Azza Karam Quotes

I believe in the power of pebbles, and I believe what we are trying to do is collect the pebbles, one by one, and as many as we can, to slowly make those transformations.

We are living in an age where religion, religious leaders, religious ideologies, are playing an important political, social, cultural and even economic role. I’m not just talking about the spiritual space here. I’m talking very practically, about the political and the financial space. In Afghanistan, we have to appreciate how complicated the situation is.

To date, we, development practitioners, researchers and policy-makers, have focused the responsibility for development action rightly mostly on governments. More recently, we began to pay attention to the private sector and to assess corporate social responsibility. When we finally woke up to the role of civil society, we focused almost entirely on secular members of civil society.

The Netherlands was the perfect environment for me to learn and eventually to strike out on my own. I didn’t really have a choice about coming to the Netherlands, because my father was posted to the Egyptian Embassy in The Hague. And as a good Muslim daughter, who really didn’t have much say in what happened to her, I was transplanted from Egypt. To be honest, I didn’t want to go at the time, but my family insisted.

Religion and faith do not lend themselves to the usual normative frameworks of development praxis, which means that engagement with religious communities has to be sustainable, built upon common goals, and mainstreamed into broader civil society and government partnerships. This is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust that is required for any such engagement, and for facilitating the co-ownership of national development processes among all the different partners involved.

...in terms of the general women’s movement, are finding it very difficult to deal with these women and with the notion of what they do and what they bring to the table, if they ever get to it. Unless we crack this and understand and appreciate it, we’re going to be doing the same old mythologizing of women as the answer. It keeps us in a rut, because we’re not moving beyond that.

The transformation begins within ourselves, in our own families, in our own relationships, in our communities, in our voice and in the power of our voice to carry the messages of healing.

There is no space for gender-based violence ever to be acceptable or accepted, or indeed for it be condoned through our silences. The more faith communities remain silent, the more we are culpable.

We are obliged to work with varied representatives of different religious organizations and communities on addressing a multiplicity of human development needs. And we have to maintain the same respect and appreciation for the respective strengths and modus operandi of each partner, as long as there is agreement on the basic goals of human development, that is, human rights, peace, and security for all.

You don’t really become politicized by a certain event; you grow up politicized.

...some of the reappraisal of the religious social-service sector is sensible and timely — after all, hands-on innovative partnerships are required for us to target some very basic humanitarian and social needs. But I also see a huge challenge in having some religious actors and some religious institutions becoming too closely aligned, some even vested, with political spaces and actors. History has taught us that when political and religious institutions collude, human welfare often suffers, and tragically so.

We are living in the context of a generation of youth—which is over 60% of our populations—that has grown up as part of a global youth culture equipped with mass communication technologies and amid huge challenges to established powers.

He is seen as a religious leader who articulates the moral responsibilities and even clarifies what needs to be done in order to heal communities and to prevent conflict,” said Prof. Karam. “So, his role will continue to be to map out the how and why of resolving and avoiding conflicts, including of living more peacefully with ourselves as people of faith.

Working with religious actors on all aspects of human rights carries both challenges and opportunities.

There is a mental, social, economic, and political transformation and a revolution to undertake; we don’t have time to waste. It is the same logic that you heard and saw in other liberation movements, but this time it was being employed, lo and behold, by the religious political groups.