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Pope Francis and a leading Sunni imam have made calls for peace at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in New York where discussion focused on the importance of “human fraternity”.
The pope, who is in hospital recovering from abdominal surgery, sent a statement to the UN meeting on Wednesday in which he said that a third world war is being fought “piecemeal” and that humanity is suffering from a “famine of fraternity”, reports Al Jazeera.
On the other hand, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old seat of Sunni learning in Cairo, said in a virtual briefing to the UN council that human fraternity was the key to global peace, a point he and the pope had made in a joint document released in 2019.
“In our own day, with nuclear weapons and those of mass destruction, the battlefield has become practically unlimited, and the effects potentially catastrophic,” the pope said in his statement, which was read by Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary for relations with states and international organisations.
Al-Tayeb said his intention in speaking to the council was to urge an end to senseless wars.
He cited Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
The grand imam also called on the council to recognise an independent Palestinian state after 75 years.
Without naming either Russia or Ukraine, the grand imam said the war unfolding on the eastern borders of Europe had instilled terror and “concern that it may regress humanity to a primitive era”.
Bd-pratidin English/Golam Rosul
