Tony Blair Faith Foundation

Lesson One from the Arab Spring in 2012: revolutionary political change is neither seasonal nor predictable. But in a time of resurgent religious identities, in North Africa and the Middle East, it was always going to heighten divisions between world views as well as between different concepts of governance and political order.

Students at Hollins School in the United Kingdom worked for a month to put together an Ethical Enterprise Day where students learned about global issues and worked in groups to come up with a stall that raised awareness of ethical issues affecting people around the globe. Students then invited the rest of the school to a day where they visited their stalls to buy their goods or play their games. As a result of this, the pupils raised over £400.00.

"We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little Hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"  Tolkien's Gollum would have been a prime target for a religious terrorist recruiter. He is obsessed by the loss of a sacred treasure that defines his identity, obsequious yet angry in its pursuit, reduced to a split personality that goes down dark holes, addicted to being manipulated. Should Gollum be pitied, loved, redeemed or cast out? The real-world question is what do religious terrorists want?

As many of our partner universities return to a new semester in January, and new groups of students begin their coursework, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on how truly global the Faith and Globalisation Initiative has become.  Last month alone saw major activities in China, the USA and, in a major new development for the programme, India. At the beginning of the month, Tony Blair visited Beijing to meet with the faculty and students involved in our programme at Peking University.  About sixty students were nearing the end of their course on ‘Interreligious Relati

At first sight, there was nothing unusual about the shelled mosque, with the aluminium roof of the minaret hanging on the side, in the village of Carraleve in 1999.

What has been the role of Colombia’s religious leaders in the construction of peace? Although seldom asked, this is a crucial question in this country’s long and tenuous search for sustainable peace, particularly at local community levels. Today, peace is understood not only as the absence of war (negative peace) but as an everyday dynamic process that includes “a psychological, social, political, ethical and spiritual state of being with its expression in the areas of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, international and global human life” (Danesh, 2006).

It is said that your religion is your identity and this was well exemplified in the 2011 post-election violence in Northern Nigeria. Your right to live was decided by your response to the 17 year old wielding a machete and asking: Muslim or Christian? Like many African Countries, civil disturbances are not new to Nigeria. They are usually motivated by citizens that feel frustrated at the state of events and try to use force to make a difference. This is at least true of the Biafran civil war in the late sixties and the many coups that riddled the era of military rule.

The development of Nigeria with its population of some 150 million people, oil reserves, and an abundance of entrepreneurial spirit, is arguably critical for the future of sub-Saharan Africa. It has had more than its fair share of misfortunes: civil war, serial military coups, tyrannical military government, spectacular corruption and all the downsides of its black gold economy. But today Nigeria is facing a new challenge.

The Eid Fitr festival was barely over, yet sectarian violence has taken away the excitement of the Shia community in Sampang, Madura, East Java. Moreover, a congregation in a village at Sukabumi, West Java had been burnt out on Eid day itself. Hundreds of people were forced to evacuate. The Indonesian government reached the conclusion that the bloody conflict was based on a family dispute. The motif of Sunni-Shia disagreement was not a dominant factor. According to the police, the violence that afflicted the Shia community was purely criminal.

A few years ago, the distinguished Jewish polymath George Steiner wrote an article in which he argued that the truest home for any Jew is not the land of Israel but the text of the Exodus itself. Home lay for him in a shared narrative as much as a contested place.  It was not an argument that sadly found much support on the ground.