Topographies of Faith : Religion in Urban Spaces [1 ed.] 9789004249073, 9789004248878

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Topographies of Faith

International Studies in Religion and Society Series edited by

Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer, University of Ottawa

VOLUME 17

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/isrs

Topographies of Faith Religion in Urban Spaces

Edited by

Irene Becci Marian Burchardt José Casanova

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013

Cover illustration: “Street Scene in Chinatown, New York City”, photo by Marian Burchardt. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Topographies of faith : religion in urban spaces / edited by Irene Becci, Marian Burchardt, José Casanova.   pages cm. -- (International studies in religion and society, ISSN 1573-4293 ; v. 17)  Includes index.  ISBN 978-90-04-24887-8 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-24907-3 (e-book) 1. Cities and towns-Religious aspects. I. Becci, Irene.  BL65.C57T67 2013  200.9173’2--dc23 2012050065

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1573-4293 ISBN 978-90-04-24887-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-24907-3 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Acknowledgments�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������vii Introduction: Religion Takes Place: Producing Urban Locality����������������������1 Marian Burchardt and Irene Becci PART 1

RELIGIOUS INNOVATIONS IN URBAN CONTEXTS Alevis in Cemevis: Religion and Secularism in Turkey������������������������������������ 25 Murat Es Somalis in Johannesburg: Muslim Transformations of the City������������������ 45 Samadia Sadouni Urban Aspirations in Mumbai and Singapore�������������������������������������������������� 61 Peter van der Veer Excarnation and the City: The Tower of Silence Debates in Mumbai�������� 73 Leilah Vevaina PART 2

URBAN DYNAMICS OF MIGRATION, RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND TRANSNATIONAL RELIGION Connecting the Local, National and Transnational Powers of a Religious Youth Organisation in Berlin�������������������������������������������������� 99 Synnøve Bendixsen Religious Associations, Religious Innovations and Denominational Identities in Contemporary Global Cities���������������������������������������������������113 José Casanova The Geopolitics of Religious Spatiality and Falun Gong’s Campaign in New York����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������129 Weishan Huang

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RELIGION, ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION Religious Involvements in a Post-Socialist Urban Space in Berlin������������149 Irene Becci Belonging and Success: Religious Vitality and the Politics of Urban Space in Cape Town������������������������������������������������������������������������167 Marian Burchardt Porous Boundaries: Hindu-Muslim Demarcation and Crossings in Delhi�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������189 Ajay Gandhi ‘Exit’ and ‘Inclusion’: The Changing Paradigm of Pentecostal Expression in the Nigerian Public Space�����������������������������������������������������207 Godwin Onuoha Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������227

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the product of a series of profound reflections carried out amongst the editors and authors, as much in larger, as in smaller circles, over the last three years. The first attempt to capitalize on the collective intelligence of scholars engaged with issues of urban change and religion occurred in the context of the conference “Urban Governance: Innovation, Insecurity and the Power of Religion”, organized and carried out by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation within the series of the “Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality” at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB) in March 18–23, 2009. José Casanova, who chaired these fascinating discussions, together with Marian Burchardt and Irene Becci, who were among the participants, felt that there was a dearth of theoretically informed ethnographic scholarship on the ways in which religious life and urban changes are mutually and concurrently shaped in the age of globalization, transnational migration, deterritorialization and re-localization, religious revitalization and secularization. How are we to understand the simultaneity of these processes as they unfold in the great cities of our time? After the roundtables we held a second meeting in Göttingen/Germany in which Peter van der Veer joined the editors to define a set of concrete research questions and themes that could be profitably addressed within the scope of an edited volume. We also decided to conduct a second workshop in Berlin in February 2010, again at the WZB. There, the contributors to this volume reconvened in order to explore theoretical issues and ethnographic material in more depth and detail, to investigate how certain conceptual concerns cut across the case material, and to identify the threads and common questions to the different themes, places, communities and traditions. We wish to thank, above all, the Irmgard Coninx Foundation, especially Ingo Richter, Sabine Berking, Stefanie Schäfer and Anne Jungjohann, who not only sponsored our meetings at the WZB in Berlin but also realized the innovative potential of the theme of urban religion right from the beginning. Their support made this book possible but also offered us the most pleasant environment one can imagine. We also wish to extend our gratitude to the Lichtenberg Kolleg at the University of Göttingen who sponsored the Göttingen meeting. Finally, we thank Michi Knecht (Humboldt University Berlin) for stimulating comments at the authors’

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workshop in 2010, Robert Parkin (Oxford University) for excellent proofreading of the final manuscript. Last but not least, our gratitude goes to the anonymous editor of Brill Publishers for the encouraging and insightful remarks which helped us to efficiently address a few shortcomings of a previous manuscript.

INTRODUCTION: RELIGION TAKES PLACE: PRODUCING URBAN LOCALITY Marian Burchardt and Irene Becci There are two reasons why it seems particularly urgent to examine the conjunctures between religion and urban spaces under the current conditions of late capitalist modernity, and to assemble in one volume papers on religious life in very different urban contexts. The first reason concerns the current rewriting of sociological narratives about the fate of religion in modernity. The fact that many cities turn out to be vibrant centres of religious innovation forced social scientists to interrogate and partially reject earlier generalized assumptions about the secularizing effects of urbanization. Urban change seems to reshape religious lines of difference rather than to eclipse them. The second reason stems from the observation that religious life in major cities is often quite different from that in the rural areas, regions or societies that surround them. In other words, major cities are enmeshed in a series of social changes today that constitute them as social zones of a special kind. Cities have their own dynamics of change which are distinct from but still related to the nation state and which also affect religious and secular change. We recognize that the changing nature of religion and the changing conceptual significance and cultural dynamics of urban spaces are both intimately tied to processes of globalization and transnational migration, which have prompted broader efforts in the social sciences to theorize contemporary societies beyond modernist conceptions in which nation states were the ultimate units of authority. This is especially evident in the emergence of the “global cities” paradigm (Sassen 2001), with its particular emphasis on the interplay between the local and the global, between territorialized place and trans-territorial social and economic spaces and processes. The paradigm thus suggests that integration into the global econ­ omy and global social forms can and does indeed happen not exclusively through nation-state regulation, but also through cities. As Saskia Sassen writes (2007: 99) “the city, a complex type of place, has once again become a lens through which to examine major processes that unsettle existing arrangements.” This idea positions modern urban centres between states and the global arena as scalar formations in their own right. Albeit in very

