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Muslim scholar to speak on God and religious diversity
January 30, 2012
Amir Hussain
Amir Hussain will present the lecture "God and Religious Diversity: A Contemporary Muslim Perspective" at 8 p.m. Monday, Feb. 13, in the Quadrangle Building's Alumni Lounge at Saint John's University.
The lecture is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning and is free and open to the public.
Hussain will discuss how Muslims understand their relationship to God given the fact of religious diversity and how they might think of religious diversity in relation to God's will.
"As the last of the Abrahamic religions, Islam comes into a world that knows Christianity and Judaism," Hussain said. "This means that Muslims have to have a theological understanding of both Jews and Christians in their relationship to God. As Islam expands out of Arabia and into Asia, it also has to make sense of Buddhism and Hinduism."
A prominent scholar of Islam and interfaith relations, Hussain is professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He earned a doctorate in religion from the University of Toronto and is the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the premier scholarly journal for the study of religion.
Hussain is the author of "Oil and Water: Two Faiths, One God," an introduction to Islam and Muslim-Christian dialogue, and more than two dozen book chapters and scholarly articles about Islam and Muslims. An appointed fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, he has appeared on the History Channel and has given interviews to numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post.