Less than a week after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, US President George W. Bush gave a remarkable speechabout America’s “Muslim Brothers and sisters”. “These acts of violence,” he declared, “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.” After quoting from the Quran, he continued, “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”
This speech is remarkable, not only for its compassion towards Muslims in the face of the attack on the US, but also because Bush was contradicting what has been, since the beginnings of Islam, the standard Western perception of this religion – namely that it is, at its core, a religion of violence.
Since its beginnings in the Arabia of the 7th century CE, the religion of Muhammad the prophet had pushed against the borders of Christendom. Within 100 years of the death of Muhammad in 632 CE, an Arabian empire extended from India and the borders of China to the south of France. Militarily, early Islam was undoubtedly successful.
Since that time, for the Christian West, regardless of the Islamic precept and practice of religious tolerance (at least as long as non-Muslims did not criticise the prophet), Islam has remained often threatening, sometimes enchanting, but ever-present. Indeed, the West created its own identity against an Islam that it saw as totally other, essentially alien, and ever likely to engulf it.
Thus, from the 8th century to the middle of the 19th, it was the virtually unanimous Western opinion that Islam was a violent religion whose success was due to the sword.
That Islam is, at its core, a violent religion is an attitude still present among some today. In the aftermath of the horrific murder of 50 Muslims in Christchurch by an Australian right wing nationalist, the conservative Australian politician Fraser Anning declared (straight out of the West’s medieval playbook), “The entire religion of Islam is simply the violent ideology of a sixth century despot masquerading as a religious leader, which justifies endless war against anyone who opposes it and calls for the murder of unbelievers and apostates.” Any violence against Muslims, he suggested, was therefore their own fault.
Anning has been roundly condemned for his statements by both sides of politics. He is clearly wildly out of step with mainstream public opinion in Australia. A change.org petition with more than 1.4 million signatures has been delivered to Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Australia’s first Muslim senator.
Clearly, blaming innocent people at prayer for their deaths at the hands of a right wing zealot crossed all the boundaries. But Anning’s view of Islam does echo an historic Western emphasis on the use of force in Islam as an explanation for its success.
This was, of course, part of an argument about the relative truth of Christianity and Islam. According to this, the success of Islam was due solely to the sword. The success of Christianity, having renounced the sword, was due to divine favour. The one was godly, the other Satanic.
This Western image of a benign, peaceful Christianity against a malevolent, violent Islam was a mythical one. With few exceptions, its proponents ignored both the violence that often went along with the spread of Christianity and the religious tolerance that often accompanied the extension of Islam. But the myth did reflect the deep-seated Western horror, always potent in the collective imagination, of being literally overrun by the fanatical hordes.
A 14th century miniature depicting Crusaders at The Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar (Battle of Homs) of 1299.Wikimedia Commons
Ripe for colonialism
In the 19th century, however, attitudes did begin to change. Muhammad was, on occasion, imagined not as the ambitious, profligate impostor of old but as a “silent great soul”, a hero who spoke “from Nature’s own heart”, as Thomas Carlyle called him. The Dublin University Magazine described him in 1873 as “one of the greatest ever sent on earth”.
Islam too now came to be seen more benevolently. The increasing cultural and global political power of the West rendered obsolete the traditional fear of being overwhelmed by Islam. The “religion of force” was now meeting a greater secular force, that of the imperial West. Islam no longer looked as threatening as it once had. The doctrine of Jihad (holy war), declared The Quarterly Review in 1877, “is not so dangerous or barbarous a one as is generally imagined”.
Islamic cultures now came to be seen as spheres of Western patronage, secular and religious. The image of a vibrant, active, progressive West against a passive, inert Islam was congenial to colonial enterprise. Ironically, the religion of aggressive action now came to be viewed as passively stagnant, decadent and degenerate, ripe for domination by an assertive West.
The inability of Western commentators in the 19th century to endorse a newly submissive Islam arose from a deep-seated Western incapacity to treat Islam on equal terms. Indeed, the greater value of the West over all those it variously characterised as backward, degenerate, or uncivilised was a central feature of most discussions of non-Western forms of life.
In short, Islam and progress were incompatible. And there was a strong tendency throughout the Victorian period to blame Islam for all the imagined ills of Oriental societies – the moral degradation of women, slavery, the physical and mental debilities of men, envy, violence and cruelty, the disquiet and misery of private life, the continual agitations, commotions, and revolutions of public life.
Contemporary times
Cut to the 21st century and a post-imperialist age, and Muslim nationalisms are again on the rise, not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but in Indonesia, India and Pakistan. The West once again feels under threat. The myth of Islam as essentially violent has re-surfaced. But, interestingly, it has done so in a different way.
On the one hand, the growth of terrorism has moved the imagined military threat of Islam from the borders of the West to its very centres – to London, Paris, New York.
On the other hand, Islam is now seen as a cultural threat as much as a military one. Even at its most benign, it is perceived as threatening Western values by virtue of the Muslims in its midst, stubbornly refusing to acquiesce to Western values. Thus the need to keep Muslims out. In December 2015, to the outrage of many Americans, then presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the US. Better the enemy kept outside the wall than the enemy within.
The refusal of the UK to allow Shamima Begum, the school girl who left London in 2015 to join ISIS, to return to England is the most recent example of the fear of home-grown terrorism and the enemy “within”. That she appears to endorse a violent Islam and is lacking in remorse has not helped her cause.
In addition, a new discourse has emerged of Islam as having failed to have a Reformation and an Enlightenment as did the West. Thus, for example, former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott declared in December 2015 that Islam has never had its own version of the Reformation and the Enlightenment – the two events that seem to symbolise for Abbott the transition from barbarism to civilisation.
