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Introduction DAVID MARSHALL Beginning in January 2002, the series of Building Bridges seminars, convened and chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, has covered a wide range of themes at the heart of Muslim-Christian dialogue. This book offers a record of the seventh seminar, held from May 6–8, 2008, at Villa Palazzola, near Rome, formerly a Cistercian monastery and now owned by the Venerable English College. Whereas all previous seminars had included a public dimension , with lectures open to the public as well as closed sessions attended just by seminar participants, this seminar happened entirely in private. While this provided an ideal environment for twenty-two Christian and Muslim scholars to engage in open and far-reaching dialogue, it is all the more important that through this publication some account of the seminar’s proceedings should be made more widely available. The seminar focused on three themes: revelation, translation, and interpretation . Each of these themes was explored through both a pair of lectures and the study alongside each other of relevant Christian and Muslim texts (mainly scriptural) that had been chosen before the seminar in consultation with a number of participants. Following normal Building Bridges practice, a large amount of time was dedicated to discussion of these texts in groups of about seven members each. Before the group discussions a brief introduction was given to the texts in question. This book reproduces the lectures and the introductions to the selected texts, together with the texts themselves. No attempt is made to give a detailed record of the group discussions, although toward the end of the volume (in ‘‘Conversations in Rome’’) there is an account of the main themes of these discussions and also of the seminar’s plenary sessions. In part I (‘‘Particularity, Universality, and Finality in Revelation’’), Seyed Amir Akrami, referring to a wide range of Qur’ānic texts, addresses the relationship between the particularity of Islam as a specific religious tradition and the xi xii Introduction universality of islām, by which he means ‘‘the essential core of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors’’ underlying Islam and other religious traditions. His conclusion is that there is no contradiction in the Qur’ān’s affirmation of both the particularity of Islam and the universality of islām. Daniel Madigan identifies four textual ‘‘hooks’’ in John’s Gospel on which to hang reflections on creation, the particularity of the incarnation, the finality especially associated with the cross, and the coming of the Spirit to guide believers into all truth, noting that, as that process of guidance is ongoing, ‘‘finality is begun, but not yet finished.’’ Madigan concludes that the particularities of the two faiths are what make us what we are ‘‘and who we are is where dialogue begins.’’ In both the Bible and the Qur’ān the ultimate revelation, whether seen as coming in Christ or in the Qur’ān itself, does not arrive without a prehistory of revelation. The first two sets of scriptural texts in part I (1.3 and 1.4) therefore focus on Israel. The biblical texts are concerned with both the particularity and the wider significance of Israel, its election, and its task among the nations. The Qur’ānic texts look back to revelation before Muhammad and the Qur’ān, focusing on Israel as a particular locus of earlier revelation. The texts in 1.5 illustrate how the New Testament conveys both the particularity and the universal significance of the revelation in Christ; these are followed by texts in 1.6 in which the Qur’ān speaks of itself and its revelation through Muhammad. Here the question might be raised: what of revelation through nature, a theme in both the Bible and the Qur’ān? That theme was not tackled, both because it had been addressed in an earlier Building Bridges seminar1 and also because the concern at this seminar was with how Christians and Muslims understand divine revelation as it has occurred at particular moments in history , rather than with continuous revelation through nature. A question for each faith has been how to make its scripture understood in a linguistically plural world. The challenge sits differently in each faith, however, because for Christians scripture is generally understood as witnessing to the primary revelation in Christ, whereas for Muslims scripture is in itself the primary revelation. In part II (‘‘Translating the Word?’’), Muhammad Abdel Haleem explores Muslim attitudes to translating the...

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