A voice from Jakarta at the Parliament of the World's Religions

When the Parliament of the World's Religions opened its plenary sessions in Chicago, the assembly hall filled with representatives of Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Indigenous and Islamic traditions gathered for one of the longest-running interfaith convenings on the planet. Among the voices invited to deliver a major address was Prof. Dr. M. Din Syamsuddin, the Indonesian Islamic scholar, former chairman of Muhammadiyah and former head of the Indonesian Council of Ulama. His presence underscored a simple truth: the largest Muslim-majority nation in the world has long treated dialogue across belief lines as a national habit rather than a diplomatic afterthought.

For readers following from Australia, where multiculturalism is woven into the social fabric of cities like Melbourne and Sydney, the gathering offered a familiar echo. SBS broadcasts its nightly news in dozens of languages, the local footy club in Brunswick might have a mosque just down the road, and Australian diplomats regularly shuttle between Canberra and Jakarta on questions of regional stability. The Parliament's themes of cooperation and climate justice therefore landed in a country that already takes plural belonging for granted, at least in its most cosmopolitan corners.

What makes the address memorable is not merely the stature of the speaker but the substance of what he brought to the lectern. He drew on decades of work with the International Council for Justice and Peace and other transnational bodies to argue that religious communities must claim their share of responsibility for the planet's future. Coverage of the broader gathering and Prof. Syamsuddin's role can be explored through the official website and its regularly updated news archive.

The gathering in context

The Parliament of the World's Religions traces its modern lineage to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and was revived in 1993 as a regular convocation. Today it draws rabbis, imams, swamis and pastors into the same auditorium, often for the first time in their careers. Themes such as sacred land, gender equity and the climate emergency have moved from the margins of religious discourse to the centre, pushed there by activists who recognise that sanctuaries cannot remain silent while forests burn.

Prof. Syamsuddin walked in as a veteran of these conversations. He helped host the 2010 Asia-Pacific Dialogue on Interfaith Cooperation in Melbourne and has spoken at forums from Kyoto to Geneva. That accumulated experience shaped the rhythm of his keynote, which moved easily between theological reflection and policy recommendation, between Quranic citation and reference to UN Sustainable Development Goal targets.

Australian observers watching the livestream would have recognised some of the rhythm. Interfaith councils in Adelaide and Perth have spent the past decade refining a similar choreography, one that translates scriptural wisdom into language that ministers and shadow cabinets can actually use. For those seeking a deeper read on how Indonesian Muslim leaders engage global debates, his recent essay traces the same intellectual lineage.

Pluralism as a foundation

The first pillar of the address was pluralism. Prof. Syamsuddin returned repeatedly to the Indonesian phrase Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, unity in diversity, and argued that the country's six officially recognised religions, plus its many folk traditions, offer a working laboratory for coexistence. He pointed to the way Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, the two largest Muslim organisations, have historically cooperated with the Catholic bishops' conference and the Hindu Dharma council on matters of national education.

He also pushed back against the assumption that pluralism is a Western export. Pluralism, in his telling, belongs to the lived experience of Java, Sumatra and Papua long before it became a buzzword in European policy circles. He cited the 1984 Tanjung Priok incident and its aftermath, when Muslim leaders publicly defended the right of minorities to worship freely, as evidence that interfaith solidarity is forged in difficult moments rather than merely theorised in them. Mate, the speaker seemed to say through his translator, the experiment has been running for decades in the world's third-largest democracy.

For Australians who occasionally hear in the media that pluralism is somehow fragile, the address carried a corrective. The results of the Indonesian experiment are written into school curricula and village bylaws, two institutions that are often talked about in Canberra policy papers but rarely visited by the people who draft them.

Indonesian experience and universal lessons

The second half of the keynote moved from national practice to global recommendation. Prof. Syamsuddin called on religious communities to invest in education, to sponsor exchange programmes between seminaries and madrasas, and to support journalists who cover religion with care. He warned that populist movements often weaponise faith, and the response must come from within religious communities themselves rather than be imposed from outside.

He linked the climate emergency to interfaith responsibility. Pollution, in his framing, is a theological failure as much as an industrial one, and our duty as custodians of creation cannot be outsourced to secular institutions alone. He invited the Parliament to adopt a binding declaration on reducing the carbon footprint of religious buildings, pilgrimages and conferences, including the conference itself.

The argument is recorded in detail across multiple platforms. For a synthesis of the keynote and the wider response from participants, the Zee Plus Three outlet carries commentary from Australian observers, including representatives of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, who were present at the plenary and found much to applaud in Prof. Syamsuddin's framing.

Resonance with Australian interfaith work

The address resonated with groups across Australia that have been quietly doing the same kind of bridge-building for years. The Jewish Christian Muslim Association of Australia, based in Sydney's Newtown, has hosted joint Iftar dinners during Ramadan for more than a decade. In Melbourne, the Religions for Peace chapter brings together Buddhist monastics from Footscray with Muslim youth workers from Coburg in programs aimed at preventing radicalisation.

Australian diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific has long drawn on Prof. Syamsuddin's expertise. Officials at Parliament House in Canberra have consulted Indonesian counterparts on counter-extremism policy, and academic partnerships between Indonesian and Australian institutions flourish from Monash to Muhammadiyah's own university in Yogyakarta. The speech arrived in a country that already takes the speaker's contributions seriously, even if most Australians would struggle to spell his name on a first attempt.

Religious communities around the world must answer the same challenge, the keynote suggested. As Prof. Syamsuddin has written elsewhere on his news page, the work of dialogue is not a side project but a central obligation of faith in the twenty-first century, a conviction that fits comfortably alongside the larrikin streak in Australian religious life that refuses to take itself too seriously.

Lasting significance of the address

What gives the speech staying power is its refusal to treat pluralism as sentiment. Prof. Syamsuddin presented it as a discipline, one that requires budgets, training programmes and the unglamorous work of drafting joint statements on contested issues. He invited his listeners to stop treating interfaith dialogue as a sideshow to realpolitik and to recognise it as a load-bearing pillar of peaceful societies.

The reception among delegates confirmed the point. Jewish participants thanked him for his consistent defence of minority rights in international forums. Hindu delegates from India noted that his framework could inform efforts to ease communal tensions in their own country. Indigenous delegates from North America said the address aligned with their own calls for the protection of sacred sites from corporate exploitation.

For Australian readers, the address is a reminder that the country's future as a plural society depends on the kind of patient institution-building the speaker has championed for half a century. It is work that happens in meeting rooms in Parramatta, in candlelight vigils in Fremantle, in classrooms in Innisfail, far from the international spotlight but connected to the same global conversation. There is no fair-dinkum substitute for showing up, listening and staying at the table.

Visit the regularly updated archive to follow Prof. Din Syamsuddin's ongoing work, read the latest essays on pluralism and democracy, and consider joining a local interfaith gathering in your city. Whether you gather over flat whites in a Brunswick café or in a town hall in Tamworth, the conversation Prof. Syamsuddin models at the Parliament of the World's Religions belongs to everyone who cares about the kind of country Australia is becoming.