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RELIGION: UN Invited to Create Interfaith Council

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jul 21 2008 (IPS) - The participants at the World Conference on Dialogue in Madrid have proposed that the United Nations create an interreligious council.

The Jul. 16-18 conference, which was attended by 250 people representing Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths, was opened on Jul. 16 by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and King Juan Carlos of Spain.

“Social dialogue should be not only interreligious but intra-religious as well, to achieve peaceful coexistence in the world,” Federico Mayor Zaragoza, head of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace and chair of the Board of Directors of the international news agency IPS (Inter Press Service) said in his speech to the conference.

A working team to seek peace and international concord was established, and it was agreed to foment cooperation between religious, cultural, educational and media organisations “to confront sexual promiscuity, family disintegration and other vices.”

It was also agreed to organise conferences, symposia, research and information programmes “to disseminate a culture of peace, understanding and coexistence,” and to promote dialogue among followers of all religions.

The final document called on “the United Nations General Assembly to support the results reached by this conference, and make use of them to enhance dialogue among the followers of religions, civilisations and cultures, through conducting a special U.N. session on dialogue.”

In his address, Mayor Zaragoza said that a terrible mistake had been made “when the values of humanity were exchanged for the laws of the market,” and that to overcome the problem thus created, people must live by sharing, including knowledge about others.

“If we accept the equal dignity of every human being, if we accept the other as an equal, whatever his or her sex, race or ideology, the problems we face are resolved,” he said.

“To achieve these goals, we need political will and the commitment of the media, because mutual understanding and knowledge, conciliation and reconciliation is the only way,” he concluded.

The Conference was organised by the Muslim World League, a civil society organisation based in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, which represents the peoples of Muslim nations and minorities of Muslim faith in other countries, and has 40 delegations on five continents.

The assistant director of the Buddhist Association of China, Xue Cheng, said that “all beliefs are based on a common value, which is life in harmony with others.” Because of this, the major problems of our time, such as wars, overpopulation and environmental degradation, should be confronted with a common global ethic.

Rabbi Claudio Epelman, head of the Latin American Jewish Congress, said that God created fish, birds and plants, but only one human being.

A Christian Arab priest, Econos Nabbel Haddad, head of the Jordanian Centre for Religious Coexistence, proposed the propagation of a religious culture based on tolerance, for which the only path is to “know one’s neighbour” through culture and cultural exchange.

Haddad stressed that “the media play a crucial role, reinforcing communication with our neighbours.”

The need for global dialogue was emphasised by Nichiko Niwano, head of the Japanese Committee of the World Conference of Religions for Peace, who said that “the world’s peoples travel in a single vehicle, the Earth.”

This vehicle suffers from global problems such as armed conflicts or climate change, which cannot be combated by any one country, so interfaith dialogue is imperative, he argued.

All religions are simply the same thing expressed in different ways, Niwano said.

Lawmaker José de Venecia, former head of the lower house of Congress of the Philippines, quoted the words of Catholic theologian and priest Hans Küng: There will be “no peace among the nations without peace among the religions, and no peace among the religions without common ethical standards.”

In de Venecia’s view, the global ethic “is not a substitute for any faith.” Many conflicts which appear to be religious in nature are really “political and sectarian,” like those affecting the island of Mindanao in his country, and Thailand, Palestine, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Lebanon, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.

It was de Venecia who proposed the creation of an interfaith council within the United Nations, and he asked King Abdullah and King Juan Carlos to support the initiative.

Redwan Naef Al-Sayyed, the chairman of the International Institute of Islamic Studies, proposed “drafting a foundational document for the creation of a secretariat to lay the foundations of an institution that will be a positive factor in the search for common denominators and a new global consciousness,” a suggestion that was accepted.

At the conference, which was overwhelmingly dominated by men, a round table discussion was held on the position of women in religions, led by Spanish theologian Margarita Pinto.

One of the participants, Spanish theologian Juan José Tamayo, told IPS that women must recover the prominence that “without any doubt” they had had in the origin of all religions.

In spite of their historical role, “women have been largely marginalised and forgotten by all religions, since these are organised in patriarchal and hierarchical ways, excluding women from religious knowledge and tasks,” said Tamayo.