Search Results (19)

In the context of globalization and rapid societal changes, preserving sacred landscapes is vital for cultural identity and resilience. This study investigates the concept of liminality within the cultural landscape of Neira Island, emphasizing the significance of the Buka Kampung ritual and keramat (sacred objects) as integral components of Neira landscape identity. Through qualitative analysis and case studies, the study explores how these rituals serve as liminal practices that mediate between continuity and transformation. The findings highlight that the act of making offerings at keramat during the Buka Kampung ritual fosters social cohesion and reinforces collective identity. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between sacredness, rituals, and identity, demonstrating how these elements shape place attachment, collective memory, and the lived experiences of local communities. It highlights the importance of sacred landscapes in fostering community resilience and cultural continuity, offering insights into the role of ritual practices in heritage preservation. Full article

This study investigates the experiences of Afro-Dutch Muslim women facing anti-Black racism within Dutch Muslim communities, illuminating the complexities of their identities as they navigate the intersections of race, religion, and belonging. Utilising in-depth narrative interviews with nine participants, alongside an online qualitative survey (n = 45), the research captures how the participants encounter exclusion, inferiorisation, and stereotyping, often feeling marginalised in spaces expected to foster inclusivity. Through the lens of intersectionality, the findings reveal a sense of conditional acceptance based on religious identity that erases part of their racialised experiences, leading to feelings of alienation within certainMuslim communities. The study explores the concept of religious innocence, an attitude adopted by some (Muslim) religious adherents who perceive themselves as immune to racism by virtue of adhering to religious (Islamic) doctrine, which they view as inherently anti-racist, thereby perpetuating injustices within their own practices. By contextualising these experiences within the framework of the Ummah, the study highlights the disconnection between Islamic ideals of unity and the realities of intra-Muslim racism. The implications underscore the need for greater inclusivity and equity within religious practices, challenging the existing racial hierarchies. Ultimately, the research aims to amplify the voices of marginalised Afro-Dutch Muslim women, contributing to an enhanced understanding of their unique challenges and resilience in the face of systemic discrimination. Full article

This article addresses religious governance in Ukraine in relation to local Muslim organizations associated with the Council of European Muslims (CEM), formerly known as the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe (FIOE). Specifically, it focuses on the Council of Ukrainian Muslims (CUM), formerly known as Alraid, and the Spiritual Administrations of Ukrainian Muslims Ummah (SAUM Ummah). Addressing the policymaking aspect of securitization, the article concerns state policies in Ukraine as ‘soft securitization’, meaning the execution of limited interventions and restrictions on the activities of Muslim organizations in Ukraine, particularly those at the focus of this article and labeled as ‘Islamist’. The FIOE in Europe and Alraid in Ukraine developed a response to these policies, informed by the wasatiyyah (moderation) post-Islamist ideology. The article analyzes how the wasatiyyah ideology was appropriated and negotiated in the discourse of these Ukrainian organizations, and how it informed their civic activism. Full article

This preliminary study initiates an exploration into a novel informal Islamic teacher education programme developed by a community organisation. The presented case study explores the Afghan Muslim inspired Hayat Foundation’s communal educational initiative, the Marefat programme. The programme, derived from Islamic educational theoriesis ‘imbued with notions of reflective, critical, and reflexive thinking’, which are designed to recognise the individual levels of development for every educator and simultaneously elevate their efficacy, agency, and person. Adopting an interpretivist-narrative methodology conveyed through a dialogical approach, this study focuses on the lived experiences of this social-welfare organisation by seeking to decipher the teleological nature of the programme. This examination is guided by three questions which seek to identify its intended audience, the specificity of the issue it attempts to address, and the approaches it has adapted to implement its programme. The findings suggest that the overarching purpose of this educational initiative is to foster empowering liberatory pedagogical responses to counter oppressive narratives in the reading of the Islamic tradition. Full article

Increasing soil and water salinity threatens global agriculture, particularly affecting rice. This study investigated the residual effects of microbial biochar and nitrogen fertilizer in mitigating salt stress in paddy soil and regulating the biochemical characteristics of rice plants. Two rice varieties, Shuang Liang You 138 (SLY138), a salt-tolerant, and Jing Liang You 534 (JLY534), a salt-sensitive, were grown under 0.4 ds/m EC (S0) and 6.84 ds/m EC (S1) in a glass house under controlled conditions. Three types of biochar—rice straw biochar (BC), fungal biochar (BF), and bacterial biochar (BB)—were applied alongside two nitrogen (N) fertilizer rates (60 kg ha⁻¹ and 120 kg ha⁻¹) in a previous study. The required salinity levels were maintained in respective pots through the application of saline irrigation water. Results showed that residual effects of microbial biochars (BF and BB) had higher salt mitigation efficiency than sole BC. The combination of BB and N fertilizer (BB + N120) significantly decreased soil pH by 23.45% and Na⁺ levels by 46.85%, creating a more conducive environment for rice growth by enhancing beneficial microbial abundance and decreasing pathogenic fungi in saline soil. Microbial biochars (BF and BB) positively improved soil properties (physicochemical) and biochemical and physiological properties of plants, ultimately rice growth. SLY138 significantly had a less severe response to salt stress compared to JLY534. The mitigation effects of BB + N120 kg ha⁻¹ were particularly favorable for SLY138. In summary, the combined residual effect of BF and BB with N120 kg ha⁻¹, especially bacterial biochar (BB), played a positive role in alleviating salt stress on rice growth, suggesting its potential utility for enhancing rice yield in paddy fields. Full article

