Religion & Society

Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, hardline leader of Indonesia’s notorious Islamic Defenders Front, is no friend of Christians and Christianity. So when he returned on November 10 to the world’s most populous Muslim nation after a three year self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia, there was a sense of foreboding among Indonesia’s 30 million Christians of what was to come. Rizieq was nurtured on a diet of religious extremism with a Wahhabi flavour. He attended mainstream Indonesian schools before studying at the Islamic and Arabic College of Indonesia (LIPIA), an overseas campus of the Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This prepared him for further studies at King Saud University (1990-92), topped off by a year of study at the International Islamic University in Malaysia. In August 1998, Rizieq established the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). This organisation quickly embarked on its hardline ideological program of violent rioting and attacking opponents. Rizieq’s notor...

An inaccurate reference to ‘Biblical corruption’ has sparked a storm of protest in Malaysia’s Parliament. The dispute erupted after comments by Muslim MP Nik Muhammad Zawawi Nik Salleh during a debate about increasing fines for drink-driving offenders. Nik Zawawi asserted that religions other than Islam forbade their followers from drinking alcohol. A Christian Member of Parliament, Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham, corrected him, adding that Christians are allowed to consume alcohol, but not to the point of intoxication and debauchery. Nik Zawawi replied curtly that Datuk Ngeh should check his facts as the original Bible, before it was changed, forbade any consumption of alcohol, adding that he had read about Christianity in documents written by Christians. Christian apologists who engage with Muslim critics of the Bible and Christianity are very familiar with the common claim by Muslim polemicists that today’s Bible has been changed. According to this claim, Jesus received an original Gospel which...

     As with the United Kingdom, the Black Lives Matter protests which have swept across the United States have overflowed to Australian society. The tangle of BLM issues with the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered bitter debate and some social dislocation.      The weekend of June 6–7 was a particular focal point. Black Lives Matter protest organisers announced plans for significant gatherings in Australia’s major cities to draw attention to the deaths in custody of Aboriginal Australians arrested for various reasons. There have been at least 432 indigenous deaths in custody since a royal commission examined the issue in 1991. This has been a simmering matter for decades, erupting into protest action at various point in time, and almost predictably piggybacking onto the worldwide BLM activism presently underway.      When the plans for the early June protests were announced, most state and federal governing authorities banned the...