RABAT – Quoting the declaration made by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)in Madinah more than 1400 years ago, a galaxy of Muslim scholars have released a declaration vowing to protect religious minorities and forbid all forms of persecution.
“Ideas must counter ideas,” Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, the founder of a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, California, told the gathering, NPR reported.
“You can drop all the bombs you want, but if you don’t pull up weeds by their roots, they just grow back.”
Sheikh Yusuf is one of about 250 Muslim scholars who gathered from more than 100 countries in Marrakech this week.
The gathering was sponsored by the Moroccan government and the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, an organization led by Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah.
It was urged to counter increasing atrocities by the so-called Islamic State against religious minorities, rejecting them as contradicting with the true teachings of Islam.
The scholars will hark back to the Charter of Madinah, in which the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) enumerated the rights of non-Muslims 1,400 years ago.
The conference, held from January 25-27, is deemed the first major effort of its kind in the Muslim world since the Charter of Madinah, written in 622 C.E. as the first constitution of the Muslim world.
An example of the charter’s principles is Article 17: “No Jew will be wronged for being a Jew.”
Sheikh Yusuf said the meeting had one focus: the plight of religious minorities in Muslim lands.
“We have people being enslaved into sexual slavery,” he told NPR from Marrakech.
“We have Christian churches that have been there for long before Islam was in these lands, that are being destroyed. And we have Jews in Yemen, one of the oldest Jewish communities, now the very existence of which is threatened.”
A declaration coming out of this week’s meeting in Morocco calls on Muslim intellectuals to develop a more inclusive concept of citizenship.
Education authorities are urged to identify curricular material “that instigates aggression and extremism, leads to war and chaos, and results in the destruction of our shared societies.”
Religious leaders are told to address the “amnesia” of their followers that blocks memories of the centuries of interfaith coexistence on their lands.
“It is unconscionable to employ religion for the purpose of aggressing upon the rights of religious minorities in Muslim countries,” the declaration concludes.