"I would never have changed my views, if I had not heard Muslims speak for themselves," says one participant in Rwanda's Christian-Muslim dialogue, which began four years ago.

Many Christians have discovered a new respect for their Muslim neighbours and have abandoned their previous image of them as "lost souls" who do not know the way to God.

Promoting social justice was the theme of the fifth national Christian-Muslim seminar, which took place at the Isano Presbyterian Centre in Kigali in August.

The organizing committee

Lack of social justice, said Désiré Rutaganda, coordinator of the Centre for Research and Popular Theological Education (CORVT) led to decades of poverty, conflict and war in Rwanda, culminating in the 1994 genocide.

In Rwanda's prisons, 120,000 suspected killers from the genocide are still awaiting trial. In response, Rwanda is introducing a system of people's courts, known as gacaca, which means justice on the grass.

The aim, explained Aloysie Cyanzayire, president of the sixth chamber of the Supreme Court, is to speed up justice for the suspects and to foster reconciliation between killers and the families of victims, thus promoting social unity.

The poster for the gacaca awareness campaign shows a bright yellow sun rising over Rwanda's hills and people joining hands with their fellow villagers. The caption is: "The truth heals".

But truth can heal only if it is told. Study of the Bible and the Qu'ran underlined the importance of truthful witness as a shared religious value.

Globalization in its current form has no concern for social justice, said Salim Ndabikunze, president of the Rwanda Muslim Council. It is turning the world into a global market where the strong triumph over the weak, and destroying Rwanda's social structure. Justice can only be based on a social compact; its absence leads inevitably to a revolt of the oppressed. The scale of the challenge calls Christians and Muslims to renewed commitment.

The seminar identified six themes common to Christianity and Islam relevant to the pursuit of social justice: a great and merciful God, human dignity, the community or congregation, Abraham the father of all believers, spiritual struggle or "jihad" (eg, the struggle against underdevelopment), and the appeal for forgiveness and reconciliation.

Sharing insights across boundaries

At the closing service, André Karamaga, president of the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda, preached against using either faith to legitimate conflict.

"On Friday Muslims in Rwanda go to the mosque to call Imana to their aid, on Saturday Adventists go to church to invoke Imana, and on Sunday the other Christians go to church also to pray to Imana," he said.

"Since we call God by the same name, which we owe to our ancestors, it is important to know what they understood by Imana. They knew Imana as all-powerful, self-sufficient and needing no defence. For them, to fight for Imana would be to scorn God, to turn God into an idol."

"No pretext permits us to despise the other or fight the other, because Christians and Muslims cannot commit the sin of reducing Imana to an idol."