An Inter-faith discussion organised by the Abrar Islamic Foundation and the Methodist Church’s Connexional Team
How do we live out our religion? Can we develop a common religious approach to the world and the issues facing us, including the difficult challenges of reconciliation, the pandemic and the environment? Our religions tell us that we can and should help. Many religious people and bodies are doing as much as they can. We can do more together if we have built good relationships, understanding and see the common tasks ahead of us.
Tuesday 8th June 2021
Imam Dr Musharraf Hussain
(Scientist, educator and religious scholar)
Rachel Pieh Jone
(Writer, author of Stronger than Death)
Sheikh Ayyoub Rashid
(Resident scholar at the Muslim community of Essex )
Revd David Butterworth
(Interfaith Workplace Chaplain at the NEC Group)
Syed Mohsin Abbas
(TV Journalist, broadcaster and documentary producer)
Father Franc Gelli
(Anglican priest, cultural critic and commentator)
Dr Aly Kabany
(Journalist, political analyst)
Imam Dr Musharraf Hussain: Salam Aleikum, peace be to you all. It is a pleasure to be among friends, people who are committed to interfaith harmony and interfaith dialogue and who will be together and sharing in a huge sense respect for each other because we believe our religion teaches us to be good, to be kind and actually to help humanity to flourish. That is what we all believe in.
I like the title: My religion, my life. Let me begin by telling you two stories. What I noticed from the blurb that Julian sent is really asking what more can we do. Religion and religious people and religious organisations, particularly charities are doing amazing work. Our country is trying to be charitable. Our MPs are showing their humanity by challenging the government’s decision to reduce foreign aid. I think there is something really interesting going on there. But let us leave that aside and go back to my religion in my life.
Let us be honest, I would say that 80 percent of our congregations would be ritualistic Let me share what the Quran tells us. This is the story of a well-known figure Shwaib, the father-in-law of Moses. This is what the Quran tells us when he started speaking to his people and their reaction.
He said :” My people you worship Allah you have no cause for cheating or giving in short measure. You are God’s people but I fear the punishment of you. My people be scrupulously honest in your weights and measures and do not defraud people out of what it is theirs or roam around creating conflict on earth. What God has given you should be sufficient for you. I am not going to be your monitor and guardian.”
And they replied Shuwaib, does your prayer stop us from worshipping what our forefathers worshipped and doing as we please with our wealth. You are too civil. You are too sensible. You just don’t understand.
You have this dialogue between Shuwaib and his people. He is preaching to them and telling them to avoid a moral problem that they have. Their problem is that they are fraudulent in the market place. They don’t weight things properly. They do not give the full measure and they are cheating and defrauding. This is not the way.
What is really interesting and what I wanted to focus on was their retort. The reaction was this. Does your prayer stop us from worshipping the idol? Does you prayer tell us to use our money in a particular way not in the way that we want to use it. How can you stop us from what we are doing. Really what they are saying is your prayer is a ritual. What has that got to do with my economic life? What has that got to do with my social life and my society and my way of living and economy.
This is what we are witnessing in our secular society which has really taken it to the highest level and we make a very clear distinction between religion and non religion. My friend is telling me how to live economically, how to do my technology, how to live all of my life.
There is a very popular video going on among the Pakistani diaspora. It is a parody. It shows a person in the market place cheating. In the evening he is on his prayer mat with his rosary and someone watching him asks him what is this? You were really fraudulent out there in the market place during the day time. Now you are sitting on the prayer mat with your rosary. And he says that is my livelihood and this is my religion.
As religious people we do not accept this for one moment. We call it hypocrisy. And hypocrisy in the Quran is regarded as the lowest of the low. You cannot be further down into continuum of good and evil.
My religion is my life and religious people have to actually show that. We will not separate our politics and our economic life from our spiritual and our religious rituals. We have to convince the wider community of the relevance of our religion in the public sphere. Christians would say we are persecuted and Muslims would say we are persecuted and there is Islamophobia. They are not letting us practise in the public space. I think there is a real challenge out there.
This seminar if about what we as people of faith can do together and share those good and wonderful practices that we are all involved in from the food banks, to Muslim charities looking after the educational needs of orphans globally. I know the Christian charities are doing amazing work.
Perhaps what we need to be able to do more of is to share amazing and good works with the wider community through interfaith forums. I don’t think there is very good communication among ourselves and that is something which we do need to focus on. How do we communicate our good works that we do and how we share those practices. We already have an amazing interfaith organisation. What is really needed is to communicate that good work and share it with the wider community. I will stop there and leave this as an idea which I hope other people will explore. So thank you listening to me. I hope we can have a discussion.
Rachel Pieh Jone My religion is Christianity. Since 2003 my life has been primarily spent in Muslim-dominant countries. And I have been profoundly impacted by Islam. I can’t say my “religion” of Christianity has been impacted, but my personal faith, my life, has been impacted by my Muslim community and specifically, impacted by what I call “holy welcomes.” So I want to share with you what I mean by holy welcome and a little bit about why this matters and how can we do it across religious boundaries.
