In recent years, a number of authors have highlighted the role that universities could potentially play in improving the public conversation about religion and belief (Gilliat-Ray, 2000, p 59; Prothero, 2008, p 173; Woodhead, 2009, p 28). Ford (2004, p 24), for example, has commented that the university is one of the:

It is easy to see why this is a popular view. Not only are universities pre-eminent centres of knowledge generation, dissemination and exchange, they are also places where people with different beliefs and social backgrounds come into sustained contact with one another. They are situated in specific national and local contexts, but operate on a global level, drawing in students from across the world. They have a huge impact on young people in their formative years – and if today's graduates have a good knowledge of the range of beliefs, then media, politics and society will surely benefit tomorrow.

There also seems to be plenty of scope for improvement in that way faith and belief are publicly discussed. When religious issues are debated in Anglophone contexts, the tone is frequently fractious, and all too often marked by mutual incomprehension. Even though today religion attracts great interest (Knott et al, nd), knowledge of it remains low. The Islamic tradition is perhaps the most obvious case of this. Despite the fact that Islam has been constantly in the media over the last decade, public understanding of it is minimal. According to one recent survey, in the UK 36 per cent of people do not know who the Prophet Mohammed was, and just 20 per cent have come into contact with the Qur’an (Tzortzis, 2010). Another found that, after Muhammad, Osama bin Laden is seen as the individual who best represents the Islamic tradition (Field, 2010). Religious knowledge is often poor even among people who strongly identify with a religious tradition (as discussed in Chapter Four by Stephen Prothero and Lauren Kerby).