news media is an ongoing area of concern. Do not misunderstand: the news media is critical for a just society and is instrumental in exposing hidden truths. But consider this: we estimate that there are over 20 million Muslims in the West (not including Russia which officially is 18 percent Muslim); over 10 million Christians in the greater Middle East; over 5 million Muslims who have studied is some form in the West; over 5 million more have visited the West, and at least 10 million Westerners have traveled to, or worked or served, somewhere in the Islamic World. That is 50 million people (out of over 3.5 billion Christians and Muslims, admittedly) with a firsthand experience of human contact and of being a religious minority. And this does not even take into consideration Africa, India or the Far East, where Muslims and Christians are often indigenously split down the middle in their millions.