Dr Williams made the appeal during a lecture to the Christian Muslim Forum Conference in Cambridge on Monday night, in which he compared “the act of nightmare violence” of September 11, 2001, with the public meeting in Johannesburg on September 11, 1906, which gave birth to Gandhi’s non-violent protest movement – the Satyagraha movement.
He praised Gandhi’s movement for putting principles into action while rejecting violence. He described it as a sort of “‘soul force’ whose central principle was that our behaviour must witness to truth whatever the cost – and that this witness to truth can never, of its very nature, involve violence or a response to oppression that simply mirrors what has been done by the oppressor”.
Dr Williams said that it must be part of the work of the Christian Muslim Forum “to recover that sense of a convergent belief in the possibility of liberation from the systems of violent struggle, in a way that genuinely opens doors in our world”.
He recounts Gandhi’s words to his audience, who were angered by the introduction of registration and fingerprinting for Indians in South Africa, reminding them that their resistance was not about power: “We do not resist [Gandhi said] in such a way that we appear to be seeking the same kind of power as is now injuring or frustrating us. We do not imitate anything except the truth: our model is the divine communication of what is good”.
Reflecting on the lessons of both anniversaries, Dr Williams argued for the place of authentic religion in society – religion which does not compete for influence or power or resort to violence.
He argued that the claims of religion must be the reverse: "The nature of an authentically religious community is made visible in its admission of dependence on God - which means both that it does not fight for position for position and power and that it will not see itself existing just by the license of human society.
“It proclaims both its right to exist on the basis of the call of God and its refusal to enforce that right by the routine methods of human conflict".
