This article explores the difficulties nineteenth‐century British evangelical ecumenists faced as they attempted to develop distinctive practical initiatives that could commend widespread support across the denominational spectrum. In particular, it focuses on the nascent Evangelical Alliance's growing concern to promote religious liberty overseas. By following the debates within the Alliance about the need to pursue religious liberty and attending to the obstacles preventing such a course of action this article suggests the need to distinguish between a qualified agenda committed to securing religious rights (religious liberty) and a broader agenda committed to securing political rights (religious equality). By favouring the former, the Evangelical Alliance succeeded in developing a distinctively pan‐evangelical initiative that commended relatively widespread support. Thus evangelical concern for religious liberty must be distinguished from the distinctively Nonconformist promotion of religious equality.
This chapter provides an account of Norman Anderson’s views of Anglo-Arab relations amidst the decline of British imperial involvement in the region and analyses the debt his account of the development of legal reform owed to a diffusionist vision of the globalization of the ‘modern’ European state. It does so by providing an account of Anderson’s influence on the domestic laws of Libya and Tunisia and the international laws of commercial arbitration in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The chapter illustrates the parallels between Anderson and secular nationalist legal thinkers and politicians who advocated for legal change in Muslim majority countries during the period.
This chapter explores Anderson’s role in debates about Islamic legal reform in Pakistan, South-East Asia, East Africa and India. It shows the ways in which his work appealed to secular nationalists outside the Arab world, but also differed in substantial ways. Throughout his travels, Anderson engaged with a wide variety of Muslim opinion including prominent Islamists, feminists and secularists. He was particularly interested in the fate of Pakistan as an Islamic state and partook in important debates about the uniform civil code in India. In the case of India, while secularists openly courted Anderson’s support for their cause, Anderson gravitated towards more moderate thinkers within the Muslim community.
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