Issue2 Article8

Beyond Tolerance: Interfaith Friendship As Ethics in Action Sister Marianne Farina, C.S.C. Abstract: The author offers a model for achieving genuine interfaith conversation and friendship, which, especially between Christian and Muslim, has become imperative in the effort to restore global peace. Citing Thomas Aquinas and Hamid Al-Ghazali, the author describes friendship as a medium for ethical and spiritual development based ultimately on friendship with God.

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ince the events of September 11, an international solidarity is growing not just to confront terrorism but to create positive forums and alliances. The war on terrorism cannot be successful if we merely respond in kind. Rather, we must work in conversation with one another.

We must listen to proposals for ensuring human rights as well as for holding all nations accountable for actions that work against the principles of justice and peace.

In particular, since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent terrorist activities in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the world community has acknowledged that the need to achieve a lasting global peace compels all of us to learn about the world’s religions, to engage in meaningful interreligious encounters, and to develop true friendships with people of different faiths. By these means we can begin the process of reconciliation in the world community so that terrorist attacks will cease to replicate themselves throughout the globe.

The most critical need is for us to engage with the religion of Islam, to understand its teachings, to converse with Muslims, and to replace mistrust with friendship. In meeting this need, the first imperative is to reflect on the realities of Muslim-Christian encounters in the past. This history begins with Islam’s missionary thrust into northern and western Arabia, and then into Africa and the Middle East in the seventh century, followed issue 2, june 2002

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by its expansion into Asia. Throughout the growth of the Muslim Empire and its subsequent decline with the colonial expansion of European and American nations, the meetings between Islam and Christianity were more confrontational than conciliatory. Each national power perceived the other as a threat or rival, while religious affiliations were aligned with competing hegemonies.

Toward the end of this century, the migration of Muslims to Europe and North America has offered new opportunities for authentic encounters between Christianity and Islam. However, these meetings may repeat the mistakes of the past unless we acknowledge the negative history between Muslims and Christians, seek forgiveness for past offenses, and voice a mutual commitment to seek justice, promote peace and foster social development.

In this context it is worth noting a positive history of interfaith friendships that contrasts with the history of Muslim-Christian conflict and distrust. During Islam’s golden age in the learning centers of Baghdad and Qum and also in the court of the Mogul leader Akbar, scholarly discussions fostered genuine friendships between various cultures and faiths. The works of philosophy, science, economics and medicine that emerged were invaluable resources for shaping society, faith and culture. We can also recall Francis of Assisi’s efforts to establish peace with the Muslims. Again, despite his tragic end at the hands of fanatics, Charles de Foucauld’s friendship with Muslims remains an ongoing witness that has inspired both Muslims and Christians to lead holier lives.1 Methodologies for Interreligious Conversation Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini’s reflection concerning human communication offers some essential points for effective interreligious dialogue. In a recent paper, Cardinal Martini explored the growing need for a communication theology in priestly formation.2 Using a paradigm taken from the scriptures, he recognizes a type of pedagogy for teaching people to communicate with one another. In Mark’s Gospel (7:31–37), Jesus cures a man who can neither hear nor speak. The gospel reports that Jesus takes the man away from the crowd of people, places his fingers in the man’s ears and also spits on the man’s exposed tongue. Jesus then exclaims, “Ephphatha, Be Open!” Relieved of his former condition, the man can communicate with others. He begins to hear the world around him and praises God. Martini explains that this healing followed a three-step process for effective communication: 1) acknowledging an inability to communicate; 2) engaging in the words and gestures of healing; and 3) accepting responsibility for communication because of the miracle.

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According to this pattern, the first phase of communication requires us to recognize that there are impediments to our speaking with and listening to one another. Among the obstacles are our desire to set the agenda for discussions and our impatience because we look for instant results.

Martini’s points are especially applicable when we converse with people of different faiths.

The healing story illustrates another important dimension to interreligious conversations. Jesus showed respect for the afflicted man by taking him aside so that the healing would not become an object of entertainment for the crowd or a demonstration of Jesus’ healing powers. Further, Jesus directly confronts the problem at hand. He touches the man and speaks directly to the infirmity. The cure reconciles the man to the dignity he deserves as a creature of God. In this way also, interreligious encounters must emulate the healing ministry Genuine exchange begins of Jesus. Conversations can lead to greater understanding of other faith traditions only when we dare to be with acknowledging the honest with one another and ourselves. Genuine exchange begins not with fancy dialogues about meta- reality of our religious physical realities but with acknowledging the reality of our religious institutions, which includes the injus- institutions, which includes tices, thereby creating a forum for other faith traditions to do the same. Such an approach recognizes that the injustices. there have been failures to put beliefs into practice and that these failures have been the source of oppression rather than liberation. This honesty offers an environment for confronting injustices directly and respectfully, thus opening the way for reconciliation.

