From Tunisia to Pakistan, the Muslim world is in turmoil, as each country struggles to find its own path to an Arab Spring.

Pessimists say that, in the end, all of these countries will end up with some form of authoritarian regime either because Islamic parties cannot accept democracy or out of a fear that these regimes will keep a nation out of the modern world.

But I am an optimist. I believe that eventually the democratic ferment in the Arab world will bring an era of relative democracy, religious tolerance and good governance. And I believe guiding Islamic principles will lead the way.

Without a doubt, revolutions are messy.

When revolutions occur after decades of authoritarian rule, the next stage is often chaotic and sometimes violent. In this region, there are many examples of long-simmering distrust between ethnic and sectarian groups that go back centuries that had been held in check by despotic rule. Now, suddenly, the grip that had stifled these competing groups has been released.

But I believe after an initial flailing about, conflicts between sectarian groups will slowly abate. Most Muslims want to join the modern world. They want to be part of the international community, not held in suspicion. They want governments that serve them. They do not want to serve the government. They want the freedom to develop their own ideas and live their own lives in harmony with their neighbors.

In short, they want a government that is as responsive to their needs as a Western democracy.

Read Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s full article in the the Detroit Free Press here.

Imam Feisal is chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, an independent, non-partisan, multi-national project that works with state and non-state actors to improve Muslim-West relations.

TOULOUSE, FRANCE-  French police have captured an armed man who took four hostages in a Toulouse bank Wednesday.  According to French media reports, the man claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda and acted for religious reasons. The hostages have been released. (Source: Al Jazeera / BBC News).

Analysts available for comment:

Jean Yves-Camus is a political analyst and research fellow at IRIS. He frequently comments on European perceptions of Israel. He is also a member of the European Consortium on Political Research and of the Task Force on Antisemitism at the European Jewish Congress.

CONTACT: jy.camus@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Paris, France
Languages: English, French

Bertrand Badie is a French political scientist and international relations specialist at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He has written extensively about international relations theory, focusing on globalization and the structural effects it exerts on the international system, states and societies.

CONTACT: bertrand.badie@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Paris, France
Languages: English, French

Gilles Kepel is a Professor and Chair, Middle East and Mediterranean Studies, at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). He is a contributor to the Financial Times, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El Pais, Al Hayat, and a number of Arabic language and international newspapers. Some of his recent publications include: Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The War for Muslim Minds, and Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam.

CONTACT: gilles.kepel@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Paris, France
Languages: English, French

Charlotte Lepri is researcher and lecturer at IRIS. She focuses on defense, security, and intelligence-related topics, crisis management, emerging global security challenges and transatlantic relations.

CONTACT: charlotte.lepri@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Paris, France
Languages: English, French, Italian

Rabbi David Rosen is chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), the organization which represents world Jewry in its relations with other world religions. He is a specialist in the field of interreligious affairs with particular expertise on the relations of the Jewish community and Israel with other religious communities.

CONTACT: david.rosen@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Jerusalem, Israel
Languages: English, Hebrew

Patrick Weil is a senior research fellow at the French National Research Center in the University of Paris. He has worked extensively with the French government on issues of secularism and immigration policy.

CONTACT: patrick.weil@theglobalexperts.org
Location: Paris, France
Languages: English, French

New York

The elderly Venerable Tep Vong, the Supreme Patriarch of the Buddhist community in Cambodia, traveled to Jaffna in Sri Lanka in the midst of the recent civil war.  In a broken city under siege, he joined others — Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians—to try to bring a peaceful end to the violent separatist conflict. The force of his quiet Buddhist resolve was unmistakable. Yet, he never quoted a single Buddhist scripture. He spoke, instead, in the plainest of ordinary words.

Who would have thought that speaking plainly in ordinary language is revolutionary? But for many religious communities, it is. The revolution is the growth of multi-religious action based upon ancient religious meanings but using new ways to communicate across religious lines. The evidence, if you look, is everywhere: war zones, places of extreme poverty, school and regular neighborhoods. Religiously fanatical forces capture headlines, but the big story is that religious communities are actively cooperating on a scale until recently unimaginable. Shoulder-to-shoulder on the front lines of today’s challenges, multi-religious cooperation is mainstream and it’s growing.

