On the Islamic authority of the Indonesian state: responsibility,suspicion, and acts of compliance

This article examines how the Indonesian state's efforts to style itself as an Islamic authority have influenced the behaviour of its Muslim citizens. I present cases in which Muslims in Indonesia's Riau Islands comply with Islamic state directives in order to transfer responsibility for their actions to the state, showing how such a mode of practice can support Islamic governmentality, bolster nationalism, and constrain civic activism. Interestingly, compliance may occur even when citizens harbour deep misgivings towards a directive, leading me to query whether suspicion is necessarily inimical to authority. I conclude that a pronouncement's Islamic authority hinges on how Muslims relate to their suspicions regarding it, and that, for Riau Islanders, suspicion's urgency has been tempered by cultural models of personhood, individual subjectivity, and the moral murk of post‐Suharto Indonesia.     

Veiled Nannies and Secular Futures in France

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.     

‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self-help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.     

Mediat(iz)ing Catholicism: saint,spectacle, and theopolitics in Lima,Peru

This article examines the annual public procession in Lima, Peru, of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) in relation to issues at the intersection of Catholic Christianity, media, and political authority. Through a theopolitical lens alert to the intermeshing of political sovereignty and authority with theological (Catholic) worldviews, I inquire into media and the Señor de los Milagros procession along three key intersecting themes that link scales of local and global Catholicism: performance, identity/belonging, and control. Key to my argument is the idea of the miraculous (lo milagroso), a culturally resonant register of embodied affective experience with compelling power, which points to how senses of belonging, authority, and ‘proper’ Catholic subjecthoods are intensified by Catholicism's diffusion through new mediatic forms, especially in church-generated productions. A consideration of media technologies, mediation, and Catholicism nuances theoretical assumptions within the anthropology of Christianity, and also suggests that the anthropology of religion should attend more closely to mediation and mediatization as newer media infrastructures – channelling flows of information, images, and affects – extend ‘the religious’ into other social spheres.     

ORGAN TRANSPLANTATION: CONTEMPORARY SUNNI MUSLIM LEGAL AND ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES

The problems that organ transplantation poses to the Muslim mind may be summarized as follows: firstly, a muslim believes that whatever he owns or possesses has been given to him as an amānah (trust) from Alla¯h. Would it not be a breach of trust to give consent for the removal of parts of one's body, while still alive, for transplantation to benefit one's child, sibling or parent? Secondly, the Sharā'ah (Islamic Law) emphasizes the sacredness of the human body. Would it not then be an act of aggression against the human body, tantamount to its mutilation, if organs were to be removed after death for the purpose of transplantation? In this paper I attempt to illustrate how the Muslim jurists have tried to resolve the dilemma of Muslims by providing them with certain guidlines based on the original sources of Islam, namely, the Qur'n and the Prophetic tradition. In order to assist the followers of other religious traditions to grasp the gravity of the problem posed by organ transplantation to the Muslim mind, I begin by discussing the opinions of Muslim jurists on the issue of utilization of human parts. Thereafter, I touch upon the resolutions taken by the various Islamic Juridical Academies on the issue in question. Finally, I shed light upon the inclusion of organ donation in a Muslim Will and the enforceable nature of such a will     

Reproductive strategies and Islamic discourse: Malian migrants negotiate everyday life in Paris, France

Approximately 37 thousand Malians currently reside in France as part of the West African diaspora. Primarily Muslim, both women and men confront challenges to their understandings of Islamic prohibitions and expectations, especially those addressing conjugal relations and reproduction. Biomedical policies generate marital conflicts and pose health dilemmas for women who face family and community pressures to reproduce but biomedical encouragement to limit childbearing. For many women, contraception represents a reprieve from repeated pregnancies and fatigue in spite of resistance from those who contest women's reproductive decisions as antithetical to Islam. French social workers play a particularly controversial role by introducing women to a discourse of women's rights that questions the authority of husbands and of religious doctrine. Women and men frame decisions and debate in diverse interpretations of Islam as they seek to manage the contradictions of everyday life and assert individual agency in the context of immigration and health politics.     

On fun and freedom: young women's moral learning in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools

This article analyses the role of fun and freedom in the moral learning of young women students in two Indonesian Islamic boarding schools. Recent debates about Islam and ethical subject formation have centred on the assumed tension between Islam and freedom. I examine decisions about television viewing and dress to illustrate both the flexibility and fixity of moral values and evaluation in girls’ lives. I argue that anthropologists of morality and Islam should take seriously moments of fun as important instances for ‘moral ludus’ or ‘moral play’ – the testing, shifting, and reshaping of the boundaries of moral behaviours that involve balancing the demands of various social fields and the larger ethical community in which a person is embedded. I suggest that these moments be viewed not as ruptures or instances of hypocrisy but as everyday occurrences of embedded agency in the lives of piety-minded individuals.     

