Psalms and Islam: Reimagining Interfaith Friendship in an Islamic Context

WORKSHOP

How can the Christian message be communicated and contextualized with cultural sensitivity to be completely appealing to a Sufi-oriented audience in an Islamic context? For the past fourteen centuries interaction between Islam and Christianity has generally been confrontational: crusades, colonial imperialism, and polemic around the Torah and Injil (the gospels). A new paradigm of cultural and creative interfaith friendship has opened in which the context shifts to the Zabor (Psalms). Here there is common ground among religious affiliations in terms of Revelation, Recitation, Ritual, and Reconciliation. This workshop proposed engaging Muslims through a mystical branch of Islam (Sufism) through the book of Psalms (Zabor). Adherents of both faiths can reimagine Scriptural engagement with the Zabor (Psalms) and the Qur’an as a catalyst for fostering peace building in the twenty-first century.