Mehri Niknam, the Founder and Executive Director of the Joseph Interfaith Foundation, the only officially registered joint Muslim-Jewish Interfaith organisation in Britain has won this year's Fulbright scholarship in Interfaith Community Action Programme. She is the only successful applicant from Britain for this year and will spend the utumn academic term in the US.
As an expert in Muslim-Jewish Relations with a longstanding and proven track record, she will be based at Temple University, Philadelphia, where she shall be a research fellow, working with Professor Leonard Swidler, President of the University, who is one of the foremost experts in the field of Interfaith Dialogue.
As part of engaging with community and religious leaders, she will meet with leaders of various Muslim and Jewish communities in the east coast and attend a colloquium in Washington DC. She will visit various universities, including School of Theology, Boston; School of Theology Denver, Colorado; and University of Kentucky, where she will speak on several subjects including Jewish-Muslim Intellectual Relations in the Middle Ages, the Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Relations in Britain since 2000, and Principals of Muslim-Jewish Dialogue for Today.
Mehri Niknam says: "Having been born and brought up in a Jewish family in Iran; I have a great love of my own religion and Jewish culture as well as the religion and the culture of the country in which I grew up. I am known as an Islamophile Jew!"
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