I am an American Christian, originally from the state of Minnesota, and grew up in a family, neighborhood, and school where I blended in easily. Skin color, language, religion…I was in the majority. But I am now speaking to you from Djibouti. In 2003 my family moved to Somalia and then in 2004, we came across the border to Djibouti where my husband has been a professor at universities and currently runs a school. I’m a writer so my work comes with me wherever we go.
When we moved to the Horn of Africa that sense of immediate belonging, my ability to blend in, the feeling of being in the majority in which I didn’t really think about my identity or position… everything flipped. I became the outsider, the one with the strange accent, weird clothes, unusual spiritual beliefs, the one who was hard to welcome. My new neighbors were predominantly Somali and exclusively Muslim. What were they going to think about this blond curly haired foreign Christian woman in their midst? Should I be afraid, like people in the USA told me to be? Did Muslims want to kill me? Should I listen to the fear-mongering emails about Muslim terrorists or violent verses ripped out of context from the Quran?
When we landed at the airport in Hargeisa, Somaliland in 2003, I was exhausted and overwhelmed, my twins were 2.5 years old and scrambling all over and I kept dropping my carryon, the scarf I’d draped over my hair kept falling off. And a woman at the immigration desk, the first person I interacted with there, smiled and helped me tuck the corner of the scarf in so it wouldn’t fall. It was such a small gesture but it was done with tender compassion. She did not, of course, try to kill me! I look back and think of that moment as a holy welcome.
I needed those holy welcomes wherever I could find them – Moving to the Horn dealt a massive blow to my pride. I don’t remember feeling afraid to move to Somalia, though I was and dealt with that later, but I do remember feeling like I was in control and knew everything I needed to know. But – Take a suburban Minneapolis girl and drop her in a rural Somali village and I was ridiculous. I couldn’t walk without rolling an ankle or getting my dress caught in cacti. I couldn’t say a coherent sentence. One day I was walking to deliver a watermelon to a woman who had just had a baby, I’m thinking I’m all generous and thoughtful, and my guard had to chase me down and ever so gently usher me back home because I was naively headed straight toward a gunfight. I was like a baby. The physical survival stuff was hard enough, humbling enough, but also my faith, something so precious to me, made no sense here and that was humbling.
I had one friend tell me that the way I fasted was sinful. Another said the way I disposed of my fingernail clippings opened me up to being cursed. My practices of faith and even simple daily routines not only didn’t make sense but were, in their view, actively working against me. One of the first words I learned was infidel, galo, and the infidel now was me! I was used to calling other people unbelievers, non-Christians. I defined them based on me. But now I was the one being defined that way and I didn’t like it.
Another time, I hosted a party at my house in Somalia for another expatriate who was leaving. When the call to prayer sounded, the Somali woman leading the dancing stopped and shouted at everyone to go pray. I sat down to wait and the room slowly emptied. All of a sudden, I was overcome by a desire to pray with them. I pray. I’m a person of faith. But what would it mean to pray next to a Muslim? I debated and debated – to pray or not to pray – when one of my new friends said, “Rachel you can’t pray. Just sit down.” I wasn’t the only one drawing boundaries or defining people based on myself. I was the infidel here. I understand that praying the salat with Muslims isn’t something Christians normally do. The few times that I have been invited to pray alongside Muslims I have been clear that I’m not a Muslim, that I don’t know the Arabic words, and that I am praying in the name of Jesus. I don’t want to confuse people. But I also understand now that prayer is bigger and more expansive than humans imagine and that approaching God is magnificently mysterious and I don’t want to prevent anyone from that experience.
In Somalia and Djibouti, at first these ideas of “you can’t pray” or “you’re an infidel” made me competitive about spirituality– comparing my giving to their giving, my fasting to their fasting. To prove I wasn’t an infidel.
This fell apart pretty quickly. For example, the Muslim fast, Ramadan, was way harder than I’d imagined. I decided to try it – no water or food from sunrise to sunset and totally failed. I started cheating with water, not only cheating but hiding it so being deceptive, and then eased up on the strict sunrise or sunset timing, and pretty soon abandoned it all together. Part of my struggle was that I was doing it alone, a Christian joining the Muslim fast. I didn’t have special meals or family traditions, there was no global community keeping me accountable, and I didn’t have the same religious convictions about the fast.
So I took step back and thought – what is there in Christianity that can provide something similar? A corporate, global sense of community? Lent. Which is not something my Baptist tradition practiced so it was a new experience for me. One thing I appreciate about Islam is the physicality of it and the way that watching friends fast, bow in prayer, give – not just through an automatic bank deposit that I don’t even notice but a coin pressed into the hand of a beggar on the street corner reminds me of God. And I’ve come to value more of these physical, tangible expressions of my internal faith.
I think of this as a holy welcome – the way Muslim faith practices opened my eyes to similar practices in my Christian tradition. Like Lent, like prostration in prayer, like spontaneous generosity, like pilgrimage.
Instead of feeling threatened by our differences and instead of feeling like I needed to adopt Muslim practice, I’ve gone back to my Christian spiritual heritage and have dug deeper into the Bible with questions like: what is prayer? How do I explain the trinity to someone who has never heard of it? Why do I love Jesus? What do I believe about God’s character? How do I hold my own faith convictions while also respecting the faith of others?
