DIALOGICAL CONVERSATION TO SEARCH FOR PRINCIPLES OF INTERFAITH RELATIONS: THE FUTURE OF PLURALISTIC WORLD ORDER

Abstract

As I begin write this paper I need to clarify my position as an
insider/outsider academician. As an insider to Islamic tradition
I face specific challenges to my inherited perspectives and
allegiances. The major challenge for me is to step outside my
own community to explore more expansive vocabularies and
notions of value understood by other communities. In my initial
research on the topic of freedom of religion and conscience in
my earlier work on The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism
(2001), I found that I was confined to and even trapped in familiar
and conventional concepts of Islamic juridical tradition, unable to
expand the horizons of the possible and desirable interpretation
that was sometimes implicit and at other times explicit in the
Islamic revelation.