Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah looks determined to get his proposal for an unprecedented Muslim- Christian-Jewish dialogue off the ground. A three-day conference in Mecca to discuss this ended with a soaring declaration of goodwill and benevolent intent. Saudi media reported that Muslim clerics from around the world had supported the call and confirmed that dialogue with other faiths was legitimate in Islam.

The official Saudi Press agency said the meeting recommended holding “conferences, forums and discussion groups between the followers of the prophetic messages and relevant civilisations, cultures and philosophies to which academics, media and religious leaders will be invited”. Given the gazillions Riyadh must be earning with oil at $140 a barrel, it may not be long before we see all sorts of petrodollar-funded “dialogue sessions” being held here and there.

Interfaith dialogue is a good thing, but the recent rising chorus of calls for more such talk hasn’t just emerged out of a vacuum. There is already a decades-long history of dialogue sessions that essentially exchanged pleasantries and generated warm feelings but did little to actually reduce misunderstanding and mistrust. The latest generation of initiatives — for example the Common Word consultations and the “Painful Verses” book we’ve blogged about here — takes the disappointment with earlier efforts as its starting point and aims to tackle the issues that earlier dialogues tended to avoid.

So where is King Abdullah on the timeline of interfaith dialogue? Up there at the cutting edge? Or a decade or so behind the times? It’s hard to say if we only have some official reports of his comments to go by. But there are a few red flags popping up in the mostly positive reporting, suggesting that whatever he comes up with may not amount to real progress.

For example, the Sunni-Shi’ite harmony message supposedly sent by the presence of former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani looked a lot thinner when journalists looked beyond centre stage. “Some Shi’ites said that, despite the presence of Iran’s Rafsanjani, few of their number were invited to the Mecca meeting. None came from Europe or North America and one from Saudi Arabia’s own Shi’ite minority which complains that it is given second class status,” our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond wrote.

Riazat Butt, religion correspondent for the Guardian, covered the conference and heard one of the classic Muslim views that goes against Abdullah’s position and turned some non-Muslims off dialogue with the muftis years ago. She wrote: “Abdullah’s understanding of interfaith dialogue differs from the one held by the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al al-Sheikh, who said dialogue with other religions was a way to bring non-Muslims into Islam. The cleric, who is the highest official of religious law, told the delegates that converting people to Islam was the ultimate goal of dialogue, a point made several times. “It is the opportunity to disseminate the principles of Islam. Islam advocates dialogue among people, especially calling them to the path of Allah.”

The grand mufti also contradicted Abdullah on dialogue with Jews, who the king has suggested could come to Saudi Arabia for talks on what would be an unprecedented visit. As Butt (right) wrote, “Several clerics, including the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, said it was almost impossible to talk to them because of the situation in the occupied territories. ‘How can you negotiate with someone who is against you all the time? They seem to be against us in every way so I don’t know how we’re supposed to have dialogue.’ Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi said he would only talk to Jews who denounced Zionism and he urged Muslims to talk to Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. His impromptu speech, lasting 15 minutes, garnered the loudest applause, proving his popularity among fellow clerics even if the west views him with suspicion.”

After having a front-row seat at the Mecca meeting, Butt was quite sceptical about the prospects for Abdullah’s initiative. But the attention this idea has been getting at the Vatican and among Jews shows there is a lot of official interest in it. If the Saudis start organising these interfaith talks, do you think they will actually produce more than nice words? Will they reflect what Saudi clerics actually think?

There were interesting words on interfaith dialogue from Mecca and Rome today and London yesterday. Efforts to improve contacts and understanding among the main monotheist religions have been gaining steam recently and we’re starting to see some concrete steps. But, as a meeting in Mecca showed, the road ahead could still be quite rocky.

The Mecca meeting, organised by the Saudi-based Muslim World League, is supposed to draw up guidelines for the inter-faith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah says he wants with Christianity and Islam. “You are meeting here today to say to the world with pride that we are a fair, honest, humanitarian and moral voice, a voice for living together and dialogue,” the monarch said in a high-minded speech.

But former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the few prominent Shi’ites at the conference, rained on his parade with broadsides against the United States and Israel. But he also said: “To have a dialogue with other religions we need to start talking among ourselves. The call needs to be directed at ourselves first of all, and all the sects need to agree on shared points. As a Muslim and a Shi’ite … I say the things we agree on are many.”

