Thursday, January 20, 2011
Unfortunate and Ominous
Professor George a few days ago rightly praised the Egyptian Muslims who protected Christians in Egypt from acts of terrible persecution. But this story reports the unfortunate decision of the highest Islamic authority in Egypt, al-Azhar, to "freeze all dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church over what it called Pope Benedict's repeated insults toward Islam."
I tend to be sanguine about conversation as an effective social lubricant to reach a modus vivendi (someone once teased me for prescribing "the talking cure" in one of my old articles). But even I wonder what talking can do if it's deemed insulting, as the story puts it, to "condemn[] attacks on churches that killed dozens of people in Egypt, Iraq and Nigeria," or to urge non-violent forms of resistance as "effective measures to protect religious minorities."
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/01/unfortunate-and-ominous.html
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Perhaps we should reflect on the words of Czeslaw Milosz in his essay, "The Telltale Scar": "All the suffering of millions of human beings terrorized by totalitarian governments would be sentenced to total oblivion if something precious is not saved from the disaster, namely, the discovery made by those people of a clear line dividing good from evil, truth from lie."
I think the Egyptian Muslims who risked their lives to protect a religious minority saw that "clear line dividing good from evil." And their brave and honourable act in and of itself gives us much hope that the crude and disheartening manipulations of others will ultimately be unsuccessful.