Hillary Clinton praises interfaith example of Tatarstan
By Sophia Kishkovsky
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has visited the historic city of Kazan, where she praised the interfaith harmony of Tatarstan, a region in Russia that has a mixed population and is home to Muslim and Orthodox Christian holy places.
"You have created an example of how people can live together and pursue a common interest," she told Tatarstan's President Mintimir Shaimiyev during a side-trip to her visit to Russia earlier in October.
Clinton spoke to the Tatarstan president after visiting Kazan's 16th-century Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation and the recently-constructed Kul-Sharif Mosque, a re-creation of a historic mosque destroyed by Ivan the Terrible.
The two houses of worship stand almost side by side in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, a semi-autonomous republic of the Russian Federation that succeeded in avoiding the separatist path of Chechnya, a direction in which it had seemed headed in the early 1990s.
Instead, Tatarstan is now viewed as an example of religious co-existence, which Clinton said could serve as a model to the rest of the world.
Clinton was in Russia to discuss improving relations with Moscow under the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama. During her visit to Kazan, about 450 miles (740 kilometres) east of Moscow she underscored the importance of religious tolerance.
"I appreciate the outreach you are doing to the Islamic world and to Europe and other places to serve as a model and a bridge between the worlds of Islam and Christianity," Clinton told Shaimiyev, according to a U.S. State Department Web transcript published on www.state.gov.
Since the celebration of Kazan's 1000th anniversary in 2005, Tatarstan has marketed interfaith harmony as its distinguishing feature. The Kul-Sharif Mosque was built in time for the celebration. Officials had also lobbied for the return to the city in 2005 of an 18th-century copy of the revered Kazan Icon of the Mother of God.
The original was lost but the copy ended up in Pope John Paul II's private apartment in the Vatican.
Wearing a headscarf for her visit to the mosque and the cathedral, Clinton venerated the icon.
The Web site of the Kazan Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, kazan.eparhia.ru, reported that Clinton also met with Metropolitan Anastasy of Kazan and Tatarstan, who gave her a tour of the Cathedral of the Annunciation.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly stressed the importance of interfaith dialogue at meetings with Russia's religious leaders in recent months.
President Obama met with Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church during a visit to Moscow in July. Obama said interfaith dialogue should be a cornerstone of diplomacy.
Clinton told Tatarstan's Shaimiyev that she might call on his expertise on this issue in her diplomatic missions.
"So as I travel around the world on these important missions ….like the Armenia-Turkey mission, I may be calling on you, Mr President, because I think that you would have a lot to contribute," Clinton said.
Source: Ecumenical News International