The United Nations celebrates the World Interfaith Harmony Week on the first week of February every year, for cultivating mutual understanding and interfaith dialogue around the world, due to the substantial support that this contributes to creating a culture of peace and harmony among adherents to religions, sects, and belief groups, while benefitting from religious differences and diversities for promoting this culture.

In order for this occasion to be an opportunity of spreading the culture of living in peace and harmony among adherents to religions and ethnicities, Bahrain Interfaith calls for organizing effective initiatives that enhance human participation between mosques, Ma’tams, churches, and temples around the world, and calls on everyone to contribute to reinforcing these values that have been endorsed by the people of Bahrain throughout its history.

Through this initiative Bahrain Interfaith calls on the government of Bahrain to assume its responsibilities of building peace and harmony, by enacting laws that criminalize messages of hatred between people, and preserving religious freedoms for all components of society. It also calls on the government to adhere to the private legal personality of religious institutions and groups, which includes respecting the independence and freedom of adherents to sects and belief groups in organizing and managing their religious affairs, as well as practicing their private beliefs, rites, and rituals.

Multiplying official and non-official efforts in spiritual guidance and in spreading the message of dialogue, good neighborliness, and human coexistence, is the right way to solving different problems and crises, including political and human-rights crises, and is what Bahrain needs, on the levels of both the government and people, to surpass the stage of attrition and losses to the stage of peace and reconciliation that everyone longs for.

 

Bahrain Interfaith

Kingdom of Bahrain – February 1, 2020.