An Interfaith Academy Seeks Common Roots

For those squeezed into the Orange County Islamic Society’s Garden Grove mosque, the recent evening was like no other in recent memory.

Members of the county’s growing Muslim community were pressed together with Christians and Jews to hear a presentation on the roots of their three faiths.

Most of the Muslim men seated themselves in one section and the Muslim women in another. But visitors who chose to sit with the opposite sex were not asked to move. Late-comers avoided the issue by standing against the wall because the crowd of more than 200 occupied all the folding chairs.

Saga of Cooperation

The topic of the evening, “Monotheism and Revelation in the Abrahamic Faiths,” might have seemed dry in another context. But for the Rev. George B. Grose of Anaheim, a Presbyterian minister, the gathering was the latest chapter in a saga of interfaith understanding and cooperation that has been his personal dream for more than 15 years.

Grose’s Academy for Judaic, Christian and Islamic Studies has presented similar “dialogue-lectures” more than a hundred times around the world. Only once before has the event taken place in a mosque.

“I congratulate the Islamic Society of Orange County for the courage and religious statesmanship in arranging this meeting tonight,” Grose said. “I want you to recognize the momentousness of what we have done tonight.”

Civility, respect and hospitality were the watchwords of the evening.

Jaffer Khan, president of the society’s board of trustees, welcomed visitors to what he called “a very modest place” and told them “there is a large amount of brotherly feeling in our society.”

In the course of the evening, he said, there might be “conflicting views--that’s the way we have to live in this world.” Inasmuch as the evening’s topic was historical, he said, “please do not get excited.” Still, Khan did mention and condemn the Sept. 6 machine gun and grenade attack on Jews praying in a synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey, saying “this was not an Islamic act.”

The panel’s first speaker, Rabbi Henri Front, of Temple Beth David in Westminster, was no stranger to many in the audience nor to the subject of terrorism. As chairman of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, he had strongly condemned the murder of Alex Odeh, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who was killed in a bombing in Santa Ana in October of 1985.

Orange County’s American-Arab community, estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000, was rocked by the bombing. Grose said later that it was a sad irony that the Odeh assassination “gave new life to our academy,” as people sent donations to the sometimes financially precarious organization.

Order of Precedence

As customary with the academy, Front spoke first at the mosque, as the representative of the oldest of the three religions, tracing the early development of monotheism. Grose spoke next, followed by Muzammil Siddiqui, director of the 2,000-member Islamic Society. It was essentially the presentation the three gave at the World Council of Churches meeting in 1983 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Grose, who in recent years has taught comparative religions at University of California, Irvine, and California State University, Fullerton, has operated the academy from his home since 1977. Front and Siddiqui serve as vice presidents, and several other area clergy are officers. The foundation has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lilly Endowment. Grose, 60, now serves as interim pastor at First United Presbyterian Church in Long Beach.

Grose’s interest in interfaith dialogue began in 1971 when he was a chaplain at Whittier College, and the campus was in turmoil that led to a general questioning of values.

“We were talking about dialogue,” he recalled, “but it was very innocuous and bland. Speakers rarely said anything meaningful to one another. It was mostly cliches about brotherhood.”

But one gathering seemed to raise more serious questions, for Grose as well as for the participants. Grose was urged to present similar programs elsewhere, which he began to do. In traveling to Presbyterian missions in the Middle East in the early 1960s, he said he felt at home both in Cairo and Jerusalem, yet he was concerned about how little he knew about Judaism and Islam.

Went Back to School

“So I went back to school,” he said, entering a doctoral program in comparative religion at Claremont College in 1974, focusing on the common roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From then on, the dialogue and lectures--always with Jewish and Muslim clergy--became Grose’s mission.

“I couldn’t say why I was doing it,” he said. “I felt led to do it. We began to see the scope of this thing, and it was huge.”

At the Garden Grove mosque, the differences in faiths were not papered over. The Christian Trinity, for example, and its compatibility with monotheism was the subject of some polite debate.

“Sometimes we talk more about differences than commonalities,” Grose said. “The price of this dialogue is not watering down what you are.”

The first goal listed in the academy’s brochure is “To reach the next generation . . . leading to fruitful dialogue and peace.”

Yet in making the presentations, Grose said, “we never spoke on a political subject. We never have in all these years.” While “we keep the parameters somewhat under control,” he said, “we never dodged a question.”

The academy, Grose said, is “a kind of model people can draw from . . . it is a moment in time in which there is mutual respect . . . it has application anywhere and everywhere.”