Search Results (21)

While digital religion and digital protest can ideally serve the common good, religious nationalist and fundamentalist movements have exploited these tools to disrupt the social fabric and create dangerous political outcomes. This paper examines how religious communicators within Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) and Alternative for Germany (AfD) perceive and enact their responsibility within digital spaces, leveraging the power of “networked communities” and the collective identity of the digital “crowd” to advance their agendas of religious fundamentalism and political conservatism. Bypassing traditional media, groups like the AfD and TLP exploit digital religion to build communities, spread propaganda that merges religion with national identity, frame political issues as religious mandates, and mobilize collective action. Campbell’s concept of the “networked community” demonstrates how digital technologies form decentralized, fluid, and global religious communities, distinct from traditional, geographically bound ones. Both the TLP and AfD have tapped into this new digital religious space, shaping and mobilizing political and religious identities across virtual borders. Gerbaudo’s idea of the “digital crowd” complements this by examining how collective action in the digital age reshapes mass mobilization, with social media transforming how political movements operate in the 21st century. Although the AfD’s platform is not overtly religious, the party strategically invokes ethno-Christian identity, framing opposition to Islam and Muslim immigration as a defense of German cultural and Christian values. Similarly, the TLP promotes religious nationalism by advocating for Pakistan’s Islamic identity against secularism and liberalism and calling for strict enforcement of blasphemy laws. Recognizing digital spaces as tools co-opted by religious nationalist movements, this paper explores how communicators in these movements understand their responsibility for the social and long term consequences of their messages. Using Luhmann’s systems theory—where communication is central to social systems—this paper analyzes how the TLP and AfD leverage individuals’ need for purpose and belonging to mobilize them digitally. By crafting emotionally charged experiences, these movements extend their influence beyond virtual spaces and into the broader public sphere. Finally, this paper will reflect on the theological implications of these dynamics both on and offline. How do religious communicators in digital spaces reconcile their theological frameworks with the social impact of their communication? Can digital religious communities be harnessed to foster social cohesion and inclusivity instead of exacerbating social divisions? Through this lens, the paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the intersection between digital religion, political mobilization, and theological responsibility in the digital age. Full article

The mainstream literature on the religiosity of Muslims in Europe often homogenises this diverse minority. This article diverges by focusing on a less visible ethno-religious minority within the Muslim population, specifically examining how Hazara Shia Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, resettled in the UK, live and organise Islam in everyday contexts. Addressing this gap, the research highlights the intersectionality of religion, ethnicity, and migration in reconfiguring religious practice. Grounded in the intersectional and lived religion approaches, this study contends that the religiosity of this Muslim minority undergoes a dynamic shift entwined with agency and adaptation in the new secular and plural context, becoming more individualised, privatised, and elective. Employing an ethnographic design, data are collected through semi-structured and key informant interviews, as well as participant observation, over 18 months of fieldwork across various council areas in Scotland. The findings illustrate reconfiguration, adaptation, and innovation in everyday Islam among this intersectional Muslim minority, identifying three main themes: the adaptation and reconfiguration of religious practices and rituals, the renegotiation of authoritative sources, and the navigation of intersectional identities and belonging since resettlement in the UK. Full article

Over the past decades, Iran has been witnessing the growth of a burgeoning feminist movement. With its origins deeply rooted in the early 20th century, the Iranian feminist movement, as such, is not a uniform body: it embodies various, opposing even, political ideologies under the umbrella of feminism, reflecting the divergent social locations of its protagonists. While the movement has been criticized for its centralist, middle-class and at times apolitical tendencies, academic scholarship has yet to offer intersectional analyses that problematize historically rooted and daily materialized relations of power within the movement, particularly in relation to axes such as ethnicity (and race), religion, gender identity, sexuality, and (dis)ability. In light of this gap, the present article aims towards documenting and theorizing the intersectionality of the challenges facing Iranian feminist activists belonging to various ethnic nations and religious beliefs. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that minority feminists find themselves between a rock and a hard place: the rock being masculinist politics within their minoritized communities, which prioritize ethno-nationalist demands over gendered ones; the hard place being a centralist liberal feminist movement that fails to reflect the intersectionality of their experiences as non-Persian non-Shia women, thereby reproducing hierarchies of power in relation to ethnicity, religion, and class. Full article

