Arts-and-Blasphemy Panel Urged : Christian, Jewish, Islamic Leaders React to Rushdie Outcry

County academics and visiting members of the National Council of Churches on Monday agreed that an interfaith conference on how literature can defame any religion would be of benefit to Muslims, Jews and Christians.

During a lunch meeting at UC Irvine, members of the NCC’s Office of Christian/Muslim Relations and the local Academy for Judaic, Christian and Islamic Studies learned that they had both been contemplating similar conferences in reaction to the outcry surrounding Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” and Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini’s subsequent death threat against the author.

Since the uproar earlier this year, Christians for the most part have supported Rushdie’s right to freedom of expression, while Muslims have insisted that their religion is defamed by the book, said Marston Speight, executive director of Christian-Muslim relations office of the New York-based NCC, a group of 40 million mainline Protestants.

“Our whole life is so secularized, we’re unaware,” Speight said. “The outrage of a community not so secularized shows us the degree to which we’ve lost our sense of the importance of the holy in our lives.”

Such a conference on defamation would seek to define the “holy things” that the world’s three great monotheistic religions hold in high respect, he said.

“I’m sure there would be divergent views among Christians,” Speight said.

It should also include an interfaith discussion of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” a movie featuring scenes that some Christians found offensive, as well as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a 19th-Century anti-Semitic French play, said George Grose, president of the Academy, a nonprofit Anaheim Hills research, educational and dialogue institute that promotes the historic and theological links among Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Others at Monday’s conference suggested that the limits of diversity in a pluralistic society should also be explored.

A dozen members of the NCC group had swung through the county as part of their annual conference held in Los Angeles to meet with Grose and the other members of his pioneering group in Judaic, Christian and Muslim studies.

Grose has taught a UCI course and tours college campuses with a dialogue program featuring Rabbi Henri Front of Temple Beth David and Muzamil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Center of Orange County.

Siddiqi has invited the Christian group to lunch today at his center’s Garden Grove mosque.

Siddiqi said Monday that Muslims remain concerned about the support Rushdie received, despite criticism in the Muslim world of his novel.

“It has concerned many of us, the way the Western world responded,” Siddiqi said. “A very large number came out in full support of Salman Rushdie.

“That has created the feeling in the minds of many Muslins that there is now an open field. You can do whatever you want. . . . Hate campaigns, slander are all OK under freedom of expression.”

The NCC, however, issued a statement in March expressing “deep sympathy” for Muslims who were insulted and offended by negative descriptions of Mohammed in Rushdie’s novel. “An offense to the religious beliefs and sensitivities to the followers of Islam or any religion should be viewed as serious as an offense against the religious beliefs and sensitivities of Christians,” the statement said.