Prologue: Our Father Avrahām/’Ibrāhīm

Abstract

This book is the result of many years of thinking, speaking and writing about peace. It was planted during the 1993 convention of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, during which I moderated a panel of scholars and clergyman on “Building a Common Ground: Jews, Christians and Muslims Working Together.” The event was sponsored by the Middle East Peace Network (MEPN), a Chicago-based not-for-profit organization I founded and led during the early 1990s and reactivated in the spring of 2011.¹ Made up originally of Arab and Jewish Americans, this organization spread the message that people-to-people relationship building, citizen diplomacy, and unofficial human interaction could enhance the prospects of the long-sought Arab-Israeli peace.