There is a massive difference between strengthening social services by engaging with all service-providers inclusively and working with religious act… - Azza Karam

...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?

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.

...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.