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different national contexts, certain cities occupy similar positions within the hierarchies of global power, as shown particularly well by geographers and political economists. An important reference in this domain is Neil Brenner (2009: 450), who points to the importance of “the transformed form of statehood” and “intra-national territorial disparities” in cities. But which cities? Whose modernity? The belated recognition of the modernity of Asian, Latin American and African societies by (Western) sociologists has unsettled the hitherto prevalent identification of modernity with Western civilization (see van der Veer, this volume). One aim in this volume is to subject the religious and cultural dynamics of the megacities of these regions to cross-cultural comparison, as well as to interrogate the conceptual space opened up by the questioning of modernist theories of religion and the new prominence of urbanity as a production site of social change. This interrogation, we hope, will bring questions of religious change and urban transformations into a creative dialogue with a view to anchoring issues of urbanity and spatiality more firmly within the agendas of the sociology and anthropology of religion. Our intuition is that urban and religious change can be addressed comprehensively if it is linked, more generally, to the social and political controversies over secularization and secularism, which are currently the subject of intense international scholarly debates.1 Secularization and Urbanization In order to conceptualize the particular intellectual perspective of our endeavour, it is important to draw attention to the ways in which religion and urbanity as well as their entanglements have formerly been construed. Several analytical lines connect mainstream theorizations of religious change within the paradigm of secularization and research about urbanism within the paradigm of modernization. These lines reveal remarkable parallelisms. For much of the twentieth century, notions of secularization constituted the meta-narrative of the sociology of religion and operated as unmarked spaces within theories of modernity. Ambiguously placed between progressivist ideas of human development, romantic nostalgia for an ideal­ ized religious past and alarmist concerns with burgeoning moral anomie in 1 Nina Glick Schilller and Ayşe Cağlar (2011) have been very successful in linking together urban and migration studies to create this type of comprehensive approach.



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early twentieth-century Europe, secularization was seen as the fate of religion in the modern age. By many often simply equated with religious decline, as Casanova (1994) has pointed out, the secularization thesis in fact comprises three distinct concepts: the decline of religious participation and belief, the privatization of religion and the increasing differentiation between religious and non-religious spheres of human activity. But it was precisely the seeming confluence of these three processes within the European historical experience that lent ideas about their inherent interdependence and their largely uncontested credibility. The rapid economic and political rise of mega-cities in Asia and Latin America, in China and India in particular, contributed to the belated recognition of the modernity of these societies by (Western) sociologists, as Peter van der Veer elaborates in this volume using the examples of Mumbai and Singapore. In its classical rendition, which would later become known as the ‘orthodox model’, secularization was largely seen not as a product of historical agents such as secularist groups or nationalist elites, but as a result of abstract and inevitable processes such as rationalization, industrialization, and urbanization: in a word, of modernization. All these processes were understood to be undermining the functionality and the very possibility of forms of sociality organized through mechanic solidarity (Durkheim) and constitutive of ‘communities’. As Wilson (1969) emphasized, since religious identities and practices were ultimately premised on the ‘community dimension’ of social life, religion was doomed to lose out in the long run with modernization. Wilson’s theory of secularization was directly inspired by Tönnies’ classical dichotomy of Gemeinschaft (‘community’) versus Gesellschaft (‘society’), in which, in a sort of zero-sum game, the latter was viewed as triumphing in modernity’s iron cage at the expense of the former. No image has better captured and illustrated these ideas than Gabriel Le Bras’s depiction of the late nineteenth-century French peasant who – an example used also by Casanova in this volume – lost his Catholicism when he arrived at Paris’s Gare de Montparnasse after his journey from his native village in Brittany. Interestingly, Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, like Durkheim’s conceptual distinctions, were also extremely influential in shaping early urban sociology in North America, particularly in the Chicago school of sociology. Louis Wirth (1938: 12), one of its main protagonists, suggested that “the superficiality, the anonymity, and transitory character of urban social relations make intelligible (…) the sophistication and the rationality generally ascribed to city-dwellers.” But he also cautioned that the city-dweller “loses, on the other hand, the spontaneous self-expression,

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the morale and the sense of participation that comes with living in an integrated society” as manifested in the communities of rural or small town America. The same ideas are even more pronounced in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s 1921 Introduction to the Science of Sociology: Charles Cooley, who was the first to make the important distinction between primary and secondary groups, has pointed out that the intimate, face-to-face associations of primary groups, i.e. the family, the neighbourhood, and the village community, are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual… As a matter of fact, many, if not most, of our present social problems have their source and origin in the transition of great masses of the population – the immigrant, for example – out of a society based on primary group relationships into looser, freer, and less controlled existence of life in great cities. (Park and Burgess 1921: 56–57)

Cities were thus perceived as social evils, and their sociological study turned into the study of social problems.2 To be sure, scholars noted how integral cities were in allowing for the functional specialization and differentiation that were a prerequisite for the advancement of industrial capitalism. They also acknowledged the rise in tolerance of cultural and religious difference that emerged from the inevitability of engagement with urban heterogeneity. In fact, Wirth contended that the toleration of differences and the relativistic perspective that comes with it would lead to the secularization of life. But concerns for the pathologies of what, following Georg Simmel, was construed as the “urban personality” as the flipside of capitalist urbanity outweighed the older European appreciation of the freedoms that urban life offered. In urban studies the social problems paradigm has long been so powerful that in 1983 Lofland found it “no exaggeration to say that for sixty-plus years … the sentiments and concerns embedded in that set of assertions” dominated her and most social scientists’ “understandings of “great cities” (Lofland 1983: 493). Saskia Sassen comments on the same process when she observes that, having been first richly theorized in terms of “urbanity” by the founders of sociology (Walter Benjamin included), the approach to the city has long been formulated in terms of social problems. However, she argues that at the beginning of the new century, the city regained its status as “a lens for social theory” (2007: 100) more generally.

2 A paradigmatic example of such an approach is the classic study by William Foote Whyte (1967).



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The dissolution of community ties was thus at the core of the urbanization paradigm and was also the key to theories of secularization in which cities were depicted as epicentres of religious decline and became spatialized expressions of secularization. Centred on rational planning, bureaucratized modes of power and industrial production and consumption, cities turned into quintessential embodiments of modernity. This holds true for modernity’s liberal capitalist, communist and postcolonial variants. For people, the passage to cities was conceptualized as equivalent to the transition from rural, traditional and therefore ahistorical modes of existence to autonomous modern citizenship. For state authorities, city planning became instrumental in this regard, based as it was on secular visions in which cities would allow for the transcending of the parochial and sectarian divisions of tradition.3 This, then, implied a more pronounced reordering of identities and loyalties in which religion needed to be subordinated to modern, national citizenship, if not privatized. It is this visionary aspect with regard to Old Delhi that Ajay Gandhi elaborates in his article in this volume. Drawing on bodily aspects of Hindu-Muslim relations, he proposes to think of the body as a site for articulating difference. Studies of Indian city life have tended to be sociologically compartmentalized, focusing on relatively homogeneous groups, practices or spaces, while, according to him, people spend much of their daily life dealing with those who are different from themselves. In the perception, regulation and shaping of differences, religious categories of belonging play a major role. In large cities, as again Saskia Sassen (2007: 98) poignantly emphasizes, multiculturalism is “as much a part of globalization as is international finance”. Sociological accounts4 within the “orthodox model of secularization” addressed this kind of issue regularly at the society level but paid only little empirical attention to the study of secularization in actual cities. As the nation-state was seen as co-extensive with society within modernizationinspired sociological accounts, research on secularization became in large part equivalent to country studies, especially in quantitative sociology. Put­ ting their main emphasis on social indicators such as education, gender and economic status, large-scale studies for the most part flattened differences in religiosity and religious particularities between cities and rural 3 Cities divided by walls such as pre-1989 Berlin or Belfast, as well as cities in apartheid South Africa, remind us that the visions on which modern cities are premised can be explicitly based on segregation and division. 4 Notions of non-urban existence as essentially parochial are most explicit in Marx’s work and Marxist studies.

