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CASA UNIVERSALE DELLE CULTURE The Maison de la Paix - Casa Universale delle Culture is a place strongly representative, in which will convey the knowledge of the different identities and cultures, structuring permanently initiatives aimed at the spreading of peace, necessary for the shared development. The Maison de la Paix - Casa Universale delle Culture (MdP) is a project conceived by Michele Capasso, approved by many Countries and international organizations. It is an architecture that keeps the memory of many Peace activities which created history, often more than the wars, but it is – above all – a space "to build” Peace. The architectonical complex has an important symbolic worth: it represents the Countries of the World engaged in the Peace process and the Countries victim of the conflicts. Proposed by the Fondazione Mediterraneo with the “Maison des Alliances” – together with the main adherent organizations, such as the Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly, the League of Arab States, the "Anna Lindh" Euro-Mediterranean Foundation and others, the MdP represents a referent point for all the ones who dedicate their lives to peace. The symbol of the MdP is the "Totem for Peace", an artwork by the Italian sculptor Mario Molinari which the Fondazione Mediterraneo is promoting all around the world, creating the network of the "Cities for Peace". The first seat of the MdP was inaugurated on the 14th of June 2010 (Maison de la Paix - Casa Universale delle Culture) in the historical building of the Grand Hotel de Londres in Naples. The action of the Maison de la Paix - Casa Universale delle Culture aims at improving the main activities of the "Universal Forum of Cultures" in: Barcelona (2004), Monterrey (2007), Valparaiso (2010) and Naples (2013). The Maison de la Paix performs most of the initiatives jointly with the Maison de la Méditerranée. |
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08 February 2017
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
The High Commission for Religious Affairs of Morocco, in charge of issuing fatwa (Islamic rulings), annulled its previous sentence that religious conversion constitutes an offence punishable by the death penalty. Muslims are now given the freedom to choose their beliefs.
In 2012, the High Commission for Religious Affairs published a book in which it set out its position on apostasy. Drawing on a widespread jurisprudential tradition, it was argued that a Muslim willing to change his religion should be punished with death.
Recently, this position has been contradicted by a new document published by the same religious body entitled "The Way of scholars". As the basis for the decision to set aside the judgment, the document redefines the principles of apostasy. The latter is no longer seen as a matter of faith but rather as a political position within the category of high treason.
In the "Way of scholars", the High Commission plunges into the past and suggests that once the context of apostasy and its punishment was predominantly pragmatic and political. Wars of apostasy were conducted in line with the effort to maintain the newly constituted state united against any kind of internal division. Therefore, he points out that the most accurate and consistent interpretation with Islamic law and the Prophet's example is that the killing of the apostate essentially concerns the traitor of the group, the one who escaping from Islam endangers the Umma (Islamic community) by revealing its secrets to its enemies; that is, the equivalent of betrayal in international law.
Consequently, the Prophet's word "whoever changes religion, kills him" must be interpreted as referring to the one who leaves his religion and abandons his own people.
Yet the idea that the apostate should not be killed is not new for Islam. In fact, at the time of al-Ḥudaybiyya accord, the same Mohammed observed this provision stating that anyone who had become Muslim and renounced to be Muslim would have been given the possibility to return to Quraysh, at the time the most powerful enemy of Islam.
Finally, the ecclesiastical committee also notes that in several cases the Koran speaks of apostasy and punishment in life to come, not in the present one. For example, in chapter 2 verse 217 reads:"[....] And those of you who renounce faith and die in unbelief are those who have failed in this life and in the other. Here are the companions of the Fire: they will remain in perpetuity ".
The decision, which has followed a political rather than religious reasoning - says President Michele Capasso, satisfied with the decision - is certainly significant and revolutionary for Moroccan society.
Christians, who represent a small minority in Morocco - with a Muslim majority - breathe a sigh of relief. After years of threats of persecution, the most vulnerable religious minorities can now freely choose which God to pray to..
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03 February 2017
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
The international conference coordinated by Prof. Caterina Arcidiacono - University Federico II and Coordinator of the Community Psychology Lab was held in Naples.
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02 February 2017
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
The Fondazione Mediterraneo - president and co-founder Michele Capasso, vice-president Caterina Arcidiacono, head of the institutional traps Claudio Azzolini, members of the Board of Directors and the International Scientific Committee, directors of the Almamed Autonomous Sections, Mediterranean Academy, Isolamed, Labmed and Euromedcity, heads of the branch offices and friends of the Foundation - greets Predrag Matvejevic’ with a heartbeat.
The friend, colleague, writer, essayist, intellectual and dissident Predrag Matvejevic died at the age of 84 in the hospital in Zagreb where he had been admitted for some time.
He has been a committed man from the point of view of human rights Predrag, as well as university lecturer: he has always fought for peace and dialogue between peoples, especially, of course, for those in the Balkans.
Born in Mostar when the city was part of Yugoslavia (then it would become Bosnia-Herzegovina), he also lived in Italy (from 1994 to 2008), where he taught Slavistica at Sapienza of Rome from 1994 to 2007. Previously he had been lecturer in French Literature at the University of Zagreb and in literature compared to the New Sorbonne-Paris III. He had emigrated to France in 1991.
