How Religious Leadership Can Help Bring Peace and Justice to the Middle East
Suhail Khan Thursday, 16 September 2010
"Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called children of God."
—Matthew 5:9
"O People! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female (Adam and Eve), and made you into nations and tribes, that you may (with affection) know each other (and not that you may despise each other). Verily the most honored of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you. And God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things)."
—Surah al-Hujarat, "the Inner Apartments," 49:13
In May of last year, I was part of a delegation to the Holy Land at the invitation of former US Ambassador Tony P. Hall and Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, formerly Archbishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC.1 For the past several years, Ambassador Hall and Cardinal McCarrick have led small groups of American leaders of all three major "Abrahamic" faith traditions to the Holy Land in an effort to build bridges with religious and political leaders in the region. Sponsored by the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) and coordinated by the Interfaith Cooperative Initiative (IFCI), these delegations have brought together evangelical and mainline Protestant leaders, Catholic leaders, Muslim scholars, and Jewish rabbis from the United States in exceptional solidarity for the cause of peace.
To read the entire article, please visit this article's page at informaworld, where articles are available for purchase from Routledge, our publishing partner.