YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: RELIGION

BUDDHISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) The self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in May 1994 and demonstrations led by Buddhist monks in major cities symbolized the deepening conflict between the Vietnamese government and the outlawed Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) during 1994-95. In December 1994 Thich Huyen Quang, the UBCV's supreme patriarch, was arrested for staging a hunger strike, and in January 1995 his chief deputy was also arrested. The Dalai Lama's government-in-exile continued to challenge the Chinese occupation of Tibet during 1995. In March, shortly after hundreds of Tibetans marched from Dharmshala to New Delhi to mark the anniversary of the failed 1959 uprising against China, Beijing announced new regulations for Tibetan Buddhism, including limitations on the number of monks per temple. In May the Dalai Lama designated six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama, who died in 1989, thereby defying Beijing's claim of authority to select Tibet's second highest leader. Denying the legality of the Dalai Lama's selection method, Beijing refused to recognize the boy as the 11th Panchen Lama. In June Chinese officials placed under house arrest the deputy abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery, traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, whom they accused of collaborating with the Dalai Lama. In a ceremony held in Beijing in December, the Chinese government installed its own candidate as Panchen Lama. In December 1994 the Mahanayakas of Sri Lanka's main Buddhist monastic orders protested against characterizations of Buddhism in a recent book by Pope John Paul II, which they called an "unprovoked and uncalled-for insult." Despite an official apology and the pope's own conciliatory remarks, they boycotted an interreligious dialogue convened for the January 1995 papal visit to Sri Lanka. In February, during a three-month truce in the decade-long Sri Lankan civil war, Buddhist monks led 2,000 people on a peace march to rebel-held Jaffna. In June, however, Sinhalese mobs attacked Tamil-owned shops in the south after the funeral of K. Silalankara, revered chief priest of the Dimbulagala temple. The release of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi in July had been anticipated since September 1994, when a Myanmar monk living in England successfully negotiated a meeting between the influential Buddhist democrat and leading Myanmar generals. Throughout the year refugee Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh balked at repatriation to Myanmar, citing fear of Arakanese Buddhists who had occupied their lands and razed many of their mosques. During March 1995 Thailand's Sangha Supreme Council enacted a new measure to defrock a popular monk accused of violating his celibacy vow. Leaders of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo movement, which claimed to incorporate many Buddhist elements, were arrested in April for releasing poisonous gas in the Tokyo subway. (See CHRONOLOGY: March 20.) In February India's notorious "Bandit Queen" Phoolan Devi converted to Ambedkar-style Buddhism as part of her ongoing advocacy for low-caste Indians. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) (JONATHAN S. WALTERS) This updates the article Buddhism. Churches. (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) The "Toronto Blessing" attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Airport Vineyard Church throughout 1995, including many Pentecostals. The movement broke out in many other countries and in many North American cities, but in December the Toronto church was excommunicated for failing to de-emphasize "exotic" manifestations such as roaring and barking. On March 31 the Church of God in Christ mourned the death of Presiding Bishop Louis Henry Ford of Chicago. Succeeding Ford as head of the eight million-member predominately black church was Bishop Chandler Owens of Atlanta, Ga. In June some 4,000 blacks and whites gathered in Greensboro, N.C., for "Bondfire '95," the first gathering of the newly constituted Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America; racial reconciliation was the theme. Some 10,000 Pentecostals and charismatics met in July at the "Orlando '95" congress sponsored by the North American Renewal Service Committee. Over half of the registrants were Catholic charismatics. Plans also were made for thousands of young people to travel to Atlanta in 1996 as Christian witnesses to the Olympic Games. In August the Assemblies of God conducted their biennial General Council in St. Louis, Mo., reelecting Thomas Trask as general superintendent. He reported that membership in the Assemblies of God throughout the world had surpassed 30 million during the previous year. The 17th Pentecostal World Conference gathered in Jerusalem in September for a triennial conference that attracted over 6,500 registered delegates from around the world, the largest Christian conference in the history of the city. Featured speakers were Chairman Ray Hughes, David Yonggi Cho (see BIOGRAPHIES), Reinhard Bonnke, and Pat Robertson. (VINSON SYNAN) HINDUISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) During January and February 1995, an estimated 18 million Hindu pilgrims from around the world journeyed to Allahabad to bathe in the sacred Ganges River as part of the triennial Kumbh