Hefner Delivers Keynote Address at Rome Summer Seminar on Religion and Global Politics
On June 25, 2026, Professor Robert Hefner of the Pardee School of Global Studies presented the keynote address for the opening of the Rome Summer Seminar on Religion and Global Politics. This international event was hosted by John Cabot University in Rome under the directorship of Professor Michael Driessen.
Hefner’s keynote titled “Humanitarian Islam, Multi-Religious Dialogue, and the Quest for Inclusive Citizenship in Global Politics,” highlighted the parallels between the civic pluralist turn in Christian Democratic thought after the Vatican II Council in Rome in 1965, and the movement for democracy and “Humanitarian Islam” sweeping across several Muslim-majority countries (with Indonesia in the lead) since the 2010s.
During the address, Hefner noted that political discourse in the last decade has witnessed regression in the quality of democracy in Western societies and a reversal or collapse of democracy in many nations in the Global South.
“The once-celebrated ‘Arab spring’ that in the early 2010s was expected to usher in a cool-breeze of democratic reform had, by 2013, given way to a distressingly grey Arab winter,” said Hefner. “In most Muslim-majority lands across the Middle East, progress toward democracy and inclusive citizenship today has either slowed or stalled entirely. The Humanitarian Islam movement established in Indonesia in the early 2010s and now disseminated in global Muslim forums in several nations of the world stands as a startling exception to these regressive trends.”
Hefner added that Islam is a religious tradition of deep ethical and legal conviction, with fiqh as its cornerstone.
“At the heart of the Humanitarian Islam movement lies the conviction that one legacy that can impede efforts to build democracy and multireligious inclusivity is the body of Muslim legal jurisprudence known as classical fiqh,” said Hefner. “Anti-democratic varieties of Islamism promoting the implementation of an unreformed variety of Islamic jurisprudence achieved noisy prominence in many parts of the Muslim-majority world in the aftermath of the ‘Arab spring’ of the early 2010s. But such campaigns only deepened the determination of Humanitarian Islam leaders in Indonesia and other countries to forge a democratic and inclusive reinterpretation of Islamic ethics and law, one compatible with religious pluralism and equality.”
The Humanitarian Islam movement, Hefner explained, seeks to promote four principles. First, that the modern nation-state is theologically legitimate; second, that there is no legal category of infidel (kafir) within a modern nation-state, only ‘fellow citizens’; third, that Muslims must obey the laws of any modern nation-state in which they dwell; and fourth, that Muslims have a religious obligation to foster peace rather than automatically wage war on behalf of their co-religionists, whenever conflict erupts between Muslim and non-Muslim populations anywhere in the world.
Robert Hefner is the professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University. He has directed 19 research projects and organized 18 international conferences, and authored or edited 19 books. He is the former president of the Association for Asian Studies. At CURA, he has directed the program on Islam and civil society since 1991; has coordinated interdisciplinary research and public policy programs on religion, pluralism, and world affairs; and is currently involved in two research projects: “The New Western Plurality and Civic Coexistence: Muslims, Catholics, and Secularists in North America and Western Europe”; and “Sharia Transitions: Islamic Law and Ethical Plurality in the Contemporary World.” Read more about Professor Hefner on his faculty profile.