Religion & Society

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...