BELFAST – The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum typically meets over lunch, but at a recent gathering, the secretary, Edwin Graham, wouldn’t even have a cup of coffee. It was during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, he noted, and a fasting day for the Baha’i.
“Apologies to our Muslim friends who are fasting at the moment, and our Baha’i friends who are also fasting,” he said. It’s rare that Ramadan and the Baha’i Nineteen-Day Fast coincide, said Graham, who is a practicing Baha’i. “The Baha’i fast finishes today; we start celebrating tomorrow.”
The lunchtime gatherings happen every third Wednesday of the month and never get cancelled. But flexibility is required when bringing together believers from different faith traditions. It seems that someone is always celebrating, commemorating, praying or fasting. A few other members, neither Baha’i nor Muslim, responded that out of solidarity, they also wouldn’t eat the lunch provided.
“Holi, the Hindu festival, was last week,” Graham added. “So you have Holi happening in the middle of Ramadan, which is unusual, and then Pesach, the Jewish festival, happening towards the end of Ramadan. And Lent, of course. So you’ve got all these major festivals happening around the same time, and that doesn’t normally happen.”
Interfaith may not be the first thing people think of when they hear Northern Ireland. It is a Christian land soaked in a history of strife between Catholics and Protestants. But Northern Ireland is changing. It is a far more diverse society today than it was a generation ago. The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum was founded in 1993, five years prior to the Good Friday Agreement. The Forum’s goal is to promote mutual understanding and foster dialogue between the faith communities in Northern Ireland: Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Catholic, Protestant and other Christian denominations. They now regularly come together to learn from the past and look to the future of Northern Ireland.
Graham’s desire to form relationships with people from different backgrounds started at an early age — and during a time when those differences were becoming more polarized. “At the age of five, I was extremely upset because I couldn’t go to the same school as my best friend, because my best friend was Catholic, and I was Protestant,” Graham said.
Graham, 68, recognized that segregating groups of people based on religion was fundamentally wrong, and it was the catalyst for his commitment to bridge the Protestant-Catholic divide as he grew older. In the 1970s, he joined a peace movement, he said. In 1977, while in university and during the Troubles, he discovered the Baha’i faith and converted. “I adopted the faith because it teaches an acceptance of people of all religions. And that took me on an entirely different journey,” Graham said.
Shortly after he got married and started raising children, he founded The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum. It was also a response to the struggle Graham experienced as he watched the way his two children, the next generation growing up in the country, received a lack of education on religious diversity in school.
But while the inclusive messaging of the organization hasn’t changed, the religious composition of the members, and the country, has. In 1991, census data in Northern Ireland showed that Protestants and other Christian denominations made up about 58% of the population and Catholics 42%. But in 2021, the two groups were almost tied: Catholics were 46%, while the Protestant and other Christians were 44%. Those not Catholic or part of a Christian denomination, or who don’t identify as religious, are part of an increasing number of minority religious groups in Northern Ireland.
Muslims represent 0.6% of the population in Northern Ireland, according to 2021 census data. Many of them are immigrants who came to the country after the Troubles.
There are currently about 50 active members of The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum. Muslims, who are now the majority religious group reflected in the organization’s Board of Trustees, are also people with a distant connection – or none at all – to the troubled history of sectarian violence and political tensions in Northern Ireland. And while the organization itself identifies as non-partisan, members of the group are actively engaged in politics and meet regularly with the various political parties.
Of the more discussed political topics: The idea of a shared future between the jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
“It’s very actively an issue for us,” Graham said. He noted a human rights lawyer from Queens University spoke to the group on Human Rights Day in December. “He said that the discourse around a shared island is developing, and he challenged us by saying that faith forces are not present in that discourse — and that we need to be.”
While Graham says that The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum is comfortable facilitating meetings from opposing political perspectives, the group wouldn’t be comfortable to take any position or align themselves with a specific cause. Raied Al-Wazzan, who is not a member of The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum but is actively involved in the Belfast Islamic Centre, said that on Fridays, members from political parties such as Sinn Féin and Alliance stand outside their mosque to greet their community. He also said that if there is a shared island between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, it will be the ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland that will swing the vote.
“Sinn Féin is actively recruiting asylum seekers,” Graham said. Sinn Féin is the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army seeking a shared island.
Kais Aloui is an asylum seeker from Tunisia who traveled about two hours to be at the interfaith meeting in Belfast. He arrived in Northern Ireland a year ago and joined The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum because he was looking to find a community that brought together people from different faith backgrounds.
“I come from an Islamic country; the majority are Muslim. We don’t have the same interfaith like Europe,” Aloui said. Unlike his experience in Tunisia where he was part of the Muslim religious majority, he is now part of a religious minority in Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland Interfaith Forum promotes peace and reconciliation through frequent opportunities to come together. While the meetings have a more formal agenda, it’s the informal lunches and gatherings where trust and friendships are developed.
“A lot of the activities that we’ve done over the past year start off with a chance conversation or a chance remark,” Graham said.
Mutaraf Ahmed, an Imam and member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community from England, discovered the organization through a Facebook advertisement after he arrived in Northern Ireland in 2023. He was seeking organizations that carried out an interfaith dialogue and that worked to build a more peaceful society.
Ahmed noted that global events, especially in the Middle East, have led people to raise questions about Islam. He strived to inform people about how his religion can be misunderstood — that extremists acting in the name of Islam actually defy the religion’s teachings.
“There would be a lot of negativity around those conversations online,” said Ahmed. “In person, when you’re meeting in such an informal environment, it’s so much easier to have those conversations, especially when you build that friendship. Because when that is there, people are more open to ask those questions which they may have in the back of their minds and which they might not be able to ask if they’ve just met you the first time.”
Paul Fitzsimmons, a convert to the Soka Gakkai sect of Buddhism, said his religion’s motto is trust through friendship, peace through trust. “There’s such a lack of trust and that’s where a lot of conflict arises from when there’s mistrust of the other,” Fitzsimmons said. “So the importance of having dialog can’t be over emphasized. Regardless of what our faith tradition is, it’s our common humanity that’s the important thing. And we all, I think, desire to have peace and happiness and coexist together.”
Graham does not want history to repeat itself. Regardless of a member’s religion or connection to the history of Northern Ireland, people in this organization can come together if there is a desire to develop an appreciation of each other’s beliefs and cultural diversity. In many ways, this organization is a mirror to the younger generations who have already learned this lesson.
“I have a virtual connection to the Troubles,” Aloui said. “Because when I was in Tunisia, we watched a lot about the Troubles on TV. I came here and found another reality. I have big respect to younger generations. They live together without any problem.”
Today, Graham watches his grandchildren engage in interfaith relationships in school in a way he never could. “So my granddaughter is 10, and her best friend of school is a Muslim, and her friend’s parents came here as asylum seekers,” he said. These children are raised without the same connection to the past; yet, they are able to move forward from the conflict.
“For my grandchildren,” Graham said, “it’s just a relationship.”