Mela, "Festival of the Pot." Allahabad is regarded as particularly holy because it lies at the confluence of three sacred rivers: the Ganges, Yamuna, and the mythical, subterranean Saraswati. Ten thousand police were needed to preserve order as pilgrims arrived at the rate of 150,000 an hour on the eve of January 30, which astrologers had fixed as the most propitious day to bathe. Concern about the future of the Ganges brought together Hindu leaders and environmentalists in opposition to a proposed government project to construct a hydroelectric dam just north of the pilgrimage site of Rishikesh near the glacial source of the river. During the summer a leading environmentalist, Sunder Lal Bahuguna, fasted 49 days to pressure India's Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to appoint a commission to study the project, and Hindu leaders mounted a protest to preserve the course and flow of the river. The potent interaction of Hinduism and politics in India was prominent during the year. A 39-year-old outcast female lawyer, Mayawati, who had served in both houses of India's Parliament, became chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state. Mayawati had outraged many Hindus in 1994 when she denounced Mohandas Gandhi as the "worst enemy of the Dalits" (outcasts). The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also experienced stunning election successes in other states during the year. In the March elections an alliance of the BJP and the radical Hindu Shiv Sena ("Army of Shiva") Party--both of which advocated the end of India's constitutional status as a secular state and the adoption of Hinduism as the nation's official religion--was successful. The Shiv Sena gained political control of Maharashtra, the state in which Bombay is located and the scene of violent conflicts between Hindus and Muslims attributed to the Shiv Sena. In August Bombay was renamed "Mumbai" after the goddess Mumbhadevi, the name by which the city is known in the regional language of Marathi. The Bombay Shiv Sena leader, Bal Thackeray, was satirized by Salman Rushdie in a new novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, which, when released in September, was banned in Maharashtra. More than 600 Hindu leaders from 38 countries gathered in South Africa during July for the World Hindu Conference, a highlight of which was an address by South African Pres. Nelson Mandela to a crowd of 40,000 of his country's 1.1 million Hindus. In August the Swaminarayan Hindu Mission consecrated a large cultural complex and temple in London, and in Chicago more than 3,000 Hindus celebrated the ancient Vedic Asvamedha Yajna fire ritual. The year saw the death on June 20 in California of Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer, the Indian-born philosopher and founder of the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara, Calif., whose many writings were directed at showing connections between Eastern and Western thought. ( See OBITUARIES.) In April the McDonald's Corp. announced plans to open restaurants in Bombay and New Delhi that, out of deference to the Hindu belief in the sanctity of the cow, would not serve beef hamburgers. (H. PATRICK SULLIVAN) This updates the article Hindusim. ISLAM (For figures of Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) By the 1990s disproportions of wealth, intractable poverty, unemployment, feelings of almost total insecurity, rising expectations, overwhelmingly rapid social and cultural change, alienation of youth, disintegration of traditional values--all these concerns were turning Muslims of all ages, educational attainments, and social classes toward trusting Islam to provide a solution. What that solution should be, however, was not clear. Observers referred to Islamic fundamentalism and saw aspects of it as part of the worldwide fundamentalist movements evident in many countries, such as the United States, where groups had similar feelings of alienation in a too rapidly changing, unstable world. Concerns about the radical aspects of Islam, however, were taking up so much attention that another important development tended to be overlooked, namely, the quiet but ever-increasing presence and spread of Islam in various parts of the world, especially Western countries. New mosques and Islamic centres continued to be built and to present attractive programs in such symbolic places as Rome and the university city of Cambridge, Mass. Specific developments in Muslim lands should be seen in the context of the broader developments. Violence continued in Afghanistan and Algeria throughout the year; Algerian extremist attacks occurred in France as well. Pakistan suffered violence in its cities, as did India, and the Kashmir situation remained unsettled. (See SPOTLIGHT: Secularism in South Asia.) Attempts to bring the warfare in Bosnia to a halt resulted in the signing of a peace treaty in December, though many feared it could not be maintained. In the southern Philippines younger radicals violently challenged what they saw as weakness or accommodation by the older Moro leadership. Violent outbreaks occurred in Turkey, involving both the ongoing fighting between Kurds and Turks and a March attack on Alawites, a Muslim minority group, some of whom lived in Istanbul. In late June, Pres. Hosni Mubarak of Egypt escaped an assassination attempt in Ethiopia, which Egyptians claimed was the responsibility of The Sudan's Muslim extremists, and which caused a brief border skirmish