Milan (AsiaNews) - This year's meeting of the Oasis International Foundation will take place in Sarajevo on Monday and Tuesday next week (16-17 June). Its topic will be 'The Temptation of Violence: Religions between War and Reconciliation'. In previous years, the foundation met in Milan, Tunis, Venice, Beirut, Amman, and Cairo.
This event, chaired by Card Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan, will be opened by Card Vinko Puljić, archbishop of Sarajevo, and Husein ef. Kavazović, Grand Mufti (Reis-ul-ulema) of the Islamic community of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The subject and the location of the meeting will offer many stimuli to the discussions that will proceed on the basis of the following guidelines:
- a re-reading of the consequences of the First World War, an epochal event not only for Europe but also for the Islamic world (the end of the Ottoman caliphate, the birth of political Islam and Arab nationalism, the strategic centrality of oil, the first genocides);
- the problematisation of the war. The period inaugurated by the First World War was characterised by deep contradictions. On the one hand, there was a calling into question of war in a radical way that was hitherto unknown at a religious and secular level; on the other, the era of the great genocides began, and the classic institution of war was eclipsed, gradually replaced by terrorism;
- religious violence. Although at the outset, the religious element had a limited role in the Great War, the nexus with religion came back onto the stage (one may think of Jihadism in the Middle East and Africa), with a grave impact on minorities. The return of religiously motivated violence has generated as a reaction in the West as suspicion about faiths rose, in particular about the monotheistic faiths, accused of being structurally violent and intolerant;
- the war in Bosnia (1992-1995). Addressing the subject of war and peace specifically in Sarajevo is not a secondary fact. Indeed, the city still bears the traces of the recent conflict and compels reflection about the violence that took place twenty years ago, which was nourished by an ethnic-religious dimension as well.