MULTIFAITH

synagogue in nearby Colleyville, was honored and received a standing ovation, flanked by the local religious leaders who had supported his family during the ordeal.

But the leaders of the project by turns testified that interfaith work begins with a moment of revelation that's less about celebrity than humility.

Roberts confessed that he had never really talked to a Muslim before he was invited several years ago to do humanitarian work in Afghanistan.

“I met this warlord in Afghanistan and for some reason there was a connection between us, and he showed me around Afghanistan,” said Roberts. “I thought to myself, I'm with the baddest of the bad Muslims, and he has become my friend. I've got this all wrong. While I thought I saw God right, or as well as anyone can, I wasn't seeing people right.”

The experience led him to bring evangelical pastors from Texas to Afghanistan and connect them with local imams to build

schools and clinics. That effort brought him into contact with Magid, imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Virginia and a former president of the Islamic Society of North America.

Magid, who grew up in Sudan, told the crowd at Northwood that he had not met anyone who was not Muslim until he came to the United States to accompany his father, who needed surgery. “There I met a Christian, and Jewish and Muslim doctors, working together to care for my father.”

Magid described meeting Roberts as a turning point: “I was watching him and saw that this guy is restless, he wants to do something. Talking about it is not enough.”

Magid found that he could trust Roberts — another essential building block for interfaith cooperation, he said. “Trust is everything in the relationship. When you trust the person then you are willing to take risk with them.”

Trust for Magid is not a vague feel-good word. “Trust is a delicate issue among evangelicals and Muslims,” he said. “Muslims question me about working with evangelicals, and people walk out of (Roberts') church because they don't trust us. People call us naïve.”

Mohammad Al-Issa, secretary general of the Muslim World League, who was the night's keynote speaker, told of leading a delegation of prominent Muslim leaders two years ago to Auschwitz for the observance of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camp. The visit, he said, was not popular among all Muslims.

When asked about how he had the bravery to visit Auschwitz in the face of criticism, he demurred: “The source of my courage is faith . ... The Jewish people were oppressed, and I had to go there to make it clear to the Muslim world that what happened was wrong. It did not require courage; it was a religious obligation. If I did not go, it would be wrong.”

One of the themes of the Global Faith Forum is “unlikely” — the unlikeliness that leaders so deeply committed to their own faiths and separated by such cultural and religious differences would come together as allies in mutual understanding.

After Al-Issa spoke, Brownback invited the crowd to consider how remarkable — how unlikely — it was to sit in an evangelical church in Texas to hear an international Muslim leader address a multifaith audience in his own language.

No less unlikely was Al-Issa's answer when I asked him the next day what people of all faiths, deep in the heart of Texas, could do to support his work. The secretary general of the Muslim League paused, smiled and said: “Pray for us. We always need your prayers.”