What’s up? Have religious communities decided to blur their distinctive identities, drop their doctrinal differences, and jettison the transcendent to flatten themselves into merely humanistic organizations?  Hardly. They are holding fast to defining differences in relationship to the transcendent. But they are also working together. It’s the successful melding of these two — real religious differences and positive cooperation — on an ever greater scale that is revolutionary. A key to understanding the underlying revolution is the fact that today’s religious communities are increasingly “bi-lingual.”

A double image illustrates the new bi-lingualism. In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached to a small Christian church about the scourge of racism. He used the language of Christianity — its scriptures, images, theologies, prayers and other customs. He spoke to Christians as a Christian in their own religious language. Now follow Dr. King to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, where he spoke with conviction on racism to hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom held different — or no — religious beliefs. Dr. King remained the same religious man. He didn’t change as he walked from church to public mall. But he couldn’t just repeat the sermon given in the little church. Many of the people gathered there didn’t share the language of his church. Instead, Dr. King spoke in the language of the public square. He never ceased being a believer, but in different circumstances of church and public square he expressed his religiously rooted care in two distinct ways. He was religiously bi-lingual.

Many religious communities are rapidly gaining this same bi-lingual skill. They keep their own religious language for exchange and action within their communities, but use ordinary language for the same purpose in the public space.

Dr. Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina led his Islamic community toward healing and reconciliation after the bitter trauma of civil war. To do so, he first worked as a Muslim among Muslims using the riches of Islamic language, including its scriptures and traditions.  But together with Roman Catholic Cardinal Puljic, Serbian Orthodox Metropolitan Nikolai and the Jewish leader Jakob Finci, he also worked in a shared public language to offer the exhausted nation a common vision of unity that called all to action. In the aftermath of the pain of war, bi-lingualism helped harness the powers of each religious community to cooperate to build the nation.

Both sectarian religious and public languages are irreplaceably important for religious communities in our globalized world. Neither can be collapsed into the other without impoverishing a religious community’s ability to both know itself and to act upon its deepest possibilities for care in today’s pluralistic world.

A revolution is underway because more and more religious communities have acquired the remarkable ability to switch from the language of the temple, synagogue, mosque, church, or gurdwara to the language of the public square. Discourse in both forms of language is required for us to have diverse religious communities composed of well-informed members with durable moral sensibilities who can find a medium for collaboration with people of all faiths, or none at all, in facing the global challenges of our day.

This piece is part of the series “Religion & the Public Space.”

LONDON

The death of “multiculturalism” has been proclaimed repeatedly recently, the idea pronounced with a big “M” as if we were talking of something tangible around which there is consensus. British Prime Minister David Cameron was the latest of many politicians to assert this in February. But his much-reported discourse in Germany offered nothing new about multiculturalism, European Islam, radicalization, or about British and European governments’ understandings of these issues. And his message does not seem to have diverged much from how Britain’s previous Labour government addressed the issue or what is being said in France and in Germany. In fact, while France never pursued the ‘multicultural’ model but rather the “assimilationist” one, the tone of its lament is similar. Germany never had an official model, but its ‘crisis discourse’ about multiculturalism is very similar to those in Britain and France. And for all the attention his speech received, Mr. Cameron did not propose fresh solutions to the multicultural riddle.

Multiculturalism is a human construction. The notion is associated with the liberal tradition and specific policy choices developed by countries like Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands as responses to national minorities or immigration. In 21st century Europe, multiculturalism takes on renewed meaning with three main components: a political theory, a policy practice, and a social reality. The possible understandings of the “fact” of multiculturalism are shaped primarily by the national histories, political cultures and social imaginaries of each country. International crises and events (from economic migration, to forced displacement due to natural disasters or civil wars; from debates around religious symbols to debates about freedom of expression bordering blasphemy), EU laws and policies, and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights each add supranational layers of meaning to the understanding of multiculturalism.

