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Workshop on Placing Religious Pluralism in Asian Global Cities (5 – 6 May 2011) Organised by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

The ARI Seminar Room, Tower Block, Level 10, Bukit Timah Road

THURSDAY, 5 MAY 2011 08:45 – 09:00 REGISTRATION

09:00 – 09:20 OPENING REMARKS

Michael FEENER Asia Research Institute and Department of History, NUS

Juliana FINUCANE Asia Research Institute, NUS

Chiara FORMICHI Asia Research Institute, NUS

09:20 – 10:20 KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Chairperson: Michael FEENER

09:20 Anthony REID The Australian National University

Many but one: The Paradox of Religious Pluralism in Southeast Asia’s History

09:50 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

10:20 – 10:45 TEA BREAK

10:45 – 12:30 PANEL 1 – RELIGION IN CIVIL SOCIETY SPACES

Discussant: Juliana FINUCANE

10:45 Carool KERSTEN King’s College London, UK

Urbanization, Civil Society and Religious Pluralism in Indonesia and Turkey

11:05 LIANG Yongjia National University of Singapore

Religious Pluralism with State Presence: the City of Dali, for Example

11:25 Mark R. MULLINS Sophia University, Tokyo

Civil Religion, Religious Pluralism, & Social Conflict in Contemporary Japanese Society


12:30 – 13:30 LUNCH

13:30 – 15:45 PANEL 2 – MEDIA SPACES

Discussant: Chiara FORMICHI

13:30 Julia Day HOWELL University of Western Sydney, Australia

Pluralist Currents and Counter‐Currents in the Indonesian Mass Media: The Case of Anand Krishna

13:50 Phyllis Ghim‐Lian CHEW

National Institute of Education, Singapore

Literacy Wars: Children’s Education and Weekend Madrasahs

14:10 Ronie PARCIACK Tel Aviv University, Israel

New Medium, New Readings of the Syncretistic Urban Space: Exploring the Imagery of the Sufi Shrine in New Delhi

14:30 Janet STEELE George Washington University, USA

Ramadan in the Newsroom: Malaysiakini, Tempo, & the Problem of Religious Pluralism


15:45 – 16:15 TEA BREAK



16:15 – 17:30 PANEL 3 – PLACES OF WORSHIP

Discussant: Julius BAUTISTA

16:15 HEW WaiWeng Australian National University

Translocal and Cosmopolitan Islam: Chinese‐style Mosques in Malaysia and Indonesia

16:35 Manuel Victor J. SAPITULA National University of Singapore

Shrines and Mosques in an Urban Neighborhood: Religious Pluralism and the Exigencies of Urbanization in Baclaran District in Metro Manila


17:30 BUS TRANSFER TO DINNER LOCATION

18:00 – 19:30 WORKSHOP DINNER

19:30 END OF DAY 1



FRIDAY, 6 MAY 2011 09:00 – 09:15 REGISTRATION

09:15 – 11:00 PANEL 4 – MOVING PLACES

Discussant: Robin JEFFREY

09:15 Angela RUDERT Syracuse University, USA

Anandmurti Gurumaa: A Sufi, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, TV Guru

09:35 Kiran A. SHINDE University of New England, Australia

Religious Diversity In A Religious Tourism Destination With A Global Catchment: Case of Shirdi, India

09:55 Sherly Saragih TURNIP

Universitas Indonesia

The Religious Pluralism among University Students in Jakarta


11:00 – 11:20 TEA BREAK

11:20 – 13:05 PANEL 5 – FESTIVALS AND OTHER CROSSROADS

Discussant: Vineeta SINHA

11:20 CHEE Wai‐chi

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

In the Name of God: South Asian Muslims in a Chinese Temple Fair in Hong Kong

11:40 Ann Grodzins GOLD Syracuse University, USA

Sweetness and Light: The Bright Side of Pluralism in a Rajasthan Town

12:00 YEOH Seng‐Guan Monash University, Malaysia

Actually Existing Religious Pluralism in Kuala Lumpur


13:05 – 14:00 LUNCH and FRIDAY PRAYER BREAK

14:00 – 15:00 FILM SCREENING

“LIVING ABOVE HIPPOPOTAMUS STREET”

14:00 Daniel GOLD

Cornell University, USA


15:00 – 15:30 TEA BREAK

15:30 – 16:45 PANEL 6 – REMAPPING RELIGIOUS GEOGRAPHIES

Discussant: Tim BUNNELL

15:30 Daniel GOH National University of Singapore

Urban Christianity and Global City Making in Hong Kong and Singapore

15:50 Heidi Østbø HAUGEN University of Oslo, Norway

African Pentecostal Migrants in China: Urban Marginality and Alternative Geographies of a Mission Theology


16:45 ‐ 17:30 CONCLUDING REMARKS (for participants only)

17:30 BUS TRANSFER BACK TO HOTEL

17:30 END OF DAY 2



KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Many but One: the Paradox of Religious Pluralism in Southeast Asia’s History

Anthony REID Australian National University

[email protected]

