nabil01.jpgLast night, the Harding University Honors College hosted another session in L.C. Sears Seminar Series at the American Heritage Auditorium.

This year’s event was entitled: “Islam in America: A Dialogue in Faith” and features a discussion between Dr. Monte Cox, Associate Dean of the Harding’s College of Bible and Religion and Dr. Nabil Bayakly of Memphis, Tennessee.

This was a great event and it was well-organized and attended. The auditorium was full and that would put the crowd at about 400. It looked like most of the audience was from the Harding community.

Dr. Bayakly spoke for about thirty-five minutes about the history of Islam in America and Dr. Cox offered some quick observations of his own. The rest of the evening was taken up with dialog between them and questions from the audience.

All of the questions were directed toward Dr. Bayakly and were friendly in nature. Dr. Bayakly is a very disarming person who knows the Harding community. I’d like to think that he was able to put a face on Islam for many audience members who had never had an opportunity to hear a Muslim discuss his faith in person.

I felt that the strongest point made by Dr. Bayakly was his observation that Americans “don’t know anything about politics”. At the time, Dr. Bayakly was making a point about how little attention we give to looking at the Palestinian conflict from the perspective of Palestinians.

I would have to agree — although not necessarily about Americans not knowing anything about politics.

I think one of the changes that is coming to America and the Middle East in the next year or so is a foreign policy based less on a knee-jerk acceptance to Israel’s policies on the occupied territories and Palestinian political rights.

It would be hard to summarize everything that was said last night other than to make the most self-evident observation: a Muslim and a Christian held a rational and thoughtful discussion on the differences in our two faiths and nobody walked away angry.

I’m anxious to hear what the rest of you who were present last night thought.

And nice work by the Hardings Honors College in putting together another great campus event. Keep up the good work!

h/t: jm for the photo