KARACHI: Speakers at a national conference highlighted the need to foster interfaith harmony, reduce intolerance and promote acceptance of others’ beliefs and ideology to ensure a just and healthy society.

The conference — Bridging Beliefs: Interfaith Harmony in Pakistan — was jointly organised by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Department of International Relations (IR) at the University of Karachi on Tuesday.

Federal Minister for Religious Affairs & Interfaith Harmony Aneeq Ahmed said the society had become reactionary as people showed immediate reactions to controversial news and took the law into their own hands and did mob justice, which was unfortunate.

Former chairman of Ruet-i-Hilal Committee and renowned cleric Mufti Muneebur Rehman said there were many good things about Pakistan as far as treatment of the people of other religions was concerned, but the media mostly highlighted the negative events which occasionally happened, even beyond Pakistan.

Speakers at KU conference say narrow mindedness leads to hatred and violence

Bishop Fredrick John, who is the bishop of Karachi and Balochistan archdiocese, said diversity was a blessing but, unfortunately, it was seen as division by most people. He said violence against minorities did not take place only in Pakistan, it was a global issue. Therefore, he suggested that to solve that problem a change of format was needed in the efforts being made for that purpose, particularly in Pakistan.

Elaborating on this, he said workshops were needed to address issues like religious violence, extremism and intolerance instead of organising seminars and conferences as workshops were more inclusive and better for the exchange of thoughts.

Similarly, he said, changes should be made in certain terminologies, words such as minorities, tolerance and sympathising.

The problem with the word tolerance was that it gave a notion of a superior person tolerating an inferior one. And internationally minorities were called communities. In the same manner, there should be open acceptance of such communities and not just sympathy for them, he added.

Terminologies, he said, affected psychology, which in turn affected people’s character. He said the audience of such events and programmes should also be changed and focus should be diverted to the common people who often participated in violent activities.

Pakistan Sikh Council patron-in-chief Sardar Ramesh Singh highlighted the positive side of the treatment of minorities in Pakistan by saying that the government had done great work in that regard, particularly for the Sikh community. The opening of Kartarpur Corridor was a good symbol of that, he said, adding that thousands of Sikhs travelled to Pakistan four times a year freely, which was commendable.

KU Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Khalid Mahmood Iraqi emphasised that people needed to foster interfaith harmony, advocating that recognising each other as fellow human beings was equally important. Only then, he said, religious violence could be reduced.

When narrow mindedness increases in society, it ultimately led to violence and a tendency to impose one’s religion on others. She said all religions had importance in Pakistan as well as a constitutional right to exist peacefully and freely, said Shaista Tabassum, dean Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

Others who also spoke on the occasion included IR department chairperson Naeem Ahmed and its former head Khalida Ghous, Cardinal Joseph Coutts (who is the cardinal of Pope Vatican and archdiocese of Karachi), Sindh Public Service Commission member Kalpana Devi and Mohsin Naqvi, former member of the Council of Islamic Ideology, Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, December 28th, 2023