A Common Word Between Us and You

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A Common Word Between Us and You did not appear out of nowhere; it was the second half of an exchange that began with controversy. On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg that quoted a medieval Byzantine emperor characterizing aspects of Islam in terms many Muslims heard as an accusation of inherent violence. The lecture provoked immediate and widespread protest across the Muslim world. One month later, in October 2006, thirty-eight Islamic scholars representing every major branch of Islam responded not with denunciation but with an Open Letter to the Pope, a considered theological reply rather than a rejection of dialogue itself.

A Common Word Between Us and You, published exactly one year later on October 13, 2007, was the fuller statement that first letter had promised. Initiated by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan through the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, it was signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics, politicians and intellectuals spanning academics and muftis from across the globe, nearly half of them university scholars. Where the 2006 letter had answered a specific offense, the 2007 letter reached past it, addressed not only to the Pope but to the leaders of every Christian church, proposing common theological ground rather than merely settling a dispute.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The theological argument at the centre of A Common Word Between Us and You is narrower, and for that reason more durable, than the controversy that surrounded its origin. The letter does not attempt to reconcile Islamic and Christian teaching on the nature of God, the status of Jesus or the authority of scripture, disagreements it treats as real and unresolved. Instead it isolates two commandments it argues both traditions already share in their own texts: love of the one God, and love of neighbor. It draws the Christian half directly from the Gospels, quoting Jesus's answer that the greatest commandments are to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love one's neighbor as oneself, and pairs it with the Quranic call to come to a common word between us and you, that we shall worship none but God.

The letter frames that shared ground as more than an academic observation, noting that Muslims and Christians together make up over half the world's population, so that peace between the two is inseparable from peace in the world at large. The argument proved persuasive enough to draw formal responses from the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion and the World Council of Churches, and it helped seed a continuing series of academic and religious Building Bridges dialogues between Muslim and Christian scholars, work the letter's 2008 Eugen Biser Award and Building Bridges Award recognized directly.