Imam Feisal Rauf of New York City was in Washington this week and spoke with us about religion's positive potential in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

As Mideast turmoil spreads, a professor of international affairs says we are witnessing changing interpretations of religion and "a struggle over which interpretations have authority over whom."

"If there is a new state, presumably there will be more religious tolerance," says Middle East author and analyst Geneive Abdo. "We can only hope so."

"Many people are hoping there will be a more pluralistic government that will embrace the Christian Copts," says Qamar-ul Huda, a senior program officer at the US Institute of Peace.

As protests and rebellion break out across the Arab world, R & E looks back at insights from interviews with scholars and experts on the compatibility of democratic values and Islam.

"The most broadly based access to the developing world is through religious people," says the former president of the World Bank, "and so it is a tragedy if they are not embraced in the overall development process."

Look back at excerpts from our conversations with reporters over the past 10 years on religion and its changing role in the world.

Many thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled a wave of violence that was unleashed in 2003 by the US invasion.

Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.

How Palestinians and Israeli settlers share water resources is "critical to the peace process."