 Hello, can you hear me? Good evening. My name is Professor Gwropal Singh. I'm Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Here at Sowas. It's my great pleasure today to introduce our distinguished speaker. We are delighted to have with us Bishop Michael Naziralli to deliver the third lecture accompanying the exhibition, Embroidered Tales and the Woven Dreams, an exhibition of traditional embroidered textiles from the land of Indus, Afghanistan, the Near Eastern Central Asia. The subject of Bishop Michael's lecture is monks, maggi and mosques, religion along the Silk Road. I've been asked to say that I hope that you have taken the glossary and the map as you came into the auditorium. If you haven't, can you please share with your person sitting next to you? A little bit about our speaker today. For most of us, he leads very few words of introduction. Bishop Michael is the President of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue, OXTRAD. He was Bishop of Rochester from 1994 to 2009. He was then the General Secretary of the Church Mission Society, CMS. Before that, he was a Bishop of Rawindi in Pakistan, where he was both a Christian, where he has both a Christian and Muslim family background. From 1999, Bishop Michael was a member of the House of Lords, where he was active in a number of areas of national and international concerns. Between 1997 and 2003, he was member of the Human Fertilisation Embryology Authority and chair of its Ethic and Law Committee and was also chair of Rochester Commission on Woman Bishops. He was also President of the Network of Interfaith Relations, Nifcon of the Anglican Communion. In addition to these activities, he has studied, researched and taught at a number of colleges and universities, in particular in Karachi and Oxford in Cambridge. He is the author of several books and his latest book is Faith, Freedom and Future, Challenges for the 21st Century. It is my pleasure, as I have said, to invite Bishop Michael to give today's lecture. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Professor Singh, for your generous introduction and for agreeing to chair this lecture. I look forward very much to the discussion later on and may I congratulate those who have organised this splendid exhibition, which is of course the other side to the lecture series. I hope there is no one here who doesn't want to see or has already seen the exhibition because the lectures are strictly ancillary to the exhibition itself. Certainly this one is and I hope you will see it in that light as a comment on what the exhibition is about. Naturally, ladies and gentlemen, I speak from my own point of view and given the subject monks, magi and mosques, religion along the Silk Road, we could have added mandirs as well to the title. I did think about that. There will be many perspectives on such a subject and mine is only mine. I hope that in the discussion there will be some complementing of what I have to say from your point of view and no doubt you will have seen other work on the subject. So I am not claiming uniqueness in any way in what I am addressing. I have put out some important books. I thought I would bring only a few. I could have brought a whole library of course, which are relevant to what I have to say this evening. Do look at them later if you have the time. You may want to sacrifice your tea and coffee to look at the books. I will leave that to you which choice you make. The title that had originally been given was somewhat factual, I think. Let's put it like that. They said, Bishop, would you like to lecture on religion and the Silk Road? So I thought, well, let's tart it up a bit and so monks, magi and mosques was my attempt and I'll leave it to you to judge whether it has succeeded. So first of all, the so-called Silk Road or Silk Route is actually a network of routes. It's not a single road or a single route. It's a network of roads and routes that take, for example, the northern way through Kazakhstan into southern and eastern Europe. There was a middle road that went to Turkey and southern routes which went into Gandhara and the Indus Valley, as you've just heard, and then also into northwestern India and even right down to the west of India. That's not in fact shown on this map. These routes have connected peoples and the nations of Eurasia. You see, Europe and Asia are actually a single continent pretending to be two different ones, but we can debate that. But the Silk Roots actually do give some reality to the idea of Eurasia. And for many hundreds of years, these routes have brought the different peoples of this region into contact with one another. But the routes are not only land routes. There are also sea routes, for example, from India to the Far East, to the so-called spice islands for the spice trade. Naturally, over such a vast area, the trade in goods has also been very diverse. Although the term Silk Root is deserved because of the importance of the trade with China of this highly desirable fabric in the ancient world, there was of course much else besides. There was a lively trade eastwards, for example, of wool and westward of spices. There was the selling and buying of precious metals and stones of tools and raw material. The list could go on. Equally importantly, there was a transfer of technology, whether in the making of paper, techniques of printing or even the introduction of writing and the reducing of hitherto purely oral languages to a written form. So the script, for instance, in many of the countries of the area, has been influenced, for instance, by Aramaic. Now you may say, why Aramaic? Well, we shall see in a moment why. One of the lasting legacies, and this is the subject of the lecture of the Silk Road, has been the bringing together of cultures, beliefs and ideas. This has brought about debate, discussion and dialogue. We cannot pretend that peace has always prevailed. The territories, roots and even the goods for trade have been the subject of wars, piracy and exploitation, especially of the weak. I know that women are particularly being celebrated in this exhibition, and they have been both contributors and actors, but they've also been victims. And we cannot forget that, of course. Nevertheless, people have talked together and learned from one another about each group's cherished beliefs and rituals, their sense of right and wrong, the transmission of moral ideas, and their basis for honesty in trade, for instance. In this connection, it is worth noting that what we call religion today was not a separate, hived-off activity, but belonged to borrow a metaphor from the world of textiles to the very warp and woof of society and of the life of an individual. It was central to people's identity, to its main symbols and to moral understanding and discourse. It was their world view, that is to say, how they understood the universe and their place in it. Arguably, this remains the case in most parts of the world, but sometimes has to be explained to secularized European audiences, not of course this one. When groups came into contact with one another through travel and trade, it was natural for them to discover their trading partners' rituals, values and way of seeing the