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A Response to Sherine Hamdy and Charles Camosy


Camosy and Hamdy both offer us food for thought in regard to the specific cases they present, as well as to the wider concerns of the Science and the Human Person project and its question: “What is the human person?” Ruminations on the provided cases may shed some light on the larger issues, as both authors have aimed to do.

Hamdy’s critique exposes the problems of relying on a too-simple notion of an Islamic bioethics based on fatwas, or on a similarly underdeveloped approach that assumes medical ethics are identical and patently-apparent in all locales and circumstances. Her call to re-frame bioethics can be seen as an elaboration on the ideal process within secular bioethics, but which seeks a higher perch from which to consider the complex context and factors of a bioethical case.

Taking a Broad Perspective

This is evident in the example of the live liver donor in Egypt. Hamdy is not content to limit the discussion to the question of whether liver donation (from either living or dead donors) is halāl or harām (religious-legally permissible or forbidden, respectively), or if medicine or bioethical principles used by physicians can justify the procedure. Instead, she calls on us to take the 30,000-foot view—to question the very forces that shape the individual case in the first place. What are the socio-political decisions which led to the environmental choices that ultimately inflated the need for liver donations in Egypt?

This movement is not foreign to the secular model of bioethics, especially as articulated by Beauchamp and Childress. Over time, in dialogue with their critics, their principle-based system has absorbed and integrated both thematic concerns similar to the type raised by Hamdy — such as power disparities involving gender or class — as well as procedural issues, including digging deeply into the particulars of each case through the use of narrative and casuistry. Ultimately, they identify this method as a process of “reflective equilibrium.” Perhaps this model is not often-enough extended to the heights from which Hamdy (and Farmer) rightly call us, but I suggest that there is a potential here to elucidate the enlarged framework for bioethics among Muslims as she is encouraging.

Justice and Bioethics

Justice is another point at which we might join and expand the discussion of secular bioethics with models that may unfold among Muslims. It may well be that the content of justice as described by secular bioethics is lacking either in the cultural contexts of bioethical decisions among Muslims, or does not sufficiently account for higher-level causes of injustice in particular cases. Likewise, Islamic conceptions of justice found in fatwas may also be lacking in their ability to see the big picture, especially in the case of rapidly developing biotechnologies. Thus far, whether scholars have been looking at fatwas or at attempts to import the secular principles approach into Islamic bioethics, the notion of justice has remained largely undeveloped. This, despite the central role it plays in the four-principles approach, as well as its extensive presence throughout the scriptures and religious resources of Islam.

I suggest that a deep, theological (rather than strictly jurisprudential) examination of justice in Islam needs to be made, either from the specific point of Islamic bioethics, or at least with that as one end in mind. Not only will this allow for an organic Islamic understanding of the term in bioethical discourse, but it will provide a solid point of contact for comparative discussion between Muslims, Christians, and secularists, and for any possible concept of a universal morality. It can also enable consideration of bioethical cases both in their specific features and in the bigger picture.

It may also shed light on the question of “What is the human person?” The Qur’an discusses one of the purposes of humanity to be the worship of God. Yet the jinn, angels, animals, and even nature all engage in such worship. Humans are the only beings tasked with establishing justice on the earth—the very core of their role as God’s vicegerent. The human person is one who must strive to institute justice.

Exploring Socio-Cultural and Theological-Ethical Contexts

Camosy’s case of the “two-minus-one” pregnancy provides further space to consider the ideas of form and content seen above. Camosy lays out the context of this particular case, and provides analysis that includes, but goes beyond, mere issues of autonomy or even of the agonizing dilemmas presented by the dimensions of IVF and pregnancy reduction. Instead, he takes us further up to explore the socio-cultural context (such as the “closed home” model, consumerism, and power and privilege) which can shape decisions back down in the clinic.

This case also indicates the need for a deeper, theological-ethical exploration within Islamic bioethics. It may well be true, as Camosy asserts, that Islam has the resources with which to critique these sorts of actions. On the other hand, the Islamic legal tradition has not been as clearly anti-abortion as the Catholic Church, and hence we have seen cases where such practices have religious-legal sanction. If the discussion simply ends with the legal-ethical judgment in a fatwa of halāl or harām, Catholics and Muslims might find no agreement on this point. Or the multiplicity of fatwas (some permitting the practice and others forbidding it) may simply muddy the waters. While there is no guarantee that theological-ethical explorations will yield firmer fruit, such an approach promises to better light the path to the engaged, supportive community that Camosy urges us towards. The creation of such a community—especially within a pluralistic society such as our own—requires that Muslims take up substantial theological engagement on the topics of children, family, community, and human dignity.

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Robert Tappan
Robert M. Tappan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University. His areas of interest include Islamic ethics, theology, and law, with a particular emphasis on exploring Shi`i scholarship on Islamic biomedical ethics. He has published several book chapters and encyclopedia articles on Islamic views of ethics, assisted reproductive technology, biomedical ethics, and health care. 
Science & the Human Person article

The Case of the “Two-Minus-One” Pregnancy


Back in August of 2011, the New York Times published a story on a reproductive choice which, unfortunately, is far too common in the United States. Here are some facts of the case:

  • Jenny and her husband—already with children in grade school—decided that they wanted to have another child. Jenny, at 45 years of age and “after six years of fertility bills, ovulation injections, donor eggs and disappointment”, got pregnant via in vitro fertilization.
  • But as often happens with IVF, Jenny discovered at 14 weeks gestation that she was pregnant with twins. But this was not in her plan. In the fact, the thought of “managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her”, especially given her worry that she could not provide for her older children, and both twins, at the same time. She and her husband made the decision to abort one of the twins.
  • Her explanation is important and worth quoting: “Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure… If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”
  • Jenny found it difficult to admit what she was doing. The story mentions “she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen” because she “didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her.” Jenny and her husband refused to tell anyone else, not even their closest friends, about their decision.

Perhaps understandably, almost all pregnancy “reductions” are clouded in this kind of secrecy. But we must lift the fog of secrecy and begin talk about them—not just because “two-minus-one” pregnancies are becoming more common (especially as more and more people with Jenny’s life situation and attitude try to have children via IVF), but because they are the logical extension of our problematic reproductive practices more generally.

Especially in post-Enlightenment secular bioethics, the default value has become the autonomy and choice of the individual. But Christian and Muslims traditions are, of course, skeptical of this shift. Unless we critically examine the social context and structures which shape and even coerce our “autonomous” and “free” choice, we cannot hope to adequately engage bioethical issues.

The unassailable nature of “free reproductive choice” has become something like a dogma of contemporary secular bioethics. But notice that even the word itself (re-production) is practically begging for us to go beyond this thin analysis and examine the social context of the choice. Jenny noted that, from start to finish, her pregnancy was “consumerish.” She and her partner purchased the eggs—perhaps from a clinic which charges on a sliding scale based on traits like the donor’s SAT scores, attractiveness, or athletic skill. She and her partner likely purchased technology and labor to examine the desirability of the eggs and sperm, to create the embryos in a laboratory, and then to examine the desirability of various embryos to implant. Finally, she also purchased the technology and labor to aim at the death of one of the twins inside of her.

The logic of consumerism drove each of these choices. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this process of re-production was not unlike buying other kinds of products. The child that she and her partner aborted—rather than seen as an end in herself—was understood as merely a tool of her parents’ will, and therefore subject to the quality control of products purchased in a market. Interestingly, we learn directly from Jenny about the direct connection between consumerism and her abortion. She said that if she had had twins “naturally” she wouldn’t have felt as she could have disturbed the “natural order.” But in this case the abortion was “just another choice.”

The traditions of Islam and Catholicism are in an excellent position both to identify this problem and propose correctives. In both traditions, procreation of children is understood as submitting to or cooperating with the Divine will. Children are gifts with inherent dignity, not products to be purchased in the Enlightenment-created “free market.” Indeed, both religions have well-developed traditions of thought about how markets exploit vulnerable populations: from children killed in abortion, to embryos discarded at the clinic, to women who serve as surrogate mothers and egg donors.

But there is another social structure at work here, and it is the peculiarly American (and secular) idea of the “closed home.” Jenny and her husband are culturally conditioned to believe that they are to raise their children by relying on their own resources. That their extended family members, their neighbors, their religious community, the government—or even their current children (especially as they get older)—will be there to help them through their struggles apparently isn’t even considered.

Again, the traditions of Islam and Catholicism are in a strong position to critique the secular American culture of the “closed home” given that it totally misunderstands the intrinsically relational and dependent nature of human beings. Individual independence and autonomy are false and dangerous myths, most often perpetuated by the wealthy and otherwise privileged.

But we must not end with mere critique. We must work to make our families, neighborhoods, religious communities, and governments better able and willing to be the communities that families like Jenny’s require. One of my good friends from high school, already a father, recently received the gift of triplets. It has been great to see how the various people in their community have come forward to offer support. But many others do not feel like they have this kind of community. Christians and Muslims, in addition to critiquing the social structures which allow for (and even coerce) increased numbers of pregnancy “reductions”, should be particularly driven to reorient our own lives away from the idolatry of freedom and autonomy. We must work to build communities which resist consumerism and support vulnerable populations—not least so that “two-minus-one” pregnancies become unthinkable.

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Charles Camosy
Charles C. Camosyis Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University. Camosy’s research engages with bioethics, Catholic social teaching, moral anthropology, and the intersection of Christian and secular ethics. Camosy is author of Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization(Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Too Expensive to Treat?: Finitude, Tragedy, and the Neonatal ICU(Eerdmans, 2010).
Field Notes article

Reframing Islamic Bioethics


Among Muslims today, there has been an ambivalent response to what we might call bioethics. Some argue that the Islamic tradition has its own ethical norms, and that therefore there should be a separate field, “Islamic bioethics,” gleaned from the fatwas of religious scholars (muftis) in Muslim countries about the permissibility of certain medical technologies. Others argue that both medicine and a “common morality” are universal, and that therefore an ethical doctor’s advice matters more than that of a shaykh, or religious scholar. In this post I argue that neither of these are valid arguments.

First, why would a single fatwa written by an Islamic scholar (most often within the confines of state bureaucracies and political pressures in the Muslim world) comprise the ultimate Islamic position on complex bioethical conundrums? On what bases did the mufti issuing the fatwa formulate his opinion?

Bioethical decisions are often based on cost-benefit analyses of a given medical procedure — but who gets to determine what cost is tolerable, and what benefit makes the cost worth it? And on what bases? People will necessarily have different experiences, perceptions, and stakes in these calculations.

Various constituents — from Muslim leaders, to academics, to UNESCO, to hospital administrators in Euro-American countries flummoxed about how to manage their Muslim patients — have sought to understand what “Islamic bioethics” might say about various topics such as organ transplantation or in vitro fertilization. Yet in trying to find out how a particular culture or religion approaches a bioethical topic, we risk overstating the homogeneity of opinion and silencing the voices of the marginalized.

Secondly, as Paul Farmer has pointed out, bioethics has been limited by a myopic set of questions that has had little to say about global inequalities underlying health disparities. Bioethics emerged in the U.S. as a field in the 1960s as a critical external power check on medical institutions and to advocate for the vulnerable position of patients and subjects of medical experimentation. Yet, in the subsequent decades, bioethics became institutionalized within biomedicine, serving more to justify than to question medical norms and to manage rather than address inequalities.

Let’s look, for example, at the case of a father dying of liver failure in Egypt, and his adult son who is eager to donate a liver lobe to him in the hope that a lobe transplant will lengthen his father’s life and ease his suffering. The surgery is risky to the healthy donor. Ever since the first living human kidney transplant in 1954 at Peter Bent Hospital in Boston, the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” has had to be violated. In Egypt, this debate has been framed by the media as a disagreement between “medical” and “religious” fields. But medical specialists do not speak in one voice on the relative risks of liver lobe extraction to the healthy donor, or the chances of success in cases of complicated liver disease.

Why not use the liver from a deceased person? This might relieve us of the risk of harming a healthy donor. In Egypt and many other countries, however, death is declared according to cardio-pulmonary criteria. For liver transplantation in the U.S. and European countries, the “deceased” donor is in fact a patient whose brain function has ceased, but whose body and organs are kept biologically functioning via a ventilator. Egypt’s muftis and physicians have argued for years about the ethics of declaring a brain-dead patient “dead” for the purposes of organ extraction.

