If you don’t look at the police when you are talking to them they think you are lying or making up a story, a migrant health worker told The Sunday Times of Malta.
“But in actual fact many Muslims and some Eritreans don’t look people of authority in the eye as a sign of respect,” she said.
Similarly, when a woman extends her hand to greet a Muslim man with a handshake and is turned down, it could easily be interpreted as an offensive action, but it is only respectful for a Muslim man to shake the hand of a woman older than himself, she explained.
These are some of the many misunderstandings that Prof. Adrian Gellel from the University’s Faculty of Theology and Education is seeking to address through a digital handbook which is to be launched early next year.
The handbook forms part of a project that seeks to inform professionals on the religious and cultural requirements of third country nationals.
Its launch comes in response to challenges, questions and concerns that professionals working in education, health and social work may have when they meet persons who have different religious beliefs.
If we truly wish to become a cosmopolitan society one needs to acknowledge and accommodate the different religious worldviews on the island
In the interviews conducted to gather data for the project, Prof. Gellel found that a number of professionals were anxious about how to deal with cultural and religious issues.
For example, they are at a loss to deal with a number of ‘novel’ situations, including polygamy, circumcision and religious bullying.
Furthermore, Prof. Gellel said there were situations where there was a lack of sensitivity to the needs and way of life of others and misunderstandings were created because of the lack of information.
The training aims to prepare professionals to be more accommodating of different worldviews and the idea is for professionals to refer to the book for guidance.
While the transition from a homogeneous Catholic community to a multicultural secular society has been going on over these past two or three decades, the pace of such change has increased dramatically over the past six years, Prof. Gellel explained.
One of the main contributors to such change is the rapid increase in the population, which is mainly due to a booming economy which is continuously short of workers.
Religion is intimately tied to one’s identity and in a country where almost a sixth of the population is foreign, Prof. Gellel explained that there is an urgent need for religious literacy for people of all ages.
“If we truly wish to become a cosmopolitan society one needs to acknowledge and accommodate the different religious worldviews on the island.
“Only in this way can one hope for full integration of the almost 15 per cent of the foreign population given that for many religion is intimately tied with one’s identity,” he said.
Prof. Gellel added that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to religion.
“Nicolas Sarkozy is as much a Catholic as Matteo Salvini, but they are two different types of Catholics and again they are different Catholics to Pope Francis,” he said.
For this reason, the handbook seeks to provide basic guidance regarding questions related to issues including the end of life, funerary customs, diet, celebrations, gender and family relations and sexuality.
The research is the basis of a two-year project part-financed by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) of the European Commission and is being conducted in collaboration with the Commission for Inter-Religious Dialogue of the Maltese Catholic Archdiocese.