world. At other times, there was a more deliberate transmission of ideas and beliefs. Scholars, monks and missionaries travelled along the routes, sometimes with the trading caravan, sometimes alone, with the express intention of sharing their knowledge, beliefs and practices with others. The arrival of Buddhism in China and the spread of Nestorian Christianity into Central Asia and China are certainly to be understood in this way of a deliberate transmission. Islam also arrived with conquest, but spread at least partially both in Central and in South Asia through the peaceful exertions of Sufis and merchants. On the other hand, some travelling was intentionally undertaken to establish the origin and authenticity of religious ideas that had been received from elsewhere. The early Buddhist travellers like Fazian and Zhuanzang went to India to determine the origin of the scriptures they had received as Buddhists and to check on the accuracy of their translations. I mean that was the main purpose of the pilgrimages, though of course much else was received besides. Buddhism and Christianity in the form of the Church of the East, sometimes erroneously referred to as Nestorian, can be seen to be active in the heartlands of the Silk Road from the earliest periods, what we might call inner Asia. Buddhism seems to have entered China at about the same time, interestingly, that the Apostle Thomas arrived in Taxila, now northern Pakistan, to build a palace for the Maharaja stroke Basilius Gundaphorus, known to us from contemporary coinage which uses both Greek and Prakrit. So one side of the coin is in Greek, the other in a form of Prakrit. Although the surviving ancient churches of southwest India testify to the Thomas tradition in the south, the archaeological evidence is at least for an initial arrival in the north. I know this is a matter that can be debated and I look forward to it. Be that as it may, the story of Christianity along the Silk Road is closely tied up with the Church of the East. This is a church whose history before the coming of Islam is mainly related to the Persian Empire, the other great superpower to Rome in the ancient world. After the arrival of Islam, its heartlands were in the Islamic world, but it had important missionary work as far as India and China. Bishop William Young, the late Bishop of Sialkot in Pakistan, his book is there, in his history of the church, recounts more or less peaceful coexistence and even dialogue during the Parthian period which lasted up to 225 AD. He tells, for example, of an exchange between Bardesan, a Christian writer regarded in the west quite often as a fatalist and as a gnostic and a magian in which Bardesan is defending freedom of the will and the distinctive ethics of Christians and Jews in that particular context. The emergence of the Sassanids and the turning of the Roman Empire towards Christianity, however, spelled trouble for these Eastern Christians. The Sassanids were much more centralized than the Lucenid Parthians and more self-consciously Zoroastrian. The Christians, moreover, began to be seen as a potential fifth column in the Sassanian conflicts with Rome. Although there had been localized persecution under the Parthians, usually instigated by various kinds of elements, including some magian elements, there were now periods of more organized persecution culminating in the Great Programme of Shapur II. I was in northern Iraq a couple of years ago and I saw people having picnics by the roadside, so I asked the driver, I said, what are they doing? And he said, oh, this is a Christian feast, these people are all Christians. So I said, well, can I go and meet with them? And he said yes, so I did. And so I asked the bishop who was there, the local bishop, what are you doing? And he said, this is the feast of a great martyr. So I said, well, when was he martyred? And he said, in the third century under Shapur II. So that's how far back these stories go. So the patriarch Shamaum witnessed the martyrdom of his bishops, his clergy and his lay people before he himself was executed. The aim seems to have been under Shapur to exterminate Christianity from the Sassanian domains altogether. It was only the edict of the Shah-in-Shah Yazdegard in 410 that the persecution came to an end and the Church of the East was recognized as a millat, a very important word that was to become very important later on, or a religious community within the Persian Empire. The edict had a similar effect to that of the edict of Milan under Constantine in the Roman world, in that Christians were now acknowledged as a religio licita, a licit religion alongside Jews and others. This term millat, it should be on your glossary, was to become important much later with the imposition of the dhimma, again it's on your glossary that word, under Islam and in the organization of the Ottoman Empire. The edict of Yazdegard did not mean that persecution was at an end. It was still a capital crime for a Zoroastrian to convert to another religion and the penalty was enforced again and again, even then. Although the Church of the East seems to have been initially under the nominal oversight of the Patriarchate of Antioch in the early period in the far west of this map, this link was severed by the edict. That is what the Persian Shah and Shahs demanded. The subsequent influence of the teachings of Nestorius further alienated the Church from the Churches to the west. By west of course here I mean western Asia, not western Europe. This to some extent explains the eastwards thrust of the Church's missionary expansion. It appears that the Christians of Saint Thomas of India were within the orbit of Nestorianism although later on they came under Jacobite influence as well. Again that term is explained in the glossary. In central Asia the Nestorians were everywhere. There were metropolitan seas in cities like Merv, Harath and Turkestan. When people and boys arrived at the request of the great Khans, they found the Nestorians there already. Many Mongol and Turkic peoples converted to Christianity and this remained the case until the 13th and 14th centuries and the gradual Islamization of the area. In China similarly the so-called Nestorian steel of Sigenfu, which dates from the 8th century, tells us of the arrival of the first Christian missionary Alor Pen and his team in 635 AD. So just about the time that Islam was emerging as a global force. They received imperial favour and in spite of opposition the Church flourished there until the loss of royal patronage and persecution led to its decline from the 9th century onwards. The discovery of a Christian pagoda from the 8th century by Dr Peter Saiki, a Japanese scholar in the 1930s as well as its rediscovery by Martin Palmer. I know who is familiar to people and so as more recently and also of the so-called Jesus Sutras at Dunhuang confirm a flourishing Christian presence in China. The wonderful account of the two Chinese monks, Rabban, Sauma and his disciple Marcos, the book is there called The Monks of Kublai Khan, who are dispatched from Beijing. Two Christian monks are dispatched from Beijing by the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan to worship a Jerusalem. Shows the