TEHRAN President Mohammad Khatami termed Islam as a divine religion and standard-bearer of the slogan of morality, security and peace based on justice ad human respect in the crisis-afflicted contemporary world.
In a message to a conference on Islam and the West, opened at the Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) here Saturday, the president said, however realization of global peace in the absence of realization of global justice is an illusion.
The message, read by the presidential advisor Hadi Khaniki, further added that the conference can prepare a suitable ground for the realization of the idea of dialogue among civilizations at a wider scale.
The conference is being held under circumstances in which Islam and the West in the past two centuries have passed behind different experiences, read the message.
Therefore, it added, it is hoped that on the threshold of the third millennium the contemporary mankind, be it Muslim or Westerner, take a good lesson of the previous bitter experiences.
Underlining the special importance of relations between Muslims and Westerners as the owners of two great civilizations, he pointed to the attempts by certain people who are displeased with the establishment of a satisfactory order between the two civilizations, in claiming that the theory (Islamic threat) is a substitute for the red threat.
But, he stressed, the reality is that not only Islam poses no threat to the West but as the best divine spiritual message it is capable of filling the moral vacuum in the West in the best possible manner.
Thus Islam can save all human beings, whom he said are strangers to themselves, out of the present quagmire while being prepared to take advantage of the positive achievements of Western civilization and culture.
Elsewhere in his message, the president raised several points and called on the participants to make expert and all-out studies over them.
He called for a revision in the traditional Western outlooks toward Islam as, he said, those assessments had been made under specific conditions and are not in conformity with the realities of the contemporary era.
Stressing that the outlook of the West toward Islam and vice versa has not been a positive outlook in the past two centuries, the president underscored the need for the scientific analysis of the historical causes behind such a negative outlook free from any political clamor.
The president said in his message that researchers who have made studies in both Islamic and Western civilizations cannot ignore diversified impacts of the two civilizations on each other, a fact that is indicative of constructive interaction between the two civilizations at certain junctures of history which can set a pattern for future interaction.
The message further stressed that neither the Islamic nor the Western civilizations can ignore each other as the two important phenomena of human history.
Islam, it said, a religion with over one billion followers throughout the world is rich in valuable human and material resources and thus holds an outstanding share in the administration of the contemporary world.
The West, too, is an undeniable reality with special political, economic and cultural specifications that cannot be ignored by Muslims.
Therefore, such a reality compels both Muslims and Westerners to abandon unhealthy rivalries and instead make efforts to take greater strides toward finding solution to the problems of the contemporary man, read the message.
The International Seminar on Islam and the West opened here on Saturday.
Thinkers from Iran, France, Britain, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, Pakistan and Iraq are participating in the seminar.
Also Iranian foreign minister was present and addressed the seminar.
(IRNA)