4 June: Unexpected Visitors

The Canterbury Diocese magazine ‘Outlook’ for this month tells how the Dean’s Easter sermon was interrupted. A note was handed to him, saying that the Canterbury Imam, Ihsan Khan, had brought flowers to demonstrate on behalf of local Muslims, their ‘respect for our Christian brothers and sisters who lost their lives in Sri Lanka’ a few hours earlier. ‘We pray for the victims and their loved ones. Our condolences, Canterbury Mosque.’

The Imam and his delegation were welcomed into the Quire to lay their flowers at the Altar, to applause led by the Dean.

Imam Khan said it was vital for the community in Canterbury to show the rest of the world that whatever our faith, or none, we are still brothers and sisters in humanity. he hoped the people of Canterbury would push solidarity forward.

Our Muslim Sisters and Brothers end their Ramadan fast today or tomorrow, depending where they live. Happy Eid!

This post from the Missionaries of Africa describes how Eid is celebrated in different places.

 

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17 September: Dialogue, Missionary Style.

I was with a Missionary of Africa, fifty years a priest, mostly in Northern Ghana, where both faiths live side-by-side.

‘Always, if I wanted to do something, I would go to the mosque and I would talk to the Imam, and be seen talking to the Imam. Do nothing without telling him, then he knows you are not trying to undermine him or his people. Always, always  Muslims are included, try to do nothing separately, be sure that the whole community can benefit.

‘Do not confine your work only to the poorest. You could be seen as undermining the better-off, especially if some of them are Muslim and see the poor Christians or traditional believers being helped, becoming organised, as a threat. Always be open.

Today, in my prison work in Holland, I share an office with the Muslim chaplain. I insisted, yes. Our door is always open. The prisoners walk by – many of them are Moroccan – they see us laughing together, they stop, they think, ‘What is this?’

We are all called to be missionaries, as Pope Francis insists, so stop, think, ‘What are we doing, what should we be doing, as witnesses to Christ among our neighbours?’

Photograph of Mosque in Tamale, Ghana by Neonstar 

September 1, Algeria V: Love them sincerely and profoundly

The Church in Algeria, despite Colonial Governments’ intermittent hostility to it, always refused to be simply a chaplaincy to French settlers who were not secularists. It insisted on respect for the Muslim faith of the vast majority of the population. Cardinal Lavigerie, who as Archbishop of Algiers founded the Missionaries of Africa in 1868, would doff his hat and bow as he passed a mosque, to respect the prayer offered there.

A twentieth century Missionary of Africa, Henri Marchal, developed the policy of the founder towards Muslims. He insisted in 1945, after some forty years in Algeria, that:

“To make use of our superior knowledge, of our extensive culture to overwhelm the masses, to show them the falseness of their beliefs and the truth of our own, to shake their convictions by sowing doubt in their mind… would be to use practices which Muslims would immediately seize upon as having an ulterior goal and motive which they would not easily forgive, since they would see in it an attack on their religion, a dishonest undertaking to undermine their convictions in order to snatch them from the good that they prize above all else, their Muslim faith, their dignity and privilege of being believers, their unbreakable cohesion in Islam.

“To have an influence on the population, it is necessary to love these people, to love them sincerely and profoundly, and to love in this manner we need to recall in the presence of each one, in our way of approaching him and dealing with him, that Jesus shed his blood for him. We have to win their hearts by our witness of goodness which is always one of welcome.

“The Church, in directing souls to God and leading them on the road to salvation, does not turn their exterior lives inside out but rather transforms their interior lives. That is why the ‘return to God’ of a whole people will in no way mean its denial or the abandonment of its own civilisation and the adoption of a civilisation or culturewhich is alien to it.”

• May Church and Society in Britain be welcoming to all migrants who come here.

• See: Gérard Demeerseman, M.Afr: Henri Marchal 1875-1957: ‘An Apostolic Approach to the Algerian World’, pp61-62, 74. On-line text PDF