Akbar Ahmed's 'Noor,' a Paean to Religious Tolerance

What deepens the divide, Ahmed says, is the brain drain of Muslim scholars from the Arab world, many of whom have been killed or have fled to the West. "The scholarly vacuum," he lamented, "leaves thugs and tyrants."

Yet his play reflects how learning is revered in Muslim cultures. "The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr," exclaims one of the characters in "Noor," quoting the Koran.

Ari Roth, the maverick artistic director of Theater J, has premiered new works by many established and budding playwrights, including last season's debut of "Either Or," a Holocaust-themed drama by first-time playwright Thomas Keneally, the Australian author best known for "Schindler's List."

Roth says "Noor" parallels another play Theater J produced this summer, Motti Lerner's "Pangs of the Messiah," which dramatizes political divisions within an Israeli family dealing with the intifada. And "Noor" thrusts into sharp relief Roth's premiere this week of David Zellnik's "Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams of Theodor Herzl," in which the Zionist leader is shown taking a hard-line stance against the Palestinians. [See review on this page.]

But "Noor" might be closest in spirit to Leila Buck's "In the Crossing," performed at Theater J on Monday night, in which a Lebanese Christian woman living in America takes her Jewish husband to Lebanon to visit her family, and the two find themselves in the middle of last summer's war between Hezbollah and Israel.

Staging "Noor" in a Jewish theater is itself highly symbolic -- a step toward opening up a crucial dialogue.

"You can't dramatize the Arab-Israeli conflict without dramatizing the Arab experience," Roth says. "We need to listen to each other and hear each other's stories."