Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a major address today on the election there. It was in the form of a khutbah, an Islamic Friday sermon that is often the platform for the most important public pronouncements in the Islamic Republic. So one might assume it would be couched in Islamic terminology and religious themes.

But a rough-and-ready indicator, a web “cloud” that indicates the frequency of certain words, tells us otherwise. Aziz Poonawalla over at the City of Brass blog generated a Khamenei khutbah cloud on Wordle on the basis of a quick translation of the ayatollah’s speech. I had some trouble reading all the terms, so I went to that site and generated one myself. Here is the result:

To be absolutely clear — this cloud is only a rough computer analysis. I generated it in Paris hours after the speech, without consulting any other Reuters bureau, so it played no part in our Tehran reporting of Khamenei’s comments or other coverage on our wire from Beirut and from London. Nothing can replace on-the-spot reporting by Persian-speaking correspondents who understand all the nuances in a political sermon like this.

That said, my techie side still thinks this cloud does highlight some interesting aspects of the sermon. The most frequently used words — people, election, state, president, revolution, country, leaders, legal — are political terms. Islamic makes a good showing, but it is only one of the top dozen or so terms — including God , which came up nine times — after the clear front-runner people (56 times).

Koran doesn’t appear at all.

“Bewildingerly diverse” is the way Asghar Ali Engineer describes his native country, India. This 70-year-old Muslim scholar has written dozens of books about Indian politics and society, Islamic reform and interreligious dialogue. As head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism in Mumbai, he works to promote peace and understanding among religious and ethnic communities through seminars, workshops, youth camps, research and publications. The centre even organises street plays in the slums of Mumbai to teach the poor about the dangers of communalism.

Our long conversation at the Centre in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz neighbourhood of Mumbai during a recent visit to India provided a few key quotes for my earlier analysis and blog post on religion in the Indian election campaign. Since these issues are crucial to the general election taking place in India, I’ve transcribed longer excerpts from his answers and posted them on the second page of this post.

(Photo: Asghar Ali Engineer, 14 April 2009/Tom Heneghan)

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Hindu nationalism, Muslim “vote banks”, anti-Christian violence, caste rivalry — Indian politics has more than enough interfaith tension to offer populist orators all kinds of “religion cards” to play. Coming only months after Islamist militants killed 166 people in a three-day rampage in Mumbai, the campaign for the general election now being held in stages between April 16 and May 13 could have been over- shadowed by communal demagoguery.

(Photo:Voters show IDs at a polling station in Ayodhya, 23 April 2009/Pawan Kumar)

But in this election, the “religion card” doesn’t seem to be the trump card it once was. It’s still being used in some ways, of course, but the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played down its trademark Hindu nationalism in its drive to oust the secular Congress Party from power in New Delhi. A BJP candidate who lashed out at the Muslim minority saw the tactic backfire. During a recent three-week stay in India, I found religious issues being discussed freely and frequently in the boisterous election campaign. But they were usually not the main issues under debate and not isolated from the pocketbook issues that really concern voters. Click here for the rest of my report quoted above.

(Photo: BJP leader L.K. Advani, 8 April 2009/Amit Dave)

This is one of those stories where context is king. Thanks to the internet and India’s lively English-language media, anyone around the globe can find Indian reports highlighting the religion angle. One of the news magazines, The Week, ran an interesting cover story about the “high priests of hate.” On balance, I think it looks a bit overdone — it was written at the height of the Varun Gandhi controversy — but it had this classic anecdote:

“A former BJP minister once said that he had won five times in a row using a simple trick: his men would make an issue of a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl or the death of a cow in a Muslim area on the eve of elections. He lost the last Assembly election when he campaigned with a development agenda.”

But religion isn’t just on the politics pages. Outlook, another news weekly, reported that an American investor long associated with the Hare Krishna movement has offered to build a huge Hindu temple in a planned Himalayan ski resort as part of a project previously nixed by religious leaders who feared it would desecrate the mountain home of their gods.

(Photo: Elderly voter helped to cast her ballot in Puri, 23 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

The Economic Times reported on its property pages that “more and more Indians want to have homes in religious centres.” Real estate developers and analysts differed on whether the financial crisis would hurt this trend, some seeing a lack of faith in the market while others firmly believed these investments were good. And the tabloid Mumbai Mirror had this story about a court defending religious names on clothes.

While in Mumbai, I went to see Asghar Ali Engineer to talk about the role of religion in politics in India. He explained the central role of communalism — the use of religious, ethnic or other loyalties to mobilise social groups — in Indian politics. A noted Muslim reformer, interfaith dialogue advocate and head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Engineer said:

Communalism is not actually a conflict between two religions but between the interests of two or more communities. It is using religious identity for political mobilisation. That is where religion becomes a tool. Religion is not a fundamental cause, religion per se does not cause any problem. Nobody is fighting whether Islam is right or Christianity is right or Hinduism is right. The main point is what the government does for Muslims, for Christians, for Hindus… The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and inclines towards them, does a lot of favours for them. ‘The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,’ that’s what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on the Hindu vote bank.

