“We are not one block, you are nor one block”. The East and the West are cultivating a deformed image of each other and it is up to men of good will to dismantle this situation, to avoid simplification endorsing their respective extremisms. This was stated by Giuliano Amato at this international conference in Cairo entitled “Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism”, organised by the Association Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations, and then emphasised in a interview with Guido Rampoldi published in La Repubblica on March 9th.
Amato’s invitation is to urgently establish a dialogue.

The cartoons published by a Danish daily paper – said the Vice-President of the European Convention – cannot represent the position of a whole continent, just as the violence that followed does not represent the entire Muslim world: “Let us abandon the old stereotypes – he insisted – Once simplification is left aside it would not be difficult to converge on shared ethical values”. This is the path that will keep at bay the clash between civilisations, because the Cairo experience proved precisely that the liberal philosophers and jurists, both Muslim and not, can after all feel they are an ‘Us’: “We must, all of us, gain awareness of our defects. The Muslims of the self-pity that ends up by legitimising terrorism. The West of a vision of life and society in which the driving force of economy and the use of freedom all too often appear as totally separated from ethics”.

Amato does not at all ask for “less religion” in the public sphere. He praises its social role and only asks that the dialogue should be moved from a theological to an ethical level: “This does not consist in persuading Muslims but it means discovering the shared values in our faiths, and I would like to add, also shared also by those who do not believe”.
So that this dialogue may be speeded up, however, the West must stop connecting the question of the defense of a liberal view of the political and social life to the Western identity, as if it was an ethnological and exclusive attribute of a part of the world, specially if this identity is interpreted as coincident with Christianism, and Christianism reduced to the West, while the Islamic world must stop seeing colonialist intentions in all initiatives taken by the West.

“This battle is not lost – concluded Giuliano Amato – I believe that the time has come to summon everyone to assume their own responsibilities. Religions, which must reject identity contrapositions; politics, that not only in the United States but now also in Italy uses the ‘clash between civilisations’ to strengthen internal conflict. And the media: consolidating and amplifying stereotypes is not without consequences”.