Muslim leaders urge mutual trust with Westerners

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Muslim leaders from around the world began their summit here on Friday with a call for the promotion of mutual respect between followers of Islam and Westerners following September's terrorist attacks on the United States.

They also urged people in the West to lay to rest their suspicions that all Muslims supported fanatical terrorism in the wake of the tragedy, widely blamed on Saudi-born exile Osama bin Laden and the Afgahan ruler of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammed Omar.

The international community, they added, should avoid generalizations that all Muslims agreed with the zealots who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Akbar Muhammad of the U.S.-based Nation of Islam said that mutual trust was crucial between the West and Muslim communities to promote peace around the world.

They should also stop being wary of each other in the wake of the devastation, which claimed more than 3,000 lives, he added.

"It is unfair that all Muslims in the world have to suffer only because of the September 11 attacks," Muhammad told journalists after his speech at the summit.

The forum was scheduled to begin on Thursday, but was delayed until Friday for undisclosed reasons.

Other speakers at the summit included Sayyed Musawi of the United Kingdom, Ahmad Tigani Ben Omar of the U.S.-based Universal Islamic Center, Chung Hwan Kwak of the Interreligious Federation for World Peace and Unification and former president Abdurrahman 'Gus Dur' Wahid of Indonesia's Nahdlatul Ulama.

The speakers all agreed that Islam was a religion that deeply respected pluralism within diverse societies and that while this helds true for the goodness of Muslims, it also yielded benefits for followers of other religions too.

"The Koran, as we observe throughout its verses, speaks not about religions, but about religious people. It must, therefore, be emphasized that the Koran recognizes the plurality of religious communities," Alwi Shihab, a noted Muslim scholar from Jakarta, told the summit.

Alwi, who also formerly served as foreign minister, underscored the need for the Muslim and Western communities to engage in more discussion aimed at building mutual understanding among followers of different faiths.

"It must be stressed here that interreligious dialogs and harmony should not simply be academic," he added. "We must be aware that we live in a religiously, culturally, and ideologically pluralistic world, which we can either share or destroy."

Sayyed Musawi agreed with Alwi, saying that interreligious talks between Muslims and followers of other faiths would increase understanding of different religious values.

"Therefore, we need another summit, which will involve not only Muslim leaders, but also leaders from other religions," he said.

Commenting on radicalism, which is often linked to Muslims, Musawi stressed that Islam, if anything, was a religion of peace and that it shunned all forms of violence.

Other religions, he noted, had often failed to curb radicalism and terrorism committed by their own followers, adding that proper education was the best way to preempt people from leaning towards violence.

Gus Dur shared Musawi's opinion, emphasizing that radical and terrorist attacks were nothing to do with the true form of a religion -- be it Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or any other.

"Muslims are just like other communities in the world, and radicalism can be found anywhere: I condemn the September 11 attacks -- but I also condemn the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan," he said.

Gus Dur lamented the overly emotional reactions in the U.S. against the terrorist incident, chiefly because there was little reflection, or examination of why the attacks were carried out in the first place.

He also said that Indonesian Muslims had respected religious pluralism since the country enacted the 1945 Constitution -- despite the fact that sectarian conflicts had continued unabated in the Maluku Islands and Poso, Central Sulawesi, over the course of the last three years.

Gur Dur, a former chairman of the 40-million strong Nahdlatul Ulama, said that in the original text of the Constitution's preamble, known as the Jakarta Charter, Muslims were obliged to include the Islamic sharia law.

But the sharia was later removed from the Constitution as the country's founding fathers wanted to establish up a nation based on pluralism, he added.