Tunis University Colloquium on Justice and Peace
27.05.2009:: by Christoph Spreng

The Chair Ben Ali for Dialogue of Civilisations and Religions hosted a Colloquium 20-23 April 2009 to which former AfR Steering Group member Christoph Spreng was invited to contribute.

The Chair Ben Ali for Dialogue of Civilisations and Religions, held by Prof Mhamed Hassine Fantar, invited for a Colloquium on the issue of “Justice and Peace, seen from the Religious Scriptures and Philosophical Thought”. The Chair had been created in 2001, thus making Dialogue an item to be developed on the academic level.

The event was attended by 100 academics, writers and activists from 15 mostly Mediterranean countries and besides plenary opening and closing events ran parallel in three separate rooms, packed with paper presentations spanning a 15 item breakdown of the main theme. One of the sessions ran for five hours.

Trying to give an overview of so much erudite learning and experience is not being attempted here. But simply to say that it was a noble effort of keeping an open debate going among a most diverse attendance. From either side of this spectrum between Iranians and Israelis there were some hermetic presentations as if there was nothing new to explore and learn. But the larger number were those who were favouring mutual learning and dialogue and willingness to see what Schools of Scripture and Thought could reveal at this point in time, in rare cases going to honest appraisal of one’s own need to improve.

The invitation for this event got to me because we had met Prof Fantar in particular circumstances three years ago in Seville, Spain. I was invited to present in the largest of the three rooms (with translation from French into Arabic and English). Due to some hiccups in the colloquium organisation my own contribution – “Some perceptions from the civil society (NGO) on Peace and Justice” - required cutting from 20 to 10 minutes just instances before delivery. Because or in spite of that the Chair of the meeting picked up two thoughts from it in his concluding remarks of the sitting.

Many conversations took place in between sessions, as well as on an outing that took us to the historic sites of Fort Keliba and the Kerkouan excavations, the latter one of the many of Fantar’s own achievements. (Photo caption: Fantar explaining the Kerkouan excavations.)

News has just come in that the Chair Ben Ali intends to publish the colloquium proceedings in a book.

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