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areas. In some of them, a national factor indicating the degree of urbanization or modernization was even attributed to the whole country.5 Likewise, the focus on countries as units of analysis limited the ways in which transnational religious formations, the particularities of diaspora religiosity and other religious phenomena outside the purview of nation states could be addressed. Within the secularization paradigm, it was particularly historians and historical sociologists who offered important and highly insightful studies of urban religion. Hugh McLeod (1974) explored the relationships between class and religion in late Victorian cities, stressing the role of the urban working classes for religious decline and the expansion of secular identities. He also demonstrated how cities such as Berlin, New York and London turned into secular spaces at the end of the nineteenth century (McLeod 1992, 1995). Importantly, however, the emergence of secular cities was never a linear process but was accompanied by religious revivals, the adaptation of churches to new urban, and then later secular environments, and by conflicts between secularist and clerical forces. In several studies, David Martin (e.g. 1978, 2010) focused on European capital cities while also stressing how their religious and spiritual significance evolves in relation to other cities. In a brilliant exercise in sociological mapping, Martin (2010) employed Shils’s notions of centre and periphery to explore contrasts between, for instance, Paris and Strasbourg, Berlin and Munich, in the context of power struggles between religious and secular authorities in secularization processes. Secularization is thus not merely a product of modernist fantasies and a presumption of the sociology of religion. As a dominant cultural development, secularization is rather limited to Europe, and as Casanova argues, to some of its cultural outliers such as Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay or Quebec.6 It is impossible to understand religious life in the urban centres of these countries without taking into account the forceful and strongly accelerating dynamics of secularization, and in some places even the emergence of secularized majority populations. In this volume, Irene Becci shows that the engagement of a Baptist community in an East Berlin neighbourhood with the social problems of the locality derives its specific meaning from that community being situated in a largely secularized urban context in 5 Cf. most analyses done on the basis of data gathered through the International Social Survey Program. See http://www.issp.org/. 6 This is not to deny the diversity of the forms, timing and degrees of secularization among and within European societies. For comparative work, see Martin (1978).



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which religious participation and the public display of religiosity are far from the norm. Similarly the effects of secularization are stark for the experiences of committed Christians, in particular when they come from Asian, African and Latin American countries to engage in “reverse missions” in attempts to re-christianize disenchanted European cities, routinely with remarkably little success. What is more, the unease with, and sometimes outright opposition to, the construction of mosques in European cities is not necessarily always an outright or hidden defensive attempt to preserve the inherited secular-Christian character of the urban architectural landscape of religious symbols; it also manifests secularist rejections of publicly visible religious markers. Such rejections can in turn be seen as the result of the discursive power of secularism as a knowledge regime according to which religion is either part of an outdated stage of human consciousness or else ought to be privatized as an inward, subjective, family practice.7 More must be said on this issue, but for now our point is that secularization does have tangible effects on urban religious life. These effects are also obvious if we move away from indicators such as religious affiliation and religious belief and instead draw attention to the institutional viability of religious organizations in the urban spheres of European societies. Here, not only has weekly church attendance become almost the exception in big cities, but problems with the recruitment of religious personnel and shrinking financial resources mean that pastors and priests either have to serve several churches on the same day or that some churches remain without services at all. In numerous English and German cities, for instance, an increasing number of churches are being sold, rededicated to other purposes or incorporated into urban leisure environments, for instance, as concert halls or bars. Likewise, in Japan traditional urban temple Buddhism has come under tremendous pressure as fewer and fewer priests are able to earn a living from their professional practice due to the shrinking number of people paying for their services such as funerals (Reader 2011). Some observers regard urban Buddhist priests as part of the “working poor”, and many of them are unable to recruit successors. All these aspects of secularization have worked to put tremendous pressures on urban sacred topographies. However, they do not combine as a single historical process, nor do they unfold in historical linearity.

7 Cf. Christine Delphy’s finely tuned critique (2006) of how this type of secularist attitude also reproduces racist and sexist orders of knowledge.

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McLeod (1992, 1995), for instance, has demonstrated for Western cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that secularization has always been accompanied by religious innovations. Nowadays, such innovations may involve attempts to improve economic viability through the ‘branding’ and marketization of religious sites according to the logics of the tourism industry, which may itself further secularize these sites. Such innovations are, for example, at work today when emergent religious groups invest secular urban spaces, as the Berlin-based project ‘Global Prayers’ found.8 They may also involve the strategic positioning of specific religious sites within the logic of religious ‘events’ whereby inherited religious festivities are conjoined with broader cultural processes towards the ‘eventization’ of leisure and religion. In Berlin, for instance, some evangelical churches hold their large and technically sophisticated religious celebrations in movie theatres or popular dance clubs.9 However, urban religious creativity in secular environments may also engender the insertion of religious meanings into commercial zones. This can be temporary, as when the Berlin Baptist community mentioned above decides to hold a prayer service in front of a McDonalds restaurant (Becci, this volume), or permanent, as when Buddhist priests in Japan rent tiny shops to capture the demand for blessings among shopkeepers and customers in metropolitan shopping malls (Porcu 2010: 232). Re-conceptualizing the Religious and the Secular Until the 1970s, scholarly orientation and the very scope of scholarly analysis appear to have been peculiarly restricted to modernist narratives. Crucial world events, such as the Iranian Revolution or the introduction of a new global and politically committed style of papacy with John Paul II, brought religion back to the public, as Casanova (1994) has famously argued. Today numerous scholarly debates on religion centre on contestations over the rewriting of these narratives, especially those of secularization, by exploring forms and sites of religion that formerly escaped scholarly attention and by acknowledging the historical embeddedness of this narrative in the Western world. For the majority of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, however, secularization as religious decline is of fairly limited importance outside particular, often elite cultural and political milieus. 8 www.globalprayers.info accessed 3.1.2013. 9 Cf. www.berlinprojekt.com for instance, accessed 3.1.2013.



