• Commonwealth:
• Managing and celebrating diversity: a mandate from Commonwealth Heads of Government to promote 'Respect and Understanding'

Managing and celebrating diversity: a mandate from Commonwealth Heads of Government to promote 'Respect and Understanding'

Date: 5 Nov 2008
Speaker: Kamalesh Sharma, Commonwealth Secretary-General
Location: Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Oxford, UK

I am delighted to be in Oxford, where I have always noted with concern that there is only one Queen in Queen’s, and not even a hint of an E on the end of Magdalene. When my father, who had never been to England, learnt I was going to be a scholar at ‘the other place’, he said, “An Oxford man walks as if the world belonged to him: a Cambridge man as if he didn’t give a tuppence to whom the world belonged”. He must have heard it from an Englishman in his youth. If the difference is less clear now, let us blame it on globalisation.

But I am happy to admit that it is always exhilarating to be in this town, with which I also have an old association. Above all, I am delighted to be here at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, for nearly 25 years now a source of enlightened scholarship, opinion and debate. I warmly thank your esteemed Director, Dr Farhan Ahmad Nizami, for this invitation. I rashly accepted to speak here, despite the wise caution sometimes attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that one is best advised to keep one’s mouth shut, and to be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt. To which one could add the adage of Boethius, ‘Si taciusses, Philosophus manisses’ – ‘If you had kept silent, you would have remained a philosopher’.

But as I have no reputation to protect, I readily volunteered. I am chastened, though, to be in a long line of distinguished speakers, but consoled that two of my predecessors figure in it. I should tell you that I have shared a bedroom with both of them. Chief Emeka Anyaoku was Commonwealth Secretary-General in the 1990s, and Don McKinnon was my predecessor until March of this year. The bedroom we have all at one stage inhabited is Queen Mary’s in Marlborough House on Pall Mall. It was also reportedly the bedroom of the irrepressible and redoubtable Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough.

I admit to a feeling of being challenged at speaking in this prestigious Centre. It seems to demand a degree of learning and gravitas which is not part of my armoury, but I am supported by two thoughts. The first is, that I am after all a Cambridge man and should be comfortably equal to any challenge in Oxford. The other is, that the want of learning can – if not compensated – perhaps be substituted with the circumstance of having had a footloose professional career, with the benefit of the education that ceaseless travel brings and the privilege of living for extended periods with diverse peoples. Thus, if not imbued with learning, these observations may at least have the merit of being authentic.

My topic today, despite the venue, does not touch specifically on Islam. Nor, indeed, is it specifically on faith, although the connections will hopefully emerge. I confess that, instead, it bears a rather institutional imprint. It is this: ‘Managing and celebrating diversity: a mandate from Commonwealth Heads of Government to promote Respect and Understanding’. But before I come to it, I cannot resist some personal diversions.

I myself come from a culture which is soaked in transcendent and spiritual pursuits in all its diverse communities. Perhaps this has something to do with the curiosity I have about these pursuits in the parts of the world where my profession has taken me. These travels have impressed upon me both the unity in the aspiration, as well as the diversity in the expression and the search.

In Boston, I came to regard Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ as one of the great documents of the human spirit, and I used to go to the lake in the spirit of a pilgrim. The light that Thoreau shone on the depth of human nature for his compatriots in New England, is guarded in the heart of this Indian nearly two centuries later. I was already aware of the great seer Jalaluddin Rumi, but in our posting to Turkey my wife and I developed a special attachment to Konya and visited the annual dervish congregation all three years, once again in the spirit of a pilgrim. My enthusiasm led me to try and teach myself Persian so that I could delve into the great ‘Masnavi’. I was similarly drawn to the resting places of Moiuddin Chishti and Qutubbudin Bakhtiar Kaki in my own country and to others in Central Asia and Turkestan and to soak the great sufi narratives and treatises. In Germany, while learning German, I chanced upon the sermons of Meister Eckhart. Moved by the words of this great preacher on a later visit, despite the passage of 700 years, I tried to trace his footsteps in Erfurt as an acolyte. In the same spirit, I was drawn to the Assisi of St Francis and the Avila of St Teresa. The mystics and contemplatives that have drawn me need not all be enumerated here. I am naturally drawn to some of them in the faith in which I am myself brought up. They are like powerful magnets that pull the base metal of my heart. In none of these pursuits has the feeling ever come to me that any part of it was strange, unfamiliar or foreign. The unity of the spirit is absolute.

