Faith in Changing World

A few days ago, an international conference with diverse loyalties, and qualities represented in the participants who were scientists, scholars, academics, and researchers from Morocco, and other countries. This conference reflected the interest and the keenness of the Muslim World League, and Mohammadia League of Scholars for today’s world with its conflicts, and darkness. This world needs to call the best methods for creating a suitable atmosphere for spreading the faith and renewing it in the souls, in addition to framing good ideologies that would resist negative tendencies.

Both important leagues which do a great job with such a valuable conference presented Rabat Convention: Faith in Changing World, and its unique recommendations, including founding another humanitarian, faith foundation under the name of the “World Monitor for Faith, and Facing Suspicions.”

This foundation will take care of strengthening the concepts of faith, and their values in addition to monitor the trending suspicions and their agendas that call for chaotic freedom, atheism, social absurdity. These phenomena should be fought by accessible writings, and special seminars.

The convention, which was cited by the Secertary – General of Mohammadia League of Scholars Ahmed Abbadi during the closing session of the conference, added that the foundation will use modern digital, and media to deliver its messages and targets successfully, in addition to publishing its achievement annually in Arabic and English. It will also form a source for thoughts about faith, and faith scholars which will help the man to deal with the growing updates and major events in his country, and world.

During the first session, I talked about atheism in a changing world. I reviewed the advantages of this changing world. Today, we belong to the global world whose rules are quickly changing. We are living under one roof more than before. People who are experts in international relations know well that the world was never stable or static, and it suddenly rebelled. But, the world is shown to us with its fast and deep change, and it never went static. The result could be somehow confusing for analysts when they aim to analyze a regional or universal system as they are both in a continuous change. They found themselves facing limited theories in international relations which they died before they were written. They are dead ideas. The result is difficulty in predicting the future, and identifying its features. It is harder than could be imagined. The world became more misty after the end of the Cold War, the end of a world dominated by two superpowers, the rise of multi economic forces, the development of overseas relations that include major participants which are not countries like bankers who transfer money online, terrorists who trade arms, hackers who threat the cyber security, and the challenges before the pandemics.

Then this environment has multiple manifestations of religious affiliations and others of atheism. Atheism has several definitions and explanations. So, I focused on some psychological and economic explanations during my remarks. These explanations among Western atheists are based on some serious studies. One of them is a study under the title "The Psychological Pattern of the Atheist" which showed a group of American male atheists, and after describing those who adopted atheism as a choice they lost one of their parents before adolescence, and a lot of them suffered a lot in their childhood and young adulthood. There is also a study by Edward Larson in one of its aspects showed that there are high levels of atheists are among people whose income exceeds USD 150,000. Atheism is an old issue as His Excellency Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, Secretary General of the Muslim World League and chairman of the Association of Muslim Scholars, mentioned where he stated that "the atheist arguments are old, aged as the humanitarian history, unlike what is said that they are trending now more before and it results from the discovery of natural sciences of matters that led to atheism.”

In my keynote, I referred to a new issue, related to the neo- atheism that Westerners such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Sting, and others brought it to discussions. They have a huge presence on social media which serves their goals and orientations through films, music, and documentaries. That’s why religious men such as Cardinal Walter Kasper started to fight and resist those trends who were angered by such neo-atheist trends in Britain.

This is what I call aggressive neo-atheism. The neo-atheists don’t only deny the presence of God, but they attack and oppose those who want to prove the opposite. Then, I found that they are in some communities engaging their thoughts with hatred for foreigners, especially Muslims; Islamophobia. So, I referred to the writings of German philosopher Habermas. 

Translated by: Rana Atef