Arab News: Vatican’s Ties With Islam

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Vatican’s Ties With Islam
Amir Taheri

While officially there is no election campaign in choosing a successor to Pope John Paul II, the half a dozen cardinals in line for the job are engaged in their version of electioneering. Some have taken to the media like duck to water, heightening their profile through TV and radio interviews. Others have relied on friends to keep their miters in the ring.

One issue that is dominating the debate about the succession is the attitude that the next pope, leader of the world’s estimated one billion Catholics, should adopt toward Islam.

For centuries the Catholic Church either tried to ignore Islam or clung to medieval prejudices borne out of misunderstanding or ignorance. By the middle of the last century, however, the Vatican, the state expression of the Catholic Church, felt obliged to develop a policy toward Islam if only to organize its relations with a growing number of Muslim countries. At the start of the last century there were just six more or less independent Muslim states. By the year 2000 that number had grown to 53.

The first pope to put relations with Islam on the agenda was Paul VI who initiated the first inter-faith dialogue. The idea was that Christianity and Islam must find a modus vivendi as two neighboring civilizations. Much of the dialogue, however, consisted of diplomatic exchanges and bland assertions of common values. The relationship remained distant and cold; it was as if the two sides were merely seizing each other up.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=62194&d=16&m=4&y=2005