Egyptian-born academic and interfaith leader, Secretary General of Religions for Peace
Azza Karam is an Egyptian professor and author, who is known for being the first woman executive director of Religions for Peace.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
...it is important not to use religion, as belief, as actors, or as institutions, in the business of politics. We need to remember that colonialism began with a missionary zeal to “civilise” the other — the “civilising mission” was a feature of the 19th and 20th centuries in much of the world, in other words not so long ago.
There is a massive difference between strengthening social services by engaging with all service-providers inclusively and working with religious actors to change harmful practices as part of building a stronger civic consciousness around social justice on the one hand, and between religious actors seeking political power, or political actors seeking religious cover, on the other. It is the latter that I believe we need to be vigilant about.
...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.
faith in its myriad formats, languages, institutional set-ups and outreach, appears attractive, all the more so when you realise that many social services around the world, especially in the realms of health and education and certainly in humanitarian crisis contexts, are still being offered through religious institutions. So “religion”, whether in terms of faith or in terms of social service, is pervasive.
...there has been a re-awakening of a sort of “religious” consciousness and emergence in public life all over the world. As a scholar of these trends, I have written elsewhere that this has had a great deal to do with the loss of the traditional meta-narratives we were familiar with, such as liberalism, socialism, and communism. I believe that some have sought recourse in religion partly because political spaces offered an ideological vacuum.
Once I take up my position in the RfP, I will have to leave the UN and will therefore no longer be able to serve inside the UN system. However, since the RfP has traditionally partnered with the UN for most of its existence, I look forward to continuing and deepening partnerships with diverse UN system organisations on the shared goals of peace-making, education, environmental stewardship and freedom of religion, belief and conscience.
The Task Force is an inter-agency mechanism that came together first in 2010 to help the focal points on religion understand what religion has to do with the UN’s commitments and to be more effective and strategic in how and whom we engage with in the realms of religious spaces in order to better serve the purposes of the UN system.