Contextualizing Bioethical Questions

While these types of questions are recognizably the stuff of “bioethics,” they barely skim the surface of deep structures of global inequality that value some lives over others. If we return to the father-son case and liver failure, we might first ask: why is there such an epidemic of liver failure throughout Egypt?

Egyptian environmentalists have demonstrated that state management of water systems, including damming projects and the maintenance of irrigation canals, plays an important role in disease incidence. The ambitious construction in 1970 of the Aswan High Dam under a politically repressive military dictatorship provided hydroelectricity throughout the nation. Yet it also dramatically reduced water flow and the movement of the richly fertile Nile silt. Farmers were thus compelled to depend on chemical fertilizers and pesticides that led to weed flourishing, blocked waterways, and caused water stagnation — the ideal habitat for the vector of schistosomiasis (also called bilharzia), a parasitic infection that wreaks havoc on the internal organs.

Increased evapotranspiration further degraded water quality. In an effort to respond to increased schistosomiasis infection in the 1970s, the Egyptian state launched a massive campaign in which public health officers went from door to door in villages up and down the Nile, dispensing tartar emetic injections as preventative therapy. Although it was yet to be discovered at the time, the virus hepatitis C survived the attempted sterilization of the needles via boiling, and the public health campaign inadvertently infected a large portion of the Egyptian population — somewhere between ten and thirty percent — with hepatitis C, a disease that can ultimately destroy the liver, which may already be compromised by the toxic use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, schistosomiasis, and poor water quality.

Where were the voices of bioethicists — whether religious or secular — when it came time to assessing the human costs and benefits of building the Aswan High Dam, and the resulting permanent re-structuring of the ecology and landscape? Where were the appeals to Islamic norms of social justice, of humility toward God’s creation and stewardship of the environment? Where were the voices of ethicists in assessing the ambitious public health campaign that yielded unintended disastrous results? What we find in this example is further evidence that the field of bioethics – in secular and religious forms – often arrives to the scene too late. And it continues to focus on small-scale questions (“Is it ethical to transplant a liver lobe?”) when liver transplants, ethical or not, will never be able to alleviate a national-epidemic at the scale of Egypt’s liver disease problem. There are simply not enough organs, surgeons, or resources.

Reframing Bioethics

Whether secular or religious, it is clear that bioethics needs to be reframed, and can only go forward by incorporating multiple voices from different scholarly disciplines, fields of expertise, and different strata of social life. A fatwa from a mufti in a Muslim-majority country doesn’t make bioethics “Islamic.” And a bioethicists’ pronouncement on a medical procedure such as liver transplant doesn’t begin to address the underlying forces predisposing vulnerable populations to disease. Bioethics needs to look beyond the cutting-edge life-or-death scenarios and speak to the everyday inequalities of politically mismanaged and economically vanquished societies. The struggle for a world of greater social justice, equality, peace, and environmental health requires more from Muslims than following fatwas, or identifying with things labeled “Islamic.” Our surest path toward greater social justice is the continual insistence on the sanctity of life — all lives — even, and especially, in the face of political oppression and economic exploitation.

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Sherine Hamdy
Sherine Hamdy is an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine with longstanding interests in cross-cultural approaches to medicine, health, and the body. Her research has centered on ethical debates around organ transplantation in the Egyptian cities of Tanta, Mansoura, and Cairo. Her book, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt, was published in 2012.
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A Reply to Thomas Banchoff and Abdulaziz Sachedina (Part 2)


In my last post, I went along with Banchoff’s hunch about religious and secular justifications for insisting on human dignity, exploring some of the issues in both Christian and Muslim thought. But I can’t say my heart was really in it, because I find that way of putting the question somewhat problematic. Asking venerable religious traditions to play catch-up with the Enlightenment grates on my post-liberal nerves, I am afraid. As Sachedina points out, the process of critique is just as necessary in the other direction. I think we need to stand back from the starting point of my previous post and take in a wider picture. Here are three reasons why:

1. Genealogy: Where Did the Enlightenment Get Its Ideas about Human Dignity From?

Kant, let us not forget was himself no secular humanist but a (somewhat rationalist) Protestant. Along with the other philosophers of the Enlightenment, he inherited his moral vision from the Christianity of his upbringing. As Europe moved through a period of Deism, a certain secularization took place which uncoupled the idea of human value from its mooring in the narrative of salvation history and finally left it as a free-standing dogmatic assertion — a myth which, like the myth of progress, people subscribe to without always knowing why.

One would have to say that in our day and age, these ‘myths of modernity’ are looking rather fragile. The myth of progress, for instance, could, in the 19th Century, just about be sustained by appeal to (then) respectable scientific understandings of evolution. Now that neo-Darwinism dominates, however, you can’t sustain the view on scientific grounds that life just keeps getting better and better. Darwinism does not support this idea (which Mary Midgely calls the “escalator fallacy”). Philosopher John Gray has written scathingly of how the spectre of progress haunts our civilisation on no empirical basis whatsoever. The same, I would suggest, could be said of our commitment as a civilisation to human dignity. So there must be a challenge to secular humanists, I think: how do you justify your impressive commitment to human dignity in a way that is credible and effective in today’s world, helping real human beings and societies to treat one another with more respect? Which brings me to…

2. The Danger of Idealism

The quest for human dignity is not all about who has the most beautiful ideals; it must also be about beautiful outcomes. Having fine ideals is one thing; finding a way to put them into practice is quite another. I, for one, think I would prefer to live in a society where people were in fact accorded real dignity even though the citizenry was conceptually inarticulate as to its reasons for living that way, rather than one which held up a glittering ideal but then seriously failed to live up to it. This raises the question of how ideas and principles can penetrate social life and bring about real social change.

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age offers a rigorous account of how the ideas of the Church and of the Enlightenment have indeed played out in the way people actually live their lives. But he goes beyond telling a story about concepts and their evolution to analyse how these concepts filter into the what he calls the social imaginary (the functional map accessible to people’s consciousness which provides them with a sense of the social space around them and their place within it) through the unfolding of events and the adoption of new social practices. It seems to me that if we are going to reflect on the role that religions like Islam and Christianity play in buttressing human rights, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the discussion of certain ideals and their origins in the Bible or the Qur’an. We should also ask the rather more difficult question of how those ideas do or do not get into the social imaginary. Which leads me to my final point, which is about what might already be in the social imaginary…

3. Imagining Persons

Westerners are very good at overlooking the fact that their secular social imaginary is a rather astonishing cultural achievement. Instead they tend to think of it as the natural, neutral view. Notably, we have developed a way of thinking about human beings in the abstract, devoid of specific identities or contingent commitments. When Westerners think about what it is to be a citizen, it is an abstract ideal that will come to their minds, such that any concrete human being could fit into the space thus imagined. You can see the effects of our blindness to what an extraordinary way of seeing things this is, nevertheless, when some among us exhibit shock and amazement that other cultures, which have followed very different trajectories to our own, seem unable immediately to implement whatever enlightened social reform concerns us at a given moment — be it the full equality of women, same-sex marriage, and so on.