church still in China in the 13th century. As is well known, Marcos is first made metropolitan of China by the patriarch Dinka I and then on the sudden death of the patriarch is himself elected patriarch under the name Yab Allah to those who are familiar with Aramaic or Syriac. You will know that Yab Allah means gift of God. Both he and the local Khan then send the other monk, Rabban Sauma to the west to forge an alliance against the Seljuk Turks and to recover Jerusalem. His meetings with the representatives of the pope, his celebration of the Eucharist in Rome and his visits to various monarchs are all found in the journal of their travels published in English by Sir Wallace Budge under the title The Monks of Kublai Khan. In the subsequent centuries, the church would experience many ups and downs. There would be serious persecution from the very groups they had tried to reach. In the last days of the Ottoman Empire, there were to be massacres of these Assyrians as these Christians were also called. They were to be betrayed about promises for a homeland of their own by Western powers. Most recently they as well as others have been the target of Islamist extremism of the most violent kind. To protect themselves and to find fellowship with the wider church, many of their number have entered into communion with the Roman sea whilst retaining their liturgy and customs. They are now known as the Chaldean Catholic Church, which is of course the predominant church in countries like Iraq today. Both Buddhism and Christianity arrived along the Silk Road, as I've said, at about the same time, first to second centuries AD. Both encountered entrenched religious, philosophical and ethical traditions to which they had to relate. Buddhism, for instance, as it spread to China, had to encounter the ethical and civic system of Confucianism. You can't call Confucianism a religion, but it is something. Buddhism had to accommodate itself to the high value given in Confucianism to a structured society, at first alien to the wandering monks of Buddhist culture, to the worship of ancestors and to a syncretistic tendency amongst Confucianists. As the Jesus Sutra show, Christianity in China also had to adapt itself to Taoist and Buddhist terminology, so it would make sense in the context in which it found itself. The encounter between Buddhism in its Mahayana form, which was the dominant form in most of this region, and Christianity in our area of discussion repays some consideration. So the story of Barlam and Yoazaf, again on your sheets, as this story shows, it was possible for even a great, perhaps the greatest Eastern Christian theologian like Saint John of Damascus to use Buddhist motifs and ideas to tell a Christian story about India. So you see what's happening. A theologian in Syria and then in Palestine is telling a Christian story to a Western audience, but using Buddhist motifs. At the same time, it appears that the Mahayana emphasis on Buddha as a savior of the human race has something to do with Christianity's central beliefs and the encounter that had taken place already. This may also be true of a renewed emphasis on metha or the Buddha's unconditional love for humankind and on themes like wisdom. Of course, our concentration so far on the Church of the East should not mean that we forget Christians of other kinds in this area, Armenians, Georgians, Jacobites, also to be found along the Silk Roots. Indeed, just as the fortunes of the Nestorians began to wane, Western religious orders such as the Dominicans and the Franciscans began to arrive in the area. They too experienced a mixed reception, sometimes being welcomed by rulers and allowed to build churches and at other times persecuted viciously for their faith. These missionaries anticipated the famous Jesuit missionary Saint Francis Xavier to Japan and India and the controversy of the Jesuit accommodation to culture in China and India which eventually led to the suppression of the order by Rome. The Jesuits were also one of the main actors in the dialogue among the religions initiated by the Emperor Akbar. Their work continued under Jahangir, Akbar's successor, with churches built in Lahore and Agra. And Catholic activity continued right up to the beginning of the modern missionary movement in the 19th century with many fascinating aspects to it such as the jurisdiction of an Eastern Catholic bishop. In what is now Pakistan and the significant numbers of Christians in the Mughal and the Afghan armies. So one of the things Nader Shah did when he invaded Northwestern India was to take back with him all the gunners that he had captured nearly all of whom were Christian. Although there was tension between Buddhists and Christians, especially in China, Buddhist encounter with Islam has often been portrayed as violent. This is summed up in the destruction caused to temples and shrines by Muslim armies from the time of Mahmood of Ghazna. 971-1030 AD. Their raids into Northwest India were to plunder the wealth of the country but the obvious targets were the wealthy temples and shrines. The destruction of the international Buddhist university at Nalanda in 1202 is often regarded as the Buddhist somnath. Just as Mahmood Ghaznawi had destroyed the temple of Somnath, so also later on the destruction of Nalanda in 1202 a bit later than Mahmood's time is regarded as spelling the end of Buddhism in the place of its birth. As the Chachnama, again I've put that out there, or an account of the Muslim conquest of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim in the 8th century shows, however, earlier conquests were not as destructive. And Qasim went so far as to declare Buddhists and Hindus dimmies or protected peoples even though this title had previously been confined to the Ahl al-Kitab. That is to say the Jews and Christians and by extensions or Westerns, people of the book. He also issued orders that peasants and artisans, people who were making the things at the exhibition, were not to be harmed. And that whilst conversion to Islam was to be encouraged, Hindu and Buddhist worshippers were not to be disturbed. Of course, Muhammad bin Qasim's conquest of the Sindh was much earlier than Mahmood Ghaznawi's raids into northwestern India. In his highly revisionist work, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, again I've put it out there for you. Johann Elverskog has shown that even in situations of tension and violence, tolerance can still be seen and dialogue can continue. He mentions the Buddha figures of Bamiyan as having survived through the Ghaznawit period right up to modern times when they were destroyed by the Taliban. How was this possible, he asks, if rulers like Mahmood were intent only on destruction? To these we can add the Buddhist and Christian remains of locations like Teksela, which even if defaced have survived enough to tell the tale. Elverskog recounts instances of dialogue and understanding between Muslims and Buddhists because of trade. There was even Muslim appreciation and more importantly purchase of the art or Buddhist art in figurines of the Buddha and Buddhist terminology was used in poetry. The widespread popularity of the tales of Kalila Vadimna is another example of