Muslim-Christian Dialogue of Life via Hospitality: A Theology of Abrahamic Asymmetric-Mutual Substitutive Responsibility Applied in an African Context

This research aims at addressing the global concern for a peaceful pluralistic society by calling attention to the responsibility of engaging diversities among Muslims and Christians. It is the position of this study to argue that asymmetric-mutual substitutive hospitality between Muslims and Christians (Nigeria in particular), at the ordinary level, will diminish age-old antagonisms. It will as well generate growth through improved openness for the respect of each other’s otherness and deepen one’s own particular faith commitments. With a primary focus on the ordinary adherents of both religions, who spontaneously interact with the religious other daily, this study aims at learning from their much-understudied elements of the dialogue of life. Above all, it seeks to articulate them into an Abrahamic theology of hospitality for the sustenance of peaceful coexistence.

This academic work engages an interdisciplinary discourse by applying an aspect of Emmanuel Levinas’ hospitality ethics into an interreligious dialogical pattern. Hospitality practice, though, not entirely absent in both Muslim and Christian traditions, lacks a theological systematization of its values for interreligious purposes between these two major religions. It is part of the goal of this research to fill that theological gap.

To attain its goal, this research sets out to awaken mutual hospitable awareness among Muslims and Christians through a three-step (chapters) approach. The Christian-Muslim mutual antagonistic past and their previous inadequate altruistic tenets will form the primary concern of chapter one. Chapter two will build on the identified problem by introducing the possibility of dialogical embrace as a way forward, but with special concentration on the dialogue of life through hospitality. In chapter three, Levinas’ substitutive responsibility will be harnessed into a theological model (the Abrahamic pilgrim model), through which, ordinary Muslims and Christians in Nigerian are challenged to demonstrate their respective faith by outdoing each other in good works.