Progress in Saudi - Anti-terrorism Pact!

Religious leaders concluded a historic inter-faith conference on Friday with a call for an international pact to combat terrorism. Representatives – which included Islamic, Christian and Jewish leaders – asked the UN General Assembly to call a special session to help foster dialogue between “followers of religions, civilisations and cultures” and prevent “a clash of civilisations,” according to Agence France-Presse.
"Terrorism is a universal phenomenon that requires unified international efforts to combat it in a serious, responsible and just way," the three-day World Conference on Dialogue said in a final statement.This demands an international agreement on defining terrorism, addressing its root causes and achieving justice and stability in the world."
The statement was read at the closing session of the closed-door gathering, organised by Saudi King Abdullah and held in Madrid. It echoed the king's speech at the opening session where he rejected religious extremism and said conflicts were created by misinterpretations, not by religions themselves.
"There is a need for continuity in dialogue and not depending only on resorting to the UN," Abdullah al-Turki, secretary general of the Muslim World League, told a news conference. "This is going to be the first of a series of conferences. We have talked about organising a conference in Japan."

The Mecca-based Muslim World League had organised the interfaith conference for Saudi King Abdullah. Participants on Thursday also called for religions to re-examine the treatment and position of women, whom some described as marginalised by religions. Saudi Arabia is the only Arab Muslim country that bans all non-Islamic religious practices despite having a sizable number of non-Muslims in the country. Wahhabism, a extremely conservative strain of Sunni Islam, is practised in Saudi Arabia.

This year, US Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended again that the State Department designate Saudi Arabia as a Country of Particular Concern – the worst religious freedom violation category – for its egregious and systematic violation of religious freedom. The government is accused of promoting hate ideologies towards non-Wahhabi Muslims through its official educational textbooks. Among what the textbooks teach include commanding Muslims to “hate” all non-Wahhabi Muslims; instructing students not to “greet”, “befriend”, “imitate”, “show loyalty to”, “be courteous to”, or “respect” non-believers; and instruct that the “fighting between Muslims and Jews” will continue until Judgment Day.

Some of the prominent religious and political figures at the event included evangelist Franklin Graham, former Vice President Al Gore, American civil rights leader the Rev Jesse Jackson, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Rabbi David Rosen.

Churches in Saudi Arabia?!

The Vatican is holding talks with Saudi Arabia on building the first church in the kingdom, where some 1.5m Christians are not allowed to worship publicly. Archbishop Paul-Mounged el-Hachem, one of Pope Benedict XVI's most senior Middle East representatives, said the discussions had begun a few weeks ago. But the archbishop cautioned that the Vatican could not predict the outcome. The discussions come in the wake of King Abdullah's historic meeting with the Pope at the Vatican last November. A Catholic-Muslim Forum was also set up by the Pope two weeks ago to repair relations between the two faiths after the crisis caused by a speech he gave in Germany in 2006, in which he appeared to associate Islam with violence.
'Reciprocity'
The disclosure of talks between the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, which do not have diplomatic ties, came soon after the first Roman Catholic church in the Qatari capital, Doha, was opened in a service attended by 15,000 people. Archbishop Hachem, the Apostolic Nuncio to Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Bahrain and the UAE, who attended the inauguration, said he hoped there would soon be a similar church for the many Christians in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

"Discussions are under way to allow the construction of churches in the kingdom," he said.
Although he made clear the outcome was uncertain, the archbishop added that a church in Saudi Arabia would be an important sign of "reciprocity" between Muslims and Christians. The Vatican has noted that Muslims are free to worship openly in Europe and demands religious freedom as a condition for the opening of diplomatic relations. About a million Catholics, many of them migrant workers from the Philippines, live in Saudi Arabia. They are allowed to worship in private, mostly in people's homes, but worship in public places and outward signs of faith, such as crucifixes, are forbidden. The last Christian priest was expelled from the kingdom in 1985.
Christians complain that rules are not clear and that the Saudi religious authorities, who enforce the kingdom's conservative brand of Islam, Wahhabism, sometimes crack down on legitimate congregations. The authorities cite a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad that only Islam can be practised in the Arabian Peninsula. A spokesman for Pope Benedict, Father Federico Lombardi, said: "If we manage to obtain authorisation for the construction of the first church, it will be an outcome of historic dimensions."

The last churches allowed in Saudi Arabia

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