Only a few days ago, Samuel Kobia from Kenya was running unopposed for a second five-year term as general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) at its Central Committee meeting now being held in Geneva. The story seemed pretty ho-hum. Then the German Protestant news agency epd revealed he had a “digital doctorate” from a unaccredited diploma mill in the U.S. Now he’s in danger of losing his job running the WCC, the global Christian grouping of 349 churches (mostly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox) that represent more than 560 million believers around the world. Our correspondent in Geneva Robert Evans reports he may be on his way out. The rumour making the rounds is that we may hear as early as Tuesday that he will not be there much longer.

All because of a phony Ph.D? No, there’s a lot more where that story came from. The epd also ran a scathing interview with Lutheran Bishop Martin Hein of Kassel, the top German on the WCC Central Committee, in the run-up to the meeting. He made it abundantly clear that the German Protestants, who contribute one-third of the WCC budget, had lost patience with Kobia. Here’s a taste of what he said:

“The WCC takes stands on everything. The World Council of Churches does not have to be a little United Nations.”

Hein noted the WCC played an active role during the Cold War and the apartheid era in South Africa but added: “The real difficulty is that both those political challenges are now gone.”

He criticsed Kobia for taking decisions without much consultation and traveling around too much: “I’m sometimes amazed how often the secretary general is on the road.”

“In the long term, one-third of the costs of the WCC cannot come exclusively from Germany,” Hein said, adding he thought other churches in the Global North, including the Orthodox churches, could give more.

Kobia, 60, told a news conference last week that he saw visiting outlying faith communities around the world as part of his mandate. Responding to another complaint voiced by Hein, he said the WCC had cut back on some of its many programmes.

Kobia would be the first head of the WCC to serve only one term if he steps down. The first general secretary, Willem A. Visser ‘t Hooft of the Netherlands, served from 1948 to 1966. Kobia’s immediate predecessor, Konrad Raiser from Germany, served from 1993 to 2003.

Comments on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s speech about sharia are starting to explore some of the ideas in more detail. Opinions are still mostly against the idea, but there are some defenders and there are more balanced arguments than the first wave of reactions. Here are some of the latest items we found interesting:

First of all, documentation — Ruth Gledhill came up with Williams’s Q&A after the speech, including the full text and the video. Note he insists he is talking about “supplementary jurisdiction” and not “parallel systems.”

muslimmatters.org argues in Shariah ‘Courts’ and Freedom of Contract that the issue is simply one of arbitration, something already allowed under the law: “The fact that the parties are choosing to settle their commercial or social disagreements by reference to the Qu’ran is therefore of no more consequence to society than if they decided to settle the same dispute by tossing a coin, asking a neighbour to decide, or any of the other myriad of ways in which human beings settle disagreements peacefully.”

altmuslim.com on One man’s sharia: “Now that the debate has become public, all concerned parties need to seek some clarity. What can be done through the courts that cannot today be done simply by mutual agreement? Proponents of sharia arbitration have not been detailed enough in their proposals to provide a suitable answer to this. If two parties want to agree to an Islamic solution that does not conflict with state law, then that is already happening in the form of arbitration. If the issue is enforcement, however, then by definition it is not mutually agreeable and the issue is about imposing a sharia interpretation that at least one party does not accept. It is this point that scares many non-Muslims and Muslims alike.”

UPDATE: Ekklesia has an interesting item called Muslims puzzled over Sharia row, but Evangelicals and inter-faith group urge debate which says: “Muslim lawyers say they are puzzled that Archbishop Rowan Williams raised the Sharia issue before they have had a chance to tackle some key concerns.” On the other hand, evangelicals are keen to start talking because they see this as a way to bring up their own concerns about secular laws. “We want to use this as a spring-board to find a way forward for those in our, and other, faith communities who feel disenfranchised on matters of conscience by the changing meaning of what it is to be British,” said the Rev Joel Edwards, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance.

The Washington Post’s On Faith blog has an interesting series of American reactions to Williams’s proposal, most of them not enthusiastic.

TotallyJewish.com reports on how Muslims are seeking advice from Orthodox Jews on how their Beth Din courts operate.

Mona Eltahawy slams what she calls Delusions in Canterbury and says the archbishop’s tolerance towards sharia “is a tolerance that condones only the most conservative options for Muslims. It is at best a form of the racism of lower expectations - the cheapest bargaining chip of liberal guilt… As a Muslim woman - born in Egypt, raised in Saudi Arabia - I can only laugh at the archbishop’s naïveté. In Egypt, as in many Muslim countries, the legal system has been completely modernized, with the exception of one area that remains caught in the web of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago — family law. Shariah is used only to govern the lives of women and children.”