Asia is, as I argued in a recent book, “the great laboratory of religious pluralism”.1 Europeans were frequently astonished to discover mosques, temples, viharas and churches coexisting cheek by jowl, particularly in Asia’s highly plural cities. Still today this is a phenomenon that strikes the visitor from Europe or the New World. Chinese and Japanese were apt to see their three major religious traditions as not incompatible but complementary, while the Indic religious tradition preferred an exuberant religious diversity (even within what we call Hinduism) and eschewed the dogmatics of orthodoxy. And yet in Southeast Asia, in many respects the most resistant part of Asia towards homogenising political and religious structures, there is a paradox. At the level of formal religious adherence, each religious tradition is surprisingly homogeneous. In particular, Southeast Asian Muslims are overwhelmingly (over 98%) Sunnis of the Shafií School of Law or mazhab, a uniformity contrasting markedly with the Middle East or South Asia. In Thailand, Burma and Cambodia, the population is overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist and shares similar rites of ordination borrowed from Sri Lanka’s Mahavihara, again contrasting with the varieties of Buddhism in Japan or China. The Philippines was until recently overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Christian, with a uniform liturgy throughout the country. How could these seemingly uniform religious orthodoxies have emerged from and coexisted with the religious pluralism described above? This paper will seek to explicate this paradox with reference to the paradigm of the religious frontier, where scriptural religions occupied a new and different space from older religious practices. The Indonesian state motto, “Bhinekka Tunggal Ika,” is a suitable epitome of this paradox, as an old Javanese mystical assertion that, “They are many, yet they are one.” Is this mysticism a basis for underlying tolerance, as Benedict Anderson famously argued,2or is the contemporary opposition to accepting even the diversity represented by Ahmadis, Ismailis, and Bahais symptomatic of a darker possibility?

1 Anthony Reid (ed.), Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p.1.

2 Benedict Anderson, Mythology and the Tolerance of the Javanese (Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1965).



Anthony Reid is a Southeast Asian historian, now again at the Australian National University after serving in turn as founding Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of California, Los Angeles, USA (1999‐2002) and of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2002‐2007). His most recent and relevant books include Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450‐1680 (2 vols. 1988‐93); An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (2004); Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (2009); and as editor or co‐editor, Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), Negotiating Asymmetry: China’s Place in Asia (2009), and Volume 3 of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010).



Urbanization, Civil Society and Religious Pluralism in Indonesia and Turkey

Carool KERSTEN

Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London, UK

[email protected]

This paper forms part of a larger new research project on alternative Islamic discourses in Indonesia and Turkey. As a work in progress, the presentation will be a tentative exploration of urbanization as a factor of influence in the formation of new forms of Islamic religiosity among upwardly mobile Muslim middle classes. Political scientists and international relations specialists are beginning to recognize parallels in the way religion features in the public and private sphere in Indonesia and Turkey during the final decades of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries (Barton, Soğuk). Using the window of opportunity created by New Order’s economic development policies, successive generations of Indonesian Muslim intellectuals and technocrats spearheaded by Nurcholish Madjid and Dawam Rahardjo began articulating concepts like civil and cultural Islam, coloring not only to the Islamization (Penghijauan, “greening”) of Indonesian society, but also the emergence of new more spiritually‐inclined phenomena such as “urban Sufism” (Day Howell). In its wake arose a plethora of Islamic think tanks, educational institutions, NGOs, and charitable foundations that have been instrumental in shaping a new religious outlook among educated Muslim urbanites. From the 1980s onwards, the Turkish‐Islamic Synthesis (TIS) policies initiated under prime minister and later president Turgut Özal, inspired by the pluralist neo‐Ottomanist aspirations of the Nurcu and Gülen Movements, and financially supported by Muslim entrepreneurial efforts evolving in urban centers in Anatolia, are having a similar effect on the Turkish religious landscape. Examining parallels between such developments in global cities such as Jakarta and Istanbul, and smaller urban centers is not only instructive for understanding the political‐historical and socio‐cultural trajectories of Islam in the public and private spheres in the countries in question, it can also provide arguments for the broader debates surrounding development and dependency theory (Binder, Abdel Malek, Alatas) and be made relevant for the exploration of the notion of “second modernity” (Beck).



Dr Carool Kersten is lecturer in the study of Islam and Muslim World at King's College London, UK. He is the author of Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam, which has just been jointly released by Hurst & Company in London and Columbia University Press in New York. His research interests include the intellectual history of the modern Muslim world, contemporary Islamic thought, Islam in global and transregional contexts, the history of Islam in Southeast Asia, and theory and method in the study of religions. Carool Kersten has a PhD in the Study of Religions from SOAS, University of London, an MA in Arabic Language and Culture from Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands), and a Certificate in the Study of Southeast Asian Studies from Payap University in Chiang Mai (Thailand).



Religious Pluralism with State Presence:

The City Of Dali, For Example

LIANG Yongjia Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

The paper offers an ethnographic account of the revival and conviviality of different religious faiths and practices in the multi‐ethnic, multi‐religious city of Dali against a historical background. The city of Dali in southwest China has a long tradition of intertwining Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, Christianity, and popular religion. For the last 30 years, the city has witnessed vibrant religious revival of all these faiths and practices, as well as of “unregistered” transnational religious movements, during a time of rapid increase in the number of domestic and international tourists and of the revival of ethnic culture. On one hand, different religions—official or unofficial, Abrahamic or non‐Abrahamic—are adept at expanding themselves by taking advantage of the local state‐agent’s incentive of generating revenue through translating religious materials/practices for the tourist industry. On the other, religious adherents are also experienced in accommodating each other in everyday life, including in education, business venture, political negotiation, and festival celebration. The paper argues that in the city of Dali, state presence, though seemingly illegitimate, has been central in maintaining the context of religious pluralism. Liang Yongjia is a Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has combined interests in the ethnographic and historical studies of popular religion and ethnicity of Chinese minorities. His publication includes a monograph on the territorial cults of the Bai in southwest China (Diyu de Dengji, Beijing, 2005), and papers on kingship, world renunciation and ethnicity. He is now writing up a monograph on the religious revival in southwest China.



