Search Results (5)

Treaties and covenants have been the most important instruments of international relations in both ancient and modem times, playing a significant role in the promotion of religious freedom, peaceful coexistence, and interfaith harmony. The rapid spread and broad appeal of early Islam brought matters of international relations and cosmopolitan state governance to a cadre of Muslim leaders whose main political experience had been with parochial Arabian tribalism. The foremost issue was the position, rights, and responsibilities of non-Muslim religious communities within the Arab-Islamic empire. Consequently, numerous covenants and treaties were devised with subjects and with foreign states during the expansion of the Muslim world. This study examines the protection of non-Muslim places of worship under the rule of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ and his successors, including future caliphs and generals. It explores the practical application of the covenants by the successors of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ during early Islamic history, exploring the extent to which these covenants and treaties were effective in maintaining peaceful co-existence in a multi-faith society. In sum, for the sake of concision, only specific segments of the covenants and treaties are examined, which were devised with the non-Muslims for the protection of their worship places during the early Muslim Conquests. Full article

This article proposes a liturgical model for multireligious worship, namely the Pilgrim’s Service for the Ultimate Goodness of Humanity. Three key humanitarian liturgical principles buttress the proposed model; story-sharing, agreed symbols (metaphors), and de-centering. The model also proposes an overarching onto-narrative image—the pilgrim weaving and holding various liturgical threads as a whole. The end goals of this multireligious worship include, among others; (1) renewed awareness of the all-encompassing Transcendent and Its Peace, (2) interreligious dialogue and collaboration, (3) raised consciousness and the practice of radical hospitality for “strangers”, and (4) appreciation of the (religiously) marginalized. The interfaith service held on September 25, 2015, at the 9/11 Museum in New York City is analyzed and annotated, along with further suggestions, as a demonstration of the proposed model. Full article

Today there are many occasions when persons from various religious traditions gather together for some type of observance. These gatherings are referred to by various names: Interfaith “Worship”, Multireligious “Prayer,” Interreligious “Services,” and “Integrative Religious Prayer.” People come together to learn more about one another, to protest injustices, to mourn disasters, and to join together to work for the common good. In some gatherings, there are also people in attendance who claim no religious affiliation at all. In other gatherings, like a community ritual event designed by the religious leaders of the town the eve before Thanksgiving, there is often an assumption that all who attend “pray” to a “God” even if the content and forms of “prayer” and the names and understandings of “God” differ. However, while Buddhists use the term “prayer,” they do not have a “god” to whom they pray. This article addresses the models of host/guest, serial interfaith occasions (when people are participant observers at a gathering where each religious tradition maintains its own integrity and contributes something to the whole in a serial fashion), and “inter-riting” (when the event is designed so the people can pray together in a unified fashion, often blurring the boundaries that commonly separate each religion). The Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawaii, a large Buddhist-designed interfaith ritual gathering that combines the personal and the global, and offers insights into guest/host, serial interfaith, and inter-riting models, will be used as a basis for understanding these issues to assist religious leaders in their interfaith work. Full article

Motivated by increasing religious intolerance, we study the socio-economic covariates of individual-level religious intolerance in Indonesia, the largest Muslim democracy in the world. We use panel data from 2007 and 2014 of more than 20,000 adult individuals (representing 83% of the population) and apply fixed-effect regression analysis to identify relevant socio-economic characteristics that are highly associated with religious intolerance at the individual level. We utilize survey questions on willingness to accept someone with different faith living in the same village, living in the same neighborhood, renting a house, marrying relatives or children, and building a place of worship in the neighborhood as our measures of religious intolerance. We find that higher individual income and educational attainment are positively correlated with the tolerance level. At the same time, a higher level of self-declared religiosity is negatively correlated with a tolerant attitude. For location-specific characteristics, higher income inequality and extent of poverty in the location where an individual resides are associated with a higher level of religious intolerance. These patterns are generally robust across different measures of religious intolerance, although there is heterogeneity in the magnitudes of the correlations, where these covariates have the smallest correlations with the willingness to accept interfaith marriage in the family. Full article

Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion and gender at a community level both on Instagram and in arts workshops, we show how sharing ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice entangles a diffraction of differences as ‘togetherness’. Such entanglement creates cross-cultural interfaith understandings and gender diverse acceptance and inclusion online. We use diffraction, intra-action and entanglement as a way of framing our understanding of this ‘togetherness’ and show that human feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages; they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, orientations, attractions, aesthetics, art and objects of attachment. The feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that we discuss are therefore direct products of human and non-human interactions, which we explore through arts-based research. In this article, we apply Karen Barad’s feminist new materialist theories of ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’ to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. We use these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of ‘community’, ‘belonging’ and ‘what really matters’ in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and Instagram-based art communities. To better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that the feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’, which are central to human subjectivity and experience, are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. The methodologies we present are community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’. We identify how creative methods are a significant and useful way of knowing about communities and argue that they are important because they are grounded in being with communities, showing that the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered. Full article