Let me share some of the emblems of that ideal, which are in my mind.

I was told in Jeddah that Caliph Omar made a journey to Jerusalem, the first Qibla, on the back of a sturdy mule. With him was the animal’s keeper. As the distance was a long one the Caliph ruled that the two would take equal turns in riding the beast. When the gates of Jerusalem were reached, a delegation of worthies received the rider with tokens of welcome and respect. The embarrassed rider pointed furtively to his companion on the ground. The bedraggled and dust-laden man holding the mule by the rope was the Caliph of Islam. When I think of the ideal of equity I think of Omar.

The mother of Abdul Qadir Gilani was convinced that her promising and precocious child deserved the highest learning and, despite the pain of parting, resolved to send him with a party of travellers to distant Baghdad to acquire it. She stitched forty gold dinars – the sum of the family’s wealth – in the lining of his coat and told her son to give it to his mentor with her letter of introduction. She knew she would not see her son again and considered what instruction she could impart maternally to guide him through life. She enjoined him sombrely never to utter an untruth even if his life depended upon it. The party of travelers was waylaid by robbers and relieved of all their goods. The child Abdul Qadir was a novelty and was asked playfully by the robbers if he also had something to give them. The boy said he had forty gold dinars. This caused much loud merriment and hilarity and the robbers decided that this cheeky child should be taken to their leader, as promising clown material. To the leader’s repeated question the child gave the same answer to renewed jocularity. The leader asked where he carried this vast wealth. ‘Stitched in the lining of my coat’ said the boy. The party was in splits but something about the level way the boy held his gaze, led the leader to have the coat ripped open and to general astonishment the forty dinars fell out. In the ensuing silence, the dumbfounded leader asked the child why he had betrayed this information. The boy made the reply, in a low and steady voice as before, ‘My mother told me never to speak a lie, even if my life depended upon it. These are a mere forty gold dinars’. The robbers broke down in remorse and lamentation and wept in repentance at having disgraced their parents and led an unworthy and despicable life. The leader said that Abdul Qadir had been sent to them to save their souls and all resolved to follow him as their guide, despite his tender years. When I think of the ideal of integrity, I think of Abdul Qadir Gilani.

These are tales from the Islamic tradition. But all faith traditions are repositories not only of practices and beliefs specific to them, but of human wisdom. All can slake their thirst for knowledge from drinking at any or all of these wells. Thirty years ago in Jeddah a greatly respected sheikh of ancient lineage told me that as a child he had heard the adage that Islam was revealed in the Hijaz, recited in al Qahira and understood in Hindistan. This tribute paid respect to the spiritual insights of an older civilisation and acknowledged the unity of our deeper being.

It has been an accident of my life that I have had the opportunity to drink copious draughts from some of these wells. When a fellow at Harvard University, my wife and I found our lodgings in the apartment of a Jewish professor on a sabbatical, whose library was generously stocked with books on Hasidic mystic traditions and Jewish wisdom literature. To have these books within arm’s reach, and the leisure to delve in them was serendipity at its best. Through these books, I entered a new world, the path lit brightly – often stunningly – by shafts of wisdom, no matter how long I chose to delve in them. And the certainty accompanied me that, despite its newness, I was after all exploring a world already familiar from the insights and spiritual literature of all faiths. It is the recognition experienced earlier when delving in the extensive literature of the Sufis in the Islamic lore, the great contemplatives of the Christian tradition or the vast Indic universe of self-knowledge. Their insights are versions of each other as they are lit by the same light of knowledge. No matter what the starting point, all journeys are a homecoming.