Civil Religion, Religious Pluralism, and Social Conflict

in Contemporary Japanese Society

Mark R. MULLINS Graduate School of Global Studies & Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University, Tokyo

[email protected]

Although diverse religious beliefs, practices, and traditions have existed in Japan for centuries, the free practice of religion has only been a prominent feature of Japanese society since the end of World War II. The disestablishment of State Shinto by the Occupation government, the abolishment of the wartime laws regulating religion, and the post‐war Constitution (1947) created a free‐market religious economy in which all forms of religion were allowed to flourish. In this new environment legally registered religious organizations (shūkyo hōjin) were defined by the government as “public benefit organizations” (kōeki hōjin) and accorded special treatment and tax benefits. “Religious pluralism,” in short, was recognized as a key feature of a democratic and peaceful society. Due to a number of controversial incidents, inter‐religious conflict, and court cases related to religion during the postwar period, a serious “gap” has emerged between this “official” (positive) understanding of religion and the public perception of religion as something “problematic” and in need of more serious scrutiny and regulation. For many Japanese today, in fact, the issue of religious freedom and protection of religious diversity has been overshadowed by a concern for protection “from” religion. This shift in orientation will be analyzed and illustrated with reference to three developments: the concern for protection from dangerous new religious movements (Aum Shinrikyō, for example); the concern of non‐Shinto Japanese for protection from Yasukuni Shrine and its unilateral enshrinements and deification of their family members along with the Class A war criminals; and concern over the reappearance of coercion in the public sphere in connection with the revitalization of civil religion, particularly in educational institutions. These three areas of concern and sources of conflict reveal how difficult it is to realize the purported “ideals” of religious pluralism in the contemporary Japanese context. Mark R. Mullins is Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Graduate School of Global Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan, where his teaching and research focus on religion in modern societies. He is the author and co‐editor of a number of works, including Religious Minorities in Canada: A Sociological Study of the Japanese Experience (1989), Religion and Society in Modern Japan (1993), Perspectives on Christianity in Korea and Japan (1995), Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements (1998), and Religion and Social Crisis in Japan (2001). He is currently writing a book on neo‐nationalism and religion in contemporary Japanese society while serving as editor of Monumenta Nipponica.



Pluralist Currents and Counter‐Currents in the Indonesian Mass Media:

The Case of Anand Krishna

Julia Day HOWELL Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies University of Western Sydney,

and Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

[email protected]

This paper examines the mass media, both print and electronic, as sites for the propagation and contestation of understandings of religious pluralism in Indonesia since the restoration of effective democracy in 1998. In this “Reformasi” period the Indonesian state’s long established policy of delimited pluralism, establishing no one religion but requiring citizens to espouse one of a limited number of named “world religions,” began to be challenged, not only by proponents of an Islamic state but by urban cosmopolitans engaging with globally circulating notions of perennialist and non‐denominational spirituality. The Reformasi period can be seen as one of destabilization and contest over these divergent notions of religiosity as properly communalist or autonomous, with the scales tipping towards the communalist since the enunciation of the 2006 MUI fatwas against pluralism and liberalism in religion.

This shift will be examined here by following the trajectory of a movement built around the popular writer and eclectic spiritual development trainer Anand Krishna. In the first years of Reformasi, Krishna’s easy‐reading books on spirituality in many different religions crowded out other personal development and general religion books in big city stores. The centers where his workshops were held provided niches for the symbols and prayer practices of all Indonesia’s recognised religions, and others as well. He was thus one of the most visible proponents of autonomous religiosity that moved freely across the state‐defined boundaries of religion. Well respected by senior Muslim intellectuals and other high public officials, he has nonetheless undergone a recent trial by media in the television news, and he fears that formal charges of insulting religion will be laid against him. The case is illustrative of the interconnections of Indonesians with the global religious market place, of the changes in forms of religiosity prompted by urban experiences of the educated elite, and also of the effective limits to autonomous individualized religiosity that have come into effect as the new era of democracy in Indonesia stabilises.



Julia Day Howell is a Deputy Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia) where she is also Associate Professor of Asian Studies. She did her postgraduate studies in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and at Stanford University, from which she received her PhD. She has researched movements of religious reform in Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, for over thirty years. Her recent work on Islam among Indonesia’s cosmopolitan urbanities and Sufi expressions of Islam contributes to the comparative sociology of Islam in contemporary societies. It also addresses issues of Islam and religious pluralism in democratic states, and examines new forms of piety in modern, media saturated societies. She has published widely in journals like Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Social Compass and the Journal of Asian Studies. Her edited volume, Sufism and the ‘Modern’ in Islam (with Martin van Bruinessen) has just appeared. She is presently working on a book entitled Cosmopolitan Sufis: Pluralism and Piety in Indonesia and a monograph on Indonesia’s Muslim televangelists.



Literacy Wars: Children’s Education and Weekend Madrasahs

Phyllis Ghim‐Lian CHEW

National Institute of Education, Singapore

[email protected]

Non‐extremist orientations have been severely neglected in the literature on Islam. Yet traditionalist and moderate orientations are extremely significant in current intra‐Muslim and inter‐religious dialogues both in Singapore and elsewhere. While there has recently been a spate of publications on madrasah education in Singapore, very little has been written about weekend madrasahs even though they are attended by more than half of its Muslim population and constitute the “common face” of Islam that the majority of Muslim children and youth are acquainted with. Indeed, weekend madrasahs have been an integral part of Singapore’s heritage and educational landscape, more so even than full‐time madrasah institutions.

