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...