Muslim Heretics Conference

Craig Nelson and Caryle Murphy

• Last Updated: July 15. 2008 10:35PM UAE / GMT

Left to right, Abdullah al Turki, the secretary general of the Muslim World League, King Abdullah, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, and King Juan Carlos I of Spain will meet for an interfaith forum in Madrid. AP, AP, AFP

MADRID and RIYADH // When the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia made a state visit to Britain in 1987, he was decorated by Queen Elizabeth II with a medallion that bore, among other symbols, a Christian cross.
The hue and cry back home was immediate, said Mustafa Alani, director of Security and Terrorism Studies at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai. “They made him out to be a sinner.”
How times have changed.
In November, his successor and half-brother, King Abdullah, was the first Saudi monarch to hold talks with Pope Benedict XVI. He was widely seen back home warmly shaking hands with Christianity’s most influential leader in the heart of Christendom’s most exalted enclave, the Vatican.

“Most people in Saudi Arabia believed in what he was doing. Some didn’t,” said Hassan al Ahdal, a spokesman for the Muslim World League, which is based in Mecca.
Today, in another first for a Saudi leader, King Abdullah will convene Muslim, Christian and Jewish clerics in the Spanish capital for talks aimed at reducing religious intolerance, improving Islam’s image and restoring respect for religious values.

Juan Carlos I, the king of Spain, is to join him in opening the three-day forum, to which nearly 250 religious figures have been invited.
The Saudi king’s choice of Madrid as the location to discuss how to defuse interfaith tensions was no coincidence, League officials here said. Between 711 and 1492, Spain boasted one of the great Muslim civilisations, with a caliphate centred in Cordovain, now Corboda. Under Islamic rule, Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live alongside each other peaceably, if not always equally.

Interfaith discussions during the heyday of ecumenism in the 1970s and 1980s focused on such theological issues as the nature of God, the individual and society before lapsing into a word-induced stupor. “Theological fiddling while Rome burned,” said Paul Kintner, a Roman Catholic professor of world religions at Union Theological in New York.
The September 2001 attacks in the US ended the lull. A series of bombings by Islamic militants in Saudi Arabia two years later intensified efforts by the country’s leaders to reckon with their home-grown extremists.

King Abdullah’s interfaith initiatives are one result, although this time the focus is not on theology but on ethics and issues of common concern, such as terrorism, human rights violations and environmental degradation.
“We live in a world that’s a small village. You have to have mutual understanding and co-operation, or perish,” Mr Ahdal said.
For all of this high-mindedness, this interfaith initiative represents something of a political test for King Abdullah at home, as he juggles his evident desire for more openness with fears of upsetting hardline Wahhabis, who make up an influential sector of the religious establishment. This sector has traditionally regarded Shiite Muslims as heretics and shunned contact with non-Muslims out of fear that their religious and cultural identity would be diluted.

So far, however, this group has been muted in its criticism of the Madrid gathering.
Their most public display of disagreement came on the eve of the Mecca Conference last month, when 22 hardline Wahhabi clerics issued a statement accusing Shiites of destabilising Muslim countries and humiliating Sunnis.
More than 80 Shiites responded with their own statement, reproaching the Wahhabis for attempting to spoil the king’s dialogue initiative.

“How could you let your statement … coincide with the interfaith dialogue that the King has called for and exerted much effort into?” they asked. “Would it not have been better … of you to have called for unity?” Your approach, they said, “has absolutely no bearing on the principles and morals enjoined by Islam”.
Hassan al Maliki, a Sunni religious scholar who was fired from the Saudi education ministry after clashing with hardliners over references to non-Muslims in school textbooks, said in a recent interview that opponents of the king’s outreach could not undermine his initiative.

“The opposition is not strong; if the ruler wants it to happen, it will,” Mr Maliki said.
“Some in the Wahhabi establishment are saying in sermons and on the internet that this is a concession, but their logic is sectarian … We should not be afraid of this movement and others should not stop any dialogue because of this minority.”
Khalid al Dakhil, a sociologist at King Saud University, said one of the reasons for King Abdullah’s Madrid initiative is that he “does realise the danger that fundamentalism and terrorism represent for the region as a whole, and for relations between the kingdom and the rest of the world”.

Mr Dakhil added: “There are those against this move … but they are not vocal.
“It’s not fashionable to take [an anti-dialogue] position … They seem to represent now a small minority.”
Mr Dakhil said that in addition to external outreach, Saudis also need to nurture more dialogue at home.
“I know one thing,” he said. “We in Saudi Arabia also need to take care of dialogue” among the “different trends – religious, cultural and intellectual – inside Saudi Arabia”.

More broadly, supporters of the Madrid conference and other interfaith conversations need positive reactions from each other to assuage critics in their own camps, participants and observers said.
A test for Saudi representatives will no doubt come when they are asked why they continue to ban the construction of churches in Saudi Arabia and the worship by Christians in the kingdom.
For their part, many Muslims still recall the pope’s lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany in Sept 2006, when the pope quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor saying the Prophet Mohammed brought “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. The comments came 14 months before he met with King Abdullah.

A test for non-Muslims will be their ability to head off any repetition of this or the Danish cartoon controversy and their reaction to it if it happens, Dr Alani said.
“King Abdullah is putting his neck on the line … These insults will undermine him and any leader who is trying to open society.”

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