That may have been a reaction to a statement this week by a group of independent Saudi clerics saying that Shi’ites, including Lebanese group Hezbollah, were posturing against Israel to hide an anti-Sunni agenda.

On the same day Abdullah spoke, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said his Vatican department for inter-religious dialogue was drawing up its own guidelines for Catholic dialogue with non-Christian religions. He told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) the guidelines for priests and lay people would be based on the Ten Commandments, which he called “a kind of universal grammar that all believers can use in their relations with God and their neighbour.” This approach neatly links Christians with Jews and Muslims such as the “Common Word” scholars who’ve called for a dialogue based on the principle of love of God and neighbour.

In London, Lambeth Palace issued a statement on Tuesday about an ecumenical meeting that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams convened on June 1-2 to discuss ways to deepen Christian-Muslim dialogue. More than 40 participants discussed the “Common Word” initiative and “what degree of consensus might be possible as we look forward,” he said. The list of participants shows most of the Christian churches addressed by the “Common Word” letter were present. The statement said: “Delegates at the Consultation were heartened by the great variety of initiatives, some by Muslims and some by Christians, that were taking place at many different levels - many with a well-established track record. A great emphasis was placed on the need to ensure that the results of these encounters were more widely disseminated and influenced the education and formation of young people. The Archbishop agreed to take forward further work, particularly in response to A Common Word.”

There have been several other stories about interfaith dialogue recently, including the following:

• Cardinal Tauran gave a speech in London last month where he said: “There is a change of climate [in interreligious dialogue] now. It is more open minded, there is greater cordiality.” Here are reports in The Times and the Guardian and the speech text in Zenit.
• Tauran also attended the sixth Doha Conference of Interfaith Dialogue in May.
• French bishops issue a document on dialogue entitled “How do Christians and Muslims speak of God?” (here in French). Rev. Christophe Roucou, the bishops’ conference specialist for relations with Islam, comments in this La Croix interview (in French).

Over 275 congregations from across the faith spectrum and all corners of America will display banners this month condemning torture. The campaign is the brain child of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) which groups over 190 religious groups.

President George W. Bush in March vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding and other controversial
interrogation techniques that critics say is torture, making the issue a political as well as moral one in this election year.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain — who was tortured while a prisoner of war in Vietnam — has strongly condemned water-boarding and has been the author of previous anti-torture legislation, winning praise from centrist U.S. evangelicals among others. But he did not support the legislation vetoed by Bush on the grounds that it was too sweeping.

The banner campaign is one of inter-faith cooperation drawing Islamic, Jewish and Christian congregations and others. The issue is an emotive one but also clearly one where folks of different faiths find common ground.

(Photo credit: Reuters, Emma Goh, Cambodia, dec 2, 2007)

Two recent op-ed articles in the United States presented Barack Obama as a “Muslim apostate” according to “Muslim law as it is universally understood.” Since Muslims were bound to see him as an apostate, they argued, the potential next president could be seen as “al Qaeda’s candidate” because Islamists could whip up popular anger in the Muslim world by portraying him as a turncoat heading a Western war against Islam. He also risked assassination, one suggested, because Muslim law considers apostasy a crime worthy of the death sentence and bars punishment for any Muslim who kills an apostate.

There were many generalisations about Islam in these two articles, one by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times and the other by Shireen K. Burki in the Christian Science Monitor. There is no one code of Muslim law, as Luttwak (who is a strategic analyst not previously known for his mastery of Islamic jurisprudence) or Burki (who we’re told “studied Islam at school” in Pakistan) want unsuspecting readers to believe. Few Muslim countries have death for apostates on their books, and even fewer actually carry it out. This is not meant to defend any law about apostasy, which is an individual right, but just to state a few facts.

Most important of all, Obama never tires of saying that he is a committed Christian and has never practiced the religion that his father (who left his son when he was 2 years old) no longer practiced either. The fact these articles appeared amid an “Obama-is-a-Muslim” whispering campaign in an election year makes a good case for suspecting they may have been motivated more by political strategy than legal scholarship. A lot of the 368 comments on Luttwak’s article assume that’s the case. Call it the “Sharia smear.”

We considered asking around in the Muslim world for reactions to Luttwak’s article (the first to appear), but it was so unfounded that it did not seem worthwhile. There wasn’t much echo there, anyway.

