Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali’s warning that Islamic extremism is creating ‘no-go’ areas in parts of Britain has provoked a predictable barrage of outrage.

He has been condemned for making ‘inflammatory’ remarks, distorting the truth about our inner cities and ‘scaremongering’ against the Muslim population.

But, paradoxically, this reaction from the politically-correct establishment is an indicator of the weight of his case. If our ruling elite were not so worried that his views would strike a chord with the public, it would not have been so anxious to condemn him.

His statement about the dangers of the rise of radical Islam matches the reality of what people see in our cities and towns, where the influence of hardliners is undermining harmony and promoting segregation.

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In fewer than 50 years, Britain has changed from being a society with an acknowledged Christian basis to one which is increasingly described by politicians and the media as “multifaith”.

One reason for this is the arrival of large numbers of people of other faiths to these shores. Their arrival has coincided with the end of the Empire which brought about a widespread questioning of Britain’s role.

On the one hand, the British were losing confidence in the Christian vision which underlay most of the achievements and values of the culture and, on the other, they sought to accommodate the newer arrivals on the basis of a novel philosophy of “multiculturalism”.

This required that people should be facilitated in living as separate communities, continuing to communicate in their own languages and having minimum need for building healthy relationships with the majority.

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If we are to win the so-called war on terror, it will not be because we killed all of our enemies. For one thing, there are too many of them, and besides, it only takes one fanatic to detonate a nuclear or biological weapon. No, if we win this war, it will be because we regained the moral high ground.

To do that, we have to win the hearts and minds of Muslims on the street. That takes us back to Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush or back further to Mr. Lincoln or, if you prefer, all the way back to Mr. Jesus. Turning our enemies into friends. That’s the only long-term strategy that makes any sense.

Ultimately, it is Muslims who must excise the scourge of radicalism from Islam. From within. We can help by behaving like the generous, just and benevolent society moderate Muslims once considered us to be.

Sorry, doves, but that doesn’t mean getting out of Iraq tomorrow. The military mission must be completed. But hawks must realize that there can be no lasting victory without a humanitarian mission as well. Not just in Iraq. In Bangladesh, the West Bank, anywhere in the Muslim world where there is suffering. Do that and who knows? Maybe by next Christmas we can start beating our swords into plowshares.

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In many parts of the world, battle seems to be in progress. The Saudis will not allow the Bible to be distributed on their soil. Many Evangelical Christians are fixated on what they call the 10/40 window””the vast swathe of the Islamic world in Africa and Asia that lies between latitudes 10 and 40 north of the equator. The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas has even created a masters degree to train missionaries in the art of converting Muslims. Some Evangelicals produce counterfeit Korans that are designed to plant doubt in Muslim minds.

And the battle of the books is certainly at the heart of the battle between the two religions. People who get hold of Bibles or Korans may not read them or understand them. Unless they are introduced to the books they will certainly remain heathens. Even an imperfect report on the state of the battle tells us a lot about the world’s two great missionary religions.

The Christians entered the 21st century with a big head start. There are 2 billion of them in the world compared with 1.5 billion Muslims. But Islam had a better 20th century than Christianity. The world’s Muslim population grew from 200m in 1900 to its current levels. Christianity has shrivelled in Christendom’s European heart. Islam is resurgent across the Arab world. Many Christian scholars predict that Islam will overtake Christianity as the world’s largest religion by 2050.

More recently, though, Muslims complain that the “war on terror” is making it much more difficult to spread the Koran. Contributions to Muslim charities have fallen since September 11th 2001. Several charities have had their funding disrupted. Missionary organisations such as the Tablighi Jamaat are under investigation by Western intelligence services, on the grounds that they may be way-stations to jihadism. And Muslims confront much bigger long-term problems in the battle of the books.

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For six years, it has been a tradition for Muslims in the Research Triangle: After morning services on the first day of Eid al-Adha — the “festival of sacrifice” — scores of families leave the tweedy environs of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and head toward an obscure plot of land on a two-lane country road.

They come to visit Eddie Rowe, a hog farmer.

The children typically run around among Rowe’s loose chickens. The women prepare picnic sandwiches. And the patriarch of each family awaits his turn to slit the throat of a lamb or a goat that Rowe has sold him.

