A few years ago I was part of a small delegation of Catholic theologians visiting the Iranian holy city of Qom, some 100 miles south of Tehran. It is a city that beats to the pulse of tradition. Holy sayings are inscribed in mosaic and traced in neon lights. The unmoving face of the Imam Khomeini glowers from posters. Women, young and old, fresh-faced students as well as aged grannies, bustle around, all dressed top-to-toe in black widow’s weeds. Yet it is also a place with a rich and diverse religious culture of its own. Qom has been likened to an Islamic Oxford with its array of academic institutes and study centres. Libraries proliferate, some the benefactions of much-loved local teachers, others carefully husbanded collections of religious and philosophical literature from different parts of the world. The scholarly pursuit of truth is part of the atmosphere. On every street corner, mullahs, dressed in the full-length flowing robes of the Shi’a cleric, seem to be engaged in one never-ending seminar – or maybe just haggling over the price of the books.

In such an atmosphere, where religion is such a live issue, interreligious conversations can suddenly happen in unlikely places. I have a vivid memory of the hair-raising bus trip back to Tehran. The driver clearly thought that careering along a narrow crowded road with headlights blazing at the oncoming traffic was some sort of virility test. In order to distract myself from the prospect of instant oblivion I got into conversation with my companion, a Shi’a theologian who was our host in Qom. Shouting over the constant blare of horns, he explained that Shi’a Islam is based on three principles – spirituality, rationality, and justice. The life of prayer and intellectual enquiry together support a life dedicated to the cause of truth and justice in the world. Putting it another way, he went on, the Shi’a account of the religious life is vested in three aspects of the divine–human relationship, what God reveals about God’s will for human beings. Human beings find their purpose in life by bringing the three into some sort of a correlation – to pray sincerely, to think clearly, and to do what is right. What he had to say impressed me, as much for the cogency of his presentation as for the craziness of the situation in which we found ourselves. I cannot, to be honest, remember much of the detail with which he justified the Shi’a version of interdependence of the three principles. It was, however, clear from the thoughtful way in which he expounded his thesis that the Shi’a tradition he represented was light years away from the popular stereotype of the self-flagellating masochist – or from the distinctly irrational behaviour of our driver.