Ali Eteraz continues to examine the implications of using sharia law in a Western context. Two latest posts are When US Courts Apply Islamic Law and Concurrent jurisdiction would be used to coerce average believers.

The London Catholic weekly the Tablet has a nice cover showing Williams among the lions in the Colosseum in ancient Rome. It also has two interesting articles:

Theo Hobson says in Quiet Voice of modernity’s enemy that “...liberal Protestantism is basic to our national identity, although people don’t tend to think of it as ‘liberal Protestantism’ but as ‘our Christian heritage’ and ‘our liberal tradition’. This is what Williams seems not to grasp, or chooses not to.”

The editorial Crisis of Identity makes the point that “… the process of secularisation is eating away at society. Too often, people of faith feel they no longer fit.”

The U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Ertürk, was in Saudi Arabia last week. She has just issued a report (official text here) that calls on the government to create a legal framework based on international human rights standards, including a law criminalising violence against women. It listed severe limits on women’s freedom of movement and ability to act in a whole range of family and social areas, from marriage, divorce and child custody to inheritance, education and employment. Her committee gave the Saudis a grilling at a hearing in Geneva last month. Yet, when she met the media in Riyadh at the end of her visit, the young female Saudi journalists there left the room muttering about how disappointed they were with her approach. “She didn’t say anything. This was just general stuff that people are aware of,” one complained. What’s up?

What they noticed in Ertürk’s comments was the degree to which she seemed to accept the official argument that Saudi society had “special characteristics” — khususiyya in Arabic — that constituted a valid frame of reference for assessing the country’s rights record. Khususiyya is a well-worn term that anyone who tries to criticise Saudi values hears in response. It’s used elsewhere in the Arab world as well, either by religious figures facing down liberal trends in society or governments opposing calls for political reform. Reformers throughout the Arab world see the term as a kind of a blanket “cultural exclusiveness” argument that seeks to shut down all serious discussion of political or religious change. It was once mocked by Saudi liberals themselves in the popular television comedy show Tash Ma Tash.

International pressure over Saudi women’s rights has been growing. Ertürk’s visit was part of an effort by Riyadh to persuade outsiders the situation was improving. She was able to announce that officials had promised to allow a couple forced to divorce by a religious court to live together again. There apparently was no movement on other issues such as the ban on women driving cars, which has become a kind of litmus test of reform in the country.

Ertürk tried to play down the importance of the ban and implied that allowing women to get behind the wheel would simply be tokenism. “The driving issue has become a characterising symbol for this country. No doubt it is important because it deprives or limits women’s freedom of movement,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen with the driving issue, I haven’t discussed it, it didn’t come up in our discussions, I don’t have a sense of how soon this will be resolved. If the ban on driving is going to continue, I think there is a need to provide transportation possibilities for people to get around, especially those who cannot afford to have a car and a driver. Whatever the preferred norm is in a country, the obligation of the state is to provide alternatives.”

And khususiyya? Ertürk said she saw patriarchal norms, values and law around the world. “It is this aspect that characterises societies across civilisation and across countries that we should try to understand and see how deviations from this norm have occurred historically, and how Saudi Arabia within its own realities can deviate to the advantage of rights and rights of women,” she said. Even Sweden, she argued, had some way to go in securing equality and justice for women. The women journalists listening to this could only dream.

A Turkish sociology professor, Ertürk clearly understood the cultural minefields inherent when trying to apply global rights standards in different contexts around the world. But her argument that the state should provide more transport if it would not let women drive missed the point. Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia do not want to see the driving ban undermined by an alternative world of women’s taxi, bus, monorail or beach buggy services that can bring women into sinful contact with men. They firmly believe that women should be at home raising children and not out on Main Street tempting men with their charms.

The leading state-appointed cleric in Saudi Arabia, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, has already attacked the committee’s report on women’s rights as disrespectful and “spiteful for our religion and country“. In a Friday sermon in a Riyadh mosque, he defended the rules segregating women from unrelated men by arguing that allowing men and women to mix was to turn them into no more than animals.

Liberals throughout the Arab world say they have found to their cost that they get nowhere with conservative political or religious authorities by accepting their frame of reference for discussion or playing it diplomatically in the hope of a concession.

