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Theorizing Modernities article

“Material Fatwas” and the Politics of Recognition


Photo Credit: Fuzzy Gerdes. Flickr.com. “Halal Chicken Chili” in Chicago, Illinois.

In Brand Islam Faegheh Shirazi investigates many dimensions of the interplay of Islamic halal guidelines and marketing. As a Christian theologian who has written on the impact of consumer culture upon religious belief, I learned much from Shirazi’s study of halal marketing in a tradition very different from my own. This is interesting terrain where producers and consumers, driven by very different incentives, interact in complex and surprising ways. Here I will focus on two elements of the realities discussed by the book: halal marketing as an intervention into the politics of recognition and halal marketing as an intervention into religious authority. I offer my own analysis of the material Shirazi presents; hopefully in a manner that complements the goals of the book.

 

Halal Marketing and the Politics of Recognition:

It is easy enough to establish the interests of many corporate producers in catering to the halal market. Shirazi cites the significant size and growth in this market segment globally; by some measures up to 17% of the food market (57-59). Add to this the price premium that halal goods can demand, and one sees the obvious profit motive to serve this market. That said, it is clear that such a marketing move has risks for large, broadly marketed brands. While some opposition to halal foods is based on slaughter practices, opposition to popular food brands that seek halal certification even for their vegetarian food offerings manifest the deeper Islamophobic roots of such opposition.

Shirazi documents halal marketing among many different kinds of producers from small proprietors to transnational corporations. In the evaluation of these various halal marketing attempts, frequent mention is made of the desire for profit. The same examples provide many opportunities to discuss the cultural effects that accompany for-profit marketing.

Corporate halal marketing has consequences beyond profits and brand curation. When broadly marketed brands offer halal products, they also offer cultural recognition to Muslim consumers in the marketplace. This recognition is active even if mass market goods have difficulty complying with strict halal interpretations (see the discussion of KFC in the UK, 44).

All of the efforts that brand curators put into associating their products with security, care, beauty, and integrity give them profound cultural power. Even when driven only by profits, corporate producers of consumer goods inevitably deploy the cultural power of their brands to offer recognition to minority consumers. This results in the construction of a commercial cosmopolitan sphere that honors the concerns of minority groups.

Photo Credit: Tokyofoodcast. Flickr.com. Tokyo Halal Foods in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.

This commercial cosmopolitan recognition in some way rivals that of the political sphere.  Politics is marked by public consensus and open dissent; the commercial sphere by market segmentation. Anti-sharia activists organize boycotts of major brands that cater to halal needs, but the bar is set much higher than the political sphere. In the commercial sphere, to be successful, a boycott must result in the removal of the halal options from the market. The mere public voicing of dissent does not undo the material presence of halal options on the market; these products’ direct hailing of Muslim consumers continues in advertising and commerce. To give but one example, KFC defused the tension through market differentiation: halal offerings in highly Muslim areas of the UK, non-halal chicken and pork options in others. Rejection of halal chicken in one neighborhood is complemented by its presence in another. The lack of public consensus does not impede commercial recognition, which continues via market segmentation.

One particularly interesting question involves the effects of major brand halal marketing. Here recognition meets homogenization. How do the use of halal by large brands impact Muslims’ religious identities and practices?  Is this a homogenizing and assimilating force?  Or does it deepen and differentiate identity?

 

Halal Marketing and Religious Authority:

In addition to its political effects, halal marketing has consequences for religious authority as well. In her discussion of cosmetics, Shirazi cites a religious authority dismissive of concerns about the presence of alcohol in cosmetics and personal care products. Since such products are not “consumed” in a manner relevant to traditional notions of halal, their alcohol content is not a matter of halal restrictions (140). But attention to the permissibility of ingredients in cosmetics has consequences for ongoing debates among the ulama concerning whether such personal adornments are haram or halal. One could argue that scrupulous attention to halal ingredients by producers brings a broader range of Qur’anic passages and other authorities into play and can thus function as a “material fatwa” legitimating their use. These are more than covert arguments for allowing cosmetics; they move the debate into the material realm of commodity marketing.

It is in Shirazi’s descriptions of hijab and women’s sportswear that the function of commodities as material religious arguments or judgements becomes most explicit. Women face profoundly limited opportunities to participate in sports in “some sharia-controlled countries” (178).  Many of the arguments given against women’s’ participation involve dress. Thus, the producers of sportswear designed to conform to hijab requirements are making a powerful intervention by eliminating a major objection to female sports practices. There is more here than merely eliminating objections, however. The existence of hijab-conforming sportswear functions as a material argument that actively associates the virtues of wearing hijab with women’s athletics.

My argument here is not about the deregulation of religion through the emergence of alternative experts and the expansion of personal choice. Yes, the activists, entrepreneurs and large corporations that lobby for and produce such gear are actively intervening in the traditional realm of judgements of the ulama. But they do so through the material medium of the commodity of sportswear. Sports hijab suggest that it is appropriate for Muslim women to be athletes.

Although these effects cannot be reduced to the deregulation of religion, they still have a profound impact on religious authority. Such “material fatwas” have a decidedly pro-consumption bias; as is evidenced in the example of halal cosmetics. Traditional judgements by the ulama can rule some goods and actions outside the realm of consumption and practice. Consumer goods seldom function to convey the importance of abstaining from anything. In this regard, it would be interesting to consider the interplay of halal marketing with Muslim practices outside the realm of consumption choices, such as the practice of the Ramadan fast.

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Vincent Miller
Vincent J. Miller, the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton, is the author of Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (Continuum) and editor of The Theological and Ecological Vision of Laudato Si’: Everything Is Connected (Bloomsbury). He is currently at work on a book entitled The Church and Neoliberal Globalization: Solidarity in a World Made Indifferent.
Theorizing Modernities article

From Politics of Piety to Islamic Commodification: Asymmetry and Agency in the Studies of Islam


Photo Credit: Adam Jones. “NBC Islamic Banking–Billboard in Kiponda District, Stone Town, Zanzibar, Tanzania”

Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam is a welcome addition to the growing number of books that attempt to move us beyond the primary focus on Islam as a political phenomenon or a platform for yet another critique of secularism, toward the more complicated—and possibly analytically and normatively more promising—intersections of theological, cultural, political, and economic aspects of life of contemporary Muslims.

This shift in the studies of Islam ought not to be surprising: it indicates that scholars have finally started to take notice of the rise of a global market of halal products and the significant implications that the encounter between Islam and the late modern capitalist economy can have on both. Some scholars see the Islamic markets as a result of the market forces’ recognition that Muslims are consumers with a great economic power, which will only increase in the coming decades; others explore the rise of Muslim consumers as a result of and an impetus for deeper cultural and theological transformations of Islam. Still others, such as a scholar and adviser to the Obama administration Vali Nasr, argue that market capitalism, rather than religion, will be the field of “‘the great battle for the soul of the Muslim world’” (3). Shirazi wants to “provide an original intervention in the Muslim cultural studies” by looking at Brand Islam as the marketing of “a wide range of commodities from food products to children’s toys” as Islamic, “in the West as well as in Muslim-majority nations” (1). She is interested, she writes, in how Muslim consumers fetishize halal products by attaching “mystical and religious significance to what might otherwise be considered inutile and mundane objects” (7). Her descriptive focus and especially her normative critique of the Brand Islam, however, suggest that Shirazi’s principal concern is less with the motivations of Muslim consumers and more with the ways in which their piety is being exploited and commodified—a point to which I’ll turn in more detail shortly.

Shirazi begins her discussion by explaining that halal, which indicates objects or actions that are permissible according to Sharia, has always been central to Islam as a theological, legal, and lived tradition. But while once primarily referring to food and drink, the notion of halal is today applied in every sphere of the daily life of Muslims—in “medical services, banking and financial services, insurance and real state providers, hotels, the tourism industry, commercial aspects of popular pilgrimages and shrines, music industry products, sportswear, lingerie, fragrances, cosmetics, hair and skin care products, and a shot of other accoutrements” (8). In the chapters that especially explore food, cosmetic, and fashion industries, Shirazi shows how modern technologies and science further complicate the determination of the meanings of halal in so many arenas of life: even when developing new methods to address the Muslims’ growing concern with sustaining their halal lifestyle, the new technologies can in fact conceal the layers of production of halal commodities.

There are two main sides to the rise of Brand Islam, as Shirazi tells the story. On the one hand are Muslims, especially those living in non-Muslim-majority societies—from Canada to Belgium to Australia—for whom halal is a way to establish the boundaries of their identity. Rigorous commitment to halal, especially among the younger diaspora Muslims, Shirazi thus suggests, helps ensure their connectedness to the global umma and their constructive response to Islamophobia and pressure that they conform to the dominant Western style of life. On the other hand, the rise of Brand Islam results from advertisers and corporations’ realization that there is much profit hidden in the world of halal. And, here begins Shirazi’s main critique: she sees Brand Islam as “a clever tool” of the entrepreneurs and corporations, as a “profit-driven” endeavor that exploits “the rise of a new Islamic economic paradigm,” a project “not necessarily created with the objective of honoring religious practice and sentiment” (1), with consumers whose absolute commitments to pious practices makes them “highly subject to manipulation” (4).

The outcome of Shirazi’s focus on the economic exploitation of Muslim spirituality is a volume that contains wonderfully detailed accounts of various halal industries and a strong critique of the ways in which the global capitalism of late modernity appropriates and distorts even the most sincere of religious commitments—of the individual Muslim consumers as well as of the religious bodies responsible for determining what halal is or is not. This primary preoccupation with exploitation of piety and fetishization of halal products brings important insights for the study of Islam as a lived, contemporary tradition. Yet, this perspective might also carry analytical and normative asymmetries that can all too quickly turn Muslims into objects of exploitation rather than subjects fully participating in, and capable of questioning, the modes of global economy.

Photo Credit: Justin Hall. “This ‘Razanne’ doll is a clear Barbie alternative for Islamic children –
according to the sticker on the package, ‘New Razanne Builds Character.'”