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This has consequences for the religious significance of urban centres in so far as they retain or even heighten their nature as sacred spaces. In fact, most of the chapters in this volume deal with cases in which the scenario is not one of religious decline but of religious vitality, vibrancy and sometimes fierce religious competition for adherents and power struggles over hegemonic religious definitions of urban spaces. In this volume, Godwin Onouha’s chapter illustrates the mutual impact of such religious competition in the Nigerian public space. As Saskia Sassen writes (2007: 123), cities indeed “are the terrain on which people from many countries are most likely to meet and a multiplicity of cultures can come together.” The complexities arising from migratory circuits and their specific historicity are brought out powerfully in the chapter by Samadia Sadouni on Muslim responses to xenophobic attacks against Somali migrants in the South African city of Johannesburg. Sadouni describes practices of solidarity offered by Indian Muslims to Somalis on the basis of a shared religious belonging. This belonging, however, is limited, as both communities follow different strands of Islam. Interestingly, in the given context Indian Muslims’ agency reflects their legitimacy as ‘proper locals’, which makes invisible their own history of migration. The same desire for legitimacy that can only be acquired through historical presence is expressed in the Somalis’ endeavour to find traces of Somali presence in the city’s twentieth century history. We recognize, however, that issues of secularization may still be played out strongly in such scenarios with regard to the differentiation of religious and secular social domains and secularism as a legal and institutional condition shaping modes of incorporation into the urban spaces of the state and the public sphere.10 This is the case where public domains are officially marked as neutral, while the very parameters of neutrality strongly resonate with the features of religious majority traditions. Nowhere else are the consequences of secularism for opportunities for and restrictions on the religious expression of minority groups more visible than in metropolitan agglomerations where ongoing transnational migration is leading to increasing religious diversity.

10 This is obviously not the case where secular spheres are already eclipsed through regimes of a state religion that greatly privileges the abilities of religious expression in public domains such as education or public places of one, often the majority, community or tradition at the expense of minorities through legally sanctioned hierarchies. The televised images of Coptic Christians being followed by army tanks through the streets of Cairo in the context of Egypt’s political upheavals in fall 2011 spring to mind here.

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In this context, writers such as Talal Asad (2003) and Saba Mahmood (2006) have drawn attention to the ways in which secularism can become a discursive space from which specific religious subjectivities, forms of expression and sensitivities are constructed as desirable for the purposes of social and national integration, legitimized and authorized. The urban implications of such secular governmentalities are evinced, for instance, in the case of the integration of Alevi communities in Istanbul. In this volume, Murat Es traces the process whereby Alevi migration to the Turkish metropolis is marked by diverse reconfigurations of Alevi identities, practices and the communities’ spatial organization in terms of officially sponsored notions of religion. In the process, the informal spaces of human sociality and identification that provide for uneasy cohabitations of religion, culture and ethnicity progressively disappear. This then raises questions about the authority of states to define religion and thus to influence scholarly perceptions of, in Beckford’s words (2003: 20), “what counts as religion”. In many countries, official recognition of a religious group as a religious group is a conditio sin qua non when it comes to permissions to build houses of worship, to run faith-based organizations with public funding, or simply to gather for religious assembly – and thus to be incorporated into the urban fabric. Limitations or denials of official recognition can spawn transnational dynamics when religious groups are forced to choose the ‘exit option’ and assemble in cities abroad. Legally, the Chinese state, for instance, recognizes five religious traditions (cf. Yang 2010). As Weishan Huang argues in this book, the fact that Falun Gong is not among them and that its adherents face serious problems in China has immediate bearings on the ways in which followers understand their meditation practices in the public parks of New York City. These definitional questions are not only relevant to the study of urban religion in terms of the power relations with which they are co-implicated: they also impinge upon researchers’ abilities to see and recognize religion and therefore also bring us back to critiques of the secularization paradigm. One of the perennial epistemological concerns of sociologists and anthropologists of religion regards the very definition of religion as the subject matter. In functional approaches such as Thomas Luckmann’s theory of transcendence, the concept was broadened in a way that allowed for treating as religion what in the perspective of the social actors has little or nothing to do with religion. Other, substantive approaches wrestled with the fact that they inevitably had to rely on the historical experiences of mostly “advanced” civilizations and the ways in which their notions of belief,



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community, God and ritual practice became the raw material out of which academic discourses would construct abstract concepts of religion and turn them into universalized benchmarks. Within this approach, concepts of transcendence and the sacred are by and large co-extensive with organized and institutionalized religion. Moreover, the narrow emphasis on the dimensions of belief (orthodoxy) and practice (orthopraxy) produce extraordinary difficulties in understanding how the sacred may operate to conjoin religion and nationalism as codes of belongingness (Anderson 1983), or how the sacred may come to underpin collective experiential states, as reflected in Marc Augé’s (1982) work on mass spectator sports. More dramatically still, substantive approaches may have trouble in conceptualizing practices such as ancestor worship rituals, which are performed in millions of urban backyards across Africa on a daily basis. Albeit constituting ‘traditional’ collective expressions, such practices fall outside the orbit of ‘world religions’ and inhabit the fault lines on which contestations over differentiations of ‘religion’, ‘culture’ and ‘custom’ unfold. The fact that even some African states do not officially recognize ancestor worship as religion reflects how closely issues of disciplinary knowledge production and legality, of definition and incorporation, are intertwined.11 It seems obvious to us, as Casanova pertinently observes, “that ‘religion’ is a modern category, constituted by the epistemic hegemony of ‘the secular’ and that the so-called ‘world religions’ are inventions of western secular Christian modernity” (2011: 253). As such, “religion” can refer to a variety of issues, and its range is actually an object of dispute and debate. According to Linda Woodhead (2011), in the social sciences religion has been defined and located theoretically in five major ways, which are not mutually exclusive but offer different views of it. The use of them all permits a “full and rounded study of religion” (Woodhead 2011: 138). According to her, religion has been theorized either as a system within culture (with a focus on beliefs, meaning, values, discourses or memory and tradition), or as identity, belonging and boundaries. Moreover, religion is also conceptualized as a social relationship, a network connecting people. Alternatively, and in particular in the anthropology of religion, the latter is first and foremost practice, in particular ritual practice. Another form she has identified is religion as a power relation. In each case, religion is articulated with the notion of the secular. Secular discourses and practices are the context of

