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Examining Religion: Social Change in Asia
Organizer and Chair: Rachel Rinaldo, University of Chicago
Discussant: Amy Freedman, Columbia University
Religion in Asian societies shapes social change and political order in complex ways that are often misunderstood. The papers in this panel draw on fieldwork to clarify religion's effect on politics and demonstrate how religious processes create new opportunities for political change from Uzbekistan to China to Indonesia. Religion's role in social change is linked to particular configurations of state authority, religious ideology, and institutions. Religion may promote democratization or challenge liberal conceptions of rights and equality. Contrary to popular perceptions, papers on Uzbekistan and Indonesia show that Islamic revival does not necessarily repress women but empowers some of them, granting a more public role in the religious community and providing a platform for launching critical discussions of religion, rights, and nationhood. On the other hand, religious institutions can usurp democratic state authority to promote their own agendas, even in a pluralist system like in Indonesia. Through anti-democratic and discriminatory fatwas, the quasi-state Indonesian Ulemas Council has increased its moral authority and weakened state power. Finally, in China, state authorization of religious practice is no guarantee of worshippers' quiescence. Protestants in state-registered churches prove to be far more assertive against state power than Protestants worshipping outside state venues. The papers demonstrate that attention to the individual effects of religion at the grassroots level leads to better understandings of the power of religion in political life and how, at a societal or state level, religion produces unexpected results by restructuring political engagement with state structures.
Pious Feminism: Islam and Women's Rights in Indonesia
Rachel Rinaldo, University of Chicago
This paper seeks to understand the implications for women’s movements of the pious forms of Islam that have emerged from the global Islamic revival. Not only do many observers assume that the rise of Islam can only be bad for women because it deprives them of rights, but some scholars assert that pious Islam is incommensurable with feminist subjectivity. Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia, I argue for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple impacts of Islamic revival, concluding that Islam can be an important tool for women’s rights activists in a society undergoing religious revival. This paper discusses how Indonesian Muslim women activists draw inspiration from Islam for a variety of political reform projects. For these women, not only does Islam serve as a crucial resource for political mobilization, but Islamic institutions supply educational and career opportunities and Islamic texts can be employed to legitimize beliefs about democracy and gender equality. In fact, some Indonesian women activists see no inherent contradictions between feminist ideas and Islam, because gender equality is central to their notions of being pious Muslims. Ultimately, the growing influence of Islam in the Indonesian public sphere may constrain some forms of women’s rights activism, but also enables new and innovative possibilities.
Mobilizing Inside and Outside State Organizations: Religious Resistance by Chinese Protestants
Carsten T. Vala, University of California, Berkeley
Communist and single-party regimes are generally assumed to be quite effective in corralling troublesome sectors of society into mass organizations where mobilization from below can be squelched. But the Chinese Communist Party-approved Protestant association has failed to capture more than half of China’s Protestant population as 20-40 million believers reject state churches. Some scholars of Chinese politics assert that groups lacking state authorization are more likely to clash with the state yet the fieldwork on Protestant resistance appears to disconfirm that conclusion. Why do state Protestants mobilize more readily to challenge state actions than Protestants in unregistered churches do?
Drawing on interviews conducted with leaders and members of both state churches and unregistered (“house”) churches, this paper applies a different conceptualization to state-society relations that avoids pitting society against state and helps to explain different forms of religious resistance by believers inside and outside state church boundaries. State Protestants in registered churches occupy a “third realm” between state and society where they assert themselves in the face of state power by exploiting savvy church leadership, strong norms of religious morality, and poorly institutionalized policies. In contrast, unregistered Protestants reject direct confrontation with the state and instead counter the hegemony of Party ideology in a far more radical - yet nonconfrontational - form of resistance.
Strategic Fundamentalism : MUI Fatwa’s and the Competition for Religious Authority in Indonesia
Jeremy Menchik, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In July 2005, the top state-sponsored religious organization in Indonesia, the Council of the Ulamas, (Majelis Ulama Indonesia or MUI) issued a fatwa stating “Religious teachings influenced by pluralism, secularism and liberalism are incompatible with Islam. Muslims must have an exclusivist attitude toward their religion and it is forbidden to mix their beliefs with other religions.” This fatwa appeared to mark a departure from the moderate history of the organization and as well as the syncretic roots of Islam in Indonesia. This paper seeks to understand MUI’s actions through a sociolegal analysis of their fatwa’s, within the theoretical framework of the state-society approach. I argue that MUI is strategically taking an extreme position in response to increasing competition for religious authority. By raising the specter of foreign forces corrupting the character of Islam in Indonesia, MUI is able to usurp democratic state authority to promote it’s own agenda, even in a pluralist system like Indonesia. This paper attempts to shed light on two key areas of social science research. First, MUI is now a central player in Indonesian politics, yet there is relatively little scholarly research on the organization. Second, I suggest that religious doctrine, including fundamentalism, may reflect underlying interests rather than being solely a function of religious tradition, ideology, or education.
Religious Practice among Local Women in the Ferghana Valley: From Information to Transformation
Svetlana Peshkova, University of Notre Dame
This presentation illustrates how Islamic practice empowers some women to confront the social order. Local female practitioners (otinchalar) in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan) help to create the conditions necessary for women's participation in social live of their respective communities. One the critical areas of otinchalar's religious practice is their leading of Qur'anic recitation and some ceremonial rituals that transform domestic space into the focus of congregational activity, the sacred place. In these places local women participate in the Muslim ummah both through the ritual practice and social discussion of familial, communal, national and political matters. Through these discussions local women learn more about Islam, their rights and social justice. As a result women begin to confront social order of the region both through talk and social practice in the form of protests.