In the quiet, persistent work of building bridges between the sacred and the secular, few figures stand as unmistakably as Azza Karam. Her career has unfolded across some of the most complex and volatile landscapes of our time, where diplomacy, development, and religious engagement converge—often uneasily. With a demeanor at once steely and compassionate, Karam has become one of the world’s most respected voices in the fraught dialogue between faith and governance.
Born in Cairo in 1968, in a region—and a decade—marked by upheaval, Azza Karam’s early life was shaped by a profound sense of cultural and political plurality. Her family’s movements across the Arab world and Europe gave her an unusual vantage point: a sense that no one culture, faith, or ideology could claim a monopoly on truth. This multiplicity, absorbed almost by osmosis, would later inform her professional conviction that sustainable peace demands the active inclusion of religious actors.
Karam pursued political science with a particular focus on the intersections of religion and democracy. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. From the beginning, her academic work resisted the easy narratives—those that portrayed faith either as an inevitable threat to modernity, or as a purely private, apolitical force.
In her early professional life, Karam taught at universities in Cairo, and collaborated with NGOs working on women’s rights and democratization. These experiences grounded her belief that lasting social change cannot be imposed from above; it must be negotiated within the deep cultural currents of belief and tradition. It was not enough to advocate for human rights or democracy in abstract terms. One had to engage with the local meanings of dignity, justice, and community—meanings often expressed through the language of faith.
This approach would distinguish Karam throughout her career, as she moved into international organizations where religion was often treated, at best, with benign neglect, and at worst, with overt suspicion. At the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), where she served for nearly two decades, Karam pioneered programs that worked directly with religious leaders and faith-based organizations to advance women’s health and rights. Rather than framing religious leaders as obstacles to be circumvented, she saw them as indispensable partners.
Her most significant contribution during this period was the founding of the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Religion and Development. Before Azza Karam’s efforts, religious engagement at the UN level was largely ad hoc, fragmented, and cautious. Under her leadership, the Task Force became a coherent body, bringing together over 20 UN entities to coordinate strategies for engaging faith-based actors in areas such as humanitarian relief, peacebuilding, and sustainable development.
Karam’s method was neither naive nor triumphalist. She recognized that faith traditions often harbored internal contradictions—voices for liberation and voices for oppression, sometimes side by side. Her work was grounded in a sober realism about the ways religious institutions can reinforce patriarchal structures, resist pluralism, or collude with authoritarianism. But it was equally grounded in a deep conviction that ignoring faith was not an option.
In 2019, her leadership took a new form when she was elected Secretary General of Religions for Peace (RfP), an international coalition founded in 1970 to mobilize religious leaders across faith traditions for peace and justice. She was the first woman ever to hold the position—a fact she has acknowledged not as a personal triumph, but as an overdue correction for a field long dominated by male clerical voices.
At RfP, Karam broadened the organization’s agenda, integrating issues of gender justice and climate action into its core priorities. She insisted that religious engagement must be holistic—that peacebuilding cannot be divorced from the fight against environmental degradation, that interfaith dialogue must address systemic inequalities, not merely theological differences.
Throughout her public life, Azza Karam has maintained a critical distance from the politics of visibility that often accompany international leadership. She rarely courts media attention, preferring the slow, painstaking work of consensus-building to the grand pronouncements that often accompany global summits. Her speeches, when she gives them, are marked by an unflinching clarity about the dangers of both religious fundamentalism and secular condescension.
In a 2021 address, she warned against the tendency, especially in Western policy circles, to treat religion as either an outdated relic or a dangerous anomaly. For her, religion is not disappearing. Nor is it uniformly regressive. It is complex, evolving, and deeply embedded in human identity. To ignore it is to ignore a profound dimension of human experience.
Karam’s own spiritual identity remains private. Raised Muslim, she has consistently refused to be boxed into narrow definitions. Her public life reflects a commitment not to any one doctrine, but to the principle that faith, in its best expression, can be a force for dignity, solidarity, and peace.
Under her leadership, Religions for Peace has pursued initiatives that model this vision: interfaith climate actions that bring together indigenous spiritual leaders with Catholic bishops and Shinto priests; gender equality campaigns that involve imams and rabbis as advocates for change; joint humanitarian efforts in conflict zones where religious identities have been used as instruments of violence.
Her approach rejects the easy binaries. She does not romanticize religious institutions, but neither does she accept the secular myth that true progress requires their marginalization. Instead, she moves within the tension, insisting that if we are to address the existential threats facing humanity—war, poverty, ecological collapse—we must reckon with the full complexity of the human spirit, faith included.
Those who have worked closely with her describe a leadership style that is both demanding and inclusive. She is known for holding high expectations, not only for intellectual rigor but for moral courage. Yet she is also known for listening—really listening—to voices often sidelined in global conversations: indigenous elders, women leaders, youth activists.
This dual commitment—to excellence and to empathy—has made Karam a rare figure in the world of international diplomacy, where urgency often overrides reflection, and where engagement with religion is too often reduced to photo opportunities with famous clerics.
As the global landscape grows ever more fractured—with rising authoritarianism, deepening climate crises, and surging religious extremisms—Azza Karam’s insistence on integrating faith into the pursuit of justice seems not only prescient, but indispensable. She does not offer easy optimism. She offers a demanding kind of hope: one that sees the messiness of religious life not as an obstacle, but as a resource.
In an era when many international institutions are grappling with crises of legitimacy, her work suggests a different path: one rooted not in top-down decrees or technocratic solutions, but in the patient weaving of trust, the acknowledgment of deep histories, the recognition of shared vulnerabilities.
Azza Karam’s faith—in humanity, in dialogue, in the possibility of transformation—has never been blind. It has been hard-earned, shaped by the long view of history and the daily grind of negotiation. It is a faith tested by failure, by betrayal, by the slow pace of change. Yet it endures, not as a relic, but as a force still capable of reshaping the world.
In the noisy, anxious agora of global leadership, hers remains a voice both rare and necessary: not preaching from above, but walking among, insisting that peace without faith is no peace at all.
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