For decades, the traditional precepts of “Turkish Islam” have defined the community structure for Turkish immigrants in The Netherlands. Today, spiritualism rather than Islamic morality is emerging as the more compelling religious practice among young people, especially among women who are looking to break out of their culturally enclosed communities. This study uses the terms “enclosure” and “opening up” as metaphors for immigrant participation in Dutch society and suggests that religious Muslim women immigrants are both the founders and dismantlers of the two metaphors. Through their own narratives, women are shown to challenge and resolve social compartmentalization, and the role of cultural transmission through “Ummahtism” (the global Islamic community) is detailed as it is reinterpreted in Europe by Dutch–Turkish women. The findings of this paper are based on field research conducted in The Netherlands between September 2020 and April 2022. Full article

This article argues that the Catholic Church in Nigeria needs to move beyond interreligious dialogue that dwells more on Councils’ interactions and discourses to develop a dialogical ethical framework that engages religious multiplicity in a more active capacity. Although Nigeria’s religious diversity necessitates interreligious dialogue, that alone is insufficient for constructing concrete ethics of dialogue. The article thus argued for an ethical framework tagged one family, many flavours. The theological sense of the proposal is rooted in Catholic social teachings but open to engagement with other religious traditions for mutual respect and social justice. The religious scope of the article is on Roman Catholicism and the Nigeria Muslim Ummah. The article addressed related ethical challenges confronting Nigeria’s interreligious landscape as a diverse religious community. Primary and secondary sources were used in gathering information for the article; thus, scriptural texts and traditions in Islam, as well as sources in Roman Catholicism, were theologically engaged. The suggested model acknowledges the importance of retaining one’s religious identity while also recognising the importance of interreligious dialogue and the right of the religious other in ethical matters. The article is envisioned to promote conversations about translating dialogical frameworks into practice. Full article

This study aims to portray the political representation of minorities using discourse analysis as a tool to analyse the 2019 legislative election in Bali province. Bali is a province with the largest Hindu population in Indonesia. It is necessary for minority groups to take strategic steps to express their participation and existence in political contestation. The power of language and the strength of minority political candidates have led to successful competition for seats in the legislature. The ethnically and religiously heterogeneous electorate sympathized with the candidate. Using a linguistic semiotic approach, the analysis results are obtained, and the use of language as a representation of Muslim power is aimed at the diction of “Khadimul Ummah”, or servant of the public. While this study uses a qualitative approach to semiotic analysis, the diction of servant of the public is interpreted using a binary opposition approach. The results of this study show that language creates its identity and becomes a figure of interest to the Balinese people as a representation of Indonesian legislative members in the electoral district of Bali. For most people in Bali, there is a belief that this diction is something that strengthens inter-religious harmony between societies. The significance of this study lies in the fact that language may have symbolic power for both ethnic minority and majority groups. Full article

Tracing back political Islam to the French Campaign that invaded Egypt in 1798, the article argues that political Islam emerged and developed from within the folds of the modern nation state in Egypt. The article conceptualizes three historical phases: from 1805 to 1849, 1849 to 1879, and 1879 to the mid-1920s. Each of these phases is centered around a common theme that characterized the discourses, knowledge, and structures of politics, the economy and “Islam”, as they encountered the West, which are, in order, technology, civilization, and ideology. The works of Ḥasan al-ʿAṭṭār will be explored as an example of the first phase, and the works of Rifāʿah al-Ṭahṭāwī will be the example of the second phase, where Islam, as it encounters politics, becomes the foundation of state nationalism. The third phase will start with a transitional period of undifferentiated discourses, but will quickly, after the British occupation in 1882, differentiate into three political Islams: liberal, represented by Muḥammad ʿAbduh and al-Ummah Party; official, represented by ʿAlī Yūsuf and the Reform on the Constitutional Principles Party; and extra-state, radical Islamism, represented by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jāwiš, and the Nationalist Party. The article will explain the national and international political and economic contexts that surrounded and participated in the formations of political Islam in all its varieties. Against the popular academic conviction of rooting Ḥasan al-Bannā’s thought in Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s work, and rooting ʿAbduh in Jamāl al-Afghānī’s movement, this article will explain the rupture and contradictions between Afghānī and ʿAbduh, on the one hand, and the rooting of al-Bannā’s ideology in ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Jāwīš’s thought, on the other hand. Full article