Recent research in social psychology underscores the role of language and its intersection with other identity markers, including ethnic visibility, in exploring social perceptions and biases. This paper examines the physical visibility of people of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) descent in the U.S., and the linguistic visibility of a concentrated MENA American community in Dearborn, Michigan. Relying on headshots, Study 1 shows that MENA could be an ambiguous ethnic community based solely on physical appearance, while religiously affiliated attire proves to be a significant ethnic marker for MENA. Using audio cues, Study 2 shows that the English variety spoken in Dearborn is a recognizable variety with masculinity associations. As such, Dearborn English is argued to be an ethnolinguistic repertoire that can be used to project ethno-local visibility. The results highlight the importance of the linguistic visibility of Dearborn and future research on language attitudes towards this variety. Full article

As part of this Special Issue devoted to research on the Jewish communities in Africa and their diaspora, we focus on the case of South African Jews who emigrated to Israel. First, we analyze the socio-religious and cultural context in which a Jewish diaspora developed and marked the ethno-religious identity of South African Jews both as individuals and as a collective. Second, we examine the role of ethno-religious identification as the main motive for migrating to Israel, and third, we show the role of ethno-religious identity in the integration of South African Jews into Israeli life. This study relies on data from a survey of South Africans and their descendants living in Israel in 2008, and in-depth interviews. The findings provide evidence for a strong Jewish community in South Africa that created a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people and a strong attachment to Israel. As expected, two of the key reasons for the decision to move to Israel were ideology and religion. The immigrants wanted to live in a place where they could feel part of the majority that was culturally and religiously Jewish. Finally, ethno-religious identities (Jewish and Zionist) influenced not only the decision making of potential immigrants but also their process of integration into Israeli life. Full article

Devotional artworks represent a valuable form of art, as they are evidence of religious worship and the demo-ethno-anthropological, as well as historical-artistic, heritage of a community, which is why they definitely belong to the cultural identity of a geographic area. The Madonna della Croce wall painting is an example of devotional art preserved today in the homonymous church in Triggiano (Bari, Italy). The presented study concerns the characterization of pigments used in the painting. The identification of pictorial materials had the aim of providing a contribution to knowledge about the painting, the history of restorations, and other historical events, and to increase the information about the Apulian painting to better reconstruct the social, cultural, and economic contexts of the region. Through a non-invasive and fast methodological approach, including portable digital microscopy, colorimetry, fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF); 42 points considered on coloured areas were analysed in situ, and results on pigment identification were achieved. According to the local wall painting tradition, red and yellow ochres, green earth, vine black, massicot, and lead-tin yellow were found. Furthermore, both indigo-woad dye and a mixture of vine black and yellow ochre to obtain a blueish colour on the Virgin’s mantle were highlighted. Full article

The identity of Jewish-Israeli men of Ethiopian descent has undergone deep-seated changes in the last decade, as evident in visual representations created by contemporary black artists living in Israel. In recent years, a new generation of Ethiopian-Israeli artists has revitalized local art and engendered deep changes in discourse and public life. Ethiopian-Israelis, who comprise less than two percent of the total Jewish population in the country, suffers multiple forms of oppression, especially due to their religious status and given that their visibility—as black Jews—stands out in a society that is predominantly white. This article draws links between events of the past decade and the images of men produced by these artists. It argues that the political awareness of Jewish-Ethiopians artists, generated by long-term social activism as well as police violence against their community, has greatly impacted their artistic production, broadened its diversity, and contributed a wealth of artworks to Israeli culture as a whole. Using intersectional analysis and drawing on theories from gender, migration and cultural studies, the article aims to produce a nuanced understanding of black Jewish masculinity in the ethno-national context of the state of Israel. Full article