literary and artistic exchange between the worlds of Islam and the Buddhist area known as the Buddhist Mediterranean. As far as intellectual exchange is concerned, he points simply to the huge Indian influence on the Islamic and Western worlds of Indian mathematics and logic. There is still a chair of Indian logic, by the way, in the University of Oxford. I'm not quite sure about London. Under the Barmacite vizies who had Buddhist origins, these were the vizies of the Abbasites, there was a real possibility that intellectual engagement would occur in the Muslim world with the Sanskrit tradition rather than the Hellenistic. The Hellenistic engagement was made possible largely through Christian translators who translated either directly from Greek into Arabic or from Syriac into Arabic more often. Whilst this in fact didn't in the end happen, the engagement with Sanskrit, there was enough influence as we shall see in a moment in areas that still remain important today. So, of course, a lot of this exchange was not exclusively Buddhist. Some of it was Hindu, but Buddhists cannot be excluded from these exchanges either. Elvis Koch also claims that there was convergence on ideas of justice and for those Muslims living under Buddhist rule, how non-Muslim rulers could be regarded as just. This question is also a question for today whether Muslim minority is living under non-Muslim rule, whether it's in India or in the Far East or here in the West, whether they can see such rulers as being just in terms of coexistence. Muslim seem also to have been aware of some ethical teachings of the wider Indian tradition including Buddhism such as Ahimsa or non-violence and the abstention from intoxicants. Although it is clear that the earliest stirrings of mysticism in Islam were rooted in the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet, other influences can by no means be discounted. Muslim scholars like Allama Muhammad Iqbal, as well as Westerners such as Margaret Smith, have well shown the interaction between Egyptian, Syrian and Mesopotamian Christian mysticism on the one hand and Sufis on the other. Nor can the influence because of the revival of Hellenistic learning of Neoplatonism be discounted. For example, in the work of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi in his Matnawi Emanui, having said that, the similarities of language, metaphor and parable employed by the Sufis of the Wahadat al-Wajood or monistic school are too similar to Hindu and Buddhist discourse to be dismissed as mere coincidence. So the similarities between the Wahadat al-Wajood school and Hindu and Buddhist discourse can be so similar to make it a problem to know where the quotation has come from in some cases. An obvious example is that of the drop merging into the ocean to signify the souls union with absolute reality, which occurs in both traditions. The greatest similarities with Indian thought are seen in the work of Ba Yazid of Bistam, who had an Indian teacher, Abu Ali Sindhi, and the more esoteric work of Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi, who was, of course, originally from Bulk, and not from Contra. I mean that's where he's buried, but that's not where he was originally from. And Bulk, of course, had been a great Buddhist centre in the past. So you know Ba Yazid's exclamation, glory be to me how great is my majesty, is not simply a sign of hubris, that would make it unacceptable, but a claim of his oneness with God or the absolute. Similarly, Jalaluddin Rumi, in his esoteric work, the Diwan-e-Shamshed Tabriz draws very heavily on what must be the Indic tradition at its widest. This is not unique, of course, because even Imam Ghazali, dare I say, even Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, in his Persian work, you see Ghazali was not an Arab. A lot of these people who are today being passed off as Arab were not Arab at all. Ghazali was Persian, and I had a teacher in Oxford a long time ago who used to make me read Ghazali's Persian work every day. Cymia esadad. Well, Cymia esadad is full of Zoroastrian imagery. The contrast between light and darkness, between reality and illusion. So, I mean, this is a Ghazali very different from the Ehia al-Aloom ad-Din and the refutation of the philosophers, the Tahafot al-Philosopher. In India at least there was continual interaction with Hinduism and in the event the birth of Sikhism was one result. So, the Guru Gharan Sahib still has at least two, if I stand to be corrected, two contributors to the Gharan Sahib who are Sufi, Tabeer and Fareed. One religious system which was hugely successful at one time in the area but which eventually died out was Manichaeism. Its founder Mani seems to have been of Persian origin but belonged to a Jewish Christian Gnostic group as these things did exist, Jewish Christian Gnostic group known as the Alkocytes. In his writings as far as we can tell he developed a dualist system based on the old Persian distinctions between light and darkness, good and evil and so on. The material world and specially human beings according to him are a mixture of good and evil, light and darkness. The good spiritual powers are seeking to liberate the light trapped in the darkness and thus lead us to salvation. This is sort of Manichaean soteriology. This is resisted by the evil powers who seek to devour and to extinguish the light. The followers of Mani in a strictly hierarchical system acknowledge the source of the true light and through their asceticism including celibacy and vegetarianism at least among the higher orders sought to be taken into the sovereignty of the good. Manichaeism was adept at adjusting to cultural conditions whether at a man or Persian or Chinese. Saint Augustine of Hipper in North Africa confessed to having been under its influence before becoming a Christian and it was such a danger in the Islamic world that the term Zandik on your list or heretic originally meant a dualist or a Maniki. In addition to Persian dualism there is some evidence of Hindu and Buddhist influences as Manichaeism developed for example in the belief in the trans migration of souls. It seems that because his Persian work the Arzan was beautifully illustrated it was dedicated to Shahpur by the way he came to be known in Persian literature as the archetypal painter or artist. So in medieval Persian poetry Mani is the artist. The importance of Manichaeism lies in the fact that though it died out it posed a challenge of world view to Christians, Muslims, Jews and Taoists. A challenge which had to be met as the writings of Saint Augustine, Al Beroony and the Fairest of Ibn al-Nadim reveal. Throughout the region we see religions, philosophies and world views arriving from outside or originating within the region itself. Islam arrived in most of the area through conquest but it also spread through instruction, trade and preaching especially of the Sufis. We are reminded here of Sir Thomas Arnold's work on the spread of Islam in India, the preaching of Islam, published I think in 1908, hugely influential on the thought of Alama Iqbal. Certainly as with other religions patronage played its part as did the restrictions of the Dhimma on non-Muslim communities. In our context of the