Religion & Society

You would expect Malaysia to be a test case for pluralism but for more than 30 years there’s a been a really substantial program of Islamisation in Malaysia pushed by its government. Read on and listen to the interview on Vision Radio Twenty20   here .

Indonesia provides a very good case study for the persistence and determination of Islamist ideology. When the nation gained its independence in the 1940s, a struggle took place to determine the shape and identity of independent Indonesia. Some were determined to follow the Western model of parliamentary democracy, considering it most appropriate to the multicultural and multifaith reality of the nation's population. However some among the almost 90% Muslim majority wanted an Islamic State, based on sharia law and its detailed enactments. In the event, the multicultural pluralists won the day and Indonesia was formed around a system of multiple parties, with regular elections and a presidential system. In response, Islamist groups launched a twelve-year rebellion which cost thousands of lives and imposed great strains on the political and economic fabric of the new nation. One particular bone of contention was what became known as the Jakarta Charter. This was a simple seven...

For today's radio interview on Vision Radio with Neil Johnson, presenter of "Twenty20", click here .

The Marrakesh Declaration , ignored by the mainstream media, has been acclaimed as a new dawn by some commentators: as promising an era of tolerance and pluralistic harmony in the Muslim-majority regions, where religious minorities have suffered so much for so long. With so much bad news coming from the Muslim world, new voices of hope are bound to receive a warm welcome. Between 25–27 January, around 300 dignitaries gathered in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh under the auspices of King Mohammed VI of Morocco. This event represented the culmination of four years of planning, led by Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah of Abu Dhabi, President of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies. The conference title was ‘The Rights of Religious Minorities in Predominantly Muslim Majority Communities: Legal Framework and a Call to Action’. As the name suggests, its specific goal was to address the discrimination and persecution experienced by religious minorities living under Islamic major...

Since the civil war began in Syria in 2011, almost a quarter of a million people have been killed. Of the survivors, an estimated 12.2 million are in need of humanitarian assistance. This fact, combined with the deliberate campaigns of terror waged by the Islamic State, has triggered the massive outpouring of refugees from Syria. Such macro figures do not discriminate between Syria’s diverse population. A closer look at the country’s demography unpacks the religious diversity: 87% of Syrians are Muslim (also diverse), 10% are Christian and the remainder represent small minority groups, such as Druze and Yazidis. With hundreds of thousands of Syrians in refugee camps outside the country at this present moment, one would expect the camps to reflect the demography of Syria. This is not the case, as it is widely reported that religious minorities have been wary to enter the camps for fear of being persecuted by some of the Muslim refugees. Preferring religious minorities In this ...

“Places of worship have become a topic of much dispute around the world in recent years”, said Dr Melissa Crouch at the launch of a new report at the Melbourne University Law School on June 26. “Examples are the Swiss ban on minarets in 2009 and the 2010 Ground Zero mosque dispute in New York city,” she added. Her talk focused on a report entitled “Disputed Churches in Jakarta”, published in Indonesian by the Center for Religious and Cross- Cultural Studies of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta and translated into English by the Melbourne Law School. Indonesia has witnessed a significant increase in attacks on churches since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. An average of fifteen such attacks occurred each year between 1968-98, but a staggering 232 churches were damaged or destroyed between 1999-2001 alone. The new report is based on extensive fieldwork by Indonesian researchers from the Jakarta-based Paramadina Foundation’s Research Team into controversies. It particula...

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...

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