The Archbishop of Canterbury

Address at opening ceremony Sant’Egidio International Meeting of Prayer for Peace – Palais de Congress, Lyons

Sunday 11 September

My diary for the seventh of July involved a very early start from London in order to travel to the North of England. I was due to meet a number of Muslim leaders in West Yorkshire – a region with a very high Muslim population – and to visit some of their institutions. The invitation arose from the close partnership in the area between the Anglican diocese of Wakefield and several local Muslim groups.

We had almost arrived in the town where the first meeting was to take place when the message came through on my chaplain’s mobile phone that the London Underground had been closed because of what looked like a bomb attack. We managed to confirm that my daughter, who travels across London to school each day, had got there safely. By the time we arrived, it had become clear that more than one incident had happened, and that the likelihood was that a terrorist group had been responsible.

This meant that already when I stepped out of the car at the Muslim madrasa where the first meeting was to occur, there was a great deal of emotion in the air. My Muslim hosts were anxious and confused; everyone was apprehensive. When I emerged from going around the madrasa, a television crew had assembled, and several local journalists. I was able to make a first, unscripted statement on television, directly in front of one of the largest Muslim institutions in Northern England, to speak not only of the shock and condemnation which I wanted to express but of the revulsion of those who stood around me at this indiscriminate and brutal violence.

Throughout that extraordinary day the same message was reinforced time and again. As more and more details came in, the local Muslims involved in the meetings went out of their way to offer words of condolence and to insist that this action was ‘not in their name’, whoever was responsible.

It was a day of cruel ironies. The substance of our discussions was the prospects for more and better co-operation between Christian and Muslim communities in the work of urban regeneration in a very poorly-resourced region. Several of the Muslims present – including a Member of Parliament and many involved in local government – manifestly saw themselves as a natural part of the political landscape in Britain. Some of my own contribution to the discussion drew upon my experience a few weeks earlier, when I had chaired a lengthy consultation in Sarajevo on the theme of how Muslims and Christians could identify a common agenda in the western social context, sharing their perspectives on matters like the support of stable families, the place of faith in education, and how the law could take better account of the convictions of religious believers, rather than assuming that faith was always necessarily a private concern only.

Sarajevo had involved leading Muslim academics from across the world, as well as Christians of all confessions, working together against the background of a recent history of brutal slaughter and civil strife. We daily walked past buildings still scarred by bullets and shells or burnt-out by bomb-blasts. But there was a powerful common willingness to find ways of identifying the common good for a religiously and ethnically plural society, a common good defined not by the abstract legal unity that a secularist would assume but by some sort of convergence about what was sowed to human beings as God’s creatures and the objects of God’s calling.

Those Christians and Muslims who were working together in West Yorkshire had already begun to make such a vision a practical reality. During that long and hard day, with everyone’s mind partially distracted in thinking about what London was suffering and fearing, the reality of a common task already understood and begun helped us carry on. The destructive ideology of those who caused the carnage in London could not be the whole story; and there were many people there in West Yorkshire determined that this is how it would remain.

For me as a Christian that day, the gift was to see how the hospitality of local Christian communities in West Yorkshire had opened up relations with others, so that fear and resentment could be expressed, explored and dealt with. When I returned to London, it was with a strengthened sense of how in the long term it seems that hospitality changes things in a way that aggression and counter-aggression do not – but also with a strengthened sense of how hospitality can, in the eyes of a compulsively (and understandably) anxious world, look like foolishness. The foolishness of the cross, ultimately.

+Rowan Williams 2005

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(464) 17-September-2005 – From the Interfaith Office NIFCON – ACO

Communique for the Anglican/al-Azhar dialogue committee

The Joint Committee, which is composed of a delegation from the Anglican Communion and from the Permanent Committee of al-Azhar al-Sharif for Dialogue with the Monotheistic Religions, held its fourth annual meeting in Al-Azhar at Lambeth Palace, London on 15 September 2005 which corresponds to 11 Shaban 1426. This was held in accord with the agreement signed at Lambeth Palace on 30 January 2002 by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar.

The theme of our dialogue in 2005 has been Christians and Muslims as minorities and majorities in the Middle East and the West. The Joint Committee learned about developments in various parts of the world and in particular from the Most Revd Alexander Malik about the situation in Pakistan. The Joint Committee heard and discussed the following papers presented by Christian members of the Committee:

The relationship of religion to the state, to law and to peace – (The Rt Revd Dr Michael Nazir Ali)

Christian minorities in Islamic countries – (The Rt Revd Dr Mouneer H Anis)

Political, Legal and Social Questions for minorities and majorities – a Christian perspective from Britain – (The Revd Canon Dr Christopher Lamb)

The Joint Committee also heard and discussed the following papers presented by Muslim members of the Committee:

Minorities in the Islamic Community – (Shaykh Fawzy el-Zefzaf)

Muslims as Minorities in the West – Dr Zaki Badawi)

The role of the media in enhancing interfaith – (Dr Ali El Samaan)

All members of the Committee for dialogue strongly condemned the terrorist attacks which took place in London and Sharm el-Sheikh during July 2005.

Such recent events in both the Middle East and the West reminded us strongly how important it was for religious minorities, both Christian and Muslim, to be able to live in peace and security, and as full participants in the political and social life of the country of which they were citizens. The majority religious community has the duty to facilitate this, both as a religious obligation and for the well-being of society.

It is equally important that religious minorities should seek to abide by the law of the country where they are resident, or of which they are citizens. We noted specifically that Islam calls for Muslims to abide by and respect the laws and regulations of the non-Islamic countries where they live.

We had a particular concern for freedom of religion and the right to worship. We hold that this is an important human right, and that there should be reciprocity in this respect between communities which are predominantly Christian and those which are predominantly Muslim.

We acknowledged that in our ‘globalised’ world, international events and conflicts often contributed to, or exacerbated, regional, national or local tensions, or were used by extremists to try to justify terrorist activity. We call upon political and religious leaders to work to resolve such conflicts in a way that respects the right to self-determination of all people. In the awareness of the changing political situation in the Palestinian territories, we expressed our hope that developments there might be an important step on a path that would eventually allow for both the right of the Palestinian people to national self-determination and to the right of Israel to live in peace and security.

A particular focus of the dialogue meeting in 2005 was the signing of a study exchange agreement between members of the Joint Committee in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Egyptian Ambassador to the United Kingdom, to inaugurate a study exchange process which would allow younger scholars, both Christian and Muslim, from Egypt and the United Kingdom, to spend time studying in religious institutions of the other faith. We believe that it is particularly important at the present time that the commitment to work toward inter faith understanding should be owned by younger as well as older members of our faith communities.

We agreed that the Joint Committee should meet again in autumn 2006.

Signed

Rt Revd Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester Chair

Sheikh Fawzy el Zef-zef, Al Azhar Dialogue Committee

Rt Revd Mouneer Anis, Bishop of Egypt Vice-Chair

Dr Ali El Samman, Al Azhar Dialogue Committee

Most Revd Alexander Malik, Bishop of Lahore, Moderator of Church of Pakistan

Dr Zaki Badawi

Canon Christopher Lamb

For further information, please contact Clare Amos, NIFCON Coordinator, who assists in administering the dialogue

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