Specifically as a result of a careful consideration of this ambivalent reality, various personalities of the Christian world (members of the laity, priests and bishops) met in Venice about a year ago to implement a project which we decided, in significant fashion taking the words pronounced by the Holy Father John Paul II at the Omayyad mosque of Damascus as a starting point to call ‘Oasis’. Oasis refers first and foremost to the Archbishop of Budapest, the Archbishop of Lyons, the Archbishop of Vienna, and the Archbishop of Zagreb, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Archbishop of Changanacherry, the Archbishop of Tunis, the Bishop of Islamabad, and the Auxiliary Bishop of Arabia, all of whom, together with the Patriarch of Venice, make up the organising committee. At the same time, Oasis refers to a group of friends who created the International Centre for Study and Research and a journal. This project was born within the Studium Generale Marcianum, which came into being in Venice as a form of renewal of the pastoral action of the Patriarchate.
Whereas for Europeans such as ourselves the name ‘Oasis’ has the ring of a somewhat exotic transposition of the locus amoenus of Platonic connotations, a kind of garden where tarrying to converse is pleasant, an oasis is held much more dear by the man of the desert. And it is not in the least surprising that the garden became both in Genesis and in the Koran the paradigm itself of heaven.

The Hybridity of Civilisations
In order to illustrate the character of a project that has run the risk of having a demanding but at the same time auspicious name, I will begin with a general observation.
In connection with so-termed globalisation and ‘network civilisation’, we have been witnessing over recent decades an unprecedented process of the mixing of peoples, which, employing a metaphor that is somewhat bold, I have defined with the phrase ‘hybridity of civilisations’ (métissage de civilisations), where there should, obviously, be a strong emphasis on the genitive ‘of civilisations’. It is not the case that the meeting of peoples is a new development. Indeed, migrations and mixtures mark out the history of mankind. We may think of what the migrations of the Germanic peoples meant for the Roman Empire or what the invasion of the Mongols meant for the Abbasid caliphate. The new fact is that today this phenomenon affects the whole of the planet. This process, which is often tumultuous and loaded with contradictions, is unstoppable, and as a process it necessarily involves us and urgently requires the freedoms that are involved to find their direction.
An important aspect of this mixing of peoples is its unprecedented ‘bi-directional’ character. Although, in fact, many inhabitants of developing countries come to seek their fortune in Europe, North America or Australia, it is also true that every year millions of people, for the purposes of work or recreation, visit the remotest localities of the globe. Despite its evident limitations, tourism has helped to break down the barriers of isolation.

Oasis wants to study this process and its implications for civilisations. This is borne out, among other things, by the composition of its scientific committee which brings together both Western and Eastern personalities in a shared endeavour that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The choice of multilingualism (the journal is printed in four bilingual versions) is also dictated by the same wish. We could have published a journal exclusively in French, or in English, or in Arabic. Instead, we chose to have languages co-existing with each other even though the difficulty of the undertaking does not allow us for the moment to have an equal relationship in quantitative terms between Arabic and Urdu and the Western languages.
It is evident that a phenomenon as new as that of the hybridity of civilisations brings with it immense problems and to find adequate solutions requires great creative capacities. In the Western world the debate tends to focus on questions that are primarily of a juridical character out of the belief that it is urgently necessary to provide a solid legislative framework within which the individuals who are progressively becoming members of our societies can be received. Indeed, this position brings out an important aspect of the problem but it cannot conceal indeed it often conceals, above all if the sirens of gay nihilism are followed the temptation stigmatised by the poet T. S. Eliot as that of dreaming of ‘systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.
In our opinion, the path that is possible is the path of testimony I use this category in the practical and theoretical sense which no man can evade because of the risk that is of necessity implied in freedom. It is useless to deceive oneself that man can be spared the adventure of encounter with others. This is because each one of us is born and grows through relationships. And it is specifically at this level that the journal Oasis intends to offer its own contribution, a journal that is not to be located at an academic or scholarly level but rather at a cultural one, in the broadest and noblest sense of that term.

