Dialogical conversation to search for principles of interfaith relations : the future of pluralistic world order

Abstract EN

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.