'BETWEEN BELIEF AND UNBELIEF LIES THE PERFORMANCE OF SALĀT': MEANING AND EFFICACY OF A MUSLIM RITUAL

Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul, Turkey, the article analyses the role of the Muslim five-times-daily prayer ( salāt ), within the Islamic tradition. It is argued that the prayer, with its intricate ritual format, provides practitioners with a formidable resource for strengthening their commitment to Islam and asserting membership in a community of believers while at the same time enabling religious Muslims to pursue new and diverse interpretations of Islam. The character of the āt as a mobile discipline that can easily be inserted into very different forms of life has become especially important as religious Muslims have increasingly been incorporated into liberal society in Turkey in the past decades.     

Cosmopolitan theology: Fethullah Gülen and the making of a ‘Golden Generation’

Global conditions, under which an increasing number of Muslims in the world currently live, do not just generate idioms of purity often adduced to global Islam, but also new and diverse forms of sociability and notions of global citizenship. This article addresses, as an example in case, Hizmet, one of the fastest growing contemporary Islamic movements. Hizmet and its founder Fethullah Gülen propagate a global Islamic doctrine with explicitly cosmopolitan underpinnings. However, there seems to be a contradiction between the cosmopolitan inclusiveness and universality of Gülen's global message, and strong internal hierarchical structures and the disciplining modes of teaching and training that are applied by the movement to teach the doctrine. I will argue that there is no contradiction between these two aspects when we focus on the central position of ‘hermeneutics of the self’ and civic responsibility in Gülen's theology.     

Sabar: body politics among middle‐aged migrant Pakistani women

This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle‐aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter‐generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self‐sublimation and self‐assertion in the practice of sabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.     

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of ‘totality’, where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of ‘infinity’, in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post‐secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.     

Mystical Styles of Expression among North Indian Faq?r: Nara as a Manifestation of Hukm

This paper explores the mystical complex of North Indian ‘holy men’ commonly known as faqir and their relationship to mainstream Indian Islam. It is based on research done at the thirteenth century Indo‐Muslim shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, India. Many faqir beliefs and practices diverge from Islamic orthodoxy by emphasising a mystical relationship with the saints. While faqir are Muslims, their emphasis on mystical expressions demarcates them from orthodox styles of Indian Islam. Two of these expressions are hukm, the mystical bond between a faqir and Muslim saint, and nara, a series of expletives used to communicate with the saint when in a euphoric state. Hukm and nara are pivotal to a faqir's mystical complex and are creative sources of his spiritual life. Prompted by a paucity of critical analyses into the area of North Indian faqir mysticism and ritual performance, this paper argues that the interplay between hukm and nara generates a form of creative expression for the faqir that is related to, but independent of, Indo‐Muslim orthodox practices and constitutes an alternative style of religious expression within Indian Islam.     

Magico‐spiritual power,female sexuality and ritual sex in Muslim Java: Unveiling the kesekten of magical women

This article argues that in practice, concepts of magico‐spiritual power (Javanese: kesekten; Indonesian: kesaktian) are linked with sexuality, particularly female sexuality, in some segments of contemporary Central and East Javanese Muslim society. Few scholars have turned attention to the interconnectedness of these seemingly contradictory topics. Feminist studies tend to focus on the ways in which women locate themselves within and critique Sharia‐based discursive and social orders, without considering the roles that magico‐spiritual power and associated practices play in these Islamic systems or in Islam in a more general sense. Similarly, male scholarship that considers the cultural relevance of Islam and magic rarely refers to gendered and sexual dimensions as praxis from a feminist perspective. By drawing on examples of ‘magical women’ including the Javanese spirit queen of the southern ocean Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the historical Hindu figure Ken Dedes, and contemporary ritual sex practices at a Muslim saint's grave, we show how women, female spiritual beings and female sexuality, and sexuality in general, can be considered sources of magico‐spiritual power in Muslim Java. Our arguments conclude that in Javanese Islam, transgression of Sharia sexual norms can be both a sign and a source of magico‐spiritual power.     

Does French Islam Have Borders? Dilemmas of Domestication in a Global Religious Field

Although many accounts of transnational religious movements emphasize mobility and communication, equally important are efforts by both political actors and religious leaders to carve out distinctive national forms of religion. In this article I examine dilemmas faced by Muslims in France who seek both to remain part of the global Muslimcommunity and to satisfy French demands for conformity to political and cultural norms. I consider the history of immigration and the importance of French notions of laïcité but emphasize the structural problem of articulating a global religious field onto a self-consciously bounded French nation-state. I then draw on recent fieldwork in Paris to analyze two recent public events in which attempts by Muslim public intellectuals to develop an "Islam of France" are frustrated by internal, structural tensions concerning religious authority and political legitimacy, and not simply by a conflict between "Muslims" and "France."     

'Representing' British Muslims: the strategic dimension to identity construction

This article explores how Muslim identity is constructed in different ways by two groups of political activists in Britain. At the heart of our investigation is an interest in how these different definitions of Muslim identity are organized to promote different forms of political action. We pay particular attention to how these groups employ the same Islamic concept, da'wah (the injunction to invite people to Islam), and show that it only gains meaning when invoked and deployed in the context of practical argumentation. That is, the meaning of such concepts is not a fixed given but highly contingent upon the contrasting strategic concerns of those claiming to represent the community. While these points have a general applicability, they are particularly important in the analysis of Muslim political activity. For too long, the ahistorical essentialist assumptions of 'Orientalism' have obscured the fundamentally contested and strategically constructed nature of Muslim identity.     

