Interfaith Dialogue Organization organized a wonderful panel discussion about Jewish - Muslim Dialogue on Tuesday, November 18, 2008. The event was supported by the Student Government of University of Kentucky and a student among the audience won an iTouch. Speakers were Mehri Niknam and Ibrahim Kalin. Mehri Niknam was at our university with a Fullbright scholarship for a research project. She is Iranian-born Jewish scholar and from the Joseph Interfaith Foundation from England. Ibrahim Kalin is a Muslim scholar teaching at Georgetown University. In spite of tension in the region during the panel and salience of the political dimension of the issue, speakers emphasized the necessity of dialogue between two religions, its necessity and what they have been doing.

Mehri Niknam was born and brought up in Iran. Her academic field is Comparative Medieval Jewish-Muslim History, on which she has lectured at several universities, including the University of Sussex and Birkbeck College, London. She has been a Jewish-Muslim consultant for over 15 years and considers her work a vocation. In 2005, she was awarded an MBE for her contributions to Muslim-Jewish Relations in Britain. In the same year she was made an Honorary Fellow at Leo Baeck-Centre for Jewish Education for her services to the College's Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Relations. She is a member of Imams and Rabbis Committee and Academics & Theologians Roundtable at the department of Communities and Local Government and a regular contributor to the BBC World Service.

Ibrahim Kalin received his Ph. D. from the George Washington University, Washington DC. As a broadly trained scholar of Islamic studies, he teaches a number of courses on Islamic history and culture. His field of concentration is post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy with research interests in Ottoman intellectual history, interfaith relations, and comparative philosophy. He has contributed to several encyclopedia including MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2nd Edition, Encyclopedia of Religion 2nd Edition, Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy and the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World.