And what I’d like people to take away from today and from my book Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus is that difference does not need to divide us but that grounded faith should make us brave to reach across the religious difference, the border, the political aisle. My Christian faith has been strengthened, not threatened, by proximity to Islam, by contrast, by questioning. I have learned new ways of prayer, like prostration but have even learned new things about characters both Christians and Muslims share, like Hagar. When I read about the role Hagar’s story plays in the Hajj pilgrimage, I was astonished and returned to the Bible, to Genesis, to learn more about this remarkable woman. When I read the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife in the Quran, I saw and appreciated new aspects to their story in the Bible. This is all a holy welcome and I believe my Muslim friends have experienced similar things through our friendships.
I was at a peace-building interfaith gathering a few years ago and a Somali woman sat next to me. When she heard I lived in Djibouti she said, “Oh my nephew just moved to Djibouti. He doesn’t speak French so at school they put him next to a girl who speaks English so she could translate for him.”
“Is your nephew’s name Najib?” I asked.
She nodded, surprised.
“He is sitting next to my daughter.”
As we laughed together about this small world, the call to prayer sounded. My new friend grabbed my hand and asked me to come pray with her. Before I could say anything – is this okay with your community, will people feel uncomfortable, she said, “I know you aren’t a Muslim and you’re aren’t becoming one. But you love God right? Let’s go pray together.”
This is a holy welcome. Come into my sacred space, let’s seek God together.
Theologian Miroslav Volf writes about the concept of embrace in conflict or difference or simply cross cultural or cross religious dialogue. He describes this as a process of opening one’s arms, waiting, closing the arms, and then opening them again. This is holy welcome. There is no coercion, there is no fundamental change in terms of identity or allegiance for either party, but there is a warm invitation to share something. Volf also writes that all of us see the world from a place. I see the world from my “here” and you see the world from your “here.” I see the world through Christian, American lenses. My community in the Horn of Africa sees the world through Somali or Djiboutian Muslim lenses. We are not sitting in the same location even as we are physically in the same location. But, if we are willing to offer one another holy welcomes, or an embrace to use Volf’s term, we will experience something profound, like what I have experienced in my daily life here, which will deepen our faith.
How do we do this?
First, I simply notice my position as an American Christian or a Somali Muslim or a whatever whatever. What am I bringing to this conversation, through what perspectives do I view the world? It requires self-awareness. Second, we cross a social boundary and move into the world of the other. This doesn’t necessarily mean move across the planet like I’ve done, but it means we use our imagination to understand the other position. This means I strive to understand my Muslim friends, to see their perspective, to appreciate their point of view.
Often religious people refer to those outside our religion as “unbelievers” or as I have often been called, “infidels,” as I mentioned. But that is not how each person views themselves. Can I see my Muslim friends as “believers” and can they see me as a “believer”? Not the same kind of believer but a person of faith, a person who lives with a value on belief. If we hope to embrace, we must be able to do this. Then, we take the other into our own world. This is where the holy welcome happens. We compare our two views, we are willing to see right and wrong in each, we invite the other person who disagrees with us into our own world. Will you pray with me? Will you join me for iftar? Will you come to the Christmas party? Can we partner in donating to those hurting from loss of work during Covid? And then, we go through this process again, offering and receiving holy welcomes, continually paying attention to our locations, perspectives, and opportunities to embrace.
This is a holy welcome. Come into my sacred space, let’s seek God together.
There can be a lot of fear of the other, fear of Christian or Muslim. Often that fear is that oh if I spend time with someone of a different faith, will I lose my own faith? There’s this idea that the other is a spiritual threat. But I think that is a rather sad approach to spirituality. First of all, what does it communicate about our own faith that we feel it would be so easily threatened or lost? But even more, this idea leads to misunderstandings, judgment, even aggression or violence sometimes.
I think that having different spiritual beliefs are gifts and opportunities. Rather than being a point of division or responding to difference with fear or denigration, these differences are an opportunity to exercise curiosity, to explore our own ideas, to learn from and about someone else. This is not some kind of universalism that ignores distinctives. We don’t believe the same things about God, Jesus, salvation, sin…OK. That doesn’t mean we shout at each other or insult or vandalize. To me, it means we ask good questions and we build relationships so that we can explore those differences. We can even feel free to simply express, hey, you know I don’t pray the same way you do or I don’t believe in fasting the same way you do, but thank you for inviting me and I’m honored.
We do not need to feel threatened by or afraid of our differences! But if we approach with a genuine humility and curiosity, out of our own sense of grounded faith, we can experience these events or conversations as opportunities for holy welcomes.
I wrote this recent book Pillars as an offer of holy welcome to Christians and Muslims and anyone else. Come into the sacred space of my story, let’s seek God together, and then go out and offer that holy welcome to someone else.
Sheikh Ayyoub Rashid: Salam akeikum. In the name of Allah, the Benificent, the Merciful may the peace and blessings of Allah be with all the messengers of Allah who are sent to guide mankind towards salvation. Peace be upon all of them from Adam until Mohammed and peace be to you all dear brothers and sisters. Thank you to the organisers of this very important meeting: My religion my life. As people of faith we have a contribution to make to the issues which face us all as human beings in this world.
