20/10/06; www.ucanews.com/
Christians and Muslims need to complement and collaborate with one another to promote peace and justice in the world, a Muslim activist, from Bangladesh, has told a Catholic gathering on evangelization. Addressing the Catholic Church’s first Asian Mission Congress on Oct. 20, M. Abdus Sabur, secretary general of Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN, peace), said Christian charitable works have challenged him to encourage his people to take up similar tasks.
“We want to complement what Christians are doing,” said Sabur, one of four people who shared their faith experiences on the second day of the congress. The 53-year-old Muslim commended the Church for organizing the assembly and bringing together so many people of different languages, cultures and practices to reflect on issues crucial to their faith. “It is unfortunate we (Muslims) cannot do similar things,” he said.
Sabur, who is from a predominantly Muslim village in a remote part of Bangladesh, noted at the outset that he is not a theologian and what he was sharing stems from his interactions with people of religions other than Islam.
Muslims believe that God has sent several prophets to guide humans, he pointed out, and one of the prophets is Jesus, who came before Muhammad. Sabur, a science graduate who has helped set up several NGOs in Asia, said Muslims “have to recognize that you are our predecessors. We are younger.”
He spoke of his life in terms of interactions between religions and said he grew up with the notion that people of other religions are bidharmi, people without religion. If a Muslim villager behaved badly, he recalled from his youth, others would say that the person had become a Christian or Hindu.
At the same, however, Sabur absorbed an interreligious spirit because Hindu and Muslim villagers would join each other’s feasts. “When we pray, we do it in our own way, but we celebrate, we do it together,” he explained.
The first Christians he encountered were a group from England. They were working among victims of the 1971 civil war in Pakistan, which led to the creation of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. Later, he also came across several Catholic and Protestant social workers in his homeland.
He began to collaborate with Christians to a greater degree when he left Bangladesh for the first time in 1977, at age 24. He said he traveled all over Asia on a study tour with people of other religions. That trip helped him know more about Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Christians in the Philippines, Hindus in India and Muslims in Indonesia, and he realized that people of other faiths have their own religious beliefs and values that transcend religious borders.
Sabur admitted that offering drink during prayer in a church bothered him initially, but he later learned that the practice was more a “tradition and way of life rather than a religious injunction.”
In 1978, he assembled young community workers from various religions to work together for society’s benefit and to learn from each other. When he began his association with the World Council of Churches in the 1980s, he said he saw Christians begin their meetings with Bible readings and reflection, and was struck by how they related what they read to poverty, displaced people and other social problems, and how they could respond to problems as Christians.
Sabur explained that the process was new for him because his experience of Muslim meetings, though they began with recitations from the Qur’an, did not relate those reflections to issues affecting people.
Christians who went out of the way to help people of other faiths also impressed him, Sabur said, such as when “Christians help the destitute, bring them relief and stay with them until they are settled.” He then began to ask himself how he could encourage fellow Muslims to do likewise.
Sabur closed by saying he wants Christians and Muslims to work together for peace and justice. “Ultimately, our goal is union in the spirit of God.”
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