between The Sudan and Egypt. Egypt continued to suffer outbreaks of violence throughout the year as Islamic militants continued their attacks. Egypt accused The Sudan of supporting the militants and of aiding many who were said to be residents of Upper Egypt. In June an Egyptian judge ordered a wife divorced from her husband because the man's writings were judged anti-Islamic; he was declared an apostate to whom a proper Muslim woman could no longer be married. The couple was subsequently reported to have left the country. In other Muslim countries a number of writers and intellectuals were attacked or charged as anti-Islamic. There were positive developments in the Muslim world as well. The growing prominence of charismatic Muslim leaders and social reformers such as Indonesia's Abdurrahman Wahid (see BIOGRAPHIES) was encouraging. The Aga Khan IV continued his efforts to assist the Ismailis, the Shi'ite sect of which he was the head, with announced support to those living in the Pamirs. In Iran a group of Muslim clerics began making accessible on computers a substantial amount of traditional Islamic legal writing, including thousands of responses to religious questions. Before the hajj in the spring, the United Nations lifted its ban on flights from Libya to allow Egyptian airliners to fly Libyan pilgrims to Saudi Arabia. In the United States the trial of 10 terrorists (including Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman) accused of terrorist conspiracy in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 concluded at the end of September with a guilty verdict. That bombing had apparently fueled the initial report that Islamic terrorists were responsible for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, Okla., in April. Although the report was quickly found to be erroneous, once again U.S. Muslims found themselves offended and put on the defensive. Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, called for a mass march of all African-American men, regardless of religious background, in Washington, D.C., in October to dramatize their need for understanding and solidarity. His apparent anti-Jewish remarks continued to alienate large numbers of people, however. (REUBEN W. SMITH) This updates the article Islam. JUDAISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) The top item on the agenda for world Jewry in 1995--peace in the Middle East--received a severe blow in early November with the murder in Tel Aviv of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (see OBITUARIES); the shock was felt more strongly because the assassin was himself a Jew. Before the attack, world Jewish support for the peace process had diminished in reaction to continuing terrorist attacks. The withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank had brought to the fore a religious issue concerning the "settlers," some of whom believed they were performing a religious duty by maintaining Jewish possession of territories that the Bible says God promised to the "People of Israel." A group of Jewish settlers joined by Knesset members called for armed resistance against the Israeli army should the government act to remove their settlements. Some extremist rabbis in New York called the leaders of the Israeli government "traitors" and declared it acceptable under Jewish law to assassinate them. The tragedy in November seemed consistent with this line of thought. Former president Chaim Herzog of Israel called a meeting in April with world Jewish leaders on relations between Israel and the Diaspora. Though Herzog himself regarded the conference as a success, it ended acrimoniously, with delegates expressing doubts whether any real dialogue had taken place. Herzog had taken a negative stance toward the Diaspora, arguing that the only future for Jews outside Israel lay in aliya (immigration) to Israel. Avraham Burg, on the other hand, urged that Zionism today should be concerned with Jewish education, wherever it might take place. In July Burg, a Religious Zionist who identified strongly with the Peace Now movement, was elected chairman of the Jewish Agency and the General Zionist Council. His manifesto Brit Am placed great emphasis on the need to "return to the sources" in Jewish education and for a separation of state and religion in Israel. The monopoly on the determination of Jewish status, held by the Orthodox rabbinate since 1953, was challenged when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that conversions under the auspices of Conservative and Reform rabbis were valid, though the government would not be required to recognize such converts as Jews. Jews in many countries participated in ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory over Japan. Comparisons drawn between the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused resentment and vigorous debate in some Jewish circles. In the U.K. the conservative Masorti movement opened a new congregation in Manchester, England, and continued to make headway elsewhere, despite vociferous Orthodox opposition and attempts to deny them a public platform. The U.K. also was the scene for serious controversies surrounding the attempt to secure equality for women in religious affairs. There was considerable disappointment at the failure of the Chief Rabbinate to act positively on the recommendations of the 1994 report, "Women in the Community," produced partly on its own initiative. In October women demonstrated outside the office