The question of agency is a complicated one, to be sure, and the spaces of agency might be uncovered in the least expected spaces. In my reading, Shirazi argues that contemporary Muslims—in the Western as well as in predominantly Muslim societies—tend to see their own agency in the acts through which they ascribe daily life with sacred meanings, in the processes in which the focus on halal turns their mundane life “into powerful symbols of religious correctness and piety” (7). In other words, to Muslims themselves, the global halal market emerges as a productive space of identity-boundary work, which does address socio-political contexts of the 21st century but is centrally theological in character. The problem, Shirazi maintains from within her cultural studies perspective, is that Brand Islam is the economic arena that turns even pure theological impulses, strict religious practices, and desire to belong to a community into “a commodity for the purpose of economic gain” (7). There is, according to her, “an unmistakable trend…emerging in all religious arenas” and that is “the proliferation of strategies that ensure the profitable marketing and sale” of religious symbols (199).

Shirazi’s points are valuable and her perspective on commodification drives home the reality of the extreme power of the global capitalist economy. At the same time, it seems to me that focusing on the motivations and acts of contemporary Muslims as believers—rather than the ways in which their piety is being exploited and commodified—could reveal an even greater paradox related to their agency. It is, I would propose, the very theological acts and practices of articulating halal(permissible)/haram(forbidden) distinctions that most profoundly problematize the scope of their agency. That is to say, by insisting on meticulous, often absolute, deeply sincere commitment to halal in every aspect of life—by asserting what Daromir Rudnyckyj highlights in the Indonesian context as “an ethic of individual self-policing based in Islamic practice”  through which “the worshiper consciously acknowledges and engages … oneness of goal, purpose and will” (8-9)—do Muslim believers reject and critique the Western modern lifestyle and neoliberalism, or do they reaffirm drives so constitutive of the modern project? One such drive is what scholars from Charles Taylor to Adam Seligman to Robert Orsi see as the drive to uniformity and order; the other is an attempt to sacralize all aspects of life. The former impulse constrains our capacity to address the spaces of liminality in individual and social life (and, as a result, the contemporary obsession with ‘haramness’ of cosmetics can befuddle even Muslims scholars, as noted on page 140). At the same time, the attempt at sacralization of all domains of life, as Max Weber showed long ago, not only led toward secularization; it was also a religious drive built into the very foundations of modernity and capitalism. In other words, while Muslims as believers might focus on halal in the context of the global market as the realm that enables them to exert theological, cultural, and political agency and do so against Western modernity, the impulses that shape their theological orientations and religious acts related to halal seem quite aligned with some aspects of that modernity.

Let me end on a slightly provocative note: Shirazi discusses in great detail the role of certified religious authorities—ayatollahs, ulama, and muftis—in ascertaining the halal/haram distinctions, and shows convincingly how the logic of the market influences and affects such bodies in Western countries such as the United States or Muslim societies such as Iran or Indonesia. I wonder, however, whether a more explicit comparison of the motivations and practices of Muslim authoritative bodies in such very different settings could reveal something surprising: the possibility that a powerful normative critique of global capitalism could emerge not from the focus on universal religious community but from the link between the theological focus on halal, the Muslim self-understanding as bounded by the framework of national identity, and the commitment to applying the Islamic understanding of social justice in one’s national society.

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Slavica Jakelić
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valporaisio University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.

Jakelić 's writings have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, Political Theology, The Hedgehog Review, The Review of Faith &International Affairs, Studies in Religion, Sciences Religieuses, and Commonweal. She co-edited three volumes: The Future of the Study of Religion, Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, and The Hedgehog Review’s issue "After Secularization." Jakelić is the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2010) and is currently working on two books, Pluralizing Humanism (under contract with Routledge) and Ethical Nationalisms.
 
Theorizing Modernities article

Piety and the Logics of Consumer Capitalism


Photo Credit: Doni Ismanto. Fashion Photoshoot For Batik Kiawah.

President Donald J. Trump is as well-known for his vocal and vitriolic Islamophobia as he is for his brand. Indeed, unabashed and aggressive Islamophobia has become a central feature of the Trump political brand. Positioned within the spaces of both tension and collusion between global commodity capitalism and contemporary Islamophobia, Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam—The Marketing and Commodification of Piety emerges at an intriguing, politically dangerous, and culturally charged moment in time.

According to Shirazi, “the truth is that Islam is merging into commodity marketing, promoting capitalist consumerism by appealing to Islamist sentiments” (140). However, as Laurence Moore and other historians remind us, the religious application of marketing techniques is not itself new. In Western contexts, Christianity and industrial capitalism were intimately entangled from the beginning. Moreover, as Coleen McDannell and others have argued, religion is reproduced, materially, in tandem with the everyday world of objects and, as Brent Rodríguez Plate and others have emphasized, religion is inexorably and endemically linked to and mediated through the body. That is, certain historical and phenomenological aspects of religious commodity fetish are not entirely new.

Photo Credit: Aslan Media. “Hot Pink and Mustard Bowtie Shirtdress” at the Abaya Addict show.

For her part, Mara Einstein has argued that in our highly commercialized society, religions themselves, in order to rise above the cultural noise, must become active and eager participants in the branding discourse. Marketing gets consumers to do things with objects–with and to their bodies. As such, among other things, Shirazi’s excellent and arresting study of religious branding proves to be a usefully critical intervention into the domains of material and popular religion. Again, however, as Shirazi herself concedes, neither the religious remaking of mundane objects nor the marketization of religion are new. What is new, she writes, are the “surprisingly out-of-the box methods entrepreneurs and companies are using to convince devout Muslims to part with their money” (196).

Having established the burgeoning Islamophobia of the post 9/11 period and the deep histories of colonialism and postcolonial struggle as the broader context for the emergence of “brand Islam”, Shirazi weaves together six case studies (the halal food industry, halal animal slaughter, the marketing of Islamic toys, halal cosmetics, and Islamic fashion) in the service of her larger argument regarding the commodification of Islam. In addition to an admitted focus on Iran, within which the author maintains active personal networks and to which she has unique cultural and institutional access, the scope of analysis extends to the Malaysian, Indonesian, Turkish, American, and E.U. contexts as well.

Brand Islam is rife with well-chosen and well-documented examples of Islam’s multivalent relationship with global consumer markets. In addition to a discussion of well-known lightning rods like the burkini controversy in France, Shirazi touches on the less-documented contestation over the halal status of civet coffee by Islamic scholars (ulama) in Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, and the proliferation of administrative bodies charged with the certification of halal goods and services (and, at times, the transnational disagreements between them about what counts as halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden)). Along the way, Shirazi provides the reader with useful signposts in the form of summations of basic Islamic theological doctrine relevant to the dynamics she explores.

As Shirazi explains, the religious practice of halal recalls Allah’s dominion over all things. Historically, dietary restrictions and the prohibition against the consumption of alcohol have taken precedence although, in reality, halal can be extended into a plethora of everyday activities. At stake, according to Shirazi, are the following are tensions which remain of central interest to her analysis: 1) Just as markets in brand Islam expand through the category of halal, on the surface potentially Islamicizing global capitalism, so too does this imply, in turn and in equal measure, a structuring of Islamic piety by the coordinates and logic of consumer capitalism; 2) The desire for piety and a stance of solidarity with the worldwide ummah (Muslim community) can fuel Muslims’ increased existential investments in the commodity circuits of global capitalism; 3) One consequence of virulently Islamophobic societies is the proliferation of “brand Islam” within the coordinates of those very societies; 4) Brands can sell the mystique of halal as well as Islamophobia (sometimes the same brand will even play both sides of that dangerous game).

As the reader learns, both the Islamic world itself and multinational corporations recognized somewhat late that the religious category of halal could be extended into Islamic-compliant lifestyle products (124). That is, halal lends itself well to market segmentation and product differentiation. In my view, the crux of Shirazi’s study—one which could receive more exacting analytical attention—is precisely this phenomenon whereby an ancient religious category is being transformed (in real time) from the inside out through its mediation by the now ubiquitous brand form.[1]

In actuality, brands are sets of metaphorical associations individuals have with products, services, persons, places, groups, and organizations. These associations are often ritualized through consumer practices. While a general discussion of the brand form itself could help further direct the reader, Shirazi does not provide one. Moreover, although the term “brand Islam” is foregrounded in the very title of Shirazi’s monograph, she does not offer a unifying definition of how she actually uses the term (and the term itself is listed in the index only twice). However, she does offer some guidance. Early on, Shirazi explains, “Islamic commodities I view as Brand Islam, working at the level of fetish, as Muslims consumers, perhaps especially Muslim middle-class consumers, attach mystical and religious significance to what might otherwise be considered inutile and mundane objects” (7). Later, she adds, “Brand Islam has morphed into an explosion of products and services, some useful and some superfluous, created by Muslim manufacturers and government-sponsored initiatives as well as by entrepreneurs solely interested in profit, not the Prophet’s teachings” (199).

While Shirazi admits that sentiments of piety (especially in the face of xenophobic violence and danger) can motivate the practices of the consumers of “brand Islam”, she is more dismissive of the manufacturers, government-sponsored agencies, and financiers who are indispensable to the explosion of the new halal culture industry. At several points in the text, Shirazi reduces motivation on the production side to profit-motive alone. However, as Daromir Rudnyckyj argues specifically within the Indonesian context, Islamic theology can be blended into the ideology of a specifically Muslim neoliberal entrepreneurship. Interesting ethnographic questions, therefore, lay beyond the horizons of Shirazi’s landmark study regarding the social processes whereby the profit-motive is ‘Islamicized’ by the entrepreneurial purveyors of “brand Islam” and whereby religious and economic valuations are squared (and transmuted) in tandem. This important sociological question also presents itself: does “brand Islam” signal the religious deinstitutionalization of swaths of global Islam into taste groups, voluntary associations, and corporate cultures? Does an increase in everyday piety through “brand Islam” simultaneously and necessarily weaken the authority of Islamic religious institutions?

