New G20 Religion Forum brings hope for peace and understanding

National Post, 04 December 2022

The 'R20' may achieve something of what the global political summits were originally intended to do

The great human drama of the World Cup — Belgium fails to advance after a nil-nil thriller! — has brought wide attention to the Muslim character of host Qatar, on matters as weighty as human rights and as trivial as beer sales. It is an example of how the relatively small Muslim populations of the Arabian Peninsula have an outsize impact on the global understanding of Islam.

Yet the biggest recent news in the Islamic world took place earlier in November, in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world. While Arabia remains central to Islamic history and identity, the majority of the world’s Muslims are Asian. The four largest Muslim populations in the world are in Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Hosting the G20 this year, Indonesian President Joko Widodo decided to lift up his own country’s experience as an Islamic democracy. Noting that in 2023 the G20 will be in India, home to the world’s largest Hindu population, and in 2024 in Brazil, the world’s largest Catholic population, Widodo launched the “Religion Forum,” called colloquially the “R20.” The R20 will be convoked for a second time in New Delhi next year.

While the R20 brought together religious leaders of all sorts, shapes and sizes — Pope Francis sent a written message to the gathering — the key and encouraging developments were in regard to Islam. Widodo gave the leadership of this first R20 to Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Indonesian Muslim group with some 110 million members.

NU is the world’s largest Muslim organization and it promotes an Islam that is both open and tolerant of pluralism. NU’s general chairman, Yahya Cholil Staquf, invited the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL), Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, to co-chair the R20 with him.

That is immensely significant. The MWL is based in Saudi Arabia and has long been associated with the Wahhabi vision of Islam promoted for decades by the House of Saud, both home and abroad. Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, has moved away from Wahhabism and cut funding for extremism overseas. That has been reflected in major shifts at the MWL, which has moved under Mohammad Al-Issa toward religious tolerance and co-operation between faiths. The NU invitation to MWL was in recognition by the former of “recent dramatic changes in policy” by the latter.

The NU has size and the MWL has influence, and fruitful co-operation between the two is of potentially enormous impact in shaping global Islam. It might be strange to consider the R20 — a meeting of many religious traditions — in light of intra-Islamic co-operation, but interfaith gatherings are quite routine the world over. For the NU to invite the MWL to joint leadership in Bali was a truly new development.

In 2019, Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the influential Muslim centre of scholarship in Egypt — signed the “Abu Dhabi Declaration” on human fraternity, which received international attention. The NU-MWL co-operation may well have more impact.

Like the G20, the R20 issued a final communiqué. It committed the participants to “prevent the political weaponization of identity,” “curtail the spread of communal hatred,” and “promote solidarity and respect among the diverse peoples, cultures, and nations of the world.”

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