There is a need for more empirical studies that document the varieties of classroom strategies teachers and students use as they attempt to accommodate social‐economic challenges brought about by the emergence of the global city and its diverse religious groups. This paper extrapolates crucial issues, both current and historical, that emerge at the intersection of literacy and education. More specifically, it focuses on classroom semiotics, pedagogical practices, textbooks, and the medium of instruction, be it Arabic, Malay or English.

The study is based on ethnographic observations of classroom practice, discourse analysis, and focused interviews with students, teachers, parents and mosque officials. It will be argued that the weekend masdrasah, like other educational institutions, has been busy reinventing itself in the field of teacher education, pedagogy and curriculum to meet the challenges of religious pluralism in the global city.

Other findings that will be discussed include the fact that the “literacy wars” that take place in today’s global city are not just between the secular and sacred but also within the sacred. In addition, the knowledge, values and behaviors that an individual reflects are not simply the products of his or her own unique and independent psychological interactions with the world but are the products of interactions and experiences with the various social groups of which the individual is a member, which include childhood experiences in the weekend madrasahs.



Phyllis Chew has authored many books on language, education, women’s studies and comparative religion. Her latest book is titled Emergent Lingua Francas (New York: Routledge 2009). An applied linguist, she has served on the international advisory boards of Teaching Education, Malaysian English Language Teaching Journal, International Journal of Language Studies, Asian EFL Journal, Asia Tefl Journal and Gendering Asia. She is the project advisor for Instep, the textbook and audio‐visual series used in Singapore schools since 2001. She has published in journals such as World Englishes, Linguistics and Education, and the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and has been invited as keynote and/or plenary for many conferences in the field of education and linguistics both locally and abroad. She is currently Principal Researcher for the National Institute of Education project on Religious Ideologies and Literacy Practices.



New Medium, New Readings of the Syncretistic Urban Space:

Exploring the Imagery of the Sufi Shrine in New Delhi

Ronie PARCIACK Department of East‐Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel

[email protected]

Sufi shrines in Indian mega‐cities may be defined as Islamic spaces within the Hindu‐dominated Indian nation‐state. However, Sufi shrines constitute a syncretistic arena in both practical (both Muslims and Hindus attend the shrine to worship) and symbolic terms. This presentation addresses the trans‐religious discourse evoked by the Sufi shrine with respect to the discourse of Indian Hindu nationalism. This will be done by exploring a new medium that has recently emerged and the way it contextualizes the Sufi shrine within the Hindu national discourse. By "new medium" I refer to Islamic VCDs produced by small, cottage‐industry urban studios using minimal means and budgets. These VCDs are produced independently of broadcasting means and bodies. They are sold in Islamic locations in Delhi (Jama Masjid/Meena Bazaar, Nizamuddin Bazaar etc.), and are far removed from orthodox, economic and political power hubs. Nevertheless, they are extremely popular and powerful because of the way they symbolically construct their new urban religious community. Whereas the concrete space of the Sufi shrine is fluid in terms of religious identity, the new medium uses the syncretistic dimension associated with it in a very different manner. Through a series of images repeatedly presented in Islamic VCDs, I will trace the ways in which the shrine is located and contextualized within the imagery of the Hindu national discourse. My contention is that this new medium creates a syncretistic imagery yet promotes a particular‐Islamic dimension in contemporary Indian urban space. Ronie Parciack received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University's School of Philosophy. Her Ph.D. dissertation was devoted to the philosophical, aesthetic and devotional aspects of classical Hinduism as expressed and transformed in popular Hindi films. She teaches at the Department of East Asian Studies and at the Dept. of Film and Television of Tel Aviv University. Her research interests include political Hinduism, The visual culture of the Indian Islam, political and gendered aspects of visual culture in India, Indian literature in English, and India‐Israel cultural encounters. She has published in several refereed journals and anthologies and now is completing her 1st book, titled, Face to Face: Hindi Cinema Encounters the Unseen.



Ramadan in the Newsroom:

Malaysiakini, Tempo, and the Problem of Religious Pluralism

Janet STEELE

School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University, USA

[email protected]

Malaysia’s internet news portal Malaysiakini and Indonesia’s Tempo magazine are both highly respected independent news organizations known for promoting pluralism, tolerance, and religious understanding. Their newsrooms are both demonstrably pluralist spaces, embracing diversity and explicitly standing for religious tolerance. Headquartered in the global cities of Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, Malaysiakini and Tempo share international norms of journalism while at the same time reflecting to varying degrees what the author has elsewhere called a local "idiom" of Islam. Despite surface similarities between the two news organizations, ethnographic research conducted during the month of Ramadan at Tempo and Malaysiakini reveals marked differences in the way journalists approach the fasting month. These differences reflect not only the ethnic and religious make‐up of the two editorial staffs, but also the impact of external factors, including the politicization of religion, the locus of religious authority, and the role of the state. This paper posits that pluralism is difficult to attain, even in organizations explicitly devoted to promoting ethnic diversity and religious understanding. A comparison of the experience of Ramadan in the newsrooms suggests that where the state dictates religious practices, pluralism suffers, and that pluralistic conditions exist in inverse proportion to state involvement in religious practices. Janet Steele is an Associate Professor of Journalism at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, USA. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University, and is especially interested in how culture is communicated through the mass media. She is a frequent visitor to Southeast Asia, where she lectures on topics ranging from the role of the press in a democratic society to specialized courses on narrative journalism. Her most recent book Wars Within: The Story of Tempo, an Independent Magazine in Soeharto’s Indonesia (Equinox Publishing and ISEAS, 2005) focuses on Tempo magazine and its relationship to the politics and culture of New Order Indonesia. She is currently working on a book on journalism and Islam in the Malay Archipelago.



