Advertise On EU-Digest

Annual Advertising Rates

9/7/06

The American Muslim (TAM): Assessing the Myths of Interfaith Dialogue - by David Shasta


For the complete report in the American Muslim click on this link

Assessing the Myths of Interfaith Dialogue - by David Shasta

The Interfaith Dialogue movement has congealed around engaging the three Abrahamic faiths; a model most successfully made into a commercial literary reality by the writer Bruce Feiler in his various books and TV documentaries; particularly in his best-seller Abraham, a book that has become the “Bible” of the Interfaith Dialogue movement.One of the primary assumptions that Interfaith Dialogue is based on is that Jews and Arabs are separate and mutually hostile peoples. And for the majority of the world’s Jews who come from Europe, perhaps this is true. But for many centuries there were in fact Jews who lived in the Middle East and developed a resilient and vibrant culture that was very much a part of its Arabic surroundings. That Jews and Arabs share a culture is a fact that stands in stark contrast with the idea that there is a primordial rupture between the peoples that has fed the endemic and corrosive violence that now permeates the region.

It is noteworthy that the figure of Arab Jews has been missing from the picture of contemporary Jewish life. The role these Arab Jews might have been able to play as indigenous inhabitants of the Middle East with knowledge of the language, customs and values of the region has been wasted. If only this cultural knowledge had been utilized over the course of the 20th century, the current realities might well have been different. But sadly, the Arab Jews have found themselves demographically as well as institutionally shut out of the discourse that has emerged from the conflict.

Interfaith Dialogue is premised on an uncontested reality – that of ancient Judaism, Islam and Christianity having been formed from the same basic religious ideas and traditions. But the classical culture of the region, a culture of Religious Humanism – religion fused with the scientific – which subsumes the poetry of Al-Mutanabbi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Abu Nuwwas and Judah Halevi; the religious philosophy of Maimonides, Averroes, Al-Ghazali and Avicenna and the historical researches of Ibn Khaldun and Solomon ibn Verga, is not at all part of the current discourse. This culture can be understood by what I have called “The Levantine Option.”

No comments: