Across the Great Divide

This afternoon's dialogue will, like the others, be bracketed by a press conference and a brunch with local religious leaders. That leaves just enough time for the dialoguers and their small advisory team to map out the coming months.

Spreading their papers over a conference table, they sift through invitations. The annual meeting of human rights agencies in Chicago in August? Yes. The Islamic Society of Central New Jersey in September, their first dialogue in a mosque? Definitely. Boston? Not a priority. But Detroit, with its large Muslim population, is.

Next up, however, is London, where they're planning a week's worth of programs. "The U.K. is very volatile," warns Ahmed. The key is to avoid being drawn into others' controversies: "We're just two grandfathers on a stage, talking."

A few hours later, the two grandfathers are about to face a crowd of more than 400. Remember, Ahmed says in Pearl's ear, what Winston Churchill advised a young friend about public speaking: "Check your fly."

Onstage, Ahmed introduces his usual theme: that the merciful Islam he knows is unrecognized by the West and in danger of being usurped by some of its own angry, dispossessed believers. Pearl asks, as he often does, why Muslim leaders don't exorcise their dangerous fanatics. Ahmed acknowledges "a problem with leadership across the Muslim world" but complains that when leaders do condemn extremism, the Western media ignore them. Pearl, trying to point out that Judaism isn't the enemy, suggests that American Jews, veterans of civil rights battles, could help "our neighbor Muslims" with the legal fallout they've faced since September 11.

There are a few tense moments. "What if you were to run a poll in, say, a village in Morocco and ask them who they would choose as a role model for their children," Pearl asks, "Jinnah or Osama bin Laden?" Mohammed Ali Jinnah, everyone who knows Ahmed soon learns, was Pakistan's democratic-minded founder. But the current answer to the question, Ahmed acknowledges, is bin Laden.

"So the idea that al Qaeda represents only a negligible minority . . . that's wrong," Pearl concludes.

Not so, says Ahmed. Muslims are drawn to bin Laden "as a symbol: This man is standing up and talking on our behalf." That doesn't mean they subscribe to his philosophy. "Osama's actions, you need to know this, are not rooted in Islam," he insists; the Koran condemns the murder of innocents.

Perhaps there's not much expressed that people couldn't learn by reading a few books, but the interfaith roadshow is more compelling, more moving, more alive. Listeners seem touched by an uncommon response from a man who's suffered a harrowing loss; they're reassured, though also alarmed, by what his counterpart has to say. The crowd gives Pearl and Ahmed a standing ovation.

BUT HOW MUCH CAN TWO GRANDFATHERS ON A STAGE ACCOMPLISH? Can speaking to several hundred people in one Western city or another create significant change? Fifteen million people live in greater Karachi, and the roadshow -- though its participants intend to visit Muslim countries -- is not headed there anytime soon.

It's not a bad idea for Ahmed and Pearl to keep talking; this may be among the few statements the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the American Jewish Committee currently agree on. But that doesn't mean they're changing hearts and minds -- or policies.

"It's a noble attempt, but I personally don't think it's going to go anywhere," says George Irani of the conflict analysis and management program at Royal Roads University in British Columbia. Ahmed, he thinks, "should be reaching out to Islamic groups in the U.S. and elsewhere, not making it an individualist quest, but a collective quest" that reaches "from the furthest mosques in the Philippines to the closest synagogues in Brooklyn."

It's not difficult to find critics. They appreciate the effort but say that the dialogue is elitist, taking place on campuses instead of reaching into ordinary people's lives. Or that it's hit-and-run, attracting crowds and then moving on (something the dialoguers are working to address). Or that it draws the already tolerant, not the haters.

On the other hand, symbols matter. "It's in the nature of our People magazine society; personalization of the news does have an effect," says Steven Wasserstrom, a Judaic and Islamic scholar at Reed College in Oregon. "A face can make a difference." And if the dialogue has not yet traveled the world, its media coverage has: News stories and columns have appeared in Karachi, Jerusalem, Riyadh and Beirut. Pearl and Ahmed have been interviewed on al-Jazeera.

Besides, there's a certain desperation, given a steady barrage of depressing news, to do something. "It's a drop in the bucket," says Rabbi Reuven Firestone, the Islamic scholar who's tutored Pearl, of the dialogue. "But you have to keep dripping."

A STORY ABOUT PUSHING A BOULDER UP A HILL should conclude with an uplifting moment, something to hang hope on. Something like the World Tolerance Forum.

This spring, Pearl received a manila envelope, encrusted with postage stamps, from the Pakistani city of Faisalabad. Inside, he was surprised to find a magazine in Urdu commemorating Danny Pearl's death and -- intriguingly -- snapshots of a "condolence ceremony."

They showed perhaps 50 men and women gathered in a hall hung with English banners: "Peace Through Dialogue, Peace Through Discussion." Someone, adapting the international symbol of prohibition, had drawn a picture of a gun with a line through it. Mounted on the lectern, wreathed with flowers, was a photograph of Danny Pearl; before it, a young boy was lighting a candle that said "Peace and Reconciliation."

"It's what I dreamed of," Judea said, looking at the photos. How often had he spoken of his hope that one day, children in Pakistan would see Danny as a role model for open-mindedness and tolerance?

Ahmed, hearing about the photographs, was skeptical. However laudable the sentiment, he cautioned, in Islam, lighting a candle before an image would be considered idolatrous, "wrong, religiously and culturally." Perhaps the group belonged to the country's small Hindu or Christian minorities.

But no, the forum's chairman replied by e-mail: The boy was indeed a Muslim, engaged in a "unique example of paying tribute to Jewish people by the Muslim Community."

To Pearl, the photos provided one more reason to keep going. If this was indeed a Muslim group, then even this single small event meant "the hope of more." And if it wasn't, if "decent Muslims with the same sentiments" were not yet ready to publicly embrace dialogue? That just meant, he said, "that we are more needed."

Paula Span (spanp@comcast.net) is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 2 p.m. Monday on washingtonpost.com/liveonline.