There is a tendency to classify the world’s religions into monotheistic and polytheistic streams. This is somewhat simplistic and impedes understanding, apart from also being misleading in implying a settled hierarchy among faiths. Recently, I read that faith representatives from the Hindu and Jewish traditions met to agree on a declaration that both believed in one supreme being. This declaration was celebrated as a breakthrough in mutual understanding. But Jewish communities were welcomed in India from migrations from the time of the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem. That it should have taken two thousand years to arrive at this moment of ‘eureka’ on something as fundamental as this is instructive. A doctrinal preconception at the root has prevented the recognition of the obvious. No great knowledge tradition is in ‘error’. Each illuminates the truth in its own way and enriches our collective legacy of spiritual knowledge. We may all be working the same mine from different ends, but what we strike is the same vein of precious metal. To take one metaphor, the sun may be too bright to be seen by the naked eye, but can be seen reflected in a thousand pools of water. This does not translate into a thousand different suns. To use another metaphor, we should be able to move beyond disputing flavours: the life-giving water that revives us is the same in all beverages. A savant put it this way: what unites us in our humanity is that we all have five fingers – we can’t claim a greater humanity by believing to possess a sixth. Inter-faith dialogues and discourses should be able to go beyond the goal of peacable coexistence, towards the recognition of the shared being that unites us. Thus will the offerings of all traditions complement and not isolate each other – a true celebration of diversity. The difference will not be a separation, but an enriching variation of what we all recognise within ourselves. For this inner transformation, it is the heart of each person which needs to open, beyond doctrinal accommodation. ‘Respect’ and ‘Understanding’ are the highest individual attributes that we can bring towards each other.

Group dialogues between faiths and civilisations should serve to erase these entrenched misconceptions that were present at the birth. But a quicker and abiding understanding is reached through the mind and heart of the individuals who form and define these groups. A collective transformation will spring from private belief and conviction of the value of others. From this transformation true respect and understanding will arise.

In a rapidly compacting world, the necessity to manage variety has been thrust upon all societies. This is historically a recent phenomenon and has accelerated with the globalising of travel, communications, migration of peoples, percolation of ideas, the integration and flow of economic activity. Less than a century ago the world seemed a much vaster place than it does now. Our daily lives and our living and thinking habits reveal the imprint of this variety, which in many ways enriches our lives, through the variety in cuisine, access to world literature and culture, cross-border professional and business connections, offshore leisure destinations, sources of news and information from all corners of the globe, not to speak of the universal grip of the world wide web and the burgeoning and incessant cascade of instant global information on all fronts. We are globalising in the pool of shared information, intelligence, opinion, ambition and speculation. But we are as yet incomplete world citizens. Despite the common ground on which we stand in our spiritual traditions, deeply rooted in our shared humanity, we are tentative and halting in moving towards each other in genuine respect for our spiritual heritage and in recognition of the unity – and not difference – that these traditions represent.

A world collapsing on itself, and exhibiting symptoms of both integration and collision, requires visionary strategies of mediation. We live not only by what goes inside our pockets and the thoughts inside our head but also by the lines drawn in our heart. The world may come together in many ways, but this will not bring us peace and fulfilment unless our hearts are joined in sympathy as well. The world is subject to the irresistible force of globalisation in myriad ways but what the global human community needs is the globalisation of human wisdom. That is the core contemporary deficit. Globalisation in other spheres is by force of circumstance: evolving a human community of mutual sympathy will be by choice.

Old understandings die hard: there may be many who have in their mind’s eye a view of a largely Christian Commonwealth, which is fair enough in that the vast majority of our countries – over 40 of the 53 – are indeed Christian. But in fact Christians comprise only around a quarter of our population, with a larger representation of Muslims and even larger of Hindus. This diversity gives us authority when we advocate healing in an ailing world.

