Building Interreligious Trust In A Climate Of Fear

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)-Univ. Frankfurt (Main), 2009.

Conflict, Identity, and Reform in the Muslim World highlights the challenges that escalating identity conflicts within Muslim-majority states pose for both the Muslim world and for the West, an issue that has received scant attention in policy and academic circles.

Nigeria, a country under a military regime for several years, transitioned to a civilian regime in May 1999. Since this change, violent conflicts between Christians and Muslims have continued to erupt. They constitute one of the gravest dangers facing Nigeria, a country with a population of 189 million people. What have Nigerian religious leaders done about this situation, especially in educational circles? Have they received formal educational training to understand the causes of this violence and especially how to provide alternatives for more peaceful relations within Nigeria? Does the current educational system in Nigeria provide the main ingredients for the promotion of a culture of peace? The absence and neglect of interreligious peace education as part of a peace education core program and the lack of an interreligious curriculum for peace education in the training of religious leaders are the two problems contributing towards the lack of effectiveness of religious leaders in promoting less violent and more peaceful living. The solution to the problem is proposed in this book entitled Interreligious Curriculum for Peace Education in Nigeria. The book develops a one-year curriculum, building on Yoruba, Islamic & Christian conceptions of peace, and teaches how to create safe, caring, spiritual, peaceful and successful interfaith relationships between all Nigerian religious communities. In the long term, the book helps to educate religious leaders to contribute, in themselves and with the help of their respective religious communities, to reducing the growing religious violence in Nigeria.

The holy sites in Jerusalem exist as objects of international veneration and sites of nationalist contest. They stand at the heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, yet surprisingly, the many efforts to promote peace, mostly by those outside the Middle East, have ignored the problem. This 2006 book seeks to address this omission by focusing upon proposals of development of a legal regime to protect the holy sites separable from the final peace negotiations to not only protect the holy sites but promote peace by removing these particularly volatile icons from the field of conflict. Peace and the protection of the holy sites cannot occur without the consent and co-operation of those on the ground. This book supports local involvement by developing a comprehensive plan for how to negotiate: outlining the relevant history, highlighting issues of import, and identifying effective strategies for promoting negotiation.

The timely Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who provide a coherent state of the art overview of the complex relationships between religion and violence. This companion tackles one of the most important topics in the field of Religion in the twenty-first century, pulling together a unique collection of cutting-edge work A focused collection of high-quality scholarship provides readers with a state-of-the-art account of the latest work in this field The contributors are broad-ranging, international, and interdisciplinary, and include historians, political scientists, religious studies scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, scholars of women's and gender studies and communication