The images of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt are destined to last in time in exactly the same way as the destruction of the Berlin wall (which did not simple ‘collapse’) has endured. In these two countries of North Africa (gradually followed by almost all the other countries of the Arab world), a process destined to go on for a long time, whatever path will be followed, including that of confusion, has just begun. One may say that an epoch ended and that suddenly, with squares filled with peaceful people demanding change, everything else seemed superseded. The old can resist by using a variety of approaches: from political openings to legislative concessions to demented violence, as, unfortunately, one can continue to see. But one is dealing with ‘resisting’ the inexorable march of a humanity that asks for freedom, justice, equality and dignity. These ‘events’, as they are often called, agitate and pose questions to the Middle East, its culture, its structural arrangements and its leaderships. A restlessness that is added to the millennium-old wound of Islam – that division between Shi’ism and Sunnism – which during the current historical period has acquired strong political, strategic and national connotations.

The murder of Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian and the Ministry for Minorities of the Pakistani government, was an authentic trauma, and not only for the Christians of that country. The terrorists, the defenders of that juridical and philosophical shame that goes under the name of ‘the law against blasphemy’, wanted, indeed, to eliminate a true, peace-loving and aware man, and with him the hope that he embodied. We render homage to him through the publication of a number of passages from a book of his which was published by Marcianum Press and which can well be defined as being a spiritual testament. The drama of the Christian martyr Bhatti is illuminated by the last hours of Jesus, when his death was imminent: that pained and solitary cry in the Garden of Olives, that night of human and divine mystery to which the Pope devotes a number of pages in his second volume on Jesus. And from Benedict XVI, as well, the text of his address given at the Basilica of Health during his visit to Venice, a city marked by beauty and an aspiration to universality, both of which are the fruits of an imposing Christian history which today needs to be renewed profoundly. Lastly, for the Islamic classics, pages from a prophetic textbook of political philosophy in the form of tales addressed to the Caliph al-Mansûr (of the eighth century) on the subject of ‘just government’.
 

For this occasion we have brought together in a single section the journalistic service and what is offered at the level of iconography. We thus celebrate the birth of a new State, whose name has still not been decided but which we all know as South Sudan and which in ancient times was called Nubia. Will its Christian roots, documented by the images presented here, know how to nourish the grave and important responsibilities that Christians are shouldering for the good of the new nation, as is illustrated to us by a report produced in the field?

Articles, analyses and testimonies from various countries and on various subjects. In this issue: the attention paid to the centrality of the educational question, to which this review dedicated a great deal of space in its last two issues, is continued with an essay that starts with a document produced by the bishops of Spain and two analyses on the system of education in the Lebanon in relation to the construction of the national identity; three Islamic cases of ‘cultural hybridisation’; the history of the three Maronite Massabki brothers, blesseds and martyrs; and the social and political journey of Muslim immigrants in the Iberian peninsula.