11 See Beyer’s brilliant discussion of the impact of such definitions for “non-worldreligions” (2006: 254–298).

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the social location of religion and vice versa, meaning that secularism must be approached jointly with religion. We assume that the distinction between religion and secularism designates one of the most powerful social boundaries historically, since the various ways of drawing it set the parameters for ongoing and re-emerging struggles between religious groups and the state. However, beyond such struggles over the character of the public sphere, the dichotomy of religion and secularity can be employed as a historically influential meta-narrative in that it delineates the space within which many other kinds of boundaries are constructed. Like forms of official recognition, scholarly definitions impinge on the visibility of religion in urban landscapes. If private homes are converted into places for Muslim prayer meetings in Europe, Christian assemblies in China or ancestor veneration in African mega-cities, they may constitute hidden religious topographies that impart religious signification to networks of sites that are only recognizable by insiders. The visibility or invisibility of religious sites, as well as their size, becomes a pivotal issue when the urban context is marked by struggles over the scarcity of space. This situation is at the heart of Leilah Vevaina’s paper in this volume, which deals with the Towers of Silence in Mumbai, a sacred site for the religious practice of Parsis. Although the Towers were once in secluded areas of the city, the urbanization process in Mumbai has led to increasing pressures on the property and to the questioning of the practice’s viability. The debates about this issue in the community, which is confronted by a demographic crisis, splits Parsi identity into different groups, who each propose different solutions for this sacred space that reflect their differing aspirations for assimilation into India and the urban fabric of Mumbai. We thus acknowledge that the myriad ways in which religion is understood and practised by people, authorized by states and conceptualized by social scientists are always situated in historical discursive fields in terms of what Michel Foucault described as the knowledge-power nexus. Between the Local and the Global: Spatializing Religion With the ‘global city’ paradigm, cities have again become prominent on social science agendas. As Saskia Sassen writes (2007: 126), “[l]arge cities around the world are the terrain on which a multiplicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms.” In this thinking about globalization, the global itself is, first and foremost, a category of space. The ways



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in which globalization theories have unsettled taken-for-granted assumptions of structure and agency, of culture and identity, are inextricably intertwined with the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences. However, the implications and repercussions of the ‘spatial turn’ for the study of religion in terms of its inspirations for rethinking the mutual shaping of sociality and space in urban spheres have not as yet been exhaustively explored.12 How does the spatial organization of religious communities shape urban identities? How is the organization of space affected by interactions between the global and the local? How does the partial deterritorialization of religious traditions shape trans-local religious identifications? In other words, how are the spatial organization of cities and spatializations of religious communities, practices and aspirations related to one another? In what follows we argue that, since religion and urbanity are transformed together by current social processes, conceptualizing the urban dimension in studies of religion is the key to a more adequate understanding of religious experience and practices today and the ways in which religion contributes to the shaping of urban contexts. Following Helmuth Berking (2006: 30), we can identify two general modes of the spatial organization of social relations. On the one hand, social relations can be territorialized by being condensed in and by spanning a well-defined territorial unit whose definition is rendered equivalent to the political and cultural definition of these social relations. Overlapping with political authority, this mode is historically expressed in the sovereign territorial nation state, in which culture, society, legitimacy and authority are isomorphic and grafted on to one another. On the other hand, social relations can be organized in deterritorialized forms foregoing spatial enclosures and borders but inhabiting far-flung networks. These social relations crystallize around an ontology of space-as-flows and are mostly associated with global capital and diasporas (Castells 1996). Operating within this paradigm, a first wave of globalization studies was primarily concerned with the economic dimensions and consequences of globalization, especially with the ways in which the global mobility of capital undermined the capacities of nation states to reproduce territorially based modes of social life. The mobility of capital was seen as engendering the mobility of labour, that is, of people, to make space for the triumph of 12 For an excellent set of papers on religion and globalization, with no specific focus on urban religion, see Beyer and Beaman (2007). For an accurate conceptualization of space and religion, see Hervieu-Léger (2002).

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deterritorialized modes of sociality, but also to undermine the very agency and reproduction of localities. Early on, however, scholars such as Robertson (1992) adopted a longer historical perspective and argued that, far from disappearing through globalization processes, the nation state has itself been globalized. In the process, it has turned into the globally accepted and universally recognized social form for the organization of particularities and differences. The history and current transformations of religion cannot be understood without taking these spatial registers into account. Territorially bounded social relations are intrinsically tied to Durkheim’s notion of religion as a community cult (Durkheim 1995; see also Casanova 1994). Later, the territorialization of religion became embroiled in the emergence and consolidation of the Westphalian system of nation states, with its rapidly evolving ideology of national cultural homogeneity and the different consequences of this for the administration, and often forced minimization, of religious diversity. Conversely, deterritorialized modes of the spatializa­ tion of religion are particularly pronounced where religion and ethnicity are strongly differentiated. This differentiation acquired a special dynamic with the rise of universalistic religions of salvation and with the immense geographical mobility of the missionary movements they produced (Weber 1948). Currently, the deterritorialization of religion is primarily visible through the ways in which transnational migration both uncouples and reconfigures place and territory from religious identity and community. Being a Hindu does not mean one lives in India, but for Hindus in Toronto, sacred sites in India can have special significance. A similar reasoning applies to Catholics and the Vatican, Rome and Jerusalem. Against this backdrop, we argue that conjugating these two modes of the spatialization of social relations with concepts of the nation state produces a conceptual space that is of central concern to the study of urban religion. On the one hand, urban centres are often defined through specific relationships with their hinterlands, and with the nation. “Berlin is not Prussia”, as Berking (2006: 34) has quipped, “but without Prussia Berlin would not be Berlin.” Urban religious dynamics and the ways in which these dynamics are cast into struggles over material and symbolic space must therefore be construed in terms of the intertwining of religion and nationalism (Anderson 1983; van der Veer 1994). On the other hand, while nationalism and nation states often set the terms on which religious communities are organized, transnational migration is leading to an increasing dissociation of territory, religion and civilizational culture. These dissociations in turn are reflected in emergent



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forms of postnational and cosmopolitan citizenship for which religions operate as institutional and symbolic levers. In this context, Casanova (2007: 118) suggests that “it is this proliferation of deterritorialized transnational global imagined communities, encompassing the so-called old world religions as well as many new forms of hybrid globalized religions, such as Bahais, Moonies, Hare Krishnas, Afro-American religions, Falun Gong, and so on” that should be conceptualized as an “emerging global denominationalism”, while religions, of course, “compete with many other forms of secular imagined communities or ummahs.” Cities must be conceptualized as the conditions and products of the processes whereby these global imagined communities are reterritorialized and of the often inchoate and creative practices through which religious aspirations and urban visions are conjoined. We argue that the entanglements of religion and nationalism on the one hand, and global denominationalism on the other are two crucial horizons through which religion is folded into urban modernity and must be interpreted. In urban studies, the ways in which communities appropriate and navigate the urban worlds in which they live and in which diverse cultural identities are accommodated in urban spheres have given rise to the idea of the ‘politics of place-making’ or the ‘politics of space’. From the perspective of the sociology and anthropology of religion, this notion raises numerous questions running through the chapters in this volume. How are the politics of space shaped by the boundaries between religious and secular spaces in urban spheres? How do they affect the visibility of religious diversity, patterns of urban religious pluralism and modes of institutional incorporation that reflect such patterns? And again, how are the very abilities of religious groups to engage in the politics of space shaped and constrained through their relationships with nationalism and transnational imagined communities? The scholarly debate in which the meaning of the ‘politics of space’ was set out followed earlier conceptualizations of globalization in primarily economic terms. In a second wave of globalization studies, students of global processes have engaged questions regarding cultural dynamics, particularly the cultural consequences of globalization. Questioning the idea that the acceleration of the mobility of capital, ideas, technologies and people would lead to an increasing cultural homogeneity in terms of a global expansion of Western modernity, scholars started to emphasize that outcomes are more realistically captured in terms of ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1994), ‘hybridization’ (Tomlinson 1999, Urry 2000) or ‘creolization’ (Hannerz 1996). With regard to questions of agency, however, these