The March issue of the U.S. magazine The Atlantic has a thought-provoking comment by Walter Russel Mead on America’s evangelical movement, arguing that it is growing more moderate and more powerful.

Mead draws on what for many would appear an unlikely source for such an observation: Adam Smith’s 1776 classic “The Wealth of Nations.”

“Smith saw what we see: the progress of modernity, he noted, was not undermining religion in the Britain of his day. Instead, religious revivals were blooming,” he writes, noting that these new movements often rejected liberal values while seeking to mould society along their conservative lines through political activism.

However, Mead says Smith observed that entering the political fray exerted a moderating influence on them because it required them to reach out to other faiths and build coalitions.

Mead sees the same forces at work today on U.S. evangelicals, who number roughly 60 million or one in five Americans and whose political activism in recent decades has been most closely associated with the so-called “religious right” and the Republican Party.

“American evangelicalism today is flexible, user-friendly, and market-driven,” he writes. “These new evangelicals share many values with their secular neighbours; they and their pastors are reshaping their politics to match.”

This is provocative stuff. Many of the “new evangelicals” are broadening their Biblical agenda to embrace issues such as helping the poor and greening the planet.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a Baptist preacher whose opposition to abortion and gay marriage echo the old religious right but who has a soft spot for the poor and the little guy, has been held up as a political example of this widening agenda.

Huckabee and people who have supported him, such as Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter– another prominent example of this trend – show that these evangelicals still feel more comfortable in the Republican fold, hinting at a moderating of that party’s evangelical wing rather than an exodus to the Democratic Party.

Watch this space: it’s going to be interesting.

Iran has urged the Netherlands to block a planned anti-Koran film, citing Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as the legal basis for doing so. This is the latest twist in the saga surrounding the controversial film by far-right leader Geert Wilders (we’ve blogged on this before). In the letter, Iran’s Justice Minister Gholamhossein Elham asked his Dutch counterpart Ernst Hirsch Ballin to use European human rights law to stop a European from exercising one of those most basic rights. Freedom of expression has been the rallying cry of those who defended the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten for publishing the Mohammad cartoons — and republishing the most controversial one (the turban bomb) this week after a death threat against the artist who drew it.

This also raises the question of whether any protest against purported blasphemy against Islam this time might not turn out to be on the streets, as after the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad, but in the courts. European Muslim organisations brought court suits against the cartoons in Denmark and in France but lost their cases — thanks to the principle of freedom of expression. Will the Iranian letter inspire any to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg? Nota bene — Danish imams preached calm at Friday prayers, in contrast to the imams who went to the Middle East to rally opposition to the cartoons when they first came out.

On Friday, Iran’s news agency IRNA reported on the letter, which the Dutch government told NRC Handelsblad it had not yet received. IRNA wrote the following (quotes from Elham in italics):

“You can stop the process of this satanic and highly intriguing move resorting to articles in European Convention on Human Rights … We, too, know and respect the freedom of expression, but insulting the sanctities and ethical values on that pretext is totally unacceptable.”

Elham reminded Balin of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, where it states, “…On this basis, observing freedom of expression, keeping in mind the responsibilities thereof, can be restricted in order to avoid the occurrence of chaotic social conditions, commuting crimes, safeguarding ethical values, or the others’ rights.”

Iran’s Justice Minister at the end of his letter to his Dutch counterpart considers the movie insulting against the most sacred sanctity of the world Muslims, a satanic move that can intrigue social unrest, and violating the rights of the entire world Muslims, asking for immediate halting of the blasphemous film’s production.

BTW Wilders has announced that his film will be called “Fitna.” That sounds like it was lifted from the book Fitna by French Islam scholar Gilles Kepel , who translates the Arabic term as “a war in the heart of Islam that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin.”

Argentina’s new president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, is trying to improve relations with the Roman Catholic Church, but progress doesn’t come easy. Church-state ties turned tense under her husband Nestor, who preceded her as president from 2003 to 2007, because he occasionally alluded to church complicity in the country’s brutal 1976-1983 military dictatorship. And his health minister, who favored loosening restrictions on abortion, had a public spat with the bishop assigned to tending to the country’s military forces.

So when Fernandez took office in December, she moved quickly to patch things up. One step she took was to meet the head of the Argentine Bishops’ Conference , Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit who ran against Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 papal election. However, the honeymoon didn’t last long. This time the problem was with the Vatican, which effectively rejected her new ambassador to the Holy See. The candidate, former Justice Minister Alberto Iribarne, is Catholic but divorced and living with a new partner, something the Church does not approve of.

