MEETIING 99
TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY


Islam. Encounter and Challenge

A deeper study necessary for a historical awareness whose purpose is the glory of Christ

The President of Algeria chose the Meeting to launch a program of reconciliation in his country. The possibilities of a dialogue with the Islamic world, in confident awareness of our own Christian identity. The witness of the Bishops of Tunis and Tripoli

BY GIORGIO PAOLUCCI

Who's afraid of Islam? The ideal and political reference for one billion two hundred million people, the religion founded by Mohammed is going through a phase of expansion and at the same time of profound upheaval, whose outcome is hard to imagine but is certainly one that involves and challenges Europe, forcing it to examine its own deep roots and to rediscover what can still lend it substance and permit it to stand up to a confrontation by now inevitable. These are questions that emerged a number of times in the course of the Meeting, and which received some answers during three sessions dedicated respectively to immigration, the presence of Christians in North Africa, and the situation in Algeria, on the occasion of President Bouteflika's first visit to Europe.

New neighbors
Ten million Moslems in the European Union, of which at least 600,000 are in Italy: this too is part of the great flood of immigrants that has been moving across the continent for the last fifty years. Summoned by heavy industry to contribute to post-war reconstruction, Maghrebi, Turks, and Asians have sunk roots in Europe, and in the wake of the workers came their wives, children were born, a second and third generation have grown up for whom Islam-although with differing connotation-constitutes a glue capable of holding together persons of distinctly different languages, ethnic groups, and traditions, providing the unifying heart of the umma, the transnational community called for by the Prophet. Thus a new protagonist has appeared on the scene of European society, leading the Bishop of Marseilles to comment, "Up to now we have encountered Moslems, now we are encountering Islam."
Italian society, too, has been familiar for years, albeit with varying intensity, with the phenomenon of immigration from Islamic countries: an immigration that can represent a resource for certain sectors of our economy and which must be rigorously studied, evaluated, and governed rather than being made out to be a demon-as the Italian Minister for Social Solidarity Livia Turco said at the Meeting-and granted the same space for free expression that the Western democracies possess as part of their genetic code. But in order for an authentic integration, a fruitful encounter between peoples and cultures to come about, the foundations of our tradition and our juridical system cannot be called into question, in the name of a politically correct appeal to a multicultural society that today is so frequently evoked and is equally vague in outline, a society in which the presumption of recognizing equal dignity and importance to all cultures would have as its unfortunate result the homogenization of identities and the cancellation of a face whose characteristics are in large part attributable to the Christian tradition, as the Director of the Agnelli Foundation, Marcello Pacini, recalled. And Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir, one of the leading scholars of the Arab Christian cultural heritage, underlined that only by rediscovering its Christian roots can Europe become capable of a fruitful dialogue with Moslems, a dialogue that, if carried out fairly and without abjuring the respective differences, would be useful to both sides. "The Moslems who are in a situation of emigration can learn that modernity is not an enemy of the faith, and that a distinction between religion and politics can be turned into an advantage for the whole of society; Western Christians, looking at Islam, can recover a depth of faith, that is too often reduced to an intimate, individual experience which has no impact on reality." But the authenticity of the dialogue, he reiterated, "requires that neither side give up a part of themselves in ord er to please the other."

The Church is never foreign
On the same wave length were the words of His Excellency Fouad Twal, the first Arab bishop in Tunisia in many centuries, who heads a community made up completely of foreigners: 22,000 persons, in large part technicians for Western companies who are working abroad for a few years. "But we feel responsible also for the 4 million tourists who every year spend their vacation in this land, as well as the 9 million Tunisian Moslems," he underlined, "because living the Church in an Islamic country is not something to be suffered as an unfortunate fate, but is a chapter in God's saving plan which concerns the whole world." So there is no inferiority complex evident in the words of the shepherd of this "small flock." Instead there is a commitment to witness in works, the few remaining after the diocese's 1956 cessation of 95% of its property to the state (as a result of independence from France). It kept only five churches, a clinic (the first one established in Tunis), 15 schools attended by thousands of Islamic students, and some libraries scattered across the capital. These works, which provide a service to all of society, are the channel for the "dialogue of life" that, Twal recalled, "is not for Christians an option, but a demand of faith, a step desired by the Church," but one that "will be even more fruitful, in Tunisia as well as in Italy, to the degree to which the Catholics who engage in this dialogue are aware of what they are, while those who live this experience suppressing their own identity give the impression of saying implicitly that Christ constitutes an obstacle to dialogue."
The testimony of His Excellency Giovanni Martinelli, Bishop of Tripoli, also echoes the awareness of a task that is above all one of presence and service, in a context like that of Libya in which Christians are guaranteed a significant amount of freedom of expression. Largely a minority from the standpoint of numbers (100,000 people, prevalently employees of oil companies or involved in the health sector), reduced to the possession of two houses of worship after the confiscation of property following Qaddafi's revolution in 1969, the Church in Libya does not consider itself to be foreign, but is present according to the logic of witness and charity: "Living the faith in an Islamic context cannot be simply a flag that one raises in contrast to another, but a presence and a sign that illuminates by the positive and concrete nature of its works," one with universal dimensions in the literal sense of the term, as is testified by the liturgies enlivened in the Church in Tripoli by hundreds of Africans, Asians, and Europeans.

The President's bet
On the same southern shores of the Mediterranean as Tunisia and Libya is a country in which Islam and violence seem to have become synonymous: this is Algeria, martyred by a civil war that has cost 100,000 lives in eight years. And one in which fundamentalist groups sow terror, fighting in the name of a radical conception of the teachings of the Koran. This conception was harshly contested right from the stage in Rimini by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, on his first trip to Europe after his recent election to the highest office in the land, where he launched the challenge of a pact of reconciliation capable of putting an end to the season of bloodshed and instability that is tearing his country apart. The project of "national harmony," already approved by Parliament and submitted to a popular referendum on September 19th, provides for the granting of amnesty to all those who, even if they supported terrorism, have not shed blood, and a sliding scale of punishments for those who took part in episodes of crime. By establishing in this way the foundation for a national reconciliation, Bouteflika intends to lead a rebirth that is at the same time economic and moral, returning Algeria to a position among the protagonists of a policy of Mediterranean cooperation and restoring confidence in the country both to foreign investors and to the civilian society. To his condemnation of an "Islam that is mutilated by the ideological shortcut of fanaticism," the President added the state's commitment to respecting religious freedom. "How can we imagine Christianity as a foreign religion in an Islamic land in which millions of Christians have always lived?" This good omen resounds as a challenge both to Bouteflika's internal adversaries and to the governments of many countries in which Islam is the state religion and where free expression of the Christian faith is often impeded. If the commitment made by the President of Algeria is joined with a political and diplomatic initiative on the part of European governments-who in rece nt years have legislated to promote areas for religious and civilian expression for the Islamic communities which have put down roots on the continent-this could be the historic chance for the theme of reciprocity finally to emerge from the limbo of good intentions and to become the object of international agreements under the banner of freedom and recognition of fundamental human rights.