NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — Merrimack College will present its biennial Goldziher Prize for Jewish-Muslim dialogue to Yousef Waleed Meri, a visiting professor in the Department of Studies of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Jordan. The prize will be presented at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Merrimack’s Rogers Center for the Arts. Meri has taught at the Institute of Isma’ili Studies in London, and was a research fellow at St. Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge, where he organized academic conferences for the Woolf Institute on questions of Jewish and Muslim identities and interactions. He was a Fellow and Special Scholar in Residence at the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in Jordan, where he worked on and was an original signatory to “A Common Word Between You and Us,” an interfaith initiative of Christians and Muslims. The prize is awarded every two years by Merrimack’s Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations. Previous recipients were Princeton professor Mark Cohen and Rabbi Burton Visotsky of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The prize and $25,000 stipend honor Ignac Goldziher, a Jewish scholar who established Islamic studies in European universities. The prize is funded by John W. Kiser, principal of the William and Mary Greve Foundation. A former international broker, he writes histories and raises pigs on a farm in Virginia. Before the presentation, from 2 to 4 p.m., the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations will host the discussion “Can a Jew and a Muslim be Friends?” featuring Rabbi Yehuda Sarna and Imam Khalid Latif of New York University. Sarna and Latif are ...      Read more