Contested identities: Tuan Guru and Ahmadiyah in the redrawing of post-1998 Sasak-Muslim boundary lines in Lombok

<p>This study examines what drives the increasing hostility towards Ahmadiyah in post-Suharto Lombok. Fieldwork was undertaken in three villages – Pemongkong, Pancor and Ketapang – where Ahmadiyah communities lived and experienced violent attacks from 1998 to 2010. The stories from these villages are analysed within the context of a revival of local religious authority and the redefinition of the paradigm of ethno-religious identity. Furthermore, this thesis contends that the redrawing of identity in Lombok generates a new interdependency of different religious authorities, as well as novel political possibilities following the regime change. Finally, the thesis concludes there is a need to understand intercommunal religious violence by reference to specific local realities. Concomitantly, there is a need for greater caution in offering sweeping universal Indonesia-wide explanations that need to be qualified in terms of local contexts.</p>

Contested identities: Tuan Guru and Ahmadiyah in the redrawing of post-1998 Sasak-Muslim boundary lines in Lombok

<p>This study examines what drives the increasing hostility towards Ahmadiyah in post-Suharto Lombok. Fieldwork was undertaken in three villages – Pemongkong, Pancor and Ketapang – where Ahmadiyah communities lived and experienced violent attacks from 1998 to 2010. The stories from these villages are analysed within the context of a revival of local religious authority and the redefinition of the paradigm of ethno-religious identity. Furthermore, this thesis contends that the redrawing of identity in Lombok generates a new interdependency of different religious authorities, as well as novel political possibilities following the regime change. Finally, the thesis concludes there is a need to understand intercommunal religious violence by reference to specific local realities. Concomitantly, there is a need for greater caution in offering sweeping universal Indonesia-wide explanations that need to be qualified in terms of local contexts.</p>

“Then He Stabbed Me with a Spear”: Aggressive Sacred Images and Interreligious Polemics

This paper studies Coptic communal identity in early Islamic Egypt by analyzing two hagiographical narratives from the Christian Copto-Arabic text The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. The narratives relate incidents of sacred images that become ‘aggressive’ when they retaliate against insults. Although the relation between religious violence and sacred art has merited much scholarly attention, the focus is usually on humans as the aggressors and sacred art as the victim. The reverse is scarcer, and its rarity means we miss an opportunity to rethink such narratives as communicative modes of rhetoric to be contextually interpreted. Here I argue that these aggressive sacred images were tools of power within a polemic religious discourse aimed at proclaiming divine truth, undergirding it with supernatural power, and ultimately shaping Coptic communal identity around this discourse.

The Duty of Violence

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

Identity threats and ideas of superiority as drivers of religious violence? Evidence from a survey experiment in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Religion has become increasingly contentious in recent years. Faith-based discrimination, hostility and violence seem to have increased worldwide. But how can faith lead to conflict? In this article, we test the impact of two important dimensions of religion that have been neglected in previous research: the belief in ‘one true religion’ and perceptions of threats by other religious groups. Putting these two potential drivers to the test, we conducted a representative survey experiment with 972 respondents in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Results show that one of the tested dimensions, perceptions of threats by others, increases the support to use violence to defend one’s own group. This is particularly the case for religiously intolerant respondents with characteristics such as pre-existing threat perceptions, unfavorable views on intermarriage, or belief in the superiority of their own faith. In contrast, we find relatively weak evidence that the prime of ‘one true religion’ increases the readiness to use violence. Our findings have important implications for policy: We conclude that appeals by leaders to threats by others and intolerance toward other faiths can contribute to more conflict. Political and religious leaders should refrain from capitalizing on such notions and should promote tolerance towards other faiths instead.

Promoting Qur'anic Verses That Reject Violence

This article highlights the mistaken paradigms that underpin the use of Islam to justify violence and terrorism. Its exploration of the Qur'an shows that Islam emphasizes peaceful values and promotes non-violent approaches; this study, thus, differs from previous ones that have argued Islam's emphasis on peace based on a deconstruction of verses with violent implications, thereby challenging religious violence and violence perpetrated in religion's name. This study analyses the content of the Quranic verses that emphasize Islam's openness and friendliness, prohibit acts of violence and narrate the peaceful resolution of problems as well as mitigating conflict. The analysis of these patterns of Quranic verses shows Islam's alignment with the values ​​of peace and, conversely, disapproval of violence. This exploration of the non-violent values offered by the Qur'an thus offers an important complement to the existing literature on peace and Islam. This study, thus, emphasizes the strategies to promote non-violence which are universal values ​​of the Qur’an. Received: 26 July 2021 / Accepted: 20 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

The Münster Rising, Memories of Violence, and Perceptions of Dissent in Restoration England

This article examines the ways in which the violent Anabaptist rising at Münster in 1533–5 was reinterpreted in Restoration England. Historians have often recognized that the incident was used to attack English Baptists in the seventeenth century, but there has been little systematic exploration of the processes behind this. This article suggests that recollections of Münster in later seventeenth-century England were a species of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – an internationally shared memory of trauma put to distinctive local uses. References to Münster served as ways for English writers to tie nonconformists to specific acts of religious violence in England, including the Civil Wars and Thomas Venner's 1661 rising in London, without directly recalling these events. Historical discussions of the Münster rising therefore often directly transformed German Anabaptists into Quakers or Fifth Monarchists. Condemnations of the violence in the German city were also used by Congregationalists and Presbyterians to differentiate themselves from Baptists and Quakers and to emphasize their orthodoxy. Some Baptist writers responded by disclaiming their links to continental Anabaptists, while others moved to question the established historiography around the Münster rising. This article demonstrates these points through a range of sources, including sermons, letters, commentaries, controversial literature, and almanacs.

Bangladesh will curb wave of religious violence

Headline BANGLADESH: Wave of religious violence will be curbed