World Interfaith Harmony Week

On 23 September 2010, King Abdullah II of Jordan stood before the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York and proposed a single, modest-sounding idea: that the world should set aside one week each year to encourage dialogue between people of different faiths. Less than a month later, on 20 October 2010, his special adviser and personal envoy, Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, presented the formal resolution to the Assembly, where it was adopted unanimously. World Interfaith Harmony Week was the result, and since 2011 it has occupied the first seven days of February in the international calendar. It is built on a deliberately broad premise: that love of God, however that God is named, and love of one’s neighbour are commitments shared across the great religious traditions, and that emphasising what is held in common can become a foundation for peace.

Where the week comes from

The week did not appear from nowhere. Its intellectual groundwork was laid in 2007 with an open letter titled “A Common Word Between Us and You”, authored largely by Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad and signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics and intellectuals. Addressed to Pope Benedict XVI and other Christian leaders, the document argued that two commandments lie at the heart of both Islam and Christianity: love of God and love of neighbour. Rather than dwelling on points of doctrinal conflict, it searched for the theological ground the two faiths already shared. That search supplied the language and the logic that the 2010 UN resolution later adopted, widening the embrace to include all religions and, explicitly, people of no religious affiliation at all.

History

The proposal arrived during a period of acute friction between religious communities, and Jordan had positioned itself for years as a broker in such matters. The Amman Message of 2004, also closely associated with Prince Ghazi, had attempted to define what Islam is and to reject the legitimacy of declaring fellow Muslims unbelievers; “A Common Word” extended that conciliatory instinct outward to Christianity in 2007. When King Abdullah II carried the idea to the General Assembly in 2010, he was building on nearly a decade of documented Jordanian diplomacy on religion. The resolution that the Assembly passed, numbered A/RES/65/5, invited governments, religious bodies and civil-society organisations to mark the first week of February with events promoting mutual understanding. To reward the best of these, the King Abdullah II Centre for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue established an annual prize, with prize money awarded to the initiatives judged to have done most for harmony in a given year. The first observances followed in February 2011, and the volume of registered events has grown with each passing year.

Why it matters

Religious belief shapes the daily lives of a large share of the planet’s population, and the relationships between faith communities can run in either direction: towards cooperation or towards bloodshed. What distinguishes this observance is its refusal to ask anyone to soften their convictions. It does not propose that Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists or anyone else dilute their theology into a vague common creed. Instead it asks something narrower and more achievable, that adherents recognise the ethical aspirations they already hold in common and act on them together for a week. The wager behind it is that habits of contact, once established, are harder to break than habits of suspicion, and that a fixed annual occasion does more to build those habits than sporadic gestures ever could. The decision to extend the invitation to the non-religious is part of the same logic: harmony framed too narrowly excludes the very neighbours it hopes to reach.

The framing also sidesteps a trap that has wrecked earlier interfaith ventures. Attempts to negotiate a single shared theology tend to collapse into either bland abstraction or fresh argument, because the points of doctrine that divide Islam from Christianity, or either from Judaism, are not trivial misunderstandings to be cleared up over tea. “A Common Word” had been careful about this in 2007: it did not claim the two faiths believed the same things, only that both placed love of God and love of neighbour at their centre. The UN week inherited that precision. By anchoring itself to shared ethical commitments rather than shared metaphysics, it gives a Hindu and a Methodist something concrete to do together without requiring either to pretend their differences have dissolved. The genius of the design, such as it is, lies in aiming low enough to be possible.

How it is observed

Communities mark the week with a striking range of activity, and the resolution’s deliberate flexibility is part of the design. Houses of worship open their doors to visitors of other faiths, hosting guided tours, shared meals and joint prayer or meditation. Universities and schools arrange panel discussions, lectures and cultural exchanges, while charities organise projects that put people of different traditions to work side by side on a common task, from food distribution to environmental cleanups. The King Abdullah II Centre collects reports of these events from its participating countries and publicises them, and the annual prize ceremony provides a focal point that draws press attention each February. Much of the activity is small and local, a single mosque inviting a single parish, but the cumulative effect across hundreds of registered events is considerable. This emphasis on doing rather than merely declaring connects the week to other observances built on practical empathy, such as Racial Harmony Day, which similarly asks people to translate fine sentiments into shared action.

How different countries take it up

The week takes root differently depending on local conditions. In countries with established interfaith councils, it often features high-profile gatherings of religious leaders alongside government officials; the United Kingdom’s Inter Faith Network, for instance, has long used the period to coordinate local events between its member bodies. In others, it is marked quietly by neighbouring congregations who might otherwise never meet. National churches frequently fold the week into their own calendars; a Christian community might tie its participation to the feast days that already structure its year, much as the Scottish church marks Saint Andrew’s Day or as Catholic communities observe All Souls’ Day. The point is not that the week replaces these distinct traditions, but that it invites them to look outward for one week and find the neighbours practising different rites down the road. Jordan, as the originator, tends to host substantial commemorations, and the King Abdullah II Centre keeps the international machinery turning between Februaries by collecting and ranking the year’s submissions.

The numbers tell their own story. Where the first February in 2011 saw a modest cluster of registered events, later years have logged many hundreds, spanning continents and traditions that the founders could not have named in advance. A Sikh gurdwara in Birmingham, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok and a synagogue in Toronto have all appeared in the Centre’s records, each having organised something local under the same banner. That decentralised quality is intentional: the resolution sets no template and demands no particular format, so the week becomes whatever a given community can sustain, from a single shared meal to a month-long programme folded into the first week of the year.

Symbols and traditions

Because the week embraces every faith and none, it has resisted settling on a single fixed ritual or emblem. Its visual language tends towards images of unity: hands joined, the symbols of different religions displayed in a row, shared light or peace motifs. The most powerful and recurring symbol is not an object at all but an act, a faith community welcoming outsiders across its threshold, or representatives of rival traditions standing together in a common cause. Where other observances lean on a flag or a colour, this one leans on hospitality, and that choice reflects its founders’ conviction that harmony is something practised rather than displayed.

Fun facts

• The week is unusual among UN observances in spanning seven days rather than a single date, a structure chosen to encourage sustained engagement rather than a one-off commemoration.
• Its founding document, “A Common Word”, began as a letter from 138 Muslim signatories to Christian leaders in 2007, three years before the UN week existed.
• The resolution, A/RES/65/5, was adopted by the General Assembly without a vote, an unusually frictionless passage for a measure touching on religion.
• The annual prize attached to the week is funded from Jordan and named for King Abdullah II, with cash awards going to the initiatives judged to have advanced interfaith harmony most effectively.
• The week explicitly includes people of no faith, an unusual move for an interfaith initiative and a deliberate widening of its founders’ original Muslim–Christian dialogue.

A closing reflection

There is a quiet realism in the way this week was framed. Its architects did not ask the world’s religions to agree, which would have been both impossible and presumptuous. They asked only that people sit together, share a meal, and recognise a neighbour’s humanity for seven days, on the calculated bet that contact is harder to undo than mistrust. Whether a single week can shift entrenched hostilities is an open question, and an honest one. But the more interesting wager is the smaller one: that the person who has once eaten in another’s house finds it a little harder, afterwards, to imagine them as an enemy.