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concepts can denote distinct ideas: on the one hand, they may imply the active and creative appropriation of new symbolic resources by local communities; on the other hand, they may suggest a specific cultural and institutional inertia, or the resistance of the local to global influences, either in the sense of cultural absorption and translation, or as direct activist struggles against ‘imperial’ intrusions. As a case in point, we may consider the ways in which the urban engagement of African Christians with new waves of Pentecostal and Evangelical missionary movements can be interpreted, as Godwin Onuoha illustrates well in his contribution to this volume. In urban studies, there is currently no consensus about such questions regarding the relationships between locality and agency. Urban structuralists such as Castells (1996) and Harvey (1989a) tend to locate agency in the mobile spheres of capital and space-as-flow urbanism. For them, globalization quite simply transforms modernity into global modernity, to which locally based actors can only respond defensively. The reminiscences and parallelisms of this characterization to the programme of the Chicago school of urban studies as briefly introduced at the beginning of this chapter are stark. Yet as capitalism has indeed become more global, and as the local, understood in terms of spatial and emotional proximity and epistemological familiarity, is shot through with inequalities and anxieties deriving from the outside, this view undoubtedly captures important points. Authors such as Smith, Massey and Berking, however, are rather critical of this view. In his critique of urban structuralism, Smith (2002: 109) suggests that its schemata “conceptualize the global-local connection that reifies the theoretical terms in this dialectic, privileging (while marginalizing) the local as the place of culture or ‘community’, while marking the global as the dynamic economic space of capital and information flows.” With regard to agency he concludes: Since human agency operates at multiple spatial scales, and is not restricted to “local” territorial or socio-cultural formations, the very concept of the “urban” thus requires re-conceptualization as a social space that is a pregnant meeting ground for the interplay of diverse localizing practices of regional, national, transnational and even global scale actors, as these wider networks of meaning, power, and social practice come into contact with more purely locally configured networks, practices, meanings, and identities.

This rendition of urban life is associated with a notion of the ‘politics of place-making’, in which place is uncoupled from locality and its conceptual cognates, and which Doreen Massey (1993) has construed as emplaced crossings of flows and interconnections that constitute the collective



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imaginaries on the basis of which communities confront their social worlds. We recognize that processes of economic globalization and the global, regional and national mobility of labour they engender are closely linked to the diversification of urban religious landscapes that is at the heart of religious life in many cities today, as Marian Burchardt shows with the example of Pentecostalism in Cape Town in this volume. At the same time, we note that cultural globalization reaches far beyond the economic dimension. In this vein, the engagement with the televised messages of Egyptian Imams of young Muslims in Berlin, and other European cities for that matter, creates a sense of familiarity and hence locality that is bound to specific sites. But we also note that urban religiosity unfolds in terms of a ‘politics of place-making’ in which multiple and diverse identities of places are negotiated and contested. Synnove Bendixsen describes and problematizes how young pious Muslims in Berlin may or may not feel that the messages of far-away preachers are so relevant for their own life situations, but these features of everyday life differ dramatically from place to place and greatly impinge on the meanings that religious messages acquire. Her chapter examines how the variety of religious spaces in urban Berlin makes it possible for young pious Muslims to pursue a religiosity which combines the local, national and transnational in new agglomerates. Some researchers have addressed the renewed visibility of religion in urban public domains through the notion of ‘postsecular cities’ (Baker and Beaumont 2011). While the concept of post-secularism has proved highly valuable in terms of reorienting philosophical and ethical debates on the legitimacy of religion in democratic public spheres, we are rather sceptical of its adequacy for understanding religious life in contemporary cities. The chapters in this volume rather demonstrate how the oscillating of urban religious sociality between national and transnational ties is bound up with religious-secular dynamics. They thus engage with the politics of placemaking in concrete cities, and with the diverse modes of the religious production of locality (Appadurai 1995). Structure of the Volume To summarise our argument briefly, we contend that, despite their different historical backgrounds, cities in northern Europe, Africa, India and Turkey have some commonalities. Under urban circumstances, people experience, more than anywhere else, the rapidity of cultural change, the hiatus of social inequalities, the consequences of the human impact on nature and

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the tangible power of political authorities. Sedimented strata of migratory populations and spaces of historical anchoring constitute the stage of their daily lives. Religious discourses, practices and communities, like sacred spaces, are part of the urban experience, but they also contribute to changing the urban environment. Processes of collective and individual identity formation, of constructing and maintaining power relations, occur in cities on the local, national and transnational levels, on each of which they are traversed by religious elements. Cities are sites of encounter for diasporas, nodal points of transnational communities and laboratories of religious innovation. They are sites where faith traditions live side by side, where internal religious differentiations are re-negotiated, and where multiple claims to public recognition and tolerance meet with entrenched cultural hierarchies, social exclusion, political resistance or ideologies of pluralism. Urban spaces are particular arenas in which the boundaries constituting religion as a social category, but also the boundaries between communities and diverse sets of cultural practices, are constantly redrawn, contested and shifting. As a result, as scholars of religion we are urged to scrutinize how well our inherited vocabularies account for the fluid and mutating nature of religion and its cognates such as secularism, belief etc. In the context of this book, we propose three main themes that are central to the transformation of religious boundaries in urban spaces. Religious Innovation in Urban Contexts Cities expose otherness. Processes of migration to cities and changing patterns of minority–majority relationships therefore often entail transformative agendas. However, the nature of that otherness is not always clear and often changes in response to differential opportunities and modalities of inclusion. This is apparent when cultural or ethnic communities, such as Alevis in Turkey, are pressured to re-fashion themselves in religious terms, or when urban Pentecostal identities in Africa are pitted against inherited ethnic customs. What we find here are emerging (re-)differentiations between religion and ‘culture’ in which both terms are put to reflexive appraisal with a view to defining acceptable limits of change and adaptation to urban circumstances. In many European countries too, multiculturalism is increasingly being reformulated in terms of religious diversity and – albeit limited – pluralism. It seems that such contestations are particularly pronounced when strong links between cultural tradition and religion are forged in the wake of immigration, especially when in the ‘receiving nation’



