The 12^th Sarajevo UN World Interfaith Harmony Week

February 5–12, 2024

International Forum Bosnia, Sarajevo

International Forum Bosnia will be holding a programme of events to mark the 12^th Sarajevo UN World Interfaith Harmony Week this year in response to the appeal by the UN General Assembly session held on October 20, 2010, to member-states. While International Forum Bosnia will, as usual, be organising and coordinating the activities, a number of other national and international organisations and societies will also be participating and contributing.

The key themes of this year's programme are summed up in the title:

Global Ethics: Urgent Questions and Challenges.

The programme will take place on Wednesday the 5^th of February and Thursday the 12^th of February. There will be three academic panels. The panels will take the form of hybrid meetings, with some participants present in person and others through Zoom. Participants will be from public and academic life in Bosnia, other universities around the world, and the Bosnian diaspora.

Ø  Second Panel on Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ: A Symbol of Maternal Mercy and the Striving for Peace or Something Else?

The Lady Mary is both a shared and a discrete symbol – connecting and dividing the traditions and their adherents. Born into the Jewish tradition and a major presence in the Muslim, she is nonetheless principally identified with the Christian traditions, within which she has been represented and interpreted as both fundamental and foreign to its core. She has been variously interpreted as an inheritance of paganism and an expression of the primordial feminine divine. At the same time, she is seen as offering a compensatory mechanism that both preserves and contests the paternalistic nature of Abrahamic monotheism, as both a symbolisation of oppressive heteronormativity and phallogocentrism and one of resistance to phallicism by the encompassing feminine. Finally, she has been seen as a symbol that allows us to transcend the binary and opens up pathways of identification that transgress reductive identity. It is particularly striking under conditions of modernity and post-modernity that Mary and Marian apparitions, shrines, and pilgrimages have become major mechanisms for mediating access to the divine and of hierophany. Mary has become a powerful symbol of peace and the striving for peace, but, like any powerful religious symbol, her cloak has always also been deployed ideological cover to projects that promote peace by the redirection of violence and the reinforcement of boundaries.

February 9, 2024

14-17 p.m.

Second Panel on Lady Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ: A Symbol of Maternal Mercy and the Striving for Peace or Something Else?

Moderator: Asim Zubčević

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87256603640?pwd=ORu3Tz2OfBX7TqXRbRinDEv2cH3Ghu.1

Meeting ID: 872 5660 3640

Passcode: 909013

Desmond Maurer, Mary and the Politics of Peace

Marko Antonio Brkić, Lady Mary as 'point of recognition' in process of transformation of social capital

Mujadad Zaman, Our Lady of the Niche: Conversing Islamic Theology today with the Image of Mary

Ivo Marković, The Catholic Political Use of Marian Piety in the Struggle against the Communist Ideologies

Abdel Latif Chalikandi, Mary, the Mother of Jesus: Her Image in the Quran and Islamic Tradition as a Unifying Figure

Rusmir Mahmutećehajić, Lady Mary in Miguel de Unamunoʼs Philosophy