Previous Section Back to Table of Contents Lords Hansard Home Page

Lord Weatherill: My Lords, a measure of the importance of this debate is that it has attracted so many speakers, and at this time of night. I hope that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester will return to this topic on another occasion, hopefully when we have a little more time. However, we have each been given five minutes to speak instead of two, so I shall enlarge my modest contribution.

When I was chosen as Speaker in 1983, I inherited from Speaker Thomas the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship. I well remember my initial address to the Christian wives fellowship when I said, "There are many roads to God". I saw pursed lips and at the end of my address someone came up to me and said, "Many roads to God, Mr Speaker? Only one". I said, "Not if you were in the Indian Army".

Some noble Lords may know that I had the privilege of serving for five of the most formative years of my life with Indian troops. We had a squadron of Sikhs and I fully understand and appreciate the Sikh community's distress and anger about the play being performed in Birmingham which I hope has been stopped. We had a squadron of PMs—Punjab Mussulmen—and we had a squadron of Javs—Hindus. Despite religious backgrounds, all worked in the closest harmony and all were volunteers. I mention that because it is a small
 
20 Dec 2004 : Column 1633
 
but practical example of what can be achieved with the right leadership in calling those of different faiths to work closely together.

I had the privilege of representing Croydon North-East for 28 years. There are few more diverse communities in our country than Croydon. Very few people will know that Addiscombe, in the heart of my old constituency, had been the training college of the Honourable East India Company from 1700 to 1850. So we have very close contacts with the Indian sub-continent. Perhaps because we have Lunar House in the constituency, we have diverse other races and religions.

In my time I was able to support the building of the local mosque by raising substantial sums of money for it. It is a flourishing mosque today. We established a gurdwara for the Sikhs; and we obtained a redundant church for the Jains. There is an important and large parish church in Croydon. Through Canon Colin Boswell and his predecessor Canon Colin Hill, there were few community problems in Croydon.

My second point reinforces the matter touched upon by the noble Lord, Lord Judd. I believe that the only way to overcome and to defeat terrorism is to transform the conditions in which it flourishes. I refer to the dangerous disparity between rich and poor nations. It is a horrific statistic that more people have died of hunger in the past year than were killed in World War I and World War II. We have an urgent and absolute duty to redress the imbalance between rich and poor countries in our world.

Debates of this kind are of course to be welcomed, but we need practical action as well. I commend to your Lordships an old Punjabi truth:

In relation to this debate that is peace in our world.

Lord Parekh: My Lords, I begin by thanking the right reverend Prelate for initiating this fascinating debate. Whenever we talk about religion, we need to bear two things in mind. First, every religion has two opposite tendencies. Religion is dogmatic and is bound to remain so because it believes that God's will is revealed in scriptures that human reason is not at liberty to alter. Therefore, every religion has a built-in dogmatic tendency.

Secondly, no human being lives by religion alone. Human beings are endowed with reason, which itself is a God-given faculty, and they have a responsibility to account to others what use they make of that reason. Every religion therefore is caught up in an interesting paradox: having to choose between faith and reason. But since it cannot choose and as both are important, it has to find a way of combining faith and reason.

I say that because it is important to bear it in mind that no religion is inherently peaceful or inherently militant, inherently violent or inherently non-violent. It has impulses that push in both directions and which way it turns depends on the historical and social forces surrounding it.
 
20 Dec 2004 : Column 1634
 

The question therefore before us is: if a religion has a tendency to be open-ended, to be a religion of love, as well as a tendency to be an instrument of war, and militancy, what should we do, so that religion's positive tendencies are fully exploited and its negative tendencies are countered? That raises an important question that I want to address. Under what historical or social conditions does a religion tend to become militant and fundamentalist? Once we identify those conditions, it becomes easier for us to address them and to develop an enlightened religious attitude.

I suggest that there are four conditions under which a religion's militant tendencies—or what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, called fundamentalist tendencies—become manifest and get exploited. First, they appear when injustice is operating in society and no institutions, associations or political parties are available to fight it, so that people are forced to turn to religious organisations to do the job that political and civic organisations should be doing. The second condition is where religion is an all-pervasive presence that dominates society and there are no alternative, secular cultures to check it. Then, religion has a tendency to hijack the entire social fabric because it is not checked. The third is when there is no freedom of expression and therefore no opportunity to examine religion critically and to challenge and debate the various interpretations. Finally, when a society feels besieged, frightened and fearful of losing its identity and integrity, it tends to turn to what it calls non-negotiable fundamentals in the hope that they will be the anchor that will allow it to navigate its way through difficult times. Here the West has much to answer for.