Finally, all of the case studies Faegheh Shirazi includes speak to the gendered dynamics that underwrite its global development and to the ways in which women’s bodies stand as literal crossroads for the crisscrossing of historical forces. From the burkini controversy to the religiously imposed strictures against an Islamic fashion industry in Iran to the displaced patriarchy played out in controversies regarding the modesty and piety of girls’ dolls, the rise of “brand Islam” (and both religiously conservative and Islamophobic resistance to it) is being mapped onto the bodies and souls of Muslim women and girls (and their proxies like lingerie mannequins). In the immediate aftermath of the election of Donald Trump (whose own personal history of violence against women became a major campaign issue) to the American presidency, Muslim women who veil have been especially vulnerable to the rising tides of hate crimes and bias attacks. Shirazi’s book might have us ponder whether in the Age of Trump, religious, political, racial, economic, and cultural conflicts might not continue to play themselves out at especially electric levels of intensity upon the commodified bodies of pious, upwardly mobile Muslims.

Brand Islam—The Marketing and Commodification of Piety is a groundbreaking book that will be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary Islam and across disciplines. It adds to our comprehension not only of contemporary Islam but also to our understanding of the conditions of post-secularity that are today characteristic of the relationship between religion and neoliberalism. Faegheh Shirazi has performed a great service to several fields by clearing such timely and fecund paths.

 

[1] None of this is to imply the either Shirazi or I put any stock in the existence of an a-historical, pristinely Islamic halal in the past. Rather, the point is that Shirazi has very usefully brought attention to a moment of observable and patent transformation and change.

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George Gonzalez
George González is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth University. Most broadly, his research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to liberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology. He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of postsecular, neoliberalism through the framework of religious social change. He was trained in ethnographic method by the philosophical anthropologist, Michael Jackson, and has special interests in the work ethnography can do at the intersections of religion, science and global capitalism and as a complement to critical theory. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project and articles on methodology in the study of religion, the conceptual relationships between ritualization and branding, and the ‘workplace spirituality’ movement in contemporary business management. He is currently working on a multi-site ethnography and historiography of the ritualization of consumer capitalism and is set to begin fieldwork with the famed radical performance troupe, Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in early 2017.
Theorizing Modernities article

Halal Markets as Sites of Cultural Hybridity: Moral Agency and Public Participation


Photo Credit: Eric Baker. A young woman joins her bikini-clad friend at the beach in Turkey.

For decades, markets saw religion, especially Islam, as something that required little or no attention. The turn of the Millennium proved this thinking wrong. Today halal markets are worth around $4 trillion and within that the Islamic apparel industry by itself is projected to be worth $300 billion in the coming few years. Once overlooked, with these mouthwatering numbers the Islamic fashion industry has attracted even Western giants like DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, MANGO and Marks & Spencer.

Despite a viable total available market, stunning growth rate, and the mobilization of global fashion giants, a unicorn is yet to emerge in the Islamic apparel industry. The fact that it has not is not simply about hard-hitting competition or bad advertisement. It is about bad product/market fit—products that do not fully cater to the need or problems of consumers. In other words, most companies that operate within the Islamic clothing industry were quick to recognize the potential but have failed to understand what the actual need or problem is, what that problem means and what socio-political factors drive it.

The common crucial mistake companies, both Muslim and non-Muslim alike, make, is that they reduce the growing Muslim interest in contemporary markets to a newfangled Islamic consumerism, which breathlessly awaits the next mundane product to be marketed as ‘Islamic’, be it a purse, an elevator that only carries halal goods, or china tableware.

This false start has led to the erroneous belief that entry to halal markets requires just a simple step: take an item, as mundane as it can be, market it as ‘Islamic’—as if Islamic is generically and mechanically defined— and voila!  As such, not just companies but whole cities, such as the City of Torino in Italy, see halal markets as part of their smart economic growth strategy and presume that they can get a jumpstart in the race for halal markets by simply marketing a wide range of items as Islamic or halal.

Academic debates follow a similar path. They too view the Islamic presence in capitalist markets as an escapist Muslim consumerism, driven by market expansion, which has engulfed Islam and commodified Islamic symbols. The broader implication in terms of social theory, they maintain, is that modernization via consumerism loosens the symbolic boundaries of religion, blurring the distinction between the sacred and the consumable profane. In the context of Muslim immigrants in the West, more recent work emphasizes Islamophobia as the fuel for rising Muslim consumerism. As Muslims confront Islamophobia, markets step in to offer products that reinforce Islamic identity, provide psychological assurance, and connect individual Muslims coping with xenophobia to the broader global Umma.

No doubt the global expansion of markets, immigration, and the rise of Islamophobia have created a unique environment for shrewd marketing. However, my empirical work in Turkey on how Muslims engage modernity and my subsequent experience as a founder of a young modest wear start-up company point to a different story, one in which Muslim engagement of fashion, or markets more broadly, goes well beyond consumerism driven by clever marketing. Approaches that follow the consumerist path, including Brand Islam and the works of Turkish scholars such as Timur Kuran and Ozlem Sandikci , seem to center their reading of Islamic markets on the manufacturers’ interests and assessments while neglecting the historical origins of Muslim engagements with modernity as well as the agency and active participation of the pious in the rise and shaping of halal markets. Moreover, these approaches are still underpinned by an old assumption: the divide of religion versus modernity, where Muslim engagements of modernity result in the engulfment of Islam, in this case via consumerism and capitalism.

Photo Credit: Aslan Media. Saudi women play soccer.

Yet the problem Islamic fashion solves goes well beyond an appetite for ostentatious consumerism. Rather, it is indicative of such broader shifts as the theological rise of the self and religious self-identity, the rejection of authoritarian religious communalism, and a redefinition of Umma, as well as increasing Muslim public female agency and visibility.

What I fundamentally found in my empirical work on the subject was that the rise of Islamic markets went well beyond consumerism, and that this rise was situated not against the backdrop of Islam versus Western-modernity divide, but, to the contrary, increasing Muslim engagements of modernity and the resulting hybridity.

 

A New Commentary: Stepping Out of False Divides

For decades, social theory on religion prescribed that religion’s interaction with modernity could take only two forms: religion would either reject modernity to preserve tradition, or, if and when it chose to engage modernity, it would have to modify tradition, ultimately turning into liberal religion.

In Turkey, since the 1980s, a new religious commentary emerged, Muslimism, which defied this dichotomous thinking. Neither a fundamentalist rejection of modernity nor liberal translation of religion, Muslimism embraces aspects of modern life while submitting that life back to a sacred, moral order, creating as such hybrid institutions, lifestyles and spaces, and practices. Muslimists are not after a top-down or bottom-up Islamization; they are neither state nor society-centered but individual-oriented. That is, Muslimism seeks to formulate a lifestyle in which the individual believer can be incorporated into modern life while holding passionately onto religion.

We can locate this new religious commentary, its practices, and institutions in “cultural sites of hybridity,” where Muslims articulate Islam with modern values, practices, and discourses, generating new amalgamations.

These sites first emerged in the markets in the form of Islamic vacations, restaurants, Islamic fashion companies, or business associations. Yet, going beyond the confines of a market orientation, these institutions have altered the boundaries that used to strictly separate religious and secular (Kemalist) lifestyles, spaces, and codes in Turkey. They showed that it was possible for Muslims to take part in modernity while preserving religious commitments. By the mid-1990s, the sites of hybridity spilled over other sectors of society becoming manifest in civil organizations and politics. These include, for example, human rights organizations, which refer both to the UN Human Rights Convention and Islamic theological sources to define human rights, and women’s organizations that claim both a pious and democrat identity. Muslimists have also generated a new Islamic political ethos that uses Islam to embrace modern political values; especially individual rights and pluralism.

Whether in markets or as articulated in a political ethos, the sites of hybridity are spaces where Islamist and secularist definitions of Islamic and modern identities are transcended and replaced with new definitions. Importantly, rather than secularizing Muslims, hybridity makes Islamic identity more salient. It introduces Islam into everyday life and public spaces in new forms making it possible for passionate religion to take part in modern life and institutions. As such, historically, the rise of Muslim markets has not been an independent development generated by shrewd marketing, but was part and parcel of this comprehensive Muslimist engagement of modernity. Additionally, Muslimists’ emphasis on individual choice and true piety (iman) rejects authoritarian religious communalism and conformity while opting for conscious moral agency and self-expression. In the case of the halal market, this orientation has furthered an interest in personalized Islamic attire and products.

Self-Styling, Moral Agency, and Hybridity 

My empirical work on Muslim engagement of modernity in Turkey involved interviews with pious women who witnessed the very first Islamic runways and the earliest attempts to combine contemporary fashion with tesettur (Islamic attire) around the late 1980s. Even then this curious mix was accused of, on the one hand, being impure—the pinnacle, indeed, of Islam’s corruption by Western modernity— and on the other hand, for being strictly moralistic. Emerging out of the “uniform era” where dress was regulated by the (male) authoritarian religious communities (cemaat), the proliferating tesettur designs opened up a new space to dress in accord to individual identity: age, marital status, likes and dislikes, body type, or personality. This also coincided with the rejection of patriarchal codes as women claimed their own moral agency and autonomy over their own bodies.

As such, what many reduce to consumerism is in fact rooted in a meaningful shift: the aversion to authoritarian religious communalism and attempts instead to nurture a religious community that recognizes and gives space to the self and individual agency to determine moral decisions and behavior. This shift importantly did not point to secularization of orthodoxy; it was filtered through theological notions of true piety and Tahqiq (what is it that I believe, and why?), which legitimized the self and expression of its uniqueness and agency.

Photo Credit: Lan Rasso. A young woman runs in a race in Malaysia.

There is more. The blend of fashion and tesettur has undermined the monotone divide of Islam and modernity, a divide that delineated how a Muslim female can (and should) live, what public spaces she can enter, and what activities she can take part in. Take swimming and sports. These activities have been dominated by secularist aesthetics and norms: ‘the normal way’ to swim is to uncover, or ‘to run the normal way’ you have to wear shorts. These norms are not just discursive but they determine product lines. For decades, designs were either appropriate to religion but not to sports activity, or vice versa. Consider a 7 year old who loves playing basketball. When she turns 13 and reaches puberty, and starts wearing tesettur, whether she will continue to play will not be based on ‘can I shoot a ball?’ but on ‘what am I gonna wear?’

The innovate pieces that emerged out of Islamic apparel industry undermine both the secularist standards that exclude religion and Islamist prescriptions that consider modern activity to be corrupt. Take the hasema, the first Islamic swimsuits. The first producer of hasema in Turkey, Mehmet Sahin, is known as “the man who made Muslim women swim”. This epithet clearly communicates the distance that used to exist between Muslim women and swimming as a cultural exercise. The hasema brought in a revolution: the company did not simply sell swimming gear; it sold the possibility of engaging in an activity —swimming— and a public space (e.g. the beach) once closed off to pious women.

