Saudi Arabia hopes to showcase a new more liberal face of its austere version of Sunni Islam at an unprecedented forum that will bring together Muslim, Christian and Jewish clergy in Spain next week.
The three-day meeting will be opened next Wednesday by King Abdullah, who won the backing of Sunni and Shi'ite clerics to go ahead with the ground-breaking meeting in Mecca last month.
The interfaith idea has sparked interest from Jewish and Christian groups around the world, coming after the Saudi king held talks with Pope Benedict at the Vatican last year.
It marks a new direction for Saudi Arabia, whose "Wahhabi" Islam has come in for criticism internationally after the September 11 attacks of 2001 in the United States, Riyadh's main ally and guarantor of security since the 1940s.
Fifteen of the 19 Arabs who killed some 3,000 people were Saudis, acting in the name of Saudi-born al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
Since then, Saudi rulers have embarked on a series of reforms to improve the image of a system in which the Saudi royal family rules in alliance with clerics who are given free rein to administer Islamic sharia law as they interpret it.
Abdulaziz al-Gasim, a pro-government reformist cleric, said the conference was part of efforts to reform Saudi Arabia's religious establishment, following changes in school textbooks, removal of radical preachers and planned judicial reform.
"These are big changes that you can't see the effect of right now but you will see it over the long term," he said, citing a break on the clerics' hold on society through the Internet and satellite television revolution in the Arab world.
"King Abdullah believes there is a problem with the traditional religious establishment," he said.
REFORM WAHHABISM?
