YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: RELIGION

BUDDHISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) A Nepali-led international archaeological team announced in February 1996 the discovery in 1995 of a stone they believed was laid by Emperor Ashoka of India in the 3rd century BC to mark the Buddha's birthplace in Lumbini, Nepal. The announcement followed an October 1995 UNESCO mission that recommended that Lumbini be placed on the World Heritage List. The birthplace claim, however, remained highly contested. In June 1996 the British Library announced that birch-bark scrolls acquired in 1994 may be the earliest extant Buddhist manuscripts, dating from the end of the 1st century AD or the beginning of the 2nd century. China celebrated the 11th Panchen Lama's June 1996 initiation into Buddhist monkhood with festivals including the presentation to the Panchen Lama's Tashilhunpo Monastery of a golden board bearing Chinese Pres. Jiang Zemin's inscription, "Safeguarding the Motherland and Working in Interests of the People." In January the six-year-old initiate, whose December 1995 enthronement by the Chinese as the 10th Panchen Lama's reincarnation was contested by the Dalai Lama, had affirmed his loyalty to Jiang. Amnesty International expressed concern in January for the Dalai Lama's candidate, missing since his May 1995 selection; in February the Dalai Lama speculated that the boy had been executed. During May, Chinese forces injured or arrested scores of Tibetan Buddhists, killing at least two monks who were protesting a new Chinese ban on possessing pictures of the Dalai Lama and wearing Buddhist protective cords. In June, at the Tibetan Freedom Concert sponsored by rock stars in San Francisco, there were demonstrations against U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton's renewal of China's most-favoured-nation status. Throughout the year leaders in Myanmar (Burma) negotiated with China to bring the Buddha's left tooth relic to their country in late 1996 for public display in Yangon (Rangoon) and Mandalay. In May the Myanmar government prevented Nobel Peace Prize winner Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy from performing the customary Buddhist New Year fish-releasing ceremony. In January Cambodian First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh retired to a Buddhist monastery following disagreements with his father, King Norodom Sihanouk, who in July affirmed his own "Buddhist tolerance" while pardoning a newspaper editor accused of defamation. Later in July Sihanouk assured minorities that the campaign for national unity would not require them to become Buddhist. In November security forces in Vietnam arrested several Buddhist monks and seized a pagoda in Hue that the government said was a centre of anticommunist activities. Throughout the year Buddhist monks protested the Sri Lankan government's peace proposal extended to the Tamil insurgents, fearing Buddhist political power would be compromised. In February police warned of rebel Tamil Tigers posing as monks; later that month they arrested the reputed chief of Tiger operations in Colombo at his rented room in a Buddhist monastery. In July police discovered a time bomb amid flowers offered to a Buddhist temple in northern Sri Lanka. A U.S. cosmetics firm apologized to the Thai government in January for disrespectful use of a Buddha image in its advertising. During the spring Chinese courts settled lawsuits against a sausage producer who used vegetarian monks in advertisements and a brewery producing "Buddha" beer. (JONATHAN S. WALTERS) This article updates Buddhism. HINDUISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) In India the installation on May 16, 1996, of a new central government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) raised fears that the country would be thrown into grave communal conflicts between Hindus and religious minorities. The new prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, however, quickly assured Muslims and other religious minorities that India would remain a constitutionally secular state and that the BJP's ideal of "Hindutva" meant only Indian cultural identity and not a Hindu nation. Unable to gain sufficient support in Parliament, the governing coalition put together by the BJP lasted only two weeks and was replaced on June 1 by a coalition of parties representing the poor, minorities, and Hindu lower castes. To some observers the new government underscored the increase in political power of the lower castes and regional parties, as well as the failure of the once dominant Congress Party to achieve the kind of society, free of caste hierarchy and discrimination, envisioned by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. In March conservation work was completed on the 12th-century temple of Jagannatha ("Lord of the World") in Puri, one of the greatest temples in India. