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The faith to cope with conflicts

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TONY BLAIR: ‘Faith can be divisive and it can be a force for good.’

Tony Blair is at his London offices the day after the anniversary of the July 2005 terrorist bombings in the British capital. When the attacks took place, the Prime Minister had been chairing the opening of a G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Much of his time in office was spent juggling rapid globalisation, faith-based terrorism and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since leaving office he has concentrated on both faith and globalisation in different ways. Just hours after he left his Downing Street office he was appointed representative for the Middle East Quartet, the diplomatic contact group for peace in West Asia comprising the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States. Since then, he has been campaigning against poverty in Africa and working on projects to combat climate change. He has also established a Faith Foundation to promote the discourse that he could not pursue when in power. He now has a position lecturing on faith and globalisation at Yale University, advises both JP Morgan Chase Bank and Zurich Financial Services. Besides, he has established a Sports Foundation that supports Britain’s young Olympic hopefuls. The former Prime Minister speaks to Jeremy Walker exclusively for The Hindu, about his multiple post-premiership roles, the conflict in West Asia and the importance he places on recognising the role played by faith in conflict, and in building bridges among different faith groups.

This is the first of two parts of the interview.

Well, here’s the thing: faith can be divisive and it can be a force for good. It can provoke people to do terrible acts as in 9/11, or it can inspire them to do great acts of charity and compassion. As organisations such as Hindu Relief, Muslim Relief, Jewish and Christian organisations across the world do. There are two aspects to religion, and the question is in the end which predominates and comes through.

Well, they can do. But part of the purpose of the Foundation is so that people of [different] religious faiths can understand each other better, learn about each other and therefore live with each other more peacefully. You know, faith can also provide a set of principles for people to live their lives by. It can, as I say, inspire people to great works. And if you were to look at, for example, the influence of the Hindu faith in India, you’d have to say that many of the characteristics of India today which make it the world’s largest democracy despite the great poverty in the country, it is still a country that people admire and admire as much for its spirit as anything else for its culture and so on, and the religious roots in India have played a part in that. So I just think that if you analyse the impact of religion, the impact is clear and you have to accept that it can do good or evil. I mean, you could say the same about politics. If you look at the 20th century and you take fascism or communism as practised in Stalin’s Russia or during the Cultural Revolution, no one would draw the conclusion from that that politics is per se bad. But political convictions and political beliefs can lead people to do terrible things. But they can also lead people to great acts of progressive political advancement.

Anyway, the whole purpose of the Faith Foundation is in a sense to recognise what you’re saying — that religion can ignite trouble. But the question, then, is how we deal with that. Do we deal with that by saying that religion is a bad thing and we should expunge it from society, or do we say “well, actually there is another side to religion and we should allow that to predominate”? That’s the side I’m coming from.

Yeah, I think so. Also, many religious faiths either have common roots, as with the Abrahamic Faiths, or many of the same spiritual values. What is interesting is that when, for example, we did the Face to Faith launch with the school in Delhi [India Heights] and one in Palestine and one in northwest England, as the students were able to interact with each other, I think the students very swiftly found that there were many values they shared… And those in part derived from their religious faith.

You know, Gandhi was one of the great teachers about religion as well as about politics. So I think that the issue is how you get people to see their faith as defining them as it does, but defining them not in opposition to those of another faith. That’s the question. And that’s what my Foundation works on and we try to do that not just by engaging people in dialogue but by engaging them in inter-faith action. So the campaign against malaria which we have many faiths working on, or as I say we have different students in many parts of the world and different universities taking the Faith in Globalisation course in many parts of the world. And we’d love to see India involved in that too.

And India, despite some of the recent problems, in many ways has often been a beacon of inter-faith understanding and dialogue between Hindus and Muslims and Christians. Despite some recent events, [they] have often got on in India together and lived together there, and that could be a model for the rest of the world. Now, we know there’re forces who want to disrupt that, but it’s equally important to look at the history and to recognise that for a very long time that did not happen.

Yeah, I think the Middle East issue and [the] Israel/Palestine question is one part of that bigger picture. Because the only solution that will ever work in Israel/Palestine is when two people that have come from very different religious backgrounds are prepared to live alongside each other in what is a very small strip of land. If you visit Mount Nebo in Jordan and you look across the Jordan Valley you can see across the whole of what would be a Palestinian state into Israel, and on very a clear day virtually out to the sea. So it’s a very small strip of land. People often say to me, “You know it’s really a political dispute and not a religious dispute,” and I say to them: “Well, that’s fine, except that the people involved in it think it’s a religious dispute to some degree.”

Everything I do, whether it’s the inter-faith or the Middle East or the work in Africa, it’s about “how do you make globalisation work?” That’s my mission: how to make this era work? This is the era of globalisation, whose effect is to push people together the whole time. Globalisation diminishes national boundaries, it pushes people of different cultures together, it forces people to interact in a way completely different to even 20 years ago. The question is, “how do you make sense of that world?”

In my view, you only make sense of it by having certain strong key values. Those values are about peaceful co-existence between people of different faiths, they’re about conflict resolution so that different cultures can live together, and they’re about recognising that global poverty is a challenge for all the world, not just the nations that live with it.

So it is a big challenge, but things fit into it that way.

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