In our previous newsletter we informed you about our webinar of June 22 – June 24 with the title Muslims and Christians contributing to building up the future of Egyptian society.

This is your chance to engage in discussions with some of the world’s best scholars and experts on this subject. We have asked each speaker for a text that will be sent out to participants prior to the start of the webinar. This makes it possible to engage with these experts about their presentations. We have asked the Anna Lindh Foundation for support to establish an Ambassadorial Dialogue Program. This webinar will collect experiences and suggestions to build the proposed Ambassadorial Dialogue Program. These Ambassadors for Dialogue then will spread the message of dialogue in informed ways, countering stereotypes and other forms of misinformation.

One of the participant scholars is Dr. Giuseppe Scattolin, one of the world’s greatest experts on Sufism. Dr. Scattolin prepared a discussion paper in which he warns that Understanding any literary text is a difficult task since there is a distance between our epistemological world and that of its author. Overcoming such a distance means undertaking a risky but inescapable travel from our spiritual world to that of the author, and vice versa from the author’s spiritual world to ours. There is often not one way of interpretation but there are wrong attitudes that we need to get rid of such as the myth of ‘literal reading.’  There is no such a thing as the ‘literal reading’ of a text, Dr. Scattolin states, “reading always means understanding a text, and necessarily translating it,” to one’s own understanding. This applies to Sufi texts but this equally applies to reading Holy Scriptures as the Bible and Qur’an as well.

These papers are an integral part of this webinar and this is what will make this so absolutely unique. Prof. Dr. Harald Suermann of the University of Aachen, Germany, was planning to visit Egypt with his students this month. The covid-19 virus has cancelled those plans but he now encouraged his students to participate in this webinar. Sign-up and participate!

The main language of this webinar is English. Some experts will be speaking Arabic but in those cases we provide translation. Applications need to be made on-line here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQOiemROQNlQXXxYu7oCLBmilW19iQhOrXbWSZmkJlG-oATA/viewform or write me on [email protected].

We can provide students who have truly participated with a certificate.  

Please apply as soon as possible which will help us in our preparations.

Cairo, June 4, 2020

Drs. Cornelis Hulsman, editor-in-chief Arab-West Report