Preface

Abstract

We have reason to celebrate the publication of this volume endorsed by ISNA and JTS. Last year, we at ISNA celebrated the 50th anniversary of our organization. Half a century of growth and development in a pluralist democracy is in itself a special experience for our Muslim community. A few years ago, we realized that the Muslim and the Jewish communities in America were growing in isolation from each other. Our success and prosperity was in some ways facilitated by our close cooperation and dialogue with various Christian denominations and organizations. But this was not true with respect to Muslim and Jewish Americans. Both communities learned about each other through the writings of their own coreligionists, many of whom were distorting the images of each other and looking at each other from the lens of the excesses committed in the Holy Land. This was a very dangerous situation. If this was allowed to continue, we would have the tensions of the Middle East visiting us here and pushing both communities to build walls of separation and see extremism thrive. We had an alternative available: Open up our communities to each other and let the dialogue begin in a big way. The good will that could be generated here would be a great asset in solving the conflict back in the Holy Land itself. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the leaders in the largest Jewish denomination, the URJ, had been thinking along the same lines. We developed a joint pilot project from this initiative called the Children of Abraham. A book with this name was written jointly by Muslims and Jews and endorsed by ISNA and the URJ. This book served as a guide for a group of mosques and synagogues that we twinned for dialogue. The response from the communities was very encouraging. This gave birth to many related and independent initiatives and projects that have proliferated since then. While we were thinking that Reform Judaism alone would open the doors to Muslim-Jewish dialogue, I received a call from Rabbi Burton Visotzky of JTS telling me that he and their Chancellor Arnold Eisen were coming to Washington, DC for the Conservative Rabbinic Assembly's annual conference and that they would like to visit us at our office. Both of them came, and this was our first friendly encounter with the leaders of the Conservative Jewish community in America. They passionately made the point that the Conservative Jews were equally interested in participating in and advancing Muslim-Jewish dialogue and solidarity. I recall asking them, if that is so, then “what took you so long to come here?” We started our work in earnest. We jointly sponsored three annual seminars with JTS: the first at JTS in New York, the second at Harford Seminary in Connecticut, and the last organized by ISNA in Washington, DC. The papers that are included in this volume of The Muslim World are the products of these seminars. They point to a new horizon of cooperation. Jewish Muslim dialogue has built a strong alliance between the two communities to fight against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and to stand up together in the corridors of power against various kinds of injustices and iniquities around us. We have indeed witnessed this in a robust interfaith movement: The Shoulder to Shoulder Campaign: Standing with American Muslims; Upholding American Values. Additionally, these dialogues prepared our Imams to go to Holocaust sites and internalize the facts of human suffering and pain inflicted on the Jewish community in history. The papers here point in a unique direction, identifying the joint struggle in approaching our respective religious texts, and reviving or reforming our regulations and traditions. It is amazing to see that the challenges of interpreting and reinterpreting certain practices and foundational principles of our jurisprudence are so similar. The struggle to maintain authenticity while remaining relevant in a pluralistic, democratic society is nearly identical at JTS and in our Fiqh Council. We have so much to learn from each other. Does this mean that the two communities will consult each other when faced with new issues, such as end of life and surrogate motherhood? They have a strikingly common methodology to be true to their guiding principles. This would provide a new context to the verse repeated twice in the Quran (cf. 16:43 and 21:7): If you are in doubt, “Go and ask the scholars of the scriptures that came before you.”