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Where is the dialogue, respect, and understanding extended to Muslims in the West, currently being given to Christians in Muslim countries?
In my piece of 26 September 2006, I put the following very simple question to Imam Mohammed el Saadi:
“It is all very well to ask for and overwhelmingly receive, dialogue, respect, and understanding for your religion in our neck of the woods, so to speak, where Muslims are clearly a minority, but where at present is that self-same spirit of dialogue, respect and understanding for other religions being shown in countries which call themselves or are generally perceived to be Muslim?”
It was, therefore, with considerable interest that I started reading the article in MaltaToday of 1 October 2006, by my friend Rachid Titouah, who apparently is intent on picking up the gauntlet on behalf of the Imam, first claims that I have concealed facts to suit my agenda and then promises “abundant facts” to dispute what he perceives to be an incorrect approach to the matter at hand. After carefully reading Titouah’s contribution, I am seized by the need to make amends and disclose some of the many facts I did, indeed, keep from your readers.
I publicly own up to having concealed, among other things, the fact that a couple of weeks ago an Algerian government-owned radio station aired a two hour-long programme on religious dialogue with the participation of five Algerian (yes, Algerian) Catholic priests. I admit to having failed to mention that Algeria is made up of no less than five dioceses which cover the twenty churches left in the whole of the country; that the remaining 700 churches have been turned into mosques, cultural centres or left in a state of abandonment; and that the church’s schools and hospitals were nationalized in the 1970s.
Also absent from my article was reference to the murders in Algeria of Monsignor Gaston Jaquier, Episcopal Vicar of Algiers, in 1978; of Father Henry Vergès and Sister Paule-Hélène Saint-Raymond in May 1994; of four White Father missionaries in December 1994; of Sister Bibiane Leclerc and Sister Angèle-Marie Littlejohn in September 1995; of Bishop Pierre Claverie of Oran in August 1996; and perhaps most horrifically of all, seven French Trappist monks decapitated in March 1996. These Catholic martyrs in Algeria, while prepared to die for their beliefs, have felt no compelling need to kill others. On the contrary, these men and women died educating Christian and Muslim children and looking after the poor.
Having decided to make a clean breast of it I must note that, against all odds, three thousand Catholics do remain in Algeria out of a total population of thirty million people and that this represents fewer people than the number of Muslims in Malta. As a matter of fact, Algeria now has fewer Catholics than any North African or Middle Eastern country, so I trust that I will be forgiven for not having made mention of Algeria in my letter (Concerning the “death of the (Catholic) church” in Algeria refer to the International Herald Tribune’s 24 July, 2006 article on Henri Tessier, Archbishop of Algeria, <www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/07/24/
news/profile.php>.
Having confessed to my sins of omission, it will, by now, have become patently clear to readers that Titouah’s choice of titbits from the non-church of Algeria hardly constitutes an “abundance of facts” that overturns my core argument. Titouah, in fact, seems to have wandered so far and wide in pursuit of his “abundance of facts” that in the process he seems to have forgotten what he set out to do, namely address the central question which I set out in my first article, again at the outset of this contribution, and which I set out yet one more time, namely:
Where, at present, is the spirit of dialogue, respect, and understanding, rightly and overwhelming extended to Muslim minorities in the West, currently being given to Christian and other religious minorities in countries which have Muslim majorities?
Having attentively read Rachid Titouah’s contribution I find no compelling reason to change the opinion I expressed in MaltaToday, namely, that from where I stand the spirit of dialogue, respect, and understanding for other religions, even for different branches of the same Muslim faith, in Muslim majority countries is, very regrettably, more notable by its absence. Titouah rightly points out the diversity of Muslim states and yet intolerance seems to be a common denominator, albeit to varying degrees (Refer to the sobering 1998 report entitled Religious Freedom in Majority Islamic Countries published by Alleanza Cattolica at < www.alleanzacattolica.org/acs/acs_english/acs_index.htm>.
I trust that I shall live to see Muslim tolerance of “others” improve but I shall not hold my breath. I also trust that when the time comes I shall have the courage to stand up and speak out against the rising swell of public sentiment against “others” in our midst, as I have had occasion to do on a number of occasions in the past.
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