A respected Islamic scholar, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, has now given a Muslim response to the supposed Islamic legal arguments the two articles are based on. “A strange paradox has emerged whereby Sharia (the religious law of Islam) has paradoxically become mythical in its alleged power to determine the behavior of Muslims everywhere, yet defenseless against the most fanciful, even outrageous claims and charges,” he remarks on the Religion Dispatches blog at Emory University, where he teaches law. An-Na’im has just published a well-reviewed book on Sharia, Islam and The Secular State .

The argument by Luttwak “is wrong from a Sharia point of view, and false in terms of the present political and legal realities of Muslim-majority countries,” An-Na’im writes. “Those who think Muslims will respond negatively to Sen. Obama based on his presumed religion have an overly simplistic view of what it means to be Muslim today.“

As for impunity for apostate killers, he asks, “how is it that the killers of the Egyptian intellectual Dr. Farag Foda were prosecuted and executed for murder by the Egyptian state in 1994?”

For all the details, the full text is here (”Swiftboating Obama/Misrepresenting Islam”) and cross-posted at The Immanent Frame (hat tip).

UPDATE: After posting this, I saw I’d missed that Ali Eteraz had already dissected Luttwak’s op-ed. Chalk it up to me being on the road…

Think the uproar over John Hagee’s comments about Hitler, the Holocaust, the Bible and John McCain’s rejection of his endorsement is over? Hardly.

U.S. news networks have been abuzz with the latest twist to the saga — a Hagee endorsement (of sorts) from renegade Democrat-turned-independent Senator Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman, who is Jewish, said in a statement posted on his website on Wednesday that “I believe that Pastor Hagee has made comments that are deeply unacceptable and hurtful. I also believe that a person should be judged on the entire span of his or her life’s works.”

The maverick Connecticut senator went on to note Hagee’s work with “Christians United for Israel.”

“Pastor Hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews. The organization that he has helped build, Christians United for Israel, is a vital force in supporting the war against terrorism and defending our ally, Israel. I will go to the CUFI Summit in July and speak,” he said.

Presumptive Republican nominee McCain dumped Hagee like a burning ember last week after it emerged that the Texas pastor had given a sermon in the 1990s in which he quoted from the Bible to make the argument that Hitler was doing God’s work by helping to drive the Jews back to Israel.

In apocalyptic Christian circles in the United States, the creation of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Second World War is widely taken as a key sign that the End Times are drawing near.

Millions of evangelical Americans to varying degrees subscribe to such views.

Observers of this scene say Hagee’s views are hardly news.

“He’s been saying this kind of thing for decades … he’s a providentialist — he believes that everything that happens on earth is part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world,” said historian Nicholas Guyatt, who has written extensively on apocalyptic Christian culture.

Watch this space: Hagee will remain in the news for some time to come.

A speck of green in a sea of sand, St. Anthony’s Monastery in Egypt welcomes those seeking God in silence broken only by the whisper of the wind.

Monks at what is considered by many to be the world’s oldest active Christian monastery still rise before dawn to chant and pray just as their predecessors did for more than 1,500 years.

Now, they also carry mobile phones, send e-mails and maintain a website, embracing modernity that has helped sustain the ancient monastery, nestled beside a spring where Egypt’s eastern desert meets the craggy Red Sea mountains.

Click here to read the rest of Will Rasmussen’s feature. For a photo slideshow, click here.

This could be very interesting … or maybe a flop. Islam Channel, a British Muslim TV channel broadcast on satellite and webcasts, plans to host a weekly religion quiz show called “Faith Off” from mid-June. It’s meant to promote better understanding among religions by pitting teams from different faiths against each other. As the Guardian’s religion correspondent Riazat Butt put it, the show will pit “Jews against Muslims, Sikhs against Christians and Hindus against Buddhists, with contestants competing for cash prizes.” Sounds like an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it will make great TV.

Like all quiz shows, its success will depend on how well it’s presented, how interesting the questions are and how knowledgable the contestants are. But one of the recurring religion stories you see is the survey about how little many people know about their own religion. In fact, they’re hardly news anymore.

So I wonder how well contestants will do even with questions about their own faith, let alone anything dealing with another religion. And what about issues where there are differences of opinion within one religion? If the producers weed out all the difficult and contentious questions, is there enough left to make a lively and challenging show?

Remember that unexpected comment that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah made in March that he wanted to hold an inter-faith dialogue with Christians and Jews? The Vatican welcomed it and the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronot reported that Saudi muftis were sending out feelers to Israeli rabbis about attending such talks, a report which was swiftly denied in Riyadh.