“It’s not culturally insensitive,” he declared, “to demand loyalty to Australia and respect for Western civilisation. Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God.”
Does Islam need an Enlightenment like Europe had in the 18th century? Well yes, in the sense that European governments finally legislated freedom of religion to stop Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other. Like Christianity in Europe in the 17th century, Islam in the 21st is as much at war with itself (especially in the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites) as it is at war with the West.
So, in the light of this history of Western attitudes to Islam, what are we to make of President Bush’s claim that Islam really is a religion of peace and that Muslim terrorists are, as a consequence, not true Muslims?
At its simplest, it is a recognition that there are vast numbers of Muslims, indeed the majority by far, both inside and outside the West, who endorse the virtues of tolerance, compassion, kindness and – simply put – just getting on with each other and with others.
It is also a recognition that multicultural and multi-religious societies thrive on unity and not divisiveness. As then Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull put it in March 2017, “What I must do, as a leader, and what all leaders should do in Australia, is emphasise our inclusivity, the fact that we are a multicultural society where all cultures, all faiths are respected and that is mutual. So, trying to demonise all Muslims is only confirming the lying, dangerous message of the terrorists.”
Many religions under one name
It is foolish to deny that there is a violent edge to Islam, as there is to Christianity and Judaism. In all these traditions, there is the tension between the idea of a God whose will is always good and a God whose will is always right.
And where God is seen as a being whose will can transcend the good (as he is in Islam, Christianity and Judaism), evil acts committed in his name can abound. Both peace and violence can equally find their justification in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish idea of God.
The willingness of the Islamic State group to accept reponsibility for the horrific bombings in Sri Lanka indicates their belief that such acts are in accord with the will of God.
That said, the question of whether Islam is essentially violent is not one that any longer makes much sense (if it ever did). The supposed fundamental oppositions between the West and Islam fail to map on to any reality.
“Islam” and “the West” are no longer helpful banners behind which any of us should enthusiastically rally. There really is no clash of civilisations here, not least because the notion of “civilisation”, Islamic or Western, really doesn’t have any purchase in a globalised world.
Moreover, we now know that it is difficult to identify the essence of any religion and futile to search for one. Any one religion is really many religions under the one name. So there are many Islams – Sunni and Shiite, but also Indonesian, Albanian, Malaysian, Moroccan, Pakistani, all culturally nuanced in quite different ways. This was evident in the many nationalities of those at prayer in the Christchurch mosques.
So too, there are many Christianities, often so different as to be hardly recognisable as parts of the same tradition – think Pentecostal snake handlers in the American south, Catholic peasants in Sicily devoted to the Virgin Mary, or cool Lutherans in Scandinavia.
The fault line in modern religion doesn’t go to a clash between civilisations or even to a clash between religions so much as to a struggle within religions and within cultures, between theologies, ethics, political ideologies, ethnicities, exclusivism and inclusivism.
It is a struggle between liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and moderates, reason and revelation. It is a battle within theologies between a God who is thought to be knowable through nature, man and history and a God who is thought to be only knowable through the revelations contained in the inerrant pages of the Torah, the New Testament or the Quran.
It is a struggle within all religions between those who believe there are “many paths to Heaven”, endorse freedom of religion, encourage tolerance and support mutual respect against those who believe there is only “one way to Paradise” and desire to impose this on everyone else, whatever it takes.
Indonesia conducted its presidential election on April 17, the fourth direct presidential election since the country’s transition to democracy in 1998. The election pitted two long-term rivals against each other: incumbent President Joko Widodo (popularly known as “Jokowi”) and former Suharto-era General Prabowo Subianto. It was one of the most divisive elections in Indonesia’s 73-year old history as an independent nation. It also saw Islam being used as a tool to create divisions in the largest Muslim-majority country in the world—a political cleavage that could divide the fourth most populous country in the world for a generation or more.
Two distinct political camps have emerged from the election, largely based on different interpretations of Islamic political theology and regional identities. Jokowi, who is widely expected to win re-election according to preliminary returns, is supported by a coalition of moderate Muslims living in central and eastern Java, the most populous island in Indonesia. Many are members of Nadhlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization. Jokowi also enjoys wide support among Indonesia’s substantial non-Muslim minority. Meanwhile, Prabowo is supported by conservative and hardline Muslims living primarily in the western coast of Java, as well as in the islands of Sumatera and Sulawesi.
During the eight-month campaign period, hardline Islamists within the Prabowo camp have portrayed Jokowi as a leader who lacks strong Islamic credentials and who is planning to implement policies to repress deeply religious Muslims. In return, NU members who supported Jokowi have portrayed these hardliners as religious extremists who wish to turn Indonesia into an Islamic or caliphate-based state.
Many of Prabowo’s Islamist supporters were former participants of 2016-17 Defending Islam movement (Aksi Bela Islam)—a movement to remove former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (popularly known as “Ahok”), who was a former Jokowi ally. A Christian of Chinese descent, Ahok was accused of committing religious blasphemy after he misspoke in a campaign rally.
Up to one million Muslims participated in the rallies sponsored by the Defending Islam movement. They ranged from members of hardline groups like Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Islamic Community Forum (FUI) to those affiliated with Muhammadiyah—Indonesia’s second largest Islamic organization, which tends to be moderate theologically but is less inclined to support Jokowi’s policies (compared to NU). These rallies resulted in Ahok’s re-election defeat and subsequent conviction for religious blasphemy, for which he served two years in prison.
