Before a man can be harmed he must be named. Every persecution in history has begun with a word, a single term that takes a neighbor with a face and a family and turns him into a category. Take the word away, and the hand that was reaching for the stone finds it has to look at a person.
The Scholars at Banjar
In the last days of February 2019, some twenty thousand people converged on a religious boarding school in the town of Banjar, in the hills of West Java. They had come for the national conference of the Nahdlatul Ulama, the Awakening of the Scholars.
It is the largest Muslim organization on earth, and most of the world has never heard its name. It was founded in 1926 by the village clerics of Java to defend their traditional, tolerant, saint-loving Islam against the stern new doctrine then spreading from Arabia. By its own count it has around ninety million followers, more than the population of Germany. It runs tens of thousands of schools. One of its chairmen, a nearly blind scholar with a fondness for jokes, became the president of Indonesia.
At Banjar a commission of its jurists took up a question of vocabulary. Indonesia is nine-tenths Muslim, but it is also home to tens of millions of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians, all of them equal citizens under its constitution. What should a Muslim call them?
The classical answer is kafir. The word is usually translated as infidel or unbeliever. Its root means one who covers up or denies the truth, and in the law books it carries consequences: the kafir is the one who may be fought, who pays the tribute, whose testimony is discounted. In Indonesian streets it had become what a preacher shouted through a loudspeaker at a Christian governor, and what a mob chanted outside a church.
The commission delivered its recommendation. Non-Muslims in a nation-state, it concluded, should not be called by that word. It wounds them, and it carries a sense of theological violence. Within the common life of the nation they are to be called muwathinun: citizens.
The organization's leaders were careful to explain that they were not rewriting theology. Their ruling concerned how fellow countrymen ought to speak of one another. Even so, the hard-liners were furious, and the reason is plain. If the largest body of Muslim scholars in the world could rule that the category of the infidel had no place in civic life, then the category was not eternal.
4 more minutes: The Word in the Prayer, Interpretation, The Method
Members read every case to the end and watch each film before release. The complete argument is also in the book.