What if you could make a trip to the Middle East? What would you expect to see and hear in a city like Beirut, the capital of Lebanon? Who would you go and try to meet? Would Shia, Sunni and Druze Muslims be on your list of people you would want to connect with? As Christians we’re called to be ‘peace makers’. And one of the teachings of Lebanon is that ‘dialogue’ is crucial to peace building.
Rita Ayoub is sitting behind her desk. From her office she has a view over the part of Beirut where the Saint Joseph University is located. Outside the rain has stopped and slowly but surely the sky is breaking open and the late afternoon sun gives a golden glow to the apartment blocks that still carry the visible scars of war. Rita is coordinating a training course on Islam-Christian dialogue, a program that is run by the Institute for Islamic-Christian Studies at the university (www.ieic.usj.edu.lb).
As part of her work she’s helped to develop this training course that aims to help participants, from many religious backgrounds, to deal with their differences. Lebanon, with 18 different communities, is a diverse country. And most Lebanese, when asked about it, mention this as something that they are proud of. However the civil war that ravaged the country, especially in and around the capital of Beirut between 1975 and 1990, changed this picture dramatically. As a lady attending a church group for women later will say about this period: “Ever since, we don’t trust the other anymore”.
Rita’s own story is another illustration of what the war did, but also how things can change. As a Maronite Christian she had to flee her home and village in the mountains surrounding Beirut when Palestinians and Druze Muslims came and took over in 1975.
Since that time she distrusted ‘the other’. Years later she experienced what she called a “shock that changed my vision”, when Christians within their own communities started to fight each other. Since then she sees war no longer as a tool to defend one’s existence; it’s just a tool of destruction, everyone can use his own background as an excuse to fight.
Finally she reached a point where she decided she wanted to meet the other, to get to know him or her outside the context of war, to hear the story of the war from their point of view. When she started attending a dialogue initiative in 1996 “it was the first time I spoke with Muslims about my fears, my anxieties. I was surprised to know that Muslims also feel fear when it’s about my religion’s behaviour”. And that is exactly part of what dialogue does, she says: “It is about discovering that both sides are afraid, are struggling with feelings of anxiety, and it helps then to connect. In the groups they learn to express their feelings, to share instead of to attack. And they meet for at least a year so there is time to build trust.”
From the dialogue groups an Islam-Christianity training course was developed. In the period of four months the students talk about issues like prejudice, stereotyping, communication skills, conflict resolution, religions’ dogmas and feasts and other subjects. Rita: “There are real eye openers. When we ask participants what their prejudices are built on, many of them discover that they’re not based on something clear. The training is helping them to live what we call ‘cognitive dissonance’, an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously.”
It’s probably recognized by some of the Druze and Christian villages in the mountains that Rita had been working with for many years. After 25 years of separation she’s been able to get them to talk to each other again.
That international politics can interfere seriously with reconciliation work on the ground, is illustrated by one of her stories: In one of the villages in the mountains surrounding Beirut, Rita worked for one year with a group of Christians and Druze Muslims, to prepare the ground for the Christians to return back to their village. They had been forced to leave during the civil war and now, 26 years later, the time had finally come for them to go back. It would be their first meeting with their former Druze neighbours inside their village. Rita was driving with the group towards their village. While in the car they heard the news on the radio of two airplanes that had crashed into the World Trade Centre. It was 9/11/2001. “At that first meeting in the village, between the two groups, all we talked about was this news”, Rita says. “When the world was living its first day of a divergence, in this village we were living a first day of convergence”.
In some cases the word ‘reconciliation’ is not welcomed, but the groups do want their children to have a future without war. And for Rita that is enough ‘common ground’ to start working with. “Before the war we lived together but we didn’t talk about our differences. Now we have started to work on it.”
With the elections coming up in June and the sensitivities around the recently started Tribunal that is to find the truth behind former premier Rafik Hariri’s death in 2005, Lebanon is challenged to its core. People like Rita teach the Lebanese to acknowledge differences that are there, but at the same time to live and embrace that God-given diversity so as to be able to communicate a message of reconciliation to the region and beyond.