We are ‘as one’, and we are one not least because we are inherently bound up with each other. I often quote the Southern African notion of Ubuntu, that ‘I am because you are, because we are’. And now more than ever, we are one because the world is so interlocked. In our new, compacting world, the sense of our inseparable inter-linkedness and dependence upon each other is ever fortified. It is this sense of shared-ness – of countries in all stages of development, rich and poor, large and small, landlocked and island, and home to people of every colour, creed and continent – which defines the Modern Commonwealth. It shares more than language, more than institutions and systems of education and law, more than the Commonwealth Games. Above all, it shares values to be striven for, and has the moral and practical authority to act to strengthen, and if necessary defend, those values.

We are given to catchy alliteration in this organisation, and we have come up with another one, by stressing that the three new Commonwealth Gs – of Globalism, Governance and Growth – are complementary to the three traditional Commonwealth Ds – of Democracy, Development and Diversity. Add to this Concern, Consensus and Conciliation.

We are searching for ideas to move the mountain of alarming statistics on the state of the world, not the least of which is that one in five people on this planet lives in abject poverty, and two in five aren’t far behind. And 80% of that ‘one in five’ – some 800 million people – lives in the Commonwealth. The other shocking figures are also well known: the indicators of the disease, ignorance, and conflict which have long been with us – coupled with the newer indications of more recent – and just as serious – ills which threaten our societies: inter-faith tensions, terror, conflict, climate change, and now the crises which have rocked the world this year, of Fuel, Food and Finance.

We need answers to an interwoven world of mounting stresses, and to prevent partial economic globalisation sifting winners and losers. The marginalised include legions of women, routinely suffering egregious discrimination. Two thirds of those with AIDS in the Commonwealth are women, as are two-thirds of those children out of school. Our stated target of having one-third female representation in national parliaments remains elusive. The marginalised also include legions of jobless youth – the people who will inherit this century and embody all its hope, but who, in fact are horribly burdened by the legacy of our failures.

What can the Commonwealth bring to this world of disturbance? I talk in my lecture title about ‘celebrating diversity’ – is this pure cant? Should my title today have been ‘minimising and containing differences’ rather than ‘celebrating diversity’?

This was the question which Commonwealth Heads of Government first seriously asked themselves in the wake of 9/11. Some may recall that the Brisbane Summit scheduled for November 2001 was cancelled because of this event, with Heads meeting again in Coolum in 2002, and then in Abuja in 2003. During that time, ideas were crystallising which took the form of a specific mandate when they met in Malta in 2005. In Malta, Leaders (I quote) ‘affirmed the importance of promoting tolerance, respect, enlightened moderation and friendship among people of different races, faiths and cultures… and of building a common platform of unity against extremism and intolerance’.

They echoed the famous words of Nelson Mandela, in 1994, when he brought South Africa back in the Commonwealth, that ‘the Commonwealth makes the world safe for diversity’.

They knew that the Commonwealth had a track record in bridging divides: in dismantling apartheid, in showing solidarity with the disadvantaged small and vulnerable states, in pursuing capacity building and institutional strengthening, in fighting for the full spectrum of women’s rights and human rights, in our support for democratic constitutionalism and the rule of law, and in our leading ideal of equity and inclusiveness.

Let me now tell you how we have responded to that task. In early 2006, we convened a task force of eight committed and extremely talented people, under the chairmanship of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Those were male and female, young and old, from Asia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean and the Pacific. They consulted widely among some organisations in the UK and beyond, not least among bodies such as yourselves.

We particularly valued the response from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Dr Nizami said that we can’t sustain ‘respect and understanding’ until we know, I quote, ‘what we are up against’. He called on us, again I quote, ‘to be frank, for fear of making the concepts of extremism and intolerance unintelligible, indeed irrational’. He gave us practical suggestions: focussing on the young, for instance – especially in urban areas of economic deprivation. He called on young Muslims to make common cause with like-minded non-Muslims, on issues they care about. He called on us all to take a more disciplined approach to history, to see it from all perspectives, and to report it fairly. This advice was heard.

