Charity - Middle East & North Africa Conference in Amman, Jordan, 26-29 September 2005:

United Religions Initiative-MENA Region
Report for the Annual Regional Conference, 26-29 September 2005
CHARITY

In the last week of September, the conference was held in Amman, Jordan; with some sixty people participating from countries in the region: Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, The Palestinian Authority and Tunisia; as well as guests from Belgium, Canada, Germany and Norway.

The conference's theme was: “Charity in the Abrahamic Religions”.

The conference started with introduction of the participants and with the acceptance of the principles for our dialogue about charity in different religions:

We participate in the dialogue as persons expressing their religious views and not as representatives of national entities or political view points. Therefore, every issue we discuss, theoretical or actual, should be addressed from its religious aspect.

Dialogue involves two or more points of view and requires from its participants listening to the other as well as expressing their own views.

Every religious view point can be expressed but attention has to be given to the way of expression: as you do not want to be embarrassed or offended and do not embarrass or offend the other.

In the following two days we studied together the theme of Charity from three perspectives; each presented and studied from several religious points of view. The three perspectives were: Legal Aspects of Charity, Historical and Modern Faith-Based Charity Institutions and Spiritual Aspects of Charity. Each session started with the presentations in the plenary, followed by more intimate joint study and conversations in the small groups.

The presentations were delivered by the following participants:

The Jewish presenters were Shlomo Alon and Dov Maimon from Israel.

The Christian presenters were Emad Adbel el Messeh from Egypt and Lars Gunnar from Norway.

The Druze presenter was Hammud Quteish from Israel.

And the Muslim presenters were AbdAllah Ramadan from Egypt and Atefeh Sadeghi from Iran.

The representatives from the four religions gave profound introductory presentations and deep discussions in small inter-religious groups followed these presentations. The Druze presentations were new to many of us who for the very first time heard a full teaching from this secret tradition.

All groups concluded that holy texts from all traditions include guidelines on how to practice charity in our daily life. For all, charity has a positive role to promote better understanding between people and communities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Discussions took different paths in the different subgroups:

In one of the subgroup, participants agreed that charity means in its deepest level the end of slavery. This will occur only when people feel free and independent enough and therefore be able to take in account the needs of the other human beings. The five main subjects of discussion of this subgroup were:

1) Detailed discussion of the legal aspects of charity in the religious texts;

2) Survey of the practical behaviors in our communities: we observed the discrepancy between the legal recommendations and the daily implementations;

3) The participants gave numerous examples of charity in education, religious observance and welfare institutions;

4) The tension between the state taxes and religious charity was discussed in detail;

5) The major elements that came out from all our discussions were the common ground that exists among our different religions and societies. We therefore will have to continue our efforts in our area, through URI and other various local and international structures.

Noticing the strong similarities among the Semitic traditions, participants from another group tried to figure out categories: both Islam and Judaism prescribe charity as a religious duty, fix the rate of net income or rate of savings to be given, establish priorities regarding the receiver profile. Beyond these legal aspects, the positive spiritual effects of charity on donors, receivers and society are equally very similar. Some suggested that a possible source for this strong resemblance could be found in the common ancestor Abraham, known as karim (generous), rachman (compassionate) and paragon of hospitality.

Despite these similarities, differences were observed in communitarian institutions established to collect and distribute charity: some have structured systems (such as free loan banks, time banks, food and clothes distributions collects, mourning donations, food distribution for festival days, etc) and other favorite spontaneous gifts, some privileged secret gifts and other request from receivers to publicize the identity of givers. This lead to a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of secret gifts and of declaring charity as a duty. According to Christians and Druze, true charity should be not a result of coercion and therefore should not be regularized. Jews and Muslims observed the famous "education through acts" classical human behaviorist methodology… disagreeing regarding the best way to achieve this result, all agree that optimally, the free charity should come from inside and not from any ritual obligation. An interesting insight was a participant proposal to enlarge charity from personal act to – given a required strict accountability – a government to government act in order to decrease the huge social gap existing today between poor and wealthy countries.

In another subgroup, participants understood charity in an enlarged meaning and emphasized recommendations: ignore ethnical specific belonging, respect all human beings and distribute charity to all; forget passed violence as much as you can and build the future on a new basis. Peace is a critical condition to this coming future. Teach our children how to respect others and do charity.

The final half-day was dedicated to translating the experience and the relations built into action.

Yehuda explained in detail the URI structure, the role of CCs in it and the procedure for forming and running a CC. Nada shared the work of the M'ghar Interfaith Encounter - how it started in April and how it developed its activity very quickly and efficiently. Then we went around the circle to identify ideas and commitments for further CC development in the MENA region and here they are:

Nada - will fill the application forms to register the M'ghar Interfaith Encounter as a CC;
Heidrun - will connect several Berlin based Israeli-Palestinian initiatives to become URI CCs;
Ahmed - will check with Mohamed for the best way to connect the organization he is directing, "Al-Karma For Human Development", to URI’s work in Egypt - either as a third CC or in cooperation with the existing CCs;
Elan - will continue to work for the formation of a Center for Communication and an International School for Diplomats to train them in working out of cooperation rather than competition;
Manal - will form a URI CC in Lebanon, where this work is so much needed and does not yet exist.
Mazal suggested a co operation between Jordan and Israel about water in Aqaba. Also: she suggested a youth cultural exchange.
Adnan is an artist, so he planed to make a summer camp for youth (painting, music, drama). In addition, he will make video conference to connect the whole group.
Nawal had an idea of preparing for a seminar on “democracy” and she suggested making a common dictionary for sign language for deaf and mute people.
Rafiqa will publish a website to exchange ideas, write an annual magazine for different cultures.


(*) This report was compiled by Ola Helmy, based on group-reports of the groups' reporters.
Mohamed Mosaad & Yehuda Stolov (URI-MENA Regional Coordinators)
Anas Abadi (URI-MENA Amman Representative)
Atefeh Sadeghi, Hanan Shahatit and Shlomo Alon (URI-MENA's Global Trustees)

 

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