Religious leaders bring Religion to G20 Conference
by Chris Sugden:
For the first time ever, the G20, or “Group of 20,” meeting in Indonesia on November 15 and 16, is formally considering how the world’s major religions should be involved in addressing urgent global issues. This unprecedented process was initiated by the G20 Religion Forum, or R20, a main event of the G20 Summit officially recognized by the Indonesian government, which holds the Presidency of the G20 this year.
The R20 Summit took place in Nusa Dua, Bali on November 2-3 2022 and was officially opened by the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo. It was co-chaired by Kyai Haji Yahya Cholil Staquf, the General Chairman of Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization, and Shaykh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, the Secretary General of the Muslim World League. Under their leadership, the R20 is mobilizing global religious and political leaders to ensure that religion serves as a genuine and dynamic solutions, and not a source of problems, in the 21st century.
The R20’s primary stated goal was to prevent identity issues from being used as weapons; to limit the spread of group hate; to protect communities from violence and suffering triggered by conflict; to encourage honest and realistic discussion within religious communities about their past and current failures and responsibility for historic injustices; and to incorporate moral and spiritual values into geopolitical and economic power structures.
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the founder and founder of R20, represents 120 million moderate Muslims, or more than 40% of the Indonesian population. The NU Chairman General, Yahya Cholil Staquf, the primary driver and Founding Chairman of the R20, has a track record of inviting fellow Muslims to recontextualise obsolete and problematic Islamic teachings. The NU recognizes the existence of such teachings, which are incompatible with robust respect for the equal rights and dignity of all human beings, and works to reconcile them with the realities and norms of contemporary civilization — a context very different from the one in which classical Islamic law emerged.
Such tenets include those governing the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, the structure of government, the legitimacy of the modern nation-state, and the proper purpose and conduct of warfare. These are often used by extremist militants to justify their actions, and by those who seek to use Islam for political purposes. At the same time, NU’s theology and movement of “Humanitarian Islam” seeks to return rahmah (“universal love and compassion”) as the primary message of Islam.
Real change has already taken place. In 2019 in Banjar, West Java, NU rejected the category of infidel in Islamic law. The NU also supported the concept of a nation state and decided that Muslims had no religious obligation to establish a caliphate. Earlier, in 2017, the Supreme Court of Indonesia ruled that all religious groups should be treated equally before the law; failure to do so would be considered “unconstitutional”.
Nahdlatul Ulama invited the Secretary General of the World Muslim League based in Mecca, Shaykh Muhammad bin Abdul Karim al-Issa, to co-chair the R20 Summit in Bali, enabling engagement with the wider Islamic world. In recent years, the Moslem World League has increasingly focused on religious moderation and friendship between societies and diverse global civilizations.
NU is also working with the global Catholic Church and with one of the world’s largest Christian networks, the World Evangelical Alliance (formerly the World Evangelical Fellowship), which represents 600 million people in 143 countries. The Secretary General, Prof. Thomas Schirrmacher from Germany, attended the R20 in Bali.
Nigerian ‘genocide in slow motion’
Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, the Primate of the Church of Nigeria which has about 25 million followers, was invited to address the R20 Forum on the situation that his church faced from violent extremists. He said that “Nigeria is now one of the most dangerous countries to be a Christian. Thousands of people have been killed by these well-organized, well-equipped, and well-funded extremist groups and over 150 villages have been sacked. There are over 2 million internally displaced people, and thousands more have been kidnapped for sex and ransom. Churches are forced to pay millions of Naira for ransom for kidnapped church members, and over a dozen, pastors have been martyred by these extremists. This is in addition to the hundreds of churches that have been attacked, bombed, and destroyed. We live daily in great trepidation.
What is most problematic in the current situation is that very few are willing to listen to the victims. Even when the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on religious freedom reported that Nigerian Christians are facing genocide in slow motion, the West insists that this is just a matter of tribal clashes between pastoralists and farmers, both fighting for scarce economic resources caused by climate change. Politically correct disinformation seems to be strategically pushed forward by Nigerian politicians and other groups who benefit from these undeclared massacres through various corrupt monetary and security budgets and the perpetuation of a radical ideology.” [Read here for full text of Archbishop Ndukuba’s speech].
The NU scholars are the most powerful theologically and operationally effective actors in promoting religious freedom for all people in the Islamic world today. They harness the unique power of the pluralistic and tolerant Indonesian Islamic understanding and practice that originated from 16th century Java.
“I regard the work of Humanitarian Islam and the Movement for Shared Civilizational Values as one of the most pathbreaking and important developments in world politics and cross-civilizational ethics in our generation. No event that I know of is more timely, urgent, or well conceived,” said Professor Robert Hefner, present at R20, a leading scholar on the Islamic World from Boston University and president of the American Institute for Indonesian Studies.
India and Brazil will hold the G20 presidency in turn in 2023 and 2024. India has the world’s largest population of Hindus (1.1 billion) and Brazil has the second-largest population of Christians (194 million). Thus, R20 took a seat at the G20 “negotiating table” for 84% of the world’s citizens who say religion is important or extremely important to them (Pew Research 2016). Hundreds of millions of them live in Global South countries with no official presence at the G20.
Final Communique
The R20 final Communique is entitled “Striving to Ensure that Religion Functions as a Source of Global Solutions”
“We, religious leaders from G20 Member States and elsewhere throughout the world, are deeply concerned by global challenges such as environmental degradation, natural and man-made disasters, poverty, unemployment, displaced persons, extremism, and terrorism. Effectively responding to these challenges has been rendered more difficult by rivalry between and among major powers and the resurgence of identity-based conflict worldwide, which threatens both domestic and international peace and security, as well as by the erosion of public commitment to ethical and spiritual values that are essential to the wellbeing of individuals and societies.
The R20 seeks to promote mutual understanding, a culture of peace, and harmonious co-existence among the world’s diverse peoples, religions, and nations. In pursuit of this objective, the R20 is mobilizing religious, social, economic, and political leaders from throughout the world to ensure that religion functions as a genuine and dynamic source of solutions, rather than problems.
The R20 welcomes and appreciates constructive endeavors to achieve the aforementioned goals, including but not limited to:
The “Forum for Building Bridges Between East and West” and the 2019 “Makkah Charter,” initiatives established by the Muslim World League in order to foster mutual understanding, peaceful co- existence, and harmony among the world’s diverse peoples, cultures, and nations.
Therefore, the R20 calls upon religious and political leaders and people of goodwill of every faith and nation to join in building a global alliance founded upon shared civilizational values.
The R20, through this global alliance, seeks to:
- develop and implement concrete initiatives that will build bridges between nations and civilizations;
- encourage honest and realistic conversation within and between religious communities, in order to ensure that religion functions as a genuine and dynamic source of solutions, rather than problems;
III. infuse the world’s social, political, and economic power structures with moral and spiritual values;
- prevent the political weaponization of identity;
- curtail the spread of communal hatred;
- promote solidarity and respect among the diverse peoples, cultures, and nations of the world;
VII. safeguard human beings from violence and suffering precipitated by conflict;
VIII. call upon the world to actively assist those who are suffering the consequences of such violence;
- harness the wisdom of spiritual ecology embedded within the world’s religious traditions to ensure respect for, and preservation of, the natural environment, including the elements of earth, air, and water;
- foster the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order, founded upon respect for the equal rights and dignity of every human being; and
- secure recognition of the R20 as an official G20 Engagement Group.
Having launched the R20 under the 2022 Indonesian Presidency of the G20, we look forward to India’s Presidency of the G20 in 2023.”
Chris Sugden, Indonesia.
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