Let me now summarise some of the main findings of the Commonwealth Commission. Again, I stress that the work of the Commission was not specifically about faith, unlike its UN counterpart the Alliance of Civilisations which was so-named as a deliberate counter-poise to Samuel Huntingdon’s 1993 thesis of The Clash of Civilisations, which the Commonwealth report itself found to be, I quote, ‘false and divisive’. Meanwhile, within the Commonwealth family, the body which promotes the interests of civil society – the Commonwealth Foundation – had done and continues to do excellent work on inter-faith dialogue. But our remit was wider. Our Commission arrived at important findings on faith, but it did much more.

Of necessity, I simplify a little, in saying that our analysis of the frictions in our societies revealed three things.

First, that we have ‘multiple identities’: people do not live, feel or act out ‘singular’ identities.

Second, that humiliation is to grievance what salt is to wounds: it adds insult to injury for oppressed people, leading to frustration and violence.

Third, that ethnic or religious identities are rarely the root causes of conflict: people basically fight to wrest empowerment or maintain hegemony.

In particular, I emphasise the point concerning multiple identities, which we can no doubt endorse from our knowledge about ourselves. We would not generally wish to be cast as a type and docketed uni-dimensionally. I think, therefore I am. I have various thoughts and interests, therefore I have a richness of being. I keep on learning new things and reflecting on the experience of life, therefore I am an evolving being. In all this growth, my attachment to my faith – if I have it – remains a constant. It does not compromise the mosaic of my being, which is always work in progress. In a lecture in London, Amartya Sen put it this way (I improvise entirely): someone may be a Muslim, but he or she enjoys reading Enlightenment philosophers, is an admirer of Ramakrishna, commends the sermons of John Donne, follows the fortunes of ‘Arsenal’, turns first to cricket scores when Test matches are on, loves Gregorian chants, supports his MP with small donations, pursues the search for Higgs boson, has a weakness for Thai food, and is not dismissive of the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects, and so on. Why should such a person want her or his personality to be painted in monochrome or stripped to a minimalist credo?

I warmly commend to you this seminal piece of research and analysis, which has been widely acclaimed (and distributed) across the world. The Economist commended it for, I quote, ‘some nuggets of very tough-minded thinking about the dangers of putting people into neat boxes – and the cynical way in which ethnic or tribal warlords or nationalist and religious zealots always try to shoehorn people into simple, unchanging categories because it suits their political purposes, and keeps conflict on the boil’. A Commonwealth example of the destructive phenomenon of propagating ‘us’ and ‘them’ is the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. Tragically, so many other examples spring to mind.

I have the report here: it is entitled Civil Paths to Peace – with the apparent sub-text that these are the opposite of military paths to peace. The report went much further in focusing on the areas in which societies can concentrate their efforts to build respect and understanding – between faiths, ethnic groups, language groups, the ages, the sexes, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the diseased, the urban and the rural: the list goes on.

Its four key areas – crucibles of debate; the anvils on which societies are forged – are young people, women, education and the media. When they met and considered the report in Kampala last November, Heads of Government tasked us with exchanging best practices and experiences of how these four groups can be encouraged to strengthen the societies of which they are a part, and make them places of tolerance and creative harmony.

Nine months later, just six weeks ago in September, Commonwealth Foreign Ministers met again in New York for a further review. They studied the findings and responses from a number of Commonwealth countries. I summarise some of the ideas that were on the table, and some of the suggestions made as to what individual countries – and we ourselves, as the multilateral convening force of the Commonwealth – could do.

Here are eight ideas that were in play and under debate in New York. For many, their strength is in their simplicity.

