Muslim religious soft power rivalry, a battle for the soul of Islam, just got hotter. The rivalry’s latest battlefield is not Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Tehran, or Istanbul. It’s Hindu nationalist Delhi.

That is because, for the next year, India chairs the Group of 20 largest economies in the world.

At stake for the Muslim rivals, proponents of rival pluralistic and autocratic forms of Islam, is who will help shape a gathering of religious leaders in advance of the September 2023 Delhi summit of G20 leaders.

The gathering would follow a first Religion Forum 20 meeting in Bali in November, where Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and democracy, declared the R20 an official engagement group with a permanent secretariat in Jakarta.

If the Bali R20 involved an attempt by its rival co-organisers, Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama and Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League, to coopt one another, Delhi promises to be a three-way competition with the United Arab Emirates joining the fray.

The competition for who will be the primary Muslim player in an R20 Delhi summit is part of a larger Muslim struggle that is likely to define Islam in the 21st century.

Senior Indian officials favour embracing the R20 as an official engagement group. But some are concerned that a religious gathering could turn into a platform that takes India to task for its perceived anti-Muslim policies.

The inter-Muslim struggle pits Nahdlatul Ulama’s socially and politically pluralistic and reformist interpretation of Islam against the Muslim World League and the UAE’s autocratic version that embraces social change, rejects political liberalization, and avoids jurisprudential and doctrinal reform of supremacist attitudes that Islam shares with other major religions.

Part of a bold and risky strategy, Nahdlatul Ulama’s partnership with the League that formally ended in late November raised questions about the group’s legitimisation of the Saudi-government agency as a non-governmental organisation.

The League is a de facto branch of Mohammed bin Salman’s government tasked with propagating the crown prince’s insistence that a socially liberal Islam demands absolute obedience to the ruler.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s silence over a new Indonesian criminal code that parliament recently passed unanimously has sparked further questions on how that squares with its unconditional endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – a significant differentiator in its rivalry with state-sponsored autocratic versions of moderate Islam.

The law bans extramarital sex and curbs freedom of expression by, for example, outlawing insulting the president, but puts major limitations on who can file a complaint.

Privately, influential Nahdlatul Ulama sources defend the socially restrictive aspects of the law but concede that freedom of expression concerns are legitimate. The sources expect the law to be modified in challenges likely to be filed with the Constitutional Court.

The competition for India’s favour in shaping a religious summit in Delhi is as much a power struggle between rival interpretations of moderate Islam as between the UAE and Saudi Arabia for religious soft power in the Muslim world.

The competition also involves a battle for influence between a G20 legacy group, the G20 Interfaith Forum Association (IF20), that long dominated the G20’s informal religious tack, and Nahdlatul Ulama.

Nahdlatul Ulama’s R20 sidelined the Utah-based IF20, creating an opportunity for the UAE to step into the breach on the back of its convening power and financial muscle.

Organised by the IF20 and the Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities, a UAE-based group, the Emirates this week is sponsoring a two-day conference of Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist figures under the patronage of Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed.

Entitled “Engaging Faith Communities: G20 Agendas and Beyond,” the conference aims to take the wind out of the sails of the Bali gathering and to position the UAE as an autocratic player alongside the Muslim World League.

Little surprise that neither Nahdlatul Ulama nor the League, despite the Emirates’ alliance with Saudi Arabia, are represented at the Abu Dhabi conference.

More surprising is the absence of longer-standing building blocks of the UAE’s religious soft power campaign, such as the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies led by Abdallah bin Bayyah, a Mauritanian Islamic scholar, and Hamza Yusuf, one of the most prominent Western Muslim figures.

The contrast between the R20 Bali’s focus and the agenda of the IF20 in Abu Dhabi says much about the difference in objectives and approaches of Nahdlatul Ulama and the UAE.

While the R20 focused on coming to grips with the problematic histories of various religions, including Islam, to generate genuine religious reform, the IF20 is geared towards themes likely to curry favour in Western capitals.

The Abu Dhabi focus is key to the UAE’s continuous effort to ensure that it is a relevant partner that the United States and Europe would want to defend against attack, particularly in the way they did in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

As a result, the IF20’s themes include interfaith dialogue, tolerance, conflict resolution, freedom of religion, refugees, the food crisis, trafficking, health care, and social protection whereas the R20 was about shared religious and civilizational values and historical grievances, truth-telling, reconciliation, and forgiveness.

Key sessions of R20 panels sought to answer questions such as “what values do our respective traditions need to relinquish to ensure that religion functions as a source of genuine solutions, and not problems, in the 21st century,” and “what values do we need to develop to ensure peaceful coexistence, and why?”

To put flesh on the skeleton, the R20 secretariat is organising working groups to formulate detailed responses to these questions that could be debated at a second meeting in Delhi.

Also, timed to coincide with Nahdlatul Ulama’s centennial, the R20 is organizing in February a gathering of Islamic scholars, to which Messrs. Bin Bayyah and Muhammed al-Issa, the Muslim World League secretary general, are being invited.

The meeting is designed to kick off a discussion that would result in jurisprudence that would recognize the legitimacy of the United Nations and its charter as well as the principle of the nation state and anchor them in Islamic law.

In doing so, Nahdlatul Ulama hopes to counter notions of a transnational Islamic state advocated by militants such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and make the UN Charter legally binding for its Muslim signatories, according to religious law.

The questions posed during Bali R20 challenge Nahdlatul Ulama, given its involvement in the 1965 massacre of perceived communists in Indonesia, as well as the Muslim World League that has failed to account for its past as a primary vehicle of decades of global Saudi propagation of an ultra-conservative, supremacist, and sectarian interpretation of Islam.

