VATICAN CITY, Nov 4: The Vatican on Tuesday opened historic inter-faith talks with top Muslim leaders, two years after Pope Benedict XVI sparked outrage among Muslims with a speech seen as linking Islam with violence.

The Holy See’s first-ever Catholic-Muslim forum opens “a new chapter in the long history” of dialogue between the two faiths, the head of the 29-member Catholic delegation, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, told the French Catholic daily La Croix.

Benedict will meet the delegations on Thursday. The Muslim side is led by the Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric, whose spokesman Yahya Pallavicini told AFP the delegates “represent no state and no ideological tendency”.

Tunisian academic Adnane Mokrani, a member of the Muslim delegation, said on Italian public radio RAI that the talks should be transformed from closed door dialogue to an open forum.

The delegation includes Swiss intellectual Tariq Ramadan, an outspoken Muslim figure in Europe, along with Aref Ali Nayed of the Islamic Centre of Strategic Studies in Amman, Jordan, and Iranian ayatollah Seyyed Mustafa Manegheg Damad.

Ramadan, in a commentary published in France’s Le Monde newspaper on Tuesday, said the need for “constructive dialogue on the values and the common goals is more important than rivalry on the size of the adherents and conversion”.—AFP