Religious Humanism Conference in Rome explores points of convergence between Christian Democracy and Humanitarian Islam
“At a time when some in the West have come to subscribe to a new cultural relativism that denies the possibility of shared humanitarian values, Nahdlatul Ulama has called for Muslims to join with Christian Democrats and others to recognize and affirm shared values across cultures and faith traditions”
~ Keynote address by Professor Robert W. Hefner,
Boston University
President of the American Institute
for Indonesian Studies
(Stefan Bauer, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons)
ROME, Italy — From 25 – 26 June 2026 prominent scholars from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia convened at the University of Notre Dame Center — located on Via Ostilia in the shadow of the Colosseum — for a conference discussing the origins, development, and enduring legacy of various forms of religious humanism, including the contributions of the global Humanitarian Islam movement.
Titled “Religious Humanisms, Inclusive Citizenship, and Democracy,” the international symposium was hosted and co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame Rome and its Rome Summer Seminars on Religion and Global Politics program, along with the G20 Religion Forum (R20), the Jakarta-based Institute for Humanitarian Islam (IFHI), and a number of institutions historically associated with Christian Democracy in Europe. These include the Luigi Sturzo Institute, named after the founder of Italy’s Christian Democracy movement; the Hanns Seidel Foundation, which is affiliated with Bavaria’s dominant political party, the Christian Social Union (CSU); LUMSA, a Catholic university whose founder, Luigia Tincani, was an influential religious sister who played a decisive role in Christian Democracy’s rebuilding of Italy and its educational system following decades of fascism and war; and John Cabot University.
According to the official conference description:
In the early 20th century, a number of religious and faith-based expressions of humanism shaped patterns of political development and international cooperation across the globe in a time of profound political and social crisis.
As conceptualized by figures like Jacques Maritain and Henri du Lubac, Christian humanism would help inspire Christian Democratic parties across Europe and Latin America and mobilize Catholic political action in favor of democratization, human rights and international solidarity.
The development of Christian humanism and Christian Democracy intersected with other religious expressions of humanism which were seeking democratic alternatives to secular liberalism and modernity. Early twentieth century humanist influences can be traced to the work of Mahatma Ghandi, who inspired French Christian humanists like Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier and Louis Massignon….
In contemporary global politics, liberalism, democracy, and the international system are experiencing a crisis with parallels to this earlier period. In this context, a number of religious and interreligious movements have actively re-connected to the traditions, experiences and institutions of religious humanism and held them up as models for political and social reform. Recent examples include the Humanitarian Islam movement in Indonesia (and its claims of kinship to the larger Christian Democratic family); the Human Fraternity document signed between Pope Francis and the Grand Imam Ahmed al Tayeb; as well as the renewed interest in Buddhist humanism and integral humanism in southeast Asia.
This conference is conceived as an initial attempt to map these religious expressions of humanism in a comparative context; observe the political, religious and institutional connections they are making; reflect on their ideas and aims; and draw them into more direct conversation. What major claims are these movements advancing about democracy, freedom, citizenship, solidarity and international order today? Why now? To what extent can they be understood as belonging to a same body of thought? What critical differences emerge?
Michael Driessen, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at John Cabot University in Rome, was the driving force behind the conference. He was inspired, in part, by his participation in an International Conference on Humanitarian Islam in Jakarta convened in November 2024 by Nahdlatul Ulama, the Institute for Humanitarian Islam, and the Center for Shared Civilizational Values (photo below).
That conference generated a major academic volume titled Indonesia’s Humanitarian Islam Movement: Origins, Development, and Global Impact, which will soon be released by the UK-based academic press Routledge. A paper presented by Professor Driessen at the Conference on Humanitarian Islam in Jakarta was subsequently developed into a chapter titled “Humanitarian Islam, Christian Humanism, and Democracy,” for the Routledge volume. Four other speakers at the Rome event — Professor Robert W. Hefner, Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah, C. Holland Taylor, and Dr. Amanda tho Seeth of Humboldt University in Berlin — are also contributors to the forthcoming volume on Humanitarian Islam.
Professors Michael Driessen (left) and Robert Hefner on the opening night of the Religious Humanism Conference, which was held at the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome
The conference began on the evening of 25 June with a keynote speech by Robert W. Hefner — Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Affairs and President of the American Institute for Indonesian Studies — who is one of the world’s leading experts on Indonesian Islam and its contemporary social and political impact. Professor Hefner was a close friend of longtime Nahdlatul Ulama Chairman and Indonesia’s first democratically elected president, KH. Abdurrahman Wahid, who inspired the birth of the Humanitarian Islam movement.