Relationship-oriented questions have always been at the crossroads of ethnoreligious identity, religious freedom, religious conversion, religious prejudice, and religious pluralism throughout Muslim-Buddhist co-existence in the sixth century within the Malay Archipelago. Other faiths could be freely practised except for propagation towards Muslim communities with Islam being the religion of the federation. This study aimed to explore Muslim-Buddhist relation types and the issues underpinning the following themes: history, identity, and concerns. Content and thematic analysis as well discourse analysis were utilised as the study method for data collection and evaluation. The data were thematically analysed with ATLAS.ti, a qualitative analysis software. Resultantly, the Muslim-Buddhist interaction pattern in Malaysia has occurred (culturally and religiously) from the early establishment of both religious communities. This relation, which has shifted in ethnoreligious orientation at every interaction level, opens more avenues and complexities requiring holistic management. Full article

Why and in what ways do far-right discourses engage with religion in geographies where religious belief, practice, and public influence are particularly low? This article examines religion’s salience in the rhetoric of leading right-wing populist parties in eight European countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Based on a qualitative content analysis of various documents such as party programmes, websites, election manifestos, reports, and speeches of their leadership, the article offers insight into the functions that Christianist discourses serve for anti-immigration stances. The findings are threefold: first, they confirm previous research suggesting that while these parties embrace Christianity as a national/civilizational heritage and identity, they are also careful to avoid references to actual belief or practice. Second, the data suggests, their secularized take on Christianity rests not simply on the omission of theological content, but also on the active framing Christianity itself as an inherently secular and progressive religion conducive to democracy. Third, and finally, they starkly contrast this notion of Christianity with Islam, believed to be incompatible due to its alleged backward and violent qualities. Emphasizing religio-cultural hierarchies—rather than ethno-racial ones—plays an indispensable role in presenting a more palatable form of boundary-making against immigrants, and helps these parties mainstream by giving their nativist cause a liberal and enlightened aura. Preliminary comparisons with traditional conservative parties, moreover, reveal that while some of the latter partially embraced a similar nativism, variations remain across countries. Full article

The classical liberal concern for freedom of religion today intersects with concerns of equality and respect for minorities, of what might be loosely termed ‘multiculturalism’. When these minorities were primarily understood in terms of ethno-racial identities, multiculturalism and freedom of religion were seen at that time as quite separate policy and legal fields. As ethno-religious identities have become central to multiculturalism (and to rejections of multiculturalism), specifically in Western Europe in relation to its growing Muslim settlements, not only have the two fields intersected, new approaches to religion and equality have emerged. We consider the relationship between freedom of religion and ethno-religious equality, or alternatively, religion as faith or conscience and religion as group identity. We argue that the normative challenges raised by multicultural equality and integration cannot be met by individualist understandings of religion and freedom, by the idea of state neutrality, nor by laicist understandings of citizenship and equality. Hence, a re-thinking of the place of religion in public life and of religion as a public good and a re-configuring of political secularism in the context of religious diversity is necessary. We explore a number of pro-diversity approaches that suggest what a respectful and inclusive egalitarian governance of religious diversity might look like, and consider what might be usefully learnt from other countries, as Europe struggles with a deeper diversity than it has known for a long time. The moderate secularism that has historically evolved in Western Europe is potentially accommodative of religious diversity, just as it came to be of Christian churches, but it has to be ‘multiculturalised’. Full article

The rise of populism in the twenty-first century has been marked by the use of religion and national identity as emotive mobilizing forces to increase in-group solidarity and demarcate the notional boundaries of communities. The process often leads to the exclusion of vulnerable ethnoreligious minorities and to increased violence against them. This article analyses the role of fear as a principal emotion in the context of ethnoreligious conflict with reference to the Rohingya conflict in Myanmar. The article is divided in three parts. Part one explores notions of collective fear with reference to religious and ethnic conflict. Part two illustrates how collective existential fear has fuelled populist religious infused responses to the Rohignya conflict leading to the latest mass exodus of 2017. The final part considers whether fear can be an instrument of construction rather than destruction, to help build bridges than destroy, to connect people than isolate them. Full article

