Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) - The third issue of Oasis review sponsored by the archdiocese of Venice opens with a reflection by the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn with the title “Paths of Mission” on the possibility of dialogue among missionary religions such as Christianity and Islam and paths for the future. The review then devotes a lengthy inquiry to terrorism with the title “Al Qaeda and the Others”. Experts and scholars face the problem from various angles offering original analysis for a better understanding of a phenomenon which is having a major impact on society. Henri Rude, professor of moral philosophy and director of the Centre d’Ethique et de Déontologie militaries all’Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr-Coetquidan, proposes three keys for analysis - physical, moral and theological-political - to describe a phenomenon born in France after the fall of Robespierre today referred to a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism.
Brian Michael Jenkins advisor to the president of the Rand Corporation, take a close look at the terrorist mentality striving to enter the mind of “warrior-martyrs”. General Carlo Jean, docent at the Luiss di Studi Strategici, deals with the question of terrorism from the point of view of finance and employment of forces with evident unfavourable asymmetry for countries forced to defend themselves from terrorist attacks. General Jean-Luop Francart instead launches the challenge of the “fourth option” which imposes a change of mentality: a war of perceptions and ideas to destroy the central nucleus of part of Muslim opinion which insists on the idea of a dominion of the western world over the other peoples.
Olivier Roy, CNRS research director proposes a counter-current analysis and connects the violence of Islamic fundamentalism with political-social radicalism rather than the Koran. Mahammed Arkoun, professor at the Sorbonne, tackles the question of how to safeguard theological validity of the Koran condemning the way Bin Laden and his partisans use the text. Paolo Branca, docent of Arabic at the Cattolica University in Milan, paints a vast fresco of an Islam of many voices speaking of a Muslim universe in which exist a great variety of positions. Fr Kamil William Samaan, an Egyptian Copt-Catholic priest, traces the long history of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. Archbishop Jean Clément Jeanbart, Greek-Melchite archbishop of Aleppo, paints a picture of Syria a country on the brink of apparently irreversible isolation. Also India in fifty years of independence has been targeted by fanaticism: Cyriac Thomas, vice-rector of Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam Kerala, paints a fresco of that vast country and recalls the great lessons in democracy of the three assassinated leaders Mahatma Gandhi, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. Paolo Terenzi, researcher at the University of Bologna asks himself, re-reading Huntington, if this is a question of a clash of civilisations or a clash within civilisations? The review presents among its documentation two discourses of Benedict XVI on the occasion of World Youth Day in Cologne last year (the first addressed to representatives of Muslim communities) and excerpts of De Civitate Dei by Saint Augustine. This 3rd issue of Oasis also contains an interview with the President of Afghanistan Hamid Garzai, a reportage by Maria Laura Conte on Indonesia and a contribution which touches among others things on the question of the Constitution of Iraq. The review’s photographs in this issue are dedicated to the discovery of Christian Ethiopia. (R.F.) (Agenzia Fides 19/5/2005 - righe 41; parole 553)