Western policies have often humiliated other societies, tried to mould them in their own image, imposed their values on them and manipulated them, as a result of which those societies have felt threatened, besieged and inevitably drawn to the power and pressure of religion. What do we do about that? Each religious community must obviously fight its own fundamentalist tendencies; it cannot be done by outsiders. But outsiders can help in a variety of ways; I wish to suggest three.

First, we should resist the temptation to try to mould other societies in our image. Whether it is a question of exporting democracy in a missionary spirit, exporting capitalism or liberalism, we should show some humility in recognising that other civilisations might have their own values from which they would benefit far more than any export that we might make. Secondly, we must do everything that we can to foster civil society and a regime of basic human rights, so that there is freedom of expression and excesses of religion can be challenged. Finally, we must enter into sympathetic dialogue with other societies and civilisations to understand their deepest concerns and anxieties.

In that context, I wish briefly to show how a dialogue can proceed and achieve wonderful results. A few months ago, I wrote a piece in which I tried to explore a dialogue between Mahatma Gandhi and Osama bin Laden, both religious people, each trying to
 
20 Dec 2004 : Column 1635
 
understand the world from a religious point of view. I was able to show that in spite of their differences there is a common ground. I was pleased to hear that not only the Gandhians but many of my Muslim friends are also beginning to understand how the world looks at them and the direction in which they need to change.

Baroness Neuberger: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for initiating the debate. I declare an interest as a trustee of the Multifaith Secondary School Educational Trust, which was founded by a rabbi colleague of mine and has been supported since its inception by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, Dr Zaki Badawi of the Muslim College, known to many noble Lords, Deva Samaroo, of the London Borough of Brent, and many others. I propose to speak about multi-faith education in the UK.

Despite their support of single-faith schools, the Government have been lukewarm in their support of this initiative thus far. There have been various attempts to find locations for such a school where local education authorities have been less than enthusiastic. There is confusion on the part of local education authorities between secular, non-denominational schools, which they mistakenly regard as multi-faith, and a multi-faith school, where faith is taken seriously and pupils learn about their own faiths and each other's. In such a school, Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus, for example, study their own faith and each other's, their own moral values and each other's, and critique literature and history through the eyes of each other's cultural and religious experience.

That is very different from a non-denominational school. The pupils would be asked to use their friendships and shared experiences to understand other people's points of view. Just as integrated education in Northern Ireland tries to tackle stereotyping and unfair prejudice, so a multi-faith school in England would tackle intolerance and promote enlightened religious attitudes.

For that to happen, the Government need to send out supportive signals. They need to encourage local education authorities to explore multi-faith education that is genuinely faith-based. They need to encourage multi-faith city academies, where societal gain would be vast, even where it is hard to raise the initial funding. They need to state that they support multi-faith education as a key component of the educational offering available in the United Kingdom. That would truly support enlightened religious attitudes in the UK.

I very much hope therefore that the Government will see their way to giving serious encouragement and funding to multi-faith schools. I hope too that they will see them as a way of tackling rising religious intolerance, which is experienced particularly by Muslims but also by other religious groups, including my own.
 
20 Dec 2004 : Column 1636
 

I hope that the Government will see that other multi-faith activities, such as the North London Hospice, the Maimonides Foundation, the Council of Christians and Jews, the Three Faiths Forum and many others, need cherishing and encouraging. Like the noble Lord, Lord Judd, I believe that many single-faith aid organisations would do well to work together, and all sorts of other organisations to boot. Of them all, schools are the most important, and our young are the key to a tolerant, inclusive society.

When I trained to be a rabbi many years ago, I learnt to preach from the then head of Westcott House, Mark Santer, who was later Bishop of Birmingham. Rabbinic students at Leo Baeck College, where I trained and later taught, study briefly at the Muslim College. Muslim and Christian students spend a Jewish Sabbath with students from Leo Baeck College and surrounding families.

The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, spoke movingly of Neve Shalom—Wahat al-Salam in Israel. My son was a volunteer there in his gap year, and a wonderful place it is. But we need many more such endeavours, especially for the young, as the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, said. I urge the Government to support such projects in the UK and abroad, to support multi-faith schools, and, as my noble friend Lord Wallace has said, to encourage our universities and theological faculties to include Muslims and Islamic teaching alongside Christianity, Judaism and other faiths. Inclusion and tolerance, rather than legislation against incitement to religious hatred, are vital for all religious groups to feel a part of our society.


Next Section Back to Table of Contents Lords Hansard Home Page