The instrumentalisation of religion is as old as religion itself. So it behoves us to be alert to both the goodness and the harm which “using religio… - Azza Karam

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.

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.

...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.