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religion, not ethnicity, becomes the primary mode of both integration and social exclusion. Boundaries set by culture or ethnicity may then be replaced by those of religion, which can be extended into transnational spaces. Conversely, ethnicity may constitute the primary marker of transnational solidarity, while at the local level religious alignments are foregrounded. The general question is, how can we understand and explain such dialectics of tradition and innovation, religion and (the wider) culture? Urban Dynamics of Migration, Religious Diversity, and Transnational Religion Religious diversity and plurality are often unproblematic in countries when they exist in geographically separate places. In cities, by contrast, the boundaries of and between religious groups are inscribed in daily routines. They are enacted when, for example, in the context of xenophobic violence against Somalis in South Africa, help is lent to co-religionists and solidarity confined to them. They are also negotiated when membership criteria come under pressure within struggles between orthodoxy and reformism. What are involved here are competing claims to the ‘true religion’. This raises important questions as to how these struggles are played out in confrontations over representations – through places of worship, collective rituals etc. – in urban topographies. Simultaneously, urban contexts may also motivate people to forego ‘official’ and institutionalized models of religion and to reconstruct boundaries that may become ‘invisible’. Religion, Economic Inequalities and Social Exclusion For the great majority of people, the passage to cities is motivated by aspirations for success and material improvement. But for long-term residents too, the city is something of a map on to which both desires and social inequalities are inscribed. Sometimes boundaries of social inequality are co-extensive with religious boundaries, sometimes the two criss-cross. Very often, it seems that religious innovations are concentrated in contexts of material deprivation. Here, religion is used to negotiate hardships and becomes entangled in multiple forms of ‘getting by’. Recent developments, particularly in Pentecostal Christianity and reformist Islam, have revealed how the readiness of religious groups to address poverty has shaped their attractiveness. Moreover, they have highlighted how the current predicament of global capitalism has lent renewed significance to Weberian concerns with links between religious notions of salvation, the economic order

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and the conduct of life. Here, we are faced with questions as to how such developments respond to the cities’ social order and to urban economies, to how individuals transcend religious boundaries prefigured by economic circumstances, or fail to do so. In all three themes, there is an assumption that the spatial and social boundaries of religion intersect in complex ways with temporal boundaries, in other words, with the multiple forms of relating (distancing, preserving, engaging) to past, present and future. The contributors take this pragmatic historicity of the subject matter into account and highlight how religion is practised in terms of demarcating pasts, confronting presents and envisioning futures. References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, A. 1995. “The Production of Locality.” In R. Fardon (ed.), Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Augé, Marc 1982. “Football: de l’histoire sociale à l’anthropologie religieuse.” Le Débat 19: 59–67. Baker, Christopher, and Justin Beamont (eds.) 2011. Postsecular Cities: Religious Space, Theory and Practice. London and New York: Continuum. Beckford, J. 2003. Religion and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berking, H. 2006. “Contested Places and Politics of Space.” In H. Berking, S. Frank, L. Frers, M. Löw, L. Meier, S. Steets and S. Stoetzer (eds.), Negotiating Urban Conflicts: Interaction, Space and Control. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Beyer, Peter 2006. Religion in Global Society. London: Routledge. —— and Beaman, L. (eds.) 2007. Religion, Globalization, and Culture. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Brenner, N. 2004. “Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe, 1960–2000.” Review of International Political Economy 11(3), 447–488. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —— 2007. “Public Religions Revisited.” In H. de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press. Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society (Vol. 1). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Delphy, Ch. 2006. “Antisexisme ou antiracisme? Un faux dilemma.” Nouvelles Questions Féministes 25(1): 59–83. Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Transl. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press. Glick Schiller, N., and A. Cağlar (eds.) 2011. Locating Migration: Rescaling Cities and Migrants. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hancock, M., and S. Srinivas 2008. “Spaces of Modernity: Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 617–630. Hannerz, Ulf 1996. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. 1989a. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1999. La religion en mouvement: le pélerin et le converti. Paris: Flammarion.



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—— 2002. “Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in Modernity.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(1): 99–105. Lofland, L.H. 1983. “Understanding Urban Life: The Chicago Legacy.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 11(4): 491–511. Mahmood, S. 2006. “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation.” Public Culture 18(2): 323–347. Martin, D. 1978. A General Theory of Secularization. New York: Harper and Row. —— 2005. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— 2010. “Inscribing the General Theory of Secularization and its Basic Patterns in the Architectural Space/Time of the City: From Presecular to Postsecular?” In A.L. Molendijk, J. Beaumont and C. Jedan (eds.), Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious, the Political and the Urban. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Massey, D. 1993. “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam and G. Robertson (eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge. —— 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McLeod, H. 1974. Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City. Hamdon: Archon Books. —— 1992. “Secular Cities? Berlin, London, and New York in the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In S. Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. London: Clarendon Press. —— (ed.) 1995. European Religion in the Age of the Great Cities 1830–1930. London and New York: Routledge. Park, R.E., and E. Burgess 1921. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pollack, Detlef 2003. “Religiousness Inside and Outside the Church in Selected PostCommunist Countries of Central and Eastern Europe.” Social Compass 30: 321–334. Porcu, E. 2010. “Speaking through the Media: Shin Buddhism, Popular Culture and the Internet.” In U. Dessi (ed.), The Social Dimension of Shin Buddhism. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Reader, I. 2011. “Secularization RIP? Nonsense!” Paper presented at the Conference Multiple Secularities and Global Interconnectedness, 13–15th October, University of Leipzig. Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. —— 1994. Globalisation or Glocalisation? Journal of International Communication 1(1): 33–52. Sassen, S. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— 2007. Sociology of Globalization. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Smith, M.P. 2002. “Power in Place: Re-theorizing the Local and the Global.” In J. Eade and C. Mele (eds.), Understanding the City: Contemporary and Future Perspectives. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Tomlinson, J. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Urry, J. 2000. Sociology beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Van der Veer, P. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Weber, M. 1948. “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.” In H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Whyte, William Foote 1967. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wilson, B. 1969. Religion in Secular Society. New York: Penguin Books. Wirth, L. 1938. Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1–25. Woodhead, Linda 2011. “Five Concepts of Religion.” International Review of Sociology 21(1): 121–143. Yang, Fenggang 2010. “Oligopoly Dynamics: Consequences of Religious Regulation.” Social Compass, 57: 194–205.

