MONTREAL, CANADA, September 12, 2006: About 40 people took a symbolic walk for peace last night from Montreal’s city hall to the Palais des congres, where they were greeted by keynote speakers at the opening event of a conference on religion. Muslim activist Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and theologian Karen Armstrong spoke at last night’s plenary session of the conference, titled the World’s Religions After Sept. 11. Both joined two thousand people milling about in the main hall who reflected the diversity of religions in attendance – Buddhist monks, Sikhs and Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians. They were later joined on the podium by Rev. Didiji, spiritual leader to the devotees of Swadhyaya, a movement based primarily on the western coast of India, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, humanitarian and scholar, who heads the 25-million member Art of Living Foundation.
Ebadi and Shankar delivered similar messages to the audience: It’s time for those who speak in the name of religious tolerance to be heard. “The voices of enlightened Muslim thinkers are not heard enough,” Ebadi said. Those who are enlightened, she argued, are faced with the difficult double tasks of convincing others there is a different way of thinking from radical Islam while at the same time fighting the ideas of extremist Islamic groups. “Muslim intellectuals are trying to let the world know that wrongful acts relate to those people and not to their religion,” said Ebadi, who was introduced by her daughter, a lawyer in Iran. “The wrongful needs of certain groups should not raise hostilities against Islam,” Ebadi added, noting that Islam is not in contradiction with human rights and “cannot be an excuse for violence.” Rather than the “clash of civilizations,” the roots of war in the Middle East “lie in economic interests and power,” she said.
People who love peace don’t raise their voices, Shankar said, “and now we need to raise our voices together.” The need to promote peace is greater in this time of religious turmoil because history has shown that people are willing to die for religion, “not for math or chemistry,” he said. But when religion, race or sex is used as an identity factor, people then forget that we are all human beings, Shankar said. “Fanaticism in one religion finds shadows in another,” he told the audience. “We need to secularize religion and spiritualize politics, to honor the values of compassion, love and a sense of belonging.” The goal of the theological scholars at this conference is to figure out how to live in harmony and to bring this concept to the world, Shankar said. “We have globalized everything but wisdom,” he said. “If every child knows a little bit about all religions, they would never become fanatics.”
The conference runs through Friday. For more information, visit here.