Together we live in this world and face a lot of challenges which could be connected to the environment, politics as well as health. In recent decades the environmental issues have taken central stage in world politics and have achieved centre stage. There are some core issues which challenge us all including politicians: deforestation and not forgetting consumerism.
What we have seen in recent years is due to our neglect of the world we live in. The rising of the sea levels, the melting of the glaciers, deforestation and diseases which the world is facing now are part and parcel of what we as human beings have done to the planet we live in.
In the holy Quran there is a chapter The Romans, verse 41 Allah the almighty says: Evil has appeared on land and sea because of the hands of the people have done that he God may make them change a part of that which they have done in order that may return.
If you look at this particular verse you will come to understand that the pollution and corruption is because of what we do in this world. The Islamic approach to solve some of the problems which are happening around the world at the moment is on the basis of moderation. Leading our lives in moderation in this world is the best solution. When we want to spend we should spend according to our needs. When we want to get the benefit of this world we have to do that according to the principles of moderation.
In Islam we understand that Allah says in the holy Quran. : Don’t forget your portion of this world. So here we need to bring equilibrium and we need to remember that the world in which we are living we need not create. There is a creator. The creation of this world is by the creator who has put all the principles of how to live our lives here. The Almighty not only created this beautiful world but also he decorated it and we should take care of this.
We read for example in Surah Salfat chapter 37 verse 36 where Allah the Almighty says. We have adorned the lowest of the near heaven with the stars of beauty. My brothers and sisters the world which we are living in is so beautiful but we have made it ugly. There are some places around the world where you want to look about for stars you may not be able to do so because of the pollution which we have brought to this beautiful world.
So as Muslims we use some terminology in our daily life which we call acts of worship or ibadah. We use this terminology which is connected with Islam. We say wajib – duty. We use the world mustahat or mandub which means recommended. Sometimes we talk about that which is wajib we apply it to acts of worship but we do not extend the terminology when it comes to the wider environment in which we are living. When Muslims go to worship they look nice because for them this is recommended.
However we forget to use this terminology when it comes to the environment. I take this opportunity I am so glad to see that there are brothers and sisters from different faiths to use this terminology. It is wajib for us to take care of this world meaning that it is compulsory. It is optional for you to have some nice plants inside your house in order to create a nice atmosphere inside the house.
One of the biggest issues in relation to pollution is the weapons which are used in wars. You can see clearly the big issue which is connected with the world we are living in is the problems that they cause. We may want to get rid of diesel cars for example. Soon we are not going to have diesel cars – this is the biggest issue. Listen to the Western politicians. They forget that there are tanks and weapons. One of these are equal to many diesel cars. We don’t discuss those issues. We need to make sure the politicians see them.
I don’t know how many problems we encounter because of the recent wars which we have seen in the Middle East because of the weapons which are being used. We need to be part of the solution whatever faith we are from: Jewish, Muslim or Christian we need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. As Muslims we use the phrase salam aleikum but this should not just remain in our words. It has to be seen in our deeds and actions.
We need to take a holistic approach towards this garden – the one we are living in in terms of faith as well as practise. This meeting is very important because it shows that our life in this world should not be left to the politicians only to set their agendas. Let the politicians do whatever they want but let us also as people of faith come together, work together in order for us to make this world a better place to live in.
My religion teaches me to live my life by always remembering to strike a balance. In the Quran we read: O my Lord allow me to have a good life in this world as well as in the hereafter. I believe that by striking this balance we can make the world a very nice place to live in. Together we can make the world a better place.
David Butterworth: I am a Methodist church minister. I have several hats. I normally reside in the Birmingham district and that includes 139 Methodist churches. Part of my role is a workplace chaplain and we have a network of chaplains in hospitals, universities, colleges, hospices, community centres, retirement homes for the elderly etc. Part of my work is in social justice and I am part of a leadership team for Citizens UK.
Regarding Interfaith work I am the lead chaplain in the National Exhibition Centre. My brief includes the National Exhibition Centre and also the International Conference Centre in the city centre where many international conferences are held including the Conservative Party conference. I inherited the role seven years ago. It was quite a quiet role a bit like a sleepy hollow but in the first few weeks I listened more and more.
The world listen has been used quite a lot this afternoon. I am a chaplain and I listen. And when there is silence I continue to listen rather than spill out what I think. I listen to people an awful lot and realised that no one felt at home in this inter faith prayer room at all. So I started conversations with other people. Because of my presence inside that space, my role is 24/7 outside church work, always in the public arena. I found out they wanted to listen and to be serious about providing them with that holy welcome that we heard of earlier.
I was speaking to the NEC’s directors and HR directors to go and buy Qurans and other holy books. Sadly there was not much response. But I went to the Islamic faith supply shop dressed like this in my cleric collar. As I walked in I could see the man behind the counter thinking he has come into the wrong shop. He must be new around here.
I explained my situation. I wanted to celebrate with my Muslim brothers and sisters in a work space, in an event centre where seven million people come each year. In the end we were like long lost friends and he said please come again I look forward to seeing you.
