Abbot Hagami and President Sadat of Egypt
Abbot Shocho Hagami of Tendai Buddhism was a leader of the Japanese inter-religious movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s. After witnessing Oomoto’s joint worship services at Kameoka and Ayabe, Abbot Hagami became convinced that joint prayer was one of the most powerful tools for creating world peace.
The First Joint Worship Ceremony at Mt. Sinai, 1979
Early in 1979 Abbot Hagami met with President Sadat of Egypt who was just then finalizing his epochal rapprochement with Israel. Abbot Hagami proposed a joint worship ceremony to be conducted at Mt. Sinai and President Sadat decided to hold it to commemorate the return of the Sinai Penninsula to Egypt.
On November 19, 1979, Kyotaro Deguchi and Alex Kerr from Oomoto, Abbot Hagami, and Dean Morton from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, attended the ceremony, which was the highest level religious collaboration between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to be held in two thousand years.
Pope Shenouda II of the Coptic Christians, the Sheikh El Azhar, and the Grand Rabbi of Alexandria each prayed in the desert at the foot of Mt. Sinai, sacred to the Three Religions of the Book. The site of their prayers, the Plain of Raha, is where the Jews waited for Moses to come down from the mount with the Ten Commandments.
The Second Joint Worship Ceremony at Mt. Sinai, 1984
Soon afterwards President Sadat was assassinated and relations between Judaism and Islam changed for the worse. However, the Mt. Sinai prayer service lived on as a beacon of hope.
On March 6, 1984, a group of over one hundred religious people, gathered with the help of Dean Morton, met in a circle on the Plain of Raha and prayed together for world peace. Their prayers at holy Mt. Sinai were in the language and ritual of many religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, and others.
