The Religious Sense In Arabic

A Veil of Hope,
Beyond Prejudice
The translation of Fr. Giussani’s book is the opportunity for an encounter between Arab culture and Christian tradition. This is what emerged from a dialogue at the Meeting

by Ambrogio Pisoni

“The wonder of a new beginning” was the title given to the presentation of the Arabic edition of Fr. Giussani’s book, The Religious Sense, and the title was well merited by the occasion.
This wonder pervaded the Meeting’s dialogue with two men, Wa’il Farouk and Said Shoaib, both Egyptians from Cairo, who had read the book and recounted their judgment on it.
Wa’il began by giving the reason he had come to the Rimini Meeting–an unexpected meeting with Paolo Caserta, a young Florentine who had moved to Cairo some years ago to study Arabic language and culture. Paolo attends the Dar Comboni Institute, the school of Arabic founded and run by the Comboni Missionaries, the most highly reputed of its kind in the Middle East.
Wa’il, a young teacher of Arabic literature, was working there and they met.

From a friendship
They came to like each other immediately, and the knowledge of one another’s history and culture led to unreserved mutual esteem. In this way, friendship reveals its true nature and its task as a means of cognition. Thus, the young Muslim Egyptian teacher introduced Paolo to the discovery of the secrets of his tradition and received in return the key that opens the door to the wealth of Christian history.
It is an ongoing friendship that did not end beneath the pyramids. Paolo’s time in Egypt became the beginning of a history, and very soon Wa’il was able to come to Italy. To know Paolo meant to appreciate his friendships and his history. Communion and Liberation became familiar for Wa’il just as his friends, fellow Muslim teachers, journalists, and writers, became Paolo’s friends and ours. Paolo gave Wa’il a copy of The Religious Sense in English; he read it and was enthusiastic about it. We spoke about it in our meetings on the banks of the Nile, and it was inevitable to hope to have it soon in the language of the Koran. And the translation was already done–our friend Thérèse who lives in Beirut had already seen to it.

The encounter
with the Rimini Meeting
It was time to get ahold of it and prepare it for publication. Seena Fadil, an Iraqi doctor who has been in Italy for years, Camille Eid, a Lebanese journalist and writer residing in Milan, and Sobhi Makhoul, an Israeli–Arab resident in Jerusalem, got to work together. Between July 2004 and January 2006, they had a number of working weekends and, finally, the text was printed at the press of the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem, and was ready in time for the 2006 Meeting.
War had prevented it being printed in Beirut, as originally planned, but Providence does not balk before human violence.
Along with Wa’id, the journalist Said Shoaib came to Rimini. He edits a newspaper called Freedom in Arabic. In front of a most attentive and curious audience, they both offered a contribution that is certainly crucial for the encounter, so urgent and dramatic today, between Christian and Arab traditions.
Wa’il revisited some key terms used by Giussani, like “realism” and “reasonability,” and we all realized that we were at the beginning of a new work–fascinating and difficult at the same time–of learning the true meaning of the words so that reality might reveal the Mystery dwelling in it. For, as Farouk noted, Arab thought today is permeated by a conflict between reason and Mystery and the clash between traditionalists and modernists of Western (particularly French) thought seems to have no remedy.

A man of life
Fr. Giussani’s proposal is of particular interest because it opens up new horizons to Arab thought and offers another face of European culture. Now, the way is open to an adequate knowledge of Christian tradition, freed from the oppressive burden of prejudice brought by the enlightenment. At last, we can begin to speak of friendship in the context of reason, reality, and Mystery, precisely because the experience of a true friendship between men has become the locus of astonished knowledge.
Said Shoaib confirms this: “I was surprised by this book. I saw that it presented a new face of Europe. It is an invitation to reflect, to freedom, an invitation to recuperate and regain what you have received from your parents.”
The merit of Fr. Giussani’s book, Said stresses, is, among other things, that of not presenting a closed ideology or a closed idea of religion. In Egypt, faith tends largely to close itself up, and whoever departs from this model becomes an apostate. This book does not present the religious experience as an alternative to life, but as an incentive to life, for a better knowledge of oneself and of reality. All this, the journalist tended to stress, is not in contradiction with his convictions as a Muslim. On reading the book, Said discovered that Giussani is not a man of religion but “a man of life.”
The last word was that of Fr. Stefano Alberto, who teaches Introduction to Theology at Catholic University in Milan. He offers a judgment that, beginning from the translation, takes the form of an acknowledgment of the challenge arising from it and of the proposal of the method for tackling it.
He said, “The translation of Fr. Giussani’s book has in mind not only our brothers in faith, but the Muslim world, too, even though we must not deny that the situation is a very delicate one.”

Footprints in the desert
Fanaticism, even religious fanaticism, is not born from religiosity, though some go on affirming the contrary. The fundamentalist fanatic is always someone who has broken with his own tradition and is therefore nurtured by resentment to the point of hating himself. “We love death more than you love life” was the unforgettable message of the Islamic terrorists after the Madrid massacre two years ago. Violence is always a child of idolatry, which is a false relationship with the Mystery. Authentic religiosity always opens one up to curious and loving knowledge of reality. After all, Fr. Giussani’s insistence on “elementary experience,” on the “heart” present in every man, is a great novelty that some still look on with suspicion in the Christian world, just like fifty years ago at the beginning of the adventure of the Movement.
Fr. Stefano explains: “It’s not a question of a generic agreement on generic values, but of going to the heart of your inner self.” This is certainly uncomfortable, both for Christians and Muslims, as it is for man as such, but there is no other way. It is the “hard and fascinating”–and therefore possible–road indicated by Benedict XVI in Cologne last year in his address to the Muslim community.
The cover of the Arab edition of The Religious Sense has a picture by the painter William Congdon: footprints in the desert–a first step, the first of many that will follow.
This certainty is born of the beauty of today’s event, the confirmation that men who are sure lovers of Truth, in the miracle of an encounter, become friends for Destiny and therefore a sign of hope and peace for all.