over the years various countries and societies were involved in numerous religious wars, and most of them have not survived except those who do not strictly get bogged down in religious issues. many regions have not suffered as a result of these wars including india and some southeast asian countries where more than 2 billion people live. historically, it is a well-known fact that the number of christians who died during religious wars at the hands of fellow christians by far outnumbers those who have been killed by the followers of other religions since the inception of the church until date. the same thing applies to muslims who died during sectarian wars, so the issue has reached the peak of hypocrisy when some call for the so-called ‘interfaith dialogue’, not because of the superfi ciality of purpose, but because we need to converse with ourselves fi rst, with each other, before we decide to have a dialogue with people of other religions. the clerics meeting the followers of other religions is immensely surprising, because they disagree on many issues more than things they agree upon, that is if they agree. there is no doubt that dialogue, in any case, is a necessity to overcome differences by reaching a common ground on the basis of general principles or specifi c facts, but religious dialogue has by far fallen on deaf ears. each party desperately expresses its point of view over controversial issues, and the other party is waiting for its turn to have its say and say the same thing over and over again and as a result the outcome of such dialogues is ‘zero’. millions have been spent on these dialogues, and those participating have gulped down tons of rich food, some of them have kissed and embraced each other, but after almost half a century there has been no favorable outcome. everyone has stuck to his own point of view. therefore, such dialogues and brotherly meetings, discussions, dialogues or whatever you may call it, has been nothing but a big play between different parties. each participant in this ‘drama’ is fully convinced and believes in what is written in ‘his holy book’ and has no intention to believe in the ‘book’ of others. the difference between two people in religious dialogue is not a topic that can reach a common ground through discussions. if this was so easy, there would not have been any religious wars. of course, i am not against convergence with others but such attempts will not yield any results and the dream of a religious unity will remain similar to the dream of arab unity, therefore we need internal convergence. it is regrettable, for example, to see the hindu majority india has offered to send more than 1 million tons of wheat to the starving afghans, most of whom are muslims, but muslim majority pakistan refuses indian trucks to pass through its territory, so it resorted to iran-the shiite country to let hindus deliver the food to the sunni afghanistan.
