A Surprising Exercise in Stupidity

Who might have thought that Canada's Thomas S. Axworthy would be so utterly naive, so out of touch with reality that he would author such an absurd paean of praise to the sponsorship by Saudi King Abdullah Ibn Abdul Azia Al Saud of a dialogue taking place in Jeddah between Muslims and Christians to hasten and cement a kinder understanding one of the other. Has his mind somehow faltered into serenely unaware incapacity known as senility?

The gushing praise he spouts in his article titled "A surprising exercise in dialogue", published in Tuesday's National Post belies the reality of suppression of basic freedoms, including that of faith, in Saudi Arabia. As chair of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Queen's University one might have expected better of Mr. Axworthy. He cannot be totally ignorant of the fanatical fundamentalism of Wahhabism.

He must be aware, surely, that it has been the Saudis' funding of Wahhabist madrasses throughout the world, and most notably in Pakistan, that has been largely responsible for the inculcation of a Muslim awareness of the need for the faithful to indulge in jihad. Violent jihad, not the namby-pamby jihad of the mind, furthering one's adherence to the precepts of Islam. Teaching the impressionable that Islam requires that they surrender to the need to commit themselves to jihad and to martyrdom.

The kind of jihad that monstrously denounces all religions other than Islam, and even within Islam, naming as apostates those whose brand of Islam: Sunni, Shia, Ahmadis, Sufis and Ismailis are not be considered as true Muslims, but impostors, bland and undeserving of the title of Muslim faithful. Jihad is waged on those sects of Islam as surely as it is upon the infidels and the Jews, the Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.

Mr. Axworthy waxes loquacious in praise of the InterAction Council of former world leaders (co-chaired, he reminds readers, by Canada's Jean Chretien - a self-availing egotist who would never bypass an opportunity to inveigle himself into any type of enterprise that would gain him entry to favours he can later parlay into economic opportunities) in responding to Saudi Arabia's invitation to develop interfaith dialogue.

"Fear of the other has typified the relations between Islam and Christianity", he writes, "as far back as the middle ages...". But he is not entirely correct. It is the need for dominance that inspired the original and ongoing struggles between Islam and Christianity that has enjoyed such a long and benighted tradition of conflict. Christianity has managed to modernize itself, reflecting the temper of the times. Islam never has.

Christianity has developed alongside society in general to reflect society's ever changing values and priorities. Islam has remained so rigidly unapproachable, so immune to interpreting its original precepts with a view to reflecting an altered global reality (enlightenment) that it has remained mired in rigidity, casting off all opportunities to rephrase and reinterpret its mandate to reflect the needs of the current day.

Hostile opposition to the inclusion within Muslim - particularly Arab - societies of others is so completely ingrained that religions other than Islam are forbidden in many Arab states. Most particularly is that in evidence in Saudi Arabia. If the Saudis are truly interested in furthering interfaith dialogue, how is it that they still will not recognize the legitimacy of other faiths' symbols, places of worship or adherents in their precincts?

Compliance with Islamic law is paramount - all else is commentary leading to derision, objection, abhorrence, finally violent jihad. That is the zeitgeist of these times. "We are great because of our religion", huffed King Abdullah in response to an admiring comment by a Chinese official speaking of his kingdom as a great nation because of its natural resources of fossil fuels.

"We all believe in one God", the King said in 2008 in Madrid, at an earlier such meeting. "We are meeting today to say that religion should be a means to iron out differences, and not to lead to disputes." But this is precisely what has occurred in the large Arab-Muslim offensive against the State of Israel having taken up position in the geography of the Middle East, a geography consecrated to Islam.

And although it sounds like music to one's ears to read Hans Kueng's pronouncement that there can be "No peace among nations without peace among the religions", therein lies the rub.