Emboldened by their success, former Defending Islam activists—now calling themselves “Alumni 212”—set their next political target: President Jokowi himself. They aligned themselves with Prabowo long before the presidential election campaign started in August 2018 by forming groups like #2019ChangePresident (#2019GantiPresiden), which staged mass rallies and protests against Jokowi between March and September 2018.
The president feared the #2019ChangePresident group so much that he ordered law enforcement officers to disband its rallies and brought criminal charges against some of the group’s leading figures, including NGO activist Ratna Sarumpaet and singer Ahmad Dhani. These resulted in a growing concern that Jokowi is responding to the challenge from hardline Islamists by using authoritarian measures.
Once the formal campaign period began, Alumni 212 aligned themselves with Islamic parties like the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and the National Mandate Party (PAN) to support Prabowo’s presidential bid. It formally endorsed Prabowo in September 2018, even though Prabowo reneged on his promise to pick an Islamic cleric (ulama) as his running mate. Prabowo selected billionaire Sandiaga Uno as his vice-presidential candidate instead.
Under pressure to increase his Islamic credentials, Jokowi chose Indonesia’s most senior Islamic cleric: Ma’ruf Amin, head of the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI), who was also NU’s supreme leader. It was done despite concerns from pro-democracy and human rights advocates regarding Amin’s track record on religious and other minorities. As long-term head of MUI’s religious edicts (fatwa) commission, Amin was thought to be responsible for the issuance of fatwas condemning Ahmadi Muslim minorities (2005) and LGBT people (2012), which resulted in increased number of communal violence and persecutions against the two groups in the last decade.
However, Amin’s selection as Jokowi’s vice-presidential nominee solidified the NU leadership’s support for Jokowi. He received endorsement from its leaders and leading clerics, who also campaigned heavily for his re-election.
Meanwhile, in addition to Alumni 212, PKS, and PAN, Prabowo also received endorsements from Indonesia’s leading popular ulama—such as Abdul Somad, Abdullah Gymnastiar, and Adi Hidayat. These ulama are active internet users to propagate their teachings and have millions of social media followers, particularly among young Muslims between the ages of 20 and 35.
The mobilization of mainstream Islamic groups like NU in Jokowi’s camp and Alumni 212 and other hardline groups in Prabowo’s camp caused this year’s presidential campaign to take an ugly turn. The hardliners painted Jokowi as a “non-devout Muslim” and an “anti-Islamic” leader who plans to impose new restrictions against Muslims’ religious freedom. Meanwhile, NU clerics have accused Prabowo of siding with radical Islamists, claiming he plans to turn Indonesia into a caliphate state.
Research by the Indonesia Program of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in battleground provinces like Central Java, East Java, West Java, and South Sulawesi clearly shows that mobilization efforts done by hardline supporters of Prabowo were responsible for increasing Prabowo’s support among religious voters within these provinces. However, NU leaders’ portrayal these groups as radical Islamists with an extremist agenda also mobilized its followers—who mainly live in Central and East Java—to support Jokowi as well.
The polarized rhetoric used by both sides during this campaign might have contributed to the record voter turnout: estimated to be around 80 percent. It is now feared that the religiously-based polarization strategies used during the election might have long-term repercussions in Indonesian politics and society. Alumni 212 is now planning a new series of mass rallies to challenge the election results. Tough statements issued by Indonesian Armed Forces Chief Hadi Tjahjanto and National Police Chief Tito Karnavian in response to this plan indicated that Jokowi might be considering additional crackdown measures against these Islamists, in an effort to further marginalize them from Indonesia’s public sphere.
To conclude, a new axis of Islam and politics is emerging in Indonesia today. Hardline Islamists will continue to challenge Jokowi during his final five-year term as Indonesia’s president. However, if he decides to crack down against them, it might result in further deconsolidation of Indonesia’s democracy, which will be a setback in Indonesia’s trajectory as a Muslim-majority democratic nation.
The mass murder of Christians in Sri Lanka stunned many observers, not only because of the obvious barbarism of the act but because the prime target was Christians, and during Easter and in church. For those of us who have been writing and broadcasting for decades about the persecution of Christians, however, this obscenity came as little surprise.
Back in 2012, I was hosting a nightly television show and on one occasion my guest was a Christian minister from the Middle East. He asked me if he could put a Bible on the desk in front of him during the interview. I politely told him that I’d rather he didn’t, because it might look like proselytizing. He replied that he understood, but that this particular Bible might be of interest to the viewers. It had been in Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic cathedral in Baghdad on October 31, 2010 when a Sunni Muslim terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq attacked the church, murdering 58 people and wounding more than 75.
The book being held in front of me was almost beyond reading, as its pages were glued together in purple lumps, sticky with the blood of the men, women and children who had been slaughtered that warm evening in a place of peace, in a city where Christians had lived and flourished for almost 2000 years. This was not a holy book to be preached from, but a holy book of martyrdom that preached. Its hardly legible pages spoke entire volumes, its red-turned-to-brown stains cried out to a still largely indifferent world.
The Baghdad attack, however, was merely one example of the war on Christianity. Even Pope Francis, hardly militant in these areas, told a group of 40 Jewish leaders, including the then head of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, “First it was your turn and now it is our turn.” In February, 2014, U.S. representative Chris Smith, chairman of the congressional panel that oversees international human rights issues, told a congressional subcommittee that discussion of “anti-Christian persecution is not meant to minimize the suffering of other religious minorities who are imprisoned or killed for their beliefs” but to make it clear that Christians “remain the most persecuted religious group the world over.”