What we find hard to take on board is that those achievements of ours are the fruit of decades, if not of centuries, of contingent development along particular lines. They cannot simply be imposed at will on societies which are on very different trajectories. (This, of course, can sound like a relativist’s charter but, for the sake of brevity, I would also point out that it need not be). All of which is to bring us to a question: supposing there were a culture which was not open to thinking of human persons in this abstract way? Lawrence Rosen would say that this is indeed the case with Arab societies, referring to a culture of what he calls ‘personalism’ (to be distinguished from the philosophical school of personalism). Arabs, he claims, do not see political life as the interplay of abstract principles and institutions but of concrete persons:

“among the Arabs, the person is largely envisioned as a unity of character traits and situated encounters bounded by the limits of Allah and subject mainly to each person’s capacity to fabricate advantageous ties without needing to create a subjective world focused inside oneself. […] Thus, to know a person’s connections is vital both to knowing his character and how to form your own ties with him; knowing someone’s background tells you what he intends by his acts; knowing how he has dealt with others in the past tells you how he deals with others now.” (58).

Inevitably, this way of perceiving human beings will make it very hard to theorise human dignity in the Western way, by separating each individual off from their social network and according them a notional and abstract worth as an isolated monad. It’s not that to do so is wrongheaded but that the individual person is not thinkable outside of the group and all the relations that go together to make up his/her identity. Human dignity in an Arab society (and note now that we are not talking directly about Islam, though that is part of the picture), therefore, will have to look rather different to its western equivalent. If, after all, we want to talk of Contending Modernities then presumably this is what we mean: contending visions of human dignity. Hence, I like what Sachedina wrote about the way Islam functions to gather people into a unity (something that also needs to be said about Catholicism); but we need to make sure that we don’t hear this as merely tantamount to the Spock dictum: “the needs of the many outweigh that of the few”. It’s a much more radical point than simply a matter of different ‘values’. It’s that different cultures actually envision the person in quite different, and mutually exclusive, ways.

So by all means let’s see what resources our religious traditions have to tell us about human dignity, but let’s do it by learning from them rather than pillaging them as scrap metal to buttress the precarious edifice of the secular model. And let’s look in depth not just at ideas but at the way societies actually work and how religious practices and beliefs get inside them and make a positive difference.

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Damian Howard
Damian Howard SJis Lecturer in Theology at Heythrop College, University of London. His research engages with Islamic theology and contemporary Islamic thought, drawing parallels and contrasts with the concepts and experiences that shape the Christian tradition. He is the author of Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview(2011), which examines the impact of the evolutionary worldview on Islamic conceptions of human identity.
Field Notes article

A Reply to Thomas Banchoff and Abdulaziz Sachedina (Part 1)


In talking about human dignity we are trying to see how secular humanists, Muslims and Catholic Christians have found a way to affirm that each human person is worthy of being treated with a respect which transcends that accorded to mere things.

Banchoff rightly identifies Kant as being a key source here for the idea as we encounter it in the human rights tradition that we are trying to engage with. Persons are always and everywhere to be treated as means and never as mere ends. (Obviously there is a further question for us these days: exactly who or what qualify as being persons? The evolutionary worldview, for instance, does indeed break down the absolute ontological privilege.) So one obvious way to proceed is to ask if Muslims and Catholics have the necessary resources in their traditions to enable them to sign up, in good faith, to this principle. The rest of my comments in this blog assume that assumption to be valid. However, I have important reservations about it which I shall explore in a subsequent blog.

It’s an obvious point to make but I’ll make it anyway: when religions think about human dignity they are, as religions, obliged to address the question by asking if and how God accords us dignity. How is it that God can respect us, animated bits of clay that we are? It’s from this theological basis that we then proceed to the question of how we are to respect one another. Secular humanism dispenses with the theological question (which is surely the point of being a secular humanist) and is therefore obliged to ground its Kantian regard for human personhood on ‘secular’ grounds, as Banchoff rightly asserts. (What those secular grounds are and whether they are powerful is another question. I think there are, broadly speaking, three types: the dictates of reason, the ‘nature’ of human beings as outlined by some sort of scientific account, and straightforward myth — though this is usually dressed up as one of the other two.) So how do our religions make the claim that we human beings have some kind of special dignity in God’s eyes?

It’s not quite as easy saying that it is because we are created by God. After all, inanimate things are created too; how does merely being created entitle a human being to a higher dignity in God’s eyes than rocks or plants? Christians and Muslims agree that the answer to that question is to be gleaned from the kind of creatures human beings are. Christians understand humans as being made in the image and likeness of God, an ontological privilege shared, apparently, with no other being. And the Qur’an describes the human being as a vicegerent (khalifa) of God. The two metaphors (‘image’ and ‘successor’) sound as though they come from different semantic fields but there are good reasons for thinking that they actually home in on the same basic thought: that human agency is structured in a way that mirrors God’s own agency, a fact that allows human beings to exercise a function in the created order analogous to God’s.

That would certainly seem to do the trick for human dignity. However, both traditions present us with narratives which suggest that we humans have proven not to be fully up to the task of living out our divinely ordained dignity. The book of Genesis recounts the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden in which, according to later Christian thought, the image of God in us was impaired. Meanwhile, the Qur’an shows the dismay of the angels at what they take to be God’s folly in according human beings this unique duty: ‘Will You place someone there who will corrupt it and shed blood, while we hymn Your praise and sanctify You?’ (Qur’an 2:30). God is not deterred by these angelic protestations but the Qur’an’s on-going complaint is that human beings seem oblivious to what has been asked of them and typically defy the prophets who come from God to remind and warn them.