exhibition though the astounding cities of Central Asia like Samarkand and Bukhara already celebrated in the time of the Persian poet Hafiz. This is a line from Hafiz's Diwan. Bachal e Hindwish, Bachal e Hindwish bacham Samarkand o Bukhara. So for one mole on the cheek of the beloved I am willing to exchange Samarkand and Bukhara. It's what you call exaggeration but there we are. So Samarkand and Bukhara with their madrasas, mosques and mausoleums bear witness to a creativity which evokes undiluted attitude. Admiration. As far as the Silk Road is concerned the establishing of caravansarais no more than a day's journey from one another. So you can see how many they needed to be. This shows not only the sophistication of medieval travel. I don't know if you've actually been in a caravansarai but they're extremely well set up around the central courtyard. And people would have been able merchants and others would have been able to stay in some comfort in them. And this, of course, is what made trade and the exchange of ideas and the meeting of cultures possible. As Professor Akbar Ahmad has noted in his living Islam, the Marxist attempt, whether in Central Asia or in China, to approve people from tribal, ethnic and religious identities to create industrial man has failed. That Marxist attempt has failed and we are living with the results of that failure certainly in Central Asia. People are either returning to their roots, be it Tengrism, it's mentioned in your glossary, or natural religion in some of the Central Asian countries, Buddhism or Taoism in China, or Islam in Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. At the same time, evangelical and Catholic Christianity continues to grow in China as well as in Central Asia and Eastern Orthodoxy remains important in the latter. New religious movements are also a feature of the landscape. The fast growth of Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, and sometimes they attract unwanted government attention and restrictions. So the persecution of the Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, in many of the Central Asian countries today, is to be noted. One feature of the religious scene which must be mentioned is both the growth and the fear of Islamist radicalism in many countries in the region. This has resulted in civil war, terrorism, the persecution of minorities like Christians, Jews, Bahais and Hindus, as well as of various Muslim groups. It has restricted the freedom of women and has had a generally negative effect on creativity and freedom of expression. It is also true that in some states attempts to curb extremism have led to a draconian curtailing of fundamental liberties of belief, expression and association. It's a lesson for us to learn, of course, here. As ever, religion both provides an opportunity for growth, debate, creativity and freedom and the dangers of violent extremism, theocracy and totalitarianism. The recent history of the region is full of the tyranny of secular ideology. Tyranny of secular ideology. Let us pray that religion will bring light, peace and love to this beautiful but troubled region. The Sino-Pakistan project of reviving at least one of the roots of the Silk Road is fraught with risk but also holds out the promise which the Silk Road has always done of opening up peoples, cultures and religions to one another. Again, let us pray that is what it does rather than being seen as an alliance against others or a hegemony of one over others. The project does show, however, that the Silk Road continues to have relevance today, cultural, commercial, political and spiritual. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Bishop Michael, for a wonderful lecture. You have, in your own way, highlighted the very rich and varied history of the Silk Road and its relevance today in terms of interreligious dialogue, encounters between religions and civilisations. I was particularly struck by how, in your exposition, you outlined how some of the faiths represented themselves. For example, Christians within Buddhist motifs. I was almost reminded of Gandhi's injunction that one should carry the other's faith within oneself. As well as the overview, you have also highlighted some of the challenges that the encounters that have happened here within the Silk Road demonstrate the growth, the debate and creativity of religions, but also warn us against the dangers of ideology and violence and, in particular, your term, the tyranny of the secular. I think you've given us quite a lot to think about and now it's the opportunity for everyone in the audience to ask questions. So we're open to questions, points of information and contributions. Yes, over there? No, yourself. Yourself. This is just a point of information from the printed material you handed out. How do Zoroastrians come to be known as the people of the book when they have nothing to do with the book? In fact, they were an unwritten religion. Initially they were oral rather than written. There are a number of possible responses. May I respond to that? There are a number of things that can be said. One, of course, is that the Zoroastrians do have a book, the Zenda Vesta. But also the real issue, I think, behind what you're asking, is how Islam came to terms with large, at first, large non-Muslim majorities in the lands that had been conquered. So whilst those lands had been predominantly Christian and to some extent Jewish at first, whether you're thinking of Egypt or Syria or Palestine or Mesopotamia, that as the conquest proceeded they came across other sorts of people. The Zoroastrians were the first in the conquest of Iran and it was completely impractical not to treat them in some way that ensured their survival in their own land because the conquerors were for a long time dependent, not only on the agricultural produce of the native population but in areas like administration, commerce and so on. The way of accommodation had to be found. The point I was trying to make was that what had been done with the Zoroastrians was later extended by Muhammad bin Qasim when he conquered the Sind to an even more problematic group of people from their point of view. That is to say the Hindus and the Buddhists. It seems that at the time of the conquest of the Sind in the 8th century the majority of the population of the Sind was Buddhist and not Hindu. That matter can be debated. So what you find is that the idea of the Dhimma, I mean I have many questions about the Dhimma and how it was exercised but given that was a way of accommodating non-Muslim majorities and in India of course they always remain the majority even under Muslim rule to allow the Muslims to govern. Now it wasn't just that Zoroastrian influence was confined to Iran because in fact we know that the Abbasids actually borrowed from Iranian systems of governance to structure and order their empire and many of the highest officials were in fact Persian. Yes, over there. Hi, can you comment on the obvious influence of Islamic Sufi mystics of the past on say Christian monks in the west? Because why I say that is there are narrations of a meeting that took place between Saint Francis of Assisi and Shamsitabrez. These narrations are kind of