More than 300-million Christians are threatened with violence or face legal discrimination, forced conversion, and daily threats. In countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere they are frequently imprisoned and tortured on false charges of drinking and blasphemy, and in Iraq the exodus of Christians has been so great that the faith may even cease to exist in any meaningful sense in years to come.
But this is a good example of why we have to be very selective and informed in how and what we judge. Saddam Hussein was a brute, but he didn’t persecute Christians. It was the western invasion of Iraq that smashed the stability of the place, empowering Islamist groups and leading to the full-scale attack on the Christian minority. Similarly in Syria, Christians are generally protected, and in Palestine the national conversation was traditionally shaped by Greek Orthodox Christians. In Egypt the story is sadly different, in Turkey there is hardly even a concept of a “Turkish Christian,” and in Pakistan the once respected Christian minority is now intimidated and frightened.
This is not an issue of Islam refusing to accept Christianity, but of radicalized Islam and of ignorant, sadistic fanatics not accepting anybody but their own – they also slaughter Muslims who refuse to adopt their gruesome twisting of the Muslim faith. Yet Christians are without doubt the main victims of this systemic persecution and violence, and the western world says relatively little.
The reasons are complex, but one of the causes is that conservative Christians in North America and Europe so frequently claim victimhood, usually when they show intolerance towards LGBTQ people. This absurd boast of martyrdom leads to cynicism about the very real horrors experienced by Christians in other parts of the world. On a grander scale, when George W. Bush launched imperial campaigns in majority-Muslim areas and spoke of a Christian motive there was an understandable if misplaced anger. If Bush and his people were Christian, how could Christians be vulnerable and persecuted?
Then there is sheer ignorance, with the political and media class having so little experience of peoples outside of their comfort zone. There’s an assumption that Christians are somehow like them, are white and secure, powerful and prosperous, and thus not the correct demographic at all for sympathy. The middle-class solipsism of all this is nauseating.
The inescapable fact is that Christians are indeed a highly persecuted group in large parts of the world, and that Christianity even faces disappearance in the places where it was born. It is not a western faith but one rooted deeply in the Middle East, and its adherents in much of that region, and in Asia and Africa, demand our help and solidarity. If we choose between marginalized groups, and ignore one for whatever reason we conjure, we are failing in our intelligence, compassion, and humanity.
At a time when Islam’s place in the modern world is a matter of global contention, Brunei, a small monarchy in Southeast Asia, has offered its two cents. By April 3, the nation, which is predominantly Muslim, had begun adhering to a new penal code with harsh corporal punishments. Accordingly, gay men or adulterers may be stoned to death, and lesbians may be flogged. Thieves will lose first their right hand, and then their left foot.
Understandably, these bits of news brought outcries from the United Nations, human rights organizations and celebrities like George Clooney. In return, the Brunei government dismissed all criticisms, reminding the world that the country is “sovereign” and “like all other independent countries, enforces its own rule of laws.”
As a Muslim, I should first tell my coreligionists in Brunei that their argument is not very good. Of course every country can enforce its own laws, but the content of those laws isn’t immune from criticism when it violates human rights. Otherwise, we would have no basis to criticize China’s totalitarian persecution of Uighur Muslims or the illiberal bans on “religious symbols,” including the Islamic head scarf, in France and, more recently, Quebec.
However, the real issue isn’t Brunei. It is Islamic law, or Shariah, the penal code from which law is applied not just in Brunei but in about a dozen other nations as well, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. It includes brutal corporal punishments that shock the rest of the world. It also criminalizes acts that shouldn’t be crimes at all — such as consensual sex, loss of faith in Islam (“apostasy”) and the right to criticize it (“blasphemy”).
Muslims who insist on keeping or reviving these measures have a simple logic: Shariah is God’s law, and enforcing it is a religious duty. But their blind literalism is wrong for three reasons.
First, the corporal punishments in the Quran — amputation of limbs and flogging — may simply be related to the context of the Quran. In seventh-century Arabia, where the Prophet Muhammad lived, there were no prisons in which to incarcerate and feed people for a long time. For the same reason, corporal punishments — much cheaper and easier than imprisonment — were the universal norm until a few centuries ago. The Hebrew Bible commanded many of them, as did pre-modern European laws.
Second, much of the Shariah is actually man-made. Islamic scholars expanded jurisprudence based on debatable reports about the words and deeds of the Prophet, as well as the norms of their time. That is how blasphemy, apostasy and drunkenness, none of which is penalized in the Quran, became crimes.
Third, Islamic jurisprudence was developed for Muslims only, whereas Christians and Jews had their own laws. But all modern nation-states, including Brunei, are both centralized and diverse. So imposing Shariah as the law of the land will go against the rights of minorities, in addition to unorthodox Muslims.
All of those arguments are persuasively made by reformist thinkers in Islam. But I doubt that conservative authorities in Brunei will have much heart for them. So let me call on them to check an authority they can’t dismiss that easily: the Ottoman Empire, the last Islamic superpower of the world and the last seat of the Sunni Caliphate.
The Ottomans, who followed the flexible Hanafi school of jurisprudence, were pragmatic about law from the beginning. Decrees issued by sultans introduced fines or prison sentences instead of corporal punishments, rendering the latter often practically obsolete.
Moreover, in the mid-19th century the Ottomans initiated a major Reform (Tanzimat) era, which included the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code of 1858. The French-inspired law was designed to be valid for all Ottoman citizens, regardless of their religion, and remained in practice until the end of the empire with some modifications. It replaced all remaining corporal punishments in Ottoman law with prison sentences or forced labor. It also decriminalized apostasy and penalized blasphemy, or “interference with religious privileges,” with only “imprisonment of from one week to three months” (Article 132).