All parents want the best accessible, available and affordable school for their children. Yet, the literature highlights that school choice for middle-class parents in the cultural West is a deliberate decision and a reflection of their salient identities. For racialised middle-class Western parents, school choice is an instrumental investment to secure social upward mobility and minimise the harms of racism for their children. Research focusing on Western middle-class Muslim parents highlights that accommodation of Muslim identities and ethno-religious values is pivotal in parental school choice. This is expected due to the rise of Islamophobia in the cultural West since 9/11. The semi-structured interviews with faith-inspired middle-class Muslim parents in Australia bring a new dimension to the parental school choice literature. Regardless of carrying more or less similar concerns for their children in an Islamophobic climate, middle-class Muslim parents’ school choices vary based on their childhood schooling experiences in the Australian context, diverse parenting styles and mentalities and their children’s varying personalities demanding a particular type of school setting. This article demonstrates there is no one size fits all Muslim parent in terms of deciding which school is the best for their children in an Islamophobic climate. Full article

Islamophobia has been a controversial concept ever since it first gained popular currency. One of the main sticking points over the term is whether or not it refers to religion. For both detractors and advocates of the term alike, religion should be or is removed from the meaning of Islamophobia, which is conceived as a form of anti-Muslim racism. Islam, we might say, is thereby removed from Islamophobia. Yet, in doing so, it falls short on two of its key objectives, i.e., identifying the particular forms of discrimination that Muslims face in society and subsequently providing a positive basis from which to address this discrimination. In this article, the question asked is if we should put Islam back into Islamophobia and, if so, on what basis? According to the existing literature as well as a study of converts to Islam, it is suggested that Islam as a religion is both an important feature of Islamophobia as well as central to the identities of many Muslims, and then it is suggested why and how we should think about including religion into the scope of thinking on Islamophobia and how it is addressed. Full article

Strong anti-Islamic sentiments increased dramatically after the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, leading to an uptick in prejudice and the perpetration of hate crimes targeting Muslims. Sikh men and boys, often mistaken for Muslims, suffered as collateral damage. The overall health of both communities has been adversely affected by these experiences. Faced with such realities, communities and parents often adopt adaptive behaviors to foster healthy development in their children. In this paper, drawing on interviews with 23 Sikh parents from 12 families, we examine Sikh parents’ ethno-religious socialization of their children. The confluence of media stereotyping and mistaken identities has shaped Sikh parents’ beliefs regarding their children’s retention/relinquishment of outward identity markers. Sikh parents, in general, are concerned about the safety of their boys, due to the distinctive appearance of their religious markers, such as the turban. They are engaged in a constant struggle to ensure that their children are not identified as Muslims and to protect them from potential harm. In most of the families in our study, boys were raised to give up wearing the indicators of their ethno-religious group. In addition, many parents took responsibility for educating the wider community about their ethno-religious practices through direct communication, participation in cultural events, and support of other ethno-religious minorities. Policy implications are discussed. Full article

In Iraqi fiction, the prerogative to narrate the experience of marginal identities, particularly ethno-religious ones, appeared only in the post-occupation era. Traditionally, secular Iraqi discourse struggled to openly address “sectarianism” due to the prevalent notion that sectarian identities are mutually exclusive and oppositional to national identity. It is distinctly in post-2003 Iraq—more precisely, since the sectarian violence of 2006–2007 began to cut across class, civil society, and urban identities—that works which consciously refuse to depict normative Iraqi identities with their mainstream formulations became noticeable. We witness this development first in the Western diaspora, where Iraqi novels exhibit a fascination with the ethno-religious culture of the Iraqi margins or subalterns and impart a message of pluralistic secularism. This paper investigates the origins of the taboo that proscribed articulations of ethno-religious subjectivities in 20th-century Iraqi fiction, and then culls examples of recent diasporic Iraqi novels in which these subjectivities are encoded and amplified in distinct ways. In the diasporic novel, I argue, modern Iraqi intellectuals attain the conceptual and political distance necessary for contending retrospectively with their formative socialization experiences in Iraq. Through a new medium of marginalization—the diasporic experience of the authors themselves—they are equipped with a newfound desire to unmask subcultures in Iraq and to write more effectively about marginal aspects of Iraqi identity inside and outside the country. These new diasporic writings showcase processes of ethnic and religious socialization in the Iraqi public sphere. The result is the deconstruction of mainstream Iraqi identity narratives and the instrumentalization of marginal identities in a nonviolent struggle against sectarian violence. Full article