Christian and Muslim scholars meeting at Yale University for a discussion on peace and reconciliation this week forewarned that a clash of "global proportions" would inevitably unravel in the near future unless Christianity and Islam learn how to co-exist.
"Why have you come here?" asked Miroslav Volf, director of the Yale Divinity School's Center for Faith and Culture, in opening remarks at the "Common Word" conference Tuesday. "Because, as I do, you see [a] heavy and dangerous storm of Muslim-Christian tensions menacing the world in which we live."
According to Volf, the motto of the Yale conference, "Loving God and Neighbour in Word and Deed" is simple: "What bounds Christians and Muslims together is their common belief in the oneness of God and the commitment to love God and to love neighbour."
He said that although relations between Christians and Muslims have been at a low point since the Crusades, he saw the "Common Word Between Us and You" document among the "rays of sun" penetrating the dark storm. The letter, signed by 138 Muslim clerics in October, called on the two faith communities to move past "polite ecumenical dialogue" and toward more sincere discussions on peace.
Volf, who helped pen the Christian response to the Muslim letter, said that over 500 Christian leaders had endorsed the Christian statement because they too "sensed a danger of global proportions if the peace between Muslim and Christians did not win over".
While Volf did not mention how that danger might materialise in today's context, Prince Ghazi bin Muhummad of Jordan, who played a leading role in writing the Muslim letter, was more explicit in his foreboding address to the 150 high-profile Christian and Muslim leaders on Tuesday.
Prince Ghazi discredited one part of Samuel Huntington's 1993 vision by stating that post-9/11 governments of Islamic majority countries have not banded together against government of Christian majority countries. He said, however, that Huntington was correct in predicting that tensions between Christians and Muslims would heighten on a global level after the collapse of atheistic communism.
On that note, he boldly compared the hostility between Christian/Western societies and Muslims to the prejudices held by Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi tribes before the 1994 genocide.
He said that such a predicament is "more likely" to happen when catastrophes such as global climate change strike and competition for food and other natural resources become more fierce.
On Monday, Senator John Kerry had appropriately summed up the lesson of the conference: "We must love one another or die."
The four-day conference, which concludes on Thursday, is the first inter-faith event to have spawned from the "Common Word" exchange. As part of its Reconciliation programme, the YCFC has scheduled four other conferences that will each take the peace initiative one step further. Those events will take place in October at Cambridge University, November at the Vatican, March 2009 at Georgetown University, and October 2009 at Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute in Jordan.
While inter-faith dialogue is nothing new, organisers and participants attending this week's conference were very optimistic of the implications that the "Common Word" dialogue would have on Christian-Muslim relations. Many speakers referred to the event as having the potential to be "historic" or "watershed".
Speakers on Tuesday also dedicated part of their addresses to respond to their critics.
Volf challenged the argument that religion would only fuel conflict rather than resolve it. He said he believes the world is becoming a "more religious" place and that in order for there to be peace among people, religion must be taken seriously.
