Azza Karam Quotes

This is a convening place in which those who speak in the name of people’s religions come together regularly to assess issues of national concern and to rally and mobilise around shared well-being. This is, especially in today’s contexts, a space of light.

Over the years the RfP has supported, facilitated and guided the establishment of 70 national Interreligious Councils and five regional Interreligious Councils from around the world. Each council brings together the leadership of the various religions in a manner reflective of the local religious demography, and they act as entities which create an inter-religious space within each nation’s civic infrastructure.

This is an organisation that was convened when religious leaders from each religious tradition from around the world came together for peace against nuclear armament and all forms of conflict and whose first World Assembly had three themes: human rights, development and disarmament. This is an organisation that has never been a platform for empty slogans.

Indeed, secular human-rights actors complain of the negative influence of religion. So why not harness the positive, transformative influence of religion that can help societies overcome harmful social norms and practices?

...behavioural change in most parts of the world in which religion remains deeply rooted in people’s consciousness is rendered possible when religious leaders start speaking to the necessity of that change as part of what makes a person more faithful.

It is time that we integrate the religious sectors into the fabric of civil society, not by arguing that religious leaders and institutions are unique and special species, but by using a “whole of society” lens to appreciate that social transformation, as part of the long arc of history which bends towards justice, as Martin Luther King Jr once said, requires engaging the religious, or the faithful parts of the civic infrastructure.

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.

If we are seeking the expansion of the freedoms that people enjoy, we must engage and situate those who can influence the processes as central parts of the equation.

...over 80 per cent of the world’s people claim a religious affiliation, according to the US Pew Research Centre, and the language of faith is the one that speaks to over 80 per cent of the world’s people.

In the reasoning of Amartya Sen, the Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, the process of development is best understood as an expansion of the freedoms people enjoy in five spheres: political, economic, social, and transparency and personal security. These are precisely the spheres of development that require transformation.

...we are living in times when conflicts are erupting all around us, many either with a religious tinge, or where religious reasons are being used to justify atrocities. Again, if religious leaders and their institutions, from all over the world and representing all faiths, are not part of confronting the fallacies of belief and actively advocating for coming together in peace and justice, then who will do so?

We are living in a global context where freedoms, all freedoms, but especially the freedom of thought, religion and belief, are seriously under attack. If religious leaders are not part and parcel of protecting these freedoms for all people of all faiths all over the world, then who is or will be?

Our planet is facing an existential crisis, and we need to ensure that all religious institutions around the world, which together target 80 per cent of the world’s people, can be active in saving this planet.

On February 11, 2011, I was born again as a proud Masriyya—Egyptian—deeply humbled by those ten or twenty years younger than I, but a thousand years more courageous. I kissed my computer screen—the very same one that had just suffered the indignity of having a shoe hurled at it—when Al Jazeera aired the announcement and displayed the unadulterated joy of Egyptians at Mubarak’s resignation.

This generation is growing up at a time when even what it is to be a man or a woman is being radically redefined.