Malaysia is known to have a diverse population across the racial and religious spectrums. However, a majority of the population identifies as Malays, and, thus, legally, as Muslims too. Although the development of the Malay identity had begun immediately after World War II, the stark division between Muslims and non-Muslims came out of the 1971 New Economic Policy that prioritized the Malay population in the name of reducing poverty and stabilizing the country. With the Malay-nationalist party United Malay National Organization (UMNO) being in power for six decades, the position of the Malays became undisputed. At the same time, international and domestic development such as the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the Global War on Terror and the splitting of Malay votes in the 2000s further pushed UMNO and, later, the Islamist PAS to redefine Malay identity as part of the larger Muslim ummah under the framework of ‘civilizational populism’. By conflating ethnicity and religion, Islamist and Malay nationalist parties together with their leaders used populist discourses to ensure the people’s continued support, even at the expense of non-Muslim Malaysian citizens. Using process tracing, this article shows that civilizationism is effective to unite the majority Muslim population in a divided country such as Malaysia when policies in place failed to engender unity. As a result, Malay-Muslims sought a community beyond its borders, and with the rise of Islamist politics around the world, it has become much easier for the Malay-Muslims to highlight the plight of Muslims over that of their own co-nationalists for the benefit of domestic politics. Full article

Even though Turkey’s ruling party’s (Justice and Development Party, the AKP) nation-building and desired citizen creation policies have been studied, its use of necropolitical narratives and propaganda in education has not been investigated. This paper addresses this gap by examining how the Turkish state ruled by the AKP has propagated its religious necropolitical narrative through the national curriculum and Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in school textbooks, and magazines and comic books for children. The paper shows that these texts and comics try to indoctrinate children into a religious cult of martyrdom in different ways by encouraging them to view tragic death and getting killed for the nation as a positive event. This paper argues that these propaganda efforts are part of a religious necropolitical indoctrination campaign that seeks to create a new Islamist and jihadist generation of lifelong supporters of the AKP, which portrays itself in the educational texts as the embodiment of Islam, the Muslim Turkish nation and even the global Muslim community (ummah). This new religious generation is expected to believe that dying for the Islamist populist authoritarian regime is the greatest honour a person can bring upon themselves. This paper contributes to the necropolitics literature by showing that not only adults but also children have been targeted by authoritarian rulers’ necropolitical propaganda attempts to create desired citizens who are ready to die for the regime, believing this is a religious obligation. Further research is needed to assess if and to what extent this propaganda has an impact on children. Full article

This article examines whether a ‘civilizational turn’ has occurred among populist movements in Indonesia. It focuses on the civilizational elements in the populist discourse of the Front Pembela Islam (Islamic Defender Front/FPI) in Indonesia. The article traces the FPI’s history and growing influence on politics and society in Indonesia in the 2010s. This article argues that the FPI has instrumentalized religious discourse, and through it divided Indonesian society into three groups: the virtuous ummah, corrupt elites, and immoral internal and external non-Muslim enemies, especially the civilizational bloc ‘the West’. This instrumentalization gained the group a degree of popularity in the second decade of the post-Suharto period and strengthened its political power and ability to bargain with mainstream political parties. The article uses the FPI’s actions and discourse during the Ahok affair to demonstrate the civilizational turn in Indonesian populism. The article shows how the FPI grew in power during the Ahok affair, in which a Christian Chinese politician, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was accused of blasphemy by Indonesian Islamists and later convicted on the same charge by an Indonesian court. The FPI was a leading part of a broad coalition of Islamist groups and individuals which called for Ahok to be charged with blasphemy; charges which were eventually laid and which led to Ahok being sentenced to two years imprisonment. The FPI, the article shows, framed Ahok as a non-Muslim Christian and therefore a ‘foreign’ enemy who was spreading moral corruption in Indonesia, governing ‘elites’ as complacent in combating immorality and positioned themselves as defenders of ‘the people’ or ummah. From the security perspective of the state, the FPI presented a critical threat that required containing. As a result of the growing power of the group, the FPI was banned in 2020 and Rizieq was imprisoned, while Ahok was politically rehabilitated by the Widodo government. Although the FPI’s banning is considered the most effective nonpermanent solution for the state, there is evidence that the FPI’s discourse has been adopted by mainstream political actors. This article, then, finds that the growth of the FPI during the second decade of the post-Suharto period, and their actions in leading the persecution of Ahok, demonstrates a civilizational turn in Indonesian Islamist populism. Full article

