Religion & Society

Today, the expression, “shari‘a” – as in “shari‘a law” and “shari‘a finance” – is heard with increasing frequency. It is important to get clear on just what shari‘a is, particularly since some Muslims wish to bring it to prominence and even dominance around the world. The great Western scholar of Islamic law, Joseph Schacht, once described the shari‘a as "the core and kernel of Islam itself."1 The concept appears obliquely in the Qur’an at verse 45:18: “Then We put thee on the (right) Way of Religion [shari‘a]: so follow thou that (Way), and follow not the desires of those who know not.” This passage underpins the common Muslim claim that shari‘a law is divinely sourced, fixed and immutable, a gift to humanity from Allah, designed to show Muslims how to live and govern correctly. Of course, there are different schools of interpretation. By the middle of the eighth century A.D., several had emerged in the Muslim Abbasid Empire. Of these, four survived among majority Sunni Musl...

“I cannot do everything but I must not do nothing,” said Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury, concluding two seminars during her recent visit to Melbourne. She was here as part of a national tour connected with the work of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), of which she is international CEO. At a reception held for her at Parliament House on 7 October, Baroness Cox emphasised the need to “speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.” She explained that her HART teams “especially aim to reach those under oppression and persecution who are not accessible to large aid organisations that depend on government approvals to do their work.” She cited the case of the devastating Burma cyclone disaster of 2008, when the Burmese military junta prevented aid organisations from reaching many of the victims. In her presentations, the Baroness spoke at length about the situation in Burma, where 30,000 Karen and 10,000 Shan refugees were driven from their homes into the jungle by the junta i...

While hung parliaments are a relatively common occurrence in some countries, there have only been two in Britain since World War Two: those that followed the elections of February 1974 and May 2010. It is curious that Australia should also produce a hung parliament within 4 months of Britain, the first at the national level since the elections of 1940. Australia’s August election campaign has been described as “boring” by many commentators, but in terms of faith matters it produced some colourful and controversial statements. Until June 2010 everybody expected the governing Australian Labor Party to be led into these elections by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, a practicing Anglican. He was expected to do battle with the Liberal-National coalition parties led by Tony Abbott, a practicing Catholic. The discourse surrounding their rivalry only rarely had sectarian overtones; it was more commonly pointed out in media comment that both leaders were Christians, rather than being cast in terms of...

A leading UK evangelical, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, considered challenges facing the church from radical Islam and militant secularism during his recent visit to Melbourne. The visit, sponsored by Family Voice Australia, included three public lectures attended by hundreds of Christians from various denominations. “My father left Islam to become a Christian in our native Pakistan,” he explained. “As I grew up, I had very good relations with Muslim children at school. But over the last 30 years the harmony between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan has been poisoned by the resurgence of radical Islam.” He was appointed Bishop of Raiwind in West Punjab in 1984. “Especially noteworthy for me was that Raiwind was the headquarters of Tablighi Jama’at. At that time they drew 800,000 Muslim missionaries to their annual gathering there. Today it is even more.” With death threats in an increasingly Islamized Pakistan under President Zia ul-Haq, Bishop Nazir-Ali moved to Britain in 1986 on the ...

NEWS from Pakistan has been dominated in recent weeks by both the devastating flooding and the diplomatic row after David Cameron referred to the Pakistani authorities’ “looking both ways” on terror. These sad developments have pushed another disturbing event into the background. On 19 July, two Christian brothers, Pastor Rashid Emmanuel, aged 32, and his brother Sajid, 24, both of them leaders in United Ministries Pakistan, were shot dead in the precinct of Faisalabad courthouse in the Punjab. Both had been arrested on blasphemy charges two weeks earlier, but the charges were about to be dropped in the absence of any evidence. The scandal of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan has deep roots. In 1978, the tough General Zia-ul-Haq came to power, after a coup deposing the elected President, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. General Zia ruled for ten years, and oversaw a process of Islamisation of the legal system and society in Pakistan. This included the Hudood Ordinance, in 1979, which prescribed the w...

On July 19, 2010, two Christian brothers accused of distributing blasphemous material were gunned down on the premises of the sessions court in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Rashid Emmanuel, a 36-year-old pastor, and Sajid Masih Emmanuel, 30, had been running United Ministries Pakistan for the last two years in the Christian community of Dawood Nagar. Their murder represents the latest episode in the ongoing troubles of Pakistani Christians... The full text of this article appears in "Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity" 23/6 (September/October 2010). Read in full at http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/issue.php?id=158

At 1.5% of the population, Australia’s Muslim community is somewhat smaller than those of many European nations, such as France (10%), Netherlands (6%), Belgium (3.6%) and Britain (3%). It is also generally a younger and more ethnically diverse community, compared with France, Germany and Britain where North African Muslims, Turks and Pakistanis respectively are particularly prominent. Nevertheless, trends among European Muslim minorities usually also emerge among Australia’s Muslims, though somewhat later. So do debates that surround these Muslim minority communities of Europe. One debate that won’t go away in European countries concerns Muslim women who wear a face veil, in the form of the niqab (which reveals the eyes) or the body-length burqa (a full face covering). In April Belgium's lower house of parliament banned face-covering Islamic dress in public. The northern Spanish city of Lleida also recently barred women from wearing such veils inside municipal buildings. France is...

