Interfaith dialog: Resisting global violent culture

From Oct. 22 to Oct. 25 experts gathered at the RMIT University in Melbourne for talks entitled "Religion and Culture in Asia Pacific: Violence or Healing?". Among them was Kinhide Mushakoji, secretary general of the private International Movement Against All Forms of Discriminations and Racism and a professor at Ferris University in Yokohama, Japan. Below are excerpts of an interview with correspondent Dewi Anggraeni.

Question: How did you become involved in inter-religious dialogs?

Answer: I was born in Belgium, of Japanese and a quarter French parentage. My grandmother on my mother's side was French. I returned to Japan when I was six years old. The Japanese had just begun their invasion of China, which escalated into an open war.

When I started elementary school, the other children regarded me as a traitor because I had just returned from a foreign country and I was not pure Japanese.

On top of that I had been baptized as a Catholic, following my mother's family tradition. So I did experience racism and discrimination at a very young age. This is the reason why I am against racism or other types of discrimination. (At) university, I was very interested in the study of peace. I joined the Catholic Student Federation in Japan.

Then I found various problems in Roman Catholicism. While studying in Paris in the mid-1960s I found that the French were not as open-minded as I had hoped.

At that time the strongest impact on me did not come from the French cathedrals but from a summer seminar I attended in the mountains of Morocco.

The seminar was held by the Benedictin monks but among the participants were many Islamic intellectuals. And I found Islam more interesting than Catholicism. It was there that I met a French expert on Islam, Rene Massignon.

He was a devout Catholic and was ordained a priest in the Greek Orthodox church. He regularly went to recite the Koran with members of the Algerian Liberation Front in prison. So in a sense, he was also a believer in Islam.

He had also lived in one of Gandhi's ashrams for one year. So he was also open to Gandhian thoughts. I became very interested in inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogs, as well as in the fight against racism and discrimination.

In the late 1960s I joined the ecumenical movement. I was a peace consultant for the Society for Development for Peace, known as "Sodepax". Then I became the vice rector for programs on human and social development at the United Nations University in Tokyo. At that time I was teaching at Sofia University.

One very unforgettable positive influence I received was from rector Sudjatmoko while I working under him for six years. He impressed me greatly with his open vision and spirituality. He was a Muslim but was open to other religions such as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism.

I now live in Tokyo and teach in Yokohama.

Q: Each religion has its own doctrine, dogma and concepts of reality, so what makes inter-religious peace possible?

A: To begin with, I am a political scientist and a Roman Catholic. I know all the bad things the Church did. Even the present Pope made an open statement asking forgiveness from God and humankind for the Inquisition, Galileo and for other things.

So for me, religion is a complex thing, combining good things and bad things.

Then you cannot think of Roman Catholicism without thinking about the churches in the East as opposed to the churches in the West. In the West there was reform which I think was very good.

But historically I don't think you can say that religion is this or that. It is a historical process where you see many subreligions or subchurches. If you look at Islam, you will see a historical community of believers.

You cannot say it is one religion. It is a richness of different spiritualities and of so many Sufi enlightened people who each have their own very individual message.

In Christianity there are different churches. Buddhism is less structured. When people talk of religion, they usually use a Western way of thinking. The West went through a process of making religion something for individuals.

In reality, what is called religion is more of a historical process where individuals have their good and bad. Some of these individuals are more spiritual, others are more interested in the rituals or in getting some high-ranking positions in the Church.

I see it as a historical process. There is a historical development for example between Islam and Christianity. There were times of fighting, there were also times of dialog.

Actually what is called Western civilization modernity started when Christianity began to learn from Islam about the Greek philosophers. So modernity did not start in the Western Christian world but in the Islamic world. That fact tends to be overlooked.

There have actually been interactions among different religions for centuries. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, had a saint who was a Buddhist bodhisatwa. He was venerated by the Catholics.

We don't hear about him now because during the Vatican Council, the Church restructured their list of saints, eliminating several, for instance mythical saints like Saint George (known as the dragon killer).

So there have been many bridges built between religions. Unfortunately, the globalization trend and the increase in secularism have not helped to maintain these bridges. The interactions between religions are becoming less religious.

There is a predominant global culture that is very violent, and it discriminates against mostly non-Western groups. The discrimination is not necessary religion-based, in fact it is more economic-based and politic-based with a religious dimension.

Thus religions are forced to play a very violent role. In reality, the believers of these religions do not like to play the role but they are under pressure from the wealthier parts of the world. And they are finding living together becoming difficult.

Take the dialog between Muslims and Christians. It is becoming difficult because Christians are somehow associated with modernity, and the wealthy and technologically dominant West.

That is the case in the Philippines and Indonesia. Also Christians tend to be proselytizing and evangelistic except in churches in the East.

The Eastern churches are not trying to convert people. Rather they believe that if they are good witnesses, those who want to hear the good message of Jesus would naturally come to them. The Coptic church for example, has been having dialogs with the Muslims in Egypt. It would be good if the churches in the West could learn from them.

Q: So you think the churches in the East are more able to hold dialogs with Muslims?

A: The fact is, they have been holding dialogs with Muslims for a long time. Now unfortunately, the situation in Lebanon is very bad. There are no more Christian-Muslim dialogs. Only violence. Political and economic factors have come in and the religious dialog has been pushed aside.

It is true that there have been historical quarrels between religions. But these quarrels were not as violent as they are now. Now there are nonreligious factors built into the society, such as economic inequality. The Christians are closer to the wealth of the North and the non-Christians are further from the wealth.

Q: You mentioned community securities in your talk at the conference. How do you dovetail religion with security?

A: Actually I started to think about the issue from discussions focussing on human security. There is a tendency to think that human security is good and everybody should have it. In reality, all these conflicts we are talking about are caused by the fight for human security, I mean the security of members of particular groups. What we actually need is a common security shared by all human groups.

We see how human groups are developing their identities and with this development they also choose with whom they want their security assured with, usually fellow Christians or fellow Muslims.

They then tend to think their security is threatened by the others. When people define communities, the easiest way is to use religion as the parameter. So it is not necessarily one religion against another, but one identity against another.

And your identity makes you want to secure the security of your people. The problem is there is always the other community. And if the other community has military power, then they become a threat to the security of your community. Then there are accompanying problems like the distribution of wealth, occupation of land, historical quarrels which come into play.

Q: Is this where individual religiosity is different from collective religiosity when external aspects come into play?

A: I try not to compare individuals to society. The distinction is more about closed religiosity and open religiosity. By open religiosity I really mean spirituality. It is individual in a sense because it is your spirituality but it is shared by an open-minded group of believers with whom you have continuous dialog.

It is not exclusive. On the other hand, closed religiosity is shared by the members of your particular community only, in a very selfish manner, to protect your own security, to guarantee your own salvation, not others. If you have true spirituality, you see your salvation as the salvation of others, yet at the same time you will not impose this salvation on others.

Q: How would you go about preventing the wealthier groups from imposing their hegemony on the less wealthy?

A: We have to develop a large coalition across different religions and beliefs, as well as those who are not connected to any religion. There is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and different kinds of discrimination keep emerging.

There need to be a force, a large coalition against all this. The coalition should include all sections of the global society, to counter the negative side of globalization, which is the casino-type globalization. We need a shared spirituality, irrespective of whether you belong to Islam, the Church or other religions. That way we can address the pressure without using violence.