In all my time in public life, one fact has struck me with increasing force: that failure to understand the power of religion means failure to understand the modern world. People of different faiths are being brought closer and closer together. In the Middle East, Christians, Muslims and Jews have in many places lived side by side for centuries. But in many other parts of the world now, this intermingling of faiths is increasingly part of the demographic reality. 

So religious faith will be of the same significance to the 21st Century as political ideology was to the 20th Century - indeed more so. And that is why I have set up my Faith Foundation, to work with others in the great faiths to help harness their full power to transform our shared world for the better.

Of course, there have been and still are times of tension and turbulence. At such moments, there is a tendency to see the world exclusively through the eyes of our own faith, race or culture. Recently I have been reading Amin Maalouf's "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", a brilliant corrective to some of the history I was taught as a child.

But history shows that for much of the time members of the three faiths have worked out ways in which to live together to their mutual benefit and flourishing.

We need to recapture and build on that record for the good of the Middle East. And, because of its powerful symbolism, for the good of the whole world. That is one of the reasons why my Faith Foundation and I are working with the Coexist Foundation and Cambridge University to establish Abraham House, a place of encounter for the Abrahamic faiths, in which their common roots and values can be explored and enriched.