Dialogue between civilisation to continue

Participants in a first-of-its-kind seminar on Islamic-Japanese inter-civilisation understanding, hosted here by the Bahraini and Japanese governments, yesterday agreed to meet next year in Tokyo to continue their "endless dialogue," said the organiser of the two-day conference.

The seminar on "Dialogue among Civilisations - Japan and the Islamic World" ended yesterday evening without any specific recommendations but the intention of having the second session in Japan next year. The third will be held in Iran in 2004.

"It was moderately successful," the organiser, Dr Ali Fakhro, Chairman of the Bahrain Centre for Studies and Research, said of the seminar in which 30 Arabic-speaking intellectuals and six Japanese counterparts have participated.

"However, it is a very good start in an endless process. We agreed to form a committee representing the parties concerned in order to follow up whatever has been discussed such as launching a web site for the participant to have regular contacts, setting up the agenda for the next session and choosing the participants who will be different," of those who had attended the Bahrain seminar, he told Gulf News at the end of the last working session.

The seminar, which was held under the patronage of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, had been made possible through the initiative of Japan's former foreign minister, Yohei Kono, who had visited Gulf states in January last year.

The seminar focused on three subjects; co-existence and interaction between Islamic and Arab countries and Japan, Islam and international relations and Islam and globalisation.

One of the issues addressed by the conference, Dr. Fakhro said, was the stereotypes Arabs and Muslims have about the Japanese and vice versa.

"There will be sub-sessions in the coming months wholly dedicated to such specific subjects," he added.

Later at a joint press conference, Professor Yuzo Itagaki, member of the Science Council of Japan said that, for him, the seminar was "a dream come true."

He said the Japanese delegation learned many things from their Muslim counterparts. "Japan and the Muslim nation are destined to approximate each other. Our history in Japan is in parallel to that of the Muslims, but we discovered meaningful differences because of which we will have this unlimited dialogue," he explained.

Nevertheless, he said, there are no instant conclusions. "It is an encouraging beginning," he observed.

In the seminar, he pointed out, there were "some very heated exchange of views and some of it was emotional". "But this is what dialogue is about," Itagaki added.

The dialogue will naturally go out of the intellectual elites closed doors to connect ordinary people. There will be direct contacts between students, teachers and experts who may want to examine school text books in order to correct false assumptions and to enrich each side's horizons about other civilisations.

"We need to learn from each other," said Professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, Yoshiya Abe.

"In spite the fact we, in Japan and the Arab and Islamic countries, are heavily interdependent economically, we lack this relationship culturally. For example, we don't have in Japan enough information about Islam and its followers even in school text books. And I believe this is also the case on the other side," he said.