Note from Dr. Nevad Kahteran
The first and second publishers from the USA, Fons Vitae (
https://fonsvitae.com/), with the wholehearted commitment of the director Dr. Virginia Henry Gray, i.e. the original itself and the book-translation, published an online edition by Reza Shah-Kazemi (2025),
Zajedničko tlo između islama i budizma: duhovni i etički afiniteti / Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism: Spiritual and Ethical Affinities, translated from English by
Nevad Kahteran from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo (pages XLIII + 200).
It is gratifying that the first and second publishers of this important pioneering work, without a doubt, the best of its kind after al-Bīrūnī’s masterful work,
Kitāb al-Hind, is Fons Vitae, which is a non-profit, academic publisher, which publishes scholarly works of intercultural content with a primary focus on world spirituality. This is especially true because this book by Reza Shah-Kazemi (
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/authors/Reza-Shah-Kazemi.aspx), one of the leading Muslim comparativists today, points out without any doubt some important similarities and parallels between Islam and Buddhism. Therefore, we express our gratitude to the Royal Aal al-Bayt Foundation for Islamic Thought in Amman, Jordan, as well as its director and proven friend of Bosnia and Herzegovina, H.R.H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal and his team for the assignment of placet and copyrights for the publication of this first Bosnian-Herzegovinian online edition in the USA. An important emphasis given the hundreds of thousands of B&H compatriots living in the United States of America.
Likewise, we express our gratitude to the permanent contributors to the special value of this book-translation as an online edition: the authors of the foreword, academician Prof. Dr. Mislav Ježić, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Zagreb, Croatia), the leading Indologist of our region and this part of the EU (
https://www.info.hazu.hr/en/clanovi/jezic-mislav/), and Prof. Dr. Soraj Hongladarom from the Buddhist Mahachula University in Bangkok, Thailand, the current president of the International Society for Comparative Philosophy toward World Philosophy (CPWP:
https://www.cpwponline.org/). Then, thanks go to the reviewers: Prof. Dr. Jana S. Rošker from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana and the editor-in-chief of the journal Asian Studies (
https://as.ff.uni-lj.si/en), Prof. Dr. Ivana Buljan from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb (
https://sinologija.ffzg.unizg.hr/), as well as the advisor to the Reisu-l-Ulema, Dr. Mustafa Prljača (
https://english.islamskazajednica.ba/). The foreword and afterword to the translation of this work were written by
Nevad Kahteran from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Sarajevo, a full professor of Eastern and Comparative Philosophy (
https://www.ff.unsa.ba/index.php/bs/2014-12-14-00-25-02/105-prof-dr-nevad-kahteran), for whom this is the 17th book of translations from English, along with 2 from Arabic and several still unpublished ones – with 12 author’s books, all from his field of research.
We pray that this book reaches far and wide.
——
An American ISBN is not needed if the book is online and a printed edition is not for sale.
Free download available and dedicated to all our young borderless thinkers in BiH and USA
