Religion and Politics in Australia

Abstract

The relationship between religion and politics in Australia has in the past been conditioned by the peculiarities of Australian history. Traditionally religion was related to issues of moral reformation and sectarianism. Changes in Australia over the past forty years have changed this relationship as the public role of religion has waned. In recent times there has been somewhat of a religious comeback in Australian public life. This has been related to a new style of Christian politics, the presence of two strong Church leaders, Cardinal George Pell and Archbishop Peter Jensen, the presence of Islam, the election of a committed Christian Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister and the continuing importance of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) as a civil religion.     

Intersections of Gender/Sex,Multiculturalism and Religion: Young Muslim Minority Women in Contemporary Bali

This article examines the experience of Muslim female students in high schools in Bali. Since the religion of the majority of the population of Bali is Balinese Hinduism, these young women are part of a Muslim minority – unusual in Indonesia. Data were obtained through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010. Interviewees were mainly Muslim students, but teachers and Muslim parents were also consulted. Some of the students are a minority within a state senior high school, and some attend a private Islamic school in Denpasar. Interviewees identified choice of school and the wearing of the jilbab (Islamic head-scarf) as issues for them in their everyday lives. The Islamic school is (mis-)perceived as a morally safe environment by parents. The state school does not allow the wearing of the jilbab, showing the limits of multiculturalism in Bali. While the jilbab should express piety and morality, there is some hypocrisy among some young jilbab-wearing women. Some young women have internalised the Balinese objection to poor Muslim immigrants, and feel inferior when they wear the jilbab. The data suggest that their female sex/gender flags their unequal Muslim-minority status in ways that Muslim-minority men do not experience.     

Institutionalization of Islam in Secular Europe: The Influence of State–Religion Relations on Anti‐Muslim Attitudes

This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.     

Muslim Theologies of Solidarity and Disavowal and the Challenge of Religious Pluralism

ABSTRACT

Rawls' conception of political liberalism does not reckon exclusivist salvation religions to be, for that reason alone, unreasonable. He posits, however, that exclusivist doctrines of salvation are likely to become more generous in their views of the religious other with the experience of toleration. While the religious welcome toleration by the majority, relaxation of doctrines of salvation dilutes the urgency of religious truth, and so reduces a religion's ability to justify its existence. Paradoxically, political toleration creates a countervailing demand within a religious community to articulate more precisely what is intolerable in the religious other. This paper explores the dialectic between toleration and nontoleration in the history of Muslim sects and suggests that this history offers lessons on the kinds of strategies that can be successful in promoting religious tolerance in a Muslim society, as well as the limits that might reasonably be expected in those societies.     

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.     

Negotiating Muslim identity and diversity in Greek urban spaces

Based on a recent study of indigenous and migrant Muslims in Greece, this article provides an exploration of the spatial expressions of religious identity and practice among indigenous and migrant Muslims in Athens. Through a detailed analysis of ethnographic and visual material, we investigate the ways in which Muslim communities negotiate their religious identities and belonging in a city where there is no official mosque, considering that exclusionary perceptions of Islam constitute an important element of Greek national identity. The discussion concentrates on the management of visibility of Muslim identity through public displays of religious practices. Finally, we explore the ongoing debates surrounding the building of a Central Mosque in Athens as a symbolic claim to acceptance and recognition of Muslim presence and religious diversity in the Greek capital.     

Islam intensified: snapshot historiography and the making of Muslim identities

The celebrated, and oft-criticised, 1001 Inventions exhibition offered a particular vision of Islam and Muslims in the West that is imbedded in the postcolonial reality of the post-9/11 world. Built around the coupling of Islam and science, the exhibition and its critics negotiate the place of Muslims in the contemporary world as mapped through the simultaneous intensification of Islam and science as epistemological categories. Such intensification is built on a symmetrical epistemology that deploys science as a universal value perceivable in snapshot historiographies. The article here argues that the exhibition and connected narratives, seen as examples of producing Muslim identities in the West, use the juncture of Islam and science, written in conforming agency, to re-inscribe and affirm the definition of Islam as a core and unchanging identity for Muslims.     

