Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, address UN meeting on the need for ‘human brotherhood’.
Pope Francis and a leading Sunni imam have called for peace at the United Nations Security Council in New York, where discussion focused on the importance of “human brotherhood”.
The pope, who is in hospital recovering from abdominal surgery, sent a statement to the UN meeting on Wednesday saying a third world war is being fought “piece by piece” and that humanity is suffering from a “famine of brotherhood”.
Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old seat of Sunni teachings in Cairo, said in a virtual briefing to the UN Council that human brotherhood is the key to world peace, a point he and the pope had made in a joint document released in 2019.
“In our age, with nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, the battlefield has become virtually unbounded and the consequences are potentially catastrophic,” the pope said in his statement, which was read by Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary for relations. with states and international organizations.
“The time has come to say emphatically ‘no’ to war, to state that wars are not just, only peace is just.” added the pope in the statement.
Al-Tayeb said his intention in speaking to the council was to push for an end to pointless wars. He mentioned Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
The Grand Imam also called on the council to recognize an independent Palestinian state after 75 years.
Without mentioning Russia or Ukraine, the Grand Imam said the war unfolding on Europe’s eastern borders had sparked terror and “concern that humanity could regress to a primitive age”.
“Our meeting today is not a luxury but a necessity, prompted by concern for the future of humanity,” al-Tayeb said.
The Grand Imam said that the mission of Al-Azhar and the Roman Catholic Church in the 2019 document on human brotherhood for world peace should be pursued by political leaders.
The United Arab Emirates this month chose the importance of human brotherhood in bringing peace as a central part of their presidency of the council.
HE Grand Imam of Al-Azhar @alimamaltayeb stressed the importance of reviving the culture of dialogue between religions and consolidating the principles of peace and peaceful coexistence in the #UAExUNSC signature event.
“We are forced in the face of these crises to… pic.twitter.com/e3fBdPbayR
— UAE Mission to the UN (@UAEMissionToUN) June 14, 2023
Following appeals from the Pope and Grand Imam and speeches from the council, members passed a resolution recognizing that hate speech, racism, xenophobia, intolerance, gender discrimination and acts of extremism “can contribute to the outbreak, escalation and recurrence of conflicts”.
The resolution, co-sponsored by the UAE and the UK, passed unanimously, although some of the council’s 15 members were charged with some of the same actions they condemned.
UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh told The Associated Press after the vote that it was a “landmark” resolution that for the first time brings together previous council resolutions that address hate speech, racism, incitement and extremism in different ways.
Nusseibeh said it promotes tolerance, equality, coexistence and dialogue.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the pope and grand imam’s statement “a model for compassion and human solidarity” and urged countries and people everywhere to “stand together as one human family” and “create an alliance of peace, rooted in the values of human brotherhood”.