About the Goldziher Prize
In 2010, Joseph V. Montville 1937-2022, U.S. diplomat and public intellectual, joined John W. Kiser of The William and Mary Greve Foundation to create the Goldziher Prize for interfaith scholars and community leaders. The Center for Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College, an independent college in the Catholic Augustinian tradition, was the original institutional host.
In 2017, with Evelyn Messinger, co-founder of Internews, Tamar Miller created the Goldziher Prize for Journalists to amplify stories other than ‘bombs, blood, and bad news,’ at a time when noisy spaces in U.S. media and social media were filled with distortions about Muslim Americans.
Religion News Foundation, dedicated to strengthening and improving the understanding of religion in America and the world, joined us for the 2019 competition.
In 2022, The Goldziher Prize continued to offer monetary awards to nationally syndicated journalists, community contributors, and journalism students in the U.S. Our interest was to bring the struggles, diversity, and richness of Muslim Americans to light.
In 2023, we expanded The Goldziher Prize to international journalism. Judges and advisors nominated journalists anywhere in the world who shined a light on the Muslim communities outside of the U.S.
Now check out what’s new in 2025! Goldziher will award monetary prizes to journalists and creators in association with Making Peace Visible Story Awards.
Who is Ignác Goldziher?
The Goldziher (Gold-zi-air) Prize is named for Ignác Goldziher (1850-1921), a respected Hungarian Jewish scholar of Islamic jurisprudence. He is credited as one of the founders of Islamic Studies in Western and Central European universities, where Jews had only recently been admitted and where the study of Islam in European departments of religion was previously treated as heresy.
In the 1870’s, Goldziher toured Constantinople, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo, where he became a student at Al-Azhar, the largest university in the Muslim world. There he prayed in a mosque and wrote in his diary, “In the midst of thousands of the pious, I rubbed my forehead against the floor… never in my life was I more devout … than on that Friday.” Goldziher believed Islam represented a touchstone for other monotheistic religions.
Goldziher was unique for his time, because he studied Islam from within and from without; that is to say, critically but not judgmentally. He was curious about the vast diversity of the Muslim experience, historically. Of course, Goldziher was not free of biases, but he felt a close affinity with Islam without being Muslim -- an interesting and productive position to claim.