The penal code’s section on sexual crimes is worth a look, for it is much more liberal than the laws Brunei just began implementing 161 years later.
According to Article 200, for example, “an abominable act” with “a girl who has not yet been married to a man” was an offense — but only when done “by force.” In other words, consensual premarital sex was not a crime.
Extramarital sex, or adultery, was an offense under Article 201 — but to be punished with a prison sentence of “three months to two years,” not stoning to death.
What about homosexuality? The Ottoman penal code didn’t say anything about it. John Bucknill and Haig Utidjian, who translated the law into English in 1913, noted, “It will be observed that unless committed with force” or upon a minor, “sodomy is not a criminal offense under the Ottoman Penal Code.”
Hard to see the debate over “willed” or “permitted” having any material effect apart from theological debates:
Pope Francis has further clarified his controversial statement issued in Abu Dhabi, in which he appeared to state that God “wills” the existence of many religions.
This appears to contrast with the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church, which teaches, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, that the “one true religion subsists in the Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which the Lord Jesus committed the duty of spreading it abroad among all men.”
The informal clarification came at today’s general audience, as the Pope reflected on his recent trip to Muslim-majority Morocco. In unscripted remarks, he said to pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square:
But some may wonder: but why does the Pope go visit the Muslims and not only the Catholics? Because there are so many religions, and why are there so many religions? With the Muslims we are descendants of the same Father, Abraham: why does God allow so many religions to exist? God wanted to allow this: the Scholastic theologians referred to the voluntas permissiva [permissive will] of God. He willed to permit this reality: there are many religions; some are born of culture, but they always look to heaven, they look to God. But what God does will is fraternity among us, and in a special way — hence the reason for this journey — with our brothers, who are sons of Abraham, like us, the Muslims. We must not be afraid of the difference: God has permitted this. We ought to be frightened if we do not work in fraternity, to walk together in life.
In February, Pope Francis came under fire for signing a joint statement with a Grand Imam in Abu Dhabi, saying that a “pluralism and diversity” of religions is “willed by God.”
The Feb. 4 statement incited controversy among Christians for asserting that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions” — like the diversity of “color, sex, race and language” — are “willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings” — a claim many believe to be contrary to the Catholic faith.
Some critics argued the Pope’s statement seemed not only to “overturn the doctrine of the Gospel” but also to align with the ideas of Freemasonry.
Observers pointed out that the potential for confusion was compounded by the fact that both Al-Azhar and the Catholic Church asked in the document that it “become the object of research and reflection in all schools, universities and institutes of formation.”
To remedy the confusion arising from the statement, four days later Bishop Athanasius Schneider issued a statement on uniqueness of faith in Jesus Christ. Three weeks after that, at a Mar. 1 ad limina meeting of the bishops of Kazakhstan and Central Asia with Pope Francis at the Vatican, Bishop Schneider privately obtained from Pope Francis a clarification that God only permits but does not positively will a “diversity of religions.”
The Pope explicitly stated that Schneider could share the contents of their exchange on this point. “You can say that the phrase in question on the diversity of religions means the permissive will of God,” he told the assembled bishops, who come from predominantly Muslim regions.
Bishop Schneider in turn asked the Pope officially to clarify the statement in the Abu Dhabi document.
In light of the Abu Dhabi statement and today’s informal clarification from Pope Francis, LifeSite spoke with Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy, a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission and former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops’ committee on doctrine, about the controversy.
In 2017, Fr. Weinandy wrote a letter to Pope Francis (which was subsequently made public) saying his pontificate is marked by “chronic confusion” and warning that teaching with a “seemingly intentional lack of clarity risks sinning against the Holy Spirit.”
In our interview with the Fr. Weinandy on the Abu Dhabi statement, he identifies what he believes is its most problematic element, and offers his perspective on both on the Pope’s private clarification to Bishop Schneider and his public remarks at this week’s general audience.
Fr. Weinandy says while he believes Pope Francis is motivated by a “noble desire” to “foster mutual understanding” and “undercut some Islamic factions that foster terrorism,” his signing the Abu Dhabi statement “has doctrinal consequences well beyond what he may have envisioned or desired.”
“What I find very sad and scandalously troubling” he added, “is that, in the midst of it all, Jesus is being insulted. He is reduced to the level of Buddha or Mohammed when in fact he is the Father’s beloved Messianic Son, the one in whom the Father is well pleased.”
As Malaysia’s ruling Pakatan Harapan government contends with a marriage of convenience between the two largest opposition parties, pressure is mounting on it to show it can defend the interests of Malay-Muslims, who make up 75 per cent of voters.
Enter a new initiative to crack down on insults against Islam. On March 7, the Department of Islamic Development (Jakim), the country’s most powerful Islamic affairs agency, set up a special unit to police insults against Islam on social media and other platforms.
Each complaint would be scrutinised and legitimate ones reported to the police or the communications regulator, said Deputy Minister Fuziah Salleh, who is overseeing the unit.
In just a week, the complaints body received 10,000 reports and as of Wednesday, it had 13,498 reports.
In Mahathir’s new Malaysia, a perfect storm for Pakatan Harapan?
The agency’s creation came soon after a 22-year-old Malaysian, whose details were withheld by the authorities, was given an unprecedented sentence of 10 years for posting content online that insulted Islam and the Prophet Mohammed, a decision that lawyers said went against the rule of law.
And police are investigating the organisers of the International Women’s Day March under the colonial-era Sedition Act, on the back of public accusations that the presence of LGBT activists at a Women’s Day parade on March 9 glorified behaviour not in accordance with Islamic teachings.
