Dr Omar Habtur: "Dialogue reduces the harshness of conflicts and combats selfishness"
On the second day of the "interreligious dialogue against exclusionary identitarianism" organised by the Foundation for Islamic Culture and Religious Tolerance, in collaboration with the Complutense University of Madrid, a new meeting was held on the second day, which continued to call for concord and religious understanding in order to achieve peace and coexistence in our society. Interreligious dialogue was once again the key to the day as an essential tool for creating a tolerant future. The Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid, Carlos Osoro, stated that "interreligious dialogue seeks to establish friendship and harmony on the basis of shared values".
The co-director of the course, Mohammed Dahiri, opened the seminar by describing it as a "very important annual meeting". He also referred to Spain as "a land of culture, civilisations and coexistence between religions, as well as being a country that possesses a positive plurality, a factor of strength and immunity for any society".
In this new meeting, the Director General of the Fatwa Council of the United Arab Emirates, Dr. Omar Habtur Alderie, representing the President of Religious Affairs of the UAE, Mohamed Salem Alkkabi, affirmed that "our differences are nothing more than colours that embellish our rapprochement. There are no canvases without colours, there is no harmony without differences. This artistic sensitivity allows us to see that difference and plurality are a strength". He also pointed out that "the motto of this meeting in El Escorial is a beautiful painting, a canvas where there are colours, shapes and messages and different ideas, creeds, confessions. All of this makes up an aesthetic".
Habtur paraphrased an expression dictated by the enlightened Voltaire, stating that, "the good management of difference is that I can disagree with you, but I am ready to die defending your opinion, because the secret of the beauty of this universe is the coexistence of things and opposites". In this line, interreligious dialogue is a "dialogue of sincere exchange between the two parties, it is a way of listening. Dialogue is a fundamental value that is common and shared by human beings. It is a human principle and is the basis of civilised human relations. It is the key to the solution of many problems and allows us to open the way for differences to become visible.
In this respect, he highlighted dialogue as a tool that "reduces the harshness of conflicts and combats selfishness, thanks to dialogue, two parties can sit down and listen to each other. This in itself is an ethical achievement. When we have two parties talking and dialogue. Party A does not need to convince party B." In this meeting "we dialogue and chat. In this meeting, "we dialogue and talk, being from different cultures. Some of us look at the abstract and the earthly, each of us represents a different ethnicity and a different condition". In this way, Habtur stresses that "the ultimate goal of religions is to serve humanity. It is not acceptable that religions are the cause of the destruction of human beings. In the Qur'an it says, say we have believed in God, we make no distinction between any of them. To associate or condition dialogue with an outcome is to demean it. Dialogue itself is a human behaviour".
The doctor referred to the arrival of Pope Francis in Abu Dhabi, during which the Pope asked a series of questions in line with these ideas at the Sheikh Zayed Mausoleum. These included how we can safeguard each other within the human family and how religions can represent avenues of brotherhood rather than exclusion. Omar Habtur proposes a number of solutions:
Firstly, Habtur proposes that "we cannot build a civilised world without dialogue as religions are part of our life and our society whether we like it or not, if they are not used properly they will be a path of destruction". Secondly, he raises "the priority of consolidating peace between religions" because "our religions encompass humanitarian and ethical commonalities that can be points of leverage that will help us to achieve mutual respect". Fourthly, "exclusionary identities represent a danger to all because that is where radicalisation and terrorism come from". Finally, "these events are a call for dialogue between different civilisations and cultures (...) our encounters must be constant".
In this way, Habtur expressed that "the islamic culture foundation offers its hand to hold our hands in this great country and to call on the students, who are the guardians of knowledge, to embrace this message, but above all it is the responsibility of the leaders and of the academic and training institutions".
Similarly, the representative spoke about the current context in which global society is immersed following the spread of the COVID pandemic. For him, if this virus has served any purpose, it has been so that "all of humanity is once again in the same boat, in a common struggle, we must unite our efforts to save this boat".
He also highlighted the United Arab Emirates as an example of progress, tolerance and "plurality in many aspects". The Emirates "shares with you the value of human brotherhood and sincere love for every human being".
