IN FEW areas of Britain do so many religions rub shoulders with each other as they do in Southall, West London. This predominantly Asian area is home to ten Sikh gurdwara temples — including the largest one in Europe — four mosques, three Hindu temples, a Buddhist vihara and many churches. And Southall now is also the focus of a Jesuit initiative to create better understanding between people of different faiths.

You see how multifaith Southall is when you emerge from the station and turn left towards The Green. Here, the Roman Catholic church of St Anselm sits between a Sikh sports club and a row of shops and cafes run by Somali Muslims.

And in a nearby sidestreet is De Nobili Dialogue Centre, an interfaith centre run by the Jesuits, who are continuing the work begun by the pioneering Father Michael Hollings in the 1970s.

The house is used for small seminars with groups of students and people from the area. On the first Sunday of the month a small inter-faith group meets to listen to speakers from different faiths discuss ideas and, sometimes, take part in religious rituals. The current programme has included talks on Hinduism and Buddhism. In Advent there will be prayers and reflections on the Jewish feast of Hanukkah — which starts next week — and in the new year, a rabbi will explain Passover, a Sikh will talk about Guru Granth and a Zoroastrian priest will comment on fire rituals.

Father Michael Barnes says: “In a multifaith area, and in a multicultural parish, it is important that some dimension of the dialogue is acknowledged. De Nobili House lets people know that the Jesuits are concerned not with just running the parish but also with the wider mission of the parish.” He runs the centre and also teaches at the Centre for Christianity and Inter-religious Dialogue at Heythrop College, part of the University of London.

The centre is named after Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656), a Tuscan Jesuit who went to India in 1605 and spent most of the remainder of his life working as a missionary in the Tamil city of Madurai.

“When de Nobili got to India he realised that the people there had something to teach him,” says Barnes. “He was about trying to understand the culture and become part of it. So having entered the culture he could talk to people on their terms. If you are going to make yourself understood, you have to understand the other people.

“What we are trying to do in Southall is to understand other traditions by living among them and conversing with them on their terms. What any religious tradition has to offer is a gift to others and not a barrier to separate oneself from them. Our neighbours next door are Hindus. For the last three years at Diwali we have gone there for a meal and then gone out into the garden to set off the fireworks, or they’ve come into our garden and set off the fireworks. It is terrific.

“A lot of what you might call inter-faith hospitality goes on around the church of St Anselm,” says Barnes. “The church is open the whole time, and you get people from different faiths going into pray. School groups also go there to find out what Christianity is all about.”

Interfaith dialogue is crucially important, particularly in the current climate, he believes: “I think one of the dangers is that post-September 11 the whole thing becomes an issue about managing Islam. How do we deal with the problem of Islam? In general the way Islam is portrayed is almost at the level of demonising it and seeing it as a problematic incursion into an otherwise homogeneous Western culture. And I think this is not fair to the enormous efforts which have been made by Muslim communities and a lot of Muslim leaders to develop an Islam which is faithful to the spirit of the tradition and yet recognises that we live in a pluralist society.

“This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems of community cohesion, but that isn’t a Muslim problem. It’s a problem of how you put together, particularly in areas like Southall, a number of disparate communities with different commitments and traditions, some of which clash, usually in a rather benign way, such as Sikhs walking in a procession on a Sunday morning and loud-mouthed Muslim youths having a jolly at Eid and annoying everyone else. But Southall is remarkable for the cohesion that exists between different groups, especially when you think of the potential for problems.”

Pyara Lal Soba, a priest at Valmik Temple, Southall, whose 2,000-strong membership belong to what he calls “one of the minor Indian religious traditions,” says: “Interfaith dialogue connects people, and they visit different places of worship. You can be friends with a lot of people but how they affect your religious thinking is difficult to say.

“You have to have dialogue with people of other faiths, and in Southall people of different faiths generally get on well. I have been living here for 40 years and I’ve never had any problems. There are skirmishes here and there, but that is the same everywhere. It amazes me, with so many different religions in Southall, that it is such a quiet place to live in.”

Since Vatican II — the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council from 1962 to 1965 — the Catholic Church has been reappraising its relationships with other faiths and their place in salvation.

“My question,” says Father Barnes, “is always, ‘Can you avoid the extremes, one pushing into a relative view, the other saying we are right, everyone else is wrong?’ Pope John Paul says that Catholic Christianity acknowledges that the word that God reveals in Christ is its most manifest form, but this is not to say that the seeds of the word may not be present in other religious traditions. For seeds you could substitute traces of the Spirit.

“He wouldn’t say that Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism are the work of the Spirit, but he would say that in the life of devout Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus the work of the Spirit can be discerned.”

Jaspal Singh Bhambra, former president of the Ramgarhia Sabha Gurdwara and co-ordinator of the Ramgarhia Council UK, believes that Sikhism is a model for interfaith dialogue. “There are Muslim writers in our scriptures and philosophy. And the foundation stone of the Golden Temple was laid by a Muslim. After the death of Cardinal Basil Hume we held a memorial service in the Ramgarhia hall, and 100 people of different faiths attended. This was a sign of people respecting other faiths.”