Open Discussions in association with
Gulf Cultural Club
Date: 18th December 2018
Religion, peace and social violence
With
*Bishop Paul Hendricks (Archdiocese of Southwark.)
** Sheikh M. Saeed Bahmanpour (Islamic scholar and author)
*** The Revd Nadim Nassar) Director; Awareness Foundation)
In a world infested with violence on many levels those who have a mission of peace are duty-bound to make efforts to disseminate a culture of love, compassion and mercy. This is the mission of divine emissaries. Jesus Christ and Mohammad (and indeed all of God’s messengers and prophets) had promoted social peace as a necessary condition for proper worship. To feel the existence of God, peace of soul and mind is necessary for deep worship and contemplation. The spirit of Christmas will be void if it does not address present ills including social violence. In London, this is of particular concern as youth stabbings take a sharp turn for the worst. What is the religious message to mankind?
Chairman: We are going to mark our 20th anniversary in May 2019. I was born with my project in May 1994 and I will be 25 soon. It has been a pleasure to meet people like you and to offer some service to the community. This is our world, this is our planet, this is our cause, the cause of humanity, the cause of compassion, fraternity, humanity and brotherhood. These are the values that we stand for that we would love to propagate. I think we have been able to do this.
Tonight our main concern is to celebrate and mark and to discuss this auspicious occasion of Christmas. Probably the Muslims would not agree that Jesus was born at this time of the year but regardless of the exact timing the spirit is there. There is a joint spirit. Jesus means a lot to the Muslims. He has been mentioned so much in the Holy Quran – much more than Prophet Mohammed is mentioned in the text.
So for us, it is an important time. For the Christians, it is the epicentre of action – the peak of their celebrations, of their central character, Jesus Christ. For us, he is a revered Prophet and a very significant figure. We welcome the birth of Jesus. His mother, the Virgin Mary is also revealed as one of the greatest women created on this planet and I am sure Sheikh Saeed Bahmanpour who has produced a big long series of films about Virgin Mary shows how much Virgin Mary is respected and revered by Muslims.
The Right Reverend Paul Hendricks: I am very happy to be
back. I have been to two of these discussions. It is also a great pleasure to share our joy in celebrating the birth of Jesus with our Muslim brothers and sisters. I took part in a charitable joint Muslim Christian event yesterday about homelessness asking the question what would Jesus have done. These are things we have done together.
I am going to focus on the situation locally. I know that violence and all that goes with it is a worldwide phenomenon. I am not really in a position to speak about the situation in other countries. What I am very much aware of is the particularly violent effect on our young people with the terrible scourge of knife crime in London but also in other parts of the country.
I would like to emphasise at the start that this is very much our problem. There is no room for denial for saying that it is someone else’s problem that it only affects other people and their families.
Shortly after I became a bishop there was a very sad and a very high profile killing of Damilola Taylor in my part of south London. In fact going back a little bit earlier to when I started work in Peckham as parish priest Damilola Taylor was killed in an incident which was very traumatic for the whole community. It is a problem for all of us.
I was attending a meeting recently of a number of church leaders in which we welcomed the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan police Cressida Dick and she certainly did acknowledge the problem of violence and knife crime. She was very much aware that even though many sorts of crimes are reducing in the London area violent crime and knife crime is sadly very high and very alarming.
One thing which the commissioner said which I would like to share with you which is fairly well known is that the police are very keen to work with the community and this gives a very important opening for us as religious leaders. We have the opportunity of encouraging a very positive attitude towards the police and the police themselves have very firm instructions to take particular care to communicate with people.
If there is a particular situation where the level of security has to be increased and there have to be more police on the streets for a particular reason that the police have to have strong instructions to make sure the local people are aware of this and to explain what is going on and why this is being done.
One of the things I became aware of as a result of these conversations is that it is a challenge even when the young person wants to get out of that gang culture which is a very pervasive thing in certain parts of London that young person can remain in danger. There is also the difficulty that even if arrangements are made for that person to be accommodated in a different area out of London other gang members are able to access and still threaten and intimidate that young person to resume his criminal activities.
