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Oddbjørn Leirvik. Photo: Leirviks homepage
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Leirvik has been involved in inter-religious dialogue since the middle of the 1980s and is a member of the Contact Group for the Church of Norway and the Islamic Council of Norway. In 2001 his book “Interreligious Dialogue in Norwegian” (Religionsdialog på norsk) was published.
Until now each religion has been studied alone. What happens, however, in the space where different religions meet? The space in between was considered as a subtitle of the new book on Islam and Christianity which appeared in January 2006 and an image Leirvik thinks a great deal about at the moment. Quite early in our conversation he mentions Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who in the 1920s wrote the book “I and Thou”:
- His point is that there exists a danger in personal relations that I will make others into “it”. The challenge is to resist the temptation to make you into an it, such that we look at each other as a thing. The truly human only becomes clear in a meeting between an I and a You who cannot be objectified.
In the space in between something happens. Communication. A reciprocal meeting between people, between I and You.
- I wonder whether there exists an open landscape that Christians and Muslims share and that nobody has control over. It is a metaphor I examine in the new book, says the theologian. In politics, he explains, it’s the space between a society’s public institutions that nobody has the right to control. One example is schools.
- Does this also apply to religious education?
- The vision is there in the new KRL subject (Christianity, religion and ethics education) . It is based on the English model. The subject there is called “religious education” and is accepted by all religious groups. In England they operate with a decentralised teaching plan, and a cross-religious committee was consulted in its formulation.
- In English religious education they often differentiate between three forms of religious education: 1. learning religion, 2. learning about religion and 3. learning from religion. “Learning religion”, or religious instruction, is the responsibility of religions. The duty of Schools is to help their pupils to “learn about” but also to “learn from” the religions. “Learning from” means that religious education shall be a source of inclusive knowledge. In this way ethics and religious education can function as the space in between.
Leirvik explains that the KRL subject is actually seen positively by many young Muslims - more positively than their parents’ generation. This is one of the discoveries of Sissel Østbergs research which was published in the book “Muslim in Norway” (Muslim i Norge).
- What is your project within Cultural Complexity?
- I shall take care of the subject area of inter-religious studies. One of our doctoral fellows - Anne Hege Grung - will read the Koran and the Bible together with Muslim and Christian women. This is a concrete example of how we can explore the space in between. This project opens up a new space.
- In Cultural Complexity the relational aspect is important. When we talk of Muslims in Norway there are three important aspects: 1) Their home country background, 2) The reinterpretation of Islam in its encounter with Norwegian society (is there a Euro-Islam or a Norwegian Islam?), 3) Influences from liberal or Islamist trends in the international community, including virtual ones from the Internet. We need more information on how all this works together. You could, for example, study Islamic websites or research what is being preached in the mosque.
- Will there also be Muslims who examine these questions?
- There is a great need for Muslims themselves to investigate these topics, yes. There are actually several in the group with projects on, among other things, what is preached in mosques.
- What blind spots are there in your field of research?
- The relationship between religion and school: In what way does school function as an open space? What role does religious education play? We need field studies where for example young Muslims have their say.
- What do you associate with cultural complexity?
- The expression signalises that Norwegian culture is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces than can be put together to make more than one picture.
- Immigration has opened our eyes into seeing how complex ethnic Norwegian culture is. For me moving from Western Norway to Oslo was both a class- and a cultural journey, actually also a religious journey. I grew up in a strict evangelist environment in Sunnmøre. In Oslo I ended up in one of the most liberal christian communities - Norway's Student Christian Movement. In my personal experience one can cross great cultural divides in Norway. I know from my own experience that such processes are difficult. We also have a coastal culture which is quite different from the farming culture and from the urban South eastern culture.
- But to discover it one needs to cross borders. Perhaps it is easier for people who have had similar experiences to open themselves to be able to see the complexity in immigrant cultures. Norwegian Islam is diverse in the same way that Norwegian Christianity is diverse: There are great differences within. The differences within a religion are as great as those between the religions.
Read more on Oddbjørn Leirvik's homepage
Interview: Lorenz Khazaleh (22.2.05, updated 30.3.06). Translation: Matthew Whiting
Redaksjon: Administrasjonen ved Sosialantropologisk instituttt, admin@culcom.uio.no
Dokument opprettet: 10.01.2006, verifisert: 10.01.2006