Interfaith dialogue in the modern era surveys the field broadly; two documents from the past two decades deserve closer attention, since together they represent the largest formal consensus statements the Muslim scholarly world has produced on, respectively, its own internal unity and its relationship with Christianity.
The Amman Message
In November 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan issued a statement seeking to define what Islam is and is not. In July 2005 an international gathering of two hundred Muslim scholars from fifty countries, meeting in Amman, ratified three points: a definition of a Muslim recognising the validity of the recognised schools of Islamic law and theology, a prohibition on declaring any adherent of those schools an apostate, and conditions restricting who may issue a binding legal opinion.1 Over the following year the three points were adopted by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and by the International Islamic Fiqh Academy of Jeddah, and more than five hundred scholars worldwide, including the Shaykh al-Azhar, endorsed the document.2 It is a statement of internal Muslim consensus rather than an interfaith one, but its scale is itself a form of authority: agreement of this breadth across the Muslim world’s major schools is without precedent in modern Islamic history.3
A Common Word Between Us and You
In October 2007, 138 Muslim scholars and leaders, representing every major school and region of the Muslim world, sent an open letter to the leaders of the Christian churches, including Pope Benedict XVI and the Archbishop of Canterbury.4 It argued, from verses of the Qur’an and the Bible set side by side, that love of God and love of neighbour form common ground between the two religions comprising over half of humanity, and that peace between them is a condition for peace in the world.5 The Archbishop of Canterbury called it a landmark in Muslim-Christian relations, and Pope Benedict XVI referred to it approvingly in a later address in Amman.6
What these documents do
Neither document erases real theological disagreement; A Common Word deliberately narrows its claim to two shared commandments rather than a wider doctrinal agreement, and the Amman Message addresses Muslims about Muslims. Their significance lies in scale and in source: statements of this kind, signed by ruling religious authorities across the Muslim world’s major branches, carry a weight that individual commentary cannot. See Interfaith dialogue in the modern era.
Further reading: Interfaith dialogue in the modern era and The Sabians of the Qur’an.
Notes
- The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, The Amman Message (Amman: 2009), 1, 16. ↩
- The Amman Message, Grand List of Signatories, 23-82. ↩
- The Amman Message, Introduction, v-vi. ↩
- A Common Word Between Us and You (Amman: The Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 13 October 2007), covering letter and list of signatories. ↩
- A Common Word Between Us and You, citing Qur’an 3:64 and the double commandment of Mark 12:29-31. ↩
- Rowan Williams, foreword to A Common Word Between Us and You, 2010 edition; Pope Benedict XVI, address at the King Hussein Mosque, Amman, 9 May 2009. ↩