The bimonthly U.S. international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just published a survey of the world’s top 20 public intellectuals and the first 10 are all Muslims. They are certainly an interesting group of men (and one woman) but the journal’s editors are not convinced they all belong on top. In their introduction in the July/August issue, they wrote: “Rankings are an inherently dangerous business.” It turns out that some candidates ran publicity campaigns on their web sites, in interviews or in reports in media friendly to them. So intellectuals who many other intellectuals might have put at the top — say Noam Chomsky or Richard Dawkins — landed only in the second 10 or in a much more mixed list of post-poll write-ins.

“No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list,” the introduction said. “In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. Within hours, votes in his favor began to pour in. His supporters—typically educated, upwardly mobile Muslims—were eager to cast ballots not only for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100. Thanks to this groundswell, the top 10 public intellectuals in this year’s reader poll are all Muslim. The ideas for which they are known, particularly concerning Islam, differ significantly. It’s clear that, in this case, identity politics carried the day.”

Still, the results are interesting. Fethullah Gülen, pictured at right by his website announcing the survey result, heads a network of schools and media that is probably the world’s largest moderate Muslim movement. He may be one of the most influential Muslims that non-Muslims have never heard of. We ran a feature about him just last month.

Second was Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the microcredit project run by his Grameen Bank. So he’s not an unknown and he’s here for his secular work rather than anything religious.

Four other Muslim religious personalities made the top 10 — Youssef al-Qaradawi (3), the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood and weekly preacher on al-Jazeera satellite television, Amr Khaled (6), a popular Egyptian television preacher, Abdolkarim Soroush (7 — pictured at left), an Iranian reformist theologian and Tariq Ramadan (8), the Swiss-born scholar popular among young European Muslims. Soroush, who is much more philosopher than activist, is probably the only one we have not written much about.

Several top-tenners besides Yunus made the list for their secular work. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, came in fourth. Next was Aitzaz Ahsan (pictured below), the Lahore lawyer whose lawyers’ protest movement is possibly the strongest voice of secular civil society in Pakistan. Ninth and tenth places went to Ugandan-born cultural anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

What do you think of this survey? Do you think these 10 are the world’s top public intellectuals? If not, who would you nominate?

“Popular imagination relegates ‘heresy’ to the Middle Ages…” says the Wikipedia entry on heresy. The Inquisition, the Salem witch trials and other excesses of religious zeal against dissenters also seem to be located comfortably far back in the past. But several  news items these past few days have shown that hunts for heretics continue in the 21st century. Locations, religions and methods may be different, but the intolerance is the same.

“Thousands of hardline Indonesian Muslims rallied outside the presidential palace and Jakarta police headquarters on Monday to urge the president to disband a sect branded by many Muslims as “deviant”, a news report from our Jakarta office said. “Militant Muslim groups have attacked mosques and buildings associated with Ahmadiyya, and are lobbying the government to outlaw the sect.”

Ahmadiyya, a late 19th-century movement that considers its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad a latter-day prophet who came to perfect Islam, says it is a Muslim denomination. Most Muslim scholars dispute this, saying Mohammed was the last one, the “seal of the prophets”. Comparisons between religions are always tricky, but its situation looks similar to that of Mormonism within Christianity. Mormons say they are Christians with latter-day prophets and scriptures, but several traditional Christian churches dispute this. This disagreement may have lost Mitt Romney some votes in the Republican primaries in the United States, but otherwise it has not had much effect on public life.

But in Indonesia, the Islamists demand that the state ban Ahmadiyya because — as the Indonesian Ulema Council has decreed — its teachings deviate from mainstream Islam. Islamic radicals have damaged mosques and other property belonging to Ahmadis in Indonesia. “Today is the beginning of our fight. We are ready to die for the Ahmadiyya sect’s dismissal,” said Abdurrahman of Indonesia’s Muslim Forum (FUI) at the rally on Monday. “If ( President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono) ignores us, we will bring him down.” As that threat indicates, the issue has become a political football and could influence elections next year.

The government finally decided to issue a stern warning to Ahmadiyya followers that they could face five years in jail for “tarnishing religion” but stopped short of banning the movement. Human Rights Watch promptly called on Jakarta to withdraw the decree. Religion experts said the Ahmadiyya unrest fits into a larger picture of rising religious intolerance in Indonesia.

