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The average American, the image of Islam may be as beautiful and mysterious as the call to prayer from a minaret, or as terrifying as news reports of punitive wife-slayings or accounts of novelist Salman Rushdie being forced into hiding in fear for his life. It may be as exotic as the downcast eyes of a woman wrapped in a full-length burqa, or veil, or as much a part of pop culture as the memory of prizefighter Cassius Clay changing his name to Mohammed Ali and making a pilgrimage to Mecca.

What many Americans' images of Islam do not encompass is the realization that Allah, the God of the prophet Mohammed, is also the God of Abraham and Moses, and that Muslims regard Jesus as among the greatest of all prophets and his mother, Mary, as the purest woman in creation. Moreover, how the Muslim faith is reflected in the daily lives of its practitioners is as on Islam's uniformity (the beliefs and practices that unite Muslims worldwide) and its diversity (the unknown to many of us as the verses of the Qur'an.

With a billion Muslims in the world—one-fifth of the Earth's population, including 5 million in the United States—the International Academic Partnership decided three years ago to develop at Andover an avenue for students to gain a better understanding of Islamic faith and culture. The course, Islamic Cultural Studies, debuted last spring as RelPhil 530: Advanced Topics in Religion. Its inaugural class included six seniors and an upper. All but one were American; none was of Muslim background.