Multi‐Scalar Practices of the Korean State in Global Climate Politics: The Case of the Global Green Growth Institute

The paper examines the significance of state territoriality and the related multi‐scalar practices of the state in the light of the symptoms of post‐politics exemplified in global environmental governance. The focus rests on the South Korean government's Green Growth (GG) strategy and the efforts to export this strategy as a role model to emerging economies worldwide through the establishment of the Global Green Growth Institute. We begin with the question why the Korean government is going global with a political program that is heavily disputed at home. We then study the practices by which the state manages to maintain its territoriality under the conditions of global climate change. Lastly, we discuss how multi‐scalar practices of environmental governance in the GG strategy are applied by state and non‐state actors both in Korea and abroad.     

Theorizing the Submerged State: The Politics of Private Schools in the United States

In this paper, I apply Mettler's concept of the “submerged state” to aid for children at private schools in the United States, including education vouchers, in‐kind aid, and property tax exemptions. All aid policies are “submerged” in that they help private organizations take on state functions but some are more submerged than others. Theoretically, this paper distinguishes between subcategories of submergence. Using policy data from 50 states and an original database of court challenges between 1912 and 2015, I employ probit regression with sample selection to evaluate the effect of submergence on successful court challenge. I find that more submerged policies are less likely to be successfully challenged than less submerged policies. Submerged policy design enables supporters to avoid legal as well as political challenge.     

The transatlantic Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the nineteenth century

Since the 16th century, African Muslims figured prominently among the slave population of the Americas. While the number of Muslims pulled into the trade has always been a matter of speculation, lists of Africans rescued from slave ships provide us with some clues about the size and direction of the Muslim diaspora to Latin America in the 19th century. Based on an analysis of tens of thousands of names recorded in these lists, this essay argues that the majority of Muslim captives leaving Africa departed from Upper Guinea and suggests that Cuba was the center of the forced Muslim diaspora in the Americas. It traces the transatlantic links that connected particular regions of embarkation in Africa to their counterparts in Latin America and considers the implications of those connections for religious and cultural change within 19th-century slave populations. The essay challenges in important ways the colonial/postcolonial divide in Latin American history and uses Islam to pose important questions about the dynamics of social change across slave societies.     

Iceland and the Nordic Model of Consensus Democracy

The Nordic countries – including Iceland – have been portrayed in the political-science literature as consensual democracies, enjoying a high degree of legitimacy and institutional mechanisms which favour consensus-building over majority rule and adversarial politics. In this explorative article the author argues that consensus politics, meaning policy concertation between major interest groups in society, a tendency to form broad coalitions in important political issues and a significant cooperation between government and opposition in Parliament, is not an apt term to describe the political reality in Iceland during the second half of the 20th century. Icelandic democracy is better described as more adversarial than consensual in style and practice. The labour market was rife with conflict and strikes more frequent than in Europe, resulting in strained government–trade union relationship. Secondly, Iceland did not share the Nordic tradition of power-sharing or corporatism as regards labour market policies or macro-economic policy management, primarily because of the weakness of Social Democrats and the Left in general. Thirdly, the legislative process did not show a strong tendency towards consensus-building between government and opposition with regard to government seeking consultation or support for key legislation. Fourthly, the political style in legislative procedures and public debate in general tended to be adversarial rather than consensual in nature.     

Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of The State

Abstract: The state is often described in transition: public spaces are rearranged by private companies, national social welfare is being privatized to some extent, and supranational institutions have more influence on national policies. “A view from the kitchen” (Diane Elson) is helpful for understanding the changing dynamics of states and societies because different women are affected by these policies in different and often ambiguous ways: women of the globalized South migrate to the North, creating global care chains, while women in Western industrialized countries are confronted with changing welfare regimes, leaving mainly highly educated women to profit from this situation. This article contributes to feminist debates on economic globalization and state internationalization. Our feminist materialist perspective allows a critical view on dominance and power in “governance”. Thus, the article adds to feminist debates on globalization from the perspective of state transformation and to debates on governance from the perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered social relations.     

Masquerade politics: race,Islam and the scale of Amazigh activism in southeastern Morocco*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the different scalar dimensions of Berber masquerades in southeastern Morocco. By ritually performing Jewish characters and demonstrating philo‐Semitic nostalgia for a former Jewish presence, Berber (Amazigh) activists simultaneously engage different audiences at a local, national and transnational scale. In the first place, they assert themselves as moderate (even secular) Muslims for a transnational audience for whom Muslims' supposed anti‐Semitism has been a mode of excluding them from modernity. At the same time, their performances underline the specificity of Berber culture as part of a national folkloric archive, welcome to a Moroccan national state interested in forging an authentic, national Islamic practice distinct from pan‐Islamic Wahhabism. Thirdly, in allying themselves with Jews, Berber activists distance themselves from a variety of rivals to local political and economic dominance, particularly black “Haratin” whose demographic and economic strength in the southeastern oases has increased since Moroccan independence. In exploring the confluences and contradictions between these different scales of activism, this article points to the internal fractures within social movements organised around religion or ethnicity.     

In the Shade of the Oaks of Mamre: Hospitality as a Framework for Political Engagement between Christians and Muslims

Abstract

This essay is the initial sketch of a theological framework for political dialogue based on traditions of hospitality. This essay is intended to further a normative commitment to pluralism by creating a space for Christians and Muslims to engage in political dialogue on issues of governance. Using the story of Abraham and the three strangers, the essay analyzes hospitality as a possible model for interreligious political dialogue. The essay follows the narrative of the story recounted in Genesis 18 and Surah 51 of the Qur'an focusing on Abraham's greeting of the strangers as expressing a "duty of hospitality"; the "sharing of a meal" as an act of mutual vulnerability; and the gift of Isaac as exemplary of hospitality's possibility for grace and transformation. The goal is to show that a shared theological tradition could be the basis for political dialogue.     

Outward Appearance of Children in Medieval Muslim Legal Texts: Modesty,Adornment and Gender

This article focuses on some aspects of boys' and girls' outward appearance in pre-modern Muslim societies according to medieval legal sources. These compendiums are analysed as the product of a continuing, two-way dialogue between law and reality, and as reflecting the desired norms side by side with existing customs. They were not created in a vacuum but are anchored in a local, socio-economic, cultural and political reality. Muslim jurists followed the physical and psychological changes of children, classified them, and concluded that these changes will be followed by changes in their outward appearance. They have constructed children's appropriate outward appearance according to age, gender distinctions, norms of modesty and manners of adornment. A careful examination of this legal discussion presents a case study of pre-modern traditional societies in which components of outward appearance reflect and construct at the same time norms of modesty, means of adornment and gendered socialisation of children's outward appearance.     

Regulating Regional Uneven Development and the Politics of Reconfiguring Belgian State Space

Abstract: This article mobilises a strategic‐relational approach to state spatial restructuring to overcome the weaknesses of the conventional “New Regionalist” account in economic geography of the resurgence of the region as a strategic site for economic governance. Focusing on hegemonic projects and the shifting nexus of spatial dependencies and engagements through which these are reproduced, undermined and transformed, the role and geography of political agency in state spatial restructuring is highlighted. To illustrate this point, I analyse the construction of new regional state spaces in Belgium, paying particular attention to the hegemonic projects that create a social basis for particular state spaces, the construction of collective agency on different scales (Belgian‐national and Flemish‐regional) and the various ways in which these processes are informed by pre‐existing state spatial and scalar selectivities.