To Muslims around the world, this is an important ritual — a tribute to Allah and to the prophet Abraham, who in both the Koran and the Bible is said to have offered his son as a sacrifice to God.

To research scientist Ahmed Mamai, 40, a native Moroccan, performing the sacrifice on Rowe’s property allows him to maintain an ancient tradition that would be difficult to square with his lifestyle in suburban Raleigh. If he slaughtered an animal in his backyard, Mamai said with a smile, “My wife would sacrifice me.”

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The Muslim new year has come in with a bang. On the eve of the high holiday of Eid al-Adha, explosions abound. Outside Beirut a car bomb kills four. A double-blast in Quetta, Pakistan, destroys eight lives. Twin suicide bombings in Iraq’s Diyala Province murder 26, including six women and children. Two bombers in Algiers, one a grandfather, claim over 35 victims.

This year-end killing spree – whose victims were nearly all Muslim – has again revealed a profound failure to stop violent extremism across the Muslim world. The international community, increasingly numb to a steady tide of slaughter in Muslim lands, has little to say. Muslim leaders offer a ritual disclaimer that the radicals don’t represent Islam – a “religion of peace” – and then retreat into silence.

We have failed to offer a robust response to the brutal wave of human sacrifice. This failure has allowed extremists to garner headlines and define the agenda without meeting an equally passionate response from the moderate center. It is long past time to mount a vigorous campaign against the cult of death and reaffirm a culture of life.

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Muslim leaders join the U.K. Commission for Equality and Human Rights in urging Britons to enjoy Christmas, and not worry about offending non-Christians. The urging comes amid reports of schools cancelling nativity plays in order not to offend Muslims and students of other religions.

Listen to it all from NPR.

My condemnation – as well as those of many other Muslim scholars around the world – has apparently not been heard. In Western countries as well as in Islamic countries, we witness a kind of selective hearing. People are invited to listen only to what apparently comforts their prejudices or suits some ideological agenda.

This polarization is dangerous because it engenders enmity. Our world needs more courageous, but also more consistent, voices. The reason why voices such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s are not heard in Islamic countries is not because she raises irrelevant questions (some of her arguments are indeed very relevant) but because her criticisms appear to be obsessive, excessive and unilateral. It is as if she wants to please the West and, yes, the West is pleased. But the Muslims are deaf to her voice.

The future belongs to those who are able to consistently exercise self-criticism in the name of shared universal values and not because of blindly belonging to the artificial construct of “Western” or “Islamic” civilization, or because of a hidden ideological agenda.

All betrayals of faith and principles must be denounced with the same energy: those of the Muslims when they kill or imprison innocent people, as well as those of democratic Western societies when they illegally invade another country, or use torture or extraordinary renditions. It would be good, indeed, to hear more often these non-selective – and non-selected – voices

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But where are the moderates? Where are the Muslim voices raised over the terrible injustice of incidents like these? How many Muslims are willing to stand up and say, in the case of the girl from Qatif, that this manner of justice is appalling, brutal and bigoted ”” and that no matter who said it was the right thing to do, and how long ago it was said, this should no longer be done?

Usually, Muslim groups like the Organization of the Islamic Conference are quick to defend any affront to the image of Islam. The organization, which represents 57 Muslim states, sent four ambassadors to the leader of my political party in the Netherlands asking him to expel me from Parliament after I gave a newspaper interview in 2003 noting that by Western standards some of the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior would be unconscionable. A few years later, Muslim ambassadors to Denmark protested the cartoons of Muhammad and demanded that their perpetrators be prosecuted.

But while the incidents in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and India have done more to damage the image of Islamic justice than a dozen cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, the organizations that lined up to protest the hideous Danish offense to Islam are quiet now.

I wish there were more Islamic moderates. For example, I would welcome some guidance from that famous Muslim theologian of moderation, Tariq Ramadan. But when there is true suffering, real cruelty in the name of Islam, we hear, first, denial from all these organizations that are so concerned about Islam’s image. We hear that violence is not in the Koran, that Islam means peace, that this is a hijacking by extremists and a smear campaign and so on. But the evidence mounts up.

