March—April, 2008 (Vol. 23, No. 5-6)

Sufi groups in India are currently engaged into efforts to establish a network around the country in order to try to prevent terrorist attacks, reports Farzand Ahmed in India Today magazine (Jan. 28).

The idea behind this civic organization is to create a “Sufi corridor of peace” connecting some 400 Sufi centers across India. The decision was made at a convention in New Delhi in December 2007. Representatives of various Sufi groups have since met again in order to identify the chain of Sufi centers, which should be operational by October.

The purpose is a dual one: on the one hand, to help authorities to counter terrorism and identify potential threats; and on the other hand, to create an awareness of the threat in the population and to educate it regarding such threats. The initiative is a consequence of several bomb attacks against Islamic places of worship and other spots in Muslim areas of India in recent times. On October 11, 2007, a bomb blast occurred at one of the main Sufi shrines on the subcontinent, in Ajmer. A number of militant Islamic groups strongly oppose Sufism, which they see as not being faithful to “pure” Islam.

The creation of a “Sufi corridor” apparently also reflects concerns among Sufi leaders regarding the potential threat of violent Islamic activism. It also signals a willingness of some Sufi groups to engage in organized and public efforts, although not everybody in the Muslim community is enthusiastic about it: the president of the Ulema Council of India thinks that such a move can create suspicions “that the community is feeling guilty.”

In some countries, especially Arab ones, governments have made attempts to promote Sufism for countering radical trends over the past decade.

(India Today, http://indiatoday. digitaltoday.in/)

The Turkish-based movement founded by the American-based preacher Fethullah Gülen now represents one of the most influential and effective Muslim networks in the world, reports The Economist magazine (March 8).

The movement claims to have established 500 schools in 90 countries and has even built up a presence in northern Iraq, with schools, a university and a hospital—no mean feat in an area marked by Turkish-Kurdish conflict. While unpopular among secularists in Turkey, the movement has a wide following in the country’s political and social life, with many Turkish police believed to be sympathizers.

The Gülen message of embracing democracy and upward mobility makes it well received in the West, particularly as its rivals, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, are often seen in a more antidemocratic light.

(The Economist, March 8)

Islam in the Muslim areas of the former Yugoslavia is becoming more diverse, with a development of neo-Salafism, but the prospects for any type of Islamic state are not very good, write experts Xavier Bougarel and Bashkim Iseni in the newly published issue of Politorbis (No. 43, 2007), a journal of international affairs published by the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Their analyses include prospects for the next ten years. Following the events of the past 15 years and the recent proclamation of independence of Kosovo, the issues related to Islam in the former Yugoslavia and neighboring countries has been a matter of concern. Bougarel and Iseni rule out any possible emergence of an Islamic state: Islamist groups will continue to be active, but either as small political players (in electoral terms) or as subgroups within mainline political parties.

Current debates vary from one country to another: political Islamism has declined in Bosnia-Herzegovina (after experiencing an impetus in the 1990s), while a discussion on links between Albanian identity and Islam has emerged in Kosovo and Macedonia.

However, the influence of pietist neo-Salafi trends within established Islamic institutions in the area is likely to grow, as a consequence of neo-Salafi propaganda—which has appealed to young people and those returning after training in Arab countries. This should lead to more literal interpretations of Islam within official institutions.

This should be seen in a context where such institutions are feeling competition, both from dynamic neo-Salafi groups and from Sufi or neo-Sufi groups; this has led to compromises allowing the entry of neo-Salafis. Moreover, Bougarel and Iseni observe that the situation in Bosnia is complex, since there are also preachers mixing Sufi and neo-Salafi elements, or former members of Islamic armed units who have subsequently affiliated with Sufi groups and denounced neo-Salafism.

The picture is one of a process of diversification within Bosnian Islam. Moreover, local religious institutions are likely to face difficulties in financing their activities, due to the increasing number of religious scholars trained at home or abroad and looking for jobs.

Institutions will have to look for new sources of income; failure to do so may reinforce dependence upon foreign funding from Muslim countries, but also create internal tensions and frustrations.

(Politorbis, Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Political Secretariate, Bernastrasse 28, 3003 Bern, Switzerland, http://www.eda.admin.ch/ politorbis)

While Scientology has been more effective than most religions in controlling its teachings and official writings from online use and criticism, recent events suggest that the dynamics of the Internet have overtaken the controversial church.

David Sarno, writing in the Los Angeles Times (March 3), reports that there have been a series of challenges to the Church of Scientology’s “well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church’s side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers, and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy.” The loosely based movement has encouraged former Scientologists to come forward to relate their negative accounts of life in Scientology.