Virtual reality training of lucid dreaming

Metacognitive reflections on one''s current state of mind are largely absent during dreaming. Lucid dreaming as the exception to this rule is a rare phenomenon; however, its occurrence can be facilitated through cognitive training. A central idea of respective training strategies is to regularly question one''s phenomenal experience: is the currently experienced world real, or just a dream? Here, we tested if such lucid dreaming training can be enhanced with dream-like virtual reality (VR): over the course of four weeks, volunteers underwent lucid dreaming training in VR scenarios comprising dream-like elements, classical lucid dreaming training or no training. We found that VR-assisted training led to significantly stronger increases in lucid dreaming compared to the no-training condition. Eye signal-verified lucid dreams during polysomnography supported behavioural results. We discuss the potential mechanisms underlying these findings, in particular the role of synthetic dream-like experiences, incorporation of VR content in dream imagery serving as memory cues, and extended dissociative effects of VR session on subsequent experiences that might amplify lucid dreaming training during wakefulness.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Offline perception: voluntary and spontaneous perceptual experiences without matching external stimulation''.     

Corrective conversion: unsettling citizens and the politics of inclusion in Israel

Gauri Viswanathan's notion of religious conversion as an ‘unsettling’ political event has recently figured prominently in the scholarship on conversion. However, although numerous scholars have productively applied Viswanathan's understanding in their work, primarily in the context of conversion to religious minorities within the nation‐state, to focus too heavily on conversion's unsettling effects risks overlooking political constellations in which it might have rather settling effects. In contrast to the scholarly focus on conversion's disruptive qualities, this article offers an ethnographic account of the ‘settling’ ambitions and logics that underwrite the state politics of Jewish conversion (giur) in contemporary Israel. By looking ethnographically into the mundane discursive, pedagogic, and bureaucratic processes through which the Jewish state converts non‐Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, I demonstrate how religious conversion works to restore the bureaucratic logic of Israeli nationalism, thereby reinstating unambiguous forms of Jewish belonging. Religious conversion can also be an act of taxonomic repair.     

Muslim Youth in Canadian Schools: Education and the Politics of Religious Identity

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the schooling experiences of Muslim youth in Canada who are committed to maintaining an Islamic lifestyle despite the pressures of conformity to the dominant culture. Little attention has been paid to how religious identity intersects with other forms of social difference, such as race and gender in the schooling experiences of minoritized youth. Using a case study often Muslim students and parents, this article demonstrates how Muslim students were able to negotiate and maintain their religious identities within secular public schools. The participants' narratives address the challenges of peer pressure, racism, and Islamophobia. Their stories reveal how Muslim students are located at the nexus of social difference based on their race, gender, and religious identity. The discussion further explores the dynamics through which these youth were able to negotiate the continuity of their Islamic identity and practices within schools despite the challenges that they faced. Building upon existing theories of identity maintenance and construction, this research demonstrates how the interplay of the core factors of ambivalence, role performance, and interaction and isolation are implicated in the way Muslim students negotiate the politics of religious identity in their schooling experiences.     

Sexual Desire,Piety, and Law in a Javanese Pesantren: Interpreting Varieties of Secret Divorce and Polygamy

Very little anthropological research has explored the polygamous worlds of women in Indonesia's traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren. These traditional schools are patriarchal institutions that teach women to be ideal Muslims according to male-defined notions of shari'ah-based piety that construct polygamy as normative. This article challenges dominant discourses on polygamy, which are mostly concerned with public protest and feminist agendas that seek to have the practice banned, and instead reveals an agentive side of women in polygamous marriages. It examines the experiences of a group of pesantren women whose actions transgress state and Islamic laws on marriage and divorce in their endorsement of polygamous union and nikah batin (Sufi spiritual marriage). It builds on feminist arguments that recognise female agency in polygamy by considering the legal ambiguity surrounding secret and informal divorce and polygamous practices initiated by women restricted from obtaining legal divorces for socio-cultural reasons. In doing so, it further considers some aspects of a notion of a woman-centric polygamy that includes polyandry, which women create based on their understanding that Islam acknowledges women's sexual rights in marriage.     

‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa

The expression ‘talking like a Motorola’ (koloba lokola Motorola) was long used during the reign of President Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaïre to indicate the undesired disclosure of information. It manifests the perception of many Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa) that the Motorola handset was only deployed by Mobutu's secret service agents in order to detect and report critics of the regime. Today, mobile phones are no longer the preserve of political agents. Nearly everybody can have one. The idiom is thus outdated. Yet other lines between ‘what can be said [over the phone]’ and ‘what cannot be said’ are being drawn in Kinshasa's political society. Indeed, transformations in practices of secrecy, concealment, and, their counterpart, the divulging of information – all three significant axes of the production of power and contestation of authority – are key, both in state actions and in strategies of civil society. In this article, I attempt to locate the mobile phone within Kinshasa's political society, and analyse how relations to the Congolese state are articulated through the politics of cell phone technology and uses of the handset.