Month: January 2015

We’ve been following forced conversions and other manifestations of radical Hindu intolerance in India.  President Obama deserves credit for speaking to the issue eloquently on his trip to India.  India’s Catholic bishops pled for religious freedom recently, too.

Update on Thursday, January 29th: More good stories have come out on President Obama’s appeal for religious tolerance, including this one by Harvard Business School’s Lakshmi Iyer on Obama’s speech and this one on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s possible blind eye towards anti-Muslim outbursts In India.

Meanwhile, the fighting Buddhist theme can be witnessed not only in Sri Lanka but also in Myanmar.  See this revealing piece.

Paola Bernardini, a friend of mine who is Associate Director for Research, Contending Modernities, at the University Notre Dame, guest blogs in memory of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah:

Saudi Arabia is rated among the worst of the countries which restrict basic civil and political liberties. In this hereditary monarchy grounded on the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, political parties are forbidden; the public practice of any religion other than Sunni Islam is restricted (including Shia Islam); women are not allowed to drive, nor to hold public office; the media is controlled by government and any opposition to the regime is severely punished with prison and corporal punishment.

And yet, the late King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz, who died last week at the age of 91, was known to be a liberal.  As last Friday’s New York Times columnist stated, “King Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world.” In only 10 years, which is how long he officially ruled, he appointed the country’s first female deputy minister; started a Center for National Dialogue  headed by  “a 70-strong group of worthies, including, unusually for Saudi Arabia, Shias, women and some noted liberals,” with the role of discussing reform and introducing  more tolerance for religious diversity within Saudi institutions; paid a visit to Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican (the first ever of a Saudi monarch); sponsored the creation of the Vienna Center for Interfaith Dialogue, which carries his name and has a board of directors with representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism; and created the first co-ed university on Saudi soil — KAUST, North of Jeddah — open to both Saudi and Western youth and faculty, where women can drive on campus, the religious police is not allowed and, according to rumors, non-Muslim have their own space for prayer.  These few and yet important attempts at modernization are the reason why the death of King Abdullah bin-Aziz was received with sadness, even when news of a new Saudi blogger being detained in prison and sentenced to 1000 lashes merely for having expressed his political dissent on the web, was being circulated. Hopefully, the new King Salman, who has assumed the throne, will follow in his brother’s footsteps, no matter how strong the resistance on the part of the religious conservatives will be.

The Charlie Hebdo killings have reignited the question of whether and how Muslims can be integrated into European societies.  By what principle can such integration can succeed?  I take up the question in a two-part posting at Cornerstone, the blog of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center.

In Part One, I look for an answer in the much-discussed work of Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Scott takes France to task for making a universal out of its aggressive secularism, which turns out to be a very particular approach to religion and politics known as laïcité — and one that marginalizes Muslims.  This much, Scott gets right.

But does Scott provide a better way forward?  In Part Two, I express skepticism.  Her postmodern politics of difference undermines her efforts to find a principle upon which religious and secular people can live together.  More promising is religious freedom, a universal principle that affords wide latitude to religion while respecting liberal democracy.

My arguments here echo those that I invoked earlier on this blog in a debate with Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and that Timothy Samuel Shah invoked in his reflection on Jacques Berlinerblau’s critique of “pomofoco.”

France, along with other northwest European countries, has long been thought to be ground zero for secularization.  Lately in French cities, however, it’s been tough to find a seat in the pews, reports Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.  Gobry admits his experience is anecdotal but offers reasons why it might be something more.  Oh mon Dieu!

On the Foreign Policy blog today, Christian Caryl posted a piece, “Religion is Not the Enemy,” where he takes issue with one way of interpreting the Charlie Hebdo violence — that religion is the problem.  He begins by engaging Salman Rushdie:

It was entirely appropriate that one of the first people to weigh in after the Charlie Hebdo massacre was Salman Rushdie, the man who spent years of his life defying a state-sponsored death threat prompted by a presumed act of blasphemy. Though Rushdie isn’t one of my favorite novelists, I’ve always admired his firm stand in defense of the freedom of speech — and I’m glad that the British government had the guts to defend his rights.

By the same token, I don’t in any way dispute his right to make the statement that he issued yesterday — even though I find myself in rather strong disagreement with it. Here’s what he said:

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. “Respect for religion” has become a code phrase meaning “fear of religion.” Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Caryl takes issue.  Further down, he writes,

The problem with such arguments is that the ranks of the religious inconveniently include people who have done great good for humankind. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent campaign for justice is unimaginable without his background as a Baptist preacher. The Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis because he denounced the Holocaust and bemoaned the criminality of Hitler’s regime. Fervent Buddhists like Aung San Suu Kyi and the Dalai Lama have devoted their lives to the defense of human rights. The Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel believed himself to be doing God’s work as he laid the foundations of modern genetics.

The whole piece is well worth reading!

I wrote recently of what often comes as a surprise to the western popular mind — chauvinistic Hindu governance and violence in India.  Equally surprising is the presence of such a spirit in Buddhism.  Just to the southwest of India, however, on the island of Sri Lanka, one finds exactly that — an aggressive Buddhist nationalism that has governed the island for decades in the name of Sri Lanka being a Buddhist homeland, much as Hindu nationalists view India as a Hindu homeland.  As in India, the dominant religion in Sri Lanka is a strong majority — 74% of the population is of the Sinhalese ethnic group, almost all of their members being Buddhists.  An insightful piece authored by Rohini Mohan was published on the latest manifestations of the phenomenon in this past Friday’s New York Times.  In Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism, there is little separation of state and sangha (the 30,000 or so monks who make up the religious leadership), while, paralleling India, the state sharply excludes Tamil Hindus and Muslims in matters of education and language.  Sri Lankan monks fashioned a Buddhist nationalism in the late 19th century, in good part in reaction to British colonization and Christian missionaries.  After World War II, Buddhist nationalists emerged as politically dominant and have been so ever since.  Tamils fought back, engulfing the island in thirty years of civil war, ending finally in a victory for the Buddhist state in 2009.  Since then, the government has been inciting violence against Muslims and wrecking their mosques and promulgating a view of culture and history that enshrines Buddhist supremacy.  If this continues, writes Mohan, it will result in “more instability, ethnic polarization and suppression of dissent.”

New Year’s Day is the World Day of Peace in the Catholic Church.  Every year the Pope chooses a theme of peace and justice to commemorate the day.  This time around it is human trafficking.  It is said that today more people are enslaved than at any other time in the history of the world.  An estimated 26 to 28 million people are now in bondage to traffickers in sex and labor, over half of whom are women and children.  The injustice is close to Francis’ heart and one that he has spoken out on numerous times since becoming pope.  It has also been the subject of high level inter-religious conferences.