Pope Francis has met Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, marking a thaw in relations between the mosque and the Vatican. This meeting puts the world’s 2.2 billion Catholics and 1.7 billion Sunni Muslims at the same table to discuss mutual interests for the first time.
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The meeting came five years after the Cairo-based Al-Azhar froze talks with the Vatican to protest comments by then-Pope Benedict.
In a statement, Al-Azhar said Tayeb had accepted the pope’s invitation in order to “explore efforts to spread peace and co-existence”.
A spokesman said the talks had been “very cordial” with the imam spending 30 minutes with the pope and just over an hour in total at St Peter’s.
“The message is the meeting”, the pope told reporters.
The Pope joined the Grand Imam and other members of the Egyptian clerical delegation for a group photograph. “The council chose to freeze dialogue between al-Azhar and the Vatican for an indefinite period”.
Dialogue resumed in 2009 but was suspended again by Al-Azhar in 2011 when Benedict called for the protection of Christian minorities after a bomb attack on a church in Alexandria, an intervention that was perceived as meddling in Egypt’s internal affairs. The situation in the Middle East regarding Christians – whose plight Francis often highlights – was another central topic.
Al-Azhar is the center of Islamic study for Sunni Muslims, who account for about 85 percent of the Muslim world, and its scholars occasionally issue religious edicts that have included denunciations of radical Islamists and violence.
A statement from the Catholic Irish bishops’ conference said “it is too early” to say whether the Pope would attend and added a decision is not expected until a few months before the event.
At the end of the audience, Pope Francis presented the grand imam with two gifts: a copy of his encyclical “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home” and peace medallion depicting an olive tree holding together two pieces of a fractured rock.
El-Tayeb has been imam of the al-Azhar Mosque since 2010 and rector of the university since 2003.
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“Today, I don’t think that there is a fear of Islam as such but of ISIS and its war of conquest, which is partly drawn from Islam”, the pope told French Catholic newspaper La Croix. When Sadiq Khan became London’s first Muslim mayor, Francis congratulated him and hailed him as a beacon of tolerance.