In the lead-up to the recent British general election, political party leaders addressed the sensitive topic of Immigration. Gordon Brown’s major address on this topic on 31 March, entitled “Controlling Immigration for a Fairer Britain”, sought to balance firmness with fairness. Meanwhile David Cameron called for a cap on immigration to the level of the early 1990s, when it averaged 50,000 annually. Public interest in this topic is widespread in Western countries, given population movements to the West in recent decades. In Australia the asylum seeker debate in particular is assuming pressure-cooker proportions. The debate is taking place at two levels. Some refugees arrive through the official program of resettlement of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). However, there are also “illegal immigrants” who arrive in Australia on boats often after paying exorbitant charges to anonymous people smugglers. Popular reaction against the second can have an impact on v...

“As we enter the 21st century, Muslim women have developed into a critical mass and are exercising their voice about their lived realities in new ways.” So said Professor Amina Wadud in a public lecture on 18 February at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. The lecture, entitled "Muslim Women and Gender Justice: Methods, Motivation and Means", was sponsored by the US Consulate in Melbourne. An Islamic “ordination” debate The American Muslim activist was visiting from her base at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US. She has long been a controversial figure among Muslims, leading a campaign that gets to the root of the gender debate within Islam about women being religious leaders, rather than merely participants. While most Islamic legal scholars, both Sunni and Shi’a, allow a woman to lead prayers to women-only congregations, the leading of mixed-gender prayers is reserved for male imams. In 2005 Wadud led mixed-gender Muslim prayers in New York in a building...

The Wedding Song (Le Chant des Mariées) Released 2009 Director: Karin Albou Writer: Karin Albou Country: France / Tunisia Language: In French and Arabic with subtitles Runtime: 100mins Broadcast on SBS 11 November 2009 This excellent film, set in Tunisia in 1942 during the German occupation, focuses on two 16 year old girls, Myriam (Jewish) and Nour (Muslim). Both their families are poor; Nour because that is her family’s lot, and Myriam because she and her mother have fallen on hard times after the death of her father. The two families live in adjoining apartments overlooking the same courtyard in the alleyways of Tunis, where the two girls have grown up together, developing a strong sisterly bond and sharing secrets and dreams of love. Myriam has been to school and is literate; Nour has not attended school, so Myriam has taught her to read Arabic. The girls consider their different religious faiths as being of no consequence to their friendship. Each girl is to be married off by thei...

The Australian city of Melbourne and its new Convention Centre played host last December to the Parliament of the World’s Religions (PWR), arguably the world’s pre-eminent interfaith event. The PWR was birthed in Chicago in 1893 but remained in a state of limbo for a century until being revived in 1993, with subsequent meetings held in 1999, 2004, and, most recently, December 3–9, 2009. The full text of this article was published in "Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity" 23/2 (March/April 2010), pp47-48

A busy life in a big city with a demanding job can creep up on you, pushing alternative perspectives on life to the margins, and threatening to relegate faith to a mechanical hour or so on a Sunday. In such circumstances, one way to take time out for some therapeutic spiritual reflection is to have a monastic experience. At least, this is what has worked for me down the years. After establishing myself in London in the mid-1990s, and getting buried in my work, I was introduced by a close friend to a wonderful Benedictine monastery in the north of France, only thirty minutes from Calais. Over the last ten years I have visited it five times; these visits have taken place at different times of the year, and all have been satisfying. However, perhaps the most meaningful have been those visits coinciding with the Advent season, where the solitude and silence afforded by the monastic environment have served as an ideal context to consider the birth of Christ and its significance in human sa...

THE New Year has started badly for Christians in Malaysia. In the past week, a number of churches have been firebombed, and Malaysian police have increased security at Christian places of worship around the country. The trigger to these incidents was a ruling, issued on New Year’s Eve, by the Malaysian High Court, which allowed Roman Catholics to use the term “Allah” to describe the Christian God in the national language, Bahasa Malaysia (News, 18 December). This overturned an earlier ban by the Malaysian government. In response, the Malaysian Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Mohd Najib, quickly announced that the Ministry of Home Affairs would appeal in the case. The dispute has deep roots. Of Malaysia’s population of 27 million, 60 per cent are Muslim, nine per cent are Christian, and there are sub­stantial numbers of Buddhists (19 per cent) and Hindus (six per cent). The resurgence in Islamic con­sciousness that has swept the world since the 1970s had a profound impact on Muslims in Malay...

The Swiss referendum in December, which supported a ban on construction of minarets, signalled troubles in the West-Muslim relationship. The reasons for these troubles, as well as possible solutions, were considered in a plenary session entitled “Islam and the West: Creating an Accord of Civilisations” at the December 2009 gathering in Melbourne of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Professor Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University spoke from personal experience as a Muslim in Europe, explaining that “if we travel within both Western and Muslim countries we can quickly see a clash of perceptions. The Swiss referendum was not simply an issue of minarets. Many Swiss people who opposed the ban on minarets nevertheless expressed mistrust of Muslims,” he said. “Similarly a poll in France suggested 46% support there for a ban on minarets. The opposition is really directed at the visible Muslim presence in the West. Across Europe this new Muslim visibility is a concern.” Speakers considered...