Machine summary:
Review Essay Advancing Muslim-Christian Dialogue Today Books Reviewed: Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; Jane Idleman Smith, Muslims, Christians, and the Challenge of Interfaith Dialogue.
The third vignette recounts an actual experience of a Catholic-Muslim dialogue group that, after several initial get-to-know-you 112 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 25:4 sessions, led to solid friendships on both sides and later spun off a series of events designed to allow the “other” to experience some aspects of their own ritual observance.
Smith’s third chapter introduces American Islam, which, alongside the variegated experiences and cultural shades of immigrant populations that came to this country in several waves, cannot be fully understood without its African-American heritage or the recent devel- opments among Muslim women, including both their greater religious involvement and their proliferating organizations.
In all of these topics, Smith displays her strength both as an Islamicist who has specialized for decades in American Islam and as a long-term teacher/participant in Muslim-Christian dialogue at Hartford Seminary (and now at Georgetown University).
The next two chapters, “Pluralistic Imperative” from Christian and then Muslim perspectives, may be Smith’s best contribution to the topic of dia- Johnston: Title 113 logue in the United States today.
The second theme, central to Ayoub’s nearly five decades of engaged dialogue, is “Islamic christology,” that is, his efforts to breathe new life into some of the Qur’anic statements about Isa ibn Maryam by deliberately set- Johnston: Title 115 ting aside centuries of tafs¥r often tarnished by the acidity of Muslim- Christian polemics.