{"id":341968,"date":"2013-05-26T05:00:12","date_gmt":"2013-05-26T03:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/christians-and-muslims-united-in-love-for-god-and-neighbour\/"},"modified":"2024-06-06T12:09:23","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:09:23","slug":"christians-and-muslims-united-in-love-for-god-and-neighbour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/christians-and-muslims-united-in-love-for-god-and-neighbour\/","title":{"rendered":"Christians and Muslims united in love for God and neighbour"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img alt=\"\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-86086\" src=\"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/20130526-02.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" \/><strong>Professor Mohammad Shomali<\/strong> is very active in the field of interfaith dialogue. He is <strong>Dean of Postgraduate studies at the Department of International Affairs at Jami\u2019at al-Zahra<\/strong> and is also the<strong> Director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies, Qom, Iran.<\/strong> He has been instrumental in organising events with Benedictine monks, Mennonites and has taken three delegations of post-graduate Iranian students to Rome to have spiritual contacts with Christianity. He was recently in Rome with a group of women students. We publish an extract of an interview with him.<strong> <\/strong><strong><em><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Recently, you led a delegation of young women students to Rome. What was your and their experience? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In May 2013, my wife and I accompanied a group of ten women currently doing post-graduate studies at Jami\u2019atul Zahra, the largest Islamic seminary for women in Iran in the city of Qom. This was my 7<sup>th<\/sup> visit to Italy but I can say that it was the most successful\u00a0 (\u2026) as over time you establish trust and you have a deeper level of friendship and dialogue. <img alt=\"\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-86087 alignleft\" style=\"margin-right: 10px\" src=\"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/20130526-01.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"240\" \/><strong><em><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>What is your experience of dialogue within the Focolare Movement; what are the characteristics of this dialogue?<\/em><\/strong><strong><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>(\u2026) For us, the Focolare Movement served as a gateway to Christianity. With our Focolare friends we feel at ease as they have a deep sense of commitment to God, a profound love for God and humanity, and at the same time they have a great openness. (\u2026) You feel that they do their best to accommodate you ; they make you feel that together we can work for the good.<\/p>\n<p>I am sure that this charism of Chiara &#8211; her spirituality &#8211; was a gift from God in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century and our hope is that it will continue to bear fruits in this 21<sup>st<\/sup> century. I very much also liked the idea of unity in that we should act as a community; we should think together, we should plan together, we should work together, and it\u2019s very similar to what I think is the core message of Islam, especially in the school of the Ahlulbayt (Shia Islam) that we very much focus on the love which must exist between believers.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore I find the spirituality of the Focolare very interesting. What they preach and what they exhibit in their character both confirm that we can achieve a lot if we have genuine love for God and for neighbour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We publish an interview with Professor Mohammad Shomali, Director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies, Qom, Iran, who was recently on a visit to Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-categorizzato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341968\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}