Interfaith dialogue – to what end?

According to the Australian Broadcast Company, over $100 million of government funding is going into next Thursday’s World Youth Day in Sydney, which features among other events a youth interfaith forum.  The amount of public financing going into the day, organized by the Catholic Church, underscores the importance Australia’s leaders place on religious tolerance; the anticipated number of attendees from different faiths – 3,000 – emphasizes the demand for such an inclusive discussion.  One of the Muslim youths who will attend believes that the reason such conversations do not occur informally is “fear of the dialogue itself” – and similarly a fear that “somehow by talking to other people their religion is less truthful than what they believed in previously…[or that] they are letting their own faith down.”

It is distressing that some young people believe that to engage in dialogue with people of other faiths is somehow a threat or an insult to their own religious identity.  This impulse not to open up to other ways of thinking, not to question, and not to engage is confined neither to a single society nor to one religion.  It can furthermore lead, according to Islamic scholar Genieve Abdo, to only superficial connections.  Last week, she suggested that, “those who emphasize the commonalities between Islamic and Western societies and among the three Abrahamic faiths, downplay or avoid completely the very real differences as if they don’t exist.”  The crux of her argument is that interfaith dialogue distracts from these real and pressing divides, particularly between Islam and the West.  Through these distractions, she says, “we are hindering solutions that could prevent the next terror attack in London, Madrid or Washington.”

Abdo’s wholesale condemnation of dialogue seems misplaced.  If the fruits of interfaith conversation so far are superficial, if the United States and other Western powers are not doing enough to really communicate with the Muslim world, it is because of insufficient dialogue, not the idea of dialogue itself.  The United Nations appears to be acting on this assumption, reaching out to religion and religious figures as international actors.  In an unprecedented way, the General Assembly is seeking the input of religious people and groups; according to a Baha’I International Community representative, “You’ve never really had the General Assembly reach out to this sector of global civil society before.”  This is an important first step in fostering the type of real, probing conversation Abdo believes has not happened yet.

An unlikely proponent of this initiative has been Saudi Arabia, which despite a large, exclusivist Sunni majority will now send King Abdullah to Madrid to convene a conference on the ways to soothe interfaith animosity.  The formal dialogue – where Muslim, Christian, and Jewish clerics will be met by representatives of several Eastern religions – offers a way to discuss the most fundamental aspects of these religions without politicizing them.  In the words of Hassan al Ahdal, media director of the Muslim World League, “At this moment, we’re not going to indulge in any political issues.  There are so many other things on which we can find common ground.”