Editorial

REBUILDING A BEAUTIFUL WORLD TOGETHER

In so many ways, our world is beautiful. But in so many other ways, it is also an ugly and violent world. Our great multi-dimensional human self is being made to shrink to view everything from the economy of money and profit. Money is fast becoming the sole currency for all human transactions. So, the only question we seek an answer for: what profit will it bring to me? When mixed with power and ably supported by arms capable of great destruction, you have a powerful weapon to make many kinds of coercive and unjust decisions. Politics is entering into all sectors of life. It is a sacrilege that it has also been allowed to enter into the sacred domain of religion, lured by the short term interests it will provide to key functionaries.    

The quest in the minds of many good-willed persons across all religious traditions is to find effective ways to contribute to rebuild our planet earth and make it once again beautiful, a spiritual quest.        

                        

Faith, human and divine, has been providing the underpinning and motive power for many great human endeavours. We humans are meaning seekers and meaning makers. As a nation, we have sought God with a relentless desire for countless centuries. Human history is filled with inspiring deeds of light, produced by men and women who dared to see beyond the limiting borders of self and had set larger goals and targets by accessing their deeper connections and capabilities. Such faith has produced many miracles of life, several of which were indeed very spectacular, be they in the realm of sport and adventure, in war or peace, in science and technology or in arts and architecture or in inspired sacred writings and actions by spirit-filled persons.  

The United Nations, while searching to find a solution for the great violence in the world, brought together the spiritual and religious leaders of the world to New York in August, 2000. The reason: in a survey it found that more than 80% of the people had a faith or belief system to power their lives. In spite of the giant progress that we have made in modern times and more so, in the recent decades, there is clear evidence that many are still searching forsomething more from life than what we have so far been able to master and use. We are moving from the Information and Communication Age to the Wisdom Age, inspired by the wisdom of the Spirit. As a result, spiritual is in. We are more than just body, mind and heart. We have also a spirit. There is growing acceptance of the fact that we are all connected beyond the global internet connectivity we already have. We are divinely rooted in God and cosmically linked to our deepest human resources. It is the great tragedy of life that most of this vast resource, human and divine, is not used by us and so we live lives of scarcity.

 The three-word mantra invitation from life:

     Discover  the aadhaar and foundation for life and living, both natural and super natural.

     Connect with these immense resources, found in the many faith traditions and so connect with persons across borders and boundaries

     Live the New and abundant life that it opens before you. The current economies, based on money, arms, technology and domination and control of others, have not produced peace and wellness of life. So, discover and live the economy of communion.

The present edition of Salaam presents many articles, which open the doors to build a new world through dialogue. Is Islam for dialogue? Yes, says Maulana Wahiuddin Khan and provides several Quranic quotes to prove it.  Victor Edwin reports the MILAP initiative that brought several scholars, searching for shared responsibility to promote union of minds and hearts. Tom Kunnunkal seeks an affirmative answer from Christians to the question: Are only a very select few called to engage in dialogue or is it a Christian imperative for all?  Herman Roborgh  explores ways to be a transforming presence in a milieu when the majority belong to another religion. Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad’s liberating views  open new windows on how education can provide personal and societal transformation. David Pinault provides insights into the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims and the political interventions that aggravate the confrontation.   

Read, get inspired and discover a new way of being a Muslim or Christian!

DIALOGUE A NEW WAY OF BEING HUMAN

 Tom Kunnunkal SJ

We live in a multi-cultural and multi-religious world.

We live in a world that makes us feel good. We also live in a world that is not at ease. Many, in our world, experience a lot of tension and fear about what could happen that would cause them injury, even serious injury or death. We live in a modern world created through knowledge and technology, a world of great  abundance. Side by side, we also find many, both the rich and the poor, experiencing lack or absence of inner peace and hence a scarcity mentality. Adding more items to the many items we already have will not help us to find a solution. We need a new mindset, a new relationship, a new connection, a new way of being human. God in his wisdom has created a beautiful world. One great reason that the world is so beautiful is that it is so diverse. We see it well illustrated in Nature. We see it in every human being as well, so uniquely different from every other, with no duplicates. It does not take much imagination to realize how quickly we will get totally bored with a world and its peoples if everything and everyone looked the same and behaved the same way. That will be an insufferable hell on earth. So we thank God for diversity. We thank God for the diverse, multi-religious and multi-cultural India we have. Each community and its peoples have made so many significant contributions to create the beautiful India we have. This is also the strength of India. Therefore, inter-faith dialogue must remain a non-negotiable constituent of the new India we want to build together. We then see Dialogue as a planned effort to sustain and take forward this beautiful India. That is why we need to resist strongly any attempt to make India a mono-cultural, a mono-religious society.

What are the stumbling blocks?

Religions were meant to promote togetherness and communion and not to divide people. I find a fundamental cause for division in the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which share a common Abrahamic spiritual foundation. Each makes the claim that they have the truth and the whole truth and that God has made a special revelation to them alone.  God’s saving presence in the world and the way God reveals Self to us humans is a mystery. God is beyond any borders and boundaries that we humans create. Can truth be proprietary to any one group or religious tradition? Obviously, only God can claim to be the sole and ultimate proprietor of all truth. But God shares His truth with all of us and to some of His saints and prophets, He shares more specially and deeply.

Restoring the integrity of God’s world, a world corrupted by our human actions, can only be a joint venture, by persons of all religious traditions. Why do I say that? Such a huge cosmic project cannot be successfully achieved, by any single group. Christians and Muslims, forming nearly 40 percent of the world population, have a major share of that responsibility.

Dialogue is an effective strategy to recreate God’s beautiful world. It is a strategic instrument for this re-creation and for the fashioning of an alternate human society. If we see dialogue as an opportunity to convince the other of our truth and show them their error, we will surely fail, as we have numerous records of such failures in the past.  Today’ world is an inter-connected world, with many wide open spaces in all sectors of life that are accessible to those who wish to do so. While this “open space” is expanding greatly in many sectors of life, there is a growing tendency to shrink within narrow borders, whether as a philosopher, a scientist or a believer in a particular religious tradition.

In the present state and conditions both globally and in India, the invitation is that we seek strategies to create an alternate universe, a new human community, the India without borders, as envisioned by the Constitution. 

ISA, founded 33 years ago, is a small organization but with a large objective. It works to build harmonious relationships between Muslims, Christians, Hindus and other faith traditions. Specifically it aims to provide opportunities for Christians to have an experience of Muslim life. Listening to several of our Muslim brothers and sisters talk of how their Islamic faith is guiding and directing their practical life and decisions will provide great inspiration to us, Christians.  

We are all pilgrims seeking to find God in our human hearts. The invitation is that we join hands and travel together as fellow pilgrims. Commitment to integral human liberation can become the meeting point for all religions. The invitation is to develop a culture of dialogue in our life. It will demand that we respect all that the Spirit of God brings about in our human history, including the multiplicity of religions. While engaged in dialogue, we remain rooted in our own religious identity. We have beautiful instances of many persons from different religious traditions (true of many Christians and many Muslims) who have successfully built bridges of understanding with other faith traditions. There is enough evidence that those who approached followers of other faith traditions with preparation, knowledge and respect, have often found that a fruitful dialogue is indeed possible. We accept the mystery of God who is in constant dialogue with all whom He has created and in imitation of God, we are also invited to engage in dialogue with others.