FaithWorld’s take on it at the time was sceptical. As Andrew Hammond in Riyadh wrote: “The king is seen in Saudi Arabia as a reformer but one who has been outmaneuvered by the powerful religious establishment and their allies in the royal family. The interfaith conference call may be a kind of trial balloon launched to see what kind of reaction it gets in a country where liberals and religious conservatives are engaged in an ideological struggle for the future of Saudi Arabia.”

The World Jewish Congress issued a statement on Monday welcoming the king’s proposal. It quoted WJC President Ronald Lauder as saying many obstacles still stood in the way but “King Abdullah’s initiative is a laudable step forward. We hope that other religious and political leaders throughout the world will be encouraged to join.” WJC Governing Board Chairman Matthew Bronfman added: “The World Jewish Congress is ready to participate in any serious inter-faith talks that are based on mutual respect.”

Another Tel Aviv newspaper, Haaretz, took this a step further today with a story saying: “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has sent an invitation to the World Jewish Congress for an interfaith dialogue with Muslim and Christian leaders, Haaretz has learned.” Now that would be news … if it were confirmed. But the WJC promptly denied the report, saying it had not received anything. The positive statement was issued now because the WJC steering committee just held its first meeting since Abdullah’s proposal and discussed it there.

The idea that Saudi Arabia would invite Christians and Jews to Islam’s heartland for “conferences between the religions to protect humanity from folly,” as Abdullah put it, is clearly too tempting for the Tel Aviv newspapers to ignore. But is it realistic to expect the Saudis to host such talks? Let us know what you think.

Blogging takes time, which I didn’t have on Friday after finishing an analysis for the Reuters wire about religion in Turkey posted here. I went to Istanbul to research several religion stories. The main impression I left with was that the prospect for religious policy changes raised by the “post- Islamist” AK Party government in recent years has mostly evaporated. The current political crisis that could end up banning the party and barring Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from belonging to a political party means the end of any liberalisation. In fact, the steam went out of the reform drive a few years ago after Ankara got the green light to negotiate Turkish membership in the European Union.

Turkey has been a test case for what Islam experts call “post-Islamism,” a trend among Muslim political groups that have given up dreams of some kind of Islamic state in favour of more democracy and human rights that include greater religious freedom (here’s a useful summary of the concept). The idea that Islamists could turn into “Muslim democrats” (or “latte Islamists“!) without a hidden agenda to introduce Sharia law once in power met with considerable scepticism. But the Erdogan government, which promoted greater freedoms in Turkey as a means to join the European Union rather than to break down secularist controls on religion in the public sphere, seemed to be prove this view. His cautious approach seemed to reflect a long-term policy to make changes gradually. It’s too much to say this could be a “model” for other Muslim countries because there are too many aspects specific to Turkey and the limits its powerful secularist elite places on religion in the public sphere. But it could be an important test case for reconciling democracy and religious rights.

The political analysts I spoke to were unanimous in rejecting the idea that Erdogan’s AK Party had a long-term “hidden agenda” to “islamise” Turkey. The real goal of Erdogan’s policy was to establish his bloc of business interests from the more religious countryside as partners in the national power structure dominated by the secularist urban elite. Part of this process was to appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses, but religion was never the core of its program. They dropped this caution after their election victory in 2007 by pressing for an end to the ban on headscarves at universities — and paid the price by provoking the legal challenge to their legitimacy.

“They are the victims of their own limitations,” Ankara University sociologist Dogu Ergil told me. “They wanted a place in the power system and once they go it, they stopped… They have depleted their reformist arsenal. This is as far as they can go. This was the end of their liberalism and understanding of freedoms.”

Cengiz Aktar, a professor of European studies at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, said the process of loosening restrictions on religion was not over, but it was now on hold for what he called a “period of restoration” that would reassert control by the secularist elite. “It’s put on ice. It’s not at its end. They will freeze it for some time. This ‘Turkish best practice’ needs to be rethought during this period of restoration. They will have to come back with a new idea.”

Rusen Cakir, a journalist who has written extensively on faith and politics in Turkey, agreed that efforts to reconcile democracy and Islam would continue but they were not the central issue for Turkish politics. The real issue was political power in Turkey, where the large state role in the economy means “if you control the government, you can control lots of money,” he said. Fears of a “hidden agenda” were unfounded, he said, but the secularist parties used them to mobilise their urban middle class base. “It’s kind of a class struggle. Each side has its own ideological tool — secularism or religion.” Or as Ergil put it, “religion here is a political instrument used by both sides.”

