Interfaith under scrutiny: a research–practice encounter

Since September, CIP postdoc Dr Anastasia Badder has been spending a day-a-week working with the Faith & Belief Forum, a national NGO. The goal is to identify synergies, test scope for research collaborations, and (when possible) observe current interfaith practice “in the wild”.

Asked to take two steps back and consider the successes and challenges of her first quarter, Anastasia reflects: 

I first connected with F&BF at the International Conference on Cohesive Societies in Singapore in 2022. I was new to the interfaith space as a researcher – and indeed new to thinking about my previous research in terms of interfaith or interreligious encounter. 

As an anthropologist, I was curious about what interfaith was. What did it mean to the people involved? What did it look like? How did “interfaith” differ from “interreligious”? What were the histories of interfaith and its present-day dynamics? What kind of work was “interfaith” doing as an idea, practice, institution, and policy in Singapore, in the UK, or elsewhere?   

While the ICCS offered me a brief glimpse in the direction of some of these questions, the opportunity to be embedded with the Faith & Belief Forum over several months has given me space and scope to pursue them in a more deliberate and longitudinal way. 

A fuzzy domain

On reflection, working with and alongside F&BF has only intensified some of these questions for me. In particular, the issue of what interfaith is – and related questions, like what its goals are, how it is used and to what ends, and what ‘good’ interfaith looks like and who gets to decide – remain fuzzy. “Interfaith” appears in some ways to be a term, like many we use every day in academia and beyond, that users assume to have a shared meaning but which in fact we spend little time defining or interrogating. This lacuna is not necessarily in itself a major fault (sometimes fuzzy or multiple definitions can be highly productive). But I do think, in light of emerging critiques about interfaith as a structured, institutional activity (e.g. Gearon 2013; Hong 2020; Lafrarchi 2021; Khan and Cowan 2018; Swamy 2017; Ziad 2018), it is something worth considering.

I want to note first that these critiques of interfaith (focused on the risks of interfaith work perpetuating Europe’s colonial logics, continuing mechanisms of exclusion, marginalizing minority groups, and concealing white secular/Christian hegemonic norms) have not gone unnoticed by F&BF. Their new emphasis on storytelling and personal experience are in part responses to concerns in this vein. 

Yet there is scope and, I suggest, need for more sustained time and space to meaningfully engage such critical voices and their implications for interfaith work – not only by F&BF, but by all scholars, practitioners, and enthusiasts (a word I recently heard used to describe regular participants) of interfaith.

Risks and opportunities

Without reflecting on extant assumptions about what interfaith is and entails, we risk propagating precisely the issues named in the above-mentioned critiques. Without interrogating what precisely we mean by ‘interfaith’ – which then shapes the qualities, exchanges, and ends we expect – we also risk missed opportunities for meaningful outcomes and impact. 

This also leads me to wonder whether, where, and how structured interfaith encounters do or should differ from everyday encounters and proximities where faith is perhaps less foregrounded but still very much shapes all the little things people do to accommodate and assert difference in their interactions. Or equally, how structured interfaith encounters do or should (or are discursively framed to) differ from so-called “tea and samosas” encounters. If the former are perceived as effective and the latter often dismissed as bringing the same people together repeatedly without widening their reach or fostering only surface-level exchange without getting to the “tough questions” or “doing nothing”, what does that tell us about the assumptions – and biases – built into our conceptualizations of interfaith? And what might we be missing in failing to probe those?

In my observation, any gap in the interrogation of interfaith stems not from a lack of desire but from a lack of time and resources, the pressures of the funding cycle, and the need to respond to regular crises as they occur. And we of course shouldn’t expect F&BF (or any interfaith charitable organization) to be able to rectify such expansive historical and sectoral issues on their own. 

The meaning of collaboration

But maybe this is where our kind of research-practice collaboration can do something meaningful, for researchers interested in mapping interfaith as a discourse, practice, institution, politics, or otherwise, and for practitioners doing interfaith. If nothing else, my experience with F&BF to date has cemented my sense that an anthropology that ends at investigating interfaith encounter without collaboratively engaging those doing interfaith is an incomplete project. Such a collaboration, to my mind, is not only about producing research outputs for translation into practice, but allowing our research to be shaped by the concerns and needs of those with whom we work; less total deconstruction and more slow, deliberate co-construction. I look forward to exploring this kind of collaboration – one that develops in multiple complementary directions to further social service and social science – with F&BF over the coming months. 

Where research meets practice: Cambridge Interfaith Knowledge Hub

The Faith & Belief Forum is one of a growing number of organisations that have a recognised partnership with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, via our new Knowledge Hub (est. 2024). Dr Badder’s embedding is a pilot as we look at different possibilities for collaboration and mutual flourishing. Other mutual activities have included a symposium organised with the Faculty of Education and a Cabinet of Crisis hosted at Michaelhouse. CIP also partnered with F&BF as part of the national consultation on UK Inter Faith Week. 

Learn more about the Cambridge Interfaith Knowledge Hub

Visit the Faith & Belief Forum’s website, faithbeliefforum.org

Bibliography (works cited)

Liam Gearon (2013) The Counter Terrorist Classroom: Religion, Education, and Security, Religious Education 108.2.  DOI: 10.1080/00344087.2013.767660

Christine J. Hong (2020) Interreligious Education: Transnational and Trans-Spiritual Identity Formation in the Classroom. In Syeed & Hadsel eds Critical Perspectives on Interreligious Education: Experiments in Empathy. Read Hong’s chapter online via library.oapen.org.

Naïma Lafrarchi (2021) Intra- and Interreligious Dialogue in Flemish (Belgian) Secondary Education as a Tool to Prevent Radicalisation. Religions 12.6. DOI: 10.3390/rel12060434

Adil Hussain Khan & Michael A. Cowan (2018) Why Christian-Muslim 'Dialogue' is not always Dialogical. Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 28.2. DOI: 10.2143/SID.28.2.3285637

Muthuraj Swamy (2017) The Problem with Interreligious Dialogue: Plurality, Conflict and Elitism in Hindu-Christian-Muslim Relations. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Homayra Ziad (2018) Why I Left The Muslim Leadership Initiative, MuslimMatters.org.