The questions also challenge the UAE’s willingness to go to any lengths to impose an autocratic interpretation of Islam that brooks no political or religious dissent.

Speaking at the Bali gathering, Sri Swapan Dasgupta, an Indian journalist, politician, and close associate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi argued that “obfuscation and denial (of traumatic historical events) has only worsened the situation.”

Mr. Dasgupta was referring to Hindu nationalist grievances dating back to the Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent in the 13th to 17th centuries that fuel Mr. Modi’s Hindutava ideology.

Mr. Dasgupta did not say that Hindu nationalist India needs to come to grips with the subcontinent’s history in ways that do not boil down to a campaign of revenge against India’s 200 million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority.

The challenges for Muslims in the rivalry to shape the Delhi G20’s religious agenda are no less daunting.

Muslims can choose between taking the high or the low road to coming to grips with history.

The high road involves confronting painful truths in a quest for a healthier, more pluralistic, and socially cohesive society. The low road allows autocrats to either rewrite history or sweep it under the table and opportunistically bend it to their will.

India is not where the battle for the soul of the world’s major religions, including Islam and Hinduism, will be decided, but it is the battle’s next arena.

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Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Munaza Kazmi

Famous as the “Fruit Garden of Pakistan” Quetta, city district and division of Baluchistan province and the 5^th largest of Pakistan. Quetta is a variation of Kwatkot, a Pashto word meaning ‘Fort’, as it is encircled by the four imposing hills namely Chiltan, Takatu, Zarghoon and Murdaar, which really gives it a status of enchanted valley, that surely engulf the visitor is its charm. The city enjoys rich history dating from 11^th Century when Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi conquered it, and on top it is a love land for all Pakistanis because it’s the region where founder of Pakistan Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, have spent last of his memorable his days.

The only high-altitude city of Pakistan, Quetta situated at 1,680 meters above sea level, having total population of 2.8 million. Local language is Pashto, but don’t worry as some people can even communicate in English, otherwise we have option open for sign language. Climate is dry and temperate is chilly where you would find a rich diversity of dry fruits. Moreover, the valley is abundant with juniper and pistachio forests and diverse wild life. Also, if anyone is obsessed with horses, it’s the right place to be, as horse breeding is thought to be the passion of locals.

Next, I would suggest you pay a visit to the colorful bazars where you would found yourself in brightest of colors of silk, handmade coppers, precious jewels, luxurious rugs, and mesmerizing perfumes, not less than that of the Arabian Nights. I would say, it’s hard to describe the Quetta valley without getting carried away.

However, I landed Quetta in the later afternoon, where I was surprised with the hospitality of locals who went so far to communicate with me even in signs as I don’t understand Pushto, to tell me about the beautiful surroundings and their rich culture. However, it was just a little episode as the hotel driver was waving the board with my name and the shuttle was waiting outside with a basket full of fruits and assorted fritters for my aftar. Really grateful for the hospitality of Serena.

I checked into the Quetta Serena Hotel, as is Serena is my favorite, reasoning its remarkable hospitality and the best services, moreover you can find them all over the country.

Quetta Serena Hotel, Quetta’s plushest hotel by a comfortable margin, the Serena is unusual among top-end hotels in that it looks like it actually belongs to its surroundings – its design echoes local architectural styles, with Baloch textiles, woodwork and local marble continuing the decorative theme inside. The rooms (all with wi-fi) are suitably refined with high-quality service from staff, plus there are two good restaurants, a food court, a coffee shop, a tennis court, outside pool also a good bookshop from where am planning to fill some left place in my personal library.

Quetta Serena has 140 rooms set in beautiful landscaped grounds. Yet despite the recent unrest all the rooms were booked, and the uniformed staff have been kept on the normal day to day business and some of the rehabilitation task, and they were truly delighted in warmly welcoming me. It surprised and equally delighted me to find out the unbending spark and encouragement in the hotel staff that is truly reflected in their hard work.

By the by it was dinner time, so after making myself easy, I went straight to the Xuelian Restaurant. The handsome restaurant with a wonderfully opulent dining area and an outdoor terrace overlooking the gardens, the manager told me Xuelian Restaurant is known for serving the best Chinese and Thai food in Quetta.

“Would you like to order dinner, madam?” a saffron-suited waiter asked on my first night.

I mumbled something about whatever they could rustle up in the kitchen being fine. His face registered surprise. “We have everything listed on the menu, madam. Fish and chips with mushy peas, sizzling beef fillet, traditional Chinese or Pakistani cuisine.”

“How can you?” I asked. “Hotel must be busy in rehabilitation”.

“But we are a five-star hotel madam,” he said proudly. “We must maintain standards at all times.”

A few minutes later a steaming plate of delicious Shashlik and Egg Fried Rice with Mint Margaretta arrived at my table.

Next morning, I woke up for Sahoor by a polite wakeup call and avail myself with the room service menu that has everything from the classic club sandwich to delicately spiced curry.  Later I spent much of the day in the handsome garden filled with numerous roses and beside the pool with a book that I bought from the hotel book shop.

By the time of late afternoon my appetite was getting increased later evening I was ravenous equally by the day pass and by the increasingly tasty smell of cooking from the hotel food court, which made me slip from the luxury of book to the live kitchen. And there what I seen is worthy of national award, the sight of hotel staff working with much diligence was a feeling of intense proud and delight, besides it was a massage enclosed in their behaviors that “we are strong enough to resist any storm, because we have the unity, faith and discipline”.