Local professor’s book presented to major Muslim scholar

Wednesday, February 25, 2015 – 12:01 am

A book on Muslim-Christian relations written by Ivy Tech Community College-Northeast professor John Andrew Morrow recently was presented to the Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a high-ranking scholar in Sunni Islam.

Morrow’s “The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World” recently was presented to Hussein by Gary L. Krupp, an American of Jewish faith and the founder and president of Pave the Way Foundation, a news release said. The non-sectarian organization works to encourage world peace by “closing the gap in tolerance, education and practical relations between religions through cultural, technological and intellectual exchanges,” it says on the group’s website, www.ptwf.org.

Hussein, who has been accused of encouraging anti-Israel action in the past, accompanied Krupp and several rabbis to the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem to offer his condolences for the terrorist attack in early January that killed four Jews at a market in Paris, the news release said. Hussein also issued a statement condemning Islamic State-affiliated terrorists’ recent murder of Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya and the burning alive of a captured Jordanian military pilot.

Hussein also gave Krupp some books to give to Morrow, a co-founder of the Covenants Initiative. The initiative seeks to make world leaders and Muslims aware of six covenants that Islam’s great prophet, Muhammad, signed with Christian groups before his death in A.D. 632 and before Islam spread across the Middle East and world.

Muhammad signed similar agreements with Jewish and other groups, Morrow, a foreign languages professor at Ivy Tech, said in a previous News-Sentinel story.

In return for agreeing to live under the civil government of a Muslim confederation, the covenants with Christians guaranteed they would retain their rights, property and freedom of religion, Morrow said previously. The documents also said the groups’ clergy, churches and religious sites should be protected.

Muhammad guaranteed this protection until the end of the world, Morrow said.