Leading Muslim journalist Fuad Nahdi addresses a meeting at the IofC centre in London.
"The problem is not the clash of civilisations but the collapse of them," a leading Muslim journalist told the Greencoat Forum which followed the Oxford Group's Annual General Meeting in London on 17 June. Fuad Nahdi, the founder and publisher of Q-News was speaking on "Towards a partnership of civilisations".
Nahdi was born in Kenya, although his parents originated from Yemen. His parents had planned to send him to the Muslim school in Yemen that his father and grandfather had attended, but this had been closed by the country's Marxist government. Nahdi ended up at a Catholic school in Tanzania. "I was a walking manifestation of interfaith," he said. He moved to England to study and in 1989 married and became "that strange and complex creature a British Muslim".
What struck me most about Nahdi’s speech was the emphasis on the role of individuals, rather than institutions, in bridging the gaps between faiths and communities. "Organisations and structures can only act as a barrier," he said. He added, "We cannot always change the world, but what we can change is ourselves."
Many first-generation British Muslims were disillusioned by what they had found in Britain, Nahdi said. "We came to this country believing it was a Christian country." The discovery that the role of Christianity in this country was not what they expected was often "very painful". Muslims were often left to speak out on moral issues which Christians were afraid to tackle.
Nahdi called on both Christians and Muslims to begin with "an honest appraisal" of themselves. "There is no substitute for love and compassion; every act of love is like an axe taken to the roots of war," he said. "Even meeting your neighbour with a smiley face is an act of defiance against anger, malevolence and ill will."
He was pessimistic about some developments within the Muslim community. "There are very powerful forces within our community which want to make us a monolithic community. Now a good Muslim is judged by how much he hates America, how much he wants to destroy Israel, how much he demonises and ridicules his neighbours for not being good Muslims." He asked non-Muslims to "give us some space to thrash out some issues internally".
He also encouraged the West to sit down with Muslims and listen to them. The two main qualities Muslims wanted to see in the world are "freedom and justice". "The root cause of the lack of freedom and justice is when people stop talking to each other," he said.
Nahdi referred to his experience as a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Muslim-Christian Listening Group which gathers people from both sides to talk freely and openly to each other about the problems they face. The meetings are held in mosques and churches up and down the country. It had proved more difficult to get Muslims to visit churches than to get Christians to visit mosques - perhaps, he said half-seriously, because of the levels of hospitality. "When I go to the mosque I get samosas, kebabs, curries. In the church, I am given some dodgy sandwiches."
Nahdi's light-hearted way of conveying serious points was very effective and stimulated a range of questions and comments from the floor. In response to one, he compared the humiliation suffered by the Muslim world today to that of Germany after the Treaty of Versailles. "We have gone through this humiliation and degradation for 60 years now. If it was not for Islam there would be many Nazi Germanys in our countries. But even Islam is being slowly peeled apart like an onion. There is conflict at the top level about whether suicide bombing is legitimate or not: this would not have been a question for us 50 years ago."
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