Two women who are close relatives of Scientology leaders recently launched their own website, ExScientologyKids.com, accusing the church of physical and mental abuse, while the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing has issued the inflammatory allegation that the church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, plagiarized his teachings from a 1934 German book called Scientologie.

More alarming to church officials have been the threats and “cyberattacks” (including a bomb threat) against church personnel and websites. The Anonymous group has even taken its protests to the streets, as thousands of masked members picketed Scientology locations around the world. Much of the protests started in January when a Tom Cruise video about the church was leaked on You Tube and then ridiculed and passed around in cyberspace.

When the church charged copyright infringement, one prominent web poster refused to take the video off his site, encouraging more people to defy the church. The new wave of activists soon made common cause with longtime church critics and ex-member groups, writes Sarno. He adds that all of this ferment has given more courage to ex-members and even to journalists formerly concerned about church lawsuits against negative coverage.

The failed candidacy of Mitt Romney both created greater visibility for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and served as a painful reminder to Mormons that they are still not fully accepted in American society.

The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 8) reports that the high rates of opposition to or wariness about a Mormon candidate found in the polls tended to surprise many observers and scholars. Mormon sociologist Armand Mauss said, “I don’t think that any of us had any idea how much anti-Mormon stuff was out there. The Romney campaign has given the church a wake-up call.

There is the equivalent of anti-Semitism still out there.” While other factors may have been at play in Romney’s withdrawal from the campaign trail, even secular analysts noted the anti-Mormon fervor. Both evangelical and Catholic leaders, such as Bill Keller and Fr Richard John Neuhaus, cited Romney’s religion as a factor in why he should be defeated, while secularists, such as Christopher Hitchens, were unsparing in their ridicule of the Mormon faith.

Although Mormons have been taught not to defend their religion publicly, the last straw may have been commentator Lawrence O’Donnell’s tirade against Mormon teachings and practices on the national McLaughlin Group show. That show has served as a “rallying cry” for Mormons to engage in a “wave of activism,” with the encouragement of the church leadership, to speak out and defend their faith. After M. Russell Ballard, one of the church’s 12 apostles, urged the students at Brigham Young University to use the Internet and the new media to defend their faith, there was a rapid growth of websites—numbering over 150—established for that purpose.

The church has also engaged in a public relations campaign and posted a series of videos on YouTube to counter anti-Mormon footage on that site. Mauss concludes that post-Romney, there will be a “wholesale consideration with how Mormons should deal with latent and overt anti-Mormon propaganda.”

Critical comments from several mainline Protestant churches regarding current policies in Israel and calls to divest from companies involved in some specific types of business with Israel are creating tensions between those religious groups and Jewish organizations, Nathan Guttman writes in the Jewish daily Forward (Jan. 30).

While relations with the Presbyterian Church are also strained, it is especially the United Methodist Church (UMC) that has recently come under fire. A recent extensive report produced by the Women’s Division, General Board of Global Ministries entitled Israel–Palestine: A Mission Study for 2007–2008 has met with harsh criticism. The B’nai B’rith International claims that the report follows “a now familiar … pattern of the UMC in maligning Israel” (Jewish Tribune, Feb. 28).

The re-emergence of a divestment campaign has added to those tensions. A resolution in the report recommends the UMC to call for divesting from a manufacturer supplying Israel with bulldozers used in building the separation barrier and demolishing Palestinian homes. The issue will probably be discussed at the UMC April conference. Advocates of the resolution insist that it should not be represented as anti-Israel, but as a refusal to benefit from human rights violations: the report does not issue a general call to divest from Israel or companies just doing business with Israel, reports Robin Russell. (United Methodist Reporter, Feb. 1).

(The Forward, http://www.forward.com; Jewish Tribune, http://www.jewishtribu ne.ca; United Methodist Reporter, http://www.umportal.org)

America’s “Fourth Great Awakening,” marked by a period of evangelical revival and reform, is coming to an end, judging by the failure of such religious and moral change and programs to gain wide resonance in the U.S., writes Ronald Bailey in the libertarian magazine Reason (April).

Bailey’s reference to the Fourth Great Awakening is taken from historian William McLoughlin and economist Robert Fogel, who both argue that there is a cyclic pattern of evangelical-led upsurges in religion and moral reform in the U.S. every century dating back to the first Great Awakening in the 1730s. Fogel posits that such Great Awakenings are largely political phenomena in which “evangelical churches represent the leading edge of an ideological and political response to the accumulated technological, economic, and social changes that undermined the received culture.”

Fogel argues that there are three phases to such events: revival, when cultural stresses cause religious revitalization movements; reform, when activists are able to convince government to take up moral improvement programs; and resistance, when religious fervor wanes and opposition builds against the forces of moral upliftment. Bailey sees the first stage of the Fourth Great Awakening in the growth of evangelical churches and the decline of the mainline denominations in the 1970s.

