Qatar archdeacon marks out limits to dialogue

The expectation of “reciprocity” on the part of Christians engaged in interfaith dialogue with the Muslim world is unrealistic, according to Dr Bill Schwartz (pictured), the Anglican archdeacon in the Gulf.

In dealings with Saudi Arabia in particular, many Catholic and other Christian leaders have said that if dialogue is to move forward, then the same religious freedoms enjoyed by Muslims in the West should be accorded Christians in the Middle East.

But interfaith dialogue cannot be about reciprocity, Dr Schwartz says, because the “two societies” have no common denominator on which to base the discussion. Religious freedom definitions in Muslim countries are based on Islamic traditions and teaching, he says, and not on the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Based in Qatar, where the 250,000 Qatari nationals are outnumbered on a scale of 10 to one by up to 2.5 million expatriate workers, Dr Schwartz was speaking at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, which focuses on relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims. At a seminar chaired by the institute’s founder-director Edward Kessler, he offered telling insights on how dialogue really works “on the ground”.

An Arabic speaker, Dr Schwartz has negotiated, and indeed played his part in developing, interfaith relations in various Gulf states for 30 years and more, and his skills have never been more in demand. His foremost concern today is to help satisfy – by negotiating with the ­powers-that-be in the Gulf – the ever-spiralling need for places for the foreign workers to worship. In Qatar, well over half a million of these are Indians, more than 400,000 Nepalese and perhaps a quarter of a million Filipinos. Hundreds of thousands are Christian. And on Friday (migrant workers on a six-day week) or Saturday (expats who gets a whole weekend off) they want to go to church.

The Government in Doha attempts to accommodate this need while ensuring that the Christian influence is strictly contained and physically walled in. The half-dozen churches that have been permitted, since a relaxation in 2003, have to cater for tens of thousands of worshippers from dozens of denominations and speaking scores of different languages. Only Christians are allowed into the church enclaves, even for delivery of goods. This is more to protect the Christians, Dr Schwartz says, than to “protect” the Muslim population from Christian influence.

The Catholic Church is “very dynamic”, he adds, managing to cope with massive numbers of overwhelmingly Asian Catholics, but its priests have occasionally confessed to him of feeling like “sacrament machines”.

Qatar is a place without history. It has a past, but the pre-Islamic past has been obliterated, and even the Arabic vocabulary there is bereft of Christian concepts. It was under the thumb of Saudi Arabia until the discovery of offshore natural gas in the mid-1990s and since then it has been catapulted into the twenty-first century. Amidst this modernising fervour, dialogue is as hedged about and confined as the churches themselves. The “official” dialogue, Dr Schwartz says, is always “social”. There is no discussion of what Christians mean by the Trinity, for example. Interfaith events are initiated by the Government and their nature is determined by the Government. A principal aim appears to some to be to support an image of the country abroad as open and welcoming. On the other hand, when he pays a Muslim at a checkout, especially when wearing his clerical collar, that is an interfaith exchange, Dr Schwartz says, and so the hundreds of thousands of Christians are involved in interfaith dialogue without knowing it.

Gulf rulers are well aware of hostility to Islam around the world – they are “deeply embarrassed” by Islamic State – and it is easy to see why they might want to use dialogue  as a tool of foreign policy. At any rate, in Qatar it is controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while religious policy is set down by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Representatives from eight Churches meet every month in Doha, and their government contact is in the Foreign Ministry. Last month an exasperated Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican’s interfaith dialogue chief, told Vatican Radio: “We’re condemned to this dialogue since the alternative would be war ... But the fruits of our dialogue with Islam are barely discernible and have no impact in daily life.”

Dr Schwartz for his part advocates realism. He believes there is a desire on the part of Gulf governments to be as considerate of the needs of “guest workers” as sharia law allows. The Gulf, he insists, is still “a great place to be involved in ministry and interfaith work”.