In the Abrahamic agreement, "it was necessary to take a step to save lives and to guarantee continuity, in the service of future generations, this agreement is embodied in the Abrahamic house that houses 3 temples, one for Muslims, one for Christians and others for Jews in the same space (...) some Muslims did not understand the Abrahamic house, it is something very simple: it constitutes a family that is made up of three confessions that wish to live in tolerance".
In a second intervention, the Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid and Vice-President of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Carlos Osoro, said that "inter-religious dialogue is the basis for building a sincere friendship on the path of fraternity". Along these lines, "what is most characteristic of fraternity is not only respect and tolerance, but above all affection, we are called to value, esteem and love each other. The human being has to be the good Samaritan who, in the face of human suffering and extreme vulnerability, has no religious frontiers. It is important that all religions unite in search of a more compassionate and fraternal world. Osoro pointed out that "between religions it is possible to find a way of serene, orderly and peaceful coexistence, welcoming differences and with the joy of being brothers and sisters as children of the one God"; he stressed that it is necessary to "deepen mutual knowledge, generating respect and compassion", alluding to the importance of dialogue between people of different religions, emphasising that this dialogue "is not carried out through diplomacy or kindness, but with the aim of establishing friendship and harmony and on the basis of shared values".
The Cardinal appeals to "build fraternity" and "not to close doors to anyone because Jesus breaks the frontier of religion, it is a spirit of truth and love", stressing that "the meeting point is the awareness of following the fundamental law of love". In interreligious dialogue "compassion and mercy along with care for the poor and a yearning for justice is part of the DNA of our religions, so dialogue and welcome are part of a polyhedron model rather than a static, incarnate sphere".
In the second part of the day, a round table discussion was held with the participation of different academic personalities to debate the future prospects for interreligious dialogue.
Joan Hernández Serret, Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, stated that "interreligious dialogue is not an end, it is a process, it helps us to share ourselves with those who are different, it helps us to be aware of diversity" and "it forces us to rethink our own path".
Referring to the exponential increase in radicalism and terrorism derived from intolerance, Hernández said that "ignorance gives security, which is why fanaticism is still a religious weed. Dialogue is the remedy because it means purification (...) inter-religious dialogue is to create a culture of peace" and in this plurality for which dialogue advocates "only a mature human being can live".
Therefore, the place that interreligious dialogue would have in our society would be derived from a series of challenges. These challenges revolve around "adapting to new challenges, being present in society and in the public space, as well as recognising the responsibility of the religions themselves with their dialogue and promoting interreligious dialogue and its relations with different idiosyncrasies as an antidote to excluding attitudes".
On the other hand, Antonio de Diego, professor of philosophy at the Pablo Olavide University, warned that "there is a danger in this interreligious dialogue, and that is the risk of an empty encounter. There is an inter-religious monologue, but there is no serious and firm dialogue".
With regard to future challenges, de Diego explained that, in general terms, we forget to live in the present, as "we live between a continuous nostalgia that is a hypertrophy of the past and an excessive longing for the future, however, God's time is the present, kairos, what is called in Christian culture, as opposed to kronos". The academic went on to explain that "the more perfect an ideology is, the more intolerant it is, because ideology is the idealisation of logos. We live in an excessively idolatrous world, idolatry is the biggest problem because we damage human dignity, which makes us different".
The next speaker, Rafael Ruiz Andrés, Doctor in Religious Sciences from the Complutense University, stated that "interreligious dialogue is configured as a fundamental space in which there is a need to focus on a more social space". For this reason, he admits that it is necessary for religions to "rethink secularity, it must stop being the history of the other and become the history of themselves, in which fraternity is a fundamental concept" in comparison with terrorist groups that start from "the premise that not all human beings are equal".
Finally, the event came to an end with the conclusion of Omar Habtur, who expressed his rejection of "violence and discrimination", and expressed the need to "find common ground, collaborate with humanity and for its benefit, prevent conflicts in favour of tolerance, coexistence and acceptance of the other".