King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, will launch an inter-faith conference in Spain later this month, reported the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) Saturday. The King “will inaugurate the international dialogue conference which will be held under his auspices in Madrid on July 16-18,” a statement carried by SPA said. The agency said the King had left for Morocco on a private visit ahead of the conference due to be attended by Christians, Jews and Muslims. In March, King Abdullah proposed talks among the three largest monotheistic religions in a first for the Kingdom. Last month the Makkah-based Muslim World League said the Madrid meeting would bring together representatives from the “followers of Allah's messages and other cultures.” The conference will “discuss cooperation between communities from different religions and cultures over common human values,” MWL Secretary General Abdullah Al-Turki said. Leading Islamic scholars meeting in the holy city of Makkah in early June also proposed creating a center to promote relations between religions. The three-day conference, which was the brainchild of King Abdullah, called for establishing a King Abdullah International Award for Civilized Dialogue to be granted to “figures and international organizations that contribute to advancing the dialogue in order to reach its objectives.” It also recommended the establishment of King Abdullah International Center for Dialogue Among Civilizations to spread the culture of dialogue. The scholars called on the King to bring together specialists from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions and other beliefs “to agree on a format for a fruitful world dialogue that would contribute to solving problems faced today by mankind.” But the scholars insisted that dialogue should not mean abandoning their principles and their religion's fundamentals. “A constructive dialogue and peaceful coexistence and cooperation between the followers of Allah's messages and others does not mean abandoning the axioms, or giving up the religion's fundamentals,” their final statement said. Scholars called for forming an international commission for dialogue with the aim to chalk out unified strategies for dialogue and to activate, cooperate, and coordinate with agencies concerned. Members of this commission would be selected by the Muslim World League (MWL). Recommendation was also made for holding conferences and symposiums for dialogue between followers of divine messages and other ideologies. __
