“In the very selective space of countries which have made the richness of their diversity the exemplary engine of their identity, the Kingdom of Morocco and Singapore have the privilege to play in the same league, that of excellence and social modernity,” said Azoulay to the Singapore Conference (September 4-11) on the Cohesion of Societies, opened by Head of State Halimah Yacob and attended by the Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Long and a dozen members of his government.
Speaking at the plenary session before 800 dignitaries from 40 countries, Azoulay praised this “remarkable” initiative “because it is embodied by Singapore, which has chosen to make the 10 religions that feed its DNA an asset, a strength and the crucible of an emerging nation whose leadership and success are authoritative and consensual on the international scene.”
“For a long time, Singapore has stood out for the exceptional success of its economic model, driven by a dynamic whose pace and impressive growth have rarely been denied for more than half a century,” said HM the King’s Advisor.
In this regard, he highlighted “the pioneering and visionary ambition of the Founding Father of the Republic of Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who succeeded in giving his country a higher standard of living than that of the richest and most developed countries in the Western world.”
Today, “we must read this historic economic and social achievement in the light of another success no less unprecedented and no less exemplary, that of a society that has been able in half a century to forge its national identity from the legitimacy and the serene and civic development of the impressive multitude of all its diversity, religious, ethnic and cultural.”
It is by echoing this unique dynamic in the world that the Advisor to HM the King put in perspective “the unshakeable rooting of Morocco in the consolidation of a project of society, which takes pride in the contributions of all civilizations that have fertilized its history and which today, force the respect and the listening of what Morocco, as Singapore, knows how to say to the others, in a time and an epoch weakened by the archaism of those, who do not know how to resist to the mortifying temptations of the denial, the cultural and spiritual fracture and often of the amnesia of their own historical determinism.”
Carried and embodied by the leadership of HM King Mohammed VI, “emblematic figure of what in the Land of Islam openness and otherness can bring to a Community of Nations in search of landmarks,” this Moroccan reality was at the heart of the successive meetings of the Advisor of HM the King with the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, those of Economic Cooperation, Culture, Communities and Islamic Affairs.
On the sidelines of the Conference and these meetings, Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan chose to “transfer to the Singapore Synagogue the luncheon offered in honor of HM the King’s Advisor, which was initially to be kept at the Ministry’s headquarters.”
With this gesture, Balakrishnan wanted to pay tribute to Morocco and to the Chief Rabbi of Singapore, Mordekhai Abergel, a fervent Moroccan and an activist committed to the Dialogue of Religions and Cultures in this part of the Asian continent, from Singapore to Hong Kong or from Shanghai to Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta.
Balakrishnan welcomed in this context the initiative of Chief Rabbi Abergel to open his synagogue and his house to the representatives of all the communities of Singapore on the occasion of Pesach, the Jewish Passover, thus extending in Asia the tradition of the Mimouna, emblematic of the ritual and traditions of conviviality and Moroccan Judaism. (MAP)
