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In the name of God, most compassionate, most forgiving.

I would like to extend my thanks, my sincere thanks to the organizers of this wonderful forum,

and thank them for the kind invitation to me to be able to contribute to this wonderful gathering.

I'm very pleased with the theme of this year's forum, because from my own context in England,

highly secularized Northern European context, we are increasingly seeing evidence

that social significance of religion has been recognized.

I can only give an example from where I am currently working at the University of Warwick,

a public secular university housing a research unit called Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit.

And as a Muslim educator, alongside Christian educators and other educators coming from different religious backgrounds,

we are reworking out the significance of religion in education and in public life.

What I would like to share with you in my address are really three points.

I want to rehearse or maybe put my own perspective on our current globalized context of cultural religious diversity

that is defining our lives, and try to discern some challenges that come out of this reality,

and find out how we can actually respond to these challenges.

And then move on to focus on much more closely about the core narrative of Islam,

the way I see it as a Muslim educator and a theologian.

And to ask myself to what extent Islam is able to reconcile itself within this increasingly secular context.

And that will help me to maybe again discern some principles from my own faith as I see it,

as resources for being able to relate peacefully and much more meaningful to one another,

and offer an Islamic logic of public good and service for the public.

And hopefully I will leave you with maybe a message of hope that, in fact,

as people who are coming from different faith traditions,

we are able to transcend upon our particularities in the name of embracing the cultural religious diversity that define our world today.

So my first point is the reality of cultural and religious diversity.

We are living in a world increasingly characterized by cultural and religious diversity.

Different value systems based on deeper narratives of meanings formed within distinct historical and cultural contexts are now living side by side.

It is true that cultural exchange and dialogue have always been a significant part of human story.

The evidence for this lie deep in our own identities.

Each time we try to pin down what make our identities unique,

we find the traces of the other already shaping us, our self-understandings.

But today, perhaps technological innovations are accelerating the speed of these encounters.

The increasing diversity while offers opportunities for positive encounters, but also brings together fear of the other,

triggering the old prejudices to be remembered, resurfaced, and pushing us back, unfortunately, sometimes to our comfort zones.

Therefore, one of the most significant questions facing the world today, as I see it,

is how do we make sense of this difference and cultural and religious plurality defining our lives?

Most importantly, how do our faith traditions perceive difference and plurality of cultures?

It can be argued that in historical terms, faith traditions became civilizational forces

whenever they had the confidence in showing an inclusive attitude towards the other.

Diversity became source of creating cosmopolitan fateful polities,

and faith became a liberating educational force to facilitate human flourishing,

and showing respect for human dignity, and creating a social ethics for the public life where the well-being of the all is protected.

In other words, inclusiveness is not really the unique property of modern secular democracy.

Religions do contain within themselves logic of reaching out to the other,

and we have examples in history we don't have time to work on that.

However, when faith is reified into the rigid framework of a religious system,

it appears it's no longer able to civilize or facilitate human flourishing,

but engage with boundary-making and serving the wider political powers.

Therefore, we have to be realistic in recognizing religion as part of human experience is full of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Although religion is supposed to be giving certainty and confidence,