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Dr Michael Nazir-Ali is the Bishop of Rochester, and thus a leading figure in the Church of England, one of the Lords Spiritual; but, as his name suggests, he is from a largely Muslim family background. Dr Nazir-Ali was received into the Anglican Church of Pakistan at the age of 20 and became the Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab at the age of 35, making him the youngest bishop in the Anglican Communion.

As Dr Nazir-Ali told me on an earlier occasion: “This was a time ”“ the late 1980s ”“ when there was a great movement towards political Islamicisation in Pakistan. As Christians we had to say that there were certain penal laws, partly concerning the role of women in society, which we could not support.”

The threats to Dr Nazir-Ali that resulted from this ideological conflict eventually became so unpleasant ”“ especially as they were also directed at his children ”“ that the young bishop left Pakistan, and settled in Britain.

What astounded Dr Nazir-Ali, when he regained his bearings, was that the dominant form of Islam in the UK that he recalled from his time here in the 1970s (when he was tutorial supervisor in theology at Cambridge University) ”“ pietistic, Sufi-orientated ”“ had, in little more than a decade, been completely supplanted by something much more militant and political: in fact, exactly the same form of the religion that had forced him out of Pakistan.

Dr Nazir-Ali claims that this had happened “because the British mosques had recruited people from fundamentalist backgrounds” ”“ people like Hannah’s father, as it happens.

Like Hannah, Dr Nazir-Ali cannot be described as anti-Islamic. As he pointed out to me, he has “a large number of Muslim friends and relatives with whom I get on very well and for which I am deeply thankful”. His complaint is against what he terms “the chauvinist manifestations of Islam, a kind of ideology which affirms the will to power”. He adds that he had been to Bosnia during the period in which Muslims were slaughtered in their thousands: “So I have seen such chauvinism in its Christian form.”

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THE ARREST OF a British school teacher in Sudan last week–amid demands for her execution–had all the earmarks of a Samuel Beckett play, a theatre of the absurd that is attracting sell-out crowds in many parts of the Islamic world. The latest source of Muslim rage: a teddy bear.

Gillian Gibbons was arrested and convicted of insulting Islam because her class of seven-year-olds innocently named a teddy bear Muhammad. Initially sentenced to 15 days in jail, she could have spent six months rotting in a Sudanese prison and gotten 40 lashes or worse, courtesy of Sudan’s shari’a law. After an international outcry, President Omar al-Bashir granted her a pardon and kicked her out of the country earlier this week. The private school in Khartoum where she taught, which educates Christian and Muslim students, has been shut down.

The saga of Ms. Gibbons has hardly been more stupefying than the reaction of media elites and others desperate to avoid charges of “Islamophobia.” The BBC’s Amber Henshaw, for example, euphemistically dismissed the protestors as “a small group of hotheads.” Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times similarly downplayed the intensity of incensed locals. “Aside from a large gathering outside the presidential palace, most of Khartoum was quiet,” he reported. Sure, imams “brought up the case” in sermons–New York Times doublespeak for a fiery call to jihad–but not to worry, since “few of them urged violence.”

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North American Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against Islamic terrorism here Friday, hoping to build on the just-completed Mideast peace talks and a Vatican invitation to meet with Muslim leaders.

The Fiqh Council of North America, an affiliate of the Islamic Society of North America, counts support from some 500 Muslim leaders and organizations for its condemnation of violence, chairman Muzammil H. Siddiqi said.

“Targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is prohibited in Islam–haram–and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not `martyrs,”‘ the fatwa reads.

The fatwa also says Muslims have a duty to alert law enforcement about any threats to human life and must not cooperate with any group or individual involved in terrorism.

Friday’s fatwa follows similar attempts by moderate Muslims, including the Fiqh Council, to denounce violence, Siddiqi said. But both Siddiqi and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, on hand Friday to promote the fatwa, said previous calls were “widely ignored.”

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The document is signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics and political leaders; it shows similarities among Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Signatory Akbar Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Studies Department at American University, sees it as a “handshake across the oceans.”

Scott Simon talks to Akbar Ahmed.

