My speech at the UN Youth Summit, on Faith and Human Rights

Yesterday, I spoke at the UN Youth Summit where the theme was “A Matter of Faith”. It was a very enriching experience, and I shared the panel with two inspiring and inspired people – Brad Chilcott and Anthony Venn-Brown. Each of us had the opportunity to speak about our view on faith and the transgression of human rights, and how the two are connected.

Me (second from right ) with the UN Youth Summit organisers and the other speakers on the day

It was a difficult speech for me to write, because I realised it was such a big topic which required a lot of breaking down to speak about it in a relatively straight forward way. But in the end, I felt I found a way to say what I needed to, and it felt pretty good to share it out loud.

Below is a transcript of my speech.

Hello and thank you for having me here.

So the theme is “a matter of faith”, and faith is such a broad topic which means so many different things to different people – both within a framework of religion, and outside of it. I thought that with a theme so broad, the best and most meaningful way for me to speak about it today, would be to share with you my own personal experience as a Muslim female, migrating to Australia from Afghanistan with my family when I was about one.

You see, I’ve always been very conscious of where religion can seemingly conflict with freedom or human rights. Both from the perspective of within my religion, where things didn’t always make sense to me – questioning things like why is it that women seem to draw the short straw when it comes to privileges within religion? And why can we justify exclusion, or even violence, in the name of religion? And at the same time, I was also very conscious of the potential to be perceived a certain way from the outside in – aware of all the assumptions that people make about Muslims and the religion in general, and the terrible abuses and human right violations that have followed on as a result. So, I was in a way from very early on, forced onto a tightrope, questioning things that seemed unjust within my religion and also defending my right to identify with Islam as my religion without being vilified by those on the outside.

But I’m so very glad that my life has revolved around this balancing act, even if it’s been confrontational at times. It’s put me in a position where I have taught myself to be comfortable with constantly unlearning things and relearning to try to go deeper beyond what the accepted narrative is to try to understand why things are the way they are and to make sense of the senseless.

In my own life, in trying to understand all the horror and oppression, the discrimination and the violation of dignity that occurs so closely with religion as its partner, I learnt that it was much more useful to just understand what it means to be human before anything else. You see, as I’ve gone on, I’ve started to realise that it is not so much a question purely of religion, because all different religions and all sorts of systems in general can justify atrocity in their name, and have done so throughout history. I realised that perhaps religion was a system that could be easily used to justify more worldly ambitions, like conquest and making sure that those at the top of power structures could stay there.

So it’s been really important for me to question this, and I want you to think about ways to always question it too. Today, I want you to challenge yourself. I want you to think about violations that occur in the name of religion, not as purely a flaw of faith, but as though they are just one part of a bigger cycle, that goes a bit like this:

1. people in power (politically or financially, with wealth and privilege many of us could not imagine) want nothing more than to retain that power
2. that power would rather people be divided and in the dark, unquestioning and pliable
3. fear is the best way to make people feel vulnerable and therefore pliable. And just a side not on fear that I think is important to always be aware of – fear is an ancient and deeply embedded response in our psyche as humans, which was especially useful for our hunter gatherer ancestors roaming savannas and fields full of predators, and it is still is useful to us today to avert danger and to self preserve. But, it is also an instinct which can be easily tapped into and manipulated for all the wrong reasons by those with a vested interest to do so, as we see every election cycle domestically (surrounding conversation on refugees) and with Trump’s current presidential bid
4. and finally, religion is a convenient and established system to tap into to manipulate that fear and therefore to keep us pliable so that those at the top can continue to centralise their power

 

This is a vicious, but very real cycle in our world, that I believe we would do well to understand to make sense of atrocity, and to be able to distinguish religion as a root of evil from human nature and its natural propensity towards fear.

To try to work through that cycle a bit more, I’ll use a couple of examples that have been resonant in my life.

My family fled Afghanistan during the Cold War era in the 80s. This was a time when America and the Soviet Union were in a massive power struggle to emerge as the dominant force in a world that had just come out of WW2. The mobiliser of conflict around the world – all throughout South America and in Afghanistan – was the West versus the threat of communism. Afghanistan was used as a backdrop for this power play to unfold, and all the while, religion was used as a system to justify war. Within Afghanistan, local differences were manipulated – with different sects within Islam – Sunni and Shia – pitted against each other by the U.S. and the Soviets respectively, to fight out their war. The biggest victims of course, were the civilians – people being killed indiscriminately so that either the U.S. or the Soviet Union could emerge as the world superpower. The public perception in the West however, the one being fed to the masses, was that the Cold War was about defending liberty and a Western way of life. This Western way of life had, at this time newly more than ever, centred around consumerism and amassing of wealth. The late seventies was a time when bankers and big corporations were becoming particularly powerful, in part, due to the departure gold-standard system of finance. Freedom in the West, it seemed, was becoming tied to the notion of free markets and wealth, at the expense of all other rights.

