In the view of London rabbi Aba Dunner, general secretary of the Conference of European Rabbis, the most serious problem in England as also in the rest of Europe remains that of the violence and fundamentalism widespread among the young. “The government and the various religious authorities ought seriously to address this problem”, he says. Mamoun Mobayed, psychiatrist and Moslem chaplain at Queen’s University in Belfast underlines two main problems: “First, that of religious education in Northern Ireland. Twelve years ago – he explains – Catholics and Protestants reached mutual agreement on a joint programme of religious education at school: a step forward for dialogue between both sides, but it excluded the non-Christian communities”. The other problem is that “in Northern Ireland there are no teachers of Moslem origin or who belong to minorities, and this does not favour the integration of children who belong to these communities. Incentives would need to be given to students to become teachers and to offer opportunities to Moslem teenagers to take teacher-training courses”.