I suppose what I was aware of when I was a parish priest in Peckham in that part of London which is sadly affected by knife crime and by violence is that it is something out of sight. It is something that older people like myself, we know it goes on but we are not really very much in touch with those who are involved. The parents amongst our congregation will be aware that this is an issue and a problem and a crisis. Yet they themselves will not necessarily know what is going on and how to get a handle on this and prevent their children from being involved as victims. People who carry knives are known to be more in danger of suffering from violence themselves and being stabbed.
The thing that strikes me, in particular, is that religious people like ourselves need to provide an alternative inspiration. To give some sort of ideal that people can aspire to as opposed to the very materialistic culture that we live in and some of the people that resort to violence in our cities are motivated by that very materialistic consumerist mentality. I suppose you could see a bit of that in the riots that we had in various parts of London local to me in Croydon and that sort of instinct to see that there are desirable things in the shop windows, technology, gadgets, all those sorts of things and to feel that these are things I don’t have and therefore I want to have them. That whole sort of mentality can affect our young people in particular.
It seems to me that we need to challenge that sort of consumerist attitude and show that there is another way and to show by example that you do not need to have possessions to be happy. You don’t need to feel that you are being judged just in terms of what you have or in terms of some sort of status or success in that sort of shallow materialistic way.
I want to add, realising that there is a lot more that could be said, is to acknowledge the great work that is being done by a relatively small number of high profile people who have renounced gang culture and crime and who are ambassadors amongst our young people to show that there is an alternative. They have discovered faith in Christ or in Islam or in one of the other religions. In a Catholic context, John Crigmore has done a lot through his advocacy work in those sorts of communities to encourage our young people to turn away from violence and not get caught in that culture of violence and gangs. I will leave it there.
Chairman: Thank you very much. There is an alternative as the bishop said in Islam and in Christianity, in religion. Can we convince our youngsters that yes there is that alternative, the alternative to the materialistic approach that leads some of the youth to carry out violence? This violent crime is really serious because we as parents are always worried about what will happen to our children when they leave school when they come out of school especially now during winter time when it is dark. It is becoming a real worry. Some years ago we were more worried about terrorism, that a bomb may explode, and some casualties will occur. But now it has become a different kind of seriousness. So given the prospect that we the people of religion can provide some alternative approach, it may encourage the youth to come towards spirituality, towards morality. That is one of the ways that may deter them from going towards violence.
Sheikh Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour: First of all congratulations
for Christmas. It is not important on which Jesus Christ was born. It is important that we celebrate one day for his birth and he really deserves to be celebrated because of the way he came into the world. The way in which the Quran described Jesus Christ is unique when it says: Jesus son of Mary was a messenger of God and the spirit of God was in him. This is unique, the way in which Jesus was described in the Quran.
Anyway to come back to our topic. I think Bishop Hendricks pointed to the major and the main problem and hit the nail on the head when he said that violence comes from this materialistic attitude. When you talk about violence you should not only focus on a few gangs in the street or people breaking into shops to steal things but on the larger scale of violence which is going on around the world: colonialism and imperialism: these are the source of violence. They create violence. They function to produce violence by propagating that ideology of greed and then the discrimination and contempt for other people. All these create violence.
Religion can be a remedy. Usually now when people talk about violence they say that all this violence comes from religion. Religious people are violent especially in the Muslim countries where they have terrorists who create violence in the West or in the East, in their own country or in other countries.
We should not focus on the symptoms, we should focus on the cause and we can actually see that religion can provide a remedy for this cause. Of course, not everyone would listen to previous instructions or would believe in Islam but what we have to make clear is that the source of violence that nowadays is interpreted as being religious belief is somewhere else. Religion is being used, is being actually misused as a pretext for violence while the source of violence comes from somewhere else.
We are very committed to our religion. But who created ISIS? America. It was not the Muslims or the Islamic faith who created ISIS. It was some other centres of power who created it. Christians, those who call themselves Christians, they have the sources of violence in colonialism. Now you see the countries that call themselves Christian like America, are actually the generators. Muslims are the generators of violence as well whether in their own countries or in other countries. But should we say this is because of Islam or because of Christianity? I don’t believe so.
The cause comes from somewhere else. The names of Christians or Muslims are used to somehow create violence. To clarify that I would like to go through some details about some teachings that Islam and Christianity teach us. In this respect, the teachings of Islam and Christianity are the same if not identical. And these teachings cannot be the source of violence. The source of violence lies somewhere else. It is either the misunderstanding of religion or greed, materialism and other things which have been somehow dressed in religious expressions.