I think if I had not listened I would have missed an awful lot of opportunities. I think if I had not listened intensely perhaps the managing director and chair and others at the NEC would have said this is not for us, it is a one trick pony. You only look after the Christian people that come through our business centres. Feedback at the visitors centre climbed like never before. I would say chaplaincy had a low profile. I encouraged the executive and others to elevate its profile because it was relevant to their business centre – the satisfaction that people felt in coming into a prayer room that would welcome everyone excluding no one actually benefitted the NEC enormously. We received letters from people saying why can’t we have one of these in Canada, why can’t we have one of these where I am coming from? Why can’t we have one in Australia. There are prayer mats and Christian books and signs of welcome to everybody.
It was low budget. I tried to welcome people from everywhere. I went to charity shops and got vases for flowers and other bits and pieces to make it really welcome. Like I was coming to your house. You would try and make it welcoming for me perhaps more so then making it welcoming for your good self.
The NEC really took on board chaplaincy. It is now supported by the NEC tremendously so. I am now with my team of volunteers and administrators on the NEC website. I am on the staff website. More recently with the COVID and redundancies I am even in the alumni group to facilitate continued support as people leave the business.
Over the last 18 months we have had chaplaincy continue to speak to people and to listen to people and every couple of weeks because I am part of the well being team and respected as the interfaith lead chaplain we meet every two weeks and we really have a role to play. I can’t see that stopping unless the funders from the church and the other spaces say we can’t afford to.
Because of the radical inclusion of chaplaincy even massive companies like car phone warehouse and others have said when we come to the NEC we would like a prayer group as you have but we would like it in our own space as well – can you help us? So the answer is yes. I celebrate it. And again I go to the Islamic supply shop, buy prayer mats and make it as welcoming as I possibly can and the feed back is just glorious from people from all faiths and none.
I am not there 24/7. I can’t be there 24/7. There are places like Warwick University, Coventry University and a lot of the social action programmes to. I would say that that form of chaplaincy in an interfaith setting is primarily listening, primarily extending that hand of friendship, to give a holy welcome.
Because of that I have learned an awful lot. It has actually opened many doors in the work of social justice in the wider West Midlands and I would say also nationally. By being friendly and supportive of our Muslim brothers and sisters and Jewish brothers and sisters has enabled me to knock on doors in the wider West Midlands and say hey we want a radical change of wider hospitality in the City of Birmingham.
So the chaplaincy programme is very collaborative and social justice is also collaborative as well. I work with Muslim, Jewish and Christian men and women and people that profess no faith. I even go and sit in some humanist meetings occasionally. I hope that through the dovetailing of that work place outside of church walls 24/7 has enabled me to have more engagement with more local people who could not possibly share those concerns with their imam or vicar of priest or whoever it might because it would not fit with the theological statement that they have heard in their local churches or mosques.
Being in the market place as it were regularly people will come and speak and share their inner most needs. The people in this webnair have to listen to the toms toms from the people on the ground. There was a listening campaign with Citizens UK when the Syrian crisis kicked off and the UK was sadly not taking refugees in any considerable number.
We worked with the chaplaincy and social justice to say to the City of Birmingham leaders we want to receive 50 Syrian refugees in Birmingham as soon as possible. We gathered 1000 people to make that claim to the city leader Sir Albert Hall. For a little while nothing happened. Emails had to wake up city engagement. I wrote a letter to the city authority and we had permission to read that letter to the full council chamber with 120 city councillors and I utilised those unbelievable words I have a dream.
By the side of me were rabbis and imams from the progressive synagogue in Birmingham and people from Citizens UK and other places. Cross party debates took place across the floor of the council chamber. I don’t think that had happened before to answer a question like that about receiving Syrian refugees. But because of the clothes I wear somebody came to the bottom of the public gallery and said to me you will won’t you receive the Christians first from Syria almost wagging a finger. And I said we will not. We will be receiving whoever might be offered to us by the United Nations vetting procedures.
The first Syrian refugees coming to Birmingham were Muslim and many of the were children. They could not speak English and many of them were not terribly well educated. We offered them a space in our Methodist church free of charge for two years and we came as friends and we would pray would them as we heard people speaking earlier and we are still continuing that.
After the first year we had a thank you session with the city councillors with hundreds and hundreds of people standing by my side. We said thank you to the city councillors for the 50 that we received into Birmingham. They have all been housed. We had the 50 and we thanked them sincerely for that. Now we wanted to receive 500. Five hundred and fifty Syrian refugees came into Birmingham.
Many of the cities were slow on the uptake of that particular programme and also slow on the programme of community sponsorship another Citizens UK refugee programme. So I communicated with Birmingham City Council to review the programme that was trying to emulate a programme in Canada which had received 40,000 refugees from the Vietnamese boat people crisis many years ago. They were receiving refugees from other places. Canada is a stalwart in receiving and welcoming refugees from anywhere with any faith position.
Unexpectedly it fell to me to speak in the House of Lords. I had been to the House of Lords as a visitor when I was based in London for five or six years but to speak in the House of Lords about welcoming strangers was quite daunting.
I knew that we were going to have a number of refugees coming into Birmingham and knowing that mosques were slow on the uptake – now several more mosques have joined the programme. I asked the University of Birmingham to fund a programme to evaluate the Community Sponsorship Programme so we could evaluate it from an academic and a distanced perspective from me and the Methodist church. Professor Jenny Philmore received funding and ethical approval. She has now rolled out the programme and that information has gone worldwide.
