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Advancing religious freedom
through interfaith collaboration
Adeel Khan, University of Cambridge, Researcher at the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue
At its March 2011 session, the United Nations Human
Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted, by consensus,
resolution 16/18, which focuses on concrete, posi-
tive measures that states can take to combat religious
intolerance while protecting the freedoms of religion and of
expression. The Istanbul Process is a series of international
conferences seeking to promote implementation of the steps
called for in this landmark UNHRC resolution.
The fourth Istanbul meeting was held in Doha on 24 and 25
March 2014, hosted by the Government of Qatar and the Doha
International Center for Interfaith Dialogue (DICID), and it
focused on advancing religious freedom through interfaith collab-
oration. By bringing interfaith community experts together with
relevant experts in government, this Istanbul Process meeting
contributed significantly to the advancement of religious toler-
ance and freedom and the formation of collaborative partnership
between government and civil society in promoting those goals.
At this meeting a leading Muslim thinker of our times, Jamal
Badawi, said that interfaith dialogue is not a mere intellectual
exercise. It should include one of the most powerful quests that
are embedded in human nature – the quest for self-purification,
knowledge and wisdom. From that perspective, the essence of
the Prophet’s mission encompasses all. As stated in the Qur’an:
“Allah has been truly gracious to the believers in sending
them a messenger from among their own, to recite His
revelations to them, to purify them [spiritually] and to
teach them the Book [the Qur’an] and wisdom – before
that they were clearly astray.”1
The atmosphere of interfaith dialogue is more enlightened
and permeated with love for fellow humans through the
inclusion of the common elements of spirituality. In the
Qatari experience of interfaith dialogue at DICID we have
developed a new vocabulary of natural rights that is spiritu-
ally grounded in nature itself.
Dr Ali Al-Qaradaghi, a leading Islamic thinker from Qatar,
pointed out the importance of viewing our dwelling within
the kindred ‘womb’ of our environment and the Earth itself.
This maternal view of the Earth as a receptacle, and of it
‘birthing’ us, diversifies the language of rights since the rights
due to our environment are the same ones that are naturally
due to our mothers: a universal experience of duty.
Dr Burhan Koroglu related his experience of creating a tool of
public education and persuasion – the film The River that Runs
to the West – emphasizing the metaphor of the river, stressing
the notions of flow, permeability, mutual influence and inter-
dependence of the cultural streams that unite East and West in
the common current of history. Water is central to the ritual
purity of Islam and Christianity. This baptismal metaphor of
rivers creates another set of imaginings of our common rights
as the source of life itself. This again is a universal experience of
right that does not require second-order explanation.
In the creation of earthly and fluid metaphors, DICID partners
create a new vocabulary of rights that are viscerally accessible to
all people irrespective of their habitat. This process of vocabu-
lary and concept creation is at the heart of the legal effort of
the United Nations as a body that brings humanity together in
common dialogue. We have diversified our language of rights
and found a common civilizational vocabulary for speaking
simultaneously about ‘difference’ and our ‘common parentage’.
Simkha Weintraub, a Jewish scholar, links this creation of
a green vocabulary for faith and rights by bringing to the fore
the question of ‘responsible consumption’ – a calling that
people of faith need to practice, according to him, by ‘green-
ing’ their own places of worship. Living the faithful life is,
after all, about preaching and acting at home first; building
our own communities as models for others to replicate.
Encounter: educational research
Encounter moves beyond simple ‘learning about’ other traditions,
which is not sufficient as a basis for mutual understanding for we
Image: DICID
As dialogue increases, so does understanding: DICID fosters dialogue in
order to help people of different beliefs build on their commonality and face
their differences
A gree to Differ