Scholars' Corner
The Institute for
Christian & Jewish Studies
presentsIslam and the Jewish-Christian Encounter What Does God Require of Us? Introductory Remarks by
Dr. Christopher M. Leighton
Executive Director, ICJSA Yiddish proverb declares that if we all pushed in the same direction, the world would fall over. I for one have long taken comfort in the conviction that the world would not, indeed, could not topple because we Chris-tians, Jews, and Muslims, believers and non-believers, push in so many different directions. No, thank God, we do not push in one direction. And therefore, the world is in no risk of falling down.
This assumption, of course, changed on September 11. It doesn't take all of us, heaving in the direction of Jerusalem or Rome or Mecca, to knock down the world. It takes only a few to do the job. A few can take the wheel by force and drive us over the edge. A few letters filled with the promise of death can rattle the founda-tions. It only takes a few.
We've all heard explanations, piled one on top of the other, reasons to explain how this catastrophe could happen, why a person would kill himself and in the pro-cess murder countless others. Yet none of it really adds up, at least in my mind. The terror has something to do with religion, or more accurately, the fusion of religion and political ideology. Faith, after all, is powerful stuff, and combined with the wrong ingredients becomes a highly combustible explosive.
Yet this we also know: religion holds the power to resist terror, to transform the world and for the better. As nothing else in this world, our religious traditions can extend the horizons of responsibility and connect us to one to another, building trust and compassion, healing and harnessing the best within us, if we could but honor the One who makes us one of a kind and would have us cherish our differences.
Our task, you see, is not to be done with religion but to engage it, to understand it, to poke and prod it, inside and out, through and through, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And so we gather tonight. We know, or we ought to know, that ignorance is a dangerous thing, and the vast majority of us are woefully ignorant when it comes to Islam. So we gather to acquire knowledge of one of the most complex and far-reaching religious tra-ditions the world has ever known. We start with the most basic of beliefs: our belief in God, or Allah. How do we come to know God, and how does that encounter with the divine shape our sense of self and society, our place in the world?
Abraham Joshua Heschel once noted: "To be is to stand for, and what human beings stand for is the great mys-tery of being God's partner. God is in need of human beings." What is it that God needs, or to put the matter in more familiar terms, what does God expect of us, command of us? What does God require of us?
There are of course different, indeed, competing under-standings of God in each of our traditions. We want to look at these tensions, to see the divergent perceptions of God, because how we live and act in the world flows from our responses to the question: Who is God and what does God ask of us?
Our featured speaker tonight is Dr. Sulayman Nyang, Professor of African Studies at Howard University, a world-class authority on Islam, himself a devout Muslim. He was born in Gambia and has had an extraordinary career, among other things serving as Deputy Ambassa-dor and Head of Chancery of the Gambia Embassy in Saudi Arabia. He received his PhD at the University of Virginia, and has authored many articles. He is the co-director of the Muslims in the American Public Square Project at Georgetown University. Over the years I have had the privilege of engaging Dr. Nyang in a number of searching conversations, and I have come to regard him as an exceptional human being as well as an outstanding scholar. It is truly an honor and a delight to welcome Dr. Nyang to Baltimore.
Dr. Nyang will speak for approximately 30 minutes. His comments will be followed by short responses from two of Baltimore's most gifted teachers, Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin and Dr. Rosann Catalano. Their bios are grossly appreviated in your programs, but they are well known to anyone who has been in and around Baltimore. The fact that their hearts and minds are so finely tuned and balanced makes them a perfect complement to Dr. Nyang. Following their remarks, we will then engage in a discussion in which we explore together the tensions that each of our traditions faces and the relationship of our respective struggles, one to the other.
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