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InterFaith Tour: A Journey Eastward
Victor Grezes (left) talks with a woman in the Ciliwung slum in Kampung Melayu neighborhood in East Jakarta
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Victor Grezes (left) talks with a woman in the Ciliwung slum in Kampung Melayu neighborhood in East Jakarta.
The five French students of different religions and beliefs are on the move to promote interfaith dialogue and cooperation around the world, while taking notes as they go.
Twenty-one-year-old Catholic Samuel Grzybowski, 20-year-old Muslim Ismael Medjdoub, 22-year-old atheist Victor Grezes, 21-year-old agnostic Josselin Rieth and 28-year-old Jew Ilan Scialom started their year-long journey in July 2013.
They set out on a journey to see and document how interfaith initiatives are being undertaken around the globe.
The students plan to compile raw data that will be made available to the public and do research resulting in finding new ways of communication and cooperation between people of different faiths.
The InterFaith Tour project was initiated by online journalism website Sparknews and French interfaith youth movement Coexister, of which the young men are members.
They started first hopping around Europe, and then went eastward to the Middle East region, then south to Africa and then back east to Asia.
Grzybowski said they had decided to go around the world to grasp all of its cultural and religious diversity and to experiment with interdependences in contemporary international relations.
'We want to observe interfaith initiatives as they are done in the field. We expect to discover new ways of coexistence and social cohesion and to convey them to the people of France,' Grzybowski told The Jakarta Post in an interview.
Grzybowski also said an important goal was to raise awareness among young people to step up and participate in interfaith initiatives.
Grezes explained that although they were grateful that France was a secular country, they were concerned that the secularism was tipping toward individuals in a negative way.
'What we are seeing in our home now is a secularism in which you can be what you want, but you cannot show it in public, you have to hide it. We are seeing that this secularism approach has moved from neutralizing the state to neutralizing individuals,' Grezes said.
Grezes then referred to a number of laws in France, including those that ban conspicuous religious symbols in public schools and prohibit the covering of the face in public.
In practice, these laws largely target the Muslim minority and especially the women. Last July, riots erupted a Paris suburb after an altercation involving the police ticketing a fully veiled woman.
'This is not the kind of society we want. We do not want to live in a society that does not allow us to show what we are,' Grezes said.
Grezes said by seeing how interfaith efforts were being done in other countries where the situation, the political context and the link between state and religion were different, they could learn new ways of living together. 'We want to live in a society where we don't have to hide, change and look the same,' Grezes said.
After eight months of rigorous travel, four members of the team ' Scialom had flown back to France to secure support from home ' arrived in Indonesia in late February. Indonesia was the 57th country on their journey.
Rieth said Indonesia was an important country to visit because it had the largest Muslim population in the world.
'Obviously, we need to see how minorities are living in the predominantly Muslim country. We are interested in how interfaith dialogue and relations are being conducted in a predominantly Muslim population.
'We can learn a lot from here, because it is a kind of opposite situation in France where the Muslim minority is living among a predominantly Christian population,' Rieth said.
In Jakarta, the four young people, all of whom are students of history and political sciences, met with people on the street, diplomats, activists and NGOs, including rights watchdog the Setara Institute, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) and environmental and socio-cultural organization Ciliwung Merdeka.
The journey is expected to cost a total of ¤100,000 (US$138,750), which is partly financed by funds from European universities, NGOs, crowd funding and government institutions.
They use the funds for travel, visas and communications. They cover expenses for food and accommodation from their own pockets. 'Fortunately, in the past eight months we have never needed to pay for a room because we're always offered accommodation,' Grezes said.
Around 80 percent of the funding for the 100,000 project has been secured and they hope to raise the rest as they continue with their tour.
Prior to Indonesia, they visited Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. The group is going to Australia after its Southeast Asian leg, before finally touring in the Americas and going back home.
'Touring with boys from different faiths means that we don't only research the interfaith issues but also live in the interfaith spirit. So far, we haven't killed each other,' Grezes said with a laugh.
' Photos courtesy of InterFaith Tour-Coexister
