ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2001, I was invited to give the Younghusband Lecture, an annual event sponsored by the World Congress of Faiths. In my mind it was to be an academic paper on the dangers of fundamentalism. In October, a few weeks after the catastrophe in the United States, I found myself, along with twenty other “faith leaders” sitting round the table at No. 10 Downing Street, getting more and more irritated by the collective politeness and rather pallid blessings bestowed upon the Prime Minister. When it came to my turn to speak, I think I caused some offence by saying that, given the scenes daily on our televisions from New York, Belfast, Kashmir, and Israel, it was little short of miraculous that the Prime Minister had not written off all religion and religious leaders as a dangerous waste of space and wasn’t it about time that we all stood up against the fundamentalists within our respective traditions and stood together in affirmation of the shared values we claimed to believe in.
