A Generation's Big Global Issue: Can Centrists Win Islam's Ideological Civil War?
Muslims praying at a mosque in Indonesia. Creative Commons photo.
(OPINION) On July 24, Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey, was converted from a museum to a mosque, giving Christians a bitter reminder that this had been the world’s grandest church for nine centuries until the 1453 conquest by Muslim forces.
Most media ignored that — two weeks beforehand — a scholarly leader of what is very likely the world’s largest organization of grass-roots Muslims posted a dramatic challenge about treatment of non-Muslims.
Excerpts from this piece by Yahya Cholil Staquf of Indonesia: “The Islamic world is in the midst of a rapidly metastasizing crisis, with no apparent sign of remission.” To “avert civilizational disaster, people of all faiths must work together to prevent the political weaponization of fundamentalist Islam.”
A summary: Believers must emulate the devout, but more culturally moderate, Muslims in what is now Indonesia who established religious freedom for all even before the young United States did so in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Yet in our own era, Christianity has all but disappeared in its historic Mideast birthplace, “the latest chapter in a long and tragic history of religious persecution in the Muslim world.” In recent decades, in Africa through the Mideast and across Asia, non-Muslim minorities have, wrote Staquf, suffered “severe discrimination and violence inflicted by those who embrace a supremacist, ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.”
This “unchecked spread of religious extremism and terror,” in turn, leads to “a rising tide of Islamophobia among non-Muslim populations.”
An “intellectually honest” examination of the situation, he added, shows that the “extremists” can rely on “specific tenets of orthodox authoritative Islam and its historic practice” from classical times, which advocate “Islamic supremacy” and encourage “enmity toward non-Muslims.” This means that, for instance, the “remarkable savagery toward Yazidis and Christians” perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq and Syria was “not a historical aberration.”
These and other newsworthy assertions come from Staquf — who is the general secretary of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama (or NU. The name means “Revival of the Ulama,” the term for the collective body of religious scholars). He wrote this article for ThePublicDiscourse.com, online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, a pro-democracy research center whose fellows include political philosophers Robert George, John Haldane and the late Jean Bethke Elshtain.
As religion writers know, Indonesia has by far the world’s largest Muslim population, with generally a more tolerant form of the faith than is found in many nations. NU was established in 1926 to both bolster orthodox Sunni belief and at the same time resist Saudi Arabia’s harsh and globally influential Wahabi movement.
NU claims tens of millions of adherents and operates thousands of boarding schools and a vast network of hospitals and charities. It has played complex roles in Indonesian politics since independence. Its chairman and revered religious teacher, the late Abdurrahman Wahid, known as Gus Dur, was Indonesia’s president 1999–2001, but impeached and removed from office.
What is to be done?
Staquf, says this situation requires development of “a new Islamic orthodoxy that reflects the actual circumstances of the modern world” and sidelines jurisprudence from long-ago times, thus “dismantling and replacing the theology that underlies and animates Islamist violence.”
In that cause, NU launched the “humanitarian Islam” movement that obviously merits media coverage if it makes inroads in the Mideast. The international office of its Bayt ar-Rahmah affiliate opened in 2014 in the surprising location of Winston-Salem, N.C.
The project is aided by C. Holland Taylor, the former CEO of the telecommunications firm USA Global Link, who has long been involved with Indonesia. (Contacts: 336–922-1278 or Carol Coates at carol@baytarrahmah.org.) In 2016, NU assembled 400 scholars from 30 nations to the International Summit of Moderate Islamic Leaders and issued a 16-point declaration (.pdf here).
Despite having a North Carolina office, this particular moderate organization appears to have gained little publicity or traction so far in North America. But if Staque and his colleagues are correct, one-fourth of the world’s peoples who follow Islam are caught in an unavoidable choice between two irreconcilable visions of the faith, with massive international implications.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for the Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.