There is a very beautiful narration from Imam Jaffar Al Sadiq the sixth Shia imam about the interaction that a person has in their lives. He says if you want to see the principles of interaction a person who is beleaguered has an interaction with God. The other area is interaction with their own selves and with their own awareness. That is another type of interaction. The third kind of interaction is interaction with people and the fourth interaction is interaction with the world as a source of wealth or whatever we call it. So if we want to see what are the different avenues that a person has in the world in terms of interaction these four are summarising that: interaction with God, interaction with one’s own self, interaction with people, interaction with the world.
Of course, this is a bit long, I did not want to go into an interaction with God or interaction with one’s own self. I just wanted to mention quickly the main concepts about how we have to interact with other people and then I want to ask the question what creates violence in the world.
I have learned about Christian teachings from my colleagues, I have read books. They are absolutely identical: there is no difference whether it comes from Jesus or Mohammed, peace be on them all. These teachings cannot create violence. Violence should come from somewhere else.
In terms of the principles of interaction with people is forbearance in the face of the roughness of other people; forgiveness which is one of the merits of a religious person. We know forgiveness in the Christian faith. We may not know that much about forgiveness in the Islamic faith. I assure you the concept is identical. If someone slaps you on the right cheek give him the other cheek. This is identical. We have it in our own narrations as well. So we don’t have any difference in that area. Humility. That is the source of peace and tranquillity. Generosity. Being able to give rather than to take all the time. Compassion for other people. Being helpful to other people. Always giving good advice to others and of course justice and fairness which are the main principles of peace among people, nations and countries. We see so much violence because we do not see justice. If there is no justice of course people become violent whether they are Muslims or Christians or Jews or whatever. If they do not see justice they become violent. So the source of violence is not religion – it lies somewhere else.
The seven principles of conduct within this world. This is an anecdote to greed and to materialism. First being content with what one has. This is exactly what the materialistic worldview is against. This is the opposite of the materialistic worldview. Giving what is available to others. Preferring others to oneself. Avoiding the quest for what is not available, the elusive and deceiving desire for having more and more.
Look at the advertisements we see before Christmas. It is all about paying less and having more, saving, saving. We know this is all a deception. When you buy more you never save. This is the idea of always wanting to have more. When abundance occupies our hearts and minds we have no place for thinking about God or for thinking about other people. No place for friendship. This is how violence is created. You have to know the evils of this world and negating the dominance of others. The aspiration for dominance is what all nations are being imbued with. We have to be the highest nation in the world, nationalistic ideas which again grow in our minds and hearts.
National interest. Do you know what national interest means? In the present world, national interest means that we rob other nations. It does not matter. These are the frameworks of our minds and thoughts. We have to look at the world in a different way so that the violence goes away and peace comes.
So to sum up religion is not the source of violence, it is the anecdote for violence whether it is Islam or Christianity or Judaism or whatever faith. The source of violence is greed, the desire for dominance, the desire for more and more all the time. This is what creates violence. Thank you very much.
Chairman: Thank you very much, Sheikh Saeed. I think this is an enlightening discourse about the sources of violence. Of course, Sheikh Saeed wanted to expand on the notion of violence and he went away from just the street violence that we are discussing today to discuss the violence that is being committed against other nations.
I want to add one thing about the nature of today’s world. I was following the G20 summit in Buenos Aries recently and then I just said to myself what are all these summits about? What is the Ministry of Commerce or Trade about? What are the insurance companies about? What are the iPhone companies all about. And then I found that it is what the poor have. It is the main motivation. Everybody wants to grab what you and me, those people who earn a thousand or two thousand pounds how can we grab that money, whether it is for the insurance of the house for the iPhone or for the clothing for the supermarkets or for the corner shop the whole idea is how much can we get from that. That is the big corporations, the multinational corporations, the ministries of trade the main subject of all this is the greed of those who think they have clever ideas to grab as much as possible from that person.
Religion does not do that. Religion aims at creating dignity for the people. The Quran says that we have dignified the people of Adam. The idea is to provide peace to the person through spirituality, through religion, through worship. The religious approach to the creation of happiness for the people is through totally different things, not the materialistic approach that Bishop Hendricks and Sheikh Saeed mentioned. This is the problem of today. The whole thing is a gimmick- how much can we get from the ordinary people in the street.