oral traditions and they go way back in time. I've heard them myself from certain individuals. And also Saint Cuthbert in England I believe had a meeting with Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani of Baghdad. So it seems that there was an obvious influence of Sufi mystics of the past on other religious groups and that's kind of not really touched upon in the history books I believe. Yeah, I mean there is certainly with, I mean you started with Saint Francis of Assisi. I mean a very remarkable figure because Francis whether he met with Shamsitabrez or not he certainly met with the Egyptian ruler and Caliph Al-Malik Al-Khamil. And after the meeting the Caliph is reported to have said that if he met another Christian like Francis he might become a Christian himself. Unfortunately he never did. But from a Christian point of view unfortunately. What is undoubtedly true? And this is the case even with the Quran itself. The Quran admires the monks for their humility in Surat Al-Maida. So there is a consciousness of Christian monasticism in the Quran itself and there are many references to their forms of prayer and so on. Favorable references. The earliest contact seemed to have been when Sufism was just emerging under Junaid Al-Muhaasibi and Dol Nun, who was Egyptian of course. And Muhammad Iqbal says that what the early Sufis admired about Christian monasticism was not so much their beliefs but their practices. And there is in Sufi writing this continual interaction between in Sufi poetry between Christian monks and Sufis and monasteries and so on. I don't know the story about Saint Cuthbert. It would be very interesting to know some more detail about it. Shamsitabrez is a very shadowy figure. I mean nobody knows who he was. He was obviously a mentor of Jalaluddin Rumi. But the way in which Rumi refers to him is not as an actual historical person so much as an idealized figure, a sort of figure of the divine beloved. And I mean obviously he must have come from Tabrez to have a name like that. But not very much is known about him. I mean I stand to be corrected about this. Okay thank you. There was a person here. Could we have the mic down here please? No sorry down here first. Thank you for your scholarly introduction to some of the religions and history of this vast area which I at least am not familiar. However I did note through your lecture that there seem to be two distinct forces for good in this history. One was the fact that profoundly religious people of any religion intuitively understand each other and have a natural tolerance. And the other was that trade is something that also supports a kind of mutual tolerance. And I wonder if these two very different trends in society ever come together for a desirable ecumenical end. Trade and religion you mean? Yes. Well some people hold that they don't and they should not. But in fact they do because I mean the Duke of Edinburgh for instance has for a long time run a group on business ethics I mean ostensibly. And it brings together a large number of business people from all over the world from different faith backgrounds to discuss the question of ethics in business. And also I've been to some of these meetings not that I'm a businessman, I wish that I were. But you know religious ideas come to the fore because whilst people who are not religious may well be moral and be more moral than religious people in fact the great moral systems of the world have been developed generally within religious traditions. So whether it's the Torah of Judaism or the Sharia of Islam or the laws of Manu or the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus these have all been articulated within a religious framework and so when people are talking to one another about what is right even in the commercial area then religious questions and backgrounds come into play and that is how it should be. The other area in which well there are two other areas one is of course ecology of how we view the world in which we live and what the faith traditions have to say about how we treat the world. And obviously interfaith dialogue can have that as a subject and does have it as a subject from time to time. Even in the most unpromising situations I mean I've been in dialogue with leaders in Iran on this question about how their version of Ithna, Sharia, Islam sees ecology and what Christians have to say about it. So it is possible the other main area and this is quite an urgent one this is nothing to do with business in a way but is the justifiability of conflict. We are now living in a world with more and more non-conventional conflict. This affects trade, it disrupts trade, it prevents people meeting one another at least in peace and it is quite urgent that interfaith dialogue should discover some common ground for agreeing when armed conflict is or is not justified. Otherwise we will be continually in this debate that one side will say it's justified and the other side will say it's not justified. So if I were influential in international fora like the United Nations I would encourage this kind of dialogue and possible agreement. Thank you. Yes down here. Yes there is. Thank you. It was a wonderful, wonderful talk. My question relates to, how to put it best, ethics. I'm very mindful of the golden rule that appears in all the major religions do unto your neighbour as you would have them do unto yourself in identical circumstances or in some religions do not do unto your neighbour as you would not have done unto yourself. I struggled to understand looking through history and also the current state of the world how people who profess to be genuinely of this religion or that religion can squirt with their consciences the way they conduct themselves. Now as you're where I'm researching a book on Rabindranath et agor so a lot of the inhumanity of the British Empire in India is coming up with my research. And when I discuss it with people of white skin they say oh you mustn't judge it. Those were different times. So I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I'm not sure what I'm doing. I mustn't judge it. Those were different times. But my reply is I'm not aware of Jesus having given any dispensation to the golden rule. So how can we really just say oh they were different times. We can't judge them by the standards of today because to me the golden rule is something that ideally is part of our living reality every day. So that as human beings being imperfect we don't always live up to them but that we should be really trying to get ourselves back on a regular basis. And what I don't understand is why the leaders of the different religions are not very very firmly saying to their flock like on a weekly basis in sermons et cetera reminding us this is the teaching. And let us compare the conduct of the individual, the community, the country. Let us compare what our conduct is compared with our teaching. That if we want to say oh well we're not Christian or we're not Buddhist or whatever so be it. But I just feel as a real mismatch between people who profess themselves to be of a faith and the teaching of the golden rule. Thank you. That's a very important question. Empires of all kinds are empires of