Christianity and Islam: a possible and necessary dialogue.

Pierre-olivier Léchot.

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

At a time when fundamentalism is intensifying, it is vital to affirm that interfaith dialogue is not only possible but necessary. If, as Raphael Picon used to say, God is always too much, then the other religions have things to teach us about God. For almost twenty years, Muslim radicalism has not stopped focusing attention on itself and encouraging the development of fantastic theories about Islam. Questions of an essentialist nature have in this way become legion: is Islam soluble in the republic? Is Islam compatible with secularity? In the face of these excessive simplifications, let us repeat vigorously: there is not one single Islam, considered normative, any more than there is one single Christianity or one single Protestantism. Islam, like every global and long lasting religion, is a universe on its own: how many common points do we find between Indonesian Muslim jurist of the Shafiite school and a member of the Sufi al-Tidjaniyya congregation? Undoubtedly no more than between a Brazilian Pentecostalist and Catholic professor of moral theology teaching in Europe.

What is still more unsettling, is the tendency to consider that Islam and the west represent two opposing blocks in their cultural foundations. But there again is the historical facts are stubborn. If Christianity and Islam have confronted one another, it is first of all because since the 7^th century the latter has not stopped growing in proximity with, and even to the detriment of, Christianity’s spheres of influence – and Christianity has indeed paid Islam back! Islam and Christianity then are more like two neighbours who have lived in the same neighbourhood for decades, with their inevitable quarrels over territory, rather than two strangers. If Christianity and Islam were so alien to one another, they would not have confronted each other with such intensity. One of the vehicles of dialogue resides therefore in the dispassionate reading of our shared history; from this point of view the historical-critical approach to the Qur’an represents an opportunity. It is the bet which has been made by a team of Berlin-based researchers gathered around the Islamic scholar Angelika Neuwirth, who have devoted themselves to producing a critical edition of the Qur’an. They are demonstrating what ought to have been obvious: far from having appeared in the middle of a region with no culture or history, the Qur’an is a text from late antiquity full of references to Greek, Christian and Jewish culture. Islam is therefore less the “totally different” that so many leader-writers paint for us than the distant cousin rediscovered as a result of a family reunion, someone whom we must get to know if we wish to enter openly into dialogue with him. It is in this context that the anthropologist Mohammed Sghir Janjar has done us the honour of dealing here with the contemporary debates about the origins of the Qur’an.

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