Translocal and Cosmopolitan Islam:

Chinese‐style Mosques in Malaysia and Indonesia

HEW Wai Weng College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University

[email protected]; [email protected]

This paper is a comparative study of Chinese‐style mosques in Malaysia and Indonesia, set within their political and social contexts. Two main questions that drive this research are: 1) to what extent do Chinese‐style mosques promote inclusive and cosmopolitan Islam? 2) What are the translocal connections and local dynamics that make the establishment of Chinese‐style mosques possible or impossible? Since the collapse of the Suharto regime, at least five Chinese‐style mosques have been built across Indonesia. The first one is the Cheng Hoo Mosque in Surabaya, whose “pagoda‐like” architectural design is inspired by an old mosque in Beijing, even as its activities are reconfigured within the local context. With the support of both Chinese and Muslim organizations in Surabaya, the mosque was established to declare that there can be a Chinese way of being Muslim and to reassure people that Indonesian Islam is tolerant of various cultural traditions. The mosque is both a sacred and social space shared by all ethnic and religious groups. For example, during a Ramadan night in 2008, while Muslims were performing their evening prayers in the mosque, mostly Chinese non‐Muslims were practicing Qi Gong (Chinese breathing exercise) at another side of the mosque compound. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the combination of a state‐controlled Islamic bureaucracy and an ethnicized Islam that equates Malays with Muslims has discouraged the establishment of Chinese‐style mosques, and even rejected it in some cases. This paper will end with a broader discussion about Islamic pluralism in both Malaysia and Indonesia by examining the recent development of mosque architectures in their major cities. Hew Wai‐Weng is a final‐year PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Change, College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National University. His research topic is “Negotiating Ethnicity and Religion: Chinese Muslim Identities in Contemporary Indonesia.” Wai‐Weng obtained his M.Phil from the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), National University of Malaysia (UKM). He was an associate researcher in an opinion research centre and a journalist at a Chinese newspaper in Malaysia.



Shrines and Mosques in an Urban Neighborhood:

Religious Pluralism and the Exigencies of Urbanization in Baclaran District in Metro Manila

Manuel Victor J. SAPITULA

Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

This paper investigates the dynamics of religious conviviality in contemporary metro Manila, particularly in the district of Baclaran in Parañaque City. The Baclaran district is the location of the National Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help (OMPH Shrine), a popular pilgrimage site for devotees of the Virgin Mary. Established in 1932 by Redemptorist priests, the OMPH Shrine is famous for its “miraculous” icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. The OMPH Shrine has witnessed immense transitions in Baclaran district during the last fifty years; from a backwater fishing village, Baclaran is currently a commercial and highly urbanized district in metro Manila. However, as displaced Muslim communities in Mindanao make their way into several cities in Luzon and Visayas, one finds the increasing presence of Muslims in Baclaran district. At present, there are three mosques within the 500‐meter radius of the OMPH Shrine. This paper explores the vagaries of Christian‐Muslim religious coexistence in the context of intra‐country migration flows and the sprawling urbanization of the Metropolitan Manila area. The immense changes in Baclaran district that affect the relative positioning of the OMPH shrine, along with the emerging Muslim communities and state apparatuses vis‐à‐vis each other present opportunities to problematize “religious pluralism” in the context of urban realities in the Philippines. It will be demonstrated here that, in addition to prevailing attitudes among religious elites, the character of local governance and urban management facilitates or constrains religious conviviality in the urban context. Manuel Victor J. Sapitula is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines‐Diliman (UPD). His fields of specialization are the sociology of religion and the study of Christianity in the Philippine context. He is currently completing his dissertation on the devotion to Our Mother of Perpetual Help, a form of Catholic popular religion that is widespread in the Philippines.



Anandmurti Gurumaa: A Sufi, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, TV Guru

Angela RUDERT

Department of Religion, Syracuse University, USA

[email protected]

