Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Michael Feener, Asia Research Institute and Department of History, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

While social scientists once asserted that modernization and secularization go hand-in-hand, by the 1970s it was quite clear this simply was not so. Excepting perhaps for Western Europe, religious movements everywhere enjoyed growing popularity, piety movements spread, and in post-colonial countries ruling elites were increasingly challenged by religiously inspired opposition movements. This was particularly so in states with Muslim majority populations and in those states where there were influential Muslim minority groups. In 1979 the Shah of Iran, who had been supported by the West, was overthrown and the Islamic Republic established. This event marked a watershed, and many Muslims saw it as a sign that true believers could accomplish anything with the help of God. “Islam is the solution“ became the new slogan for Muslim activists in their global battle against western dominance and authoritarian rule.

It has now been more than thirty years since the Iranian Revolution, and Islam in its politicized form continues to be attractive for broad segments of the population in the Islamic world. As soon as dictatorships fall and free elections are held, Islamic or Islamist political parties achieve remarkable electoral success. Even in Europe many young Muslims are turning to Islam, oftentimes to its more conservative or fundamentalist variants. What this religious renaissance means and what consequences this entails for the respective societies are questions that have sparked controversy in the humanities and social sciences. In this controversy, parties mostly fall in one of two camps. The one points to the disastrous attacks perpetrated by Jihadis, stirring fears of rampant religious fanaticism that will stop at nothing to erect Islamic dictatorships wherever they can. The other camp, focusing its attention on Islamist organizations, claims that the seductive appeal of Islamism will eventually wane, that religious actors tend to become democratic ones once they have been integrated into the democratic process, and that political Islam will eventually become “culturalized”, diluted by market capitalism, consumerism and individualism that are part and parcel of modernity. The most well-known scholars arguing this so-called “post-Islamism-hypothesis“ are Asef Bayat in the US, Olivier Roy in France and Werner Schiffauer in Germany. According to them, inclusion will eventually turn Islamists into post-Islamists who by and large give up their political demands and instead become more concerned with the cultivation of religious tradition.

The paper will critically examine these two positions by looking to the empirical cases of Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Tunisia and Germany.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Susanne Schröter, professor of Anthropology of Colonial and Postcolonial Orders, Goethe University, Frankfurt; principle Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Formation of Normative Orders”; head of the research group “Cultural and Political Transformations in the Islamic World” at Frankfurt University; president of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies. Research interests: Islamic feminism; anthropology of religions; political Islam; peace and conflict studies; multicultural societies; multiple modernities; normative orders and social practices. Selected publications: Gender and Islam in Southeast Asia. Negotiating Women’s Rights, Islamic Piety and Sexual Orders. Leiden: Brill, 2013 (forthcoming), Islam, Salafism and multiculturalism. The German Debate In: Ennaji, Moha (Ed.): Multiculturalism and Muslim DiasporasLondon: Routledge, 2013 (forthcoming); Aceh. History, Politics and Culture Singapur: ISEAS, 2010 (together with Arndt Graf and Edwin Wieringa), Christianity in Indonesia. Perspectives of Power Berlin: Lit, 2010.

Dominik Müller obtained his PhD 2012 in Cultural Anthropology from Goethe University, Frankfurt, where he works as a research associate at the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”. He previously studied anthropology, philosophy, and law in Frankfurt and at Leiden University. Müller is currently a visiting scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Publications: Islam, Politics, and Youth in Malaysia, London: Routledge (forthcoming) An Internationalist National Islamic Struggle? Narratives of ‘brothers abroad’ in the discursive practices of the Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS), In: South East Asia Research, Vol. 18 (4), pp. 757-791

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg