IT\u2019S a very long way from the cloisters of Cambridge to the Iraqi city of Mosul, where at least a dozen Christians have been killed this month, and hundreds of Christian families have fled, in that country\u2019s latest sectarian mayhem.<\/p>\n
But Rowan Williams, head of the 80m-strong Anglican Communion, and Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, were doing their gallant best to minimise the distance as they presided, this week, over a new effort by the world\u2019s leading Muslim and Christian scholars to understand each other. The threat facing Iraqi Christians had \u201cundermined a centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community\u201d\u009d, the two clerics carefully opined, as they pledged to create links between Western academia and Muslim universities, like Egypt\u2019s 400,000-strong al-Azhar campus, a place which had already been awarding degrees for two centuries when Cambridge was founded in 1209.<\/p>\n