Pope Francis and the grand imam of one of the most important Sunni Muslim institutions embraced at the Vatican on Monday, five years after the imam broke off relations with the papacy. “The meeting is the message,” the Pope told Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, as the religious scholar came through the door of the papal library. Al-Tayeb’s visit was the first meeting between a pontiff and a grand imam since the Muslim university in Cairo suspended talks in 2011. Al-Azhar froze relations after Benedict XVI called for better protection of Egypt’s Christian minority. Al-Azhar claimed that Pope Benedict had offended Islam and Muslims by focusing only on the suffering of Christians when many Muslims were suffering as well. Monday’s meeting came about after Bishop Miguel Ayuso Guixot, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, delivered a letter to al-Tayeb from Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, council president, inviting him to the Vatican. Fr Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said the Pope spoke privately with al-Tayeb for 25 minutes and the conversation included a discussion about “the great significance of this new encounter within the scope of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam”. Fr Lombardi said the leaders discussed a “common commitment of the authorities and the faithful of the great religions for world peace, the rejection of violence and terrorism [and] the situation of Christians in the context of conflicts and tensions in the Middle East as well as their protection.”