Religion in Culture, Law and Politics [antikvár]

Prompted by a varlety of suggestions from scholarship and polltics in the Fédéral Republic of Germany, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation issued invitations to the first Muslim-Christian Colloquium, to be held In Bonn from the 23rd to the 26th of March 1981: a further link in the chain of meetings that present the milestones of the dialogue between the Christian tradition of the West and those lands of the Near, Middle, and Far East influenced by Islam.1. A large number of articles and lectures that have been published in the Fédéral Republic of Germany in recent years have attempted to reawaken an awareness of the importance of the Arabic-lslamic inherltance for Western culture. This inheritance is the resuit of the many-sided exchange between Christians and Muslims in the Middle Ages. Since then the systematic discourse has been interrupted. The mistakes and misunderstandings of recent centuries in mutual rela-tionships created probiems that were only intensifled by colonial history.1.1. Geneva, the Vatican, Broummana, Cairo, Tripoli, Cordoba, Tunis, Kairouan and Hammamet, Accra, Hong Kong, and many other régional meetings indicate the stages of the continent-wide dialogue that Muslims and Christians began anew in 1969. It has repeatedly proven to be difficult to speak openly to one another, for préjudices have accumulated, even after Western scholars had begun to study Islam. 1.2 Fundamentalistic Islamic reform movements, reacting to the growing saturation of the Orient with the materialistic values of Industrial civilization, are alarming the West. The "re-lslamization", the rediscovery wlthin Islam of its own worth, which forms a part of the movement of the entire Third World toward solving their probiems on their own this tendency produces a perplexity in the West, which forums and scholarly congresses are incapable of concealing. The specter of a militant Islam, in whose control a significant fraction of the world's energy resources lie, concerns politicians and large segments of the population. At the same time, the awareness of our interdependence is growing.1.3. Never before have so many followers of non-Christian religions