Anti-Ahmadi protesters have an easier time in Pakistan, which officially declared the group non-Muslim in 1974. At the Punjab Medical College in Faisalabad, 23 students have just been “rusticated” (a term a Pakistani blogger translates as expelled) after Islamist students beat them up and demonstrated against them. The college principal told the Daily Times on Sunday that “the issue of Ahmadis was one of the most provocative in the world”. He said the college was sympathetic to the students but it was clear it had to give in to the Islamist students’ pressure.

Witch hunts are also still practiced. “Villagers in Assam stoned four members of a family, including two women, and then buried them alive on suspicion of practising witchcraft, police said on Wednesday,” according to our report from Guwahati in India. “More than 500 people have been killed in the state in the past few years because their neighbours thought they were witches, police say.”

The “virginity lie” case gripping France for the past two days has given French politicians the opportunity to indulge in one of their favourite pastimes — expressing indignation. There’s been much more heat than light in this story since it broke last Friday.

If you haven’t been following it, the story is about a French Muslim couple who got their marriage annulled after the husband complained the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. Since he could not have cited either religion or the traditional Muslim preference for virgin brides as valid reasons for annulment, the husband’s lawyer argued the wife had lied about an “essential quality” necessary for the marriage. Under French law, a marriage can be annulled if, for example, one partner found out only after the wedding that the other had lied about a previous marriage or a criminal record.

Politicians, feminists and human rights activists immediately demanded the ruling be overturned. The critics vied to issue the most ringing denunciation. “A real fatwa for women’s liberation … (like) a ruling handed down in Kandahar” was a memorable one from Fadela Amara, the state secretary for urban affairs who comes from an Algerian Muslim family. Here are many more in French. By Monday, Justice Minister Rachida Dati — another cabinet member with a North African Muslim background — was flip-flopping. After originally defending the ruling as a means of helping a woman get out of an unwanted marriage, she decided on Monday to ask a public prosecutor to launch an appeal.

The news today was that the erstwhile husband and wife both accept the ruling and do not want an appeal that would make them a legally married couple all over again and force them to replay their separation through a longer and more costly divorce process. The woman’s lawyer said she was furious. “I have to get on with my life,” he quoted her as saying. “I don’t know who decided that they would think for me. I haven’t asked for anything. It feels like I’m hallucinating.”

Almost nobody but the couple and their lawyers want the ruling to stand. But almost nobody is actually thinking through the implications of what they’re demanding.

Most critics want the ruling overturned for one or several of the following reasons:

• it violates a woman’s privacy by making virginity a possible criterion for marriage.
• it violates sexual equality because no proof is asked of a groom’s virginity.
• it introduces a religious concept of the virgin bride into the secular marriage contract.
• it treats the bride like merchandise in a commercial transaction.

These are all valid arguments. Unfortunately, the result of a successful appeal would be to restore the marriage of a couple who do not want to be married, especially not after the drama they went through. As was widely reported, the hoodwinked husband discovered his wife’s lie on their first night together and went right back to the wedding reception, which was still in progress, to announce the news…

Simply overturning the ruling would also leave on the books the paragraph in the civil code that allowed it in the first place. Several hundred marriages are annulled in France every year because of the “essential quality” clause, and nobody’s saying this should be scrapped. Some critics have said the other criteria — such as hiding a previous marriage – were OK but a woman’s sex life must remain completely private. There is probably a way to amend the code to accommodate that, but the legislators will have to get around another problem. Male impotence is currently accepted as a criterion for annulment. Should that be private too?

One of the few politicians who seemed to look beyond a knee-jerk reaction was the straight-talking health minister, Roselyne Bachelot. While explaining her position, she made some statements that might surprise people outside of France. But her comments still made a lot more sense than most others:

“This is a topic that cannot be resolved in court,” she said. “What one ruling has done, another can’t simply undo. Now, it’s an issue for national legislators. Parliament is where all this should be decided.

“It’s true that the notion of a ‘fundamental quality’ is something that, in the case of virginity, may have been widely accepted … in the 19th century or in the early 20th. Morals have changed and that’s fine. So I want parliament to pass a law to define these characteristics.”

She rejected the argument that the wife’s lie was the central issue. “The right to lie is a fundamental right of human beings. The issue at the heart of this is the notion of a fundamental, substantial and essential quality.”

Nadine Morano, the state secretary for family affairs, warned against seeing this as a Muslim issue. “People say it’s a Muslim family, but I also know many families of practising Catholics for whom this element remains an essential quality for both the man and the woman.”

