Hefner Explores Nahdlatul Ulama’s Rights Revolution
On December 14, 2023, Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Director of the School’s Center for the Study of Asia, traveled to Princeton, New Jersey to present an invited address entitled, “A Historical Event of Global Importance: Nahdlatul Ulama’s Human-Rights-Based Reformation of Islamic Law and Ethics (fiqh).”
Hefner’s remarks served as the closing keynote for an international and multi-religious conference in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universital Declaration of Human Rights. The larger conference was entitled, “The Future of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Towards a Global Consensus that the UDHR Embodies a Civilizational Vision that the World’s Diverse Peoples, Faiths, and Nations Should Strive to Fulfill.”
The conference was sponsored by the Nahdlatul Ulama (with some 100 million followers, the largest Muslim organization in Indonesia and in the world); the James Madison Program, Princeton University; and the Center for Shared Civilizational Values and the Bayt ar-Rahmah Institute for Humanitarian Islam, Jakarta, Indonesia and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The conference brought together forty leading Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and clerics and public intellectuals from around the world to celebrate the anniversary of the UDHR and to affirm the conviction that – in a time of inter-religious strife and democratic regression — a global commitment to international human rights is more necessary than ever for world peace and human flourishing.
Robert Hefner has directed 19 research projects and organized 18 international conferences, and authored or edited nineteen books. He is the former president of the Association for Asian Studies. At CURA, he directed the program on Islam and civil society since 1991; 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.