The Failure of Interreligious Dialogue with Islam

Last week, on the morning of August 7th, Pope Francis, just before his regular Wednesday general audience, received a group of representatives from the Afghan Muslim community in Italy. He touched upon the “complicated and dramatic history [in Afghanistan], marked by a succession of wars and blood-stained conflicts, which have made it very difficult for people to lead peaceful, free and secure lives.” 

The pontiff went on to tell the Afghan males—there were, surprisingly, no women at the encounter—“to continue in [their] noble endeavour to promote religious harmony and to strive to overcome misunderstandings between different religions in order to build paths of trusting [interfaith] dialogue and peace.” 

Interreligious dialogue has been a constant policy of Pope Francis’ pontificate, more so than when Pope St. John Paul II had the reins of the Church. In his historic meeting with the Russian Patriarch Kirill on February 12, 2016, in Havana, Cuba, for example, Francis underlined the vitality of interreligious dialogue “in our disturbing times” and confirmed that “[d]ifferences in the understanding of religious truths must not impede people of different faiths to live in peace and harmony.” 

Both religious leaders appealed to 

…all Christians and all believers of God [Muslims (and Jews)] to pray fervently to the providential Creator of the world to protect His creation from destruction and not permit a new world war. [And, in] order to ensure a solid and enduring peace, specific efforts must be undertaken to rediscover the common values uniting us, based on the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Yet, as the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, referring to the war in the Holy Land, recently singled out, interfaith dialogue with Muslims (and Jews) has been ineffective:

Interreligious dialogue has produced very beautiful documents on human fraternity, on being all children of God, on the need to work together for the preservation of an individual’s rights... These are all fruits of an activity that I consider spiritual. Yet, in our current context of war, all this in the Holy Land today seems to be a dead letter.

The failure of interfaith dialogues—and not just in the Middle East—is that, as Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf, Research Fellow at the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, argues:

They are just one-time meetings or a photo opportunity, or what I call “goody-goody dialogue,” where you just talk about the good in one’s own religion and the good in other religions. But there are hardly any follow-ups after these events, and they don’t really trickle down to the common man. 

There is also another fundamental factor to the ineffectiveness of such dialogues, and that is that there is no substantial point of unity. The concept of “common values uniting…Christians and all believers of God” highlighted by Francis and Kirill inaccurately puts both Christianity and Islam, and for that matter Judaism, as mutually and interchangeably intelligible or translatable. It overlooks the fundamental tenets common to all who are baptized in Christ which are incompatible with those that are common to all Muslims and Jews, such as the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Francis told the aforementioned Afghans:

…oftentimes religion is manipulated and instrumentalized, and ends up being used for contrary ends. In such cases, religion becomes a factor of confrontation and hatred, which can lead to violent acts…. It is imperative, then, that everyone accept the principle that one cannot invoke God’s name to foment contempt, hatred and violence towards others. 

The truth of the matter is that the Islamic religion is not manipulated or instrumentalized in order to justify violence, just the opposite. “The problem lies within Islam itself,” said Yahya Cholil Staquf, General Secretary of the Nahdlatul Ulama Supreme Council—the world’s largest Muslim organization.

Indeed, since the inception of Islam, there has been a war of religious purification on the part of Muslim jihadists, with a clear and direct intent to exterminate Christians and other non-Muslims. The Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, Bashar Warda, on February 19, 2018, explained:

The violent Muslim persecution of Christians in the Middle East did not begin with the Islamic State’s rise to power in 2014,…but rather many centuries ago. Having faced for 1,400 years the slow-motion genocide that began long before the ongoing ISIS genocide today, the time for excusing this inhuman behavior and its causes is long since past.

Avowed Islamist-backed jihadists invoke verses in their religious texts—the Quran and hadiths—to justify their indiscriminate acts of violence. Many contemporary Muslims exercise a personal choice to construe their sacred books’ appeal to the taking of arms and financing terrorism according to their own ideas. Muslim apologists have catered to these preferences with questionable positions that camouflage historical fact, generally lacking any sort of profound scrutiny. This problem is not necessarily one of bad people but of bad ideology. 

It is true that the Islamic faith, at times, parallels Christianity in its external outlook on social issues, such as the prohibition of abortion or the exclusiveness of marriage between a male and female. In this, there has been fruitful dialogue, at least until Muslims began to insist on the moral goodness of polygamous marriages.

The Catholic clergy in the West has not been able to grasp Islam in a coherent and meaningful manner; that is, unlike Christianity, Islam—like (Talmudic) Judaism, the present-day Judaism practice from the second century A.D.—cannot be perceived as a religion from our Western perspective. The Catholic clergy in the West has not been able to grasp Islam in a coherent and meaningful manner; that is, unlike Christianity, Islam cannot be perceived as a religion from our Western perspective.Tweet This

When we claim that Christianity and other non-Christian religions are similar because we all believe and pray to the same God, we then give analytical priority to the classification of “religion” as constituted by the historical experiences in Western society, thus stipulating a categorical equality between the Christian faith and other forms of worship. If this is the case, we then forbear to give sufficient attention to whether there are inherent, fundamental, or categorical elements of Christianity that render it essentially different from Islam.

William Kilpatrick once said that for decades both Catholic and Protestant leaders have contented themselves to accepting the “common ground thesis”—the comforting idea that both Christianity and Islam share much in common. This led many Christians to become complacent about the threat from Islam, a threat many of our Christian brethren (and other non-Muslims) who live in the Islamic world have learned the reality of the hard way. 

The Church is well within its authority to find a point of harmony with other non-Christian religions through interfaith dialogue—if it will facilitate global peace. However, as Cardinal Pizzaballa stipulated, “the Church’s mission [can be compromised by] entering into political dynamics that do not belong to it, and which by their very nature are often foreign to the logic of the Gospel.” 

The ultimate goal of any interreligious dialogue must be in compliance with the last order the Lord gave His apostles before returning to the Father: “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

[Photo Credit: Vatican Media/CNA]