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) undertook the conservation in 1975 when stones forming the building's exterior began falling because of the weight and the excessive salinity of layers of lime that had been applied as a preservative on the walls and domes during the past 300 years. The restoration revealed the splendid original temple carvings. Two sets of calamities befell Hindu worshipers in the summer. On July 15, during the festival of Somavati Amavasya, sacred to devotees of Shiva, stampedes at two of the seven holiest sites in India left at least 60 dead and dozens more seriously injured. At Hardwar, where 1.5 million pilgrims had gone to bathe in the sacred Ganges River to celebrate the festival and pray for monsoon rains, 21 were killed in a stampede on a narrow bridge. Another 39 died when worshipers fell on top of one another on a slippery stairway leading to an underground shrine of the Mahakaleshwar temple at Ujjain, where some 200,000 had gathered for the festival. In late August the bodies of more than 120 pilgrims were recovered from along a mountain path leading to the Amarnath cave in Kashmir, where it is believed Shiva imparted the secret of immortality and where the god is worshiped in the phallic form of a stalagmite of ice. More than 110,000 pilgrims, the largest number in years, had registered for an annual pilgrimage to the sacred cave, and about 50,000 of them were caught in a blizzard at 4,575 m (15,000 ft) with virtually no shelter, food, or water. Many died from exposure, while others fell into ravines hundreds of metres below the narrow trail. July 11 marked the 30th anniversary of the founding in New York City of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Its founder, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, brought from India a form of Hinduism that arose in the 16th century and directed devotion to Hare ("Lord") Krishna through ecstatic dancing and chanting. It quickly won converts among thousands of Americans, mostly young people. By 1980, three years after Prabhupada's death, the movement had established temples in about 40 U.S. cities, with 5,000 resident devotees, opened a chain of vegetarian restaurants, founded a publishing house, and instituted inner-city and international relief programs. The Hindu belief that deity can assume any number of forms underlay the erection throughout Andhra Pradesh of shrines dedicated to the popular film star N.T. Rama Rao following his death on January 18 at the age of 72. (See OBITUARIES.) (H. PATRICK SULLIVAN) This article updates Hindusim. ISLAM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) Muslims in most places in the world continued in 1996 to be subject to outbursts of violence, military operations by government and insurgent forces, and disappointed economic and social expectations. Various groups and leaders continued to call for Islamist action--that is, for Islamic solutions that emphasized the implementation of traditional behaviour and the Islamic Shari'ah law code. These calls were often labeled as fundamentalist; that term, however, continued to become less useful and accurate, because various Islamist groups generally had their own agendas that were based on a common theme of Islamic social justice but could be nuanced in a number of ways. The more specific religious concerns remained inextricably blended with political, and often nationalistic and cultural, concerns. At the same time, in Europe and North America, Islamic influences continued to expand. Violence continued in many places: Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan and India, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, The Sudan, China, and Israel and the West Bank and Jerusalem. The disorders were often a continuation of the patterns of recent years: disaffected groups and their leaders called for reforms based on Islamic principles; there were attacks against governmental authority, sometimes obliquely in the form of terrorist attacks on tourists (Egypt in April); and those attacks were generally met by swift government reprisals. Leaders of the disaffected groups and their followers tended to be economically insecure or unemployed, disgusted by the social and cultural milieu about them, unhappy at the rapid changes and alien values they perceived as overwhelming their society, and longing for now disintegrated traditional values. Many of these disaffected persons were relatively well educated and members of the middle class. The solutions they proffered for ending the ills were couched in the language, symbols, and systematic exposition of Islam. Events in Algeria, Egypt, The Sudan, Tajikistan, India and Pakistan, and China were confined to outbreaks of violence in specific areas and were dealt with swiftly. Other areas faced outright civil war. In Afghanistan the Taliban Islamists, after occupying the southern half of that country for about two years, began to expand northward, taking the capital Kabul in September. In the name of Islam, they announced a strict code of behaviour that included limitations on women's activities, such as closing girls' schools and ordering women to remain at home in seclusion. The Shari'ah was to be the enforced law. In Iraq the national forces supported a move by one Kurdish group in the north against its rival Kurdish group, an action that brought a reprisal strike in southern Iraq by the U.S. in September. In Turkey the Islamic Welfare (Refah) Party, which won a plurality in elections at the end of 1995, was finally able in June to form a coalition government under Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. (See BIOGRAPHIES.) It was the first time since the early 1920s that an Islamic religious party had held parliamentary power in Turkey. In the Philippines, after many years of rebellion in the southern island of Mindanao, Islamic guerrilla forces and the government signed a truce early in September, which signified a new era of shared power; the agreement was objected to by some Christian and other groups. