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It is a staple premise of the interfaith movement, which has been picking at the problem since the late 1800s, that if Muslims, Christians and Jews are ever to respect and understand one another, a key road leads through Abraham. Says Fisher of the Conference of Catholic Bishops: "We can't not talk to each other about him." But identifying a path does not make it passable. Part of the problem, says Jon Levenson, a Harvard Jewish-studies professor who has examined affinities and conflicts in the Abrahamic traditions, is that even before they went to work on him, his story featured a theme of exclusivity. "If you want a symbol for universal humanity, go to Adam," he says. "Don't go to Abraham, because his whole story is about the singling out of one guy to found a new family, a distinct family marked off from the rest of humanity. He was always a particularist." Another stumbling block between Jews and Muslims is that they are working from two different texts.
Nonetheless, moderate Islamic leaders have periodically enlisted Abraham as a bridge builder. In 1977 Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, announcing before the Israeli Knesset the brave initiative that would become the 1979 Camp David peace accords, invoked, "Abraham--peace be upon him--great-grandfather of the Arabs and the Jews." Sadat noted that Abraham had undertaken his great sacrifice "not outof weakness but through free will, prompted by an unshakable belief in the ideals that lend life a profound significance," clearly hoping that both sides would approach Arab-Israeli cohabitation in the same spirit. The accords went through, although this time a sacrifice was completed. Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
More recently, seeking a way to reach out to the U.S. that would pass the scrutiny of his nation's dogmatic clerics, moderate Iranian President Muhammad Khatami proposed a "dialogue of civilizations," with Abraham as common ground, in 1998. (The U.N.'s Kofi Annan subsequently adopted the gesture.) Observers assumed Khatami was crafting a smoke screen for political talks. But the former professor of Eastern and Western philosophy seems to regard Abraham as a mascot for his comparatively humanistic, open-minded brand of Islam.
A more thoroughgoing theological initiative has been undertaken by the Catholic Church. Christianity's position on Abraham had remained depressingly consistent since Justin Martyr's condemnation of the circumcised, but theologians at the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, shaken by the Holocaust, reread Paul's letters. They noted that at one point Paul calls the Covenant between God and the Jews irrevocable and that in one passage he compares Christians to a wild olive branch grafted onto the tree of Judaism. "If the Covenant between God and the children of Abraham dies," says Fisher, "the branch withers with the roots. Christians would be orphans." The resulting Vatican II document rolled back centuries of anti-Judaism and began a rehabilitation of the notion of Abraham as a Jew. No one has pursued its spirit more avidly than Pope John Paul II, who in March 2000 pressed a prayer card between blocks of Jerusalem's Western Wall: "God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your name to the nations ... we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant."
THE EFFECT OF SEPT. 11