India is not a nation in the classical sense as in Europe. France, for example, is built on the French language and culture. But India is a bewilderingly diverse country and we have made it one nation. Declaring it a nation was easy, but in the process of nation-building, all these forces have come into play. Whatever development takes place is not based on justice. It is highly skewed. Some religious communities get much more than others, some castes or regions get much more than others. That is why this question of identity has become so important. Those who are left out use their identity to mobilise their people. Similarly, those who are privileged see a threat when other communities mobilise, so they also have to use their identity to ward off this threat from lower castes and backwards religious communities. This is the interplay of religion and politics.

More from that interview in a later post. For more on the Indian election, see the Reuters India website and its special section on the 2009 election. Click here for a slideshow of election pictures.

Here’s a video from the second round of voting on April 23:

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India's general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

"Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony," he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad's campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: "The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place."

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory "hate speech" against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country's home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP's pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won't necessarily help Kumar's attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally's pledge:

"The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda," he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India's economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

"In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar."

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar's ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

"It's a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani," Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad's party, told me. "L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism."

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

Parliamentary and presidential elections in Indonesia this year may hinge on how the public reacts to a directive from the country’s top Islamic council –all Muslims must vote or risk going to hell.

The fatwa from the Indonesian Council of Ulema (MUI) is not legally binding. But it does carry weight in the world’s most populous Muslim country, where Islamic conservatism has been growing since the fall of the country’s former autocratic president, Suharto, moe than a decade ago. Suharto kept a lid on politicised Islam with the same ruthless approach he took to eradicating leftist influences after coming to power following a 1965 coup blamed on communists.

(Photo: Cigarette factory where orders dropped after MUI issued fatwa against smoking in public, 2 Feb 2009/Sigit Pamungkas)

The MUI has evolved from being a pliant arm of Suharto’s regime to becoming an independent body that aims to influence public policy.  The edict does not state which parties or candidates voters should choose. But it could encourage Muslims to choose Islamist candidates at the polls, pushing  the country away from secularism toward a more socially rigid government.

Indonesia’s plethora of political parties mean relatively small shifts among voters could potentially determine which groups form alliances in the April 9 general election and which field candidates in the presidential election in July.

Austrian politicians and media are in uproar over a recent survey that said a fifth of all Islamic religious education teachers here hold anti-democratic views.

In the survey of 210 teachers, conducted as part of a PhD thesis, 21.9 percent agreed with the following statement: “I oppose democracy because it is not compatible with Islam.”

The public debate has worn on without asking a few crucial questions, such as how representative these findings are, how thorough the survey was and whether the questions steered the answers.

(Photo: A Muslim woman and a far-right election poster saying “Now it’s about us Austrians” in Vienna, 18 Sept 2008/Dominic Ebenbichler)

Instead, only days after the survey appeared in the weekly magazine Falter, the education ministry unveiled a five-point programme to be implemented by the Islamic Community overseeing the teaching of Islam.

Children in Austria can choose to study their own religion at school. Lessons are funded by the state and, until now, teachers were not required to have any formal education. Now, among other measures, Islamic religion teachers will have to sign a contract stating their adherence to democracy, human rights and the Austrian constitution.

“No teacher- in any subject, and of any religion — should express undemocratic opinions in Austria’s schools or disdain our constitution,” said Education Minister Claudia Schmied of the Social Democrats.

Members of Austria’s far right Freedom Party, which scored 17.5 percent in the Sept. 2008 elections, extrapolated the findings to the Muslim community at large. “For years, (politicians) have looked away and acted as if there were no problems with the integration of Muslims,” they said. “It is high time that the Social Democrats wake up out of their multicultural dreams.”

The author of the survey, Islam expert Mouhanad Khorchide, 37, said he had feared his findings could be misused by the far-right and Austria’s estimated 400,000 Muslims. The Palestinian-born Austrian citizen  held back from publishing them until after the elections, in which the far right nevertheless garnered a record 28 percent of the vote.

(Photo: Muslims protesters pray outside Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, 10 Feb 2006/stringer)

Khorchide said those saying Islam was incompatible with democracy were often older Islamic religion teachers, many of whom came from countries in the Middle East without established democratic traditions.

In a previous survey in 2007, he found that 97 percent young Muslims between 16-26 years of age in Austria felt that democracy and Islam were compatible. “This shows there is a change in attitude over the generations, younger people think differently, which is actually positive” he said.

Austria’s Greens party has criticised the government for not extending their new plan to teachers of other religions. A question like that raises another one, i.e. how many Austrians overall are dissatisfied with democracy and national institutions if so many vote for far-right parties?

Former British diplomat Henry Hogger was in Vienna this week to discuss two recent Gallup polls debunking some common misconceptions about Muslim communities. One main finding was that the generally higher religiosity of Muslims did not imply a weaker sense of national identity.  On the contrary, about two-thirds of Muslims in London said they had confidence in the British government, for example, compared with just 36% of the British public overall.

