Abdul Razak Hassan Maricar, Chief Executive, Muis, opened the Singapore International Religious Conference (ICS2018), held in conjunction with the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore’s 50th anniversary, with a call to explore novel ways of instilling positive values and developing strong institutions to address the emerging challenges for humanity.
"Muis strongly believe that religious traditions are founded on powerful values that can guide communities. For the Singapore Muslim community, a key value is the value of 'rahmah' (رَحمة), which means 'compassion'. It is also the underlying philosophy of Muis’ vision and mission for the last 50 years. Inspired by the Divine’s attribute to care for all of creation unconditionally, we aspire to nurture a community that brings goodness to everyone," he said in his welcome remarks.
He added that faith communities in Singapore demonstrate strong mutual respect and understanding as well as the spirit of helping and working together.
"Through this conference, we seek to highlight such efforts that promote goodness in society," he said.
In his closing remarks, Dr Mohamed Fatris Bakaram, the Mufti of Singapore, concluded that the conference seeks to offer a framework to realise traditional ethics, teachings and values, and stressed that success requires active analysis of how to maintain the core values of the religion within the modern context.
"...Our optimism can only materialise if religions are willing to continue to renew ourselves by engaging critically with our own traitions, as opposed to being passive recipients of tradition, and by reconnecting ourselves with the core values of our religion in contextualised ways," he said.
He added that the challenge for faith communities is to identify the type and nature of scriptural references and religious texts; which are immutable as they form the core principles and beliefs of the religion, and which are context-specific and serve as exceptions to the norm. This is especially important when some groups may be preaching exclusivist and isolationist ideas and practices to the extent of denying the right to exist.
Looking towards the future is also important. "As we think ahead, we also need to reflect on whether more needs to be done. This question though must be considered together with a good and deep understanding of what the future may look like – religiously, socio-politically as well as economically and technologically," he said.
This affects how future religious scholars are trained, for example, he pointed out. Dr Mohamed shared that the Singapore Fatwa Committee has used creativity and criticality in engaging religious texts so that Singapore Muslims may remain relevant and actively engaged in the modern world. One such conclusion is to recognise nomination as part of wealth transfers as being a form of hibah (الهبة), a gift given voluntarily, without the expectation of anything in return.
"The Fatwa Committee acknowledged that we could not force the
modern forms of transactions onto traditional or historical ones which
existed in a certain historical economic context. This is in no way
abandoning our traditions, in fact, we drew from our traditions the
fundamentals upon which our scholars have reviewed, adapted and even
acknowledged instruments of their time to be one which is shari'ah-compliant. By exercising our creativity and criticality, we are in fact
upholding the very scholarly tradition by ensuring it thrives in solving
real issues of the time," he said.
ICS2018, with the theme The Future of Faith: Religious Values in a Plural World, is jointly organised by Muis and the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies led by His Eminence Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah.
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