The eventual adoption of the antiabortion crusade by the evangelicals and the resulting emergence of the Christian right led to the reform stage of the Fourth Great Awakening, according to Bailey. In the 1980s, these moral crusades were bipartisan, including the attacks against rock music (led by Tipper Gore) and the later faithbased social programs to use the government to accelerate moral betterment. The high point of the reform period was the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex education programs and his foreign policy based on fighting evil and spreading democracy abroad.

But now this period is coming to an end, argues Bailey, as best seen in the failure of a wide range of programs and movements appealing to morality to gain a foothold with the public. Thus, the opposition to gays and gay rights is fading, even if gay marriage is still unpopular (though efforts to ban gay marriage are passing by much narrower margins than was the case a few years ago). The support for embryonic stem cell research, the division and weakness of the Christian right and the slackening off of support for Republican would-be presidential candidate Mike Huckabee all suggest a mood of resistance to evangelical moral reform.

Bailey argues that another scenario may be that the Fourth Great Awakening is “taking a left turn,” where “environmental revivalism may supplant the fundamentalist aspect of the Fourth Great Awakening. If so, we may be in for a period in which campaigns for green reform programs dominate American politics.”

(Reason, 3415 S. Spulveda Blvd, Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034-6064)

From Burma to Tibet, from Thailand to Sri Lanka, more and more Buddhists are taking to the streets and supporting increasingly assertive political movements, in contrast to the usual image of Buddhism as “Asia’s quietest religion,” writes Christian Cary in Newsweek (March 1).

The recent protests in Tibet and across the Tibetan diaspora that erupted from March 10 seem to confirm such an assessment: while the Chinese security agencies were “mentally prepared” for some form of Tibetan activism in the months preceding the Beijing Olympics, the widespread nature of this activism has been a matter of surprise, explains Indian intelligence expert B. Raman in an analysis published by the Chennai Centre for Chinese Studies (March 14). Interviewed by Newsweek, Prof. Jim Holt (Bowdoin College) analyzes the rise of activist Buddhism as “an instance of the wider politicization of religion worldwide.”

But the magazine remarks that there are several forms of Buddhism, and that apolitical forms continue to flourish along with other expressions of that tradition. Other forms find a middle way, supporting specific issues while avoiding general politics. Despite the impression that there is unity among contemporary Buddhism, there is a difference between the “very local” and the “very national” dimensions of the religion, writes Thomas Borchert (University of Vermont) in Religion Compass (September), a new online academic journal.

While international ties among Buddhist institutions have been growing, as evidenced by international Buddhist gatherings, the significance of different nation states in relation to Buddhism should not be overlooked: similarly to other religions, Buddhism is “marked by a tension between the transnational and the national.” The most well-known case of Buddhist social activism was the massive protests of Buddhist monks and laypeople in Myanmar (Burma) last fall. But since then, there has been a government clampdown on freedoms, as well as a paradoxical reassertion of military support for Buddhism, something that will make religious-based democratic reform difficult.

The e-newsletter Sightings (Feb. 14) notes that the same Buddhist monks doing the protesting against the military ironically need the government, even if it is a tyrannical one, to transmit and legitimate their teachings and practices, known as Sasana. These texts and rituals affirm the existence of a multi-tiered cosmos in which sentient beings are born, die and are reborn. The junta adheres to a kingship model whereby the lay government plays an active role in promoting the persistence of the Sasana (including funding lay and monastic meditation centers and the publication of Buddhist texts), even if a large number of monks dissent and protest against it.

Jason Carbine writes that “monastic transmissions of the Sasana have been conducive to sustaining military rule in Myanmar, and hence to the violence the military perpetuates, precisely because those transmissions laud and often depend upon lay governments (even repressive juntas) that support them as representatives of the Sasana.”

Yet the demonstrations of a few months ago demonstrated that the military support for the Sasana can also contribute to the “strengthening of a powerful enemy: the monkhood itself, motivated by compassion for the suffering of the Burmese people and by the perception that its way of life is under severe attack.”

Carbine concludes that if these efforts to challenge and reject the role of the junta’s claim that it is a good sponsor of the Sasana (and its own legitimating roles in transmission of these teachings and practices) can be sustained by the dissident monks and their lay supporters, and can “help encourage massive defections from the armed forces, they may finally open the door to the change so many have sought.”

(Sightings, http://marty-center.uchicago.edu; Religion Compass, http://www.blackwell-compass. com/subject/religion/; Chennai Centre for Chinese Studies, http://www.c3sindia.org)