Hogger pointed out that the formulation of the statement in the survey of Austria’s Islamic teachers could have been misleading – arguably, it already suggests that Islam is not compatible with democracy, something many Muslims might disagree with.

An analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that blacks are considerably more religious than the overall U.S. population. You can see the whole report here.

“While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life,” the report says.

Its highlights include:

- Nearly eight in 10 blacks (79 percent) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent among all U.S. adults.

- Blacks attend religious services and pray more frequently than the general population. While 39 percent of all Americans report attending religious services at least once a week, 53 percent of blacks report the same.

- Similarly, while 58 percent of all Americans report praying at least once a day, 76 percent of blacks report praying daily.

- The vast majority of blacks are Protestant (78 percent), compared with 51 percent of the U.S. adult population as a whole.

The findings, drawn mostly from data within  Pew’s Religious Landscape Survey conducted in 2007, have political as well as cultural implications.

President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party made a strong bid in last November’s presidential election to woo voters of faith — a strategy that dovetailed neatly with Obama’s strong appeal to the party’s black base.

The survey also highlights the cultural and social conservatism of U.S. blacks on issues such as gay rights.

According to Pew Research Center surveys conducted in the summer of 2008, nearly two-thirds of blacks said they opposed gay marriage compared to 51 percent among whites.

Some leading groups in the religious right such as the Family Research Council have been tapping this vein by forming alliances with leading black Christian conservatives.

Democrat and Republican strategists will no doubt read this report carefully.

(Photo: Barack Obama at a New Orleans church, Aug. 26, 2007. REUTERS/Lee Celano, USA)

The Russian Orthodox Church elected Metropolitan Kirill, 62, as its new leader on Tuesday, succeeding Alexiy II who died last month. The new leader of the 165 million-strong Church, the largest in the Orthodox world,  is seen as a moderniser who may thaw long icy ties with the Roman Catholic Church.

There was speculation before the vote that nationalists, anti-westerners and anti-Catholic forces among the clergy and monks might rally to block Kirill’s election. He seemed to take the possibility seriously enough to strike a conservative tone in recent days. In his address before the vote, Kirill spoke of “the assault of aggressive Western secularism against Christianity” and of “attempts by some Protestant groups to revise the teachings of Christianity and evangelical morality”. He also hit out at Protestant and Roman Catholic missionaries, saying they sought converts in post-Soviet Russia — a key point of discord with the Vatican.

(Photo: Metropolitan Kirill before the vote, 27 Jan 2009/Alexander Natruskin)

But the vote showed his support was strong. Kirill received 508 votes from a total of 677 valid ballots cast. His rival, conservative nationalist Metropolitan Kliment, 59, polled just 169 votes and a third candidate, Metropolitan Filaret of Belarus, withdrew in favour of Kirill.

Kirill, whose official title is Metropolitan (senior archbishop) of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, is one of the few  senior Russian clerics to have met Pope Benedict. He favours closer ties with the Vatican and observers say he would chart a more independent course for the Russian church.

Hopes of a thaw have been fuelled by Kirill’s meetings with Pope Benedict at the Vatican in 2006 and 2007 and his optimistic comments about better relations with Rome. He even spoke about a thaw in an interview with the pope’s own paper, L’Osservatore Romano.

(Photo: Pope Benedict and Metropolitan Kirill at the Vatican, 7 Dec 2007/L’Osservatore Romano)

But Kirill has also echoed Alexei’s criticisms of Catholics on occasions. On Monday, as delegates gathered for the election, Kirill said in a newspaper interview that there was some way to go before a meeting between the heads of the two churches would be possible. “A meeting between the patriarch and the pope will become possible only when there are conclusive signs of real and positive progress on issues which for a long time have been problematic for our relations,” he said.

Here’s our video of the voting session in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, with a long clip of Kirill addressing the Local Council (in Russian):

Thousands of Shi’ite Muslims in southern Iraq are wrestling with a choice of religion or democracy before a pilgrimage which may prevent them from voting in elections to provincial councils on Saturday.

Pilgrims from the southern city of Basra are setting out on an arduous walk hundreds of km (miles) long to the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala, far from the election centres where they are registered to vote. The pilgrimage for Arbain, or 40 days of mourning for the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Imam Hussein slain in battle at Kerbala in the 7th century, culminates in mid-February.

(Photo: Pilgrims in Kerbala for Arbain, 27 Feb 2008/Mohammed Ameen)

“Kerbala is more important than voting, and so far I haven’t seen any candidate that deserves my confidence. I still have no job after the last election,” said Mohammed Ali, one of a group of pilgrims at a roadside tent.

Read here the full story from Mohammed Abbas in Basra. Missy Ryan in our Baghdad bureau reported last week that Iraq’s religious parties could face a backlash at the polls because voters have tired of too much religion in politics.