“Being a historian I believe that one of the reasons for today’s problems with what we call ‘dialogue among civilizations’ in the Mediterranean area — precisely between the northern and the southern shore — is the result of an imprecise basic vocabulary” explains historian Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, a professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy. “That is why I am working on the construction of a sort of shared library: our authors and their authors, the pages we have read and those that our friends on the other side of the Mediterranean have read. But which are these 10 Mediterranean books which allow our discussion today to be one in which we understand one another?” We interviewed Professor Mascilli Migliorini during our Istanbul Seminars 2013.

“We must underline the importance of dialogue between Islam and the West, and we should overcome the historical difficulties that have divided them. The main condition for dialogue between the West and the Muslim world is: Western countries need to change their attitude and Muslims commit themselves to democratic norms, beyond the cliché that secularism means democracy and Islamism means dictatorship”, explains Gholamali Khoshroo, an Iranian scholar, Senior Editor of the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Islam and former Deputy Minister of Mohammad Khatami.

“Islam is in a transformative course of the European public space: this means that we have to engage in new ways of post-enlightenment understanding of Western modernity. More and more, the issues related to Islam are transforming the definitions of the European public spheres. Today we can’t frame the Islamic difference within the usual discourses of multiculturalism or neutral secularity. Religion and secularism might not be opposite binaries after all”, explains Turkish Sociologist Nilüfer Göle, whom we interviewed during our Istanbul Seminars 2013.  

Do Muslims need to secularize the Qur’an to obtain rights, in particular women’s rights? “No, says philosopher Asma Barlas – a Professor of Politics and Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, USA – because the Qur’an is sacred and untouchable. But freedom in applying Qur’anic hermeneutics to support the struggle of women for equality and justice is important. Scriptures can be read and interpreted paying more attention to the problem of gender equality and following what I call an “antipatriarchal episteme”, because God’s word is in no way gendered.” We interviewed Prof. Asma Barlas during our Istanbul Seminars.

“One really important thing is how we imagine the world, how we create some of the reality that we live in by imagining it. The phenomenon of the social imaginary gives us not just some topics that we talk about, but the very way we talk, the way we think of the world. How do people from one part of the world conceptualize other parts of the world? Do we think of humanity as a whole lot of individual people, or do we think about the kind of connections that we make? In our countries or even in our families and our cities, the social imaginary is a force that shapes even before we have made conscious decisions about how to act.” How? During our Istanbul Seminars, we interviewed professor Craig Calhoun, the current director of the London School of Economics.

“I think that scholars, both in India and in Europe, need to map the trajectory from irreverence to offence. There is a culture of irreverence, and this culture emerges from skepticism, from play, from a little bit of mischief..and gradually, as it develops, we find groups responding to that culture. Some accept it, some enjoy it, some are offended by it. Therefore, I think it is important – as a first exercise for both societies, the Indian and the European, which are in transformation, learning to live with diversity and pluralism – to map these different forms: irreverence, iconoclasm and then offence. Once you map that, you understand what are the elements of irreverence and iconoclasm which produce the offence. The production of this offence has two sides: it can emerge from the contents of what is said, from a film, a cartoon or a painting…and in can emerge from the perception of a group, so it is both content and perception. Very often the perception is produced by political groups, and here politics enters the production of perception. The production of that perception often produces an experience or an expression of offence, although the offence may not be intended and although it may be a very creative act,” explains professor Peter Ronald deSouza, now serving as the interim Director of the International Centre for Human Development in Delhi, India. We have interviewed professor de Souza during our Venice-Delhi Seminars 2012 held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice and the topic of this interview has inspired the subject of our 2013 Seminar held in New Delhi: “Religious Pluralism: Freedom and Diversity, Blasphemy and Respect.” More about the Venice-Delhi Seminars 2013 Read the proceedings of our 2012 Seminar Interview: Nicola MissagliaFilmmaker: Ruben Lagattolla