Listen to it all from NPR, it serves as a good compliment to the previously posted story.

Muslim and Christian scholars are to gather in Singapore next week at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. On the agenda will issues including gender and diversity issues.

The meeting is the latest ”˜Building Bridges’ exercise, the sixth in the annual series, which will bring together over 30 scholars to examine issues of current interest from a religious perspective.

Hosted by the National University of Singapore, it will consider how the respective religions approach such matters as care and responsibility for the environment. As previously, the Seminar will consist of the presentation of papers in public and separate private sessions for the participants.

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Just last year, the morality police roamed these streets in dusky blue uniforms and black berets, brandishing cudgels at prayer shirkers and dragging fornicators into Islamic courts to face sentences like death by public stoning.

But these days, the fearsome police officers, known as the Hisbah, are little more than glorified crossing guards. They have largely been confined to their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping fans to their seats at soccer games.

The Islamic revolution that seemed so destined to transform northern Nigeria in recent years appears to have come and gone ”” or at least gone in a direction few here would have expected.

When Muslim-dominated states like Kano adopted Islamic law after the fall of military rule in 1999, radical clerics from the Arabian peninsula arrived in droves to preach a draconian brand of fundamentalism, and newly empowered religious judges handed down tough punishments like amputation for theft. Kano became a center of anti-American sentiment in one of the most reliably pro-American countries in Africa.

But since then, much of the furor has died down, and the practice of Islamic law, or Shariah, which had gone on for centuries in the private sphere before becoming enshrined in public law, has settled into a distinctively Nigerian compromise between the dictates of faith and the chaotic realities of modern life in an impoverished, developing nation.

“Shariah needs to be practical,” said Bala Abdullahi, a civil servant here. “We are a developing country, so there is a kind of moderation between the ideas of the West and traditional Islamic values. We try to weigh it so there is no contradiction.”

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The Muslim Canadian Congress is organizing a teddy bear mail-in to protest Sudan’s imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher.

The 54-year-old woman was jailed on Thursday for 15 days for allowing her young students to name a teddy bear Muhammad as part of a class project.

Tarek Fatah, MCC’s founder, said he is asking the group’s 300 members to send “tiny teddy bears” (including the one pictured) to Faiza Hassan

Taha, Sudan’s ambassador in Ottawa, as a protest.

Yesterday, protests at the leniency of Ms. Gibbons’ sentence brought hostile crowds out on the streets of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, with angry men brandishing ceremonial swords and calling for her execution.

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In response to a letter from Muslim leaders seeking better relations with the Christian world, Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday invited those leaders to the Vatican for a “working meeting” on inter-religious dialogue.

Writing on behalf of the pope, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, expressed Benedict’s “gratitude” and “deep appreciation” for an open letter that 138 Muslim scholars and clerics sent to the pope on Oct. 13.

That letter invoked the common principles of “love of the One God, and love of the neighbor” as the ultimate basis for peace between Muslims and Christians. Bertone’s reply acknowledged and reaffirmed those points.

“Without ignoring or downplaying our differences as Christians and Muslims, we can and therefore should look to what unites us, namely, belief in the one God,” the cardinal wrote.

Bertone noted that Benedict was “particularly impressed by the attention given (by the Muslim letter writers) to the twofold commandment to love God and one’s neighbor.”

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Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher who allowed her class to name their teddy bear Mohamed, has been sentenced to 15 days in jail followed by deportation from Sudan.

Her lawyers announced that Ms Gibbons was found guilty of insulting Islam. The 54-year-old former Liverpool primary school teacher had faced a maximum penalty of 40 lashes and a six-month jail sentence.

Tonight David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said he was “extremely disappointed” with the sentence and summoned Omer Siddig, the Sudanese ambassador to London, to the Foreign and Commnwealth Office (FCO) to make Britain’s position clear.

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Muslim leaders are to carry out spot checks and will introduce programmes to fight extremism in the first set of national guidelines for mosques.

The draft guidelines, to be published tomorrow, represent the most radical attempt so far by leaders of the country’s two million Muslims to tackle extremism and introduce an effective system of self-regulation.

The hope is that the new measures will help to prevent young people from being drawn to extremism through extremist teaching in and around unregulated mosques.