of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. The Second African Christian/Jewish Consultation took place in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 26-29 under the joint auspices of the World Council of Churches and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations. Delegates were greatly inspired by the breakdown of apartheid that had occurred since the first consultation, in Nairobi, Kenya. An independent group of Christians, Jews, and Muslims headed by the Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, and Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan promoted a code of ethics on international business for Christians, Muslims, and Jews intended to reflect the ethical basis common to the three religions. (NORMAN SOLOMON) This updates the article Judaism. ORIENTAL ORTHODOX CHURCH (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) Succeeding the catholicos of Echmiadzin, Vazgen I, who died in August 1994, was Syrian-born Karekin I (secular name, Neshan Sarkisian). He was elected the 131st supreme head of the Armenian Orthodox Church at the church's council held in Echmiadzin on April 4, 1995. His prior position was catholicos of Cilicia, Lebanon. The election was widely interpreted as a step in overcoming the rivalries between the two centres of Armenian church life. In his first encyclical the new catholicos of Echmiadzin announced a six-point program of action for church renewal. On June 28 the vacant see of the catholicos of Cilicia was filled with the election of Archbishop Aram Keshishian of the diocese of Lebanon. Keshishian had been serving as moderator of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. He was consecrated catholicos on July 1 in Antelias, Lebanon. Present at the consecration were Catholicos Karekin I of Echmiadzin and the Armenian patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, an event unprecedented in modern times. The Coptic Church in Egypt reported that harassment by Muslims continued. A female convert from Islam whose conversion was deemed a crime of "denigrating Islam" was arrested in November 1994. A priest and laymen also arrested in the incident were released in January 1995. An influx of proselytizing Protestants provoked Orthodox reaction in Addis Ababa, Eth., in April. After a group of about 100 Orthodox protested a crusade led by a California-based evangelist, the city council relocated the event. (STANLEY S. HARAKAS) PROTESTANT CHURCHES (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) The Anglican Church of Mexico became the newest province in the Anglican Communion in 1995. Previously a missionary district of the U.S. Episcopal Church, the 1994 Episcopal Convention granted the five Mexican dioceses permission to withdraw in order to become an autonomous province effective Jan. 1, 1995. The Mexican church held its first General Synod in February and elected Bishop Jos G. Saucedo of Cuernavaca as its first primate and leader. In England, Bishop David Hope was named archbishop of York, the second highest post in the Church of England. Hope, an Anglo-Catholic, had been bishop of London since 1991. His appointment was seen as a move to balance the more evangelical style of Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey. A new 900-page volume, A Prayer Book for Australia, was authorized by an overwhelming majority during the Anglican Church of Australia's General Synod in July. Meanwhile, the diocese of Sydney postponed voting on a proposal allowing deacons and laypersons to preside at Holy Communion. The measure breaks a 450-year-old Anglican tradition of allowing only ordained priests and bishops to celebrate Holy Communion. The Episcopal Church in the U.S. survived a year of scandals that included an embezzlement by its national treasurer, a suicide of a leading bishop, and an ecclesiastical trial against a bishop. Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning announced in May that former national treasurer Ellen Cooke had diverted $2.2 million from church funds during a five-year period. Cooke, who had resigned in January, had been the second highest paid national member. A grand jury indictment on embezzlement and theft charges was expected. In January, 10 bishops filed a formal "letter of presentment" charging Bishop Walter C. Righter with "holding and teaching doctrine contrary to that of the Episcopal Church" because he ordained an avowed practicing homosexual to the diaconate. Righter, the retired bishop of Iowa, was currently assistant bishop of Newark, N.J. By August the required one-fourth of the 297-member House of Bishops had consented to allow the presentment charges to proceed to a trial. The trial, scheduled for February 1996, would be the first ecclesiastical trial of a bishop in the Episcopal Church since 1924. Bishop David Johnson of Massachusetts, the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church, died in January of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The diocese later revealed that the bishop, who had already announced his retirement, had been involved in extramarital affairs over several years and had made at least one previous attempt to take his life. On the brighter side, Episcopal Church membership increased in 1994 for the fourth consecutive year, reversing a decline that had begun in 1966. Baptized church membership topped 2.5 million for the first time since 1986. (DAVID E. SUMNER) This updates the article Anglican Communion.