Given the historical Islam versus modernity divide, for Muslim women, the question of “what am I going to wear?” then translates to:

Who can I be?

What activities can I engage in?

What spaces can I enter?

The hybrid, innovative products that emerged out of halal markets affirm these questions, and alter, as such, the boundaries that had strictly separated Islamic versus secular life spaces, practices, and cultural codes. Hence, rather than expanding one’s fashion choices, fashion in the Islamic context has originally been about expanding women’s life options and plans.

This is why the Islamic fashion market has come to be worth billions.

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Neslihan Cevik
Neslihan Cevik is a Turkish sociologist of religion. Cevik completed her PhD at Arizona State University (2010). She then joined Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, for her post-doctoral research. She is the author of “Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond: Religion in the Modern World” (November-2015, Palgrave MacMillan). Currently, Cevik is a senior researcher at SESRIC,Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. Her work on religion appears in CNN-Arabic, Daily Sabah, OrientXXI, Informed Comment, and Political Theology Today, and is translated into Arabic, French, and Turkish. Cevik helped found the first postcolonial studies research center in Turkey, PAMER, Uskudar University. An engaged social entrepreneur, Cevik also is the founder of Mline Fashion, a modest wear and lifestyle start-up company that seeks to encourage Muslim women's economic and public integration.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Hybridities of Hijabi Barbie: A CM Book Symposium on “Brand Islam”


How to interpret the meanings, functions, and hybridities that Hijabi Barbie, halal cosmetic, and Burkini merchandise inhabit in the cacophonous urban spaces of France, London, and Los Angeles? How does this question, along with a deeper engagement with the commodification of religion and pluralization of the sites of religious authority through the secular mechanisms of the market, touch upon the tensions, contestations, and varieties of modernities religious actors embody through daily practices? Contending Modernities (CM) chose to focus on Faegheh Shirazi’s Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety to highlight a few central conceptual issues that animate our research initiative. First, the book affords an opportunity to discuss modernity’s reliance on capitalist and neoliberal engines and logics and the construction of a certain kind of modern subjectivity coherent with these logics. Second, it illumines the phenomenon of expanding brand Islam, that is, the employment of a halal label, to a diverse scope of “secular” and “ordinary” activities such as makeup application and selecting attires for athletic activities. It also examines how such halalization currently contributes to and participates in novel modes of self-described piety in the midst of Islamophobia and sociocultural estrangement in non-majority contexts, or to creative innovation within the constraints of Muslim-majority settings.

Shirazi grounds her conceptual frames in the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior to explain halalization as an effective marketing strategy. Clearly, this theoretical framing already gestures to Shirazi’s reliance on a conception of the individual-qua-consumer—a modern subjectivity foregrounding an autonomous choice that could offer, Shirazi seems to suggest, emancipatory possibilities. “At a time when many Muslim citizens…are struggling to free themselves from conservative fundamentalism and the patriarchal stranglehold of mullahs, muftis, ayatollahs, and mulanas, one might ask whether the trend toward Islamic commodification is helpful,” Shirazi ponders. “Will it serve to minimize suffering, diminish discrimination particularly against women, or further basic human rights?” (207-9). She poses this question but does not respond directly. This quote points to two responses: the one embraces halalization of daily life through Islam branding as emancipatory. The other is concerned with the neoliberal assumptions folded into a celebration of emancipation through consumption.

One of our solicited respondents, Neslihan Cevik, makes a strong case for the emancipatory potentialities of neoliberalization of Islamic branding and consumption. For Cevik, marketization of Muslim products for everyday activities and consumption patterns represents more than “shrewd marketing.” Drawing on her empirical work in Turkey and experience developing a modest fashion line for young women, she claims the market also represents a site of hybridity she calls Muslimism. Muslimism, Cevik writes, “is a quest to formulate a lifestyle in which the individual believer can be incorporated into modern life while holding passionately onto religion.” Our shrewd reader will immediately surmise the many assumptions presupposed in this quote that suggest that Muslimism, as articulated by Cevik, seems to be embedded in a modernist discourse of subjectivity. Even while attempting to challenge unreconstructed secularist bifurcation of “religious” and “secular”, it nonetheless reinstates such bifurcation by positing the marketing and commodification of Muslim piety as a site where Muslim subjectivity can finally be modern. Nonetheless, Cevik views the kind of Muslimism generated through commodification of brand Islam as an emancipatory space where Muslim actors can participate in “generat[ing] a new Islamic political ethos that uses Islam to embrace modern political values; especially individual rights and pluralism.” Hence, the codification of piety described by Shirazi facilitates, Cevik argues (without explicitly referring to Shirazi’s thesis), the emergence of new Muslim subjectivities consistent, so it seems, with political liberalism. Let us not forget the Christian underpinnings and colonial histories of this tradition (Asad 2003, for instance).

The implication in Cevik’s account, therefore, is that somehow commodification and marketing of Islamic piety is emancipatory from tradition by producing a modern Muslim piety (and pious individuals) understood in terms of individual self-stylizing. Shirazi maintains a focus on the phenomenon of the marketing of Islamic piety rather than engaging in the kind of normative deliberation pursued by Cevik. Halal consumerism, Shirazi shows, cultivates the possibility of stylizing and marketing piety such that Muslim women and men can go through their daily and secular lives in a thoroughly “Muslim” way, from their choice of toothpaste, cosmetic products, and banking to their wardrobe, food, and vacations. The halalization of an entire spectrum of activities as a mechanism for enhancing a particular target market (from the perspective of business) but also for enabling, in some instances, Muslim women to enjoy more “normal” leisure as on public beaches and/or by wearing burkinis poses a question about whether the “secular” realms of activities are religionized or whether piety and religiosity are driven by market forces. A second respondent, Vincent Miller, likewise ponders the emancipatory aspects of the halalization of daily activities. In particular, he underscores the pluralization of religious authorities afforded through neoliberalization where religious expertise blends with business decisions, allowing for the emergence of “alternative experts” and with it “the expansion of personal choice.” The manufacturing of burkini and halal athletic wear for women and girls indeed entails that athleticism is a permissible sphere for Muslim actors. Hence, branding Islam tells an emancipatory narrative that pushes the boundaries of unreconstructed interpretations of secular modernity.

Photo Credit: Ikhlasul Amal. Barbie look-alike in West Java, Indonesia.

However, the emancipatory conclusion only represents one type of response to Shirazi’s work. The other response, as noted, worries about the operative forces of fetishism and commodification. The book certainly exposes a tension between profit and prophet which leads Miller to underscore that the “deregulation of religion” through the pluralization of religious authority also entails a “decidedly pro-consumption bias.” Likewise, George Gonzalez, in his response, ponders “does ‘brand Islam’ signal the religious deinstitutionalization of swaths of global Islam into taste groups, voluntary associations, and corporate cultures? Does an increase in everyday piety through ‘brand Islam’ simultaneously and necessarily weaken the authority of Islamic religious institutions?” Gonzalez’s analysis is deeply attuned to a critique of neoliberalism, offering a sobering reminder that Cevik’s self-stylizing individual (in its assumed middle to upper class and/or Mister [Muslim hipster] status) is a product of the neoliberal frame and cannot be understood outside of its discursive scope and epistemological assumptions. Gonzalez situates his discussion of Brand Islam within a broader scholarly engagement with the commodification of religion and piety, highlighting both gender and class in articulating where more research on branding religious tradition can be further enriching. Far from the emancipatory potentialities Cevik and Miller find in Islamic branding as a mechanism for individual Muslim piety and inclusion through redefining of modernity and pluralizing the sites of religious authority, Gonzalez views the trend of commodification of culture and religion as far from liberating, constituting a mode of imprisonment in the “iron cage” of capitalism (to recall Weber’s famous pronouncement).

A fourth respondent, Slavica Jakelić, ponders “the desire to sacralize all domains of life.” She is reminded of the familiar Weberian insight about the relations between religion and the emergence of modern capitalism and processes of secularization. Jakelić subsequently identifies paradoxical tensions in the supposed intensification of Muslim piety through capitalist mechanisms: “while Muslims as believers might focus on halal in the context of the global market as the realm that enables them to exert theological, cultural, and political agency and do so against Western modernity,” she writes, “the impulses that shape their theological orientations and religious acts related to halal seem quite aligned with some aspects of that modernity.” What Jakelić suggests here is that the commodification of piety studied by Shirazi is highly consistent with secular modernity or the secular condition even while enabling individual pious actors to assert their Muslim self-stylization as oppositional. The very focus of the market on individual consumers and their tastes and preferences validates this point. Shirazi’s account, however, dives deeply into the hermeneutical process present in this heightened level of brand Islam. Jakelić, therefore, echoes Gonzalez’s reservations about the emancipatory narrative, celebrating post-secular conceptions of Muslim modernity as embodied in branding processes.

The commercialization of halal finds Quranic authentication or, at the very least, Shirazi writes, does not subvert its authority, although the processes of certifying products (especially food) as halal as opposed to haram constitute sites of contestation between business motives and a multiplicity of Sharia-grounded religious authorities. Notably, Shirazi shows how an unfavorable fatwa, even if emerging from an unqualified or dubious source, can have severe ramifications for a product’s career in the market. Shirazi highlights that such fatwas influence patterns of consumerism and labeling of haram or halal. The latter point foregrounds another theme of CM noted in Miller’s engagement with the book, namely our focus on the dynamism of religious authorities in a secular age that does not spell the absence, diminishment, or declension of religion but rather its relocation and reimagining in relation to political, social, and cultural conceptions of citizenship. Clearly, both the market potential of halal and the participation of Muslim consumption in generating new modalities of piety that often project themselves as “traditional” force us to analyze, through a Weberian Verstehen methodology, the intersections of socioeconomic and political forces with religious meanings, traditions, and modes of interpretations.