Drawing from his introduction to the forthcoming Routledge volume, for which he is lead editor, Professor Hefner said:
In a Muslim-majority country like Indonesia, one legacy that can impede efforts to build democracy and multireligious inclusivity is the body of Muslim legal jurisprudence known as fiqh. Islam is a religious tradition of deep ethical and legal conviction, and fiqh lies at its heart. Although surveys indicate they enjoy the support of only a small share of the national electorate (Hefner 2024; Lindsey 2012), anti-democratic varieties of Islamism promoting the implementation of an unreformed variety of Islamic jurisprudence achieved noisy prominence in the open political atmosphere of Reformasi Indonesia after 1998 – 1999. Islamist movements like the Party of Liberation (Hizbut Tahrir, now banned; see Osman 2010) or militant neo-Salafiyya groups called for the implementation of a variety of fiqh premised on a “differentiated citizenship” (Beaman 2016) in which Muslims and non-Muslims are accorded different social standing rather than equal citizen rights. But such campaigns only deepened the determination of NU leaders to forge a democratic and inclusive reinterpretation of Islamic ethics and law.
NU scholars have long justified their efforts by citing the three varieties of human solidarity that they insist are at the heart of modern Islamic jurisprudence. The three principles had been affirmed in the 1980s by the NU leadership under the guidance of KH. Achmad Siddiq and Abdurrahman Wahid. They include intertwined commitments to the fraternity of Muslims (ukhuwwah Islamiyah), to the fraternity of nation (ukhuwwah wataniyah), and to the fraternity of all human beings (ukuwwah insaniyah, or ukuwwah basyariyah; see Staquf 2019). NU’s endorsement of these three ukhuwwah solidarities is the ethical foundation on which NU bases its continuing commitment to the ideals of pluralist democracy and Humanitarian Islam.
In recent years NU’s leadership has only stepped up its efforts to strengthen public commitment to these values. Beginning in 2014 – 2015 and under the direction of KH. Yahya Cholil Staquf and Holland Taylor, NU devoted particular attention to a campaign to reform discriminatory features of Islamic jurisprudence. Staquf and Taylor intensified these efforts after Staquf’s election as General Chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama on 24 December 2021. Over the course of his career, Staquf has made clear that he believes that a key obstacle to democracy and inclusive citizenship in all Muslim lands is what he has described as “obsolescent” and discriminatory features of classical Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). In Staquf’s view, such exclusivist currents in Islamic jurisprudence are premised on an identity politics that denies the higher aims of shari‘ah (maqasid al-shari‘ah), and, with them, the principles of democracy, equality across faith-traditions, and a human-rights-based international order (Staquf 2019)….
In the aftermath of these early appeals for jurisprudential reform, the NU leadership carried its campaign forward to a series of national and international forums. Beginning in July 2022 and continuing into early 2023, the NU executive organized no fewer than 231 halaqoh study circles at major centers of Islamic learning across Indonesia to explain the aims and timely importance of a reformed, “civilizational” fiqh (fiqh al-hadarah). NU also went global, presenting its proposals for Humanitarian Islam and Civilizational Jurisprudence at major international conferences. The most prominent of these events included the R20 (“Religion 20”) meeting at the G20 in Bali in November 2022; the NU International Congress in Surabaya in February 2023; and a conference held in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Princeton University in December 2023. Through these and other initiatives, NU has succeeded at establishing itself as the moral leader of a global movement to demonstrate the compatibility of democracy and multireligious citizenship with the highest principles (maqasid) of Islam….
NU[’s] program for civilizational fiqh is of global importance because the project makes clear that these humanitarian values can only become the basis of a truly effective global consensus inasmuch as people in all faith traditions engage in the effort to bring religious values into alignment with the “interfused” realities of our age (cf. Alan Brill 2023). Here again I would note Michael Driessen has insightfully summarized the parallels between this NU-based effort from within Islamic tradition and those of Catholic thinkers providing theological rationales for democracy and universal human rights in the aftermath of Vatican II (see also Berger 2014).
For Muslims and other modern believers, NU scholars emphasize that the effort “to address ‘obsolete and problematic tenets of Islamic orthodoxy’” cannot proceed on the basis of a non-theistic liberalism, as some people of assertively secularist persuasion might assume. For people of Islamic faith, the effort can only succeed if it takes place (and here I quote the 2023 document again) “from within the system of fiqh itself.” By working from within the heart of Islamic tradition Muslim scholars are more likely to be able to neutralize the challenge posed by “ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezballah… the Taliban” and others. The latter groups draw “upon key elements of classical Islamic law (fiqh)” but in a way that reinforces an exclusive and supremacist rather than compassionate and rahmat-based understanding of God’s message.
