The only reason to destroy the mosque was malice.
The night of January 16, 2025, local officials supervised the destruction of a mosque in Daska, Pakistan. Dating back to the British Raj, this historic mosque was built by Zafarullah Khan, Pakistan’s first foreign minister after independence. Why was the mosque destroyed? In short, extremists wanted to send a message to the beleaguered Ahmadiyya Muslim community about their supposed heresies. A similar fate befell 22 other Ahmadi places of worship in Punjab province in 2024.
How can human rights defenders advance religious freedom and protect faith groups in such a charged environment? Extremists in Pakistan and elsewhere care little for international human rights standards. Their negative influence over government officials reduces the ability or willingness of law enforcement to protect individuals from harm and hold perpetrators accountable. In other contexts, governments themselves support the destruction of sacred places in a war against a disfavored community.
Targeting sacred sites as a political act
Those engaged in sectarian and political conflict understand the significance of sacred sites—it was not accidental that extremists chose to demolish an Ahmadi place of worship. Extremists and authoritarian governments consistently target sacred sites to convey their ability to terrorize and persecute. For instance, the Chinese Communist Party actively destroys Tibetan Buddhist cultural sites, Russia bombs Ukrainian churches, and ISIS attempted a cultural cleansing of Yazidi, Christian, and other sacred sites in Iraq. These are ominous warnings of future harm, and scholars increasingly understand how heritage destruction can be a prelude to mass violence and even genocide.
To confront the mentality that leads to these abuses, new approaches are needed, as traditional advocacy can only go so far. Sacred sites can be more than targets to protect—they have unrealized potential to promote pluralism, tolerance, and respect for others’ beliefs. Sacred sites, whether historical cultural heritage or contemporary places of worship, pilgrimage, and gathering, provide points of connection for individuals to commune with the divine and for collective worship and prayer. They also hold the potential to be transformative hubs for peace and mutual understanding—places of inclusion, not exclusion.
The connection between sacred sites and human rights
To better understand the potential of sacred sites to cultivate interfaith understanding and human rights, we launched the Sacred Sites Promoting Pluralism initiative (SSPP) in early 2023 thanks to a grant. The initiative explores new pathways to counter rising religious persecution at a time when people and religions are intermixing in unprecedented ways. The initiative examines how local histories of sacred sites can be leveraged to promote religious pluralism, peace, and respect for the beliefs of others and their holy places.
While venerated among co-religionists, sacred sites also provide unique locations to spark forward-leaning conversations about living together in peaceful pluralism with people from different backgrounds and faiths. Despite this, sacred sites are often overlooked or ignored as an asset to advance mutually reinforcing goals related to human rights and religious freedom. While traditional human rights advocacy must continue, practitioners and scholars are increasingly recognizing the potential of sacred sites to address various challenges in diverse circumstances in ways that support advocacy efforts.
Faith communities are important partners in this effort. Recent conversations in the United Kingdom demonstrated how sacred sites in a multicultural society can positively engage in dialogue around religious pluralism. For example, Coventry Cathedral in the British Midlands was destroyed by German bombs in November 1940. The next day, the cathedral dean wrote “Father Forgive” on the remains of the altar. The community has since decided to leave the cathedral ruins as a reminder and a challenge. The cathedral’s spiritual influence sparked a powerful movement of reconciliation, first with Germany and then with other faiths. The cathedral’s story and striking remains give it a uniquely powerful ability to foster reconciliation and interfaith tolerance.
Sacred sites also present opportunities to demonstrate solidarity with beleaguered communities. For instance, the Bevis Marks Synagogue is the oldest in the United Kingdom, built in 1701 for a Sephardic community of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. We interviewed a rabbi who described how encouraging it was when Christian clergy met with synagogue leaders and then walked to city hall in full vestments to protest a development project threatening the historic building. Likewise, the south London Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Morden shared how the public rallied to their support after a fire destroyed part of the Baitul Futuh Mosque. Both the synagogue and the mosque provided a transmission point for positive support while demonstrating the power of sacred sites to build unity around shared concerns.
Sacred sites and the promotion of pluralism
Organizations elsewhere are also beginning to understand how sacred sites can convene diverse groups to break down religious and cultural silos and emphasize religious freedom for all. In the United States, the organization Sharing Sacred Spaces is pioneering this approach, as well as programming at the Abrahamic Family House in the United Arab Emirates. Education opportunities also exist; sacred sites present unique prelogical tools to teach about past diversity and discuss how to live together today. The Leimena Institute in Indonesia and the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon have both explored this possibility in their respective multicultural countries. Other organizations, such as the Smithsonian Institution in Iraq and ASOR in Tunisia, have offered opportunities to train religious groups on preservation techniques for historic sacred sites with experts from different communities.
These efforts provide early examples of how sacred sites offer unique opportunities to simultaneously advance human rights and religious freedom, cultural heritage protection, and interfaith promotion. The SSPP approach focuses on listening and learning, not lecturing, to understand how the past informs our multifaith future and to create successful, collaborative interventions in distinct social, religious, and political environments. SSPP’s flexibility provides a customizable approach that emphasizes local histories to address contemporary problems.
Destruction of sacred sites will continue, as has occurred in Pakistan. However, the SSPP framework envisions these unique sacred sites as a solution in and of themselves by fostering cooperation, appreciation for diversity, and respect for different beliefs. Sacred sites demonstrate a history of living together despite profound differences. If proactively engaged, these holy places can foster advances in human rights in a locally acceptable, flexible, and sustainable way.