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AR 26:10 - The battle for the soul of Islam
pdf = www.bit.ly/3evVbwe
In this issue:
APOLOGETICS - valuing what God values, holding loosely to the rest
ISLAM - interest in Asian Islam grows
ORIGINS - major scientific journal challenges the long-held assumptions that Intelligent Design cannot be tested
Apologia Report 26:10 (1,515)
March 10, 2021
APOLOGETICS
"Discernment Without and Within" by Nicholas Batzig -- a good, concise biblical review which highlights the work of Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow Sinclair Ferguson. Batzig explains that "we desperately need to discover the source of discernment" for it "ensures that we value what God values and hold loosely to what we ought to hold loosely." Feeding on Christ, Oct 27 ‘20, <www.bit.ly/3kAmFSF>
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ISLAM
"The Battle for the Soul of Islam" by James M. Dorsey <www.bit.ly/3kpCn2T> -- this update of the overall picture that we featured in 2016 (AR 22:8) <www.bit.ly/3uipmfR> includes what amounts to an introduction to Indonesia's growing influence on global Islam. Dorsey's conclusion is also a good summary: "A major battle for Muslim religious soft power that pits Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, and Indonesia against one another is largely about enhancing countries' global and regional influence. This battle has little to do with implementing notions of a moderate Islam in theory or practice despite claims by the various rivals....
"Muslim-majority Indonesia, the world's third largest democracy, is the odd-man out. A traditionalist and in many ways conservative organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, the world's largest <www.nu.or.id> Muslim movement, has garnered international respect and recognition with its embrace of a Humanitarian Islam that recognizes the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the principles enshrined in it and has taken tangible steps to address Islamic concepts that it considers outdated. In doing so, Nahdlatul Ulama has emerged as a formidable challenger to powerful state actors in the battle for the soul of Islam. But it still faces the challenge of overcoming the Arab view...."
Dorsey's introduction highlights the battle's change of focus, explaining that "it is not the caliphate that the world's Muslim powerhouses are fighting about. Instead, they are engaged in a deepening religious soft power struggle for geopolitical influence and dominance.
"This battle for the soul of Islam pits rival Middle Eastern and Asian powers against one another...."
The rest of the lengthy discussion amounts to a review of the players, their alignments, and their activities. In it we learn that "the course of the battle could determine the degree to which Islam will be defined by either one or more competing stripes of ultra-conservativism - statist forms of the faith that preach absolute obedience to political rulers and/or reduce religious establishments to pawns of the state. [Which] goes to the heart of the relationship between the state and religion. ... This struggle has and will affect the prospects for the emergence of a truly more tolerant and pluralistic interpretation of one of the three Abrahamic religions."
In describing the increasing complexity of the battle, Dorsey begins: "If the first phase of the battle for the soul of Islam was defined by the largely uncontested Saudi religious soft power campaign, and the second phase began with the emergence of revolutionary Iran, the third and most recent phase is the most complex one, not only because of the arrival on the scene of new players but also because it entails rivalries within rivalries.
"The new players are first and foremost the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Qatar, and Indonesia. Their entry into the fray has further blurred the dividing lines between purely religious and cultural soft power, nationalism, and the struggle within Muslim societies over values, including various freedoms, rights, and preferred political systems.
"The third phase is complicated by the fact that all of the players with the exception of Indonesia have embraced Iran's model of coupling religious soft power with hard power and the use of proxies to advance their respective agendas. ...
"Indonesia, the new kid on the block in the competition for Muslim religious soft power and leadership, has proven to be a different kettle of fish. Nahdlatul Ulama ... rather than the government of President Joko Widodo, has emerged as a formidable contender, one that is capable of operating on the same level as the states with which it competes. ...
"The movement also forged close working ties to Muslim grassroots communities in various parts of the world as well as prominent Jewish and Christian groups. Nahdlatul Ulama's growing international influence and access was enabled by its embrace in 2015 of a concept of 'Nusantara (archipelago) Islam' or 'humanitarian Islam' that recognized the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The movement has also gone beyond paying lip service to notions of tolerance and pluralism with the issuance of fatwas intended to re-contextualize the faith by eliminating categories like infidels. ...
"Widodo laid down a gauntlet for his competitors in the Middle East by declaring that it was 'natural and fitting that Indonesia should become the (authoritative) reference for the progress of Islamic civilization.'
