Geopolitical analyst Dr. James Dorsey identifies Humanitarian Islam as the only “truly inclusive and pluralistic” contender in a multi-front battle for the soul of Islam
“In the search for a non-autocratic vision of ‘moderate’ Islam, Nahdlatul Ulama is the only game in town that has the political, organisational, and religious clout to ensure that its voice cannot be ignored”
~ James M. Dorsey,
The Battle for the Soul of Islam: Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century
LONDON, United Kingdom — On 3 July 2024, Palgrave Macmillan, a leading academic and trade publishing house, released a widely anticipated book by geopolitical analyst, scholar, and veteran journalist Dr. James M. Dorsey. An award-winning, two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Dr. Dorsey spent decades in the Middle East reporting for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Christian Science Monitor. His newly published in-depth study — titled The Battle for the Soul of Islam: Defining the Muslim Faith in the 21st Century — identifies Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama as the only contender in a global competition for Islamic authority whose “understanding of the faith demonstrate[s] Islam’s compatibility with modernism, human rights, and principles of tolerance and pluralism.”
In his preface to the book, titled “Why Religion Matters in Geopolitics,” Dr. Dorsey states:
A weekend in 2015 in the northeastern Central Java town of Rembang hosted by Yahya Cholil Staquf, a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest and most moderate Muslim civil society movement, and his international affairs advisor, C. Holland Taylor, alerted me to the fact that there were fundamentally different visions of Islam competing to define what ‘moderate’ means. I travelled to Rembang to satisfy my curiosity sparked by snippets I heard and read about Nahdlatul Ulama’s pluralistic, anti-autocratic vision of Islam that challenged Saudi and Emirati concepts as well as the teachings of Al-Azhar, the more than 1,000-year-old Cairo-based citadel of Islamic learning….
This book zeroes in on the struggle to define what constitutes ‘moderate’ Islam, about which little has been written, rather than the divide between moderates and militants. To be sure, extensive research exists on individual rivals competing to don the mantle as a beacon of moderate Islam, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia, but few have conducted comparative research or paid attention to the rivalry itself. Nevertheless, the outcome of the battle among moderates is likely to define what Islam stands for in the 21st century.
This book is the product of seven years of looking into the rivalry that amounted to competing quests for the wielding of Muslim religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world sparked by geopolitical jockeying, particularly in the Middle East, and my eye-opening journey to Rembang. The book is both a first stab at writing an initial history of the rivalry and a snapshot of an ongoing battle. While this book zeroes in on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Indonesia, it also refers extensively to their main rivals, including Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and Turkey. There are other players such as Morocco, Jordan, and Malaysia that I have not included because they either play bit or regional roles or have little impact beyond their borders.
R20 Founding Chairman KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf (center right) greets H.E. Shaykh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, Secretary General of the Muslim World League and Co-chair of the R20 Summit in Bali
Dr. Dorsey’s analysis provides readers with extensive background knowledge regarding Nahdlatul Ulama’s Humanitarian Islam movement; its efforts to recontextualize obsolete and problematic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy through the fiqh al-hadarah (Islamic Jurisprudence for a Global Civilization) movement; and its relationship with Centrist Democrat International, the world’s largest political network. The book also examines initiatives jointly executed by Nahdlatul Ulama and the North Carolina-based Center for Shared Civilizational Values, including the G20 Religion Forum (R20), Ashoka Approach, and ASEAN Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue Conference (IIDC).
Dr. Dorsey explains Nahdlatul Ulama’s decisive role in Indonesian politics, noting that Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto has “vowed to walk in the footsteps of his immediate, widely popular predecessor, Joko Widodo, who maintains close ties to Nahdlatul Ulama. He owed his third-time success, after twice failing to defeat Widodo, to his predecessor and Nahdlatul Ulama’s tacit support.”
Dr. James M. Dorsey addressing the Second Global Unity Forum — held on 25 – 26 October 2018 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia — which gave birth to the Nusantara Statement and Nusantara Manifesto
Dr. Dorsey has closely followed Nahdlatul Ulama since January 2016, when he travelled to Rembang, Central Java, to interview Nahdlatul Ulama leaders responsible for a 90-minute film which The New York Times described as “a relentless, religious repudiation of the Islamic State and the opening salvo in a global campaign by the world’s largest Muslim group to challenge its ideology head-on.” Since that first meeting in Rembang, Dr. Dorsey has become one of the world’s leading experts on Nahdlatul Ulama and its efforts to recontextualize obsolete and problematic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy.
Dr. Dorsey’s assessment — that “Nahdlatul Ulama is the only game in town that has the political, organisational, and religious clout to ensure that its voice cannot be ignored, even if it operates in a decentralised Muslim world in which no player can impose their view” — is increasingly shared by NU’s Middle East interlocutors, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, with which the world’s largest Muslim organization enjoys increasingly constructive and cordial relations.
Abstract
The battle for the soul of Islam pits rival Middle Eastern and Asian powers against one another: Saudi Arabia, home to the faith’s two holiest cities; the UAE, propagator of a militantly statist interpretation of Islam; Turkey, seat of the Islamic world’s last true caliphate; and Indonesia, promoting a humanitarian, pluralistic notion of Islam that reaches out to other faiths as well as to non-Muslim centrist forces across the globe. In the ultimate analysis, no clear winner may emerge. Yet, 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 the ruler and/or reduce religious establishments to pawns of the state, or a truly more tolerant and pluralistic interpretation of one of the three most important Abrahamic religions.
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