The Bible is full of fratricides. So much so that Gerard Haddad, in The Cain Complex, his previous book, described fraternal rivalry as “the original sin of human society”, in the same way as the Oedipus Complex.
But evil carries its own antidote. This antidote is the story of Ishmael and Isaac, whose father, Abraham, is both considered the father of the Jewish people, an essential forefather of Christianity and one of the prophets of Islam. Everything is done to set the brothers against each other: didn’t Sarah, Isaac’s mother, exclude from her house Hagar, the young Egyptian servant girl with whom her husband had Ishmael? Yet the two brothers managed to coexist peacefully, on the model of “good neighbourliness”.
Thus, ironically, the greatest example of happy brotherhood is given to us by those whose descendants, caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are today being torn apart. Restoring the fundamental bond that unites the children of Abraham, opposing any exclusion that would replay the inaugural exclusion – that of the prophetess Hagar – is the symbolic condition for the return of a dialogue. In order to do this, he believes it is necessary to abandon the expression “Judeo-Christian civilization”, which excludes Muslims from a Western history that owes them a great deal, in order to qualify our civilization as “Greco-Arahamic”.
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