Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand the motivation of A Common Word is at the end. The authors note that, since together we make up more than half the world’s population, there will be no peace in the world unless Muslims and Christians find a way to live at peace with one another. They surely echo the feelings of many when they say that “our common future is at stake. The very survival of the world itself is perhaps at stake.” In a world that increasingly ready to see our current situation as a winner-takes-all struggle between two incompatible civilizations, this is a welcome reminder that there is an alternative: we can still try to envision a common future.

The signatories rightly believe that the resolution of our conflicts lies not merely in political negotiation but in finding a common theological basis that can ground our mutual commitments and give them an authority beyond the calculations of temporary expediency. So they undertake to demonstrate the common ground we share in our belief in the unity of God, in the necessity of complete devotion to God and of love towards the neighbour. They quite rightly refuse to accept the idea, all too often expressed even by members of the Roman Curia, that Muslims are incapable of entering into theological dialogue.

However dramatic may be the current world context that prompted it, this open letter to Christian leaders by 138 Muslim scholars and authorities should probably be read against a longer timeline. Forty-some years ago over two thousand Catholic bishops at Vatican II approved an epoch-making statement that, as Pope Benedict has several times reaffirmed, remains the official position of the Church with regard to Muslims. Though it did not deal with some of the more substantial differences between our faiths, Nostra Aetate, as it was entitled, focussed on the things we have in common, which are the basis for the esteem for Muslims that the Council professed. The bishops concluded: “Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims, this sacred synod urges all to forget [‘transcend’ or ‘overcome’ might have been a better choice of words] the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all humanity social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.”

The Catholic Church has a well-defined authority structure that makes possible the enunciation of such a clear change in policy, and its implementation through control over the training of priests and the appointment of bishops. Even so, the Council’s positions, especially with regard to Muslims, are still not broadly enough known or accepted. They are sometimes dismissed as just outdated pastoral advice appropriate for the optimistic 60’s, but hopelessly out of touch with twenty-first century realities.

No other religious community, Christian or non-, has such an authority structure. Everywhere else authority is more diffuse—we might even say democratic. It has to be painstakingly negotiated, and binding consensus is often elusive. We should therefore be particularly grateful to this group of Muslim scholars that they have succeeded in arriving at a statement like this, subscribed to by such a broad representation. One might read their letter as a first collective Muslim response to Nostra Aetate, a response that agrees to adopt the same approach as the Council: the bracketing of differences in order to affirm common beliefs, and an appeal to work together for justice and peace in the world.

A Common Word forms part of a larger project, focused in Jordan, to develop an authoritative consensus on what it means to be Muslim in our time. In so doing the Amman project seeks to fill a vacuum in the leadership of the worldwide Muslim community—a vacuum that has in recent years been filled by the extremist voices only too well known to us through the world’s media. In media terms, such reasoned and scholarly voices may be no match for the sabre-rattling diatribes that make for good television, but they deserve to be taken seriously and given the widest possible diffusion. We can only hope that this letter, though it may well have to struggle as Nostra Aetate does to be accepted as authoritative, will favour just as momentous a change of mentality.

The authors are not the “moderate Muslims” with whom everyone professes to be ready to dialogue. What a patronizing term that is! We seem to be looking for Muslims who “don’t take it all too seriously” and who are ready to tell us what we want to hear. It is against “moderates” of this kind in the Catholic Church that bishops fulminate at election time. “Cafeteria Catholics”—take the bits you like and leave the rest—are roundly condemned, but similarly picky Muslims are celebrated. The presumption seems to be that a commitment that takes seriously the whole Islamic tradition is incapable of dealing with the modern world. In fact the opposite would seem to be the case: the reactionary and intransigent ideologies that drive terrorism and puritanical repression are not drawing on the whole of the Islamic tradition, but rather a truncated and impoverished reading of it.

The group of scholars behind A Common Word are ignorant neither of the breadth and depth of the Islamic tradition, nor of Christianity. Among them are people like Mustafa Ceric, grand-mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who knows both the Western academic world and traditional Islamic learning, as well has having first-hand experience of the genocidal rage driving some Christians. We would be mistaken to think that they are pushovers who will settle for a ceremonial acknowledgement of fellowship without a serious intellectual and spiritual engagement, and frank political talk. In their patient but insistent correspondence since Regensburg they have shown a determination to pursue this discussion with seriousness and respect.

For several decades, of course, it was the Church that made much of the running in interreligious dialogue, but our interlocutors feel that in recent years our pace has faltered somewhat and that, at least in Rome, there is no great energy for dialogue even if we still profess a commitment to it. It may be discomfiting for us, but the initiative seems now to be in the hands of others.

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Dan Madigan SJ is an Australian Jesuit, founder of the Institute for the Study of Religions at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and member of the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims. This year he is International Visiting Fellow in the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, Washington DC.