1. “World Wide Religious News” (http://wwrn.org.)
"Saudi Arabia extends hand of friendship to Pope"
by Richard Owen ("The Times", March 17, 2008)
Vatican City - The Vatican is believed to be holding talks with Saudi authorities over opening the first Roman Catholic church in the Islamic kingdom, where Christian worship is banned and even to possess a Bible, rosary or crucifix is an offence.
The disclosure came the day after the first Catholic church in Qatar was inaugurated in a service attended by 15,000 people and conducted by a senior Vatican official.
The Vatican and Saudi Arabia do not have diplomatic relations. However, Archbishop Paul-Mounged El-Hachem, the Papal Nuncio to Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Yemen and Bahrain, who attended the Doha inauguration, said that moves towards diplomatic ties were under way after an unprecedented visit to the Vatican last November by King Abdullah. This would involve negotiations for the “authorisation of the building of Catholic churches” in Saudi Arabia, he said.
The move would amount to a potential revolution in Christian-Muslim relations, since Saudi Arabia adheres to a hardline Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam and is home to Mecca and Medina, the most holy sites of the religion. No faith other than Islam may be practised.
Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said that he could not confirm that the two sides were in negotiations. However, he added: “If, as we hope, we reach an agreement authorising the construction of the first church in Saudi Arabia, it will be a step of historic importance.”
Saudi religious police search the homes of Christians regularly; even private prayer services are forbidden in practice. Foreign workers have to observe Ramadan but are not allowed to celebrate Christmas or Easter.
La Stampa, the Italian daily, said that the talks would have been “unthinkable” until recently. The way was paved by King Abdullah's talks with the Pope and by the recent setting up of a permanent Catholic-Muslim forum to repair relations between the two faiths after the Pope's controversial remarks on Islam at the University of Regensburg in 2006.
The Pope said that his apparent reference to Islam as inherently violent had been misunderstood and he made amends by praying at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul soon afterwards.
Of the Saudi Arabian population, 94 per cent are Muslim and less than 4 per cent - nearly a million people - Christian, nearly all of them foreign workers. The last Christian priest was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1985.
Qtar, which hopes to bid to host the Olympic Games in 2016, has approved five churches for other Christian denominations, including the Anglican Communion.
Land of one faith
・Saudi laws do not recognise or protect freedom of religion. Non- nationals are severely restricted in practising different faiths
・Missionaries are banned and face imprisonment if caught. Sunni Muslims face severe repercussions from the Mutawwain, or religious police, for breaking Muslim law
・The official policy of allowing non-Muslims to worship freely at home is not reliably enforced
・In the courts, once fault is determined, a Muslim receives all of the amount of compensation determined, a Jew or Christian half, and all others a sixteenth
（Sources: US State Department; Conference of Catholic Bishops）
Disclaimer: WWRN does not endorse or adhere to views or opinions expressed in the articles posted. This is purely an information site, to inform interested parties of religious trends.
２．Malaysiakini.com
Shariah law can be modern, 18 March 2008
by Dr Terry Lacey
The recent controversy in the UK when the Archbishop of Canterbury raised the possibility that some aspects of shariah law might be implemented in UK Muslim communities raised cultural and economic issues rather than simply religious questions. Shariah law is not always about backwardness, despite its image in the West.
If shariah banking can be modernised, globalised and, in management terms, ‘westernised’ in synergy with a liberal financial system, then why not other aspects of shariah law? Interpretation of shariah law is culturally contextualised in time and space, not universally fixed like concrete.
The liberal Islamic Indonesian scholar Zuhairi Misrawi argues that shariah law is a cultural product because it has been historically constructed and is attached to a specific territorial, geographical and socio-political culture.
Last year, there were a series of seminars on shariah banking in Indonesia organised with the British Chamber of Commerce. Shariah banking can be very modern. It has export credits, bonds, mortgages, leasing and profit-sharing, and will doubtless devise environmental credits too.
The profit and loss sharing aspect of shariah banking is the most innovative but the poor can normally only access fixed cost Islamic facilities more similar to Western interest. However Islamic profit and loss sharing instruments in Asia are, surprisingly, heavily used by non-Muslims (in Malaysia).
The big issue in shariah banking policy is the gap between rich and poor. When a modern economically dynamic society like UK absorbs migrants from a culture of rural poverty with tribal and feudal influences, then economics is driving social change. Shariah banking could make a greater contribution to resolving these problems by extending its more innovative profit-sharing concepts to poorer people to reduce marginalisation and promote social inclusion.
Maybe the UK should consult more with social workers in Pakistani and Bangladeshi cities who are also coping with urbanisation from backward rural areas. The only way out of this will be economic and social change, in UK, and in countries of origin.
Shariah banking should offer part of the way forward without excluding other groups or religions. In Indonesia, the trend is towards Islamic windows in conventional banks based on consumer choice - not to an institutionally separatist Muslim banking system. If non-Muslim Chinese business people in Malaysia or Indonesia want to use Islamic banking, they are welcome to do so, it is open to everybody.
One way to mobilise Islamic banking to help the poor would be to promote more investment in what we might call social capital markets like water supply and power supply, especially new and renewable energy. The profit and loss instruments of Islamic finance are the right shape to finance these long-term investments where poor people cannot afford the services at the start, but can afford to pay as incomes rise.
Some UK Muslim communities are already resolving family disputes voluntarily with shariah law. Of course, all parties should also have the right of recourse to the jurisdiction of UK courts. However, such rights have to be taught, learned and upheld. Politicising the debate on shariah law and confusing it with extreme criminal punishments which are not agreed with or practiced by most Muslims in the world does not help this process.
We should study the voluntary use of shariah law to resolve family disputes in UK, Canada and elsewhere, parallel to recourse to normal courts, to see if this helps resolve conflicts rather than hinder social changes.
Most of the same people who react strongly about shariah law in the UK would not be so negative if the modernisation of their factory or water supply was partly financed by an Islamic financing institution. Nor do they object to shariah law when they eat in a halal restaurant while they drink their lager with their curry. If the Muslims who serve the lager can be broad-minded, is it too much to ask of other people?
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