Testimony: the Path to Encounter
The term ‘testimony’ runs the risk of immediately raising a problem. Given, it is said, that testimony implies an identity, and because the affirmation of one’s own identity is generally seen as being opposed to encounter with others, one should, it is argued, conclude that these positions exclude each other: either one engages in encounter or one bears testimony.
In our specific case, given that this is a journal produced by Christians, one would, it is proposed, be tempted to conclude that it should be directed solely to Christian communities that live in the West or in Muslim countries. To speak with ‘others’ as well, one would need, it might be suggested, another style, another point of departure, in essentials: another journal.

I think that this is an insidious cultural aut aut to which we should briefly turn our attention. If we turn our minds to history, to the standard bearers of the unbridgeable opposition between identity and encounter, we find many refutations of this. We may think, for example, of the great epic work of the transmission of classical knowledge. Who fails to recognise the cardinal importance of the re-reading of the Greek texts in the advance of Abbasid civilisation? And who, in turn, does not concede the important role, in a Europe that was already not unaware of the classical inheritance thanks to the patient work of monks, played by the input of Arab philosophical and scientific thought? Of this dialectic of encounter and identity it seems to me the Arab poet al-Buhturi was also aware when, towards the middle of the ninth century, after admiring the ruins of Persian rule in Ctesiphon, he ended his famous sniyya with the words ‘And thus I will always admire all noble people, from all lineages and descent’. An Arab and a Muslim, he found that he was celebrating a Persian and Zoroastrian king.

Naturally, history also records ferocious oppositions that have arisen when identity has been understood in an exclusivistic sense, but rather than discouraging us this should provide us with warnings about the present.
In reality, the very possibility of encounter lies in the inexhaustible search for truth understood in a dynamic, living and personal way by the human heart, which in all latitudes beats with the same desires, living every day on affection and work. If such was not the case, one would not know how to justify the fact that human cultures, albeit in their evident diversity, are mutually comprehensible: perhaps at the end of a long journey towards languages and categories that at the outset were distant, but always mutually comprehensible.

It is starting from this belief that Oasis intends to offer itself. With a dynamic identity and thus an identity open to others. Recognising the ecumenism and theology of religions as an inescapable dimension of the Christian experience, Oasis calls on all men of good will, whether Christians, Muslims, members of other religions, atheists or agnostics, and invites them to stand forward in the first person in a shared work about the meaning of the person, community, and the family of peoples. And without being afraid to propose to the freedom of others what they have found to be answers, without omitting to ask that a free dialogue of this kind be made possible everywhere in the world, as a generator of a new civilisation.

Indeed, freedom is for truth. Ever since Greek philosophy this has been an unquestioned cornerstone of the European mind. It has been more difficult for European thought to understand the equally irrepressible principle of the truth of freedom. Practical atheism as the ‘destiny of European modernity’ arose from the defence of the freedom of man carried to the point of postulating, as a minimum, the impossibility of re-cognising the truth. Beginning with the modern age, finite freedom in its constituent desire, its untameable technical-scientific effort to ‘possess’ man and the cosmos, and in the attempt to construct new forms of civil, economic and political life supported by good government has believed that it must require, at the least, a foregoing of the question of absolute truth: hence the censorship of the question about God.

Instead, Biblical revelation contains a theoretical core that post-modern man is rediscovering. Truth is the encounter that takes place between the absolute and transcendent foundation and man. This foundation testifies itself to man in the individual act of freedom that calls him to involvement. Freedom is based upon a God who manifests himself in history in order to come to encounter with man.
In Christian tradition truth, although conserving the whole of its character of absoluteness, is living and personal truth. It thus is not afraid of giving itself over to the finite freedom of man. The very event of Jesus Christ is overwhelming proof of this. Freedom for truth is not given that is not at the same time truth of freedom.
With these assumptions we thus sincerely invite whomsoever so wishes to engage in co-operation, in the certainty of the need to contribute to the accompanying of this complex but unstoppable process of the hybridity of civilisations with an authentic critical spirit. Indeed, only thus will there be realised that wish also contained in the Arabic word that expresses the concept of integration: to become mutually complete, perfect.