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MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING – Book Sample

Foreword – MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING

This work represents the latest fruit of A Common Word Between Us and You (http://www. acommonword.com), a high-level Christian-Muslim dialogue that provides the focus of our exploration of commonalities, differences, and shared interests between the Western and Islamic worlds.

 We would like to thank the chief architect of the “Common Word” initiative, HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, for his encouragement in exploring the initiative’s wide-ranging implications in an academic setting. His leadership in promoting interfaith relations has been both visionary and inspirational.

We are also grateful to Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates for its sup- port in bringing together senior Muslim and Christian figures from throughout the Middle East to discuss various themes of the book, which have enriched it greatly.

In particular, we would like to thank HE Shaykh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, UAE Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, and President of Zayed University, for his support. We are also grateful to HE Shaykh Ali Goma‛a, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, who not only contributed an essay to the volume, but was a catalyst for the book itself.

Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Sulaiman Al Jassim, Vice President of Zayed University, Dr. Nasr Arif, Professor of Political Science of Zayed University, and Ms. Marlys Berg, Director, Administration of Zayed University, for all their encouragement and efforts.

On the Christian side, we are most grateful to Rudolph C. Barnes, Jr., whose family endowed the Barnes Symposium at the University of South Carolina that provided a forum to engage in serious academic inquiry on pressing issues of law and morality understood in the broadest sense.

His commitment to in- terfaith dialogue between Christianity and Islam helped make this book pos- sible. We also wish to thank the Right Reverend William O. Gregg, Episcopal Bishop of Charlotte, for his warm engagement. Once your appetite is whetted by this book, the reader can watch more at http://www.lfip.org/barnes/2009/ videopage.htm.

We thank, of course, our families (especially Eman) for patience during all the late nights involved in producing scholarship, and to whom this work is dedicated. We also acknowledge our colleagues and contributors in Indonesia and elsewhere, who spent their own late nights on the work. We close by thanking God, for by…..