Where Islam-Church relations are ok

[lemonbeam]

VATICAN CITY, OCT. 6, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A bishop at the Africa synod is proposing that North Africans participate in the 2010 synod on the Middle East, since Muslim-Christian relations in the north of the African continent are different than in the sub-Saharan region.

This proposal was made today by Bishop Maroun Elias Lahham of Tunis, Tunisia. The Jordanian-born bishop was ordained a priest for Jerusalem and assigned to the Diocese of Tunis in 2005.

The prelate noted that the working document to prepare the Second Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops, which began Sunday in Rome, “talks about Islam in only one paragraph, in generic terms and only touching upon Islam in sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Now,” he said, "the vast majority on African Muslims live in North Africa, a geographic area completely absent in the ‘instrumentum laboris.’ Another point is that almost 80% of the 350 million Muslim Arabs live in Northern African countries. “This is just to point out that Islamic-Christian relations in North Africa are different from those in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, and even from the Arab countries in the Middle East.”

More: zenit.org/article-27086?l=english