So there is a weakness in arguing for human dignity from the special status of human beings in creation: what happens when (some of) those human beings don’t match up to the role assigned to them by God? Perhaps they forfeit their dignity? From that simple thought proceeds the dark underside of religious history — the conceptual poverty that ends up denying dignity to human beings who appear to, or who actually have refused God’s call. Herein also lies the anxiety of those who wonder whether Muslims can be religiously motivated to commit to secular democracy and respect for religious minorities (an anxiety held with regard to Catholics, let’s not forget, until the Second Vatican Council committed the Church by issuing a strong doctrinal statement on religious freedom). Is full human dignity only to be accorded to believers or can it be extended to people of other religions and or no religions at all?

So dignity by virtue of creation alone doesn’t quite work. Christianity has a fallback position, however: human personhood is worthy of an absolute sort of respect because the imago dei has been repaired by the descending love of God in Christ. And since Christ descended towards all human beings, there is a real sense in which the dignity of non-believers has been somewhat restored by God’s free grace. I am no expert in this area but one of my colleagues, Dominic Robinson SJ recently wrote about the doctrine of the imago dei in contemporary Christian theology: “Through greater emphasis on Christ’s descent, human identity may now be placed more clearly in the perspective of God’s presence within us, thus emphasising the dignity of each human person in whom God, in descending to us in the person of his Son, resides.” (p.159). There is, then, I think, more to it than just creation, from a Christian point of view, when it comes to understanding how we are endowed with dignity; there is also the work of salvation in Christ. And this has the happy corollary of calling Christians to accord dignity to all human persons, regardless of their beliefs, something they have clearly not always succeeded in doing through history and which still challenges many of them, both in theory and in practice.

Is there a fallback position for Muslims — a religious datum that ensures that non-Muslims are accorded the same dignity as believers? That is a question I think a Muslim had better answer.

 

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Damian Howard
Damian Howard SJis Lecturer in Theology at Heythrop College, University of London. His research engages with Islamic theology and contemporary Islamic thought, drawing parallels and contrasts with the concepts and experiences that shape the Christian tradition. He is the author of Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview(2011), which examines the impact of the evolutionary worldview on Islamic conceptions of human identity.
Governance, Citizenship, Rights & Obligations article

Towards a New Model of Relationship: A Call for Collective and Individual Self-Reflection


The groundbreaking transformations initiated in some Middle Eastern and North African countries in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, and the processes of reform unfolding in varying degrees and intensity in other member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), raised hopes for new social contracts based on more balanced relationships between states and citizens and between majority and minority communities in terms of ideological, religious or sectarian divides. However, despite these hopes, such an outcome will not be easy to achieve and cannot be taken for granted — as recent developments in Egypt have displayed.

Any new social contract of governance in Muslim majority countries should be accompanied by open dialogue and sincere soul searching on the common challenges that these countries face, including societal divisions as well as radicalization and sectarianism.  Additionally, these challenges require not only common understanding but also collective and comprehensive responses from the Muslim world. Therefore, serious discussions among political, intellectual and religious leaders should be increased within OIC member states.

Understandably, due to fears of negative implications for their own societies, many Western governments, think tanks, and universities are spending considerable time and resources on programs addressing global challenges, particularly in the MENA region. Yet, sustainable remedies are primarily initiated and realized from within. There is a danger that even indirect Western support provided to local civil society initiatives can place local institutions in precarious situations, and there is no guarantee that resources will be used effectively.

More vocal interventions from prominent religious leaders and interfaith initiatives advocating for co-existence and mutual respect are needed. It is also high time that national governments and politicians act as role models and rise to the challenge of advocating for compassion and acceptance through their actions. A good example is OIC Secretary General Prof. Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s visit to a church in Iraq after it was attacked, and his recent visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. These were not only human gestures of solidarity, but appeals for moderation, mutual respect and co-existence in the face of messages of hate.

Unexpected Opportunities for Reflection

Crises caused by the manipulation and incitement of religious sentiments have paradoxically brought about a process of self-reflection, enlightenment and learning, not only for Muslim communities but for all stakeholders. I have observed this in cases where US Muslims have exhibited a reserved and low-profile public stance in the face of incitement, choosing to determinedly pursue legal avenues against discriminative acts. In the same vein, a Danish colleague’s recent admission to me that the Danish Government learned important lessons from its mistakes in managing the Danish cartoon crisis in 2005-2006 was noteworthy. Reaching a viable compromise between Western states and OIC Groups at the UN on promoting religious tolerance, by leaving the concept of defamation of religions behind, only became possible as a result of lessons learned on both sides.

There is certainly a need to interlink political and intellectual dialogue efforts. The Istanbul Process on the implementation of the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 of March 2011 should not be limited to holding technical-legal workshops. Rather, its political dialogue component should be strengthened — allowing for a much-needed sincere exchanges of views and perspectives outside the confines of official UN meetings. In addition to the Istanbul Process, where the OIC, US, and EU come together in open dialogue, the continuation of the OIC-EU Joint Ministerial Forum, the first and last meeting of which was held in Istanbul in February 2002 as a response to the strained relations created by the attacks of September 11, 2001, could also have provided a precious venue for open and sincere political/intellectual debate.

Holding the OIC Accountable

Intra-Muslim challenges are becoming increasingly serious and less manageable, partly because national governments and intellectuals are not paying sufficient attention to transnational issues.  Yet, despite a lack of interest from member states, transnational and regional organizations such as the OIC are still being kept accountable, and expectations of them remain high. In the case of the OIC, countless vital questions are being asked by academics, peace institutes, NGOs and activists — many of whom are based in OIC member states. What are the OIC policies for reforming the curriculum of madrasas and religious schools? Does the OIC have means to support the Muslim communities in the West and to train their community based Imams? How can the OIC be helpful in de-radicalization and mainstream incorporation of youth elements that are splintering away from Al Qaeda in Maghreb? What are the OIC’s plans to support political participation of women?

While expectations of what the OIC can achieve remain high, in the absence of support and interest on the part of the national governments of member states there is a limit to what intergovernmental organizations such as OIC can achieve. It is high time that the OIC is empowered with increased means and capacities in order to design innovative approaches to these questions.