Anandmurti Gurumaa is a multi‐talented, multi‐lingual teacher of meditation and “spirituality” situated at the intersection of Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, and Sikh mystical traditions. Known affectionately as Gurumaa to her followers, this young Amritsar‐born guru’s discourses and musical compositions address the global fusion of linguistic, cultural and religious sensibilities encountered by her (mostly) urban disciples. Her television and internet audiences from around the globe come to the rural setting of her ashram and also draw her out to their own global cities, where she visits and offers meditation retreats and public discourses. Before entering the ethnographic field of her north Indian ashram, I had been studying Gurumaa long enough to know that the “spirituality” she teaches draws from multiple religious traditions. Indeed, her body itself is a place of pluralism: she was born a Sikh, was educated in a Catholic convent school, and found her enlightenment in Vrindavan (the site of Krishna’s amorous play with the gopis). She sometimes refers to herself as a Buddha and sometimes as a Sufi. After months in her ashram, I asked a question of Gurumaa that caused her to laugh at me publicly. I had already given up identifying her strongly with any one religious tradition. She told me face‐to‐face very early that she refused any such identification with an “ism.” But my analytical training prevailed, and I wanted to know how she saw herself, or perhaps, more importantly, how her followers who might themselves have more difficulty transcending particular religious identities would identify their master. Would she be identified with any one religion or creed? Would she be considered, rather, a New Age guru? A meditation guru? A feminist guru? A TV Guru? Her boisterous laugh turned gentle as she responded, “You are not going to be able to put me in any box; I’ll keep you guessing!” This essay examines the pluralism modeled by Gurumaa to her increasingly cosmopolitan audience, exploring the notion that she draws from many classifiable “isms,” and yet remains difficult to place in any one of them. She is a little bit of everything, or as one Indian American disciple explained, she’s an “All‐in‐one guru.” In both India and abroad, Gurumaa appeals to an educated class of urbanites who think of traditional “religion” as a limiting boundary in a globalizing world of “spiritual” possibilities. Regardless, Gurumaa’s appeal to these followers lies precisely in her ability to acknowledge tradition in an intelligent way – especially the heritage of Indian spiritual expertise – while at the same time make innovations pertinent to a “new audience in a new time,” as she put it. Indeed, her innovations represent a new boundary crossing in an era of unprecedented transnationalism and media flows, and movements such as hers provide some evidence that new religious and spiritual movements, can and do provide alternative religiosities to regressive fundamentalisms.



Angela Rudert’s current research examines tradition and innovation in 21st century guru devotion through a study of Anandmurti Gurumaa, a young, yet prominent and globetrotting north Indian guru. Her work brings ethnographic, religio‐historical and textual research methods together to shed light on theoretical concepts in the study of religion, globalization and gender/feminist studies. A Doctoral Dissertation Research Award from Fulbright‐Hays and a dissertation research award from FLAS supported Angela’s fieldwork in India in 2008 and 2009. She holds a BA in Religion from Davidson College, MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University, and she is currently a PhD candidate in Religion at Syracuse University.



Religious Diversity in a Religious Tourism Destination

with a Global Catchment: Case of Shirdi, India

Kiran A. SHINDE School of Behavioural, Cognitive & Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences,

University of New England, Australia

[email protected]

The reported increase in travel for religious purposes in recent years has catalyzed processes of change in many religious tourism destinations in India. Using a case study of one such place, Shirdi, this paper examines how socio‐spatial transformations constitute and reflect religious diversity. People from all religious backgrounds and all over the world come to Shirdi to seek blessings of Saibaba (c. 1860‐1918), a saint whose eternal presence, they believe, helps them. From a village of 200 people in 1920s, Shirdi has grown to a bustling town of 30,000 residents and estimated tourist influx of 10 million annual visitors. The study found that in spite of belonging to a saint who had no religious affiliations, the religious sphere in Shirdi is not homogenous. Rather, many religious practices that visitors bring from their native places co‐exist with dominant patterns of worship followed in the shrine. Religious diversity is evident in religious rituals, observances, and experiences. It is articulated at three levels: encounters between locals and visitors, between natives and new migrants, and among different ethnicities. Different religious groupings reinforce diversity by establishing their own ashrams, temples, and celebrations of festivals concurrent with standard performances. This diversity may be subsumed under the commonality of devotion, but there are underlying tensions as religious practices intertwine with the economy of pilgrimage and opportunities offered by religious tourism. This paper argues that while religious pluralism has been integral to religious tourism destinations, its materiality is closely related via visitor flows to global trends and socio‐economic processes in and outside of these places. Kiran Shinde is a lecturer in urban planning at the University of New England, Australia. He has published several research papers and a book related to religious tourism and pilgrimage sites. His current project involves comparative analysis of six pilgrimage sites in India for planning and management for religious tourism. He has a PhD (from Monash University, Australia), Masters Degree in Urban Environmental Management (from AIT, Thailand) and in Planning (from CEPT, India). In his doctoral thesis he focused on the environmental issues associated with religious tourism in India. His research interests include environmental planning and management, tourism, heritage and urban design.



The Religious Pluralism among University Students in Jakarta

Sherly Saragih TURNIP

Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia

[email protected]

Universitas Indonesia (UI) is the largest university in Indonesia with the widest range of study options. Every year, the university welcomes thousands of new students with various ethnic, cultural, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. With more than 28,000 undergraduate students, the university compound is a melting pot that incorporates representatives of every different group that exists in Indonesia. Students often face new situations at UI, including the encounter with students from various religious groups and encounters with new religious movement on campus. The status of the most prestigious university in the emerging global city of Jakarta has made UI a reflection of the conditions under which active religious pluralism emerges from material contexts of diversity in Indonesia. Campus life at UI provides opportunities to work and live with people from different religions. The experience often opens up opportunities for students to renegotiate their perspectives and boundaries related to their religion upon encountering a multi religious context. Therefore it is essential to investigate the perspective toward religious pluralism in a more comprehensive way and include the whole UI undergraduate student body through a descriptive study with a quantitative approach. Proportioned stratified random sampling was used to select participants from twelve faculties at UI and four batches from 2006 to 2009 intakes. The number of potential participants approached is 862. Sherly Saragih Turnip is an academic staff at the Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia. Her main research area involves the psychological well‐being of people in different kinds of communities in Indonesia, ranging from people living in religious conflict situations in Mollucas to people living in the urban centers in Indonesia.