Let me end my remarks by taking note of one cross-cultural irony at the heart of the Humanitarian Islam initiative. It is that, at a time when some people in the West have come to subscribe to a new cultural relativism that denies the possibility of shared humanitarian values, NU has called for Muslims to join with Christian Democrats and others to recognize and affirm shared values across cultures and faith traditions. All this is to say that the moral vision at the heart of NU’s Humanitarian Islam project is at once both Islam-specific and humanistically multi-religious. Here, too, my conclusion converges with Michael Driessen’s observations in his 2024 conference paper. In leading the way in its own project of ethical reformation, NU has appealed to people in other civilizational traditions to revitalize their values by way of a theistically enunciated commitment to universal human dignity and equality. In my view, there are few moral messages more relevant than this for the unsettled times in which humanity finds itself today.
Read Professor Hefner’s keynote speech in full.
Robert Hefner, C. Holland Taylor, and Ibu Maria Fauzi
The conference resumed on the morning of 26 July at the Rome campus of the University of Notre Dame, with a panel titled “Humanitarian Islam and Democracy in Indonesia.” C. Holland Taylor — Deputy Chairman & CEO of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values — traced the origin of the term Humanitarian Islam to a phrase often used by NU spiritual leader KH. A. Mustofa Bisri to characterize the purpose of Islam: memanusiakan manusia. That is, to elevate human beings from a spiritually ignorant, ego-driven, and animalistic state to become fully humane, and thus human (i.e., saint-like).
In his remarks, Mr. Taylor provided an overview of the Humanitarian Islam movement’s genealogy and global impact, including NU’s systematic, institutional, and decades-long campaign to recontextualize (i.e., reform) “obsolete tenets of classical Islamic law, which are premised upon perpetual conflict with those who do not embrace or submit to Islam” (Gerakan Pemuda Ansor Declaration on Humanitarian Islam).
Mr. Taylor also described how the Humanitarian Islam movement’s projection of strategic influence in Europe compelled the Muslim World League to relinquish control of the so-called “Brussels Terror Mosque,” which helped radicalize generations of Belgian Muslims, including those who participated in the 2015 ISIS atrocities in Paris. Mr. Taylor concluded his remarks by explaining how these developments in Europe contributed to Saudi Arabia’s historic turn away from Wahhabism under the leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The second speaker was Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah, co-founder and Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Center for Shared Civilizational Values and Distinguished Research Scholar in Politics at the University of Dallas. Dr. Shah noted “the remarkable fact that the epitaph on Abdurrahman Wahid’s gravestone bears the inscription ‘Here Rests a Humanist’ in Indonesian, Arabic, English, and Chinese,” in order to emphasize that Humanitarian Islam is, at its heart, a pure and distinctive form of religious humanism.
In June 2025 Dr. Shah joined religious leaders and scholars from Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America who gathered at the Knights of Malta Palazzo Magistrale on the Aventine Hill (photo above) and at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome campus for a conference titled “Changing the conversation about religious freedom in India, Nigeria and Italy: An integral human development approach”
Drawing a comparison with the philosophy of “integral humanism” articulated by the French Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973), who exercised a massive influence on Christian Democracy and the Second Vatican Council, Shah underscored the fact that Wahid’s Islamic humanism and Maritain’s Catholic humanism are both deeply rooted in the centrality of Divine Mercy or compassion. In both cases, he stressed, they are also rooted in a profoundly humble and self-critical acknowledgment of the moral failings of their respective communities, and of the need to undertake serious and systematic theological reform to address these failings head-on.
In Maritain’s case, antisemitism historically fostered by the Church — as well as the moral compromises associated with Catholic support for General Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) — and in Gus Dur’s case, the terrible excesses associated with Nahdlatul Ulama’s participation in the liquidation of the Indonesian Communist Party (1965 – 1966), prompted enormous soul searching and a determination to embrace a compassionate humanism firmly opposed to political triumphalism and religious extremism.
Ibu Maria Fauzi, Dr. Amanda tho Seeth, and Dr. Timothy Samuel Shah at the Conference on Religious Humanism in Rome
Following Dr. Shah’s speech, Ibu Maria Fauzi, Director of the Shafiec Research Center at Nahdlatul Ulama University of Yogyakarta, delivered a presentation titled “The Making of Humanitarian Islam: From Pesantren Ethics to a Global Reform Project.” A PDF of her presentation may be viewed by clicking on the image below, which shows Professor Robert Hefner of Boston University with a group of NU children.