Christian-Muslim Dialogue: Creating a new language
Conflicts in the world in the 21st century are more and more defined by ‘religious ethnicity’. Since Samuel Huntington’s book ‘the clash of civilisations’ and the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and fed by migration, battle lines are increasingly drawn following what is seen as religious boundaries: Islam versus Christianity, Hindu versus Christian. In a counter movement, initiatives like The Common Word have come up where Islamic leaders and thinkers have invited their Christian colleagues into a dialogue. And ‘dialogue’ seems to be the key word, also in Lebanon. It was here also that another initiative, a women’s symposium on interfaith dialogue was held, focussing on ‘learning to live in a Europe of many religions’.
With over 50 participants the symposium took place in the capital Beirut under the theme “Embracing Diversity – how to live in a world of religious pluralism.” Christian and Muslim women were encouraged to look at issues from a different perspective, to learn how to listen with empathy, to learn to say “I” and take responsibility and to suspend judgement. As one of the participants commented, it really is about creating a possible new language for Christian-Muslim dialogue in Europe and possibly in the Middle-East.
And that is why Lebanon as a location was chosen. With 18 different communities in a country slightly larger than the island of Cyprus (just over 10.000 sq km) and with a past of internal strife and regular foreign interference, the Lebanese had to work very hard to embrace their ‘diversity and pluralism’.
Judge Abbas Halabi, one of the organisers of the symposium, explains: “Lebanon, which has been since the beginning of time a point of intercultural and inter-religious intersection, as well as a meeting point between the East and the West, has always been a strategic location, and unfortunately, a reflection of divergences and inter-religious conflicts”.
It’s probably because of this that Pope John Paul II once made the comment that “Lebanon is not a nation, but a message”. Lebanon as a laboratory, where if they can get it right, it will be a message of hope to the world at large where Christians and Muslims struggle to find unity in diversity.
As a possible step in the right direction, the former French colony has started to find its own way in how to handle that diversity. For instance, in the legal and the political realm they’ve chosen for a power sharing agreement between Christians and Moslems. Halabi: “The constitution considers the Lebanese citizens having a plural identity: as citizens of a state from one part, and as members of religious communities from the other. Citizens enjoy civil and political rights as individuals, but at the same time communities have privileges. Therefore, a duality of representation exists in Lebanon: the parliament represents the Lebanese as citizens, and the Senate, not established, represents religious communities.”
Other initiatives like the Arab Group for Christian-Muslim Dialogue are bringing politicians, teachers, religious leaders and thinkers together who have a desire to build bridges. The aim is to find common ground and move forward together.
Judge Halabi however sees that there’s still a way to go when it comes to embracing God-given pluralism, both in the Western and in the Arab world: “A sword of two edges, diversity can, on one side, be harmful and separating. On the other side, if carefully nurtured and positively reflected, it can be nourishing and uniting.”
Marjon Busstra
“What we see in T.V. is so different from the reality here”
We began our work at the Tent of Nations just outside Bethlehem. We spent much of our time tending to the olive and almond trees planted there the year pervious and assisting in running a camp for children from the largest refugee camp in Bethlehem. I wanted to take the group there because of the amazing example the family that owns the land are. Each day they face challenges of living with an occupied territory. Instead of letting their frustrations of their situation turn to hopelessness, they have done the opposite turning the very land they are fighting to keep into a place of hope and peace. I am always impacted and so was the team about a simple sign that painted on a rock at the property entrance that says “we refuse to be enemies”. It is a challenging statement to think about not only with Israel/Palestine but also in our individual lives.
Our journey then took us in to Bethlehem to spend a few days working in practical ways in one of the refugee camps. In translation that meant getting a bit dirty, as we assisted in the construction of a community centre for the camp, sanding walls applying grout to tiles. The women of the team also had an opportunity to go and work in a village outside of Bethlehem at the village’s women’s centre doing arts and crafts with the women and children. In all of this we hope that we could be a blessing to them and restore some hope and dignity to them as well.
Our time ended in Jaffa and we discussed the trip they were blown away but the hospitality and welcome they had been shown. Most of all the stories of the people they had met from both sides. As they left for home, they left with a desire to share all that had learnt and heard over the past ten days to those who had sent them.