Finally, the story illustrates the consequences of Jesus’ healing. Fully healed, the man returns to his community as a living proclamation of God’s goodness. He praises God, and his life’s witness leads others to do the same.

Thus the story demonstrates that once we are liberated from what blocks our true potential, we can be of service to God’s kingdom. Ideally, the goal of interreligious encounters is to be engaged in God’s work. Once we have removed all that prevents us from authentic sharing and exchange, we can begin to grow in solidarity with one common task: God’s good will for all of creation.

To explore this issue further, I suggest that, based upon Martini’s analysis of the gospel story, effective communication between Christians and Muslims requires us to converse in four essential ways. Each of these styles of communication calls forth respect and love for the other and enables us to engage fully in both word and deed.

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We begin with conversations about life. We come to know each other by creating places and paths for encounter. These settings may be the neighborhood or the workplace. The purpose of the exchanges is to move past our fears of the other by attempting to remove prejudices that block genuine exchange.

From these initial conversations, we can begin discussions that include intellectual inquiry, that is, conversations about content. Such conversations help us to learn about each other’s beliefs, practices and traditions. Building upon the initial relationship and on study about the other’s beliefs and practices, we discover the deep values that motivate the other.

Intellectual inquiries also create a foundation for engaging in conversations about needs. We not only become knowledgeable about each other’s faiths but also become able to participate in addressing the needs and concerns of the pluralistic community. The energy for group problem solving and commonwealth projects arises because we have recognized common ground between us. Having acknowledged those forces within each tradition that block the work for justice, we have opened the pathway for genuine interfaith solidarity.

The final type of discourse, an outgrowth of the first three, is spiritual conversation. In these encounters, we collaborate with prayer and religious celebrations. Recognizing the common good to which divine wisdom calls humanity, these conversations help us to turn toward divine goodness in mutuality, receiving new life from each other’s holiness. What we celebrate is our new interfaith ethos, authentic liberation and holistic human development.

These four types of dialogue can help Muslims and Christians to create lasting friendships. Through such friendships, we can participate in ongoing conversations convinced that humanity’s survival depends upon engaging in its unfolding story of growth and development.

Interfaith Friendship as a Basis for Ethics and Spiritual Development Many thinkers have reflected on the centrality of friendship in ethics and spirituality. Paul Wadell, for example, offers interfaith friendship as a model for modern ethics. He notes that ethics is not something we create, nor is our ethical response to certain dilemmas. He believes that morality is a lived experience within which we discover moral worth and that these values claim us. Wadell comments that the virtuous life is “a skilled endeavor to conform ourselves to the purposes in which fullness of life consists.”

Friendship, he contends, is a good model for the moral life because it is the means for relating to a good by living one’s life in a certain way. It is in friendship that we learn to love together all that is necessary for life to have

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meaning.3 Ethics emerge from the unfolding story of our life and the relationships that give shape to this story.

Friendship as a basis for spiritual and moral development can become a shared focus for Muslims and Christians. As the French Islamicist Roger Arnaldez notes, the mutual presence to one another that exists in such interreligious encounters becomes the reality from which we embark “on a voyage of discovery stripped of colonizing pretensions: an invitation to explore the other on the way to discovering ourselves.” 4 Jim Fredricks calls such encounters a virtue. He states that “in befriending the Other, perhaps most especially the religious Other, truths foreign to my own tradition become real possibilities for shaping and giving direction to my life.” 5 Friendship with other people is derived ultimately from friendship with God. In this belief there is theological common ground in Christian and Muslim tradition. We see this especially in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Hamid Al-Ghazali. Though Aquinas and Al-Ghazali vary in their methods of theological exploration, they share a common interest in teaching how charity, which is God’s friendship with human beings, is the essence of knowledge and moral guidance. Both hold that friendship with God, as the relationship between uncreated being and free creatures, is what gives human existence its ultimate value and truest authority. Through this virtue, humans grow in their potential for fulfillment in this life.