In Muslim-majority Malaysia, same-sex relations are banned, and sedition laws have been used against those who express dissent or excite disaffection against state institutions.
Observers such as Oh Ei Sun of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs have pointed out the irony of these developments. Pakatan Harapan, led by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, won office on promises of legal reform and improved human rights for all Malaysians.
But it is now moving to stem the growing appeal of an alliance between former ruling party the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) and the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) – the former championing Malay rights and the latter milking pro-Muslim sentiments.
Umno-PAS’ attractiveness to voters has been heightened by the government’s struggle to realise its election pledges of higher salaries and a lower cost of living.
“The Malay parties in Pakatan Harapan have to pander to the conservatives by regressing to religio-racial supremacy in order to maintain a foothold in the Malay vote bank, especially in view of their successive crushing defeats in recent by-elections,” Oh said.
Political economist Terence Gomez, along with prominent local activists, also criticised this political “trend” of political parties capitalising on perceived insults to religion to gain popularity.
“In the application of laws prohibiting insulting religion, we must strive for a rational and liberal balance with the protection of the freedom of expression while being mindful of the religious sensitivities of our multi-religious communities. Hence open mindedness and moderation should be the norm in the interpretation and application of the existing laws,” the group said.
It added that criticising issues such as child marriage or female circumcision – permitted under Malaysia’s sharia laws – was “perfectly defensible”.
Fuziah said the complaints received by the unit regarded insults to Islam and the Prophet.
“One touches on insulting the Agong,” she said, referring to Malaysia’s ruler and head of state.She did not comment on whether any police reports had been filed.
Where does Malaysia stand on gay rights? Nobody knows
But so far only 28 links had been sent to the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, which is supposed to take them down. Another 15 complaints were being investigated, Fuziah said.
The commission told the South China Morning Post it had not received any reports as of Wednesday, but would “provide assistance to Jakim as required”.
When the new Jakim unit was launched, Fuziah told local media she was aware some insults online were published by those with fake accounts. Some were also “unhealthy retaliations”, she said, sparked by comments by opposition politicians against non-Muslims.
As the battle against the Islamic State (IS) group in eastern Syria enters its final stages, the BBC’s Jewan Abdi says the mood amongst many of the jihadists’ supporters who have left the area, including many women, remains defiant.
The encampment in the village of Baghuz is barely more than a few holes in the dirt covered with blankets. It is squalid and filthy.
But above it flies the black Islamic State flag, fresh and clean. IS fighters had raised it only the day before, an act of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.
“That’s a sign they will fight,” says a soldier belonging to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on the front lines battling the jihadists.
Just 24 hours later the battle resumed. It was the end of a ceasefire that had seen more than 12,000 leave in the preceding few days.
One day last week in the early morning, more than 20 trucks led by Humvees armed with machine guns went inside the tiny IS enclave to evacuate jihadist fighters and their families.
I followed these vehicles on their return journey to the desert where they were checked, separated, and sent on to camps run by the SDF forces. One military commander told me the total number of people evacuated was about 7,000.
The hunger and anger was evident on their faces. As I walked among them with my camera, trying to talk to them and film, several IS women suddenly attacked me and threw stones, dust and cans.
“Go film the brothers, don’t come here. Go. Leave. Go film them, we’re the woman of the Islamic State, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar (God is greatest),” they said.
A few weeks ago, the SDF estimated the number of IS families and fighters left remaining in Baghuz to be between 1,500 and 2,000 people. But in just two days last week, 9,000 people emerged.
The final territory under IS’s control may be on its last legs in Syria, but the ideology remains strong among those who have left.
Many of the IS women I encountered threatened of violent jihad and raising their children to become jihadist fighters.
Two captors for one woman
Among the thousands of people turning up out of Baghuz, I also found victims of IS’s notorious brutality, including one Yazidi woman called Adiba.
A mother of two, Adiba was enslaved for five years after IS attacked her small village in Sinjar, northern Iraq, in 2014.
Her husband was one of the hundreds of Yazidi men killed by the jihadist group, and she – like thousands of Yazidi women – was forced to convert to Islam and was used as a sex slave.
She says she was enslaved by a Moroccan man who beat her constantly and raped her. He was the father of her two-year-old child.
“I had to marry him. When we were alone he wasn’t good to me, he was always angry with me, but in front of people he treated me well,” Adiba tells me.
After Adiba’s first captor died, she was taken by another Moroccan man named Ahmed – orders she says came from her first captor in the event of his death.
Ahmed, who surrendered to the SDF last week, has denied enslaving Adiba.
Most of the people evacuated from Baghuz recently, including many foreigners who travelled to Syria and Iraq to live under IS rule, have been transported to the SDF-controlled camp al-Hol, in the north-east of the country.
The camp was designed to accommodate 20,000 people but the UN says conditions there are dire as the numbers have risen to more than 66,000.
The global dream of an Islamic State caliphate – a state governed in accordance with Islamic law – is on the brink of collapse, with most of its leadership gone and many captured by the SDF and coalition forces.
Hundreds of IS fighters have surrendered. Separated from their families, they sit in long queues in an area inaccessible to journalists, where US Special Forces and SDF soldiers interrogate them and send them on to detention centres and prisons under Kurdish control.
After losing their self-proclaimed caliphate, a sense of sadness, anger and indignation was clear among these fighters who are stuck in the middle of the desert, waiting to be moved into detention camps, away from their wives and children.
