Religious Leaders launch R20 to resolve conflicts
Church of England Newspaper September 29
Ahead of the Group of 20 meeting in Indonesia from November 15-16 , a coalition of the world’s major religions will gather in Bali from November 2-3. Known as the R20, the group’s aim is to give a unique global platform through which religious leaders from every faith and nation can express their concerns and voice shared moral and spiritual values.
The Nadhlatul Ulama (NU) the world’s largest Muslim organization which has an estimated 120 million followers will host the G20 Religion Forum, a major motivation of which is to prevent the political weaponization of communal hatred and foster the emergence of a truly just and harmonious world order. Unlike many Muslim organizations and institutions across the Muslim world, NU is completely independent of any government control: a purely autonomous religious civil society organization.
The underlying conviction is that the issues to be addressed by the G20 summit, which President Putin and President Zelensky of Ukraine are reported to be attending, cannot be fully or finally resolved by politics or economics alone. Religions have an important role to play through their resource for, expression of and support for humanitarian ethics. The organisers hope it will counter the global narrative and agenda which they say is currently controlled by political leadership, big corporations, some economic think tanks or some extremist and terrorist groups. “One of the primary agendas is to quell the ideas of radical Islam and extremism,” said Hadza Min Fadhli R an Indonesian Islamic scholar. In 2016 the NU issued a declaration from a summit of Moderate Islamic Leaders which “called upon people of every faith and nation to join in building a global consensus…to marginalize those who would exploit Islam in a way to harm others”. NU seeks to address “the violence committed by terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.”
The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) which represents 600 million Protestants in 143 countries is also a co-sponsor of the conference which will be addressed by Archbishop Thomas Schirrmacher, the Secretary General of the WEA.
Participants include the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, where Muslims constitute around 88 per cent of the population, the King of Cambodia, and the Secretary General of the Muslim World League from Saudi Arabia. Pope Francis is sending the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue as his formal representative. Among Anglicans invited to attend are Rev Richard Sudworth, who is in charge of inter-religious relations for the Archbishop of Canterbury who has also been invited to attend. Other Anglican invitees are the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Bishop Antony Poggo from South Sudan, and the Primate of Nigeria.
The conference will try to identify values shared by the world’s major religions and civilisations, how to overcome historical grievances and move towards reconciliation and forgiveness, and whether religions need to relinquish certain traditions in the 21st century to ensure that religion functions as a source of solutions and not problems. It will also explore regional topics such as the weaponization of religious identity in contemporary West Africa.
The conference will issue a final statement and prepare the ground for 2023 R20 conference in India, also the host of next year’s G20. It will then move to Brazil in 2024.
www.churchnewspaper.com
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