Paul Keenan
Dialogue of the Heart: Christian Muslim Stories of Encounter
by Fr Martin McGee OSB
(Veritas, €12.99)
Late in March 1996, at the height of the Algerian Civil War, seven Trappist monks of the Notre-Dame de l’Atlas in Tibhirine, were abducted by members of the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA), reportedly to be exchanged for the group’s imprisoned former leader, Abdelhak Layada. After two months of captivity, and failed negotiations with the French Secret Service, the GIA announced it had executed the seven. Investigators would later find seven heads dumped in the desert.
That a religious congregation which met such a grisly end should become the subject of author Fr Martin McGee’s championing of Christian-Muslim dialogue in his Dialogue of the Heart might seem at first glance to be strange.
That his message should emerge now, just as a virulent strain of Islamic fundamentalism eschews all and any negotiation with anyone not succumbing to its poisonous ideology, seems no less bizarre.
However, as Fr McGee himself demonstrates through his close examination of the witness offered by the monks of Tibhirine, the message he conveys on their behalf is both important and timely.
Indeed, the story of the monks of Tibhirine, already compelling enough to have resulted in the multi-award-winning film Of Gods and Men (2010), is one which the author finds to be replete with examples of inter-religious solidarity which outshine the barbaric works of the fundamentalists.
Meanwhile, as the ongoing Syrian conflict forces ever more refugees into Europe, Christian and Muslims are coming into ever more contact with each other, requiring a model of co-existence to avoid what the author calls a retreat into “social ghettoes [where we] look at each other with increasing suspicion”.
Taking as his starting point the steadfast refusal of the Tibhirine monks to abandon their Muslim neighbours, whom they lived alongside in a shared “context of weakness and vulnerability”, and despite direct threats to themselves, Fr McGee examines the lives and works of four of the monks – interviewing two survivors who had been fortunate enough to be overlooked by the militants as they stormed the monastery that fateful night in 1996.
What emerges is a story of Gospel values fully lived, in which the murdered Trappists dared to reach out to ‘the other’ – their Muslim neighbours – towards a deep understanding of each other, a true dialogue of the heart.
An early result of this reaching out comes in the chapter dealing with the life of Bro. Luc.
Employing his medical qualifications to tend to the villagers of Tibhirine, Bro. Luc’s spiritual life is revealed to them, until Fr McGee is able to quote them as declaring, “he is almost like one of us!”
Later, building on such trust, Fr Christian would found The Bond of Peace, a forum for dialogue which drew Muslim scholars to Tibhirine for enhanced understanding through discussion and shared prayer.
Thus, in the book’s second half, Fr McGee is able to expand from tiny Tibhirine to a broader understanding of the relationship between the Catholic Church and Islam in Algeria, before coming to a consideration of what lessons this holds for Christian-Muslim dialogue in 2015 and beyond.
Clinging to the example of the Trappists of Tibhirine, Fr McGee contends that “the dialogue of friendship is open to all of us. The only qualification is that we try to see and love God’s image and likeness in our neighbour… The lives of the Tibhirine monks teach us that love is the most effective way of overcoming fear of the other.”