In the Name of God:

South Asian Muslims in a Chinese Temple Fair in Hong Kong

CHEE Wai‐chi Department of Anthropology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong

[email protected]

Globalization and transnational flows of religious groups may mean negotiation and contestation for religious spaces, especially in cities. While some have argued that sociability has become a casualty in increasingly capitalist modern cities, others have argued that the acquired cosmopolitan worldview has encouraged accommodation of differences. This paper explores the spaces of religious pluralism in global cities by investigating how such spaces are created, negotiated, and contested between South Asian Muslims and Hong Kong Chinese popular religion believers in Hong Kong, a highly capitalist global city. The former is a migrant ethnic and religious minority group, while the latter is the local dominant group in terms of both ethnicity and religion. This project addresses the above issue by looking into the active participation of some fifty South Asian women and children, predominantly Pakistani Muslims, in an annual Chinese Temple Fair in Tai Kok Tsui, Hong Kong, where they are the only non‐Chinese participants. The 2010 Fair attracted some 100,000 visitors. These South Asians have participated for five consecutive years, with increasing involvement, ranging from raising funds, joining parade, selling South Asian food, and drawing henna patterns for visitors, to performing ethnic dances, dragon‐dance and Chinese Kung Fu. Their participation is remarkable because it demonstrates the permeability of religious boundaries and the creation of new spaces for religious pluralism. This paper seeks to delineate the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that have contributed to such boundary shift, and the relations that emerge between the religious groups as a result. Wai‐chi Chee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She also teaches at the University of Macau in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include culture and identity, education, governance, migration, and globalization. Geographical areas of her research include mainland China, Hong Kong and South Asia. Her dissertation compares how mainland Chinese and South Asian migrant students adapt to schooling and life in Hong Kong. She is the author of, “When the Cultural Model of Success Fails: Mainland Chinese Teenage Immigrants in Hong Kong,” in Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 8(2): 85‐110 (2010).



Sweetness and Light: The Bright Side of Pluralism in a Rajasthan Town

Ann Grodzins GOLD

Departments of Religion and Anthropology, Syracuse University, USA

[email protected]

The municipality of Jahazpur is the administrative hub of a sub‐district in provincial Rajasthan, North India. Relatively remote from global cosmopolitan centers, Jahazpur's public and private spaces are nonetheless thoroughly pervaded by imagery, emanating from signboards and television that originates in metropolitan areas. Well aware of their peripheral location, many of Jahazpur's residents when interviewed in August – October 2010 described their town to me as a place of stagnated development and limited opportunities – whether for education, employment or shopping. By contrast (with a few meaningful exceptions) everyone in Jahazpur with whom I spoke seemed proud of its festivals. They urged me and my husband to attend, unequivocally declaring these to be worth seeing. In this paper I explore aspects of public religious celebrations observed in Jahazpur in September 2010. The rainy season month of Bhadrapad is one of the Hindu calendar's busiest; concurrent Muslim and Jain events included Islam's Id al‐Fitr, marking the close of Ramadan, and a Jain procession closing a ten‐day period of fasting, purification and mutual forgiveness. In the context of these festivals – occasions of palpable collective effervescence, of lavish light displays and shared sweets – I ask how diverse communities perform and articulate identity and difference. My consideration of both negotiated and spontaneous conviviality among communities attempts to take into account not only Jahazpur's three religious groups but distinctions of caste, sect and class within these. I hope to conclude that beautifying streets and shared sweets help to produce a feel‐good version of reality that ‐‐ however sugar‐coated ‐‐ actually matters. Ann Grodzins Gold is Professor in the Departments of Religion and Anthropology at Syracuse University and former director of the Syracuse South Asia Center. During academic year 2010‐11 she holds a Fulbright‐Hays Faculty Research Fellowship for fieldwork on landscape and identity in a small market town in North India. Her earlier research has focused on pilgrimage, gender, expressive traditions, and environmental history, and been supported by fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Spencer Foundation. Her publications include numerous articles and four books, including In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (2002, co‐authored with Bhoju Ram Gujar) which in 2004 was awarded the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.



Actually Existing Religious Pluralism in Kuala Lumpur

YEOH Seng‐Guan

School of Arts & Social Sciences, Monash University (Sunway Campus, Malaysia)

[email protected]

Abdoumaliq Simone characterizes a central feature “city‐ness” as marked by “crossroads”, viz., where people “take the opportunity to change each other around by virtue of being in that space, getting rid of the familiar ways of and plans for doing things and finding new possibilities by virtue of whatever is gathered there”. This paper briefly discusses some of the “crossroads” that have been historically traversed and how they have had impacts on inter‐ethnic and inter‐faith relations in the socio‐spatial context of the capital city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. These include the trajectories of colonialist knowledge, the Islamization of Malaysian society, the New Economic Policy (1971‐90) and, most significantly, the Vision 2020 programmatic push initiated by Mahathir Mohamad during his long reign as prime minister. I argue that these material, demographic, and affective changes have given rise to unfamiliar cultural and religious complexities in Kuala Lumpur, and in ways which both deepen and dilute religious conviviality. Yeoh Seng Guan is Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Sunway Campus. He is an anthropologist who conducts research on cities, religion, media and civil society in the Southeast Asian region. He also produces ethnographic video documentaries. Recent publications include “In defence of the secular?: Christians, Islamization and new politics in (urbane) Malaysia” in Asia Studies Review (2011 forthcoming); “Globalising the sidewalk: Street vendors and the production of space in Baguio City, Philippines” in Isagani Yuzon ed. The Philippines Informal Sector: Politics, practices and perspectives (2010); and “The streets of Kuala Lumpur: Cityspace, ‘race’ and civil disobedience” in Melissa Butcher and Selvaraj Velayutham eds. Dissent and cultural resistance in Asia’s cities (2009). He is also editor of Media, Culture and Society in Malaysia (2010).



