Religious differences are still the root of many conflicts around the world. Due to lack of understanding of other religions, people create opinions leading to communal hatred and violence. The Interreligious Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina wanted to tackle prejudice and raise awareness of the importance of inter-religious dialogue. The objective was to bring Christians and Muslims closer and give the world a message of peace, starting a positive conversation between people from different cultural backgrounds to promote mutual cooperation and harmony.

One Book For Peace. A book that contains the teachings of both the Bible and the Quran, where verses from each were printed next to each other to demonstrate how similar the teachings are. It focuses on topics such as One God, Peace, Justice, Love, Family Relatives and Neighbours, Sanctity of Life, Compassion, Forgiveness, Helping Others and Hope. Each chapter consists of ten verses clearly showing the similarities and explaining to the reader in a simple way that teachings on humanity may have been written differently but they truly have one voice. This is precisely what was needed to be communicated to Bosnia and Herzegovina and other countries that are experiencing humanitarian migration crises, thereby beginning a conversation about how there’s so much more that unites us than sets us apart.

The book was launched on a prime time show on Al Jazeera Balkans along with Youtube, to spread the message of peace to the world. Soon it featured on all leading news channels and received over 150 announcements in the Balkans region alone. The book was also launched through One Share platform on Twitter, where every page was converted into a tweet, and targeted to messages of hate with love, hope and peace, all in real-time. We found a common pathway between the church and the mosque where we placed our ONE book audio poster. The poster played the verses from the Bible and the Quran, encouraging people to visit the website to listen to the full book and download the audiobook or e-book. On YouTube, our video received over a million views.The One Book touched 53 million hearts globally, which is 17 times the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

One Book for Peace received a total of 53 million impressions.Right from the launch on Aljazeera Balkans, to sending the books to influential leaders like Pope Francis, Antonio Guterres and Donald Trump, to releasing the book on Twitter, we reached 96% of the total population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and 100% of its online population. People from every continent visited our website, requested a physical copy and downloaded the e-book. We even got a letter of acknowledgement from the Prime Minister of UK, Theresa May and Deputy PM of Turkey Hakan Cavusoglu, encouraging us to continue spreading this message of peace.Two weeks after the launch of the book, faith leaders came together for a common prayer for the first time after the Bosnian War.