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the truce seemed to be holding, and elections supervised by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were held in September. The situation in the West Bank and Israel worsened considerably during the year as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which came to power as the result of Israel's May election, appeared to have a different timetable for the implementation of the agreements of 1993 between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Outbreaks of violence occurred throughout the year, but the situation became especially severe in September and October over the Temple Mount area in Jerusalem, the location of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest Islamic shrine. (See ISRAEL.) In the U.S. the Islamic presence continued to grow and be recognized. One estimate numbered mosques there at more than 1,200. In late spring a national meeting of Muslims attracted thousands of attendees; in May an international women's conference was held in Washington, D.C., to discuss issues of interest to Muslim women throughout the world. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the organization the Nation of Islam, visited a number of Islamic countries early in the year, including Iran and Libya, with which the U.S. did not have regular diplomatic relations. As a result, and because of remarks Farrakhan made, the trip caused controversy. The Nation of Islam continued its efforts to reach out to inmates in U.S. prisons and also its controversial patrol service of inner-city housing complexes suffering high crime rates. Discrimination and isolated incidents of harassment and attacks on U.S. Muslims were reported. In July Citibank opened a bank in Bahrain that followed Islamic legal rules for banking practices, the first such Western bank in the Persian Gulf. Citibank's decision could be understood in light of the fact that Islamic banks now managed funds valued in the $50 billion-$100 billion range. (REUBEN W. SMITH) This article updates Islam. JUDAISM (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) Of 120 Knesset (parliament) members elected in Israel on May 29, 1996, 23 belonged to the three religious parties, compared with 16 in the previous Knesset. This increase could be seen in the context of changes in the electoral system that favoured the small parties. Israel's newly elected prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (see BIOGRAPHIES), included the three religious parties in his governing coalition. Guidelines issued by his bureau stated that "the Government will act to bring the religious and secular closer through mutual understanding and respect. The Government will retain the status quo on religious matters." Aryeh Deri, leader of Shas, the largest religious party, insisted that the religious parties should not use their voting power to bargain for religious legislation. Despite this declaration, in August, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that Bar-Ilan Street in Jerusalem should remain open on the Sabbath, Orthodox members of the Knesset threatened to bring down the government unless it supported legislation to change the way in which Supreme Court justices were chosen; they were, however, heavily outvoted. In reaction to rising tensions between religious and secular Jews and between the religious groups, several Jewish bodies as well as prominent leaders called for communal unity and mutual understanding. The Conference of European Rabbis, meeting in London in April, adopted 13 resolutions, mostly aimed at strengthening Orthodox leadership, education, and observance but also including calls for better relations between religious and secular Jews and for tolerance and the cessation of violence. In July, nevertheless, considerable resentment was aroused in the United States by a sermon given in Jerusalem by Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliahu Bakshi Doron, in which he compared Reform Jews to the biblical character Zimri, the adulterous Israelite prince rightfully slain by Phinehas. Reform Jews accused Bakshi Doron of incitement to violence, a charge he vigorously denied. Various Jewish religious groups from Reform to Hasidic continued to attract adherents in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. At the Centre for Jewish Studies at Moscow State University, Russian students graduated for the first time with a state-recognized degree in Jewish studies, and several of them attended a conference on the Teaching of Jewish Civilization at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In Britain, Clause 9 of the Divorce Bill, which passed through Parliament and awaited royal assent, authorizes a court to decline to make a divorce absolute if one of the parties claims that the marriage has not been properly dissolved according to religious law. If the bill was enacted, it would ease the plight of Jewish women whose husbands would otherwise be unwilling to initiate a get, or religious divorce. Meanwhile, the prenuptial agreement recommended by the chief rabbi and Beth Din (Jewish religious court) was signed by almost half of the couples to whom it had been offered; in its weaker version it commits couples to consult the Beth Din in case of marriage breakdown, and in the stronger version it authorizes the Beth Din to act as arbitrators. In August Commentary, the monthly journal of the American Jewish Committee, published a symposium, "What Do American Jews Believe?" The 47 respondents, not typical of the general U.S. Jewish population, because they were "prominent rabbis and thinkers across the denominational spectrum," appeared to support the