“No matter what anyone says, the decision handed down by the court in Lille conformed to the civil code. Should we make a law and say we cannot include virginity as one of the essential qualities of a person simply because we see that it creates inequality between men and women?”

Any suggestions about what French lawmakers should do once the soundbite phase of this story is over?

“Religion has been used, politicised, not only by groups but also the official institutions in every Arab country … Nearly everything is theologised — every issue society faces has to be solved by asking if Islam allows it. There is no distinction between the domain of religion and secular space.”

Ulema (Muslim scholars) are too keen to deliver rulings on economic, social or even medical issues like organ transplants: “You’ll hardly find any scholar who says, ‘I’m very sorry, but this is not my business, go consult a doctor’.”

Nasr Abu Zayd was declared an apostate, divorced from his wife by court order, threatened with death by Islamists and forced to flee his native Egypt in 1995. Now a professor of humanism and Islam at the University for Humanistics in Utrecht in the Netherlands, he has lost none of his critical perspective. But he looks back on his case, a major human rights issue at the time, without rancour.

“Now when some people say ‘you are an apostate’ or something, I really laugh rather than try to defend myself,” he told Alistair Lyon, our Middle East Special Correspondent, in an interview in Beirut.

Read the full story here and tell us what you think.

Remember ping-pong diplomacy, the exchange of ping-pong players between the United States and communist China in the 1970s that was one of the first steps that led to a thaw in relations between the two countries? If the Vatican had a ping-pong team, perhaps China would have considered sending their squad to the walled city in Rome for a match.

But the Vatican does not have a ping-pong team, as far as we know. So, the next best thing appears to be music. This week, Vatican Radio made a surprise announcement on its daily 2 p.m. bulletin. The China Philharmonic Orchestra of Beijing and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus will perform Mozart’s Requiem for Pope Benedict on May 7 in the Vatican’s audience hall, adding a stop to its already scheduled European tour.

As one diplomat said, “this could not have happened without the Beijing government approving it.” Given the fact that relations between the Vatican and Beijing have been scratchy to say the least, one can only wonder if this is the start of a mating game. It could lead to diplomatic relations and China’s recognition of the pope as leader of all Catholics in the world, including Chinese Catholics, many of whom have been forced to join the state-backed Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.

Something seemed afoot in the last few months. In November, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, undersecretary for relations with states, was reported to have made a secret visit to China. The Vatican never denied the reports. In March, a Chinese delegation secretly had talks in the Vatican, sources confirmed.

One precedent for baton diplomacy that comes to mind is a similar event that happened in the Vatican on February 20, 1988 when the now mostly-forgotten Cold War still existed.

The then-Soviet Union’s Red Army Choir performed for Pope John Paul, singing, of all things, Ave Maria. It, too, was a shocker when it was announced. But on Dec 1, 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made his historic visit to the Vatican, turning relations between the Kremlin and the Vatican on their head after some 70 years of mutual distrust. Relations between Russia and the Vatican were established in 1990 and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, if music be the food of diplomacy, play on.

As readers of this blog will have noticed, I posted a note yesterday about calls by Italian intellectuals for Pope Benedict to break his supposed silence over Tibet. On Wednesday he did so at his weekly general audience, making a carefully worded appeal (here in Italian) for an end to the suffering of the people there.

Given the delicate nature of relations between the Vatican and China, the appeal seemed to strike a balance between his concern for the people and Vatican diplomacy. He mentioned the violence without mentioning China.

In fairness to the Pope, the accusations of “silence” made by some in Italy were perhaps, as was noted by his defenders in yesterday’s blog, a bit premature. Unless he is saying a Mass on a Church holy day or a similar occasion, the Pope only has set days in which he can make a public appeal that the Vatican believes is most effective — Sunday at the Angelus prayer from his window and Wednesday at the general audience.

The unrest in Tibet began last Friday. He did not mention the troubles on Palm Sunday. So the wait for the “silence” to be broken lasted only five days.

In a related development, the Rome-based Catholic agency Asianews published some pretty harrowing photos from Tibetan province of Amdo, which currently is part of the northern Chinese province of Sichuan. Asianews said the photos were sent from the monastery of Kirti to the Free Tibet Campaign and from there to Asianews. They speak for themselves.