Shriazi’s book offers a glimpse into the Quranic exegetical work that participates in the marketing and commodification of Muslim piety. She also offers resources to show why it works, especially by examining sociological and psychological factors informing halal consumerism and commodification. Especially in non-majority western contexts, where the colonial legacy is enduring and has been recalibrated through other means, anti-western sensibilities offer resources for supposedly reclaiming authentic Islamic identity through enactment and promotion of a halal lifestyle. The commodification of Islam afforded through the market logic of neoliberalism, therefore, becomes a primary mechanism for reclaiming tradition interpreted through a brand. On the other front, Shirazi suggests, the consolidation and growth of the halal market also plays into the rhetoric of Islamophobes who identify supposedly subversive (violent) intentions behind consumer choices. Yet, Shirazi concludes, “In the West, ironically, the more vitriolic and anti-halal the public discourse, the more attention the general public pays to all things halal” giving rise, for instance, to “haloodies” [or halal foodies] (212). The broadening acceptability and integration of halalization onto the landscape of multiculturalism goes beyond a simple market analysis recognizing that millions of Muslims constitute a “market” to be exploited and manipulated. It also illumines the elasticity and dynamism of the modern pluralistic secular sociopolitical frames, with their internal tensions and inconsistencies and yet various sites of hybridization, religious innovation, and multidimensional deepening of the discursive scope of the secular.

 

Photo Credit: Lu_Lu on Flickr.com

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
Global Currents article

Theo-Politics in Flux: The ‘Alt-Right’ on God, Christendom, and the Nation


Photo credit: IndyBay.org. White supremacist group Identity Evropa was founded in 2016 in California and conducts poster campaigns across US universities, particularly targeting offices of professors of color.

A few moments with the Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt can show us ways in which race, religion, and political life operate elastically to produce a narrative that sustains a totalitarian, anti-pluralistic system of control. Arendt’s insights are deeply relevant to the cultural imagination of America’s “Alt-Right”—the euphemistic label employed by American White nationalists. This is an especially important time to revisit Arendt. 

Arendt shows us how the Nazi racial fantasy of almighty power to remake the world, the will to power of ethnic nationalism, remains entangled in a tradition of monotheistic theology. The continuous logic of messianism operates together, paradoxically, with Nietzsche’s conviction that “God is dead.” The Nazi ideology of Arendt’s own “dark times,” as she called them, depended upon the tension between these contending modernities. Whether killing God left us an inheritance only of the human will to power, or whether the will to power killed God, cannot be readily disaggregated.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt provides an account of “the hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world were dissolved,” (viii).[1] (This theme is under-recognized in the current literature, but I address it in my forthcoming book Politics in the Absence of God.) Comparable threats are manifesting today. With the dramatic resurgence of White nationalism in America, we can borrow Arendt’s insights and say that “[t]he subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition” (ix).

This twenty-first century “Alt-Right” American movement revives singular White entitlement to formal power, complete with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim discourse that are both sublimated and explicated. The movement is at once secular and indebted to singularly Christian logic. Its manifestos preach the “imperious necessity of a European Brotherhood.” The National Policy Institute, its primary think tank, is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.” The movement’s adherents admire Russia as an embodiment of White anti-LGBTQI nationalism. They herald Zionism as implemented in Israel for its commitment to religio-ethnic purity and domination (ethnocracy). Its aspirations require that the “Alt-Right” subvert the aspirational values that underpin, to return to Arendt, “all traditional elements of our political and spiritual world” (viii).

Below, I shadow male writers of White nationalism as they contend internally over how to occupy time and space, and under allegiance to what God or gods. We will see how pre-modern aesthetics and theology function to produce White politics and culture in ways that can be culturally practiced.

 

A note on method: technology as medium, subverting “hidden mechanics” 

Photo Credit: Bob Jagendorf Neo Nazi Rally in Trenton, NJ, 2011.

Contemporary fantasies of White supremacist and/or separatist patriarchal White nations are not overtly modeled by the mastery of antebellum plantations or racialized purity drives marching native peoples west. Nevertheless, the “Alt-Right” imaginary is fostered by alluring narratives and archetypes that foster identification with pre- or a-modern cultures. Virtual realities of cable television, video games, on-line blogs, and chat rooms present enchanted worlds manufactured as “purer” times of White supremacy, free from contaminating environments of pluralism, diversity, feminism, and the regime of “political correctness.” Collective imaginaries of a lost world that must be fought for, or might be made Great Again foster identification with concatenated European Whiteness, masculinity, and power.

Distinctively late-modern technological delivery systems and cyber space also allow for accelerated and more effective consolidation of “alternative facts.” Therefore at each stage in this brief tour, we will briefly glimpse how a fantasy of White patriarchy with a special relationship to God and to salvation history is reflected back through contemporary American media.

 

The madman’s cry: “Where is God?” and the conflict of absolute values

Where is the Christian tradition in this project of racial trans-Atlantic nationalism? Within to the Alt-Right movement, this is a surprisingly complex and important question.

Christian doctrine teaches a universal brotherhood of salvation in which there is “neither Jew nor Greek.” Because the “Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist,” because it does not recognize spiritual equality across races and ethnicities, the movement would seem to be on a collision course with essential Christian values.

For the New Right, “The Christian Question” (Sam Francis, 2001) asks whether the values of German folk religion have not always been at odds with Christian values of egalitarianism and universalism. Francis works from James Russell’s Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Socio Historical Approach to Religious Transformation, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).  The recent kerfuffle at the University of Chicago Divinity School reminds scholars of religion that we should be alert as to how reputable academic institutions, and perhaps our guild in particular, wittingly and unwittingly serves white nationalist agendas.

 

White Paganism

Stephen McNallen, the Texan-born founder of the neo-Paganist religious movement Asatru Folk Assembly, rejects Christianity for its profession of universal humanity. Because Christianity “lacks any roots in blood or soil,” he says with concern, it can “claim the allegiance of all the human race.”

McNallen calls for a return to “the Faith of our Ancestors.” He professes, “I am a pagan, because it is the only way I can be true to who, and what, I am. I am a pagan because the best things in our civilization come from pre-Christian Europe.” (Other American Heathens object to any association of McNallen with their religious movement, given his association with the “American neo-fascist radical traditionalist movement.”

Identifying against Christianity functions in multiple ways. A new identity is produced that signifies its repudiation of values of universalism and egalitarianism. Rejection of Christianity also accomplishes rejection of debts to the Jewish Jesus and the Jewish origins of Christianity.

These practices of identity are also derivative of neo-romantic atavistic values and aesthetics of proto-fascist Europe. Then too, Aryan nationalists identified with “pagan” Europe, appealed to hero-god mythology of Greek antiquity, or claimed absolute allegiance to a lineage of blood and soil.

In the U.S. now, pre-modern but post-Christian media invites viewers in to constructed worlds of so-called “paganism.” Earnest adventures of noble Whites triumph in “Vikings” and “Game of Thrones.”  “World of Warcraft,” like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings invites consumers to inhabit fantasy worlds in which species are differently playable races (The blond humans of the Alliance fight the tribal orcs of the Horde, etc.).

 

Christendom and Racial Rule

The paradox here, Vox Day, another White nationalist male blogger, reminds his readers, is that Christendom was necessary for forging common European identity. “Pagan or Nietzschean alt-righters” have “legitimate criticisms about Christianity,” he allows. Yet his White brethren “souldn’t [sic] forget that it was the first religion that gave a feeling of kinship and a common purpose to Europeans.”

Arendt agrees. “Consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development” (230). Under Christendom, the ethnic nation was secondary to participation in God’s order. By doctrine, all humans shared the possibility of salvation through Christ.

In ““What the Alt Right Is,” Vox Day professes that “[h]uman equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.” Nevertheless, he identifies as a Christian, as well as with the superiority of Whites.

If this claim strikes some readers as dissonant, Arendt invites her readers to re-encounter the theo-politics of European Christian imperialism and colonialism. On their imperial adventures, Christian Europeans encountered “great physical differences between themselves and the peoples they found on other continents,” she recounts. They proved themselves unable “to include all the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity” (176-177).

Religion is a malleable institution. Its history can be told in many ways, and it can be lived out in many ways. Arendt revisits the Dutch Boers in South Africa to illustrate how readily they reconciled Christian practice with the supremacy of their own ethnic group.

Nativist White American Protestants lived out this performative contradiction of doctrinal principles of universalism with militant chattel slavery by identifying Whiteness alone with civilization and progress. They are indebted to European imperialists and colonialists, but also to ongoing White American Christian practices of eugenics, mass incarceration, and other forms of terror.

Given this history, it should not be surprising at all that some American White Nationalists seek to “Save Christianity.”  Richard Spenser joined the conversation in December 2016 with “Ghosts of Christmas Past.” He reclaims both the enchantment of Santa and the local and in particular the Whiteness of Santa in religious imagination of northern Europeans.

Certainly Jesus is back on TV. Promos for “Finding Jesus” season 2 play on CNN between the hours as news anchors fret about Breitbart news and the authority of Alt-Right visionary Stephen Bannon. Special effects enchant biblical epics such as “Noah” (played by Russell Crowe) and Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: God and Kings” (in which Welsh Christian Bale plays Moses). The Roman world of primitive Christianity also performs White masculinity in divine favor. In “Ben-Hur,” the British Jack Huston is cast in a “Gladiator”-like remake. In the forthcoming “Resurrection,” Mel Gibson will supplement his “Passion of the Christ.”

 

The Post-Christian White Nation: Its Own Absolute

Credit: John Kittelsrud Photos taken during National Socialist Movement (Neo-Nazis) march in Phoenix, AZ, in 2010. “The NSM was there to protest a federal judge’s decision to ‘water down’ the SB1070 immigration legislation.”

“A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion,” says Nietzsche in The AntiChrist §16. “A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honor to the conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks.”

In Europe, says Arendt, even an idea of a sovereign God slipped away. The collective no longer looked to providence to work through a chosen nation, granting it a warrant for ethnic violence. Instead, the ethnic nation came to believe its “own chosenness without believing in Him who chooses and rejects,” she says (73). Attributes once assigned to God (stable, eternal, and essential) transferred to the nation in which one lived and for which one died. Émile Durkheim’s social functionalist analysis of religion shows its ongoing conceptual purchase. Society worships itself. The practices and sentiments of social solidarity prove basic in this analysis of religion as epiphenomenal.

This post-Christian vision for White nationalism that seeks “metapolitical prayer and will to power” installs the ethnic nation as its own god. Predictably, the ethnocracy arrogates ultimacy to itself and authorizes the “ethical” violence required for population purity.

In this rendition of contending modernities, individuals and groups of the Alt-Right travel the internet under the name of nihilism. Their second-order humor is sardonic; they deride enchantment. Pepe the Frog (with benign origins in the web comic Boy’s Club) functions as an anti-Semitic, racist internet meme. The signification of the image is, again, atavistic. Kek the frog-headed man had a prior life as the ancient, androgynous Egyptian deity of darkness and god of chaos. Now his initials show up as “LOL” on infamously female-trolling World of Warcraft chat boards.

The technological medium is modern, but the message refuses the norms of modern liberal society: transparency, accountability, and equal power of civic participation.

 

Where that Leaves Us

“We are protected by God,” said President Donald Trump in an Inauguration Speech co-written by Bannon. This much American exceptionalism is consonant with our national history. But singular changes to civil religion are afoot. In the Holocaust Remembrance Day national address, the murder of European Jewry went purposefully and unapologetically unmentioned. Muslims with U.S. Green Cards were singularly legally held at international airports, while Syrian Christians received the special attention of the president. Bannon’s ascent to a general’s role on the principles’ committee of the U.S. National Security Council defies precedent, and Arendt’s cigarette smoke lingers in the air.

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Mara Willard
Mara Willard is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is completing her first book, entitled Politics after the Death of God: Hannah Arendt on Religion and Politics, and publishes and teaches more widely on religion, modernity, and feminist thought. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and her BA from Swarthmore College.
Field Notes article

Faith, Ethnicity, and Illiberal Citizenship: Authority, Identity, and Religious “Others” in Aceh’s Border Areas


Although Indonesia is not an Islamic state, it uniquely granted the province of Aceh permission to officially implement sharia law in 2001. This was an effort to win over the Aceh people, who are known to be deeply religious Muslims, against the Aceh Liberation Movement (which had no sharia agenda). Since then sharia has become the “master signifier” which defines all other aspects of life in the region. All other legal sources—customary laws, national laws, and international conventions—are interpreted according to, and should not contradict, sharia. The Quran and prophetic traditions are the major sources of legal authority and take precedence over the state constitution and national laws in all local qanuns (bylaws). The thing is, although Muslims are a majority (98.19% according to the 2010 census), non-Muslims live in Aceh too, albeit a small minority. They are citizens, just like their Muslim counterparts, and should technically have equal rights.

How, then, do local Islamic establishment politics and illiberal citizenship affect interreligious relations, sources of authority, and how individuals define their identity, especially in Aceh’s ethnically and religiously mixed border areas?

 

Religions, Ethnicity and “Host-Guest Citizenship”  

Map of Aceh Province in tan, with North Sumatra Province in pale yellow.

We entered Aceh in 2016 from the east border areas adjacent to North Sumatra— the Regencies of South East Aceh, Singkil, and Tamiang, and the municipalities of Subulussalam and Langsa—with liberal citizenship in mind, and encountered many questions regarding interreligious relations. Through observations, interviews, informal conversations, and focused group discussions, we found that Aceh implements a “host-guest citizenship”, in which Aceh is seen as the “land of sharia” (nanggroe syariat) and therefore the land  of Islam with Muslims as “hosts”. Meanwhile, non-Muslims are considered “guests”. Such illiberal citizenship has been legalized by the central government through Law No. 18/2001 and Law No. 11/2006. The former grants Aceh the right to implement sharia law and the latter obligates the governor, mayors, and regents to ensure sharia is implemented in their respective territories. To our surprise, this is not only the way the Acehnese define themselves against “others,” but also, to some extent, the way non-Muslims perceive themselves in Aceh. Some Christian and Buddhist leaders told us, “as guests we have to respect the traditions of the host.”

The Aceh-North Sumatra border is interesting in terms of religious identity and ethnicity. The neighboring province, North Sumatra, is home to a significant number of Christians (31% Protestants and Catholics), although Muslims are still the majority (66.09%). Migration of Batak Christians and others from North Sumatra to the border areas of Aceh is common practice, usually for work in palm oil plantation factories. Due to this migration, the number of Batak Christians living in Aceh’s border areas has been increasing. As a result, unlike most other parts of Aceh, the east border areas are more religiously and ethnically pluralistic. Although Muslims are still the majority, the Acehnese ethnic group are mostly a minority. Here live ethnic groups that are identified as Muslim, such as the Acehnese, Alas, Tamiang Malay, Boang, and Minangkabau; those identified as Christian, such as the Toba Batak and Karo Batak; and those associated with multiple faiths, such as Pakpak (Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, and Pambi [a local religion]), and Javanese (Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam).

These border areas also have the highest number of churches in Aceh. In Southeast Aceh there are 124 churches operating (only 38 are officially recognized by the government); in Singkil 24 churches (of which four are official); in Subulussalam four churches (only one church is legally recognized); in Tamiang there was one church, but it was closed by the government, and three Buddhist temples (vihara); in Langsa one church and one Buddhist temple shared with Hindus. Most of the churches belong to Batak and Pakpak people.

Since the implementation of sharia in 2001, the identity marker that indicates a group is the “host”, or “insider”, has become religious (Islamic) rather than ethnic. The Muslim ethnic groups hold dual “hosthood”, that is, they are ethnically and religiously hosts, such as Acehnese in Langsa; Alas is Southeast Aceh; and Tamiang Malay in Tamiang. Meanwhile in multi-religious ethnic groups, Muslim and non-Muslims compete with each other internally, and externally the Muslim members align with Muslims from other ethnicities to form a pan-Islamic “hosthood”. Multi-religious Pakpak and Muslim Boang have shared “hosthood” in Subulussalam and Singkil for a long time, but since 2001 the Boang and Muslim Pakpak have allied with other Muslims such as the Acehnese, Minangkabau, and Muslim Javanese, claiming the “hosthood” of Subulussalam and Singkil.

 

Protecting Muslim Faith, Establishing Authority and Identity

Aceh’s Muslims and the Aceh provincial government have at times viewed the heterogeneous and pluralistic nature of the border areas as a “threat” to the Muslim faith and Aceh’s identity as the “land of sharia”. The growing number of churches and rumors of “Christianization” of the border areas frequently generate concern for local authority as well as Muslims. Responding to such a “threat”, the Aceh government issued Gubernatorial Decree on Building Places of Worship in 2007. At the national level, the Joint Decree between the Minister of Religious Affairs and the Minister of Home Affairs in 2006 requires a place of worship obtain the support of 90 congregation members and 60 neighbors, complete with copies of their ID cards. But locally, the Aceh government’s 2007 Gubernatorial Decree makes the requirement even stricter. A place of worship must be supported by 150 congregation members and 120 neighbors. This has made it almost impossible for minority religions in Aceh to build their places of worship.

Islamic Center in Aceh Tamiang Regency.

In addition, the provincial Sharia Office, which operates within the gubernatorial office, established a “frontier preachers” (da’i perbatasan) program which has been operating since 2002. About 150 to 170 preachers were sent to border areas to teach Islam to Muslims. To bolster the program, the government also established “frontier Islamic boarding schools” (dayah perbatasan) and Islamic centers. The main aim of these endeavors is to protect the Islamic identity of the border areas, and prevent Muslims from being targeted by Christian missions.

The above policies cannot be separated from three government institutions: the Sharia Office, Council of Ulama Deliberation (Majelis Permusyawaratan Ulama/MPU), and Aceh Religious Treasury Council (Baitul Mal Aceh/BMA). They exist at the provincial, municipal, and regency levels. While the Sharia Office drafts sharia derived legislation and manages sharia related policies, the MPU gives religious opinions (fatwas) and advice to the government concerning policies and regulations, as well as giving or not giving permission for public events. In this respect, many non-Muslim religious and social events cannot be conducted because they fail to receive the MPU’s permission. The BMA collects Islamic charity (zakat, infaq, sadaqah) and manages them for poverty alleviation and for supporting programs of sharia implementation. No similar institutions exist for non-Muslim citizens.

The only institution shared by Muslims and non-Muslims is a state-supported Forum for Harmonious Relations among Interreligious Communities (FKUB). It is in this forum that interreligious issues and social problems are discussed. It is also in charge of giving letters of recommendation for building places of worship. However, in most cases Muslim biases dominate the forum because, in most regions, the number of Muslim representatives in the forum is double or even triple that of other religions. Committee members are selected proportionately from the local community and Muslims tend to be the overwhelming majority. Non-Muslims have no choice because it is the only government-supported interreligious forum. So far, there are no civil society NGOs working specifically on interreligious issues, although there are individuals striving for religious freedom. On the contrary, there are Islamist movements—Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), Islamic Ummah Forum (FUI), and Youth for the Care of Islam (PPI)—which have successfully organized people against any increase of churches in Singkil, burned a church, and pressured the government to close others.

The host-guest model of illiberal citizenship is also the framework through which the Aceh government and Muslims perceive tolerance of non-Muslim citizens, which can be called “asymmetric tolerance”. As host, the argument goes, they have given their non-Muslims “guests” the right to perform their beliefs and religion, but within the bounds set by the host. In return, the guests should respect the tradition, beliefs, and regulations of the host. Such favoring of a particular religion, seen through the perspective of liberal citizenship, is nothing but legal, political, and social exclusion. As such, the demand for equal citizenship has been emerging among academics, intelligentsia, NGO activists, and those who struggle for religious freedom in Aceh, although their voices have so far not affected the mainstream adherence to illiberal citizenship.

 

Photo Credit: Moch Nur Ichwan. Featured image: Youth Christmas in Tamiang (2016). The Christmas ceremony was planned to be held in an open space, but moved to a parishioner’s home because of the rain. The congregation could not use their church because they failed to receive the government’s permission.

 

References

Ichwan, Moch Nur. “The Politics of Shari‘atisation: Central Governmental and Regional Discourses of Shari‘a Implementation in Aceh,” Michael Feener and Mark Cammack (eds.), Islamic Law in Contemporary Indonesia, Harvard: Islamic Legal Studies Program, 2007, 193-215.