During preparations for the OIC Extraordinary Summit of December 2005, an innovative Muslim Scholars and Intellectuals Forum was held in Makkah. The deliberations of the scholars and thinkers, which took place next to Holy Kaaba, were conducted in three panels: political and media; economics, science, and technology; and socio-cultural issues involving education and Islamic teachings. In the final panel, among the main themes of discussion were combating extremist views, trends and unlearned fatwas, the role of educational institutions in this regard, restructuring of the Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) Academy to deal with this issue as a pan-Islamic authority, and the need to disseminate across the Islamic world teachings of moderation which reject bigotry, fanaticism, and extremism. These themes and challenges still warrant attention from Muslim scholars and intellectuals.

Acknowledging Internal Challenges within Islam

As a point of caution, it should be noted that the more Muslim leaders and intellectuals ring alarm bells on Islamophobia, without showing recognition of internal challenges within Islam — particularly the situation of minority religions and minority sects within Islamic societies, and issues facing women throughout the Islamic world — propagandists of Islamophobia will have all the more ammunition to fan anti-Muslim sentiments. Furthermore, the lack of continuity in response to all forms of stigmatization and discrimination will remain an obstacle to true, meaningful dialogue and real change in relations.

One case of particular concern for the Islamic world is that of Syria. Fears are growing as to the long-term implications of the destruction of the social fabric and traditions of Syria. The Syrian crisis, in addition to the loss of inconceivable number of precious lives  and destruction of its precious history of co-existence, could dangerously heighten the Sunni-Shia divide. Everybody bears responsibility in not letting the political divisions in the Middle east turn into a sectarian confrontation. In this regard, we should expand on the wisdom of the OIC Secretary General Professor Ihsanoglu who called on Muslims to draw a line between politics and religion so that politics does not dominate religion and religion does not dominate politics. Would it not be inspiring if we could hear more words of wisdom and compassion from political and faith leaders?

The Muslim world should increase efforts to counter the widening Sunni-Shia chasm and the struggle between moderate and extremist forces by utilizing the intellectual capacity of its people. At the same time, OIC member states should provide assurances of safety and religious freedom to their native Christian minorities. Although concerns with regard to Islamophobia are quite legitimate and warranted, fairness in treating all types of injustice and discrimination with equal urgency and care would bring far more credibility to Muslim activists and communities.

In this particular period in our history, showing empathy towards the concerns of all communities and cherishing compassion and respect for every single human being without any favoritism or discrimination will surely enhance the prospects of peace and stability.

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Ufuk Gokcen
Amb. Ufuk Gokcen is the Ambassador and Permanent Observer of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to the United Nations in New York since April 2010. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Gokcen, a Turkish national, was the political adviser to the OIC Secretary General from 2005 to 2010 at the OIC Headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. From 2001 to 2005, he was First Secretary/Counsellor and Deputy Head of his country’s Embassy in Syria. Previously, he served at the Turkish Embassies in Riyadh and Muscat as well as at the Middle East Department of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Presently he also acts as a key representative of the OIC General Secretariat to the US State Department.
Science & the Human Person article

Science, Religion and the Human Person: A Response to Abdulaziz Sachedina


The focus of the Science and the Human Person project precludes an oversimplification of personhood based on theological doctrine alone.  Rather, it is important to see theology within the larger context of cosmology and thus to understand the human person within the whole order of science, philosophy and theology.  In this respect, two sentences from Abdulaziz Sachedina’s reflection are important for me.  The first is his opening sentence:  “Modernity has played havoc in appraising human personhood.”  I could not agree more.  In my view this havoc ensued at the dawn of modernity in two main events.  First, the new cosmology wrought by heliocentrism set the eternal celestial realm in opposition to the terrestrial scene of change and decay, challenging the immutability of God and dissolving the place of the human person in creation.  The spinning earth demoted the human person from the stable center of the universe to an elliptical orbit so that human uniqueness and God’s particular concern for human life seemed in danger.  Second, the flourishing of the human in the Renaissance and the rise of the Enlightenment gave the human a new mastery over nature.

In the medieval synthesis God was the source of unity, but in the Enlightenment, the power to unify was found in the self-thinking subject.  The Cartesian “turn to the subject” imposed a burden on each person to make sense of the world individually and unify it by rational thought alone.  The Bible spoke of the human person as image of God, but with the rise of modern science the human person had no defined role.  The great absentee in the scientific description of nature to this day is the human person.  Raimon Panikkar writes:  “Gods there are aplenty, the form of black holes, galaxies, and infinities, etc… matter and energy are all-pervasive, as are time and space.  Only man (sic) does not come into the picture.  Man cannot be located among the data.  Man is in a certain way the obstacle to pure information.”

In Panikkar’s view, modern science and technology dispensed with the human person as image of God.  Once the earth was identified as moving around the sun, the human person lost stability and purpose in nature, as nature was stripped of its divine character.  The human person created new gods to fill the need for worship, surrendering personal autonomy to science and technology, violence and power.  Descartes’ cogito became a substitute for the cosmos.  That is, the cosmos was replaced by the feeling of being a separate, thinking individual.  Instead of seeing God reflected in the cosmos, the human could now possess the cosmos; instead of surrendering to God, the human could now play God.  Modern science developed without the human person as person, that is, a relational self at home in creation reflecting the divine Creator.

Sachedina’s second statement follows accordingly:  “The future of human personhood is intimately intertwined with the unfolding of scientific truth.”  This is such an important statement that I would underscore it because the new world picture brought about by modern science has not included religion.  Both Christianity and Islam have constructed their theologies based on the ancient and outmoded Ptolemaic cosmos.  Both religions are inscribed within a perfect, immutable, hierarchical and anthropocentric order and therefore feel threatened by modern science.  Hence the question “where are science and technology taking us?” is a real one of perceived danger.  Blessed Pope John Paul II’s insight is helpful here:  “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.”  These two pillars of human existence must be brought together into a vision of the whole.

We know today that human persons emerge out of 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.  Evolution is not background to the human story; it is the human story.  To realize that the human person is part of a larger process which involves long spans of developmental time brings a massive change to all of our knowledge and beliefs.  We rise from the process of evolution but in reflecting on the process we stand apart from it and are distinguished from non-human species by our complex brains that are capable of symbolic language, self-reflective consciousness, and personal freedom to love.  We not only know, but we know that we know.  The human person is the arrow of evolution, the point at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself. We realize today that the human person is constantly being shaped by constitutive relationships.  In terms of evolution, the human person is not a fixed essence but a dynamic becoming.  Human nature consists of open, evolving systems which proceed by quantum jumps from one steady state system to the next through a hierarchy of ordered systems.