self-interest at the very least. And the British Empire is obviously no exception to that. But let's take another empire, let's take the Roman Empire. I mean the Roman Empire resulted in enormous cruelties and enormities enacted against the populations of the various parts of it. But at the same time it also introduced the Pax Romana, the kind of security for travel and so on which made trade possible, which made the exchange of ideas possible. I mean it is impossible to imagine for example the spread of early Christianity without the Pax Romana. So what I'm saying is you know empires like so many other human projects are mixed and this is also true of the British Empire particularly in India. I mean if you I often think what has saved a country like Pakistan if saved is the right word from totalitarianism which it could have ended up with and may still do, why is Pakistan different from say Iran? And in almost every case the answer is the institutions created by the British, whether it is parliamentary democracy or the judicial system or the press, you know, Rudyard Kipling and Lahore, I think you're doing something at SOAS quite soon about that. Now this is not to justify of course the other side to the empire which was what happened at Jallianwala Bagh or the salt marches and how they were dealt with. Our chairman referred to Mahatma Gandhi and the violent response to Gandhi's non-violence. So yes he was and his followers beaten up and arrested but the British judge sentencing Gandhi apologised for having to do so. Well I mean not every empire would have done that. I mean on the question of what religious leaders are doing I think this is one of the purposes of interfaith dialogue is to ask religious leaders, ask them to account about what it is they are teaching their people and whether that is making for co-existence for the recognition of people's fundamental freedoms or not. I was for a long time involved in the Christian dialogue with Al-Azhar As-Sharif, the premier place of Sunni learning and every year we had this dialogue and the rule was that each side would propose one subject because that is all we had time for. And very often on both sides the subject had to do with fundamental freedoms, not so much with what we believed but whether people were free to believe, whether people were free to express their faith, whether they were free to change their faith. I remember doing a joint lecture Mr Chairman with Sheikh Tantawi who was then the rector of Al-Azhar, the chief in Cairo. I mean what I said is not important at all but Sheikh Tantawi said in Cairo that what people believe in Egypt is not the business of the state at all. Now this is a very remarkable thing for a Muslim leader to say in his own country, it's easier to say these things in London or Washington or New York, but to say it in Cairo took courage. President Rohani of Iran has repeatedly called for greater freedom of conscience and belief in Iran. He has so far been ignored by the Iranian establishment but he has said so and I think it has cost him. I remember reading one of his speeches that was soon after I read it censored by whoever, I don't know who censored it. But it must be a unique instance where the president of a country has his own speeches censored. So there are people like that who are doing this and we have to honour them for it but there should be more of them. Okay, anyone else? Yes. Could you just explain what is mysticism? You mentioned the word mysticism in Islam. Could you just elaborate please? Yes, this is a, well first of all in Islam the initial period of mysticism under Muhassabi, Junaid, Dolnoun a Rabi al Adawiyah, the famous woman mystic, was about love of God, an intense expression of love for God seen in devotion. And as I have said I think this was in interaction with Christian monasticism of Egypt and Syria at the time. But as it developed, Sufism as it developed began to be influenced by other ideas particularly Neoplatonist and Indic ideas which had to do not so much with love of God as with unity with God and the unity of everything. Now this is quite different from the Judeo-Christian and even Islamic traditions which of course distinguished God from the world. So it was a new departure and more generally mysticism or whatever kind you have to distinguish between what you might call nature mysticism, which is, I mean an obvious modern example is the poetry of Walt Whitman which is an intense experience of oneness with nature. But then there is in addition to nature mysticism there is what you might call theistic mysticism in Christianity, Judaism and Islam which is not about oneness but about relationship. As a famous verse of Allama Iqbal, it's not his verse, it was a favorite of his, it's an anonymous verse in Farsi. Mardana Khudha Khudha Nabashand. Mardana Khudha Khudha Nabashand. Llekin zi Khudha Judha Nabashand. So men of God never become God but they're not separate from God either. And that's sort of theistic mysticism. Then of course there is this mysticism, monism, mentioned the imagery of the drop merging into the ocean and so on, where nothing is left of the human person in the absorption into God, which the Sufi is called Fana Filhag, annihilation in God. But the more mature Sufis like Sheikh Khujveri from my own city of Lahore where I used to work point out that this is only the beginning of mystic experience. That after the experience of annihilation there is also the experience of remaining, the Baqa Filhag, of remaining in God. And this is also found in the Christian traditions in Francois de Sel, the founder of the Silesian said after the journey to God there is the journey in God. So I think we have to be very careful to distinguish exactly what we are talking about because mysticism is such a broad term. Okay, we have two questions, one over there and then here. Thank you, I really enjoy listening to you, thank you so much. I was just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about the contemporary situation in Europe and other regions of the world. I'm from Europe, so like Central Europe. I was just wondering, so obviously there is an encounter of two religions happening right now. I'm obviously talking about so many immigrants coming to Europe. And I was just wondering because you have studied so many situations of encounters of different religions if you could, I don't know, predict maybe how we are going to deal with the situation basically. It's a tough question. It is very tough, I know, but it's something that is really important I think. Sure, perhaps we could take the other question as together. Yes, I just wondered about the western Arabs, did they learn their math from India? And the other thing was, when did Buddhism cease to be of the book? When did Buddhism cease to be of the book? Yeah, and the other question was, is when the western Arabs, did they learn originally the math from India? Yeah, well, sorry, let me not lose the, just give you the factual answers first. I mean, I think the numerals as we use them, they are called Arabic numerals, but actually they are from India, as is the zero. I mean, you know, without the zero, maths as we know it wouldn't exist. So transmitted to the western world