Faith with a positive, celebratory aspect teaches us that all doors will open to us if we press on them. If they do not open the first time, they will open the second or third time. Now there are 214 families safely in Britain. They are all Muslim men and women and children and we love them like our own.
I could go on at great length about others things like the living wage but going back to the chaplaincy I am an advocate for inclusion whether your mobility is an issue, I am advocate for inclusion from the top of somebody’s head to their feet. That is quite unusual in some places for people from a faith perspective to be like us. It is hard to hear myself say that. When people do not want to offer love to a stranger because they are of a different faith I have to challenge that to push it back and I have to resist. That is my calling, that is my religion, that is my life.
Syed Mohsin Abbas: I think we are in a world where we cannot ignore the fact that there is a very much an organised set of strategies, actions, policies and phenomena. Not everything that takes place in the world is random or chaotic. There are key institutions which are there to promulgate various world views, ideologies, doctrines, dogma for policies which are fundamentally immoral from any of the religious perspectives that I am aware.
You would all agree I am sure that the virtu ethics and the morality of those religions make it very clear and easy for us to reject the kind of strategies, policies and promotions of certain ideas and ideologies that are going on. The one that religious institutions and individuals have failed to address as the root cause of all the problems that we then have to go and try and clean up the mess that is left has to be the issue of injustice and especially the issue of economic injustice and usury. As people of faith in the majority of religions we have failed to address this issue even though our scriptures have given a very clear indication of what is right and what is wrong.
I think that is not accidental. I am going to put this as a question at the end of my little tirade. It is really that these institutions which are pushing forward structural elitism, the hierarchal power which exists. Those that are pushing forward usury and the abuse of wealth and money in the system in the world today also promote the theft of the commons , the theft of the people’s rights, the land the water all of this whether it is international corporations or others.
This is all fundamentally rooted in injustice. By now the great institutions of the great religions ought to have been able to create a firm strategy for believers to be given a firm direction and to at least head in that direction. I have not seen this. It looks as if religions institutions are caught in this reactionary behaviour based on agendas that are set by forces which are against promoting virtue and morality. It seems as if we have got trapped with this reactionary faith because finances, funding and the community funding and the huge arsenal of ideas and concepts and strategies and the implementation of those strategies is coming from an overwhelmingly wealthy non religions fraternity. Some of these folk sometimes pretend to be religions.
I think our fundamental, whether we are individual believers in terms of our faith on an individual level or as individuals within a collective we need to address the fundamental root cause of injustice. We are not doing that. I believe our rituals or our do gooding are a reactionary plaster which is placed on problems which are produced by those who in the old days we would identify as Pharoah or Nimrud in the Islamic tradition – tyrants.
I think that until and unless the religious fraternity – whether that is in the form of the pope or it is Ayatollah Khamenei or Sistani or the Church of England of the Dalai Lama these folks can demonstrate to me that they are giving a clear line to the religious fraternity about what the moral politic or the holistic solution for us is to take on. I have a problem with that kind of religion and I don’t subscribe to any potential real success to changing the way the world is ultimately.
My real question is what are the big institutions of religions doing towards all the problems that I see manifesting in the world. For me personal faith my religion hinges fundamentally around the issue of justice and injustice. The most powerful element of my din or way of life is really to try and first of all implement that within my own life and my own circle and try to live by that idea of justice as defined by the scriptures and more specifically by the holy Quran as defined by the life of the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH). There are lots of clear cut examples which give us a really clear picture of what justice means within the Islamic context.
And I think that having that picture and accessing that knowledge has shifted my religion – Islam is not merely a religion, It is not even a faith, it is a way of life. I was told by a very senior Jewish figure Islam like Judaism is actually a way of life. It is not something we come to because we have a leap of faith. It is logical and totally rational for us. I mulled over that several times.
This is how one evolves in ones own perception of religion. This is something that happens naturally. Everyone who is conscientious will go through a period from their youth onwards if they are a critical thinking, analysing individual. Their notion of their faith will change with time as experiences accumulate, as life teaches you its lessons and as you learn and read as well you will learn more and more.
I would say that where the evolution has ultimately taken us maybe is that justice is the most central concept. I am not going to go on the personal side. You can talk about justice within a marriage, justice towards your children, doing justice towards your society and your elders and also justice within your region and community. I believe that most religious people do quite well on this. Those who profess a religious faith and are clear about what the ethics and morality of those religions are.
I would argue also that most of the virtue ethics we would list -whether it is Christianity, Buddhism, Islam etc are all the same. It is very easy to come to an agreement about what a moral, ethical framework is based on in the Prophetic scriptures. These days I think we are being coerced into tweaking this morality and to start to compromise our views from the scriptural truths to what I call the dictates of the most modern religion – secularism.
I believe it is a religion now. It has not declared itself as such but the way it behaves its institutions, its dogma, its priests, advocates. To me this is the new most powerful most financially well endowered and most politically influential religion of the world today but it does not get mentioned of course within the discourse because that is the way it is designed. It is designed in such a way that it cannot be targeted whereas Christianity, Judaism, Islam – all the others are formulated within institutions.