One hundred seventeen landslides occurred in Malang Regency throughout 2021, triggering the need for practical hazard assessments to strengthen the disaster mitigation process. In terms of providing a solution for investigating the location of landslides more precisely, this research aims to compare machine learning algorithms to produce an accurate landslide susceptibility model. This research applies three machine learning algorithms composed of RF (random forest), NB (naïve Bayes), and KNN (k-nearest neighbor) and 12 conditioning factors. The conditioning factors consist of slope, elevation, aspect, NDVI, geological type, soil type, distance from the fault, distance from the river, river density, TWI, land cover, and annual rainfall. This research performs seven models over three ratios between the training and testing dataset encompassing 50:50, 60:40, and 70:30 for KNN and NB algorithms and 70:30 for the RF algorithm. This research measures the performance of each model using eight parameters (ROC, AUC, ACC, SN, SP, BA, GM, CK, and MCC). The results indicate that RF 70:30 generates the best performance, witnessed by the evaluation parameters ACC (0.884), SN (0.765), GM (0.863), BA (0.857), CK (0.749), MCC (0.876), and AUC (0.943). Overall, seven models have reasonably good accuracy, ranging between 0.806 and 0.884. Furthermore, based on the best model, the study area is dominated by high susceptibility with an area coverage of 51%, which occurs in the areas with high slopes. This research is expected to improve the quality of landslide susceptibility maps in the study area as a foundation for mitigation planning. Furthermore, it can provide recommendations for further research in splitting ratio scenarios between training and testing data. Full article

In this article, I discuss the topic of Divine preservation of the Qur’an in the context of exegesis verse 15:9: ‘Indeed, it is We who sent down the reminder (dhikr) [i.e., the Qur’an], and indeed, We will be its guardian’. First, I will briefly examine Muslim and non-Muslim perceptions regarding authentic transmission of the Qur’an. I question some Western researchers, who problematise Muslims’ approaches to the history of the Qur’an with various polemics, and the Muslim perception, which compresses the notion of Divine preservation of the Qur’an into the narrow meaning of verse 15:9 with dogmatic and apologetic reflexes. Then, I chronologically analyse interpretations of the verse from linguistic, historical, theological and sociological aspects of the exegeses from the classical period to the modern times. The main argument of this article is centred on verse 15:9, which, in my opinion, deals with the first route of Qur’anic revelation from God to the Prophet through Angel Gabriel, and the Prophet’s perfect memorisation of it together with his flawless transmission to the Companions. The next processes (post-Prophetic developments in transmission of the revelation) were left to the foresight of the Muslim community, ummah. I believe, while the vertical process (revelation from arsh to farsh (heaven to earth) is guaranteed by God, responsibility for the horizontal process (from the Companions to the following generation and so on) is left to the Muslim community. The use of the same Qur’anic text by Sunnis, Shi’ites, Ibadis, etc., from northern Kazakhstan to West Africa, from Asia Pacific to the Balkans, is the clearest proof that Muslims are preserving the book entrusted to them. They demonstrate the reflection of their understanding of tawhid (Oneness of God) in their faith on the Qur’an by their consensus on a single mushaf. Full article

The 19th and 20th centuries were times of great change and transformation for the Muslim world. The salvation of the ummah—which is getting politically, militarily, and economically more backward against the West, terms such as revival (ihya), renewal (tajdid) and reform and reconstruction (islah)—have occupied almost all intellectuals and ulama. Many prescriptions have been proposed on this subject, the most vivid examples of which are mainly related to new approaches to the Qur’an and its interpretation. This article deals with the innovations put forward by reformist–revivalist leaders in different Muslim geographies regarding the interpretation of the Qur’an under the influence of modernism. We see that these approaches, which are basically based on the assumption of the inadequacy of classical methods and understandings, open up to questions and discussions for many hermeneutical devices that have become entrenched in the classical period and even argue that they are now unnecessary. Contrary to classical Qur’anic exegesis, reformist tajdid-centered suggestions of polyphonic modern Qur’an interpretations, the theological reflections of these suggestions, and most importantly their effect (or ineffectiveness) on Muslim societies are among the main topics of the article. In the beginning, the pressure of modernity, which should not be ignored in the perception and interpretation of the Qur’an, has become an indispensable element in the course of time. This new phenomenon and changing conditions have forced many Muslim intellectuals to compromise on principles that have become norms. The result, instead of a healthy reform, consisted of eclectic innovations and only saved the day and could not find a serious ground for itself in the grassroots. Full article