"Widodo saw [the International Islamic University (UIII) in West Java] as providing an alternative to the Islamic University of Medina, that has played a key role in Saudi Arabia's religious soft power campaign, and the centuries-old Al Azhar in Cairo, that is influenced by financially-backed Saudi scholars and scholarship as well as Emirati funding. ...
"The degree to which Nahdlatul Ulama is perceived as a threat by the UAE and Saudi Arabia is evident in battles in high level inter-faith meetings....
"Nahdlatul Ulama's ability to compete is further evidenced by its increasingly influential role in Centrist Democrat International <www.idc-cdi.com> or CDI, the world's largest alliance of political parties, that grew out of European and Latin American Christian Democratic movements. ...
"Nahdlatul Ulama's sway was apparent in CDI's adoption of a resolution that called for adherence to universal ethics and humanitarian values based on Western humanism, Christian democracy, and Humanitarian Islam. The resolution urged resistance to 'the emergence of authoritarian, civilizationalist states that do not accept the rules-based post-WWII order, whether in terms of human rights, rule of law, democracy or respect for international borders and the sovereignty of other nations.'
"Nahdlatul Ulama benefits from what journalist Muhammad Abu Fadil described as rejection of an 'Arab face of Islam' that in his words was 'hopelessly contorted by extremism' in Western perceptions. Abu Fadil suggested that 'certain elements in the West have become interested in 'Asian Islam,' which appears to be more moderate than Arab Islam; less inclined to export radical ideology; less dominated by extremist interpretations of religion; and possessed of a genuine and sincere tendency to act with tolerance.'"
A final interesting discovery is the mention of Hamza Yusuf, an American convert to Islam: "Born Mark Hanson, Yusuf, a disciple of [Islamic scholar Abdullah] Bin Bayyah, is widely viewed <www.bit.ly/3qrmcDq> as one of the most influential and charismatic Western Islamic preachers." Hudson Institute, Oct 28 '20, <www.bit.ly/3sue6LO>
For more on Yusuf, see AR 7:7 <www.bit.ly/3uvSxMx> from way back in 2002.
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ORIGINS
"Intelligent Design Passes Peer Review" by John Stonestreet with Shane Morris (BreakPoint, Oct 16 '20) -- in 1986 fundamentalist atheist Richard Dawkins "defined biology as 'the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.' [He] goes on to argue that life is not designed at all. ...
"For a long time now, the scientific establishment has shared that assumption. In classrooms and peer-reviewed journals, only naturalistic explanations for life are allowed. ...
"The authors of a groundbreaking new paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology <www.bit.ly/3aTLc1N> argue [that] our intuition that paramecia and porpoises and people are too exquisitely complex to have arisen by mindless, purposeless forces of nature could be expressed in, say, mathematical terms...."
The authors, Steinar Thorvaldsen of Norway's University of Tromsø and Ola Hössjer of Stockholm University "ask a simple question: Can we detect 'fine-tuning' in biology as we can in physics? In other words, do the chemistry and construction of living things give Darwinian evolution any 'wiggle room' for mistakes and do-overs, or are they precise? Will they, like a puzzle piece, only fit in one place, one way?
"Employing a lot of math" they state: "Something in biology can be described as 'fine-tuned' ... if it is 'unlikely to have occurred by chance' and if it conforms to 'an independent or detached specification.'
"As an article over at Evolution News <www.bit.ly/2P83ZxH> points out, this is nothing other than what ID theorist William Dembski has called 'specified complexity.' In fact, the authors of the paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology even cite Dembski by name. As if that weren't risky enough, they also invoke biochemist Michael Behe's concept of 'irreducible complexity' as a measure of the fine-tuning in life, credit him by name....
"These Scandinavian scientists offer, for the first time, a statistical framework for determining whether certain features in living things are fine-tuned or were 'evolve-able.' ...
"'Fine-tuning,' the authors say, ... 'is even more extreme in biological systems than in inorganic systems.' And, in a shot over the establishment's bow, they say bluntly: 'It is detectable within the realm of scientific methodology.'
"Not only were their arguments compelling enough to be published in a major scientific journal, it challenges the long-held assumptions that design cannot be tested using scientific methods." (But of course!) <www.bit.ly/3kmi06u>
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