Each year, a different faith group is assigned the chairmanship of the Interfaith Partnership/Faith Beyond Walls annual dinner. This year, the dinner was hosted by the St. Louis Muslim community, and the largest crowd in the event's 18-year history turned out for a night of interfaith dialogue.

About 420 people of all religious stripes converged on the Hilton St. Louis Frontenac Thursday night to share a meal and hear from the night's keynote speaker, Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia.

Imam Muhamed Hasic of the Islamic Community Center, a largely Bosnian mosque in St. Louis, said Ceric was "the highest authority for Bosnian Muslims. He's like the pope for us."

St. Louis is home to between 60,000 and 70,000 Bosnians, according to the International Institute, making it the largest Bosnian community outside Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Many of them fled their country during the Yugoslav civil war of the early 1990s, an ethnic conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 people, including 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the massacre in 1995 in Srebrenica.

It's Ceric's second visit to St. Louis in as many years, and the Bosnian Muslim community here regards his visits as honors.

"It means so much to us," said Hasic. "He's the most respected person in Bosnia and in the diaspora."

Ceric is well known in international interfaith circles. He is on the advisory council of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, and was one of the 138 original signatories of "A Common Word Between Us and You." The letter was sent from Muslim leaders to Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI, two years ago.

"A Common Word" is a compendium of verses from the Quran and the Bible that support what Ceric and the letter's other authors call "the two greatest commandments" — love of God and love of neighbor.

The letter was intended to ease increased Muslim-Christian tension following a lecture the pope gave in which he quoted a 14th-century emperor who said Islam's influence was evil and was spread by violence. Benedict has since said he has a "deep respect" for Islam.

Ceric's address Thursday in Frontenac, titled "Seeking Common Ground," was an extension of the ideas in "A Common Word." The grand mufti was an imam at a mosque in Chicago for five years in the 1980s while he earned his doctorate in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago.

Before arriving in St. Louis, Ceric had visited Chicago and Washington for a conference at Georgetown University called "A Common Word Between Us and You: A Global Agenda for Change" with Blair and other global political and faith leaders.

In an interview before the Interfaith Partnership dinner, Ceric said he believed the world was in the midst of an interfaith "crisis."

"Humanity is, at the moment, confused. People of all beliefs and concepts are claiming now that they possess the whole truth about our destiny," Ceric said. "No one possesses the whole truth, but each of us has a bit of it. That's God leading us toward each other."

As in past years, educational literature for a wide variety of faith groups — from Jainism to Christian Science, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism — was displayed on tables outside the Interfaith Partnership banquet hall. Those who were interested could learn about Islam's teaching on marriage and divorce, "Ten Questions People Ask About Hinduism ... And Ten Terrific Answers," or "Eight Commitments of Ethical Culture."

Signs posted around the dinner's entrances asked "in the spirit of the evening," that people "celebrate with a challenge" by sharing a table with those of a different faith and engaging in interfaith dialogue.

Inside the hall, pagans, Quakers, Christian Scientists, Protestants, Mormons, Jews, Unitarians, Bahá'ís, Roman Catholics and Hindus sat together. More than a quarter of the audience was Muslim — the largest Muslim turnout of any Interfaith Partnership dinner.

"This year was the Muslims' turn to host, so I wanted to come to support our community," said Shaheen Mansoor, from Town and Country.

"America is such a multicultural environment," said Erum Qazi, from Ballwin. "And I have so many friends who are Jewish and Christian."

Interfaith Partnership board member John Parres, said the organization was "desperately needed" in today's political climate.

"People are so divisive and down on each other today," Parres said. "Someone has to be out there counterbalancing that, and I think that's what we try to do with these dinners and the work we do the rest of the year."

Beth Damsgaard-Rodriguez, the nonprofit's executive director, told the crowd that at last year's dinner, the organization was "on the edge" of financial ruin, and that she wasn't sure there would be a dinner this year.

"It's been a scary year for nonprofits, and we did not want to be one of those that closed its doors," she said.

Last year, the organization had nine staff members, five of them working full time. This year it has six staff members, only three of whom work full time. And it has shed some programs.

In his remarks to the group, Ceric made it clear that he believed the interfaith work being done in St. Louis was crucial, both locally and globally.

"There is a difference in the value of having knowledge without information, possessing information without knowledge, and keeping both knowledge and information without wisdom," Ceric said. "Today's world has a great amount of knowledge, it possesses a surplus of information but lacks the insightful sense of wisdom."

That was Ceric's key message to those who believe, like he does, that interfaith dialogue can be a route to such wisdom. And to drive home his point that there is nothing new under the sun, Ceric quoted from Abraham Lincoln's concluding remarks in his annual address to Congress in 1862, a month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation:

"The dogmas of the stormy past are inadequate to the stormy present," Lincoln said. "The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."