Al-Ghazali says: Know oh beloved, that you were not created in jest or at random but marvelously made for some great end. Although you are not from everlasting, yet you will live forever; and though this body is finite, your spirit is made for the divine, . . . [for] attaining the state of the divine is heaven and the contemplation of the Eternal Beauty [of God]. 6 Aquinas states: Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. [This] happiness implies two things, the last end itself, i.e., the Sovereign Good [God]; and the attainment or enjoyment of that same Good. 7 Al-Ghazali and Aquinas reach these conclusions through reflecting on the provident love of God in creation. Both theologians share a central focus in their theological ethical systems in that they seek to understand God’s self-communication to creatures. Primary to their insights is the issue 2, june 2002

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notion that revelation is an act, and as such has a certain end in view. The salvation of human beings consists in attaining this end, and humans cannot reach this goal without knowledge of it. Aquinas’s and Al-Ghazali’s writings explore their respective beliefs about the ultimate end for human beings, which for both Christianity and Islam is the beatific vision of God. The activity that leads humans to this truth involves contemplating divine truths as well as employing practical reason so that this end becomes a reality shaping one’s moral life. For them, the theological enterprise has pastoral implications.

Though they disagree in their estimation of the importance of philosophical inquiry, both Aquinas and Al-Ghazali recognize that a profound experiential investigation of creation is not a hindrance to theological truth but a powerful aid. We learn from their writings that contemplation of divine truths, practical science, and exploring human experience foster a deeper awareness of how the seal of divine wisdom is impressed on all creation and its activities. Whether expressing this truth as Aquinas does (ipsum esse, God is) or with Al-Ghazali’s understanding of tawhid (the absolute unity of God), this singular good is perfect wisdom and love. Both theologians illustrate that these insights about God’s being in relationship to creation burst into human experience and expand one’s mind and heart for knowledge and goodness.

In addressing directly friendship with, or love for, God, Al-Ghazali and Aquinas teach that this virtuous activity participates in the reality of beatitude now by allowing God’s goodness to us to pursue God’s agenda for creation. In today’s terms, as humans learn to love God and all things in God, and as friends of God and one another, we become empowered to show mercy, to seek forgiveness, to work for justice and peace. As such, befriending others from various religious traditions can become a global reality that can shape the social, economic and religious life of each person according to God’s wisdom. A love for God, far from removing us from finite realities, helps us to realize that the world is not so much a place as it is a process dependent upon all types of friendships. The journeys we share together become the foundation for a truly liberating and compassionate existence for all people. ❧ Notes 1

We can recall the life and work of Louis Massignon (1883–1962), whose contact with Muslims and the studying of Islam contributed deeply to his own Christian conversion. Significant to his journey was the friendship he developed with Charles de Foucauld.

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Beyond Tolerance: Interfaith Friendship As Ethics in Action 2

Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, Effata, Apriti: Communicating Christ to the World: The Pastoral Letters Effata, Apriti and II Lembo del Mantello, trans. Thomas Lucas, S.J. (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1994), pp. 16–19.

3 Paul Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), pp. 15–17, 25. Here too we must note the work of Stanley Hauerwas, who contends that we must move from a type of “problem-solving ethics” to the realization that the “type of quandaries we confront depends upon the kind of people we are and the way we have learned to construe the world through our language, habits and feelings.” See Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, p. 117.

4 Roger Arnaldez, Three Messengers for One God, trans. Gerald Schlabach (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), p. vii.

See also David Burrell, Friendship and the Way to Truth (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2001), pp. 61–62.

5 Jim Fredricks, “Interreligious Friendship: A New Theological Virtue,” Ecumenical Studies 35:2 (1998), p. 11.

6 The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claude Field (Lahore: Ashraf Press, 1947), p. 17. This book is a compendium to Al-Ghazali’s major work, Ihya ulum al-din, The Revival of Religious Sciences. There are several versions of this text in Arabic and Persian.

7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Dominican Friars (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), I-II, question 3, article 8, and question 5, article 2.

About the Author Sr. Marianne Farina, C.S.C., is a religious sister of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Notre Dame, Indiana. She is a doctoral candidate at Boston College in moral theology in both the Christian and Islamic traditions. Her dissertation topic is “Charity in Two Traditions: A Comparison of the Virtue Ethics of Thomas Aquinas and Hamid Al-Ghazali.”

Over the last twenty-five years, Sr. Marianne has worked with Muslim, Hindu and Christian communities both in the United States and Bangladesh. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Pacific School of Religion and the Institute for World Religions in Berkeley, California.

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