Feener, R. Michael. Shari`a and Social Engineering: The Implementation of Islamic Law in Contemporary Aceh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Kloos, David, R. Michael Feener, and Annemarie Samuels (eds.). Islam and the Limits of the State: Reconfigurations of Practices, Community and Authority in Contemporary Aceh, Leiden etc.: Brill, 2015.

Salim, Arskal. Contemporary Islamic Law in Indonesia: Shari`a and Legal Pluralism, Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2015.

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Moch Nur Ichwan
Dr. Moch Nur Ichwan holds PhD degree in Religious Studies and Islamic Politics from Tilburg University (2006) and is currently coordinator of doctorate program at the Graduate School of the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His most recent publication is “Neo-Sufism, Shari‘atism, and Ulama Politics: Abuya Shaykh Amran Waly and Tauhid-Tasawuf Movement in Post-Conflict Aceh,” in C. van Dijk and N. Kaptein (Eds.), Islam, Politics and Change: The Indonesian Experience after the Fall of Suharto, Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2016.
Field Notes article

Living Under Islamic Authority: Identity and Community Among Non-Muslims in Aceh


Many know Aceh, Indonesia, as a predominantly Muslim area with a very strong Islamic identity. It is a province of the western-most part of Indonesian archipelago, at the northern tip of Sumatra island. As early as the twelfth century, Aceh was the first locale in this region to witness the establishment of a Muslim sultanate, after which Islam spread to much of the rest of Indonesia. According to the 2010 census, while around 88% of the total Indonesian population is Muslim, almost 99% of the population of Aceh is Muslim. The remaining one percent non-Muslim residents (around 55 thousand) living in Aceh are Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus, and Confucians. This non-Muslim minority largely lives in towns or districts along the provincial border with North Sumatra, such as Singkil, Subulussalam, Kutacane, and Tamiang. Another concentration of the non-Muslim population is found in population centers such as Lhokseumawe, Langsa, and the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.

Researchers Arskal Salim and Moch Nur Ichwan interview a religious leader in Kutacane.

Of those cities or districts where non-Muslims live in Aceh, both Kutacane and Singkil have the largest non-Muslim population. For this reason, we visited these sites first for this Contending Modernities research project. Along with Moch Nur Ichwan (my co-investigator) and Marzi Afriko (a local research assistant), we arrived at these bordering districts in March 2016. We started our trip not from Banda Aceh, but from Medan, the capital of the North Sumatra province. We did so not only because of Medan’s relative proximity, but also to see and feel how much both districts are culturally and demographically affected by North Sumatra, which is quite different from Aceh. While Aceh is primarily a Muslim province, North Sumatra is a province with a large Protestant population.

Given the long presence of non-Muslims in Aceh and the fact that sharia Islamic rules are now officially enforced in Aceh since the beginning of the twenty first century, we are interested in finding answers to the following questions: 1) How does the local implementation of sharia in Aceh affect relationships between people of different ethnic and religious affiliations? 2) How do ethnic and religious minority groups perceive and respond to the enforcement of sharia? Are they optimistic or pessimistic about their future in the province? And 3) How can we explain the process of identity and community making for non-Muslims in Aceh given they now live under Islamic authority?

Like in other areas of Indonesia, the burning issues that bring interreligious relations sharply to the fore are religious conversion and the establishment of places of worship for religious minorities. As early as 1968, a church was burned in Meulaboh, in West Aceh, and from then on the presence of a new church in any part of Aceh has been contentious. Muslims in Aceh and elsewhere in Indonesia view churches with suspicion as hubs for spreading the influence of Christianity. Some members of the Muslim majority fear that churches are platforms for proselytization aimed at gradually converting Muslims.

Our recent site visit to Kutacane and Singkil generated more questions. Both districts have a strong presence of Protestants both in terms of population and the public presence of churches and Christian symbols. However, while in Kutacane people with different religious backgrounds are bound by a variety of social relations including long traditions of interreligious marriage, the people who live in Singkil tend to be socially segregated. What are factors that foster religioethnic engagement in Kutacane and social barriers Singkil? How do non-Muslims in both districts identify themselves and build their own community? To what extent are they able to address the social constraints of living under Aceh’s Islamic sharia rules—like dietary restrictions and bans on alcohol?

Our tentative findings reveal an interesting hypothesis. It seems that people who live in Singkil are uncertain about how to present their social identity: in particular, their insider or outsider status. The question of whether or not Singkil is within the Acehnese ethnic group’s zone of influence, or how much it has been Acehnized, remains unresolved. The Acehnese are the majority ethnic group who live on the northern tip of Sumatra. Almost all of the Acehnese are Muslims, and to be Acehnese is to be associated with Islam. As Singkil is located on the provincial border, near populations of non-Muslims in North Sumatra, the presence as well as the influence of the Acehnese in this region has generated strong ethno-religious rivalries. Unlike other places in Aceh, territorial and ethno-religious “insider” identities do not cleanly overlap: to be from Singkil does not simultaneously reference both ethnic and religious categories. In fact, the question of who is an insider remains contested.

The population of Singkil is predominantly composed of members of the Batak Pakpak group. Although some of them are Muslim, unlike the Acehnese, their identity as Batak Pakpak is independent of their Muslim identity. In fact, many Batak Pakpak are non-Muslim. Before Indonesia’s independence in 1945, these non-Muslim Batak Pakpak were a majority population across the region. The provincial division after the independence made non-Muslim Batak Pakpak a majority population in North Sumatra province, while across the border in Singkil, in the Aceh province, the majority is Muslim Batak Pakpak. For this historical reason, non-Muslim Batak Pakpak who currently live in Aceh Singkil refuse to be identified as migrant outsiders. In summary, to be from Singkil implies identity elements that do not easily coexist with those of the Acehnese. So when it comes to the current term for the regency and town, ‘Aceh Singkil’, one would think that two different things are forcefully blended. And, this blend is yet incomplete.

In contrast, Kutacane is widely known as the home of the Alas, the predominant ethnic group which has lived in this area for centuries. The Alas are distinct from the Acehnese. However, like the Acehnese, most Alas people are Muslim. And being Muslim, the Alas easily integrated into the prevailing political culture in the province including the implementation of sharia. In the meantime, non-Muslims living in Kutacane are mostly from the Batak Karo sub-ethnic group. They are considered outsiders who migrated from North Sumatra. Thus, compared to Non-Muslim Batak Pakpak in Singkil who contend with Muslim local residents (some of whom are also Batak Pakpak) for “insider” status, non-Muslim Batak Karo in Kutacane seem to have accepted their outsider status and are less motivated to compete politically with the local Alas residents. The non-Muslim Batak Karo are recognized and accepted in the region as a distinct entity, and therefore have more reasons to remain a separate community. As such, despite inter-ethnic social relationships with Muslim Alas, the Batak Karo also have opportunities to express their particular religious identity even under Islamic sharia authority.

 

Photo Credit: Arskal Salim. A woman drives by the Religious Court of Singkil, which hands down sharia law for the regency.

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Arskal Salim
ARSKAL SALIM is currently Professor of Politics of Islamic Law at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta, Indonesia. He obtained a PhD in Law from Melbourne Law School, Australia, in 2006. His PhD dissertation was published by Hawaii University Press in 2008 with the title: Challenging the Secular State: The Islamization of Laws in Modern Indonesia. Having completed his PhD, he went to Germany for a postdoctoral research fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology from 2006 to 2009. His postdoctoral project then was published in 2015 by Edinburgh University Press with the title: Contemporary Islamic Law in Indonesia: Sharia and Legal Pluralism.
Authority, Community & Identity article

Religious Festivals, Community Engagement and Peaceful Co-Existence


Community engagement is an important mechanism to maintain peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic and multicultural country like Indonesia. It is comprised of the active involvement by diverse members of a given society in mutually beneficial interactions. In Lombok, an island in the eastern part of the country and home to many ethnicities and religions, one way to generate community engagement is through public religious observances and cultural festivals. They can serve as a means for social integration, peace, and harmony, as evidenced in various events.

For example, people of different ethnic backgrounds and religious affiliations participated in the 26th national Qur’anic reading festival in Mataram last summer. While the Hindu-Balinese deployed pecalang (civil guards) to safeguard the festival parade, Catholic students joined the choir team and sung the festival anthem in the opening ceremony. In another festival featured in the top image, called perang topat  (a theatrical war using rice cake) in the area of Pura Lingsar, west Lombok, Hindus and Muslims gather, interact, and compete in religious and musical performances. On Christmas morning members of Radio Antar Penduduk Indonesia/RAPI civil force assisted the police to ensure the safety of Christians during their rituals. While this is a secular civil association with no affiliation to any one religion or ethnic group, a mix of Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and others make up its membership. Furthermore, the Ansor of Mataram Branch, the youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama/NU (the largest Islamic organization in the country), has successfully sponsored multiple interreligious gatherings in remembrance of a pluralist figure, the late fourth Indonesian president and NU former leader Abdurrahman Wahid. It has also supported the congregation of Gereja Yesus Kristus Tuhan (GYKT church) in its so-far unsuccessful efforts to obtain a permit to establish a new church.

From the left: researcher, policewoman, and RAPI members in the front of the main gate of Gereja Protestan Indonesia Barat (GBIP church) in Mataram on Christmas morning, 2016.

Cultural festivals promote community engagement along cultural and ethno-religious lines, lessening segregation through what may be extended contact in preparation for the event and establishing relationships and communication between groups. In order for public engagement to have greater positive impacts and reach, it needs to be “scaled up”, to borrow Robert Hefner’s word, by involving broader community participation. Scaling up public engagement requires integrating diverse groups into more religious and cultural festivals and other regular community programs. According to a senior Christian priest, there has been no systematic grass-roots peacemaking effort for the purpose of mediating Muslim-Christian tensions in Lombok since the 2000 outbreak of violence. Instead, what has continued is inter-group consolidation amongst elite and top figures. The Indonesian inter-religious harmony forum (Forum Kerukunan Umat Beragama/FKUB, a state body) holds regular meetings with state officials, the intelligence service, the police, community leaders, as well as other secular and religious authorities about the religious social dynamic, security, and intolerance. Those assembled seek to formulate the best mechanism to curb intolerance or violent conflict. For example, within a week of the destruction of a mosque in Tolikara, Papua, in June of 2015, the provincial FKUB board quickly responded to the incident by inviting all community and religious leaders to unite. This is an important mechanism, but it only addresses tensions at a certain level of society.

