“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
The Symposium, Plato
Prof. Azza Karam is founding President and CEO of Lead-Integrity – a global consultancy firm dedicated to serving the common good, through empowering women professionals, inspired by their faiths. One-time president and CEO of the Women’s Learning Partnership, and Secretary General of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. Prof. Karam has twenty-years of experience working at the United Nations, where she coordinated the Arab Human Development Reports; she co-founded and chaired the United Nations Interagency Task Force on Religion and Development, and founded and convened its Multi Faith Advisory Council and was Lead Facilitator for UN system-wide peer to peer “Strategic Learning Exchanges” on ‘Religion, Development and Diplomacy.’ Prof. Karam has taught in various universities, is widely published, and translated, into several languages. Laureate of multiple awards, most recently, she was granted a Doctorate in Humane Letters honoris causa, by John Cabot University, in Rome, Italy.
Prof. Michael Nazir-Ali was the 106th Bishop of Rochester, for 15 years, until 1 September 2009. He is originally from Southwest Asia and was the first Diocesan Bishop in the Church of England born abroad. He was appointed in 1994. Before that he was the General Secretary of Church Mission Society from 1989-1994 and prior to holding this position was Bishop of Raiwind in Pakistan. He is now a Priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walshingham and Prelate of Honour to His Holiness Pope Francis. He holds both British and Pakistani citizenship and from 1999 was a member of the House of Lords where he was active in a number of areas of national and international concern. He has both a Christian and a Muslim family background and is now President of the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue (OXTRAD).
Prof. Joseph L. Cumming is the International Director of the Woodberry Intercultural Institute and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. He previously served as the Director of the Reconciliation Program at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and taught courses at Yale Divinity School. Prof. Cumming works internationally as a consultant on Christian-Muslim relations. He was one of the architects of the ‘Yale Response’ to the Common Word initiative, which was endorsed by 138 prominent Muslim leaders and scholars.
Prof. Adnane Mokrani is a Muslim theologian and is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was Senior Fellow at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose FSCIRE (2020-2023) and prior to this, he taught at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome (2009-2020). Additionally, he was a member of the Scientific Council for the Promotion of the “Charter of Values of Citizenship and Integration,” an initiative established by Giuliano Amato at the Italian Ministry of Domestic Affairs (2006-2008). He holds a license in Islamic theology and comparative religions from the Emir Abdelkader University for Islamic Sciences, in Constantine, Algeria, (1989). He obtained his doctorate in the same discipline from al-Zaytuna University, Faculty of Islamic Theology, Tunis (1997). He received his doctorate in Islamic studies and Muslim-Christian relations from PISAI in 2005. He attended several pontifical universities such as the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) and the Pontifical Lateran University
Prof. Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Cordoba. His research focuses on Christian Arabic literature in the Near East and in al-Andalus. He is the founding co-editor of Collectanea Christiana Orientalia, and member of scientific committee of the Series Biblia Arabica. He has published studies of religious texts from early Islam, Christian-Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic materials.
