As Daesch continues its murderous rampage in the name of an exclusionary interpretation of Islam, another Iraqi Islamic institution is giving traction to an inclusive practice of religious cooperation. An article in The Economist, In Shia's Holiest Shrine, a New Openness to Other Faiths, highlights the work at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, Iraq toward interfaith understanding.
On one recent day, there was a surprising scene, when set against the hatreds engulfing the wider Middle East. Inside the bejewelled Imam Ali Shrine, the holiest place for Shia Islam (pictured, above), a turbaned cleric was leading a delegation of women representing what remains of Iraq’s colourful sectarian make-up. The party included Melkite and Orthodox Christians, Sunni Muslims and members of smaller religious minorities, such as Yazidis and Mandeans. They also visited an 11-story academy for inter-religious studies, under construction opposite the shrine’s gates. And in an apparently unprecedented gesture, a Grand Ayatollah, one of four clergy of that rank in Najaf, invited them in for a bite to eat.
One of the organizers of the interfaith center, Jawad al-Khoei, stresses that the center wants representatives of various traditions to have room to explain their own self-understanding.
“We want Yazidis to teach the Yazidi faith, Sabaeans to teach about Sabeans, and Christians to teach Christianity,” he says. Another inter-faith programme is already up and running at the Faculty of Islamic Law at Kufa University, Najaf’s largest college. “We want to turn Najaf into a meeting place of religions,” says Walid Farajallah al-Asali, the faculty dean and a turbaned cleric, speaking after a lecture on the Bablylonian Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law compiled in the Sura Academy, once located nearby. “All Iraqi students know about Judaism is the conflict with Israel. We have to explain the beliefs of Judaism.”
Arguments for interfaith cooperation in Islam are not new. They’ve been made by the South African theologian Farid Esack in his tour-de-force Qur'an, Liberation, and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression, by the expert in Islamic law Khaled Abou el-Fadl’s The Place of Tolerance in Islam, and by Jerusha Tanner Lamptey in Never Wholly Other: A Muslima Theology of Religious Pluralism. What is exciting about the development here is that there is a central institutional place of support for Muslim inter-faith dialogue that offers a concrete plan to get people talking to each other.