Across the Great Divide

That's what the still-fledgling Daniel Pearl Foundation, with Judea as president, works toward. The foundation brings journalists from Muslim countries to work in American newsrooms; it organizes hundreds of concerts around the world on Danny's birthday to promote tolerance; it sponsors cross-cultural programs for young people. And it supports this Muslim/Jewish dialogue.

There were times, early on, when both Ahmed and Pearl felt uneasy about it. Ahmed worried that nothing he could say about the compassion in Islam would outweigh people's horror at Danny's murder.

Judea Pearl, for his part, felt somewhat inadequate. Because the world remembers his son's murder, people will listen to him. "I must call it an 'opportunity,' even though that sounds ridiculous," he says. "I see doors opening to me that were not open before and are not open to everyone."

If only a door had opened to someone with more political savvy, greater organizational skill, he thinks. "But it happened to me. Me with my shortcomings, with my not speaking Arabic, with my imperfect knowledge of Islam," he says. "To me, not Henry Kissinger. So I have to do the work."

HISTORICALLY, SCHOLARS POINT OUT, animosity between Islam and Judaism, two "Abrahamic" faiths (after the patriarch they -- and Christianity -- share), makes little sense. They have a great deal in common, "the same history, the same personalities and the same values," says Tamara Sonn, past president of the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies. Judaism and Islam coexisted for centuries with comparative tolerance, even friendship. Islam's Golden Age in medieval Spain was a 500-year joint venture among Christians, Muslims and Jews. For centuries afterward, every Muslim capital -- Baghdad, Istanbul, Damascus -- included a flourishing Jewish community. Jews generally fared far worse under Christianity.

Even the wounding violence in the Middle East was couched, until very recently, in nationalist, not religious terms: a territorial and political struggle between Israelis and Arabs, not a religious dispute pitting Judaism against Islam.

Now, however, extremists on both sides wield religious imagery to justify their actions. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the suicide bombers they recruit cite the Koran; Israel's religious ultranationalists, like Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, invoke the Old Testament. This marks the "religionization" of the conflict, says Mumtaz Ahmad, a specialist in Middle Eastern politics at Hampton University, and, thanks to the growth of extreme Islamist movements and to globalized communications, its bitterness has spread around the world.

Ahmad collects militant publications from Muslim countries and finds them "almost entirely based on religious idioms of conflict with the Jews." That old anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulates in Pakistan; it also transmuted into an Egyptian television series. Many non-Muslims' equation of Islam with terrorism has further poisoned the relationship. Muslim/Jewish dialogues have cropped up in some Western cities, but they're mostly small, sometimes fragile efforts.

Such was the discouraging state of affairs when discussions about a dialogue in Pittsburgh began last year. A retired businessman attracted to public affairs, Lewis Jaffe, happened to see Ahmed on a news show, tracked down his phone number and called, saying, "I've found the right Muslim." Then he asked Pearl (another complete stranger) if he'd join Ahmed for a public discussion. Both parties cautiously agreed.

One measure of the suspicion and sensitivity between Muslims and Jews was the extreme care taken in organizing the first dialogue. Although the local American Jewish Committee was its sponsor, everyone nixed the idea of staging the event at a synagogue, opting instead for the neutral University of Pittsburgh in October. Ahmed, they agreed, should speak first. "If somehow this program was perceived as being about Judea Pearl and Akbar was secondary, many Muslims would see that as a slight to Islam and him as a tool of American Jews," explains David Shtulman of the AJC.

Despite some doubts on all sides -- the two dialoguers had met just once before, briefly -- everything went off without a hitch. Almost 500 Christians, Jews and Muslims turned out. Pearl and Ahmed, determined to avoid a warm-and-fuzzy exchange, tackled some pointed questions. A member of the Pakistani National Assembly, invited by Ahmed, even humbly offered Pearl the first public apology from anyone in the Pakistani government. Nobody got insulted, ignored or drowned out.

"In the car on the way to the airport," recalls Shtulman, who was driving his two guests, "we said, 'This may really have legs.' " They soon decided, as invitations streamed in, to take the dialogue to Philadelphia in January and then to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.

Though much of their early trepidation has eased, some remains. Pearl, who's been reading the Koran and receiving tutorials in Islam, frets about whether he's being effective, whether as a "proud Zionist" who favors both a Palestinian and a Jewish state in the Middle East (as does Ahmed), he can tackle such "hot issues" without appearing to be anti-Muslim.

Others worry about him, too. "You represent this horrible story," says Mariane Pearl, who understands the psychological difficulty. "You have to embrace other people's emotions." It entails, she says, "a certain loneliness."

But the greater risk may be to Ahmed. In some countries, Muslim academics perceived as too Western, too critical of religious or political leaders, too sympathetic to Jews, have been arrested, deported, even murdered. In Britain, Ahmed's calls for understanding generated flak from militant Muslims, who denounced him as a naive "apologist," an Uncle Tom. He continues to get nasty e-mail in this country, too, from mistrustful Muslims ("How can one shake hands with someone firing a gun at you?") and angry non-Muslims ("Does your culture BUILD anything, or just blow things up?").

Being in America doesn't ward off acrimony. Three years ago, an explanatory book about Islam, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, was assailed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and a Jordanian cleric branded its author -- Khalid Duran, then at Temple University -- an "apostate" whose blood should be shed. A few years earlier, University of Virginia professor Abdulaziz Sachedina faced a heresy trial in Iraq after publishing books and articles advocating religious pluralism. The resulting fatwa (which he ignores) forbids Sachedina to speak to Muslim gatherings anywhere in the world.

So Ahmed is careful with his words and assiduous about cultivating allies -- but he is also fatalistic. "When you take the middle position, you are attacked from both sides," he says, sounding untroubled. "But I am dragging people along."

WILLIAMSBURG IS BASKING IN ITS FIRST WARM SPRING DAY.

"Welcome, welcome, dear friend," Ahmed declares, flinging an arm around Pearl's shoulder when he comes downstairs in the morning. "Come sit down, calm yourself, have some coffee."

They're staying at an elegant William and Mary guesthouse.