KARACHI, June 16: Speakers at an international conference said on Thursday that respect for human dignity and promotion of righteousness could be the only basis for bringing about a long-lasting reconciliation between Islam and the West.
Speaking on the second day of a conference on “Common values between Islam and the West”, Zohra Yusuf, the chairperson of HRCP, Sindh, said that current polarization, with Islam phobia prevalent in the West and anti-West specially Anti-American sentiments often violently expressed on streets in Muslim countries, were a challenge to the world that needed to be addressed for an urgent and a lasting solution.
She criticized both the West and Islamic countries for their failures to end prejudices and maintained that perhaps the solution today lay not more in religion, but moving from public and political to the private and personal contexts.
Referring to the question of common values between Islam and the West, and said she believed that a starting point could be the recognition that all religions promote tolerance.
“The role of religion should be confined to this stated position only, as interpretation of scriptures tend to create divisiveness”, she added, saying that the basis for seeking common values and greater understanding, therefore, must be mutual acceptance of universal principles of human rights.
She expressed the view that in the West individuals sometimes appeared biased in approach and dealings, but institutions were still secular, while in most of the Islamic countries, institutions were biased.
In another presentation, the chairman of Department of World Religions, Dhaka University, Dr Kazi Nurul Islam, said that Islam was a religion which advocated inter-religious harmony and denounced any kind of antagonism towards people of any other faith.
He said it was quite clear that Islam identifies itself with other religions.
“It as an article of faith for a Muslim to affirm his belief in other prophets and their scriptures”, he said, adding it promotes harmony and peace, with other religions.
He mentioned that Islam is a religion of peace and harmony and as such Islam and violence or terrorism or any kind of antagonism towards people with different faiths could not go together.
He called for introduction of special courses on objective studies of major religions at the secondary school level, both in the east and in the west, for promotion of a better understanding about each others religions and their traditions which can eliminate enmity and hatred in the world.
Talking on “respect for human dignity of patients”, Dr Aamir M Jafarey of the Centre of Biomedical Ethics and Culture, SIUT, said that value of human dignity in the medical perspective was a value common to all cultures, Westerns or Eastern, and across all belief systems, religious or secular.
With the help of slides and references, he discussed the approaches of physicians and surgeons throughout the world and discussed “informed consent”, which is recognized in contemporary bioethics as the main safeguard to assure dignity of patients and protect them from exploitation.