First – and central and local governments and international institutions should take note – that community-level village or neighbourhood initiatives to build social cohesion are the most effective. For each of our findings we amassed a body of evidence: in this instance, I may cite the example of promoting tolerance and respect for opposing views and different lifestyles through townhouse meetings in the tiny – and admittedly harmonious – Caribbean island of St Lucia.

Second, that those multiple identities of which I spoke can be demonstrably explored and celebrated in innovative ways, often through the arts or education. This time, I warmed to a South African example, where schools are encouraged to celebrate National Youth Day, National Women’s Month (in August), Cultural Diversity Day, National Day, Africa Human Rights Day, and Africa Day, thereby reinforcing different identities, and, in the case of the last, a ‘broader African identity’.

Third, dialogue is best facilitated by those knowledgeable in the task. Whilst the Bangladesh government engages community leaders such as imams, priests and social workers in community level arbitration and negotiation processes, in the UK it is so-called ‘Neighbourhood Renewal Advisors’ who are trained in conflict management negotiation and are given advice on how to monitor local tensions. In Zambia, the Church mediated to bring about multi-party politics. From India’s village panchayats or local councils, to Malaysia’s Institutes of Higher Education, and Singapore’s Community Engagement Programme, Commonwealth governments are actively using community level dialogue to build resilience and address divides.

Fourth, it takes bold and sometimes courageous measures to identify and respond to cases of grievance. For example, in February 2008, the ‘Apology to the Australian Indigenous Peoples’, with specific reference to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, was described as an occasion for, I quote ‘the nation to turn a new page in its history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence in the future’.

Fifth – and despite what I have said about the immediacy of grass-roots work – there are ways in which National Constitutions and Declarations can enshrine a people’s commitment to human rights and equality. For India, the national Constitution is considered to embody the very essence of the commitment to core human values, rights and responsibilities. In Singapore, the Declaration on Religious Harmony is similarly ‘owned’ by the people. A ‘bottom-up’ initiative, it began with them.

Sixth, just as media can inflame tensions, it can smooth them. The mix of freedom, fairness and responsibility is our target. I cite another South African example, in its new Media Diversity and Development Agency, which has been set up to grapple with issues of media diversity and ownership.

Seventh, give young people a voice, just as we did ourselves in two regional consultations in Johannesburg and Chandigarh, in order to build this argument. We collated impressive evidence on the importance of youth councils, youth forums, youth leaders’ networks, and youth parliaments as effective mechanisms for engaging young people. The Africa Youth Trust in Kenya, for instance, has established a mechanism for structured engagement between young people and Members of Parliament. The country has what it calls a ‘Marshall Plan for Youth Employment’.

Eighth and finally, practical training is the logical way of turning right thoughts into right action. We shared a powerful example of a DVD shown in schools in Western Sydney, in the wake of serious disaffection and alienation felt by young people of Middle Eastern backgrounds there. It made very telling points about racism, stereotyping, discrimination and religion. The project was such a success that the same teaching resources were distributed to secondary schools nationally.

The findings we shared in New York went further – no stone was left unturned. We looked at the role of Micro-Credit for young people in places like Bangladesh, of Community or National Service in places like Malaysia, of being able to measure improved integration in the public sector in the UK.

There are practical examples of all of these in the report. On the strength of all this, we identified ways in which governments could run with this baton themselves, and also ways in which we could help them.

There were ideas shared at the international level, the national level, and the level of civil society.

The Commonwealth Secretariat, for instance, has already designed citizenship education projects in Cameroon, Guyana, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago. It will do more of them. We are famed for developing Commonwealth ‘toolkits’, outlining practical ways of turning our principles into practice, and we have it in mind to develop a toolkit on the subject of respect and understanding.

As for national governments, we have sensed a willingness in many of them to look hard at just how representative their national institutions of government really are. That means, for instance, revisiting the traditions, customs and symbols of institutions to ensure that they are not barriers to participation and inclusion. We can assist them in this task, if asked, from the experience of others.

