Delhi: Christian students accompany Muslim friends during Ramadan
In the year when the Islamic holy month and Lent overlap, Profs Gaetano Sabetta and Nadjia Kebour of the Pontifical Urbaniana University and Jesuit Fr Victor Edwin have coordinated an initiative of interfaith dialogue between Rome and India as a way to learn to “disagree better”, respecting each other.
Delhi (AsiaNews) – Young Christian students in Delhi and Rome are taking part in a special initiative of accompaniment in prayer and dialogue with their Muslim brothers and sisters during the holy month of Ramadan. This takes on a special significance in India today.
The initiative is the work of two professors at the Pontifical Urbaniana University, Prof Gaetano Sabetta, an Italian Christian, and Prof Nadjia Kebour, an Algerian Muslim who has lived in Rome for years, along with some students and other friends from the Focolare Movement in Delhi and Fr Victor Edwin SJ, a member of the Association for Islamic Studies in the capital of India.
“[S]ome young Christian students in Rome and Delhi are accompanying their Muslim friends in their prayers during this month of Ramadan,” said Prof Gaetano Sabetta and Prof Nadjia Kebour speaking to AsiaNews.
“This coincides with the period of Lent, which is also marked by prayer, fasting, and sharing in the name of God. We thus have a confluence of religiously and spiritually significant periods that can stimulate unprecedented encounters between different believers in and towards a renewed interfaith understanding,” they explain.
“Both Delhi and Rome are centres of their respective Hindu-Muslim and Christian civilisations, and such an initiative is undoubtedly of great religious and moral significance.
In fact, the idea follows similar experiences elsewhere. “The initiative of accompanying Muslim brothers and sisters in prayer originated on the island of Mindanao where Christians started with a programme called 'Accompanying Ramadan’,” Sabetta and Kebour note.
“This spiritual practice of accompaniment and sharing was then taken up in some parishes in the city of Liverpool by adding some information about Ramadan. Given the paramount importance of the Qur'an to Muslims, it was thought that this prayer guide could be supplemented with some brief information about the Muslim holy book.”
This has led to “short daily reflections on the suras of the Qur'an that Card (Michael) Fitzgerald, as a Christian, wanted to offer to all Christians and others as an opportunity to spiritually accompany our Muslim brothers and sisters during their month of Ramadan,” eventually becoming a book titled Journeying With Muslims-Listening, Praying and Working Together.
Several students from Rome and Delhi are involved, coordinated by the three scholars.
“It is part of a broader movement of interreligious dialogue and encounter that also involves the practice of Interfaith Scriptural Reasoning (ISR),” said the two professors from Pontifical Urbaniana University. “ISR is a tool for interfaith dialogue that brings people of different faiths together to read and reflect on their scriptures.”
“[I]t is not about seeking agreement, but about exploring the texts and their possible interpretations across faith boundaries and learning to ‘disagree better’. The result is often a deeper understanding of each other’s scriptures and their own, and the development of strong bonds between faith communities.”
As such, “It is a small open door for every Christian to enter into the Muslim religious world and thus benefit and rejoice by overcoming all prejudices", which is how a young Christian student described the experience.
“Our hope can only be to promote a ‘falling in love between religions and cultures’. A falling in love that passes through mutual knowledge and relative sharing, including through common actions to be carried out for the common good,” the two Urbaniana scholars add.
“There is no lack of difficulties, given the prejudices resulting from mutual ignorance and oversimplification, and the difficulty of getting closer to the other, but nothing can stop this slow but steady movement of interfaith drawing closer to the one God.”
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03/01/2012
04/01/2023 14:09
