Aref Ali Nayed - Theological

Theological

He is member of the Board of Advisors of the prestigious Templeton Foundation; Senior Advisor to the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme at the University of Cambridge, UK; and Fellow of the Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute in Jordan. He was included in the list of 500 most influential Muslims published by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre, Amman. He was a former professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, and the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization, Malaysia.

Nayed is one of the leading Muslim figures in the field of inter-faith relations, and has been involved in various inter-iaith initiatives since 1987, including the recent A Common Word process, of which he was one of the original signatories. He was part of the Muslim delegation at the seminal Common Word bilateral meetings between Muslims and Christians at the Vatican, Lambeth Palace, Cambridge, Yale and Georgetown. In 2006 when Pope Benedict XVI made controversial comments on Islam in Regensburg, Germany, Nayed was one of 138 Muslim scholars who drafted a letter inviting Catholic-Muslim dialogue. He also took part in a conference of clerics who reinterpreted the 14th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya’s celebrated fatwa on jihad, arguing that radical Islamists who use it to justify killing are misguided.

When the Libyan civil war started in February 2011, he and other clerics issued a joint fatwa calling on Libyans to resist Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Two days later he fled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he ran Kalam Research & Media, an Islamic theological research and policy organization, until he was appointed as Libyan Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.