As for civil society, the Commonwealth Foundation is already investigating new criteria for its grant projects, which examine how well a recipient responds to and promotes the issue of multiple identity. Another sister organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning, is developing distance learning materials which teach respect and understanding.

In other words, I am happy to say that this project is moving from theory into practice, and we look forward to being able to develop more ambitious and effective ideas.

So the Commonwealth has something very real to offer to the debate about social cohesion in these four fields – women, youth, education and media. It holds that no culture, no nation, no religion has a monopoly on truth, and that ‘the Commonwealth way’ is the consensual way forward: arriving at decisions on which all can agree. The Commonwealth should be seen as a microcosm of the wider world, as a family of peoples. And the ideas that we develop should be disseminated and shared far beyond the one-third of humanity which belongs to our organisation. I like to think that this is our enlightened globalist mindset in practice, with our organisation performing the sorely needed globalisation of wisdom.

I can also illustrate what we have to offer with anecdotal evidence. Here’s yet one more, from many. You may remember the race and faith riots in Cronulla, in southern Sydney, in December 2005. The beach there became a contested space between people of Middle Eastern background and what you might call ‘traditional’ Anglo-Australians. Since then, wonders have happened, in the form of simple and practical measures, like encouraging young Muslims to train as life-savers, and adapting Muslim women’s traditional swimming costumes, allowing them to enjoy the beach.

So the Commonwealth brings to this debate its principles, its networks, and its many instances of success which are there to be shared and adapted by all. This is the Commonwealth which will be 60 years old next year, with the strapline that it is, I quote, ‘serving a new generation’. Its message is for the one billion of its citizens who are under 25; and it’s for the world. This topic of managing and celebrating ‘diversity’, and overcoming ‘difference’, will be an important element of our communications for the year 2009, and we know it will again take centre stage when our Heads of Government meet in Port of Spain twelve months from now. Diverse and dynamic Trinidad and Tobago has been one of the most active supporters of this project.

In drawing to a close, I’d like to paraphrase a telling remark made by Kofi Annan in the very first weeks of this year, when he first flew into Nairobi to try and broker peace and dialogue, in the wake of the appalling violence that had swept across the country and which would claim hundreds of lives. ‘There is only one Kenya’, he said. ‘We all have multiple identities, but I hope you see yourselves as Kenyans first’. In turn, there is only one humanity. We all have multiple identities, but I hope we see ourselves as human first. Our salvation lies in realising that hope.

How different can we be if the following is our guide to ideal conduct:

Muslims say: ‘no one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself’;

Christians say: ‘do unto others what you would have them do unto you’;

The Jews say: ‘what is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man’;

Hindus say: ‘do naught unto another which would cause pain if done to you’;

Sikhs say: ‘treat others as you would be treated yourself’;

Buddhists say: ‘hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

Either there is a very good and long-lived plagiarist out there, or – more likely – we are cut of the same cloth, in preaching the love of neighbour.

I end where I began, with educational institutions of ancient lineage, and with some of the revered words that have passed down the ages.

Cambridge will soon be 800 years old: this great university is even older. Yet both of these pale into insignificance alongside the Muslim university of Al Azhar in Cairo, which was a seat of Muslim learning in the year 969.

That Muslim learning has always been solidly centred on The Book, the Quran. I leave you with a reference, which speaks loud and clear to our common humanity and the shared cause which we seek in my title phrase of ‘managing and celebrating diversity’.

‘O mankind! We created you from a single soul, male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, so that you may come to know one another. Truly, the most honoured of you in God’s sight is the greatest of you in piety’.

‘Piety’ is not about outward form: it is an inward conviction, which can only become the manifestation of ‘Respect and Understanding’. ENDS

Download the speech: Managing and celebrating diversity: a mandate from Commonwealth Heads of Government to promote 'Respect and Understanding'