These are heady times for Kahina Bahloul, organizer of a women’s mosque in France, a country that is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe. Practical considerations dominate the spiritual — a search for an affordable location, a flurry of radio and television interviews marking the rise of a vanguard of women imams leading pop-up mosques from Berlin to Berkeley, Calif.
Ms. Bahloul, 39, who was trained as a lawyer in Algeria, said she stopped attending formal prayer services in Paris about three years ago because “I didn’t feel respected.”
She said she was taken aback by mosques that isolated women, steering them to back doors and relegating the worshipers to basements or seats hidden behind screens. She gave up after one mosque directed the women to pray in a nearby garage.
“I felt excluded by the mosques,” said Ms. Bahloul, who is earning a doctorate in Islamic studies from France’s École Pratique des Hautes Études and intends to be one of two imams leading prayers at the mosque. “I felt excluded by my community — and a lot of other women felt the same way.”
Together with Faker Korchane, 40, a high school philosophy teacher and a freelance journalist, she is developing the Fatima Mosque while searching for rental space in the Paris region. Their concept is a liberal mosque that will host weekly prayers led alternately by a female and male imam with worshipers of both sexes separated on either side of the same prayer hall.
Ms. Bahloul is building on an evolving tradition of women imams with history dating from the 19th century in China among the Hui Muslims. There, women lead mosques exclusively for women. But in the last three years, women imams elsewhere have begun to organize women’s mosques with varying styles in Denmark, Germany, Canada and the United States.
In 2016, the Mariam mosque opened in central Copenhagen, with the call to prayer sung by women. A year later, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-born German lawyer and activist, founded the Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque in Berlin. To great fanfare and speeches, a women’s mosque started in Berkeley, Calif., in 2017 at Starr King School for the Ministry, a graduate school and Unitarian Universalist seminary.
Rabi’a Keeble, a Muslim convert and graduate of that seminary, founded the Berkeley mosque, Qal’bu Maryam. But she quickly faced challenges. It was not easy to attract Muslim women, who were wary of the organizers, she said.
“You assume there must be other like-minded people all over the place,” Ms. Keeble said. “What woman wants to continue to sit behind, walk behind, listen to men interpret scripture to their benefit? There must be a bunch of women waiting for someone to step up and kick those doors down. Well, that’s just not true.”
The Berkeley mosque’s location was always tenuous. After a year occupying free space, the group moved to a temporary home, she said, and recently found new quarters at First Congregational Church of Oakland.
Real estate is the critical issue that determines the strength of reform mosques. In 2012, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed opened a mosque in Paris designed to be inclusive to women and welcoming to homosexual Muslims. Faced with insults and some hostility, Mr. Zahed said members preferred to be discreet, moving locations every three months to avoid being targeted. The mosque closed after three years, and Mr. Zahed has since resettled in Marseille in the south of France to run an institute to train reform imams.
“We had threats and people identified the places,” Mr. Zahed said of the Paris mosque. “Then owners didn’t want us to stay any longer. They were very happy to have us in the beginning, but they had so much political pressure that they wanted us to leave. It was always like this.”
Ms. Bahloul has not faced that kind of pressure for the Fatima Mosque, a concept she has openly promoted since January with a series of television interviews in France that have provoked hundreds of comments. She has also drawn coverage in Brazil, Italy and Canada, and in Northern Africa in Morocco, which characterized her concept as revolutionary.
“Among Muslims there are two reactions,” she said. “Most are very favorable — ‘finally a breath of fresh air. We have been waiting for this for a long time.’ There are others who are insulting and accuse us of trying to change the real Islam. But what is real Islam? Those critics have a very simple approach and have a superficial understanding of Islam.”
Ms. Bahloul’s views are shaped by her eclectic background, divided between France and Algeria, where she grew up in northern Kabylia, the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Her maternal grandmother was a Polish Jew and her grandfather French Catholic.
“Since I was young, I have always posed questions,” Ms. Bahloul said. “What really struck me was the evolution of the practice of Islam of my paternal grandparents, who were very traditional, cultural and spiritual. And after that I watched the spread of the conservative Salafist movement and the first veils worn by women in the 1990s.”
For now the organizers are preoccupied with practical concerns — renting a location, eventually organizing a crowdfunding campaign, reaching out to city officials who could aid in the search for space for Friday prayers and community meetings.
In the meantime, Ms. Bahloul teaches about Islam online through her association, Parle-moi d’Islam, with lectures on how to read the Quran or prosaic themes such as: “Does the Quran say to hit wives?”
Mr. Korchane, the co-founder, also says they must work to reach another pivotal group. He wants to create special videos to attract young Muslims, who he says sometimes lack deep knowledge of Islam. “They think, for example,” he said, “that eating halal or wearing a veil are part of the pillars of Islam.”
Reminder of need for caution regarding wannabe returnees:
AL-HOL CAMP, Syria, March 8 (Reuters) – Foreign women with Islamic State have tried to assault others they deem “infidels” at a camp where they are being held in northeast Syria, attempting to impose their views even as the jihadists are facing territorial defeat, Reuters journalists visiting the site have found.
“They yell at us that we are infidels for showing our faces,” said a Syrian woman at al-Hol camp, where women and children were transferred from Islamic State’s final bastion in eastern Syria. “They tried to hit us.”
The Baghouz enclave is Islamic State’s last shred of populated territory after years of attacks have rolled back its ultra-radical “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.
But its impending defeat is confronting the U.S.-allies Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the problem of what to do with growing numbers of people, many of them Islamic State followers, emerging from the enclave.
Most have been sent to al-Hol camp, already overcrowded with uprooted Syrians and Iraqis. Camp officials say they do not have enough tents, food, or medicine. Aid workers warn of spreading diseases, and dozens of children have died on the way there.
