Imam Feisal

A transcript of part of the address of visiting American Muslim leader Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to a multi-faith gathering hosted by the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney on the 1st April, 2004

In the Name of God, All-Merciful, All-Compassionate

We are people who are not usually in the same house of prayer with one another, and all too rarely with an opportunity to talk to each other.

We are Christians, Jews, and Muslims. We are Roman Catholics, Protestants, and members of other faiths, some practicing and some not. We are from diverse cultures of the world.

But today we have come together, at the invitation of two inspired men of Sydney - our Premier Bob Carr and our Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Pell, to confirm the common ground of our faiths, on which we all stand united, to assert our common values, values that constrain us to act in the highest and truest sense of what it means to be human.

We are here to affirm the value of this service today both for the shaping of shared convictions and for the actions that we can, and must, strive to accomplish together. Further, we intend to deepen our belief that effective public engagement around difficult issues can include, and in fact, requires, religious voices. From our own experience, we affirm that multiple religious voices praying and working together can serve our deepest common good when joined together to represent the conscience of our communities.

In the Cordoba Initiative which are pursuing in America , we began a simple exercise: we called it The Children of Abraham Break Bread Together. The event was held at St Bartholomew's Church in New York City ten months ago. Over three hundred Christians, Jews and Muslims came together to break bread, eat together, and share stories about the primary role that bread has played in the Abrahamic religions and cultures. Beginning with fresh delicious challah bread and salt that our Jewish brothers and sisters broke to begin and honor the sacredness of the Sabbath, to the bread that represents the body of Jesus Christ that our Christian brothers and sisters symbolically ingest in the moving transformational power of the sacrament of the Eucharist, the evening demonstrated - through words, music and theater - how something as simple as bread can teach us profound truths, transcend differences and evoke an atmosphere in which interfaith dialogue occurs spontaneously.

This is just one example of our work which the Premier has asked us to share with you.

But our conversations must continue where many public discussions have in the past ended. They must be as much in private as in public. Some of us may be suspicious of the religious voice in public, and believe that these voices ought to be kept out of public policy. Others may fear that entering into constructive dialogue and common ground with the "other side" - where the "other" may be religious or agnostic, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim - must be wrong, sinful or at best useless and naive.

We disagree.

We are here both as individuals and as representatives of our religious traditions. We must take advantage of this unusual breadth, a breadth not only of religion and geographical views of each other, but also of social vantage points. We have experienced the reality that there is a multiplicity of religious voices in the world, and have come to affirm, importantly, that common religious, moral and policy grounds can be found in an exchange among these voices.

Where once many of us may not have cared to speak, much less listened, to others, now we do, and we must. We shall find ourselves with good people of deep faith, and we shall locate many important, shared values: justice, compassion, service, faithfulness, fidelity and love. Though many of us may have come skeptically, we shall, God willing, insha Allah, baruch Hashem, Deo Velente, leave with hope and a redoubled determination to encourage others to embark on this kind of fruitful exploration. For ourselves, and in different ways, we want to continue to convey the message - not only among us, but also in the communities and arenas of service to which we shall be returning, that we are all created imago Dei, in the image of God - as our Prophet Muhammad expressed this truth in the pure Semitic Arabic tongue of his people: khalaqa-llahu adama ala suratihi.

We are grateful to Cardinal Pell, and to the Premier Bob Carr, and to their respective staff, for their wisdom, effort and gracious hospitality in making this event a launching pad for a humane vision of a society, of an Australia , and of a globalized world. We thank all of you present today for validating this forum with the imprimatur of your presence, and for providing us with the opportunity to comprehend how beneath differences of faith and religious interpretation lie similarities of values and principles, eternal values that embody respect for the humanity of all.

We pray that the God we worship in any and all names, and in multiple languages and liturgies, even in our silence, will bless this gathering, bless our efforts, and bless us as peacemakers, and admit us into His pleasure as a loving Father to His children.

Amen.

Imam Feisal founded the Cordoba Project in New York to develop strategies to bring about rapprochement between Islam and the West. He is also author of What's Right with Islam to be launched on May 1 in New York., and President of the American Sufi Muslim Association.