Scholar El-Husseini: Peaceful Coexistence is the Foundation and Essence of Revealed Religions

Scholar El-Husseini: Peaceful Coexistence is the Foundation and Essence of Revealed Religions

Peaceful coexistence among the nations that embrace different revealed religions is an extremely important and serious topic that can be considered as a best feature and a suitable basis for establishing peace and security and creating a real stability in the realistic and literal sense of the word. This is because, for the most part, it reflects the philosophy, essence, and attitude of these religions, their perception standard, as well as their holistic understanding and harmony with the human reality.

Humanity suffered extremely from the historical eras and phases that witnessed conflicts and wars based on religious differences, or rather political issues and ambitions covered by religion. Such black times teemed with very enormous humanitarian nightmares and disasters that can no longer be afforded by humanity after the big prices it paid from the different generations of the nations belonging to all the revealed religions throughout the world.

If we came back to these religion-based wars and bloody conflicts to carefully study them, we would find them caused mainly by two basic motivations:

First, the assumption that one religion or religious sect is better than the other, which fills the hearts with hatred and urges for the death of others for allegedly upholding the religion throughout many of such black historical times.

Second, the nations’ ignorance of the religions, their essence and their humanitarian tendency towards peaceful coexistence, especially that these historical phases lacked religious scholars with profound knowledge in these religions and good understanding of their basic message which calls for the need for peaceful coexistence as their main pillar and substance.

The efforts of the extremists and narrow-minded persons which aim, unfortunately, at making Islam, combined with the other revealed religions, appear as a religion refusing the others and urging for their extermination and death are suspicious, distorted, Islamophobic, and contradicting with its teachings.

“Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to an agreement between us and you: that we shall worship none but Allah, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside Allah. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him)”.
By reading the former noble verse, we see it summarizing the principles of coexistence among the revealed religions, all of which agree that there is only one God who is the source and origin of all religions, and that this God is infallible and inviolable. They also agree on the need for common understanding on the goals and objectives, and for the joint cooperation with a view to achieving commonly agreed goals. Therefore, we refer our disputed issues to the points that were found agreed on within our heritage. This allows us to develop a common basis among these religions through the tolerance which strongly combines and links all such issues. There is no doubt that all the revealed religions contain enough teachings calling for tolerance; therefore, it is incumbent upon their scholars to call for the culture of tolerance.

Looking back at the historical times and eras that witnessed bloody religious conflicts which cost the innocent people their lives, we would find them imbued with a culture of malice, hatred, and exclusion and refusal of other religions. Such a hostile culture that conflicts with the principle on which all the revealed religions were based nourished the minds with tendencies towards relying on cruelty and violence as means of imposing one religion over the other ones. After all these centuries, not only years or decades, neither do we find that one religion has won the conflict nor do we find that a single religion in the entire world has been eradicated or extinguished. Conversely, both the religions and the nations are alive, but it is only the culture of religious hatred which is based on ignorance and amti-religious sentiments that has extinguished to some extent. This bears a profound meaning that should be carefully contemplated.

Nowadays, as we are again facing a conspicuous escalation of the culture of religious hatred and the efforts aimed at its revival and resurrection: all of us, particularly the religious scholars, should understand that such a defective and obscurant culture is conflicting with the religions in the first place. We should also understand that its resurrection will harm the religions and their humanitarian message which is full of love, compassion, friendliness, communication, sacrifice, and altruism. Accordingly, we are not only required to emphasize the culture of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and acceptance of the other, but we are also required to advocate it using all the possible means. In this way, we can achieve many goals and objectives and, above all, advocate the essence and foundation of the revealed religions.

Scholar Mr. Mohamed Ali El-Husseini

General Secretary of the Arab Islamic Council in Lebanon.