At least 62,000 people have now flooded the camp, the United Nations said on Friday, way above its capacity. More than 90 percent of the new arrivals are women and children.
The Syrian Kurdish authorities who control the camp have cordoned off the foreign women. On Friday, dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing full face veils, they gathered behind a fence with a locked gate.
“The foreigners throw stones. They swear at the Syrians or Iraqis and at the camp officials. Even the kids make threats,” said a security official at the camp.
‘WE NEED HELP’
Guards have fired in the air to break up a few fights and on one occasion used a taser to pacify a foreign female jihadist detainee, another Syrian woman at the camp said.
Some of the women coming out of Baghouz in recent weeks have displayed strongly pro-Islamic State sympathies.
Hundreds of jihadists have also surrendered. But the Kurdish-led SDF believes the most hardened are still inside, ready for a fight to the death.
Before the final assault on Baghouz, the SDF said it was holding some 800 foreign Islamic State militants and 2,000 of their wives and children. While it has not given updated figures, the numbers have ballooned, prompting fresh calls for support.
“The situation in the camp is very miserable. The displaced are growing very much and we are trying to cover people’s needs as much as we can. But we need help,” said Mazin Shekhi, an official at the camp.
When young children arrive alone, officials deliver them to aid agencies or try to find adults to care for them at the camp for now, he added.
“Even the big tents are full. People are sleeping out in the open.”
The International Rescue Committee said at least 100 people have died, mostly children, en route or soon after reaching the camp, and more than 100 children have arrived on their own. The aid agency warned the camp had reached breaking point.
Women from different countries begged for food or asked about their detained husbands, while young boys kicked a ball around in the dirt amid scores of tents swaying in the wind.
CAMP SKIRMISHES
Some of the tensions at al-Hol reflect friction that has simmered for years between jihadists who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State, “al-Muhajirin”, and locals who were members or lived under its rule.
“There were problems with some people,” said a 30-year-old woman from Turkestan who gave her name as Dilnor.
She said her entire family had moved to Syria to escape oppression at home and “just wanted to live under the caliphate”. Her mother, father and siblings all followed her to Syria.
“The natives … they were kind of rude. They always said the muhajirin are a problem and dirty and so on. It was always like that,” she said outside the wire fence of the pen where she was staying with scores of other women.
“Now (they) are alone, and the muhajirin alone. Now there are no problems.”
Shekhi, the camp official, said foreign women with ties to Islamic State had been kept apart so “they don’t mix” with others. “We put them in a section alone to avoid them making problems with the displaced,” he said.
The foreign women often fought among themselves, he added.
“There are some who are more extremist who don’t accept others. This is happening just among themselves, because they are separated from the Syrians and Iraqis,” he said. “The situation is under control.”
The staunch loyalties of Islamic State followers point to the risk the group will continue to pose after the capture of Baghouz. It is also widely accepted that the militants will still represent a threat, holding remote patches of territory and mounting guerrilla attacks.
Beijing has vowed to push ahead with its controversial campaign to “Sinicise religion”, defying growing international condemnation over its sweeping crackdown on Muslims and Christians.
Delivering his annual government work report on Tuesday, Premier Li Keqiang told the national legislature that “we must fully implement the [Communist] Party’s fundamental policy on religious affairs and uphold the Sinicisation of religion in China”.
The push to “Sinicise religion” – introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2015 – is an attempt by the officially atheist party to bring religions under its absolute control and into line with Chinese culture.
The campaign has coincided with an intensified clampdown on religious freedom across the country, especially on Protestants, Catholics and Muslims who the party fears could become tools of foreign influence or ethnic separatism.
In the far western region of Xinjiang, over 1 million Uygurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities have reportedly been held in internment camps and forced to denounce Islam and pledge loyalty to the party.
Expressions and observance of Islam, ethnic customs and culture have also been curbed or discouraged in what some critics called a “cultural cleansing” of the Uygur minority.
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring regions of Ningxia Hui and Gansu – home to many Hui Muslims – domes, Islamic decor and Arabic signs have been taken off the streets and some mosques. No new “Arab style” mosques can be built and some Arabic-language schools have been shut down.
Outside the western regions, a wave of underground congregations – including the Zion Church in Beijing and Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, both prominent “house churches” – have been forced to shut down, with their members and pastors interrogated and detained.
Early Rain pastor Wang Yi has remained in detention facing subversion charges since a raid on his church in December.
The crackdowns – especially the mass detentions and security lockdown in Xinjiang – have been met with a rising chorus of criticism not only from human rights groups, but also academics, foreign governments and the United Nations.
Vatican will improve bishop agreement with Beijing to help reunite mainland China’s underground Catholic churches, envoy of Pope Francis says
But according to the government’s work report, Beijing plans to continue tightening its grip on religion. The “Sinicisation of religion” was included in Xi’s report – laying out broad policy directions for the next five years – to the party congress in late 2017 that kicked off his second term in power.
It has been included in the two government work reports that followed, for 2018 and 2019.
Last year, the party-controlled governing bodies for Protestants, Catholics and Muslims in China all released detailed five-year plans on how to Sinicise their own religions.
For Christianity, the plan calls for “Sinicised theology”, including retranslating the Bible and rewriting annotations.
It also demands Chinese traditional culture be integrated into expressions of faith, with “Chinese elements” to be added to liturgies, sacred music, clerical clothing and church buildings. Examples given include using traditional Chinese tunes to compose hymns and encouraging Christians to practise calligraphy and Chinese painting.
Multicultural Meanderings 