This trend has only continued. One of the biggest moral challenges of our time is wealth inequality. An Oxfam report last year revealed that the richest 1% of the world have more wealth than the rest of the world combined. Think about how this powerful elite can use its influence to skew systems – economic and political – to ensure that their wealth is maintained, while most of the world’s population suffers.

This big gap between the haves and the have-nots severely imbalances our world, and is not unrelated to the ability for those in power to stoke fear. It means that most of the world’s population is either living in poverty in the Third World or living in fear in the First World. In the First World, it means we become susceptible to the narrative of foreigners invading our shores, here to steal our precious little jobs, as our own Immigration Minister Peter Dutton bluntly said just a couple of weeks ago. But there is an elite and privileged few who feel very secure in knowing that things seem unstable. Think of the political security this general feeling of insecurity amongst the electorate provides to our major parties so close to election time. When we are fearful, we are more likely to vote for the party that seems the toughest – and both our major parties are doing an expert job of making sure they seem the most ruthless. A huge part of creating this fear has been to ensure that people associate refugees from Muslim backgrounds with the idea of terrorism and war.

Interestingly enough, the real wars we are engaged in around the world have used this dependence on fear of religion, particularly Islam, as motivation and justification. After 9/11, we followed unquestioningly into war in Afghanistan alongside the U.S. Not far behind was Iraq and now Syria. The narrative around all these wars has relied heavily on bringing religion as something we need to fear to the forefront. George Bush assured us the war against terror was the next Crusade – we needed to invade the Middle East because of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and because Islamic terrorists were gaining power and planning to attack our Western way of life. After over a decade of war in the region, that threat has only become very real. Through the dismantling of existing governments, power vacuums were created and filled by groups like ISIS, which offers one of the most brutalised visions of what religion can be constructed to be.

Of course, religion can be abused from within by those claiming to be adherents of that religion for their own means. The likes of ISIS and the Taliban, and even the Governments of nations like Saudi Arabia, use and abuse Islam to reinforce what they view as their legitimate claim to power. The Taliban used Islam as a means to justify not only a holy war against non-Muslims, but also to abuse the rights of people living within their power structure. Women were exposed to a brutal version of what the Taliban leaders interpreted as Islam – forced to cover their faces, and denied access to education and other basic rights. In all my thinking on this, the conclusion I come to, is that, yes, the way Islam is practiced today has many problems, which need to be addressed and reformed. But it would be a mistake to see this depravity exclusively as a misgiving of religion. It should be seen within the context of decades of war which has given the power cycle mentioned earlier an even more fertile breeding ground to exist.

But, it is not all doom in the game of religion and human nature. We should be encouraged by the fact that there are many living within the systems of fabricated Islam who are battling for a resurgence of its fairness – there are women in Saudi openly flouting the ban on females driving, there are scholars in Iran questioning the politicisation of Islam and making the extremely valid point that if religion is as valuable and divine as the clerics insist, then it should not be muddied by politics which is an essentially human game; and there are artists and film makers in Afghanistan putting their life on the line, simply for the sake of beauty.

So throughout my speech today, I have used Islam as an example of the vehicle used to enable the justification of atrocity, because it is something that I am close to, but it is not unique. More or less the same is true for all religions, and indeed belief systems, throughout history. Buddhist monks in Myanamar used Buddhism as a means to justify marginalising Muslim refugees in Rohingya communities, rendering them stateless. Christianity was used to ferociously justify the slavery of black people as a God given right. Catholicism was used throughout history to silence scientific pioneers, like Galileo, whose findings about the natural order of the world were at odds with the Church’s interpretation of the teachings of the Bible. While these are all different systems, what they all have in common is that they rely on the abuse of a distortion of belief, to justify the concentration of power in the hands of those in charge.

And this brings us full circle – there is something about being human that is always dangerously close to denying others their humanity in order to self preserve. This is independent of religion and this is the part we need to question. If it is left unchecked, it can be easily skewed to have us feeling justified in oppressing the rights of others, voting for political leaders who have stoked our natural human tendency of fear for their own personal gain, and believing the myth that amassing wealth at any expense is the great privilege of living in the civilised West.

So in my own thinking, I’ve had a few revelations. Real faith, the type that matters, encourages free-thinking and constant challenging of what has become the norm. There is a beauty and cohesion in this type of faith, that transcends all sorts of barriers, and which brings people together instead of tearing them apart. And by the very fact that we are human, this free-thinking will always be challenged by authority and power. But it is our duty, as individuals, to identify this power and to hold it to account.

A capacity to identify and challenge the power structures which behave like viruses, using  religion as the host agent to spread fear and demise, would perhaps mean that we could live in a world where many human rights would never be transgressed.

This is why I believe we need to take a moment, look our real enemy in the eye, and recognise our own character and our ‘humanness’ – our propensity to be fearful and to be seduced by power. I think, if we can do this, we might be closer to preserving our humanity.