Arab Media and Society has published an English translation of the Arab League’s Satellite Broadcasting Charter approved by Arab governments at a meeting in Cairo in February, along with contrasting opinions of the charter widely criticised by advocates of media freedom. In essence, the charter incorporates restrictions which most Arab governments already apply to their own terrestrial broadcasters and to satellite broadcasters which operate from their territory. But the governments have tended to give the satellite broadcasters a little more freedom than they allow terrestrial broadcasters, most of which are state-owned.

The operative clauses for religious broadcasting are clauses 9 and 10 of article 6:

9. To comply with the religious and ethical values of Arab society and maintain its family ties and social integrity.

10. To refrain from insulting God, revealed religions, prophets, mazhabs (religious sects), and religious symbols.

As with several other clauses prohibiting certain types of broadcasts, the bans are stated in the broadest terms, leaving plenty of room for interpretation. But until the governments start to apply the charter to satellite broadcasters under their jurisdiction, it will be hard to predict what practical effect it will have.

For more on this charter, check out our reporting on the charter and reactions from Arab satellite broadcasters and Human Rights Watch.

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.

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.”

Preparations are under way for a planned visit to the Vatican by representatives of the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam. This group of Muslim scholars and leaders got to be known as the “138″ because that was the number of initial signatories, but the total has grown to 221, so that label is a bit confusing now. Anyway, veteran vaticanista Sandro Magister informs us that five Muslim representatives were at the Vatican early this week to start preparing for the visit expected to take place in the next month or so. One interesting aspect is simply the geographical mix of people involved — they come from Turkey, Britain, Jordan, Libya and Italy.

Discussion of this initiative continues apace.

The conservative U.S. Catholic author George Weigel argues that the”Common Word” authors “seemed to be trying to change the subject ” in their statements about the planned dialogue because they did not address what Pope Benedict cited as discussion points when he addressed the Roman Curia in December 2006. In that speech, Benedict said Muslims and Christians had to “counter a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of the community and from public organizations” and “welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognise these also as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion.”

In his weekly column, the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican expert, John Allen, has a long interview with Father Thomas Michel S.J., one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam. Allen notes two interesting points Michel makes:

• Michel said: “It’s about time that somebody moved the conversation off geopolitical conflicts and onto faith questions.” Although some Vatican officials have argued that inter-religious dialogue ought to be seen as part of a broader dialogue among cultures, Michel said he doesn’t share that view. “Religion is already too often relegated to the status of folklore, of being a mere artifact of culture,” he said. “Muslims are making us all aware that if we’re not talking directly about God and religion, we’re not accomplishing anything.”

• I asked Michel to comment on one issue certain to surface in any Muslim-Christian conversation: “reciprocity,” or the insistence that if Muslim immigrants in the West receive the benefit of religious freedom and protection of law, Christian minorities in the world’s 56 Muslim-majority states ought to get the same deal. “We have to be careful,” Michel said. “Reciprocity is not a gospel value, but something that comes out of diplomatic and trade negotiations.” It was entirely appropriate, Michel said, to insist that Muslims treated minorities fairly. On the other hand, he said, respect for human dignity could not become a bargaining chip.

Sohail Nakhooda, editor-in-chief of Islamica magazine, kept the focus on what Muslims and Christians have in common. He made two interesting points about that in an interview for the Venice-based journal Oasis :

• “The document definitely caught people by surprise, particularly the naysayers in both religions who prefer to keep complete theological distance to legitimise their polemics … the document generated dialogue within and between communities. Its aim is not to whittle away differences in doctrine or, say, soteriology, but it is more about a recognition that we need to retrieve and learn to appreciate shared history and shared theological principles.

• “What is innovative and seminal about ‘A Common Word’ is that it starts from unity and moves to difference, rather than from difference to unity. It began with unity, that is, with what both communities shared deeply. That unity, or sharedness, was to be the basis for difference. This is an altogether different way of approaching the problem of intercultural relations and of plurality; it preserves their religious and cultural identities; it enables each to come together on solid theological grounds whose basis are in their own scriptures and which both share. They may disagree, and naturally they will, but when dialogue is based on the dual principles of love of God and of neighbour, it will ensure that they always leave as friends and that their disagreement does not escalate into all-out conflict.”

It’s interesting to see some people such as Weigel pointing to a large gap between Christianity and Islam and others like Nakhooda stressing what links them. Which approach do you think is more realistic or has more chance of fostering understanding?