The Vatican did not reject Iribarne’s nomination outright. It simply did not confirm him in the post, which in diplomatic terms means he hasn’t got a prayer. Local media report that Argentina is awaiting some formal response from the Vatican, but local Church sources say that is unlikely to materialise.

Argentina is expected to leave the post unfilled for now if the Vatican doesn’t unexpectedly accept Iribarne. “This issue is strictly between the Vatican and the government,” a source who works at Argentina’s Church offices said. “It’s unfortunate that this has come up now, when we were making progress toward good relations.”

The government has been reported to be considering scrapping the post of military bishop in retaliation against the Vatican. But a government source said although officials would like to eliminate the post, it was “not on the agenda” for now. All the same, the discussion was another opportunity for the Church’s critics to air their complaint that some military chaplains used confessions to squeeze information out of torture victims during the dictatorship.

The Church’s collaboration with the dictatorship is far from forgotten here. Last October, an Argentine court handed down a life prison sentence to a priest, former police chaplain Christian Von Wernich, convicting him of involvement in torture, kidnapping and murder during the notorious “dirty war” purge of suspected leftists.

The Rev. Samuel Kobia, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), has had to drop his Ph.D in religious studies from his resumé because it came from a U.S. diploma mill that was never accredited and no longer exists. Ouch!

Kobia told a news conference in Geneva he had no idea that the Louisiana-based university had no right to award the degree he got in 2004 after three years of work via the Internet.

“Hearing of the status of Fairfax University was a shock to me. I followed their programme in good faith,” said Kobia, a 60-year-old Methodist from Kenya. If it’s any consolation, Sweden’s Labour Minister Sven Otto Littorin had to purge his CV of a Fairfax MBA last year after a blogger broke a similar story.

It’s interesting to note who broke the Kobia story. The news first came in a report from Geneva on Tuesday by the Evangelischer Pressedienst (epd), the German Protestant news agency. It landed just before a meeting of the WCC central committee that is due to re-elect Kobia for another five-year term as head of the global Christian grouping of 349 churches (mostly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox) that represent more than 560 million believers.

Kobia is the only candidate, but he has been criticised by some European church leaders for his extensive travel and his management style. The issue has apparently not been discussed in public at the central committee but there are rumours in the corridors that some churches from the Global North were against him. But the feeling is that he’ll get the Swedish treatment — an embarrassment and a scare, but he’ll be able to keep his job.

Do you think Kobia or Littorin could have failed to notice their university was dodgy? Do you think resumé fraud — intentional or not — should lead to dismissal?

The “Sarko & secularism” story takes on ever new twists. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already kicked up lively debates in France by praising religious faith whenever he can, defending his country’s Christian roots in a Roman basilica and complimenting the Saudis in Riyadh for fighting against fanaticism and fundamentalism. After the Catholics and the Muslims, France’s Jews were in line for some presidential stroking. It came on Wednesday evening, at the annual dinner of the leading Jewish organisation here, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF).

Always good for a surprise, Sarkozy unexpectedly announced he wanted each 10-year-old pupil to study the life and death of one of France’s 11,000 child Holocaust victims. The president also announced he would visit Israel in May to mark its 60th anniversary and “won’t shake hands with people who refuse to recognise Israel” — a remark apparently ruling out any face-to-face meetings with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

One of Sarkozy’s remarks at the CRIF dinner seemed to go too far even for his hosts. He said: “The drama of the 20th century was not due to an excess of God, but to his awesome absence. There is not a line in the Torah, the Gospel or the Koran, when seen in its context and the fullness of its meaning, that can put up with the massacres committed in Europe during the 20th century in the name of totalitarianism and a world without God.”

CRIF President Richard Prasquier, who described himself as a secular Jew, made it clear he preferred the the traditional approach of keeping Godtalk down to a whisper. He defended the 1905 law on laïcité and said it had “given Jews the benevolent neutrality (of the state) that guaranteed equality and produced concrete solutions to practical problems. For us, this law is part of the superego that links us to the French republic.” As for the butchery of the 20th century, he said: “I have too much respect for those Righteous among the Nations who were atheists to believe that religions are the only barrier to evil.”

The idea of studying child Holocaust victims ran into criticism from politicians and teachers who said it might be psychologically too much for 10-year-olds to bear. “I don’t think we can impose remembrance,” former prime minister Dominique de Villepin said.