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Sometimes when Asma Haidara, a 12-year-old Somali immigrant, wants to shop at Target or ride the Minneapolis light-rail system, she puts her Girl Scout sash over her everyday clothes, which usually include a long skirt worn over pants as well as a swirling head scarf.

She has discovered that the trademark green sash ”” with its American flag, troop number (3009) and colorful merit badges ”” reduces the number of glowering looks she draws from people otherwise bothered by her traditional Muslim dress.

“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ”˜Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”

Scattered Muslim communities across the United States are forming Girl Scout troops as a sort of assimilation tool to help girls who often feel alienated from the mainstream culture, and to give Muslims a neighborly aura. Boy Scout troops are organized with the same inspiration, but often the leap for girls is greater because many come from conservative cultures that frown upon their participating in public physical activity.

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Friday’s multiple bomb blasts in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh — which killed 13 people and injured about 80 — ought to give pause to those who see the world’s largest democracy as a linchpin in the war on terror. India’s leaders and diplomats seek to portray the country as a firebreak against radical Islam, or the drive to impose the medieval Arab norms enshrined in Shariah law on 21st century life. In reality, India is ill- equipped to fight this scourge.

Like neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, (and unlike Turkey or Tunisia) India has failed to modernize much of its Muslim population. Successive generations of politicians have pandered to the most backward elements of India’s 150-million strong Muslim population, the second largest in the world after Indonesia’s. India has allowed Muslims to follow Shariah in civil matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. An increasingly radicalized neighborhood, fragmented domestic politics and a curiously timid mainstream discourse on Islam add up to hobble India’s response to radical Islamic intimidation.

Most Indian Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism, and are more concerned with the struggles of daily life than the effort to create a global caliphate. Muslim contributions to the fabric of national life — most visible in sports, movies and the arts — should not be dismissed. Furthermore, religious zealotry in India is not a Muslim monopoly. Still, the notion that Indian Islam is uniquely tolerant, or somehow immune to the rising tide of world-wide radical sentiment, is a myth.

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A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God ”” not different ones.

—From the New York Times “Corrections” section on November 25th; the original article to which it refers is here.

Between trips to the Middle East and Africa to across the United States, John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., and former dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in San Diego, has been busy.

His most recent venture: Iran, where he met with religious officials to discuss similarities between Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“We’re all monotheists, and that means we share a tremendous amount theologically in common, which I find fascinating,” Chane said. “The Virgin Mary is venerated more times in Iran than in the gospels, and they celebrate Jesus Christ’s birthday.”

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Reams have been written on the differences between Islamic and Western societies, but for sheer pithiness, it’s hard to beat a quip by my former colleague, a Pakistani scholar of Islamic studies. I’d strolled into his office one day to find him on the floor, at prayer. I left, shutting his door, mortified. Later he cheerfully batted my apologies away. “That’s the big difference between us,” he said with a shrug. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”

At the nub of debates over Muslim integration in the West lies the question, What’s decent to do in public–display your sexuality or your faith? The French have no problem with bare breasts on billboards and TV but big problems with hijab-covered heads in public schools and government offices. Many Muslims feel just the opposite. As my friend suggested, Westerners believe that prayer is something best done in private, a matter for individual souls rather than state institutions. In the Islamic world, religion is out of the closet: on the streets, chanted five times daily from minarets, enshrined in constitutions, party platforms and penal codes. Sexual matters are kept discreet.

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A counterterrorism project in Los Angeles that would collect information about Muslim neighborhoods is drawing outrage from Islamic groups and civil libertarians who say it unjustly singles out residents based on faith and could lead to unconstitutional police tactics.
The groups complain that the Los Angeles Police Department’s “community mapping” project, which aims to prevent radicalization and homegrown terrorism, unfairly brings suspicion on Muslims.

They say it undermines trust established between Muslims and police since the 9/11 attacks and is reminiscent of how Nazis identified Jews during the Holocaust.

“This is anti-Semitism reborn as Islamophobia,” said Shakeel Syed, director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. “We will fiercely resist this.”

The mapping project would collect information about specific neighborhoods but not individuals, according to Michael Downing, the LAPD’s counterterrorism chief.

