Catholic-Muslim forum to open at Vatican
VATICAN CITY: The Vatican’s first-ever Catholic-Muslim forum kicks off on Tuesday, two years after Pope Benedict XVI sparked outrage among Muslims for a speech seen as linking Islam with violence.
The three-day forum opens “a new chapter in the long history” of dialogue between the two faiths, the head of the Catholic delegation, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, told the French Catholic daily La Croix. Benedict will meet the delegations on Thursday.
The Muslim side is led by the mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, whose spokesman Yahya Pallavicini told AFP the delegates “represent no state and no ideological tendency.”
The delegation includes Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan, an outspoken and controversial Muslim figure in Europe, along with Aref Ali Nayed of the Islamic Centre of Strategic Studies in Amman, Jordan, and Iranian ayatollah Seyyed Mustafa Manegheg Damad.
Several women in the delegation include Ingrid Mary Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at the Hartford (Connecticut) Seminary in the United States.
Osama’s son seeks asylum in Spain
MADRID: One of Osama Bin Laden’s sons has asked for political asylum in Spain, local officials say.
Omar Osama Bin Laden, aged 27, made his claim after a scheduled stopover at Madrid’s Barajas airport on a flight from Egypt to Morocco.
The reasons for his asylum request were not immediately clear. The self-declared pacifist son of the al-Qaeda leader was earlier this year refused entry to live in the UK with his 52-year-old British wife.
The Spanish authorities said they would deal with Mr Bin Laden’s case “speedily”, Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported.
He was carrying a Saudi passport, the Spanish interior ministry officials said. He currently lives in Cairo, with wife Zaina Alsabah-Bin Laden, formerly named Jane Felix-Browne, from Cheshire.
They had hoped to move to Mrs Bin Laden’s home in north-western England. The couple said the visa application was rejected in April after the British authorities had judged that it might not be “conducive to the public good”.
Mrs Bin Laden, who is severely visually impaired, said she needed access to medical treatment in the UK but refused to be apart from her husband. Mr Bin Laden is one of 19 sons of the al-Qaeda leader.
The Vatican seminar was organised in response to a Muslim call for dialogue issued in October 2006, a month after Benedict’s speech in Regensburg, Germany. The call titled “A Common World” was signed by 138 Muslim religious figures and scholars.
“Now that the shock waves touched off by Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks ... have subsided, the overall consequences have proven more positive than negative,” Ramadan commented in the British daily The Guardian’s online edition.
“Above and beyond polemics, the pope’s lecture has heightened general awareness of their respective responsibilities among Christians and Muslims in the West,” he added.
The Regensburg lecture sparked days of sometimes violent protests in Muslim countries, prompting the pontiff to say that he was “deeply sorry” for any offence and to attribute Muslim anger to an “unfortunate misunderstanding.”
The closed-door discussions at the Vatican will focus on Tuesday on “God’s love” and Wednesday on “loving your neighbour,” a theme that touches on two Vatican priorities, human rights and religious freedom.
The Vatican is however cautious over opening a purely theological dialogue, with Tauran telling La Croix: “We’ll see ... how far we can go together.” Muslims and Christians differ in their concept of God, and follow “different paths to reach this God,” said Tauran, the Roman Catholic Church’s point man for dialogue with Islam.
