JISRA KENYA F2A PROGRAMME

Joint Initiative for Strategic Religious Action (JISRA) is an interfaith consortium – including Catholic, Islamic, Protestant, interreligious and secular organisations – which will promote Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) in Kenya. JISRA will address key issues in freedom of religion and belief in Kenya within three pathways – intrareligious, interreligious and extra religious. Within faiths (intrareligious) divergent doctrines and different ways of interpreting religious texts have often caused tensions, hostilities and threats of clashes between mainstream Christian denominations and the minority denominations. Within the inter-religious pathway, there have been tensions and clashes between Muslims and Christians largely because of the disproportionate killings of Christians and the destruction of Christian institutions by the Islamist Somali militia, Al Shabaab, and the killing of non-Muslim teachers in the predominantly Muslim North-Eastern region. Also, there have been tensions and hostilities between the traditional African religions and the mainstream faiths, especially Christians and Muslims, because the latter misrepresent and stereotype the former as ‘religious others’. And extra-religious issues include tensions over failure by the government to register religious organisations potentially in violation of their FoRB rights; ambiguous interface between the Islamic identity and Kenyan citizenship; profiling of Muslims by security agencies over terrorism and violent extremism and violation of their rights; and shrinking civic space.