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This is heartwarming.

In a communiqué, Dr Williams, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, and Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger said that Christians and Jews should respond jointly to the Muslim letter.

“The ”˜Common Word’, though addressed to Christian Churches, also makes clear its respect for Hebrew scripture in citing directly from the Book of Deuteronomy, and in acknowledging the inspiration that this provided for their understanding of the Qur’anic teaching on the unity and love of God and of neighbour,” they said in the communiqué.

The communiqué also called for the furthering of “universal religious solidarity” by regarding places of worship, Christian, Jewish or those of other faiths, as “sacrosanct and therefore inviolate”.

The three religious leaders said they were “very concerned about the well-being of the ever-increasing number of refugees from Iraq, and the plight of religious minorities, in particular Christian communities in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region”.

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Wasiu Olasunkani drops to his knees in the sacred grove, lowers his chin to his chest and turns his palms skyward: a gesture of thanks to a traditional water goddess embodied by the massive stone idol with outstretched arms that sweep over an ancient shrine.

Olasunkani, a Muslim whose 1998 pilgrimage to Mecca fulfilled one of the five pillars of Islam, joins tens of thousands of ethnic Yoruba people each year to pray before the idol and offer libations to her mermaid-like spirit, Osun. Last year, Olasunkani beseeched the goddess for a baby. This year he’s thanking her for twin boys, Farook and Cordroy.

“If you want to get a baby, you come here and pray, and you’ll certainly have one,” said the 46-year old doctor after finishing his riverside reverie. Speaking of his fellow Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria ”” 20 million strong and roughly evenly split between Christians and Muslims ”” he says: “We’ve been doing this for centuries.”

Across West Africa, churches or mosques can be found in virtually every settlement: evidence of deep Christian and Muslim roots sown by the merchants, missionaries and slave traders who brought the religions hundreds of years ago. But also firmly settled in the red soil are indigenous practices that West Africans integrate with the foreign beliefs.

The results may sometimes seem to flout the monotheistic holy books, the Bible and Quran. But many West African faithful say their interpretations are equally valid ”” although they don’t always tell their pastors or imams.

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The leader of the world’s Anglicans on Thursday welcomed a letter from Islamic scholars and leaders urging Christians and Muslims to develop their common ground of belief in one God.

The letter carried 138 signatures, including those of Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Europe and the United States.

“The theological basis of the letter and its call to ‘vie with each other only in righteousness and good works; to respect each other, be fair, just and kind to another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual good will,’ are indicative of the kind of relationship for which we yearn in all parts of the world, and especially where Christians and Muslims live together,” Archbishop Rowan Williams said.

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Update: The full Rowan Williams press release is here.

Listen to it all (starts just past 13 minutes in).

Update: there is more from Time Magazine here, including this:

It is time that Muslims and Christians recognized just how similar they are ”” the fate of the world depends on it. That’s the message being sent out today by 138 Muslim leaders and scholars in an open letter to their Christian counterparts saying that world peace hinges on greater understanding between the two faiths.

The 29-page letter is addressed to Pope Benedict XVI, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and 25 other Christian leaders. Organized by the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan, it’s the first time so many high-profile Muslims have come together to make such a public call for peace. Launched first in Jordan this morning, and then in other countries over the course of the day, the letter’s big unveiling takes place at a joint press conference by Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia, and John Esposito, Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. By pointing out the similarities between the Bible and the Koran, between Christianity and Islam, the letter’s signatories are hoping to convince Christian leaders to “come together with us on the common essentials of our two religions.”

Quoting from both holy texts, the letter notes that both Christianity and Islam require believers to believe in only one god and insists that it is the same god. It points out that both religions are founded on goodwill, not violence, and that many of the fundamental truths that were revealed to Muhammad are the same ones that came to other Christian and Jewish prophets.

Because of this, the letter says, Muslims are duty-bound by the Koran to treat believers of other faiths with respect and friendship ”” and that Muslims expect the same in return. “As Muslims, we say to Christians that we are not against them and that Islam is not against them ”” as long as they do not wage war against Muslims on account of their religion, oppress them and drive them out of their homes.”