Both Christianity and Islam must engage modern science and, in particular, understand the human person in light of evolution.  We cannot simply affirm the human person as imago Dei — we must also affirm that the human is evolution become conscious of itself. Science and technology place the human person today on the threshold of a radically new future.  Without a coherent understanding of religion and evolution, however, technology can appear ominous, threatening to unravel the human person.   From a Christian perspective, we are created “co-creators” and what we become will reflect the extent to which we participate in evolution. Teilhard de Chardin wrote:  “I can only be saved by becoming one with the universe.”  The unification of the cosmos is now in and through the human person who is the growing tip of the evolutionary process. Can Christianity and Islam reconceive the divine dignity of the human person in light of evolution?  If so, can we ask together, what is the role of the human person in an unfinished universe?

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Ilia Delio
Ilia Delio, OSFis Director of Catholic Studies and Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. Delio’s research concentrates in science and religion, with a focus on transhumanism, nature and ecology, and evolutionary theology. Her book, The Emergent Christ (Orbis, 2011) explores the meaning of Christian faith in light of evolution. Her new book The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution and the Power of Love (Orbis, 2013) was released this spring.
Field Notes article

Reflections on Human Personhood: An Islamic Perspective


Modernity has played havoc in appraising human personhood.  Science and technology are progressing unabatedly to improve the quality of human life, and yet the end result unwittingly points to further confusion in appreciating the natural and spiritual dimensions of the human person.  Increasingly, human beings appear mono-dimensionally geared towards improving and maintaining their physical form, devoid from a meaning that is connected with their total existence on the planet.

The indifference with which we treat human relationships today has prompted many religious leaders to assert the foundational religious mission of creating human communities that value their beliefs, practices, and interaction with fellow humans.  “Where are science and technology taking us?” is an oft-repeated question when biotechnology, through assisted reproduction or genetic engineering, interferes with the psychosomatic constitution of human beings and threatens to affect future generations undesirably.  What has a religious tradition like Islam, which has a documented history of encouraging and endorsing scientific research that benefits humanity as a form of devotion to God (‘ibada), to say about biotechnological research — whose benefits remain to be proven?

Religions emerge with a single most important purpose: to guide humanity toward spiritual and moral perfection by connecting them to one another.  They aim to steer humanity toward a meaningful life.  Spiritual and moral guidance prepares humanity to become the conduit for divine purposes on earth.  Besides divine revelation and endowed reason, the entire natural environment also contributes to human endeavors to further spiritual and material well-being.  Humans discover new resources through science and deepen their understanding of the underlining laws of nature that govern creation as a whole.  This is the juncture where human beings interact with the natural world to understand and garner its functionality to their advantage.  In this way, science is at the service of humanity to advance it to attain its divinely ordained personhood.

The Unfolding of Scientific Truth

In this sense, the future of human personhood is intimately intertwined with the unfolding of scientific truth.  The Qur’an captures the comprehensive mission of revelation from God in these terms: “We shall show them [human beings] our signs in horizons and in themselves, so that it will become clear that it is the truth.  Is it not enough that your Lord is witness over all things?” (Q. 41:54).  The “signs in the horizons” are, collectively, nature, which moves in an orderly fashion that suggests the purposiveness of creation; the “signs” in human beings suggest the human capacity to understand right from wrong and to promote the good of the larger community of which they are a part.

Yet phenomenal advancements in biotechnology reveal the tensions that may arise between scientific developments and religiously inspired conceptions of order and progress. For example, the claim that scientists can use genetic modifications to produce healthier babies or clone more desirable persons threatens the meaning of an individual’s organic connection to society and nature. The promise of progress through scientific manipulation seems to conflict with the priorities of morally and spiritually aware members of a community that consciously wills justice and compassion for its members in accordance with a divine order or plan.

No Harm, No Harassment

Besides the need to understand and live within the order of nature, humans need to search for practical ways to pursue their individual interests as well as the collective good.  The Qur’an emphasizes the purpose of interpersonal relations by reminding humanity that they have been created of a male and a female and made into nations and tribes in order for the people to “recognize each other” (Q. 39:13).  What is the best course of action that people can adopt to “recognize one another?”

The most fundamental principle of Muslim social ethics is “No harm, no harassment,” which means there shall be no harming, injuring or hurting of one human by another in the first instance, nor in requital.  In other words, no course of action that leads to one human being harming another should be adopted.  This principle has served as an important check on the potentially dehumanizing implications of advanced medical technology and research in the life sciences.  There is a clear need for moral analysis about what is permissible or impermissible when human life and dignity — human personhood — are at stake.

In a world characterized by competition over recognition and financial advantage, the potential implications of biomedical research that deals with human subjects increase the need for a regulatory body that can appraise ethically questionable modes of research and experimentation.  Although international standards for biomedical research involving human subjects are gradually being adopted in Muslim countries, there is a widespread lack of accountability among medical professionals and researchers in the life sciences who often lack the training and sophistication needed to deal with major ethical and theological quandaries.

There is no way to separate the subject and the object of experimentation when the investigation deals with human beings.  Yet no amount of medical erudition or expertise can by itself provide the ethical criteria necessary for rulings that may involve life-and-death decisions.  Respect for human personhood is built upon one’s personal moral convictions and the ability to consider the merit of necessary particular scientific intervention in a person’s course of medical treatment.  In the final analysis, any and all experimentation dealing with human beings carries with it a moral responsibility – a responsibility to the subject, who has a right to know, to comment, and to seek guidance before agreeing to any scientific intervention that can impact his or her personhood.

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Abdulaziz Sachedina
Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ph.D., is Professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His research and writing focuses on the field of Islamic Law, Ethics, and Theology (Sunni and Shiite). More recently, he has concentrated on social and political ethics, including Interfaith and Intrafaith Relations, Islamic Biomedical Ethics and Islam and Human Rights.
Field Notes article

Human Persons and Human Dignity: Implications for Dialogue and Action


What is the human person? As human beings, we are biological as well as social creatures; we inhabit both physical and cultural space. What distinguishes us as persons, and not just as organisms, is a culture of human dignity – the shared idea that, as human beings, we are entitled to respect and recognition from one another.

Where does the dignity of the human person come from? Broadly speaking, one can distinguish secular-scientific and religious foundations.

