Intra-Religious Dialogue

"The freeze was prompted by the repeated attacks on Islam by Pope Benedict XVI of the Vatican. The Pope has reiterated that Muslims oppress non-Muslims who are living with them in the Middle East." Al-Azhar

The most highly respected Muslim Cairo-based academic institution, Al-Azhar, chief centre of Sunni Muslim learning, has taken the step of suspending its relations with the Vatican. Maintaining open doors of communication has always been seen to be a positive undertaking, particularly among academic institutions. But Al-Azhar is offended, claiming that the Holy See has interfered too often in affairs of the Muslim world.

That in this instance the umbrage has been occasioned by the Vatican, the world's foremost Christian-orthodox body, coming to the defence of Egyptian Christian Copts makes little sense. Given that Roman Catholicism recognizes its birthplace and its birth, and that Egyptian Copts are among the original groups of Christianity, and as such when that group is threatened and suffers violent threats and death rampages, the Vatican must voice its concern.

Still, in the interests of maintaining open communion, without backtracking or apologizing for critical support on behalf of its venerable partners in the religion that much pre-dated Islam, the Vatican is urging a resumption of good relations. "The pontifical council for inter-religious dialogue's line of openness and desire to dialogue is unchanged", noted a Vatican spokesman.

Is it not sufficiently self-evident that Christians, or as Al-Azhar puts it, "non-Muslims" are indeed threatened in the Middle East? Where are the Christians who lived harmoniously in Syria, Iraq, the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon? Slowly bleeding out of the geography, as a result of spontaneous and institutionalized threats to their well-being, if not outright violent attacks. Christians have found safe haven in Israel, however, a Jewish-majority state.

Al-Azhar is implacable in its denunciation of interference in internal Muslim states and their affairs on the part of the Vatican. It is that purported interference that is intolerable, not the plight of Egyptian Copts who live in fear and misery, and mourn the passing of the mutual respect and tolerance they were better accustomed to, before the rise of militant Islam.

By repeatedly expressing solidarity with Egyptian Copts, and beseeching their protective custody on the world stage, Pope Benedict has committed the unthinkable; criticized Islam by implication. The most recent attack on an Egyptian church represented "yet another sign of the urgent need for the governments of the region to adopt ... effective measures for the protection of religious minorities."

Which caused Cairo to recall its envoy to the Vatican. "Egypt will not allow any non-Egyptian faction to interfere in its internal affairs under any pretext", was the statement issued by the country's foreign ministry. "The Coptic question is specifically an internal Egyptian affair." Which is exceedingly strange, since the entire Muslim clergy of the Ummah have denounced the prevalence of what they declare to be "Islamophobia".

Described as a pernicious and undeserved loathing of Islam by non-Muslim entities and individuals in the international community concerned and fearful of the planned and executed, past and future violent attacks on the non-Muslim community.