Maryam Ishaq Al-Khalifa Sharief (Sudan)

Speech delivered before an assembly of religious leaders gathered with

the Dalai Lama in San Francisco on April 15, 2006

In the matters of religion, as my good friend Dr William Stoddart once wrote, it is always advisable to start at the centre and then work your way to the periphery, or to start at the top and then work your way downward. Said in another way, it is better in fact to begin with God, not with man or the world. For absoluteness, universality, totality and simplicity belong to the order of God; whereas, relativity, particularity, partiality and complexity are of the order of man.

Now the values of harmony can only reside in the universal order of God wherein all opposition and discord are absent. Thus we all know that God is One, whereas all things that are created or which concern the human world are multiple. It is then a fact which cannot be eradicated, that the world’s various religions should be multiple, and exist as 'Other' to one another. But this fact is nevertheless also capable of being decisively ameliorated. The only way to that end is to make man look more towards God, and less towards the world or his own things.

Unity is already to be found in the Greatest Truth to which all our religions seem to attest in one way or another. This is the truth of the Transcendence of the Divine Reality, or the Divine Principle itself. If one is ready to fully acknowledge that the Divine Reality as such is Transcendent, then one can also admit that this Truth cannot be expressed in a unique form, nor exhausted by a single instance of revelation. In other words, if we cannot capture all of God in our own definition of Him, we must allow for the legitimacy of defining Him in ways of which the sense may not be entirely obvious to us.

There is a prayer of the Prophet Muhammad – Blessings and Peace be upon him - that captures this meaning quite well indeed. He says: "O God! I call upon Thee with every Name that Thou hast taught us to call Thee with, and every Name Thou hast vouchsafed in secret to some of thy servants, and every Name Thou hast kept hidden from all in the realm of the Unseen with you." If we accept this truth of the Infinite Names of God, of which an infinite number is also kept hidden from us, we can hope to meet each other in all sincerity and in truth, not just politely and in tolerance.

But even if one refuses to rise to the highest reaches of metaphysical imagination in comprehending Divine reality, and prefers to think in the down-to-earth terms of simple pragmatism – seeing that we live in a world wherein neither one's particular religious worldview nor that of Religion as such is in a position to set the terms of discourse or to fashion the patterns of life – it stands to reason that people of religion should try to know each other to the best possible degree, and strive to remove their 'lower nature' from their dealings with one another. For one thing, the very survival of one's 'good faith' in the modern pluralist world – wherein we are all bound to exist more often than not in close proximity to one another – demands it. One cannot spend all of one's life hating and denouncing the vast majority of the human race.

On a more positive note, there is the great mutual support that the religions can offer to one another, as paths that acknowledge the Unseen Realities. It thus seems necessary that people of religion should try to focus more on that which unites them, and less on things that divide them. Indeed, what makes the rapprochement between religions something of a modern imperative is the almost identical fate that awaits them, once they lose their ground to the ever-encroaching forces of worldliness and materialism.

Finally, great strides can be made towards establishing harmony between religions, when people guard against the temptation to accuse and condemn any given religion as such, rather than the way humanity practices said religion. Most of all, one must guard against the oft-repeated call to reform religion, to make it better suited to our times, which really means to make it more a symbol of our wishful thinking, rather than a symbol of transcendent truths. If we understand religion to be a Divine gift to humanity, it cannot need reform on account of human wishes. It is man who must reform his ways to live up to the truths and values of religion.

What religion really needs is renewal and revival, within individual souls, as well as an objective message formulated to address all intellectual needs. Thus the people of religion are called upon today to address themselves both intellectually and practically to the challenges that face their faith in this particular historical moment; the presence of other religions being one of the greatest of these challenges. Trying to accomplish this task already goes a long way towards meeting the people of other faiths on a common ground, and to rising to the general challenges of our times.

 

Maryam Ishaq Al-Khalifa Sharief was born in Omdurman, Sudan. On both sides of her family, she is the great-granddaughter of Muhammad ibn Abdallah, commonly known as Al-Mahdi, a religious leader who united the Muslim tribes of the Sudan and led a nationalist revolt against Egyptian rule which led to the fall of Khartoum in 1885.  Members of her immediate and extended family were also prominent leaders of the Sudanese independence movement in the 1940s and 50s, and remain highly respected by the Sudan’s millions of traditional Muslims. Ms. Sharief was educated in the Sudan before she moved to the UK, where she received a B.A in religious studies and history (Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) from the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She earned her master’s degree in Philosophy in Medieval Arabic Thought from Oxford University.  A wife and mother, Mrs. Sharief is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.  Her doctoral thesis is entitled “Sufi Perspectives on Modernity: Modern Perennialism and Parallel Islamic Schools.”  She is well known and respected in many traditional Muslim, Sufi and political circles in the Arab Middle East.