Amanda tho Seeth, interim Professor of Southeast Asian History and Society at Humboldt University, Berlin, drew upon her contribution to the Routledge volume — titled “Fiqh al-Hadarah and Its Implications for the United Nations and the Future of a Rules-Based International Order (RBIO)” — to summarize the unique characteristics and approach of Nahdlatul Ulama’s fiqh al-hadarah (Islamic jurisprudence for a global civilization) movement. Professor Seeth characterized fiqh al-hadarah as a “double-reform movement,” which aims to recontextualize Islamic law and align it with international agreements on human rights, state sovereignty, and inter-state peace, as well as to reshape existing power asymmetries within the RBIO and its institutions, such as the United Nations, in order to promote greater inclusion of the Global South and its religious perspectives.
Dr. Amanda tho Seeth at the November 2024 International Conference on Humanitarian Islam held in Jakarta, Indonesia
The conference included the participation of 15 PhD students attending the Rome Summer Seminars on Religion and Global Politics, a two-week program for graduate students working at the crossroads of religion and politics. The students critically engaged with the papers presented at the conference and the panel on the Humanitarian Islam movement, raising questions about its presentation of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and the relationship between contemporary reform movements within Islam and violence often associated with Islam.
One PhD candidate — whose field research involves studying Sufi (mystical) traditions in South Asia — was quick to recognize that Indonesia’s Humanitarian Islam movement is deeply rooted in the spiritual teachings of orthodox Sunni Islam, which position rahmah (universal love and compassion) as a primary message of religion.
Tunisian-Italian theologian Adnane al-Mokrani addressing the conference during a panel on “Inclusive Citizenship, Democracy and Humanism in Contemporary Arab Thought and Societies”
Dr. Adnane al-Mokrani (pictured above) encouraged Arab Muslims to engage constructively with Humanitarian Islam, which he praised as a significant and welcome development within the wider Muslim world. Adnane, who is Professor of Islamic Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, argued for the need to develop a “theology of integral humanism” that is both non-violent and mystical. Such a theology would recognize the presence of the divine within every human being.
Conference participants included NU youth delegate Charles Bhagaskara Taylor (left) and Miriam Shah, who recently graduated with a Master’s degree in Religion and Philosophy from the University of Chicago Divinity School
(Tristan Surtel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
On the afternoon of 26 June, the Reverend Canon Professor Luke Bretherton delivered a keynote address titled “Christian Humanism in a Fractured World.” Dr. Bretherton is a prominent British theologian and author who serves as the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church, University of Oxford (photo above). He is also a Canon of Christ Church Cathedral and serves as Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Oxford. His work primarily explores the intersection of religion, moral philosophy, and democratic politics, focusing on how faith communities can foster a shared civic life amid deep pluralism and disagreement.
Titled “Interreligious Dialogue, Pluralism and Citizenship,” the final panel featured several speakers including Shaykh Yahya Pallavicini (speaking, above), co-founder and President of the European Muslim Leadership Council (EULEMA); Dr. Mustafa Cenap Aydin, Director of Istituto Tevere and Vice-Secretary General of the Jacques Maritain International Institute; Monseigneur Indunil Janakaratne Kodithuwakku, Secretary of the Pontifical Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue; and Dr. Rita Moussallem, Co-Director of the Focolare Movement’s International Centre for Interreligious Dialogue.
Dr. Timothy S. Shah and Ibu Maria Fauzi with leaders of the Focolare Movement on 24 June at its headquarters near Castel Gandolfo outside Rome. The President of Focolare, Dr. Margaret Karram (third from left), is a Palestinian Israeli citizen born in Haifa. Following an extensive briefing by Dr. Shah, the group discussed various lines of cooperation between Nahdlatul Ulama’s Humanitarian Islam movement, the Center for Shared Civilizational Values, and Focolare. Specifically, Dr. Karram enthusiastically agreed to support and participate in both the G20 Religion Forum (R20) and its Road Not Yet Taken Initiative: A Multi-Religious Path Towards Middle East Peace.
(Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi (above), where on 25 March 1957 six European nations (four of them governed by Christian Democratic parties) signed the Treaty of Rome. By establishing the European Economic Community, precursor of the European Union, the founders of the EEC sought to prevent a recurrence of the calamitous wars that devastated Europe and much of the world during the first half of the 20th century.
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International Conference on Humanitarian Islam
CDI Resolution on Western Humanism, Christian Democracy, and Humanitarian Islam