Campaign for thorough reform of Muslim law deserves mainstream coverage -- now

The world’s largest organization of Muslims is campaigning for thorough worldwide reform of how to understand the faith’s religious law (Sharia) and applied jurisprudence (Fiqh).

Such an ambitious goal may seem unlikely and, to date, western media have given the effort minimal coverage. It’s time for that trend to change.

Far from some esoteric intellectual discourse, such a philosophical change could potentially affect the future of the world’s second-largest faith regarding democracy, blasphemy laws, human rights, education, the role of women, treatment of other religions, warfare, extremism, terrorism and crime and punishment.

The organization in question is Nahdlatul Ulama (NU, meaning Revival of Islamic Scholars) in Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population. Consider these numbers from James M. Dorsey, a freelance writer and adjunct senior fellow in international studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University: NU encompasses an estimated 90 million lay followers, tens of thousands of religious scholars, 44 universities and 18,000 lower schools.

NU upholds Sunni orthodoxy, but with a more tolerant tone than is customary in the Mideast. Its legal reform program was prominent during the massive February celebration of its 100th anniversary, analyzed in Dorsey’s March 31 Substack column. His article is a good starting point for journalists, but its opinionated viewpoint warrants careful follow-up interviewing. Also note this 2021 NU backgrounder by political scientist Ahmet T. Kuru (akuru@sdsu.edu).

Moderate Muslim thinkers have long favored some sort of move away from rigid legal traditionalism. Dorsey depicts a two-sided struggle among them, pitting allies of NU’s fully democratic and tolerant outlook against religious leaders beholden to rulers in the Mideast, as in Saudi Arabia, where certain social liberation is being allowed without fundamentally rethinking Islamic law or politics.

Trends that influence news: Where in the world is Christianity still growing?

THE QUESTION:

Where in the world is Christianity still growing, and why?

THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER:

This page often addresses topics that have been in the air for months, even years. But this one is raised by a brand-new article this week at Christianity Today and a more academic version posted by the journal Sociology of Religion. There's further timeliness in the Gallup Poll's March bombshell that less than half of Americans now claim religious affiliations, the lowest mark since it began asking about this 84 years ago.

The CT article, headlined "Proof That Political Privilege Is Harmful for Christianity," is found here. The academic article is headlined "Paradoxes of Pluralism, Privilege and Persecution: Explaining Christian Growth and Decline Worldwide," and available for purchase.

So: Bad times for Christians are good times for Christianity?

That contention is a modern update on Tertullian's 2nd Century maxim during an era of outright persecution, "semen est sanguis Christianorum" — "blood is the seed of Christians." If you persecute us, we grow even more. And so it was.

The scholars proposing a 21st Century version of this are Nilay Saiya (writing solo in C.T.) and study partner Stuti Manchanda, both at the public policy department of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This team analyzed data on churches' rise and decline in 166 countries from 2010 to 2020, found impressive expansion, and examined causal factors.

Looking back, Asia began the last century with only one Christianized nation, the Philippines, but more recently the faith "has grown at twice the rate of the population." Africa in 1900 had only pockets of Christians, mostly in coastal locations but today is "the world's most Christian continent in terms of population."

Now, all of that is familiar to missionary strategists and historians of the modern church. What's new here is the team's fresh look at explanations. They conclude "the most important determinant of Christian vitality is the extent to which governments give official support to Christianity." It's often said that the American founders' pioneering separation of church and state energized Christianity across two centuries.