John Esposito, the founder of Islam in the US, has died at the age of 86 Appearance

Professor John L Esposito, considered one of the most prominent Islamic scholars of his time, has died at the age of 86, his family and Georgetown University said.

Esposito died on July 15, after more than fifty years of work in which he sought – through many books and lifelong studies – to correct the misconceptions of the white people about Islam and to establish lasting ways of dialogue between Muslims and surrounding groups.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, Esposito studied under the renowned Palestinian-American Islamic scholar Isma’il Raji al-Faruqi, a philosophical course that formed his lifelong devotion. explain Islam according to his will not through the logic of Western concerns.

He spent almost two decades teaching world religions at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, heading its Department of Religious Studies, before moving to Georgetown University, where he would spend the rest of his career.

In Georgetown, Esposito was the head of the University of Religion, International Affairs and Islamic Studies, and in 1993 he founded the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, later named the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

Under his leadership, the center grew into one of the world’s leading organizations for interfaith dialogue, and he later founded the Bridge Initiative, a research project dedicated to investigating and challenging Islamophobia.

Esposito’s professional results were amazing even with high education: more than 50 books were written, co-authored or edited during his career, and his work was translated into 35 languages.

Some of his best known books are Islam: The Straight Path, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, What Everyone Should Know About Islam, The Future of Islam, and Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century.

His 2007 book Who Speaks for Islam? What Most Muslims Really Think, co-authored by Dalia Mogahed and based on more than 50,000 interviews in more than 35 Muslim-majority countries, became one of the most widely cited Muslim studies ever produced, providing rare evidence to disprove the many claims of 1.6 billion Muslims in the world at the time.

He also served as the editor-in-chief of several well-known books, including The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, The Oxford History of Islam, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World.

Esposito, who was a staunch Catholic all his life, attributed his faith to his understanding of other people’s customs.

He served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the American Academy of Religion, and was honored with the academy’s Martin E Marty Award for Public Understanding of Religion, and Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam Award for Outstanding Contribution to Islamic Studies.

Celebrations came from across the Muslim world after news of his death. Prime Minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahimin a Facebook post, he said that his friendship with Esposito dates back more than fifty years to their first meeting in the early 1970s, describing him as a scholar who built an intellectual foundation for a better understanding of Islam and called him. “A true friend of the Muslim world”.

Anwar said the scholar’s work was particularly rich in the years following the September 11 attacks, when understanding of Islam was most important.

Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian-American scholar who directs the Center for Islam and Global Affairs at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, recalled that Esposito visited him repeatedly during the years he was imprisoned in the US following a “terrorist” charge, before he was deported to Turkey in 2015.

“I lost not only a good friend, but also one of the most knowledgeable and helpful professionals today,” Al-Arian wrote on social media, adding that Esposito “built bridges in the age of walls.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States, also killed him.

National Executive Director Nihad Awad said Esposito dedicated his life to advancing a better understanding of Islam and Muslims “at a time when misinformation and bigotry were often in the public eye,” crediting his education for helping to educate generations of students, policymakers, journalists and religious leaders around the world.

Awad described him as “not just an ordinary student, but a kind friend and a trusted voice”.

Esposito is survived by his wife, Dr Jeanette P Esposito.