The Revd Nadim Nassar: Dr Saeed always makes me feel at home. I
feel welcome and Dr Saeed is a very dear friend. I want to start with why do we have violence. It is the absolute basic problem, the basic question why do we have the tendency to be violent? I am going to share some ideas with you. It is not a lecture. It is not a structured talk. These are ideas we have to explore together and some resolutions we have to think about and see where it takes us.
One idea says that the absolute basic instinct of human beings that leads to violence is when we divide the world into black and white, good and evil. This primitive division of you are wrong, I am right, you have the religion, my religion is right. You are black I am white therefore you are bad I am good. You are female I am male, it means I am superior, I am inferior and we start categorising, classifying people endlessly and all of those classifications are based on very simple dual classification: bad and good, black and white.
So this is a very basic tendency that leads to violence. If we accept that people are not divided into black and white, my friend or my enemy, evil or good. If we refrain, if we resist this classification we reduce violence. If we accept that when we look at the rain When the rain comes out and the sun hits the rain what do we see? A rainbow. When we see the light it is not white and our eyes deceive us. Inside that white light that we see actually, it is a whole range of colours. And all those colours are good, beautiful worthy or exploring. Otherwise, our lives could be very boring and could be very disappointing. Imagine if we all looked the same if we all dressed the same and all our clothing is one colour and all our skin is one colour and everything is monotone. Can you imagine how awful life would be?
So the basic stuff that we are dealing with is our inability or lack of equipment – we are not equipped socially to accept and understand people as different. And I say one of the most difficult problems at the moment in the whole world including ISIS and the Arab spring and the seven years of war in Syria and all the wars that we hear about in Yemen, in Libya, in Sudan, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Africa everywhere are based on one word: difference. We are unable to accept that we are different. We insist on reducing everything into this duality: bad and good, black and white.
Some psychologist, thinkers, philosophers, theologians and religious leaders think that religion can be ideologised. What do I mean by that? Religion is a fantastic base for abuse. Religion is the most flexible foundation to be abused. Why? Because religion convinces its followers that it has the absolute truth and also it convinces its followers that if you would kill the other the reward after this life ends is huge.
So first of all the absolute truth cannot be proved. It is a matter of faith. Can you prove that a Christianity is an absolute truth or Islam is the absolute truth? Or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism? You cannot. Perfect. I can brainwash young people, especially young people to believe that they have the absolute truth and then I can go further to convince them that if you fight for the sake of that truth and kill those infidels then I get the absolute reward after this life.
This is a fantastic framework to brainwash the youth with their passion to be involved in violence. This is what the church has to fight and stop. The violence that hit the church for centuries? What did the church do? How did the church stop the centuries of violence and continuous wars in Europe? The church finally brought itself to say the following: God does not rule our societies through governments. God rules our heart for a better life. Do you see the difference? God does not need institutions to oppress the people in his name and call them religious institutions and subject the people to violence and politicising the principles that lead to good, justice and love.
So the church said this combination of the will of God and the rule of the government could not be mixed. Do not rule me in the name of God. Guide me in the name of God for a better life. Don’t rule me. Don’t create a government that talks in the name of God because we know that politics cannot be in the name of God. Politicians lie, politicians fabricate the truth, politicians follow their own interests, parties follow their own agenda and ideologies. Don’t insult my intelligence by telling me that you are creating a government in the name of God to subject me to persecution and violence.
That is how the church emerged from centuries of violence. The religious violence around the world in the name of religion or against the religious violence. What happens? Politicians use religion to create religious institutions that are violent so that they have the justification to attack them and kill them in the name of liberalism, in the name of democracy.
In Syria all this violence that destroyed 70percent of Syria in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of justice. So even those principles can be hijacked in order to create wave after wave of violence. So lets us not be deceived by governments that try to rule people in the name of God.
I am categorically against any government in the world that tries to rule people in the name of God. Take God out of the government, and second take God out of those principles that brainwash our children in order to create bad and good an enemy and a friend.
