http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=96780&d=29&m=5&y=2007&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Tuesday, 29, May, 2007 (12, Jumada al-Ula, 1428)
The Peoples of the Book Need to Find a New 'Convivencia'
Jonathan Sacks, Arab News
If you haven't yet been to Sacred, the British Library's display of
religious manuscripts, go. It is a stunning exhibition of some of the oldest
and most beautiful texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, shown side by side
in all their complex, intricate glory. The idea was to show how much the three
faiths have in common. And they really do.
For they are all religions of the Word, "Peoples of the Book", faiths
that believe that God who created the Universe did not hide His purposes in
silence. He spoke to those humble enough to listen. They taught those words to
others and preserved them in sacred texts which became their most precious
possession: The Hebrew Bible, the Old and New Testaments and the Qur'an.
Here they are, displayed together: A fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls,
ancient versions of the gospels including the only remaining copy of a
composite narrative written by Tatian, a 2nd-century Christian, and a Qur'an
written in Arabia within a century of the Prophet's lifetime.
What you see immediately is the creative interplay between the faiths in
earlier times. They learned calligraphy, design and illumination from one
another. Ancient Torah scrolls, the elaborate capital letters of the
Lindisfarne Gospels, and the rich geometric patterns of Islamic texts each
sends forth ripples of resonance and imitation in the other faiths. At times
the illustrations look like direct copies. King David looks suspiciously alike
in two 13th century French texts, one Jewish, one Christian.
And this is only the surface of what was in fact a much deeper web of
reciprocal borrowing. Jewish law, Halakhah, influenced Shariah, its Islamic
counterpart. The great Muslim philosophers of the 11th and 12th centuries
introduced the thought of Plato and Aristotle to Jewish sages such as
Maimonides, who in turn influenced Aquinas. The Jewish poetry of medieval Spain
owed much to Arabic verse. The encounter with Christianity stimulated Jewish
Bible commentary. The strands interweave, forming unexpected patterns.
But there is another story about which the exhibition is silent. Ages of
tolerance, what the Spanish called convivencia, were short. This struck me when
I saw a rare, beautiful and lavishly decorated Hebrew manuscript: The Lisbon
Bible of 1482.
Look at it and you see a settled Jewish community, able to commission
works of craftsmanship that must have taken years to make.
Yet within ten years, Jews and Muslims had been exiled from Spain, and
five years after that they were driven from Portugal. It was the sudden, brutal
end of medieval Jewry's golden age.
Religion, I constantly have to emphasize these days, has no monopoly on
bloodshed. French revolutionary terror, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia,
secular systems all, were far more murderous. The issue has nothing to do with
faith and everything to do with our inability to recognize the human dignity of
those with whom we disagree. I sometimes worry whether we might be living in
another 1482, a time of economic growth and affluence, but one in which you
have to be deaf not to hear the distant thunder of civilizational conflict.
That is when libraries and ancient manuscripts become terribly important. If we
forget the past, we may repeat it.
We need Jews, Christians and Muslims prepared to bring together what the
winds of globalization are driving apart. One such figure was the late Dr. Zaki
Badawi, a generous role model of moderate Islam. Another is Akbar Ahmed, whose
forthcoming Journey into Islam tells the story of his search for tolerance
within, and dialogue between, faiths.
Look at these manuscripts in the British Library and ask yourself: If the
rabbis, priests and imams who cherished them could only have seen them side by
side, as we do now, would they not have recognized that however different, they
share a loving devotion to the sacred word.
- Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew
Congregations of the Commonwealth. Rabbi Sacks studied philosophy and obtained
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. He has also been awarded honorary
doctorates from the universities of: Cambridge; Glasgow; Haifa; Middlesex;
Yeshiva University; Liverpool and St. Andrews, and is an honorary fellow of
Gonville and Caius and King's College London.
