“Religion just kept coming up.”

“So many places in the world [and] so many press reports talk about Christians and Muslims being in conflict with each other, or Sunnis and Shias,” Smock, who also serves as USIP’s vice president for Governance, Law & Society, said in the September discussion. “And it’s true – religion is a factor in conflict.”

But he cited the example of a conflict he observed 10 years ago between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria’s Plateau State that left more than 53,000 people dead over the course of three years, according to a government investigative committee. More than 1,000 people had been killed in the village of Yelwa/Nshar alone, mostly Muslims by Christians, Smock said.

Although the fighting sides were most often delineated based on their religions, that element turned out to be only one of many distinctions between the groups. They also differed based on ethnicity, language, occupation, economic and social class, and based on whether they were longtime settlers or migrants, Smock told the audience at Rumi Forum, a Washington D.C.-based organization that seeks to foster intercultural dialogue and support for democracy and peace.

“We found that religion was only a handle, only a convenient way to describe the two groups that were in conflict,” Smock said.

The USIP program also works in places like Colombia, where religion isn’t a major factor in the conflict between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, but religious leaders can be highly influential in easing tensions.

Hayward, a USIP senior program officer in religion and peacebuilding, said the various roles religions can play in refugee cases and the conflicts that drove them to flee spurred her to merge her interest in asylum seekers in the U.S. with her academic background in religion.

In her work interviewing asylum seekers, “religion just kept coming up,” Hayward told the Rumi Forum audience.

“It was the reason they were targeted” in their home countries, she said. “It was who gave them safe sanctuary in their home countries.”

When the asylum seekers landed in the U.S., the groups providing them relief and assistance, humanitarian aid and references for pro bono legal advice were churches or other religious organizations, she said. Faith also often contributed to their coping skills and resilience.

Kakar, also a senior program officer at USIP, was a teenage Afghan-American in Pakistan after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan plunged the country into a civil war. Her father taught Afghan refugees at a university in Pakistan. Kakar was struck by the way the understanding of Islam there restricted her female cousins from getting an education and led to the idealization of war. Both were dramatically different from her own understanding of Islam.

Kakar has worked extensively since then to help develop curriculum for peace and conflict resolution in educational institutions, including madrassas in Pakistan and Nigeria, and on the intersection between religion and women’s rights in countries such as Afghanistan and Libya.

A recent project across multiple countries brings women’s rights or political activists together with religious leaders and legal advocates for “making change happen within an Islamic framework,” Kakar said.

For more details about this work, check out the accompanying video of the discussion, which you can also view at Rumi Forum’s web site.

Viola Gienger is a senior writer at USIP.