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Postcards from an interfaith tour of Turkey

 
By María de Lourdes Ruiz Scaperlanda
Special to Today’s Catholic

The group dialogues with Imam Enrullah Hatipogla in his office, flanked by Freddie Komar of Bryan and Patricia Mejia, assistant director of the St. Mary’s Leadership Center.
Photo provided

    Like an overused kitchen rag, the word tolerance has lost its ability to convey energy and the strength demanded by utility. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the question of interfaith dialogue.
    Seeking more than a mere brush with the concept, a group of 12 Texas pilgrims, the majority faculty and staff from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, traveled to Turkey in January as participants in a 10-day interfaith tour.

     Traveling a mere month after Pope Benedict XVI, the group not only visited many of the Pope’s original destinations, but also met with Muslim educators, professionals, families, and religious leaders committed to promoting interfaith dialogue.

    “The call to prayer from the mosques, the archeological environment and the people we met, all renewed my faith that God is present in our world in good and loving people,” said Sister Grace Walle, FMI, chaplain of St. Mary’s Law School.

    The tour was funded and hosted by representatives from the San Antonio Institute of Interfaith Dialog (IID) www.interfaithdialog.org, working in cooperation with St. Mary’s Fund for Judeao Christian Studies.
Inspired by the teachings of Turkish educator and spiritual leader M. Fethullah Gülen, the IID’s mission is to promote peace and dialogue among people of different faiths.

    One of the basic hopes of interfaith efforts, noted Cemal Usak, secretary general of Istanbul’s Intercultural Dialogue Platform, is “to change the average person’s image of the ‘Other,’ so that ‘Desperate Housewives’ or ‘Sex in the City’ do not represent the United States, and El Qaida and suicide bombers do not represent Turkey or Islam.”

    As people of faith, “we have a number of common grounds as monotheistic believers, and we can focus on those commonalities, at least for the time being,” Usak emphasized in his welcome to the Texas group. “We are already working together with Catholics…It’s a humble idea to promote this kind of dialogue.”

    In addition to its ancient archeological history and its New Testament theological importance as a place where St. Paul traveled, Turkey is important “as a possible practical bridge into the Muslim world, especially the former Soviet states with large Muslim populations and Turkic culture/languages,” explains Father Charles H. Miller, SM, St. Mary’s professor of Theology and Archeology, and director of Roamin’ Rattlers.

    During his visit to Istanbul, Pope Benedict went out of his way to express respect for Muslims and their faith, reiterating that Christians and Muslims can build on their mutual belief in the “sacred character and dignity of the person.” This is, added the pope, “the basis of our mutual respect and esteem… the basis for cooperation in the service of peace between nations and people, the dearest wish of all believers and all people of good will.”

    Father Miller agrees. “When we realize that ‘the Other’ is as human as we are, and has many of the same values — family integrity, respect for persons, concern to bring up children in loving and positive environment, value of having children, deep faith in God — then we can start dialoguing about how to better understand each other’s core beliefs, which will not always coincide nice and neatly. Personal acceptance and the building of personal trust comes first,” explained Father Miller, who has been traveling to Turkey since 1975, acknowledging that this interfaith tour was “the first time I really had the opportunity to observe Turkish family life in the home.”

    Turkey, officially a secular republic of 63.5 million — with 200,000 Christians, has been called “the Holy Land of the Church” because so many of the earliest Church communities were founded there. Most of the writings that make up the New Testament originated there or were addressed to its Christian communities, inspired by the preaching of the Apostles, particularly St. Paul and St. John. According to tradition, Mother Mary lived at Ephesus in the home of St. John.

    Turkey is also the land of Abraham — a patriarch shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam, making him a significant link for the three monotheistic religions. But the country’s population is overwhelmingly Muslim, 99 percent to be precise.

    The Texas group began their Turkey tour in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, and the ancient capital of both the Roman and the Byzantine empires. Over the next ten days, the group visited Ephesus, Izmir, Anatalya, Urfa and Turkey’s capital city of Ankara.

    Imam Emrullah Hatipogla (with mark over the “g”), who greeted Pope Benedict during his visit to Istanbul’s famed Blue Mosque last month, also welcomed the St. Mary’s group to the mosque personally, inviting them across the carpeted prayer hall into his office, where he informally answered questions. “I should thank YOU for coming here, for traveling so far,” he smiled, bringing his right hand to his heart. “I thank you for your vision and for your role in this important work (of interfaith dialogue).”

    For the Imam (or officiating priest), nothing in interfaith dialogue compares to a personal encounter. “If you’ve never met a Muslim, you don’t know them as ‘persons.’ You decide what you believe based on what you hear. But if you see and meet people first hand, you begin to know each other as human.”

    During his visit, the pope described “authentic” dialogue as “based on truth and inspired by a sincere wish to know one another better, respecting differences and recognizing what we have in common.”

     Sister Walle echoes the pope’s definition. The people who conducted the tour “demonstrated through their actions a love, acceptance and openness that created an atmosphere to learn and share our different religious beliefs. It is like a tree with different branches. We are each called to demonstrate our love through service to follow God’s call.”

Part II of this series will appear in the March 2 issue of Today’s Catholic.




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