As an attempt to protect people and to apply justice in diverse societies, multiculturalism entails a continuous tension between universal individual rights and group rights, providing security and guaranteeing equal and fair treatment to all inhabitants of Europe, whether citizens or immigrants. In today’s Europe, pluralism engages a number of political and societal actors beyond state institutions, including citizens, long and short term immigrants, civil society, religious groups, and political parties and ideological groups. What many people do not seem to recognize is that religious-ethnic-cultural pluralism is no longer exogenous to European countries but is already part of their essence. The need for a collective answer and effort has become evident, and talking about multiculturalism requires reflecting not only on the meaning and modalities of “integration” of migrants and minorities into mainstream society, but considering the dynamics among and between minority and migrant groups.

What has clearly emerged from recent speeches and ensuing public national debates on multiculturalism is a sense of confusion, malaise and often contradictory messages. Policy makers and the general public alike appear to be in the midst of a thick fog that prevents them from understanding and tackling the challenges of individual and collective security within increasing religious, ethnic, and cultural diversity. And so we look for easy answers presented as simple choices – e.g., moderate vs. radical Islam, multiculturalism vs. assimilation, secularism vs. religious fundamentalism, etc. Yet such simplistic naming and categorizing further divides people and provokes animosities.

There is a path out of the fog of multicultural confusion. It passes through the appreciation of the nuances of identities, of the subjective and collective meanings of religion, the abandoning of dogmatisms (religious and secular), and a pragmatic approach focused on what we can do together as human beings. In an interconnected world facing complex global challenges, we must nourish an ethos of mutual responsibility towards the common good. This concept resonates with values espoused by the main religions of the world and that are present in Europe, including Islam, which place considerable emphasis on ideas of social justice, solidarity, charity, and collective identity. From this perspective emerges a more positive and multicultural-friendly aspect of religion, rather than its intransigent, exclusivist, or violent face, which is often condemned for being incompatible with western and democratic secular values.

This piece is part of the series “Religion & the Public Space.”

SAO PAULO

Brazil is seen as a country of diverse and profound faith.  But though religion is an important reference point in the lives of the population, the extent of religious diversity in this sprawling country is not nearly so pervasive as belief itself.

Though globally, the image of Brazil is connected to African traditions and religions, looking at the 2000 census data, the Brazilian sociologist Flávio Pierucci found that Brazil is, in reality, a Christian country, indeed, perhaps the largest Christian country in the world. 73,8%  of the population calls themselves Catholic, 15,4%, evangelical; a total of 89,2 % of Christian people. A mere 0,3% of the population identified as adherents of the African religions Candomblé and Umbanda. Looking at these numbers Pierucci asks: Where is our proclaimed religious diversity? It is true that this strict identifications don’t take into consideration  what we call “multiple belonging”, that is, the common Brazilian practice of those  who call themselves Catholic, but go regularly  to Candomblé cults or of any other religion: I go to the Mass on Sundays and visit my Mother of Saint in the yard  on Fridays.

And yet the hegemony of Christianity has political ramifications, despite the codification of the separation of church and state under the 1891 Brazilian constitution. During the 2010 presidential campaign, religion was used to bolster conservative views, especially on sexuality and reproductive questions. Cultural flashpoints – including the right of gay men and lesbians to a legal union, and the legalization of abortion – became the focus of inflamed public discussions. This investment in dogmatic arguments during a political campaign was highly unusual for Brazil, even though the culture is permeated with religious values and the rate of religious observance is very high. In previous campaigns, religious symbols and doctrinal principles were not so directly raised.

But the use of religious dogma to fight political values shows the significant public role that religions, particularly the Catholic Church, still have in Brazilian society and in seeking to influence the political process. Those that believed in secularism, or at the very least the separation of religion and state, were forced to aggressively oppose religious intervention.  The divisiveness points to a growing trend of anti-religiosity in the country.  In each census, the number of people declaring themselves “without religion” grows most.

Juan Marco Vaggione, an Argentine sociologist, argues that “religious narratives are publicly articulated and become debatable material not only by secular groups but also by those who, being religious, do not agree with some aspects of the official doctrine.” Indeed, during the 2009 electoral campaign, one case became a cause célèbre. A nine-year-old girl, raped by her stepfather and made pregnant, sought a legal abortion.  When her bishop attempted to prevent the termination of that pregnancy,  the reactions and discussions in the media came not only from the secular sectors of civil society but also from church members, other Catholic  Bishops, priests and Protestant pastors, offering evidence, as a result, of dissident ways of thinking internal to the churches

After the elections of October 2010, evangelical organized groups in Congress had increased their presence from 43 to 71 members.  The electoral campaign and the focus of religious groups on securing positions in Parliament, forces us to consider crucial questions surrounding the public role of religions in modern societies and secular States. Are these public interventions of the Catholic Church, and these protestant pastors elected to the Parliament, a violation of the democratic and constitutional principle of the separation church/state? Or, on the contrary, is this a demonstration, and a result, of the acceptance of democracy, one which allows religious groups and institutions to participate in the public debate regarding questions of interest to greater society?