through the Arabs, but actually originally India. So it's Indian maths that makes modern maths possible, but I'm sure there's a greater authority on that sitting here. What was the other part of your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, sorry, Buddhism has never ceased to be of the book. I mean, you know, the Pali scriptures are the definitive scriptures of Buddhism. In addition, there are many other writings. When I say religion of the book, the Alal Kitab, this was a technical Muslim. Yeah, I think that's a very interesting question. I don't know the answer to that. I expect you would, you will get a variety of answers from Muslims if they were asked that question. Generally what I have heard the Ulama saying in the Middle East, the scholars in the Middle East, is that they are confining themselves to what they call the heavenly religions. The Deena Samawi, which to them are Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So the new Egyptian constitution, which is a great improvement on the older one, gives freedom of religion to everyone, but freedom of cultic worship only to the heavenly religions. So in that case, Judaism is clearly not Alal Kitab. Coming back to the lady's question about Europe, I think the difficulty with Europe in the last 50 or 60 years has been the myth that secularism is neutrality. I mean secularism is not neutrality. It has its own worldview, its own presuppositions and assumptions. And in my view, I think Europe would have been better place to accommodate people of other faiths if it had given attention to its own tradition. So the complete ignoring for instance of Christianity in the so-called abortive constitution for Europe, which recognized every conceivable influence on Europe except Christianity, is just, I mean it's fiction. Because the material civilization, the art, the music, the literature, everything cannot be understood without reference to the Judeo-Christian heritage of Europe. And that should be the basis for interaction with other religious traditions that are coming into Europe. The effect of secularity is A, to marginalize all religious traditions and secondly to isolate them from one another. So you end up with isolated, ghettoized communities in the name of various doctrines like multiculturalism, etc. Rather than both respecting culture and religion and producing some way of understanding common citizenship, a common history, the need for integration and so on. But this cannot be done with historical amnesia. I think that's the point I would make. Well thank you. One final question. Sorry? I'm just wondering if the title should have been shattered dreams and torn tales rather than the embroidery and the woven dreams. Given the great tapestry of beliefs and religions and philosophies that have risen from this vast area, perpetuated through trade but also used by monks, what has happened? I mean I suppose there is the same essence that other questioners have asked. I mean the people like Yazidis who must have become through intermarriage. I don't think they're a sector or tribe of their own and this great tapestry of everything and it's now just descended into sheer terror, atrocities, no compassion for fellow humans. Where did it all go wrong? And separately, can you comment that the three gifts that the Magi brought to the manger were gold, myr and frankincense, but the gold is actually turmeric? Because all three have healing elements and now they say frankincense and myr are also being developed as cures that kill cancer cells and Christ being a healer. This were the three gifts that came. Thank you. Yes, I mean the gifts of the manger. That's why I saw in Eastern Iraq recently a Syrian church of the East and written on its front door in Arabic. It said we Easterns were the first to worship Christ. So the Magi, yes, I mean it is quite clear to anyone familiar with Persian civilization who the Magi were. I mean even in modern Persian the word Mughan means a wise man. So many poems start with old Magi's. I don't know if you read Eliot's poem about the Magi in their visit, but I think that shows both their origin and the disturbance that the visit to Christ caused among them. And this is why I gave some attention to the church of the East because this is a Christian tradition largely unknown in the West. I know that so has a department for Eastern Christianity. You have a colleague here present. Well done. Is that you? Where is Erica? Yes, well I know Dr Hunter's work very well. So yeah, I mean well she is a far greater expert on the tradition of that church than I am and I'm so glad that you have that here. The I mean the destruction of the tapestry that you're talking about. Well, yeah, I mean we only see what is in our experience. But if you read the descriptions of the Arab historians about the destruction of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mawls, I've just been reading Bar-Hebrace's account of it. I mean it must have appeared to people then that this was the end of the world, you know. And in fact some people the Persian poet Saadi said, he said, Muhammad if you ought to come on judgment day come now because this is judgment day. Such havoc was wrought by the Mongol invasions. So yes and what is happening now looks to us like that. But the there is also the question of hope. I mean somebody was asking me earlier, in fact a Muslim theologian asked me earlier today whether there was any hope for this world. And I said, well you know from a Christian point of view I have to say yes of course there is but that hope is in God not in us and not in the cultures that we've been talking about or any culture. So we can't lose hope. I mean that is one of the things religion has to bring to the table is a transcendence which is not possible for people who are simply exchanging. Political and military possibilities with one another. So it may be that commanders talking to one another is productive in say Syria today. But the meetings that I witnessed in September between religious leaders in Syria I think will be even more significant for the future of that shattered conflict. Then the meetings of these military commanders necessary though they may be you know what is going to build Syria again. The Grand Mufti of Syria said to me in September that he had said to his son you are free to think and believe as you wish. I do not want to impose what I believe on you. Well I mean I think that's a hugely hopeful thing in a country like Syria at this time. But this is the kind of thing that has to be said and I am so sorry that people like the Grand Mufti and many other leaders religious leaders in Syria like the many of the Christian leaders are denied access to audiences here so that you may hear what they have to say. OK on that note I think we will have to draw the events to a conclusion here today. Before we do I just want to thank Bishop Michael for providing us with a very thoughtful lecture and a willingness to answer frankly a range of questions which were perhaps not in the lecture itself. And you know and that's a testament to his great strength. You are all invited to a cup of tea upstairs but before we go can I ask you to join hands and thank Bishop Michael.