Saudi Arabia to lead UN talks on religious tolerance 

By Neil MacFarquar
November 11, 2008
International Herald Tribune
Original Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/11/mideast/nations.php

UNITED NATIONS, New York: Saudi Arabia, which deploys a special police force to ensure that only one narrow sect of Islam predominates in the kingdom, is sponsoring a discussion at the United Nations on religious tolerance starting Wednesday.
More than a dozen world leaders are expected to attend, including President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah, making a rare appearance at the UN headquarters.
Officially, the United Nations does not sponsor religious discussions, so the two-day session of the General Assembly is being billed as a meeting on the Culture of Peace, and most of those attending are government rather than religious figures.
But human rights defenders are crying foul that Saudi Arabia is being given the platform of the United Nations to promote religious tolerance abroad while it actively combats anything similar at home.
It's like apartheid South Africa having a conference at the UN on racial harmony, said Ali Al-Ahmed, a Shiite Muslim dissident from Saudi Arabia based in Washington.
In the lead-up to the conference there has also been a pitched battle among Western states trying to safeguard freedom of speech and Muslim states attempting to get a statement or resolution passed that condemns anything that might echo the Danish newspaper cartoons that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. The compromise formula is that there will be no formal final resolution but an oral statement saying that disparaging other religions should be condemned.
Some of the excitement surrounding the conference is generated by the fact that the Saudi monarch and the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, were both invited by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, to a dinner on Tuesday evening. No one is predicting a specific outcome, but said the leaders' proximity suggested what the meeting was meant to showcase.
The purpose of the meeting itself is to promote mutual understanding and to address all differences of opinion, either political or religious, said Ban, while skirting the issue of the lack of religious freedom inside Saudi Arabia.
Western leaders, starting with Bush, have taken the attitude that any attempt by the leader of a Muslim state, especially one as influential as Saudi Arabia, is worth supporting.
He is hopeful that this dialogue will provide a platform for voices from many different religions to foster tolerance, said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman. Bush believes in the the importance of people, especially people in the Muslim world, being empowered to say that suicide bombings are not O.K. and to make that case especially to the young people of the Muslim world.
Neither the Saudi Embassy at the United Nations nor the embassy in Washington responded to phone and e-mail messages seeking a comment about criticism of the kingdom's domestic record on religious discrimination.
Saudi Arabia forbids its citizens and the sprawling expatriate community, including tens of thousands of Christians, from any form of public worship except for Islam. Even within Islam, the more than two million Shiites in the kingdom face widespread discrimination in worship, education and employment. The intolerance also extends to Sunni Islam. Only the teachings of the Hanbali sect are encouraged, while the other three main branches of the faith are opposed.
A special police force patrols the kingdom making sure that Muslims go to prayer five times a day and that no other religion is practiced.
The Saudi government often portrays King Abdullah as a reformer, doing what he can to oppose a puritanical religious establishment. They cite the interfaith dialogue as a prime example of that kind of reform.
But critics point out that the kingdom promotes such dialogue at the United Nations, not in Riyadh.
They maintain that the long alliance between the ruling Al-Saud dynasty and the clerical establishment is still going strong, with the clerics endorsing the absolute rule of the princes in exchange for the religious establishment's wide influence over social and religious policy.
It is a public relations exercise, they want to shed the image that they are the kingdom of intolerance and extremism and xenophobia, Ahmed said of the interfaith dialogue.
The government controls the whole religious establishment, that is the problem. The problem is that the Saudi government doesn't want to change anything.