Issues

Politics of the Vatican in the modern Islamic world: on the issue of the strategy of ecumenization of traditional Islam

Миняжетдинов И. Х.

Religiia i obshchestvo na Vostoke, Issue III (2019), p. 222-248.

 
Today, the Islamic world is undergoing a period of great transformations: fundamental changes are occurring in almost all spheres of life of Muslim communities. The basis of these transformational processes is a complex of reasons of a different nature, the most important of which is in the spiritual sphere. The Muslim Ummah is threatened by a global spiritual crisis, which already manifests itself in the obvious loss of values. It turns around the growth of radicalism, xenophobia, the aggravation of contradictions and conflicts. The destruction of the spiritual core of Islamic civilization will entail the gradual disruption of the Islamic community, which, as can be seen today, is already beginning to take place along cultural, political and spiritual lines. The emergence and growth of the modern reform movement in Islam is one of the direct manifestations of the hardest crisis in the spiritual sphere. The projects of Islam reform that were initiated or supported by the Muslim political leaders stand apart: in recent years, several heads of Muslim states have announced the need to reform Islam. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the reform of Islam is a requirement of the club of Western elite groups, from the diverse support of which the financial, economic and political well-being of the ruling Muslim circles depends.
Western elites, in turn, demand changes in Islam, for the reason that it still plays the role of a deterrent and serves as a spiritual bond that supposedly prevents Muslim communities from finally and irrevocably entering the new neo-modern world order. Despite the longstanding and powerful cultural expansion of the West, Islamic communities are still trying to hold on to their civilization core. In 2015, the UN approved the project “Transforming Our World: the Sustainable Development Agenda until 2030”, which was signed by the leaders of all countries of the world. Its neo-modern content virtually excludes the existence of traditional Islam as such in the near future. Creating a single global spiritual and cultural space of the world is one of the key goals of this “project of the future”. The peoples of the world allegedly will have to unite with a common ideological platform, which is based on the values of postmodernism.
As the key partner of the UN in this project is the Vatican. Currently, when the power in the Roman Catholic Church was seized by the modernist movement, the Vatican became one of the leading global curators of the process of modernist transformation of many traditional spiritual systems of various Eastern communities. The papal global ecumenical project is a tool designed to promote the unification of traditional confessions of different nations into a single universal world postmodern religion. In this context, the theme of the influence of the Vatican on the reform processes in Islam is extremely relevant. The two big projects — the papal global ecumenical initiative, from the one hand, and the reform of Islam, from another — turned out to be closely related to each other. Catholic diplomacy is making very serious efforts to stimulate the development of the reform movement in Islam, giving it an ecumenical character. In particular, the papal curia seeks to mobilize in the Islamic world a group of high-level supporters of its global ecumenical project. The Islamic policy of the Vatican shows that it is important for him not to miss the historical moment and to unite the growing but fragmented movement of Muslim modernists, directing it to the ideological course it needs. In this regard, a great interest is the study of the Catholic project of renewal of Islam and the technology of its implementation.

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Keywords: Vatican, Catholicism, ecumenism, islam, Koran, Islamic world, reform of Islam

Volume: 222-248

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