“If tolerating means accepting what cannot be prevented, dialoguing means going beyond tolerance: it means the recognition of the other person”: so said T. Houssam Sbat, Imam of Strasbourg, intervening at the second interreligious colloquium promoted in recent days by the Protestant Federation of France. In the view of Fabrice Midal, who was born Jewish but converted to Islam, “dialogue is a conversion that leads one back to the roots of one’s own faith. I don’t discuss what I already know, but I want to understand what I don’t know”. “Jewish religion is identified in unity, Christianity in love, Islam in hospitality, but who speaks in the name of religions?”, asked Bernard Kanovitch, of the Council representing the Jewish institutions in France (CRIF). “It is simplistic to affirm that religion, per se, is the bearer of peace or violence replied Midal -; what we need to prevent, instead, is the relation with the absolute being corrupted into absolutism”. “We need a critical interpretation of our sources without confining dialogue to the social sphere, or to theology”, declared the chairman of the Protestant Federation, Jean-Arnold de Clermont, at the end of the colloquium.
