A Common Word...and World Interfaith Harmony

In September 2005 Pope Benedict XVI gave an address at the University of Regensburg, where he had once been Professor of Theology, on Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections. Part of this Regensburg address, as it became known, was taken as provocative and insulting by certain parts of the Muslim community, and sparked mass street protests in many Islamic countries. Pakistan called on the Pope to retract what it called “this objectionable statement.” The Pope apologized to Muslims and assured them that the passage quoted did not reflect his own views. 

Relations between Muslims and Christians at that time were stormy and deteriorating. Into this climate a letter was launched, printed in The New York Times in October 2007, signed by 138 leading Muslim intellectuals and scholars. It extended a hand to the leaders of the world’s Christian churches and denominations, including His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, in a call for peace and harmony between the two religions worldwide. The letter, “A Common Word Between Us and You”, outlined the basis of this offering, in the spirit of the shared doctrine of love of God and love of neighbor on which dialogue could be opened.

The handshake was symbolically returned within just over a month, in a letter known as the Yale Response, also published in The New York Times (accompanied by the release of an Arabic translation in the United Arab Emirates). It was written originally by four Christian scholars, and then endorsed by more than 500 Christian theologians and leaders, representing many hundreds of millions of Christians across the globe. 

From this exchange of handshakes has grown an organization based on the expressed purpose to find common ways, in Christianity and Islam, to work together for the social good of all. Grievances are recognized on both sides of the faith divide; it is acknowledged that there are some irreconcilable differences of interpretation on both sides, some difficult questions to deal with.

Sixty leading Christian figures including H.H. Pope Benedict XVI responded to the document in the two years following its issue. A Common Word has been the subject of major international conferences at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, Lambeth Palace, Georgetown University, and other venues. University and college courses have been built around the initiative, it has spawned hundreds of articles and books, won various awards and led to the launch of the UN World Interfaith Harmony Week. Nearly half a million people have visited its official website to date. However, while millions will view the latest YouTube frivolity within hours or days, less than 13,000 have signed up on the Common Word site since 2007 to endorse its intentions and less than 600 people "like" its Facebook page. Now isn't that a tragedy?

We must all hope and pray that the momentum of this initiative is not lost and that the movement continues to fulfill its promise of ever more understanding and respect between these two religions.

Recent events yet again remind us that relationships between the Muslim and Christian worlds are undoubtedly of the greatest importance in forging a more peaceable future for us all, given the sheer numbers involved, and the grievances, differences, prejudices, and caricatures forged out of misunderstandings, which both religions can claim. Nonetheless, other faiths and belief systems must not be ignored. As Professor David F. Ford, Director of the Cambridge Inter-faithProgram has said:

“Our society is not simply secular; nor is it simply religious; it is both religious and secular in complex ways. If it is to work well there need to be huge numbers of conversations and collaborations across religious and secular boundaries.”

From the founding of the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 to the latest A Common Word initiative in 2007 and beyond, has much changed? We have certainly failed to prevent dreadful wars and mass genocides, and we live under greater threats than could have been conceived possible a century ago. We have to continue promoting and forging peaceful dialogue between religions, so that we may come to understand that we are as one in our beliefs to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves. This will need plenty of work by religious leaders, who bear an awesome responsibility for ensuring that this unifying message of love and peace trickles down to the mass population: because trickle down it must! And it will need responsible media. We need their cooperation and support in spreading awareness of the good work being done by religions across the world, in informing the general public of this huge social capital that seems to be largely unappreciated.

As individuals we are not let off the hook either. We have an equally vital role to play: in building on empathy and compassion, and love for all, seeking our own ways of bridging gaps, building up from grass roots. Think of stalactites and stalagmites meeting, of ideas trickling down through the hierarchies, and growing upwards from the masses, until we reach a point of coalescence, where there is a total fusion of ideas and actions, coming from different directions: 

all working towards the same common good.

Interfaith Initiatives - Interfaith Weeks - and 9/11

We all know where we were, what we were doing, on 9/11.

Curiously, another 9/11, in another century, marked the beginning of inter-religious dialogue, as we now understand it. On that day in Chicago in 1893 the World Parliament of Religions was founded. “From now on,” declared Charles Bonney, “the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but on the giant ills that afflict [humankind].”A further conference was convened in 1993 on the centenary of the first, and a series of similar conferences have subsequently come together under the new title ‘Parliament of the World’s Religions’.

