Interfaith harmony week – an opportunity to demonstrate the value of faith as a global good

Above: Group of of family, friends and neighbours together. Credit: CBM UK/Habimana

Not a lot of people know this, but the first week in February is World Interfaith Harmony Week. Embedded within that week is the International Day for Human Fraternity on the 4th of February.  In a world riven by conflict, it is true that animosity towards the religion of others – not necessarily, or if at all, driven by religion itself – can be sustenance for megalomaniacs who have no respect for lives of others.  

Many conflicts are portrayed as ‘religious’ in origin but that is not really true. Religion, most often is simply an identifier – a marker of ‘otherness’ – that sets different populations and people apart from each other.  

People fight other people because they are not of their own. For an inexhaustible number of reasons. Very few conflicts are religious in origin. Very few have religious aims. Yes, there are some examples for sure where religious wars of conquest, often masked as liberation, take place with the aim of establishing some form of theocracy – of furthering a religion.  

Take the establishment, fleeting as it was, of the ISIS ‘caliphate’ that stretched from Aleppo in Syria to Mosul in Iraq. For a while, it was treated as a global existential threat. Had it a religious objective? Clearly, yes. But at its heart it was another example of humanity’s inhumanity and quest for power, resources and control.  

Oftentimes, religion can be a marker that sets the ‘in’ group apart from the ‘out’ group but as power takes precedence, establishing who is in the ‘in’ group contracts almost to a reductio ad absurdum. In the quest to establish dominance, to purge internal rivals (who often become more of a threat than the enemy itself) requires a continual radicalisation of identity.  

In these instances, religion can be an abused tool. It offers a dogma to hold fast to, or to set the ‘in’ group apart. But it is just a tool: replicated in human conflict through time and across geographies.

The French Revolution saw the exact same pattern established, except instead of religion, it was the Cult of Reason established by Robespierre that eventually saw him fall on his self-made sword. Stalin in his purges used his own version of communism to send his enemies to the Gulag while provoking revolution (conflict) across the world.  

World Interfaith Harmony Week was established in 2011 by the United Nations in order to recognise need for dialogue among “different faiths and religions to enhance mutual understanding, harmony and cooperation” and, (somewhat patronisingly) claiming “that the moral imperatives of all religions, convictions and beliefs call for peace, tolerance and mutual understanding”.  

In 2023, the UN Secretary General, took a different perspective, pointing the finger quite directly at religion as a source of conflict: “we see examples of religious extremism and intolerance in all societies and among all faiths”, not singling out any particular religion but considering it was ubiquitous across all. He called on religious leaders to do the impossible: prevent instrumentalization of hatred and defuse extremism. 

In 2019, February 4th was declared International Day for Human Fraternity, marked by the declaration “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” – co-authored by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed El Tayeb.  

They used the joint document to highlight a fundamental point that religion can be and often is instrumentalised for nefarious ends: “religions must never incite war, hateful attitudes, hostility and extremism, nor must they incite violence or the shedding of blood. These tragic realities are the consequence of a deviation from religious teachings. They result from a political manipulation of religions and from interpretations made by religious groups who, in the course of history, have taken advantage of the power of religious sentiment in the hearts of men and women in order to make them act in a way that has nothing to do with the truth of religion. This is done for the purpose of achieving objectives that are political, economic, worldly and short-sighted. We thus call upon all concerned to stop using religions to incite hatred, violence, extremism and blind fanaticism, and to refrain from using the name of God to justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression.” 

They highlight what the true value of religion is in terms of human fraternity and interfaith harmony. It is religion that can be the solution if wedded to the “firm conviction that authentic teachings of religions invite us to remain rooted in the values of peace; to defend the values of mutual understanding, human fraternity and harmonious coexistence”.  

Religion is necessary “to re-establish wisdom, justice and love; and to reawaken religious awareness among young people so that future generations may be protected from the realm of materialistic thinking and from dangerous policies of unbridled greed and indifference that are based on the law of force and not on the force of law”. 

In our work at Christian Blind Mission Ireland, we have a social aim of ending the cycle of disability and poverty, underpinned by our Christian identity. The explosion of conflict often leads to work in very insecure environments where people of different faiths are vulnerable to the abuse of their religion to inspire violence that perpetuates the cycle of disability and poverty.   

Yet, our teams in places like Nigeria and Burkina Faso, continue to work for justice, with integrity, and across all faiths, following the sentiment of the interfaith document, exemplifying the call of Christian solidarity. This is not to say that it comes easy: our teams are part of society in countries riven by conflict – they have loyalties, they feel family and tribal pressures, they know people who have suffered, even died, in the fighting. Like other charities working in these places, the challenge can often be putting aside those loyalties and resisting the human urge to partisanship.  

All organisations working in these situations have to align with the humanitarian principle to be impartial in their work in the face of conflict and human suffering. For organisations working from a Christian perspective, it is not just the humanitarian principles that apply but the positive obligations to seek to harmony where religion has been co-opted as a source of division and to demonstrate the responsibilities required by faith through our work of social services.  

Dualta Roughneen is CEO of Christian Blind Mission (CBM) Ireland