Religion & Society

The Wedding Song (Le Chant des Mariées) Released 2009 Director: Karin Albou Writer: Karin Albou Country: France / Tunisia Language: In French and Arabic with subtitles Runtime: 100mins Broadcast on SBS 11 November 2009 This excellent film, set in Tunisia in 1942 during the German occupation, focuses on two 16 year old girls, Myriam (Jewish) and Nour (Muslim). Both their families are poor; Nour because that is her family’s lot, and Myriam because she and her mother have fallen on hard times after the death of her father. The two families live in adjoining apartments overlooking the same courtyard in the alleyways of Tunis, where the two girls have grown up together, developing a strong sisterly bond and sharing secrets and dreams of love. Myriam has been to school and is literate; Nour has not attended school, so Myriam has taught her to read Arabic. The girls consider their different religious faiths as being of no consequence to their friendship. Each girl is to be married off by thei...

The Australian city of Melbourne and its new Convention Centre played host last December to the Parliament of the World’s Religions (PWR), arguably the world’s pre-eminent interfaith event. The PWR was birthed in Chicago in 1893 but remained in a state of limbo for a century until being revived in 1993, with subsequent meetings held in 1999, 2004, and, most recently, December 3–9, 2009. The full text of this article was published in "Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity" 23/2 (March/April 2010), pp47-48

A busy life in a big city with a demanding job can creep up on you, pushing alternative perspectives on life to the margins, and threatening to relegate faith to a mechanical hour or so on a Sunday. In such circumstances, one way to take time out for some therapeutic spiritual reflection is to have a monastic experience. At least, this is what has worked for me down the years. After establishing myself in London in the mid-1990s, and getting buried in my work, I was introduced by a close friend to a wonderful Benedictine monastery in the north of France, only thirty minutes from Calais. Over the last ten years I have visited it five times; these visits have taken place at different times of the year, and all have been satisfying. However, perhaps the most meaningful have been those visits coinciding with the Advent season, where the solitude and silence afforded by the monastic environment have served as an ideal context to consider the birth of Christ and its significance in human sa...

THE New Year has started badly for Christians in Malaysia. In the past week, a number of churches have been firebombed, and Malaysian police have increased security at Christian places of worship around the country. The trigger to these incidents was a ruling, issued on New Year’s Eve, by the Malaysian High Court, which allowed Roman Catholics to use the term “Allah” to describe the Christian God in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia (News, 18 December). This overturned an earlier ban by the Malaysian government. In response, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Mohd Najib, quickly announced that the Ministry of Home Affairs would appeal in the case. The dispute has deep roots. Of Malaysia’s population of 27 million, 60 per cent are Muslim, nine per cent are Christian, and there are sub­stantial numbers of Buddhists (19 per cent) and Hindus (six per cent). The resurgence in Islamic con­sciousness that has swept the world since the 1970s had a profound impact on Muslims in Malay...

The Swiss referendum in December, which supported a ban on construction of minarets, signalled troubles in the West-Muslim relationship. The reasons for these troubles, as well as possible solutions, were considered in a plenary session entitled “Islam and the West: Creating an Accord of Civilisations” at the December 2009 gathering in Melbourne of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Professor Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University spoke from personal experience as a Muslim in Europe, explaining that “if we travel within both Western and Muslim countries we can quickly see a clash of perceptions. The Swiss referendum was not simply an issue of minarets. Many Swiss people who opposed the ban on minarets nevertheless expressed mistrust of Muslims,” he said. “Similarly a poll in France suggested 46% support there for a ban on minarets. The opposition is really directed at the visible Muslim presence in the West. Across Europe this new Muslim visibility is a concern.” Speakers considered...