Noor Cultural Centre and The United Church of Canada
present
Dialogues of History: Muslim-Christian Dinner and Dialogue
Lecture by Dr. Adnan Husain, Queens University
Date: Sunday November 2, 2008
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Noor Cultural Centre
Cost: $10.00 (full dinner included)
To register, please email [email protected] or phone 416.444.7148 ext.222. The deadline for registration is Tuesday October 28.
Program
4:30 p.m. – Lecture
Muslim-Christian interaction has become a topic fraught with identitarian, theological, and political conflicts and freighted with a presumed history of inevitable and long-standing hostility. Typically, interfaith dialogues have attempted to engage Muslims and Christians over their shared beliefs and values in a spirit of optimism about mutual understanding, in the hope that such communication can ameliorate present political conflict and overcome substantial differences. This lecture takes a different departure point for achieving similar goals and attempts to provide a preparation for more informed and sustained dialogue. The history of Muslim-Christian interaction in the premodern world has some suggestive surprises. These may allow for a more grounded relationship that does not ignore differences between religious faith communities and their traditions but builds on the possibilities our forbears have already experienced in dialogue, co-existence, mutual exchange as well as, of course, conflict and competition.
6:00 p.m. – Break for Prayers
6:30 p.m. – Dinner and Dialogue in table groups
How may mutuality and harmony be recreated in our time?
Dr. Adnan Husain is both a Medieval European and Middle Eastern historian. His early work focused on religious phenomena and social imagination in Medieval Catholicism and Islam, particularly on Franciscan spiritual and Sufi mystical traditions. He now principally studies and teaches on the cross-cultural and inter-religious encounters among the Muslims, Christians and Jews of Latin Christendom and the Islamic world in the Mediterranean zone from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. On these topics, he has published several articles; completed a forthcoming study, entitled Identity Polemics: Encounters with Islam in the Medieval Mediterranean World (1150-1300); and has co-edited a collection, A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700, in a new series he edits called “Islam and the West: Influences, Interactions, Intersections.” He is currently at work on a study of the intellectual and religious culture of Muslim diasporic minorities in “the West” from the late Medieval Mediterranean to the Early Modern Atlantic worlds, while co-editing a collection on the cultural history of the Qur’an in translation.
Beyond his core research focus on religious culture and difference in the pre-modern world, he makes strategic forays into modern and contemporary areas of personal and professional interest: Islam and Muslims in Europe and North America, Middle East politics, public and political discourses in “multicultural” societies on race and religion, and the histories of transnational solidarities and resistance culture in the era from decolonization to globalization. He explores some of these issues in a weekly program, “Radio Bandung” (www.radiobandung.blogspot.com) he co-hosts on Queen’s campus radio station (CFRC 101.9 FM, www.cfrc.ca).