He was a consultant for the Mediterranean in the Group of Wise Men of the European Commission during the Prodi Presidency and among the ideologists of the "Anna Lindh Foundation"; vice-president of the PEN International Club of London; co-founder and president of the scientific committee of our Fondazione Laboratorio Mediterraneo (now the Mediterranean Foundation) with headquarters in Naples.
For his work as a writer he has received numerous awards in Italy and abroad, including the Malaparte Prize in 1991, the European Witch Prize in 2003 and the Prix du Meilleurlivreétranger 1993 in Paris. The French government gave him the Legion of Honor, the President of the Italian Republic awarded him Italian citizenship and the title of Commendatore of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity.
Among his most important works are: "Mediterranean breviary" - translated into various languages - "Sarajevo","A Curse Europe," our bread ".
The Fondazione Mediterraneo and the United States of the World have published several books by its co-founder: among them there are "Diary of a war","On the identities of Europe","The Mediterranean and Europe".
President Capasso, moved, remembers his brother, friend and intellectual with whom he has shared so many battles for over 25 years: for peace, for dialogue, for freedom, for social justice; from the Appeal for Peace in former Yugoslavia to those for Palestine, Syria, Kosovo…
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02 February 2017
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
A few days after Gerardo Marotta's death, Predrag also left us: two great personalities who created the "Fondazione Mediterraneo" with me.
Predrag died without the recognition he deserved, that Nobel Prize winner who only a year ago with a committee of journalists and writers, including Claudio Magris, we urgently demanded: the homage to a great writer, victim of injustice and what he called "democratura", the dictatorship of democracy.
He died yesterday in Zagreb at the age of 84 years. For some time he had distanced himself from public debate because of the disease.
He would have deserved the Nobel Prize only for "Breviario Mediterraneo", his most famous work, a splendid essay' geopoetic',' diary on board',' novel about places', translated into 20 languages and considered by Magris as "a brilliant, lightning-fast, unexpected book".
Predrag: brother, friend, confidant, intellectual. He who influenced the second part of my life by making me become, like him, a warrior of the battles in defence of human rights, always alongside the dissidents persecuted by power: from Sakharov to Havel, from Kundera to Sinjavsky.
He himself was then persecuted and invisible to the Croatian authorities, sentenced to five months in prison in November 2005 by a court in Zagreb. He had dared to break the hypocrisy of that regime by writing, in 2001, a essay in which he accused some writers of having been "warmongers" during the Yugoslav wars. He called them "Our Taliban" or "Christian Taliban" and the establishment turned against them. Processed for slander and defamation, he accepted the sentence as a medal, renouncing the appeal:"I do not want to recognize the authority of those who have made this sentence".
He was born in Mostar, then Yugoslavia, today Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Odessa's Russian father and Croatian mother. A mixture of races and cultures. Multicultural roots, an opening towards the world that distinguished it from other intellectuals approved to the system.
Predrag teaches Slavic at Sapienza in Rome, from 1994 to 2007. First he teaches in Zagreb and the Sorbonne. France grants him the "Legion of Honour", Italy the citizenship that he proudly exhibits, just as he feels flattered when the Prodi European Commission places him in the Group of Wise Men for the Mediterranean that was at the base of our "Anna Lindh Foundation".
In 1987, the "Breviario Mediterraneo" gave him international fame but he, courted by publishers and newspapers, always remains the same, ironic until the desecration, very attached to his students, lover of good food, life, always on the run, always hovering,"between asylum and exile": Naples, my home and the seat of the Fondazione Mediterraneo, were his home, his refuge!
A convinced and lucidly pessimistic pro-European:"There are too many fractures in the Mediterranean. Both in the North and South, the whole basin is tied with difficulty to the continent and this generates frustrations and ghosts".
Frustrations, ghosts, wars, blood and democrats. Democrature is a neologism that, as I said before, bears his signature. Democrats are "those regimes, formally democratic, in reality oligarchic". Matvejevic' conjures up the expression in reference to countries of real socialism. But, in more recent years, the writer, with bitterness, also identifies traces of democrats in liberal and social democratic Europe.
In past years we have written together, as on many occasions, considerations about the "Bread" he contemplated in the book "Pane Nostro" (2010). "The men and women - Predrag observed - have always travelled, and still do so, to those lands where bread is baked in great quantity. And where, for surplus, it is thrown away every day at night's fall.
Even today, as Pjotr Kropotkin once said,' the question of bread is more important than any other'".
It is here impossible to remember 25 years of close brotherhood, friendship, collaboration: with time we will understand the greatness of this Man, before Intellectual and Writer.
In this moment of sadness, I entrust to a few images and videos his memory.
Goodbye Pedrarg, my Brother!
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02 February 2017
Parent Category: Iniziative (EN) -
Category: Maison de la Paix (EN)
The president of CONI Giovanni Malagò visited the Museum of Peace - MAMT expressing great appreciation for this place. In particular, he appreciated the sections dedicated to Pino Daniele, Mario Molinari and Raffaele Capasso.
"This is a place not rare but unique - he said - there is a history of passion towards the values of life ... "