We often get this situation when the presiding power in the world which dictates what is justice and injustice is actually in a position to be able to vilify, stereotype and castigate Prophetic religions.
For me this is the root cause of most of our problems – injustice on a macro scale. It is very challenging to be just in a situation where you are being forced to live on very low budgets and all the pressures. These pressures manifest in creating injustice within individuals within their own ambiance.
But I will keep my focus a little bit more macro and look at how this injustice which is largely now being perpetrated, manufactured, packaged and distributed effects people at the grass roots and how it is done. What should religious people do? What should a person from the Prophetic religions who is committed to social justice, or divine justice do in a situation we are in particularly in Britain and the West.
I feel that a corrupt hierarchy, elitism, financially affluent individuals who have easy access to power and decision making is a fundamental area that one has to look at. It is a problem of religious morality if we are ever going to have a Prophetic morality re-emerging in the world in a way that I would like to see it.
We also have to address the theft of the commons by that hierarchy, that elite because the theft of the commons is a fundamental injustice. Ninety seven percent of the land of the world is owned by 5 – 6 percent of the population. This is a fundamental problem because the control of that wealth and the hording of that wealth by a very few individuals is a leaving very little for the rest of the world to solve its problems of poverty.
So if we do not deal with the hierarchy and the theft of the commons as religious individuals we are failing in our duty as purveyors of divine justice as khalifas on earth which is the title we have been given. We are the stewards of this planet. This is the way Islam views mankind.
Also of course the economic and usury based mechanisms which propagate all of this oppression and injustice have to be looked at. You cannot ignore the Bank of International Settlements, the World Trade Organisation, DAVOS which always trump the ethics of the economic leaders of the world. This makes it necessary that we look at this system and make a decision as religious people whether it is morally right or wrong. If it is wrong it is something that we should be thinking about opposing. The corrupt hierarchy is also wrong. They have the wrong moral values and are causing trouble. God has given us abundance in this world and there should be very few problems.
There is a deliberate erosion of the Prophetic morality in all areas of life from top to bottom whether it is our political institutions. All of the fundamental institutions prompted by the holy Prophet are under attack. And they are under attack specifically from the ruling elite which are promoting specific religions like secularism as a tool and as a means of undermining this.
As an individual my role has always been as an individual to promote, fight for and stand for the idea of social justice, political justice, economic justice – justice of every form not just social justice. Political justice and economic justice are all vital aspects of my religious obligation. I have no choice. This is very clear in our scripture. We have to stand up against oppression.
A manifestation of what I am talking about is the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the industrial military arms complex that we see proliferating. If you look at its behaviour and its stance it is very much neo-fascist yet they are promoted by the mainstream media. There is the immortality of the media. We have to mention the pandemic in this context.
Let me now throw in medical terrorism and scientific terrorism. All of these vast institutions whether it is the WHO and WTO, the World Economic Forum they all answer to a corrupt hierarchical elite. The transnational corporations are all pally pally. Within that comes the media and scientism. There is now the notion that scientism has many things we must adhere to and listen to because it is the superior religions as well. This is a problem for me.
To what extent would I attack established religious institutions that represent the faith around the world as being part of that hierarchical elite, influenced if not actually dictated to. To what extent does the Church of England have links with these hierarchical elites? It is a question that maybe people within the church can answer.
There is an institution within the Sunni Islamic world which is being dictated to by despots. Sisi for instance dictates to the religious fraternity in Egypt. He is just one example. You can do it with Erdogan. We can talk about various other leaders.
It is problematic if religious institutions themselves are also now part and parcel of the same systematic hierarchical corruption that dare not speak against the policies which are detrimental and harmful for the majority. This is a problem for me as these institutions are less and less worth trusting and they are less and less likely to command my respect.
How do we come to some solutions if in the scenarios I am painting we have a systematic problem of injustice? With the system and the planetary mechanism with which we live it becomes difficult for me to trust most of the narratives come from the hierarchical main stream media, politicians and institutions. I have come to the question ten times when WHO says something about the pandemic whether they are saying this because it is based on genuine research or they are strategically politicising agendas which are being rolled out.
I can do this with the Bank of International Settlements. What is in it for them? With the WTO. I can do this with every global institution which his supposed to be working in the interests of humanity. This then leads to all sorts of other questions. If we are getting from the academics and the scientists who are employed by the same system the same corrupt hierarchy they are singing from the same hymn book.
The solution to this is to refer to Iman Ali. Look at the arrows which they are shooting, in which direction they are pointing. The likes of Iran, Venezuela and religiously motivated people fighting across Asia and liberation theology among the Christians. To me the arrows of the new neo liberalism are pointing at these guys and I ask myself why. I ask myself what is within the justice agenda of these chaps. It is usually the case that these people do have Prophetic morality at the heart of what they are doing and why they are being attacked is because they stand a chance of putting Prophetic morals back in society.
I have a choice to make. I have to either believe in the system’s propaganda and the stories that are coming out the pandemic, wars and terrorism and I have to ask how believable and how true are these and then I have to look at the counter narratives. And when I look at the counter narratives they are pushing back. But what is also happening is that the mainstream spaces like facebook, twitter etc increasing are using their weight and the right to speak out is being challenged.
