The Common Word document, and the Christian Response post in the Yale Divinity School site were both beautiful examples of finding common ground with one another. I particularly liked that authors included passages from both the Qur’an and the Bible.
One thing I noticed, however, in these writings, was that they were particularly focused on what each religion dictates about human behavior, namely how we are to love God and love our neighbor. Clearly, this is where we are going to find our overlap. And if we are shooting for lasting peace or an extended understanding of one another, I believe that we will look to the common objective, much like we discussed in our last class with multi-religious prayer.
In reading these though, as well as the Howard article, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat frustrated that the centrality of Jesus Christ was so heavily underscored. Obviously, the person of Jesus Christ is the central point of departure between Christians and Muslims, but I’m left wondering if the best strategy is to ignore the role of Jesus altogether. My fear, in reading these articles, is that Jesus is reduced to a teacher or prophet, and since we both agree He was significant, we include what He said. To implicitly reduce Jesus to a prophet, even implicitly, feels like a sheepish way of going about things. If we truly desire to understand one another, I think that Christian spirituality should be explored by Muslims, as should Muslim spirituality by Christians. Once that understanding is in place, perhaps then we can discuss points of converge.
Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations, Hamaty 
Andrew, thanks for your thoughts. I found the statement that “Christians themselves anyway have never all agreed with each other on Jesus Christ’s ( عليه سلام ) nature” to be a weak point of the Common Word document, as I think it far under-represents the extent to which there is general agreement among Christians on the basic Christological affirmation of the human and divine natures of Christ. Your point relating Christology to spirituality is really interesting; I’m looking forward to discussing Sufism precisely so that I can better understand this tradition of Islamic spirituality.
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Thanks for these comments, Andrew. I’m inclined to agree with you that the weakest point of the Common Word document is the way it reduces Jesus to merely a teacher or prophet. It’s interesting too that the only scriptures cited are the three Synoptic Gospels — never the Gospel of John. There’s something fundamentally troubling about trying to delineate common ground about Jesus while bracketing what has historically been the most important Gospel for the development of Christology.
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