From a secular and scientific angle, we have dignity and should respect and recognize one another because of our common humanity. Some emphasize our shared capacity for independent thought; in line with Immanuel Kant, they see autonomy and rationality as a foundation for human dignity.  Others focus more on our ability to identify and sympathize with others, an approach related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of “pitié” and Adam Smith’s “moral sentiments.”

Recent advances in evolutionary biology and neuroscience have deepened our understanding of this latter, relational approach to the foundations of human dignity. In the long run, evolution appears to have favored the development of ecological sensitivity, group identification and solidarity, and cooperation in the acquisition and shared use of resources. In the here and now, new developments in neuroscience suggest that our brains are much more than autonomous information processors; they change and grow through our interactions and relationships with others and with our external environments.

Interestingly, scientific methods that do not begin with the concept of human dignity are increasingly leading to a conclusion compatible with it — that we have good evolutionary and biological reasons to acknowledge one another as fellow human beings worthy of respect and recognition and therefore endowed with an intrinsic dignity.

For Catholicism and Islam, the focus of the Contending Modernities project, the dignity of the human person has divine foundations. Because God created each of us and cares for each of us, each individual person has an intrinsic and inviolable dignity. The moral theology of the person is most developed in Christianity; it is connected with the mystery of the Trinity (one God in three persons), and in the Incarnation (God becoming a human being.) But the idea of the person, as a creature of an all powerful and merciful God, also plays an important role in Islam. God reveals his law to humankind and calls us to live as His co-regents on earth, honoring one another with recognition and respect.

There is, of course, a fundamental asymmetry between the secular-scientific and the religious understandings of the human person. The non-believer will reject the idea that the dignity of the human person has divine origins, while the believer will typically assert that human dignity has both divine and natural foundations.

Yet this asymmetry need not be a barrier to dialogue. In our contemporary era, even those who reject the idea of human dignity as fuzzy and unscientific generally affirm the importance of according basic respect and recognition to all human beings. The basic idea of the human person and of universal human dignity is shared, even as terminology differs. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which emerged out of decades of contestation within and across secular and religious traditions – and in revulsion against the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust – remains the clearest and most powerful expression of this far-reaching consensus.

In practice we know that this broad contemporary convergence around the idea of the human person and human dignity, across the secular-religious divide, coexists with fierce disagreement on a range of ethical and policy questions. Is the human embryo or fetus a human person deserving of protection? Are primates or other non-human animals to be considered persons with intrinsic dignity or rights? Should governments work to secure equality of opportunity for their citizens and provide a minimum standard of living for all? Should governments and citizens share their wealth with those in need outside, as well as inside, a nation’s borders? Questions relating to the human person and human dignity can be multiplied across economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy domains (even if, in the United States, they tend to center on bioethics).

A key challenge in such ethical and policy debates, within and across secular-scientific and religious communities, is to keep the ideas of the human person and of human dignity in the foreground. That means asking what is at stake for particular people and their livelihoods in particular contexts, as well as thinking through the ethical implications of our individual and collective decisions for global humanity, at a time when the rapid advance of technology and of globalization in all its dimensions is rendering those decisions more complex and consequential.

A focus on the human person has a further implication, perhaps the most challenging of all – that in all these ethical and policy controversies, we should acknowledge the humanity and dignity of our interlocutors, no matter how much we may disagree.

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Thomas Banchoff
Thomas Banchoffis Vice President for Global Engagement at Georgetown University. He also serves as founding director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and as Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His research centers on religious and ethical issues in world politics. Dr. Banchoff is the author of Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies(Cornell University Press, 2011).
Global Currents article

Latest Contending Modernities Report Sparks Debate on the Future of Multiculturalism


Following the launch of the latest Contending Modernities publication “Making Multiculturalism Work”, a range of politicians, scholars and journalists have engaged with the findings of author David Barclay of the Contextual Theology Center. Here, Barclay outlines reaction to the report.

The latest Contending Modernities publication, produced in conjunction with Theos, has attracted significant attention since its launch at the end of June. The report’s main claim, that the way towards a sustainable ‘multicultural settlement’ is not through new theories or top-down policies but through grass-roots relationships across difference, has sparked comment and renewed calls for engagement on these issues amongst prominent politicians, academics and journalists.

The Rt Hon David Lammy MP speaks at the launch of 'Making Multiculturalism Work'
The Rt Hon David Lammy MP speaks at the launch of ‘Making Multiculturalism Work’

The Economist described the report as a “clarion call for ‘political friendships across difference’ in which people of various faiths and no faith form local coalitions to attain their ends”. Noting that the central thesis “challenges some secularist thinking about broad coalitions” the article explored how Making Multiculturalism Work was “plunging into” the “hard debate about the terms on which people of different religions and none can or should co-operate to achieve common goals.”

Launching the report in Westminster, the Rt Hon David Lammy MP described it as “a timely and important piece of work”, and said it was “refreshing to read a report that focuses on practical multiculturalism, moving away from theory and looking at how relational politics adds meaning to theoretical discussion of this challenging issue”. Professor Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths, University of London, argued that “anyone interested in the successful expression of multiculturalism in action should read this report and welcome it for the practical contribution it makes to a fractious debate at a crucial moment.”

The Revd Dr Michael Ipgrave, Church of England Bishop of Woolwich — where British soldier Lee Rigby was recently murdered ­— also welcomed the report. He said that it “rightly contests the elitist view that people and organisations need to prove their progressive credentials to be considered acceptable as partners” and that it “points to a way of engaging which is more widespread, more invigorating, and more effective than any ‘-ism’: the core human practice of forming friendships.”

Finally, Professor Luke Bretherton of Duke University said “This important report presents a constructive way forward on one of the neuralgic issues facing contemporary Britain: how to forge a common life between different faith groups and people of no faith without demanding everyone abandons what they cherish about their way of life in order to do so.”

Several other news and comment websites have featured articles on the report, including The Huffington Post, Prospect Magazine,Conservative Home and Left Foot Forward.

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David Barclay
David Barclay is a Partner at Good Faith Partnership helping leaders in politics, business, faith, and charity to work together towards shared goals. From 2012-2016, he was the Faith in Public Life Officer at the Contextual Theology Centre, based in East London, which helps churches to engage with their communities. He is a former President of the Oxford University Student Union, and has spent two years living and working in Western China.