If we want to go down to the basic principles of religion it is not more or less than loving God and loving the other. As simple as that. If I love God to show me that you love the other. Saint John says how can you love God who you cannot see if you cannot love your brother and sister who you can see and deal with. If you say I love God and I cannot love my neighbour, you are a liar. If you say I love God and you cannot love your neighbour you are a liar. How can you love God whom you cannot see and then you fail to love your neighbour whom you live day by day.
Social violence, street violence should be treated by all institutions, governments, religions, social institutions, charities, religious leaders, cultural leaders and businesses- we are all in it. Why? Because we all have responsibilities to exercise. How to treat our children well. To accept the differences in the others. Education is the main solution to violence. It is how we educate our young people to behave. If you educate a child who is Christian that the Muslim is evil if I educate my son that he is superior to his sister because his sister is a girl if I educate my child don’t talk to that child because he is black then how can I be surprised if my child becomes violent. The way we educate our children, our children behave.
And therefore to reduce violence on the level of the street to the level of countries we have to look into what we are educating our people and what kind of ideologies we are allowing to hijack principles and religions in order to brainwash our young people. That if you kill and you get violent you get a reward now by having democracy and freedom or after you die you go to heaven. This is rubbish. No harm leads to heaven and something I want to finish on you cannot harm a human being and you cannot kill a human being unless you dehumanise them. It is impossible to kill a human being before you mentally dehumanise them. So we have to be careful what we teach that makes our children and our young people makes them able to dehumanise the other. This makes the basic foundation of our social life that we have to be very careful about. Thank you very much.
The Right Reverend Paul Hendricks is an Auxiliary Bishop for the Archdiocese of Southwark. Born in Beckenham, Kent in March 1956, Bishop Hendricks was ordained to the priesthood in 1984. He was ordained bishop on 14 February 2006. Before that he was a Catholic priest, serving in the parish of Our Lady of Sorrow, Peckham. For the previous ten years, he had been teaching philosophy at St John’s Seminary, Wonersh, near Guildford in Surrey. Bishop Hendricks has responsibility for the South West pastoral area of the diocese. He is a member of the Bishops’ Conference Department of Dialogue and Unity.
**Sheikh Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour is a cleric and a popular speaker. Currently, he is the director of interfaith relations at the Islamic Centre of England. He studied sociology at LSE and Tabatabai University of Tehran in which he has obtained a Masters degree. Then he studied religion proper in Tehran and Qum seminaries and assumed clerical duties. In 1999 he was invited to Cambridge University to teach as a visiting lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Later, he was appointed as the principal of The Islamic College in London. His main fields of interest are theology, Islamic mysticism, and Qur’anic sciences and exegeses, including its history and compilation. He is also interested in the history of Jesus and Mary from an Islamic perspective and has written a screenplay about the life of Mary based on the Islamic sources, which was made into a successful movie. Another of his works on Christian history was the screenplay about The Seven Sleepers of the Cave (Ashab al-Kahf). Sheikh Bahmanpour has authored several books including Muslim Identity in the 21st Century, ed. (2001), The Idols Will Fall (2010), The Blessed Tree: The Life and Times of Fatima Daughter of Muhammad (2011), Towards Eternal Life (2015), and Understanding Sura Yasin (2018).
*** The Revd Nadim Nassar is the Executive Director and Founder of the Awareness Foundation. He established the Awareness Foundation in 2003 with Bishop Michael Marshall in response to the growing need to study the Christian faith in the context of the 21st century. In 2018, Nassar’s first book, “The Culture of God”, was published by Hodder & Stoughton. The BBC’s Edward Stourton said, ‘So much of the reporting of the Middle East at the moment reflects war and human misery; it’s inspiring to find, in this thoughtful and engaging book, a message of hope from what Fr Nadim calls “that region of the world that God chose to live in when he took human form”. Nadim was born and raised in Lattakia, Syria and he is the only Syrian priest in the Church of England. He lectured in different universities in London, including the American Intercontinental University where he taught world religions, and London Guildhall University where he developed the ‘Faith and Citizenship’ seminar. Revd Nassar studied at the Near East School of Theology between 1981 and 1988. He became the editor of the Arabic Hymnal for a year in Limassol, Cyprus then went to Lattakia, Syria to be the minister of the National Evangelical Church in Lattakia which is a member of the National Evangelical Synod in Syria and Lebanon. He stayed in Lattakia for two years before he left to Germany to continue his theological education.