What has not been sufficiently developed are formal or informal encounters at the grassroots level which involve all community members regardless of their ethnic and religious affiliations. Religious cultural events or festivals help resolve this problem because almost everyone is welcome to participate and engage. Through such festivals, people interact and engage intensively, establishing channels of communication and relationships. The lack of positive exposure to diverse people is a major concern for efforts to eradicate intolerance. The failure, or at least the postponement, of the approval for the GYKT church noted above underscores the effects of insufficient community engagement with this minority Christian community. Recently, the FKUB of Mataram city issued a recommendation to the Mataram city government advising the GYKT congregation be permitted to build a church. However, the recommendation is now at odds with the opposition of the majority of the local community. While procedural or administrative steps have been fulfilled, intolerance remains a roadblock. The problem arises mainly because none of the GYTK congregation lives in the area where the church will be built. More importantly, the congregation and the community hardly communicate or engage in public events together. This leads one to ask whether a new religious space can be built in a community where no congregational members live.

In Indonesia, it is legally nearly impossible to erect a new place of worship that does not correspond to the majority religion in a given community. The Minister of Religious Affairs and Minister of Home Affairs Joint Decree No. 8 and 9/2006 require at least 60 local residents’ approval and 90 available religious adherents before a place of worship can be built. While in practice adherents to the majority religions in Indonesia often do not fulfill the requirement nor do they have serious difficulties in meeting it, religious minorities have often found it to be a major obstacle. They believe that the decree discriminates against them. However, the examples from Lombok suggest that the issue is not solely a legal one. Rather, it is also a cultural issue. The solution to this problem is often contingent upon the management of communication and engagement with the local community where the new place of worship will be constructed.

A Catholic bishop baptizes children on Christmas at St Maria Immaculata Church, Mataram, one the most damaged churches in the 17th of January, 2000 riot

This can be seen in the cases of a church for the Gereja Kemah Injil Indonesia community (GKII) and a Christian college called Sekolah Tinggi Theologia Injili Indonesia (STTII). The GKII church does not yet have an official permit from the local government in Mataram. The GKII contends that it has completed requirements to obtain a permit that will give it the status of a permanent “legal” church, but it has not yet been approved. The priest of the church, however, does not consider this as important as the proper functioning of the church and regular services for its members. Every year, his church celebrates Christmas openly and invites local community leaders and sub-district heads. To gain community support, the church is involved in community social work, such as giving to charity and caring for the environment. A similar approach is taken by STTII. Although this college holds an official permit, it continues to cooperate with non-Christian locals (most of whom are Muslim) and comply with their social conventions, such as participating in community-based security at night (ronda), celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (mawled), and attending burial ceremonies whenever a neighbor passes away. As a result of this engagement, the college principal suggests, non-Christian neighbors have never considered the presence of the college a threat. Indeed, the ability to build and maintain houses of worship in these cases may be predicated upon the positive esteem of their non-Christian neighbors.

The social and cultural practices which these two Christian institutions have adopted in their respective communities are by no means obligatory. Rather, the institutions are seeking the most viable way to negotiate a strict legal boundary or cultural barrier. The goal is to establish good communication and enhance social engagement. These are key parts of accelerating social integration. Further efforts by the parties concerned, including the state agencies, religious authorities, community leaders and non-government organizations, must move beyond elite dialogue to focus on strengthening and enhancing community engagement.

 

Photo Credit: Mohamad Abdun Nasir

2 Comments on Religious Festivals, Community Engagement and Peaceful Co-Existence Array
Mohamad Abdun Nasir
Mohamad Abdun Nasir is a lecturer at the Department of Islamic Law and Economics at the Graduate School of the State Islamic Institute (IAIN) Mataram. He received a Fulbright Presidential Scholarship and Emory Laney Graduate School Scholarship for his doctoral degree at Emory University, where he earned his PhD in Islamic studies in 2013. His recent publications have appeared in the Asian Journal of Social Science and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.
Theorizing Modernities article

Bridging Ethnoreligious Divides in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Choosing Peace Together through Interreligious Action for Conflict Transformation


Choosing Peace Together (CPT) was a CRS-run program in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that operated from 2010 to 2014 in partnership with Caritas of the Bishops’ Conference of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Two decades after the formal conclusion of the war, CPT demonstrates the constructive role of inter-religious action in responding to enduring deep ethnoreligious divisions in post-war contexts of trauma and in working intently on substantial reconciliation. In distinction from the apparent secularity of land conflicts in Mindanao, BiH’s deep ethnic divisions overlap with religious identities (Christian Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks), and thus a superficial analysis posits religion as a driver of conflict. In both cases, however, religion intersects in complex and dynamic ways with the history of violence, the construction of rigid and exclusionary identity boundaries, and the potential for conflict transformation. The mono-cultural/ethnic/religious nation is an outcome of modern nation-making, in spite of romantic claims of primordial nationalistic authenticity. The fact that exclusivist ethnoreligious warrants and the war in BiH are very recent historical developments counters potential narratives that suggest ancient hatreds and inevitable separationist impulses as the conflict’s primary causes.

In post-war BiH, ethnic divisions still loom strongly, especially in associations of war victims, which tend to harbor hostile views of ethnic others. Counting around 150,000 members, these associations are typically mono-ethnic, and exert broad and substantial informal influence on public opinion. Likewise, in intergenerational terms, and due to strict ethnic segregation of schooling and curriculum, youth born after the war’s conclusion are exposed to routine dehumanizing of other communities by parents, educators, and media while harboring no memories of inter-communal interactions and peaceful cohabitation. Such youth, Nell Bolton and Edita Colo Zahirovic explain in their overview of the CRS/BiH CPT program, are even more predisposed to resist reconciliation efforts than their parents, fearing that reconciliation means accepting the suffering their parents endured during the war. CPT, consequently, was designed as a three-part psychosocial training on communication, trauma, and forgiveness, followed by “Speaking Out” events where war survivors publicly share their stories. When implemented with youth, CPT also included interactive performances using the approach of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, a three-week Peer Peace Education Camp, and an online Small School of Peacebuilding. CPT’s theory of change posited that if potential spoilers (in this case, war victims and youth) were to embrace reconciliatory efforts, and if influential organizations demonstrated support of such efforts, then reconciliatory attitudes would spread to organization members and to broader societal circles. Survey data produced by CPT in BiH indeed suggest that the targeted workshops strengthened inter-communal interaction and mutual understanding, with 84% of participants reporting willingness to consider the possibility of forgiveness. 84 “Speaking Out” events subsequently facilitated interethnic panels of war survivors, reaching over 3,500 audience members who, when surveyed, reported that such events contributed to attitudinal change toward other ethnicities (in one location over 80% reported such a change).

A youth peace camp

CPT’s focus on open discussion of painful memories facilitated transformative experiences on personal and inter-personal levels. However, in some instances, “Speaking Out” caused anxiety and re-victimization, highlighting enduring needs for psychosocial support. Another shortcoming was the inability to offer pathways from personal and inter-personal (horizontal) transformations to (vertical) policy-level structural change as in the Binding, Bonding, and Bridging program in Mindanao, when municipal authorities became stakeholders in inter-communal land dispute management. CPT also overlooked providing participants with tools and resources for “re-entry” into communities where rigid ethnic other-ing still persists, as well as the peacebuilding potential of (but also obstacles for) intentionally involving women in the male-dominated space of discussions of wartime memories.

Despite all these shortcomings, CPT, by Bolton and Zahirovic’s account, effectively illustrates the binding, bonding, and bridging approach formalized later for the context of the conflict in Mindanao. This 3B method focuses on three sets of activities: binding activities focus on self-transformation (including through trauma healing processes); bonding activities direct attention to intra-group relation-building as constituting a necessary stage for inter-group dialogue and collaboration, which represent the third bridgingtype of activities. According to Bolton and Zahirovic, CPT demonstrated the role of trauma healing and self-transformation in the 3B method in particular as mechanisms for inter-ethnoreligious recognition.

Focusing on youth and other potential spoilers as loci of reconciliation through trauma healing and “counter-messaging” suggests that hermeneutical work that draws upon religio-cultural and historical literacy is a necessary, if less attended to, dimension of the assessment of CPT in BiH as a peacebuilding mechanism. Indeed, the case study of CPT illuminates the distinct ways in which the 3B approach could operate in transforming narratives, perceptions of the “other,” and societal reconciliation through inter-ethnoreligious engagement and truth-telling. Like in Mindanao where religious and indigenous leaders in the barangays were key to implementing 3B, CPT too highlights the potential role of religious actors in promoting such projects for social cohesion. By “counter-messaging,” I mean the ways in which re-interpretive work counters the various levels at which exclusionary narratives and other-ing unfold in the media and in school curricula.

While, in Mindanao, the effectiveness of the 3B program was measured in terms of capacity to mediate land conflicts among Christians, Muslims, and other indigenous people, in BiH the effectiveness of CPT was measured by tracking attitudinal shifts and greater recognition of the other’s authentic narratives among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. To reach such transformative spaces, it is necessary to engage more deeply with questions of how stereotyping of other ethnoreligious communities can be combated through counter-messaging (including through transgressive theatre) and challenging historiographical accounts in text books. The role of religion, therefore, is more interpretive than instrumental as in the case of Mindanao, where traditional religious leaders were identified for the communal traction they already possessed and which was enhanced through inter- and intra-religious work as well as training in more “secular” conflict resolution skills.  By contrast, inter-ethnoreligious action in BiH–and especially action that could offer pathways to reconciliation and desegregation of ethnoreligious spheres–requires re-narrating religion’s intersections with national historiographies and their reproduction in media and popular artistic expressions. Hence, such an analysis calls for more research on how religious literacy can participate in peace media, art, youth engagement, and curricula development pertaining to efforts for re-narration and cultivation of empathy and inclusive democratic praxis.

 

Photo credit: Velija Hasanbegovic for CRS

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015).