Muslim scholars to meet Pope

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS (Reuters) - Muslim scholars make a rare visit to the Vatican next week to discuss with Pope Benedict and Roman Catholic experts how to overcome mutual suspicion and ignorance between Christianity and Islam.

Twenty-four signatories of A Common Word, a Muslim call to dialogue with Christianity issued last year, will assemble in Rome from around the Islamic world for the November 4-6 talks, the first annual meeting of a new Catholic-Muslim Forum.

The meeting, following talks with U.S. Protestants in July and Anglicans earlier this month, will take place one week before Saudi King Abdullah visits the United Nations to promote a parallel interfaith dialogue he launched last summer.

These meetings reflect a new urgency Muslim leaders have felt in recent years after the September 11 attacks, the "clash of civilisations" theory and Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech showed a widening gap between the world's two largest faiths.

Common Word signatories say their meetings have forged new bonds with Christians, including U.S. evangelicals wary about Islam, and helped both sides shed stereotypes to see shared teaching about the need to love God and neighbour.

"We go to Rome with an open heart and good spirit and hope to achieve more and more in the months to come," said Libyan theologian Aref Ali Nayed, senior adviser to the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.

With 1.1 billion followers, Roman Catholicism is by far the largest church among the world's 2 billion Christians. Islam has 1.3 billion faithful but no central authority like the Vatican to speak for itself or its main schools of thought.

CAUTIOUS CATHOLICS