Azza Karam Quotes

My very first experience of interreligious dialogue happened at the level of human rights. I was an intern in a human rights organization and the conversation was very legalistic and political. The question was how to maximally serve the human rights of everyone, including those in jail. In the midst of this conversation, which was very secular, we had to confront situations in which those who were detained or missing were actually in trouble in the first place because of their religious convictions or what they understood to be their religious convictions.

...each religious community on its own is very rich. But when it comes to religious community members who are willing to stick their necks out, come together, and work across religions, there is very little money for that. Even the biggest governments don’t provide financial support for that kind of work.

By understanding or appreciating the religious as part of the civic, and thus “right-sizing” the role of religion rather than assuming it is the answer to all things, whether good or evil.

we have to be committed to questioning what we think we know, and few of us have that bandwidth (some call it a luxury). But how can we inspire and transform if we are always in a hurry to work only with the like-minded?

There are moral imperative, social imperative, and healthy imperative, indeed cultural, financial, military imperative for us to work together. All religions have much to teach, and we will be humble, we should be humble in understanding that we have to learn from one another that the main and most important lesson of survival is inter respect and interdependence we have.

Two phenomena are happening at the same time. Either we are ignoring religion altogether or we are identifying individual religious actors as the most important. And both are actually problematic.

How can you defend the human rights of a person who takes actions which are deemed harmful by society and governments, but this person believes that he/she is acting out of religious convictions? This actually opened for me the door to a conversation about convictions and faith. This evolved into learning about other people’s beliefs and trying to understand what it is that moves people to behave in certain ways. This is how I got interested in the “pulse of faith” inside each of us

There has been a gap, not only in research and knowledge, but in terms of our own responsibility as researchers, in trying to understand the women who themselves fight. The ones who are the guerrillas; the ones who are the strategists and the planners; and the ones who blow themselves up.

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.

If there is one lesson we keep learning from history, and that has been highlighted of late by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is that people change their own cultures from within all the time.

Cooperation, collaboration, are not options. They are necessities for us to survive. Unfortunately, there are still many people who feel or believe that their nations or communities could survive at expense of everyone else. The truth, however, is we are growing, even with globalization, even with technology, even with wealth, we are growing dependent, not less dependent, more dependent on one another, economically, socially, politically, culturally.

For religions to be about peace requires many things: we need to appreciate that religious consciousness, spirituality, or belief is a force for good in most people’s lives, and we need to appreciate that religious institutions suffer from some of the same ills as all other institutions populated by humans, but that this is no cause to dismiss all the institutions.

Since 2000, religious engagement (in diverse forms) has become the ‘normal’ for many inside the UN system. But the question is—or should always be—are we wise about the how and why of this?

The UN Interagency Task Force on Religion was founded to inform and support UN system actors as to the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘who’, and ‘what’ of religion, and engagement with religious actors, around the UN’s main areas of work: peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.

The interpretations of religions that are so focused on controlling women have plenty to do with this fear of women’s anger. We are venturing into a terrain that is psychologically, socially, politically, and personally incredibly difficult. And that’s why we don’t go there. But if we don’t go there, we are simply regurgitating the same old thing.