26 November, 2025
The last Wednesday of November 2025, a day before the Thanksgiving Holiday in the USA, will be remembered as a historic milestone in the interfaith world.
Dr Emily Qureshi-Hurst‘s book Launch, Decoding the Universe: God, Physics, and the Search for Deeper Explanation, brought together Oxford Interfaith Forum and the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge, to mark the first Oxbridge interfaith event—a brainchild of Dr Iona Hine.
This historic interfaith collaboration, featuring the Cambridge author and responses from Oxford’s Prof Mark Harris and Allan Furic, not only transcends a historical sense of rivalry, but also emphasises that we succeed and flourish through collaboration, not through competition—a concept narrated beautifully in Awakened Brain, the NYT best-selling book of Prof Lisa Miller (Columbia University).
The ancient wisdom teaches that ‘one good deed leads to another’ (Ethics of the Fathers, 4:2). Dr Hine‘s initiative gave birth to a new chapter in Oxbridge interfaith partnership, which will reach a new heights as we open the 2026 interfaith forum by hosting Professor Abdullah Galadari, a celebrated Emirati scholar in Quranic and Islamic Studies at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, in conversation with Professor Daniel Weiss, Professor of Jewish Studies and Philosophy of Religion, Deputy Director of Cambridge Interfaith Programme, and Fellow and Graduate Tutor at Darwin College, University of Cambridge.
In a true interfaith spirit, these eminent scholars of Islamic Studies and Jewish Philosophy will discuss ‘The Unbegotten Begotten Christ: How the Qur’an Agrees with the Gospel of John‘.