I will conclude here. My question is really and my suggestion is that Islamic or Christian or other Prophetic based religions and religious persons have to stand on the side of truth and justice rather than following the main stream hierarchical stance on matters.
Father Gelli: May I speak to you in the name of the one true God. I want to go from the sacred to the sacrament and talk about the sacrament of Holy Communion. We are talking about a sacred meal that was instituted by Christ when he was still on this earth.
There is a difference between games and rituals. Games are about conflict, you fight it out with the other side but ritual brings people together. I am talking about the ritual, the sacrament of Holy Communion. You have to be baptised to receive the bread and wine but everyone is welcome to come up to the altar rails and be blessed. So this is an inclusive sacrament.
Before giving out Holy Communion I always invite people to come to the altar rails and be blessed. So everybody can share. There were people who were clearly Muslims who came up to be blessed.
I want to now move on to the next concept. I want to speak about what is ethics. Ethnics is right and wrong. People often ask you for guidance. What should I do? Or what do you think I should do. And they don’t always articulate it in that way. They often desire guidance. We have to guide guidance. But how can you give guidance if you don’t know how to guide?
An ancient Christian writer said to the pagans – there were still lots of pagans around – we are not like you. We do not kill our own children in the womb. We do not fight in the arena like animals. To me those words are very important. He said to the pagan we are not like you.
This is more telling in our culture. I refer to the book the One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse. He talks about advanced technological society and the digital society. This is the kind of culture which needs to be criticised because one dimensional means flat.
Our culture is today fundamentally one dimensional. It is culture which only leads in one direction. It does not want to know about fundamental values and the teachings of the great faiths.
Saint Peter the head of the apostles said we must follow God. He laid down the fundamental criterion. Our commitment is to follow divine revelation otherwise we are lost. Today there are all sorts of courses which are controversial. Marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman.
The next point is the relationship between the church and the state. The philosopher Hegel said the state is the incarnation of the absence of some sort of total divine ideas. It was nothing really to do with the divine. The function of the state is to uphold the common good. But you have to have an idea of what constitutes the common good.
Today when you get state legislation which is contrary to the gospel you have to be able to say ‘no’. During the Second World War the bombing of civilians in German cities was condemned by a bishop who was supposed to be the next archbishop of Canterbury. He said that the innocent should not be attacked. We uphold this in our culture today. Especially the unborn, the babies in the womb.
The church has to have an ethical relationship with the state – uphold the state for the common good and be critical of the state and be able to stand up and be counted because we must follow God. That is the fundamental teaching.
People say that you Christians are living with your heads in the clouds when you say love your enemy. This is not real. Some of them are lunatics. We must wish our enemies good. I quote Saint Peter we must follow God.
Dr Ali Kabany: I would like to express my admiration for Rev David Butterworth’s good work. In my religion Islam believing in God is not enough if it is not complemented by good work and good deeds. In the Quran we always find that. good deeds are important for the whole society and they are appreciated by God almighty.
The other thing I would like to call actually for the unity of all people of religion. We all have different convictions from beliefs and our diversity should enrich our relationship and not divide us. There are common goals and principles which unite us if we believe in God and the day of judgement and doing good deeds for all of humanity.
We also have to unite and have a common voice to combat and confront the atheist aggressive attacks against religions in general and to promote our beliefs in justice, equality, and social justice. We have to have one voice and unite to fight anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and tarnishing the image of any religion in general. Attacking religion and tarnishing the image is not the ultimate goal of the atheist campaign. We know that religion is the author of the ethical and moral code and we can see now how going away from the ethical and moral code is degenerating in all societies, the Muslim society, the Christian society or non religious society. Our unity is important to keep that moral and ethical code and to promote the principles which we hold dear in our religions.
The other thing is the difference between the ritual worshipping and the relationship with God worshipping. The five pillars of Islam are just the basis on which the building of Islam is built upon. That building includes social justice, equality, good deeds, respecting each other helping each other, helping the needy and the poor. All the principles and morality which all religions follow.
So we should not mix between the pillars of each religion and the principles and the goals of that religion. The pillars are only the base on which the whole building stands.
The ritual worshipping only benefits the believers. It does not benefit the society. We should always respect our differences because they exist inside the faith religions between the different religions and people of no religion. So we should respect each other and others beliefs if we want others to respect our beliefs and work together with us.
So again if the people of all religions speak with one voice it will give them strength in talking with parliament, government and change society to the way we prefer and comply with our teachings. That will give us a strength also in facing the campaigns of the media. I will not be ambitious and say that people of religion have to establish their media and have their own papers and television stations.
As a first step we work together and have one voice. In future we should build on that and have our voice heard and have our pressure exercised on government and parliament to the benefit of everyone and society in general.
I would like to be practical and put a programme among us of how we can achieve the unity of all people of religion to talk with one voice and to agree on our common goals. From a social point of view Islam came and said it is forbidden to spoil and corrupt the environment. That is a principle of Islam. So as people of religion we should promote those values which benefit our community and combat pollution and corruption of society in all its shapes and forms.
All people of religion should unite and talk with one voice if we want to combat and fight all the pressures against us.