contention that "among affiliated Jews in general, religion is back, and it is fueled by traditionalism," a finding greatly at variance with the results of a similar survey in 1966 but not out of keeping with trends in the U.S. generally. On June 9 in Teaneck, N.J., the Metivta, the rabbinical seminary of the Union for Traditional Judaism, conferred ordination on its first four graduates. The Union was the most recently formed Jewish denomination and was expected to appeal to the non-fundamentalist but tradition-oriented Jew. Among major international interfaith events during the year was a Jewish-Christian Symposium on the Jubilee, convened by the World Council of Churches and the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Switz., in May. Jews and Christians worked together for four days on the task of applying scripture to the modern world, with special reference to environmental issues and the problem of international debt. (NORMAN SOLOMON) This article updates Judaism. ORIENTAL ORTHODOX CHURCHES (For figures on Adherents of All Religions by Continent, see Table I; for Adherents in the U.S., see Table II.) The Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt during 1996 began circumventing government policies designed to frustrate its need to repair old churches and construct new church buildings by purchasing closed and abandoned Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. These closings had resulted from the policies of former presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar as-Sadat against non-Egyptian Christians in Egypt. Approximately 50 church buildings were purchased at reasonable prices because their owners preferred that they be used as Christian churches rather than for secular purposes. On May 8, 1996, Karekin I, the catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church based in Echmiadzin, Armenia, conducted an official visit at the headquarters of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople (Istanbul). He met with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, saying that he was committed to promoting Orthodox unity. Satisfaction was expressed regarding the elimination of doctrinal differences between the two traditions as a result of theological dialogue. The leader of the Armenian Orthodox jurisdiction headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon, Catholicos Aram I, conducted a 21-day visit to California beginning June 20. His branch of the Armenian Church was working for closer cooperation with other branches. (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.) A church court dismissed heresy charges in May against the retired Episcopal bishop of Iowa, Walter C. Righter. In early 1995 Righter had been charged by 10 bishops under church canons for "teaching publicly and advisedly that a practicing homosexual may properly be ordained" and for violating his ordination vows. The court, however, held that neither the doctrine nor discipline of the Episcopal Church prohibited the ordination of a noncelibate homosexual person. The bishops who filed the charges said at a May news conference that they would not appeal the ruling. They did, however, plan to present a canonical change at the next general convention that would obligate all members of the clergy to "abstain from sexual relations outside Holy Matrimony." Ellen F. Cooke, the former national church treasurer who admitted to embezzling $2.2 million in church funds, was sentenced to a five-year prison term by a U.S. District Court judge in Newark, N.J., in July. She began her sentence at a federal prison in Alderson, W.V., on August 26. Bishop Winston Ndungane was installed in September as the successor to Desmond Tutu as archbishop of Cape Town, the highest office of the Anglican Church in southern Africa. Formerly bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman in the Northern Cape, Bishop Ndungane served a three-year prison term from 1963 to 1966 for his anti-apartheid activities as a student. In the Philippines, Bishop Idnacio Capuyan Soliba of the diocese of Northern Luzon was chosen the prime bishop of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines at the church's June synod. In late 1995 the Church in the Province of the West Indies became the 15th Anglican province to vote in favour of ordaining women to the priesthood. Others included the Anglican churches in Australia, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, England, Hong Kong and Macao, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, the Philippines, southern Africa, Uganda, the United States, and West Africa. Meanwhile, the General Synod of Japan's Anglican church, Nippon Sei Ko Kai, rejected a proposal to ordain women priests after the bishops voted against it. Clergy and lay delegates at the synod had voted by a two-thirds majority in favour of ordination. The assistant bishop of the Kirinyaga diocese in Kenya, Andrew Adano Tuye, was killed on July 27. Bishop Tuye died with senior government officials when the police helicopter they were traveling in crashed just outside Marsabit. In February the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, rector of Grace-Calvary Church in Clarkesville, Ga., was named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. The selections were made by researchers at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, in a poll of 1,500 other preachers and seminary professors. Taylor was the only woman and only Episcopalian on the list. (DAVID E. SUMNER) This article updates Anglican Communion.