FILM SCREENING

Living above Hippopotamus Street

Daniel GOLD

Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University, USA

[email protected]

The highlight of a series entitled Religion and Community in Gwalior, this video presentation explores religious life and sensibilities in a group of interconnected working class neighborhoods in a central Indian city. As the former capital of an important princely state, Gwalior, with a population of about a million, is large enough to have absorbed some cultural impact from global flows, but retains a strong provincial identity. Like many cities of its size, it has attracted immigrants from the surrounding areas seeking work—many of whom have settled on a hill above Hippopotamus street. The area includes people mixed caste, class, and religion, some living in small, homogenous neighborhoods, others living next door to people of different communities. In this thirty‐five minute video, members of formerly untouchable groups, higher caste Hindus, and Muslims all comment on issues of identity, community, belief, and religious practice. Particularly engaging are some conversations with two young Muslim performers who act in traditional Hindu religious dramas. The video makes vivid some ways in which people of diverse backgrounds interact with their own and one another’s traditions. Daniel Gold (AB Berkeley; MA PhD Chicago) is Professor of South Asian Religions at Cornell University and director of the South Asia Program there. He has written The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in the North Indian Tradition (1987); Comprehending the Guru (1988); and Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion (2003). He has also written on Nath Yogis and Hindu fundamentalism and is currently completing a book on religion and community in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India.

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Urban Christianity and Global City Making in Hong Kong and Singapore

Daniel GOH Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

[email protected]

Christianity in the city‐states of Hong Kong and Singapore has seen tremendous growth over the last few decades in tandem with urbanization and rapid economic growth in the two cities. Today, Christians form eight per cent of the population in Hong Kong and fifteen per cent in Singapore. Few studies have mapped Christian adaptations and innovations in discourse, practice and institutions with regards to their urban environment. This paper surveys Christian responses to rapid urban transformation from colonial towns to modern port cities to the latest phase of global city making, from 1960s through to the 2000s. I track the fates of liberal, evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity as they make their way and seek to sink in their roots in the urbanizing and religiously plural Chinese communities of the two cities. Their adaptations have been conditioned by the specific postcolonial social crises and political fracturing experienced by the two city‐states in the wake of nation‐state formation in Asia. This has led to the decline of liberal Christianity and stagnation of non‐Pentecostal evangelical Christianity in Singapore as they failed to tackle the interventionist territorial urbanism of the postcolonial developmental state, and the awakening of liberal and evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong in the wake of decolonization and democratization in the lead up to the 1997 Handover. I then show that the dialectic of territorial and organic urbanisms has driven successful Christian urban engagements in the two cities since. In turn, this has resulted in liberal Christianity's turn to secular multiculturalism and the paradoxical evangelical openness to urban pluralism. The converse problem is deterritorialization unto the commercial and postindustrial networks of the global city and the withdrawal of Christianity into postmodern arks in the city that are disconnected from urban communities. Daniel Goh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He specializes in comparative‐historical sociology and cultural studies. His research interests are state‐formation, postcolonialism, religion, and urban ecologies. He has published in leading journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Mobilities, and is co‐editor of Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore (Routledge, 2009).



African Pentecostal Migrants in China:

Urban Marginality and Alternative Geographies of a Mission Theology

Heidi Østbø HAUGEN Department of Sociology & Human Geography, University of Oslo, Norway

[email protected]

This paper explores faith‐based constructions of mobility and spatial hierarchies among African migrants in Guangzhou, China. The city hosts a diverse population of foreign Christians, in which investors and professionals are increasingly joined by migrants from the global periphery. The religious needs of the former group have been accommodated through government approval of a non‐denominational church for foreigners. By contrast, Pentecostal churches catering mainly to Africans operate in anonymous hotels and office buildings under informal agreements with law‐enforcement officers. These churches are forced to relocate or shut down when their presence becomes too conspicuous. The analysis is based on in‐depth interviews, participant observation, and video recordings of sermons in one such church, with a predominately Nigerian congregation. The marginality of the churches is mirrored by the daily lives of the church‐goers; many are undocumented immigrants who restrain their movements within and between urban areas to avoid police interception. The Church leadership encourages members to exercise spatial discipline, which underscores their marginality in the urban environment. However, the Church also presents an alternative geography in which the migrants take center stage: First, Africans are given responsibility for evangelizing the Gospel, as Europeans are seen to have abandoned their mission. Second, China is presented as a pivotal battlefield for Christianity. Third, Guangzhou is heralded for its potential to deliver divine promises of prosperity. The geographical imagery of the mission theology assigns meaning to the migration experience, but simultaneously reinforces the distrust and ethnic isolation created by everyday experiences of spatial marginalization. Heidi Østbø Haugen is a research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. She is currently doing a PhD project about Sino‐African relations with fieldwork among African migrants and itinerant traders in Guangzhou and in Nigeria. Her previous academic publications are on the topics of Beijing’s Olympic bid and Chinese entrepreneurial migration to Africa. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as a vulnerability analyst at the World Food Program’s West Africa Bureau, and she has studied Mandarin at Beijing Normal University. She was a visiting scholar at the Asia Research Institute from October through December 2010.

Documents

THURSDAY, 5 MAY 2011 - Asia Research Institute, NUS · ... 6 May 2011) Organised by Asia Research ... Pluralism in Southeast Asia’s ... relevant books include Southeast Asia in