The emerging public debate over religion’s role in Brazilian politics foretells a more diverse and complex religious landscape within Brazil’s society that promises to be exciting to see and to live.

This piece is part of the series “Religion & the Public Space”

NEW YORK

Even as the world’s attention is focused on ongoing revolutions in the Arab World, and the possible role that Islamic movements may play in transitions from authoritarian regimes, debates rage on how to curb Sharia law in Western European capitals and the American Mid-West, places where the imposition of such laws is far from a realistic possibility.

But in Nigeria, the country with Africa’s greatest number of Muslims and home to more Muslims than any single Arab country, including Egypt, Sharia is already a reality. Nigeria has become one of the largest constituencies of Islamic Law: over 70 million Nigerians are now partly governed according to Sharia in 13 of Nigeria’s 36 states.

Under 60 years of British colonial control, a policy of indirect rule allowed considerable autonomy to Islamic institutions in the northern Emirates of Nigeria. Islamic Law was administered within colonial limitations the British deemed appropriate. After independence in 1960, the importance of Sharia began to decline in northern Nigeria, as Muslims assumed powerful positions in the Federal Government of Nigeria.

The military coup of January 1966, which killed Nigeria’s prime minister, a Muslim from the north, was a serious blow to Nigeria. Northerners sought revenge in deadly riots, setting the stage for an escalating politicization of sectarianism and the outbreak of the three-year civil war in 1967. Opposing the secessionist east to the rest of Nigeria, the war was often wrongly depicted as a confrontation between Christians and Muslims.

Due to the expanding role of the federal government, Muslim political strength continued to increase while the cultural and legal influence of Islam weakened. By the late 1970s, Federal Government institutions overshadowed the old Emirates’ systems of authority and the Qadhis’ courts, and Islam’s role in jurisprudence diminished further.

In the 1990s, Nigerian Muslims from the northern states began to react both to the reduced influence of their region in national politics and the waning influence of Islam. The perception of declining national power reactivated the northern Muslims’ sense of cultural identity, and not least pride in their religion. The ‘Shariacracy’ movement was part of this development, with a revival of the legal role of Islam at the state level, as one state after the other adopted Sharia.

The Sharia implemented in Nigerian states has been uneven in both theory and practice.  It has sometimes applied rules of evidence that are not only stringent but sometimes unjust according to its own principles. A Sharia court in the State of Katsina condemned the unmarried pregnant Amina Lawal to death for adultery without meting out a similar sentence to the offending man – while Sharia normally would require stronger evidence for a death sentence to be pronounced. This case resulted in an outpouring of protests from across the Muslim world and from Western critics, and the Katsina State Court of Appeal finally overturned the sentence.

Ongoing tensions around the application of the Sharia are paired with periodic communal clashes, often over local resource issues, and continuing national rivalry between Christians and Muslims for political influence. Politics also can fan sectarian tensions. The intense political campaigns the before Nigeria’s general elections in April 2011 raised political and ethno-religious tensions in the country. As in previous elections, voting patterns reflected divisions between Christians and Muslims, and were magnified by some politicians’ efforts to cultivate religious sentiment to bolster their support.

Beyond the fact that it has the largest population of Muslims in Africa, Nigeria is the world’s seventh most populous country, and holds the 11th largest global oil reserves. It is also the key actor in West Africa’s economy and politics. How Nigeria manages its religious and ethnic diversity will be felt far beyond its own borders. The country is still struggling to find a balance between its religious communities’ identities and the concepts of both modern rights and the modern state. Its critical strategic importance for international affairs calls for us not to ignore the risks of terrible communal violence and threats to local and regional stability that manipulation of divisions rather than promotion of unity could bring.

This piece is part of the series “Religion & the Public Space”