In a country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim, the remaining one percent is not politically significant. But the government’s attitude towards the religious minorities is a good barometer of how it feels about religious liberty. During my stay, I spoke with Catholic and Orthodox churchmen who reported little progress and some backsliding on the question of religious freedom. Their impression was also that Ankara had lost interest in any liberalisation after it got the green light for EU accession talks.

“The minorities were a hot issues for a while, but in the past two years, there has been no movement at all,” said an official at the Istanbul headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians. A Catholic churchman said senior Church officials traveled under guard “and that tells you something.”

“We have to be very careful,” he said. “Some newspapers talk as if there were thousands of (Christian) missionaries in Turkey. We Catholics don’t evangelise. The Orthodox don’t either. Only some Protestant groups do, but they have also become very careful.” Turkish nationalists whippped up the spectre of Christian missionaries trying to “destroy Turkish identity,” he said. “The nationalists are in retreat, and this is a kind of parting shot from them.”

That said, the Roman Catholic Church in Turkey is quite hopeful that the commemorative year for Saint Paul, who was born 2,000 years ago in Tarsus in today’s southern Turkey, will bring some small gestures of flexibility. The Church wants officials to allow a former church in Tarsus, now used as a museum, to be returned to its original state as a house of worship. The “Pauline Year” starting on June 29 would be the occasion to hand over the building to the Church for the use of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected there during the following 12 months. Local officials have been quite helpful with preparations for the visitors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told me. But it’s still a big leap from being cooperative to actually handing over the church. Padovese is waiting for a final decision from the government.

In Tarsus, local business people clearly see the interest in the Pauline Year. The Tarsus Chamber of Commerce and Industry has set up the most interesting website about the commemoration that I’ve found. Among the gems are 360° panoramic views of the Tarsus church, both its interior and its exterior, the story of St. Paul’s life and a detailed account of his missionary travels.

After my quick initial post on this story, an American reader asked what greater religious freedom meant for the average Turk — a very difficult question that I tried to answer in the comments section here. A Turkish reader sent me an email calling my analysis “a piece of scrap,” saying that “latest developments in Turkey” were not a reform and disputing “that people were under pressure on religious matters during the pre-AKP period.” But he declined to elaborate his criticisms when I asked for more detail, so I can’t say more than that this sounds like a critique from a very secularist Turkish point of view, one I do not agree with.

I notice from other blogs that the idea of “post-Islamism” is either new or dubious to many readers out there. What do you think about the idea that “Muslim democrats” are working to reconcile Islam and modern political systems?

The light being cast on China by the coming Summer Games is far brighter than the flickering Olympic flame now wending its way across that vast country. Politics, society, human rights, the status of Tibet and even the environment have been widely discussed.

Now a window has been opened on faith and religion in a country where six decades of Communist philosophy and rule might seem to have pushed those subjects into obscurity.

In a recent report the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has analyzed available surveys, some a few years old, and concluded that 31 percent of the Chinese population considers religion to be very or somewhat important in their lives, with only 11 percent rating it as meaningless. Even the exact starting time of the Summer Olympics is rooted in Confucianism and Chinese folk religions,  the report adds, where the numeral 8 is revered for its luck and power. The games will start on the 8th day of the 8th month of ‘08 at precisely 8 minutes and 8 seonds past 8 o’clock.

This does not mean that religious affiliation is high in China. Only one in five adults has an active connection, the report says, with one of the country’s five major religions — Buddhism (by far the largest single group), Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam and Taoism. That compares to 8 in every 10 adults in the United States who claim a religious affiliation.

But a recent report from East China Normal University in Shanghai appearing in state-approved media said that about 300 million Chinese over 16 — slghtly less than a third of the population in that age group — are religious, perhaps indicating the government has given recognition to the depth of religious sentiment.

The question is whether China’s modernization brought about by its economic engine will bring religion into society in a bigger way. The report notes that Hu Jintao, general secretary of the country’s Communist Party, earlier this year told the Chinese Politburo the leadedrship should try to “closely unite religious figures and believers … to build an all-around … prosperous society while quickening the pace toward the modernization of socialism.”

Photo credits: Reuters/Bobby Yip/David Gray