The three-day conference in Rome involving Catholic clergy and professors and Islamic Scholars, ended with Pope Benedict meeting the participants.

He said that he had followed the “progress” of the talks closely.

The meeting came a year after 138 Muslim leaders wrote a letter to Pope Benedict XVI after he offended Muslims across the world by quoting a Byzantine emperor who called some teachings of the Prophet Muhammad “evil and inhuman.”

Last Easter, the pope’s baptism of a prominent Egyptian-born Muslim in St. Peter’s Basilica upset some in the Muslim world.

Muslim scholars then invited Christian churches to a dialogue at the time to foster mutual respect through a better understanding of each other’s beliefs. Their manifesto, ‘A Common Word,’ argued that both faiths shared several core principles.

The forum brought together nearly 30 Catholic clerics and scholars, led by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue; and 29 clerics and scholars of Islam, led by Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina based in Sarajevo.

Benedict has expressed regret for any offence caused by his 2006 remarks.

It was the first Catholic-Muslim Forum, but the third conference of Muslims with Christians after the July talks with the United States Protestants and the Anglicans in October.The leaders from both faiths discussed common points as well as their differences of opinions.

“Muslims are suffering under the yoke of tyrannies where rights, which should be afforded to anyone” are denied, said Hamza Yusuf Hanson, a U.S.-based scholar among the Muslim participants.

The call for tolerance also applies to countries that are essentially “failed states” for their Muslim citizens, too, said Hanson.

The discussions at the Vatican made important strides, according to Abdul Hakim Murad Winter, an Islamic studies lecturer at the Divinity School at England’s Cambridge University.

Winter also said that both sides agreed to respect the sanctity of each other’s beliefs and to “not tolerate any mockery,”.

Mufti Mustafa Ceric of Bosnia predicted that Barack Obama’s election and family background will foster better Muslim-Christian understanding.

The President elect was born to a Muslim father and has his middle name as Hussain , an Arabic word. Obama also spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, a predominantly Muslim nation.

Catholic delegates to the conference included Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, who heads the Vatican’s council on interreligious dialogue, retired Washington, D.C. archbishop, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

At the end of the forum, the leaders also issued a joint declaration, in which they agreed to work together to stop any violent or terrorist action in the name of religion.

It called on Catholics and Muslims to renounce “oppression, aggressive violence and terrorism especially that committed in the name of religion.”

Participants in this week’s conference pledged to hold another dialogue in a Muslim country in 2010.