G20: Islamic clerics mainstream pluralism
Aremarkable transformation has been taking place in the Muslim world, a years-long shift towards pluralism and tolerance belying common assumptions about Islam.
Maybe we missed this earlier: A lot has been going on, after all. But last week in Bali, at the G20's ground-breaking Religion Forum, the R20, that transformation took center stage. Not only is it an epochal moment in modern Islam, but this moment also helped create the world's most important interfaith conversation.
By expanding beyond the G7 to the G20 - the world's 20 largest economies - the developed world has created more space for nonWestern populations to enter the space of global governance and bring their perspectives and insights with them. That extends to India, with the world's largest Hindu population and a massive Muslim minority, as well as three Muslimmajority countries: Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
Over the course of a week in Bali, I watched, spellbound. Three hundred senior leaders from the world's major faith traditions explored how to interject religious frameworks into questions of global governance. Whether for climate change or civil conflicts, the discourse was always sophisticated and substantive. Given that this was happening through and at the G20, it's not an exaggeration to say the R20 may be, in just its first year, the world's most important interfaith venue.
It's not only the world's many people of faith who gain from having their religious leaders exposed to high-level political conversations that connect the
West and other parts of the world. The same can be said for secular leaders enriched by the insights of faith leaders they might never have otherwise interacted with - how, after all, can Western leaders pursue global challenges without understanding what shapes most global sentiments?
Indonesia - a secular democracy - is the world's most populous Muslim country. Saudi Arabia is the historic birthplace of Islam; its wealth, the sacred mosques in Mecca and Medina, and the hajj (a pilgrimage that is the fifth pillar of Islam) mean it has always had an outsized impact - especially on
Muslim-majority countries.
While for Western Muslims many of these conversations may not feel so urgent, topical, or even interesting, that hardly means they are not hugely significant for hundreds of millions.
The R20 is driven by the Indonesian Islamic organization Nahdlatul Ulama, building on its shared religious vision with the Muslim World League, headquartered in Saudi Arabia. Nahdlatul Ulama counts tens of millions of Indonesians as members.
The NU has long backed Indonesia's foundational secularism and continues to support its relatively recent transition to democracy; it also promotes interfaith collaboration including with Buddhists and Hindus and always strongly critiques extremism.
Headquartered in the historic birthplace of the faith, the Muslim World League enjoys a concomitantly massive influence, including over 1,000 clergy in dozens of countries.
Its secretary general, AbdulKarim Al-Issa, is a highly regarded Islamic scholar who has visited Auschwitz with Jewish leaders, toured Christian Evangelical churches in America and invited Hindu and Buddhist leaders to Riyadh in a country where, a few years ago, it was taboo even to celebrate holidays from other faith traditions.
Just how far will this partnership go? Opening the R20, NU Chairman Yahya Chalil Stoquf called for faith leaders to work with secular leaders to promote social development, interfaith solidarity and more sustainable economies. Echoing and embodying that spirit, Al-Issa announced the Muslim World League was establishing a humanitarian fund for victims of war, a new and substantial initiative that will aim to aid civilians, including those in Ukraine. This is exceptional, yes. But it is also not unusual.
The Muslim World League was the force behind the Makkah Charter. This pioneering treatise, ratified in Islam's holiest city, signed by over 1,000 Muslim scholars and endorsed by 6,000 more Muslim thinkers and visionaries, lays out a stunningly ecumenical vision for a moderate, peaceful and plural Islam.
(Signatories come from over 130 countries.) It emphasizes, among other things, Islam's commitment to female empowerment, environmental preservation and tolerance for all religious and sectarian differences.
For those who aren't Muslim, or invested in faith, perhaps the initiatives the Nahdlatul Ulama and Muslim World League are spearheading seem unimportant though I'm hard-pressed to see how the world's fastest-growing and second-largest faith is meaningfully incidental to anyone.