There is a faith line described by the American Indian Muslim Eboo Patel that is no less divisive and no less violent than the 20th century color line of racial segregation that existed after the abolition of slavery (1)The faith line does not divide different faiths, or separate the religious from the secular. This line is divisive between the values of religious totalitarians, the exclusivists, and the values of the religious pluralists. (Pluralism is not quite the same as inclusivism, which from a Christian perspective takes the view that Christianity is present in all religions, and they are all moving towards Christianity without knowing it. This is an angle not much more conducive to tolerance than exclusivism or totalitarianism!) The totalitarians believe that their way is the only way and are prepared to convert, condemn or indeed kill those who are different, in the name of God. It is this side of the faith line that gives religions a bad press in the eyes of the secular public. The pluralists on the other hand hold that “people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty.” Patel describes pluralism as the belief “that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its own unique contribution.”Patel founded the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and this serves to promote and support many initiatives between religions, to foster understanding and therefore respect for the long-term. IFYC has trained thousands of people across continents (Australia, India, Qatar, and across Western Europe for example as well as across America) for the skills needed to transform religious diversity or religious tension into active interfaith cooperation. One way it achieves this is by training college students as leaders to engage with and address topical social issues in an interfaith way, within the college, schools and in the community, wherever there is an identified social need.

We need to build more tolerance between us all, to live and let live, but much more than that, to celebrate and build on our diversities, rather than quarrel about them; because the stakes are now too high, given the deadly weaponry that is available across the world in the hands of those from so many different cultures and creeds. “We have inherited a big house,” said Martin Luther King in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture in 1964, “a great world house in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.”

This week is interfaith week in / England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Actually this year it is longer than a week, as it runs from 18th - 27th November this year, extended to celebrate our Diamond Jubilee year. There is also a World Interfaith Harmony Week. This was first proposed at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010 by H.M. King Abdullah II of Jordan. Just under a month later, on October 20, 2010, it was unanimously adopted by the UN and henceforth the first week of February will be observed as a World Interfaith Harmony Week each year. The World Interfaith Harmony Week is based on the pioneering work of The Common Word initiative. This initiative, which started in 2007, called for Muslim and Christian leaders to engage in a dialogue based on two common fundamental religious Commandments; Love of God, and Love of the Neighbor, without nevertheless compromising any of their own religious tenets. The Two commandments are at the heart of the three Monotheistic religions and therefore provide the most solid theological ground possible. I have written about this in more detail in a previous blog.

So let's observe our interfaith weeks and do all we can to promote their causes. Because therein lies the future of us all.

(1) Warning over 100 years ago by the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois

 (2) Eboo Patel (2007) Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, Beacon Press, Boston

Expanded and explored further in Why Religions Work

Hooray - what a sense of relief as I touch the Enter key and my final manuscript has winged its way to the publisher. All those months of slog and research and writing. What a sense of satisfaction. I hope to now have time for my regular blogs again, that have been somewhat neglected of late. To my readers, Mea Culpa. But the garden is also beckoning me. It too has felt neglected! 
And of course the book work is not finished. Copy editing, cover design, text design, marketing, etc, in the months ahead, before the book hits the shelves.

Meanwhile...I say to all my readers - "let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to [one] another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill."


From A Common Word Between Us and You, an open letter to all leaders of the Christian churches and denominations worldwide, signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars and intellectuals, October 2007.

Interfaith dialogue then and now

"From now on, the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but on the giant ills that afflict [humankind]."

Charles Bonney, 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions

"World Scriptures will become a shining light,…a precious textbook for educating the younger generation who are to live together as one global family…to overcome barriers between religions, between races, and between cultures…through this text, all people will not only free themselves from religious ignorance and self-righteousness, but also realise the fact that, among religions, there are shared values and a universal foundation which are of greater significance than the differences which have historically divided religions."

Andrew Wilson, World Scripture and Education for Peace, in World Scriptures, October 1991.

"So let our differences not cause hatred and strife between us. Let us vie with each other only in righteousness and good works. Let us respect each other, be fair, just and kind to [one] another and live in sincere peace, harmony and mutual goodwill."

A Common Word Between Us and You, an open letter to all leaders of the Christian churches and denominations worldwide, signed by 138 leading Muslim scholars and intellectuals October 2007

And nothing changes!