The teachers’ union SE-Unsa said it was “particularly shocked by this presidential initiative that completely ignores how young people form their personalities. Must every child of 10 years now be personally charged with this weighty act of posthumous adoption?”

But Jewish writer Marek Halter said it was a “tremendous initiative … for a child at school, the death of six million people is an abstraction.” But they could imagine “the face of a little Moshe, a little Isaac or a Jean-Jacques Rabinovitch.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos said pupils would not be allowed to refuse to participate. Muslim pupils have been reported to refuse to discuss the Holocaust in class or to deny that it ever happened. “They are rare cases,” Darcos told France2 television. “It’s unacceptable and it is not accepted.”

Click here for interesting Le Monde analysis of “Sarkozy et Dieu” (in French).

For an example of how India often struggles with its secular ideals, especially in election years, look no further than Andhra Pradesh. The chief minister Y.S. Reddy has decided the large southern Indian state will subsidise pilgrimages for Christians who want to travel to Israel.

This kind of subsidy is not new. The central government has for years offered subsidies to Muslims wanting to join the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca. New Delhi even has a special haj air terminal for Muslims, who account for about 13 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population. Tens of thousands travel every year from India.

But the latest announcement has sparked debate in India over whether it further eats into the country’s secular ideals.

“The government has undermined Indian secularism once again,” said one India’s leading newspapers, the Times of India. The Indian constitution says there should be no discrimination on religious grounds. It is broadly intepreted to mean that none of India’s religious groups, whether majority Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs, should ever dominate. That secular identity was the pride of many of the country’s founders 60 years ago after independence.

The debate is now focused on what kind of secularism should exist. Should there be the kind of separation of church and state as in France, where the idea that religion should be kept out of public life is strong? Or should India make compromises by appeasing minority faiths to ensure religious harmony?

The original argument for subsidies for Muslims, who are among the poorest members of Indian society, was that it helped them go on the haj many could not otherwise afford. It’s still controversial, though, and even one of India’s school text books has a chapter titled “Should a secular state provide subsidies for the Haj pilgrimage?”

But critics say the latest move over Christians was a cheap populist trick ahead of state elections this year. While Christians account for only 2 percent of Andhra Pradesh’s population, that’s still 1.2 million people.

Subsidies like this have long been criticised by India’s main Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has asked why Hindus, who account for about 80 percent of the population, don’t get subsidies to visit Hindu temples. For the BJP, the current secularism in India is another word for “appeasement of minorities”.

Defenders of the move argue that India’s secularism is much more loosely fitting, as highlighted by the controversy last month when the French government awarded an exiled Muslim woman writer in India with the Simone de Beauvoir Prize. That prize met with silent disapproval from the Indian government, worried the award could incite Muslim groups. It showed how the Indian government is reluctant to speak publicly of lofty secular ideals — ideas the French loudly defend — if it means upsetting a religious group.

The debate this time round has also come down to politics and electoral votes. As the Times of India’s Ronojoy Sen pointed out, those opposing the subsidies to Christians should also oppose the haj subsidy. But no political party, even the BJP, has ended that.

With 13 percent of India’s population, that’s a lot of Muslim votes to lose. Especially in an election year.

The Vatican’s top official for issues dealing with saints, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, has denounced the sale of saints’ relics on eBay. Unauthorised sales of relics are forbidden by the Catholic Church, he told the Italian daily La Stampa, and the objects could be used by satanic sects.

The Milan daily reported that the Internet auction site was offering a reliquary of St. Vincent de Paul for 1,600 euros ($2,380), a “special offer” of bone fragments of six saints going for 430 euros ($625) and a lock of hair from St. Thérèse of Lisieux for 30 euros ($44). Shreds of cloaks belonging to St. Francis of Assisi and St. Rita of Cascia are up for auction, it said.

Saraiva Martins told La Stampa:

“It is absolutely wrong to sell sacred relics.

“Without a written certificate, a relic is considered false as I consider most of those sold on the Internet.

“If used improperly, they could favour superstition, or satanic sects could buy them to destroy them or change their significance in blasphemous ceremonies.”

Here are English-language reports on the story from Adnkronos and Catholic News Agency.

La Stampa said eBay has a task force of experts to block the trade but “it only takes a click to have the relics kit sent to you.”

P.S.: I have a confession to make: An eBay newbie, I couldn’t find any of them, neither on the U.S. nor the Italian site. Did you have any better luck?