Sephardic chief rabbi criticizes pope's remarks

[link to www.haaretz.com]
By Yair Ettinger and Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondents, Haaretz Service and Agencies

The Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel on Sunday sent a letter criticizing the pope for his remarks on Islam to a leading Sunni Islamic legal scholar in Qatar.

In the letter, Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar wrote to Sheikh Yusef Kardawi, "our way is to honor every religion and every nation according to their paths, as it is written in the book of prophets: 'because every nation will go in the name of its lord.'"

"Even when there is a struggle between nations" Amar added, "it cannot be turned into a war of religions."

The letter, written in Arabic, was delivered to Kardawi by a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Abdullah Naimar Darwish. Amar sent the letter first to Rabbi Menachem Froman, chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, who is known as a champion of inter-religious reconciliation.

In his introduction to the letter, Froman added to Amar's remarks, saying "every Jew who learns the writings of the great sages - who, at the head of them all stands Maimonides - knows that our great thinkers wrote in the Arabic language, lived in Islamic states and participated with the great Muslim thinkers in the effort to explain the words of God, according to the paths of the sages and amidst the difficult bloody battles that we have had since the beginning of Zionism with the Muslims.


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Last Edited by SHR on 09/29/2011 05:54 PM