PART 1

RELIGIOUS INNOVATIONS IN URBAN CONTEXTS

ALEVIS IN CEMEVIS: RELIGION AND SECULARISM IN TURKEY Murat Es On a hot summer evening, I was helping Ali clean up the congregational hall of the Okmeydanı Cemevi in Istanbul. When we found some nuts and paper tissues left behind by the congregation, Ali, a teenager who volunteered regularly for service at the cemevi, was embarrassed and furious. He started to criticize the congregation for “their ignorance.” Eventually his frustration with the congregation’s failure to maintain order in sacred space expanded to the cemevi itself: “Why do not we have orderly places [of worship] like Sunnis? In every mosque everyone gathers for prayer at the same time, the prayers are the same everywhere, there is no difference between individual practices of imams compared to our dedes. We should work hard to make all cemevis alike, just like the mosques.” This chapter builds on the anxieties and challenges that Ali and many other Alevis face with regard to cemevis, their centres of religious and cultural activity in Turkey. The relationship between urbanity and religion will be analysed through the prism of the construction of spaces of belief and secular religion by Alevis in Turkey. Alevis are diverse ethno-religious communities comprising one fifth to one third of Turkey’s population. Due to their esoteric, non-conformist beliefs and practices, they have historically been considered heretics, if not ignorant Muslims, by Sunnis, in need of enlightenment about ‘the true Islam’ (Clarke, 1999; Bozarslan, 2003). The majority of Alevis do not abide by the ‘pillars of Islam’: they do not make the pilgrimage to Mecca, do not perform the five daily prayers (namaz), and do not fast during the Ramadan. Instead of attending mosques for the daily prayers and the weekly communal prayer, Alevis participate in cem ceremonies, communal gatherings led by dedes, charismatic spiritual leaders who claim to be the descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Alevis fast for 12 days during the month of Muharram to commemorate and mourn the murder of the Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet. For pilgrimage they have been increasingly frequenting the town of Hacıbektaş in the Central Anatolian city of Nevşehir, where the founding saint of the Bektashi Sufi order is enshrined. Alevi beliefs and practices are immensely diverse as a result of the predominantly oral transmission of lore and traditions – at least until

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recently – as well as relatively isolated trajectories of historical development in separate regions (van Bruinessen, 2000; Massicard, 2007). Relatively marginalized under the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, various Alevi communities have until recently lived predominantly in rural areas of Anatolia and Balkans, with limited contact not only with Sunnis, but also with other ‘Alevi’ communities (Olsson et al., 1998). There are not only regional, but also ethnic and linguistic differences that cut across Alevi communities, underlying the presence of a multitude of Alevisms in Turkey. The reason for Ali’s frustration with “the lack” of a certain type of order in his cemevi has to do with this diversity within and between Alevi communities. In this chapter, I look at the reconstitution of Alevism as secular religion through three related developments: the emergence of a transnational Alevist politics of recognition, increased interaction with Sunni Islam mediated and embodied by state institutions, and the temporospatial dynamics of urbanization. I argue that secularism in its vernacular form precedes Alevism as religion and is constitutive of it. Alevi communities predominantly lived in rural areas up until the second half of the twentieth century. Their migration to cities has been often interpreted as the main force behind the rupture regarding ‘traditional’ Alevi beliefs and practices. The idea that Alevism is both more prone to modernization and defenceless in the face of it is commonplace in the literature on it. One of the main themes that predominate in the recent popular and academic studies of Alevism and Alevi communities has been the deinstitutionalization experienced in the face of Alevis’ displacement to urban space, which has ‘exposed’ them to ‘modernity’ (Yaman, 2004; Yalçınkaya, 1996; Subaşı, 2002; Üzüm, 1999). The literature is imbued with references to the loss of authority and influence by dedes, the declining interest in organizing and attending cems and the erosion of communal ties (Subaşı, 2010; Yılmaz, 2005). Initially, these studies posit a dichotomy between the rural and the urban, where the former stands for tradition – which is associated with organic religion – and the latter is the privileged site of the secular modern. An essentialized Alevi identity anchored in a rural past then becomes the foundation of a mythical Alevism that informs the ‘modern’ obsession in such analyses with ‘the fading tradition’. Approaching cities exclusively as sites of rupture for Alevis/m is misleading. The discontinuities in terms of the organization of Alevi rites and the declining authority of dedes over their communities are not just limited to city contexts and cannot be explained simply by urbanization.



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The reasons for this transformation to a great extent have to do with the banning of religious brotherhoods and the closing of shrines and lodges in 1925 by the founding elite of the Turkish Republic in an attempt to eliminate religious organizations that were autonomous of the state control (Kara, 2004). The Kemalist regime attacked folk and mystical expressions of ‘religion’, including Alevism, in order to disseminate a secular, rational version of Sunni Islam as the state religion. Accordingly, despite the fact that Alevi communities were not recognized as religious communities under the Ottomans, their recognition as Turkish citizens resulted in Alevis’ interpellation as Sunni Muslims. The closing of shrines and banning of the activities of the dedes were major blows to the reproduction of Alevi communities. As a result of the single party regime’s undermining of religious organizations, by the 1960s both Alevis and the Sunnis were hardly observant in Turkey, and the major premises of the secularization thesis – the declining influence of ‘religion’ and privatization of belief (Casanova, 2009) – were accepted as inevitable and went unchallenged (Berkes, 1998). That is, Sunnis too experienced a ‘rupture’: the cultivation of an Islamic lifestyle and Islamicization of everyday spaces and practices by Islamists have emerged in the same context and as a response to challenges similar to those Alevis faced (Tuğal, 2009). Despite, then, the prevailing sense of loss that predominates in the debates over Alevism, in this chapter I prefer to emphasize the reinstitutionalization process. Alevi identities are reconstructed through transnational networks as well as novel institutional practices in the contemporary conjuncture, rather than simply being dismantled by modernization and/or being decoupled from “traditional ways”. Traditions are not just static entities that are discarded by the advent of the modernity: they are traditions because of the very fact that they continuously reproduce themselves. Secondly, I do not take the ambiguities, multiplicities and transformations that define the contemporary Alevism(s) and Alevi communities as a problem, a weakness to be feared or overcome. Rather, I suggest that the fractured structure of the Alevist movement, the myriad understandings of Alevism, the diversity of Alevi practices and the current positioning of Alevis in the political arena are contingent on the institutionalization patterns, material limits and unequal power relations that Alevis engage in. Lastly, since I do not subscribe to a pure and essentialized Alevism located in the static “tradition,” of a rural past, I do not approach the recent restructuring process as a deviation from an “authentic, traditional” Alevism.

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The diversity characterizing the Alevi presence in Turkey is reflected in the architecture, design and operations of cemevis. Cemevis, literally “houses of gathering”, are cultural and religious centres established by Alevis. They have emerged primarily in urban centres, largely during the last three decades. Cemevis are places where Alevi communities congregate to organize cem ceremonies and communal services such as funerals, the sacrificing of animals and the distribution of alms. They also are sites for ‘cultural activities’ such as music and dance classes. This does not mean that there was no spatial organization for the performance of cem ceremonies and other communal practices preceding the emergence of cemevis. Although lodges and shrines were used in some cases for the performance of cem ceremonies, it was more often the case that the congregation would gather in the houses of dedes or one of the community members, both of which were generally distinguished from the other dwellings in a village by having large rooms to accommodate a large number of people (Şanlı, 2004; Birdoğan, 2003). Not only were openair areas such as village squares used for organizing cem ceremonies (Bozkurt, 1993), it was also common for dedes to spend a few days in the houses of each of their followers. Then cems would circulate between the houses the dede was staying at (Aydın, 2003). There were only three cemevis in Istanbul before 1993, but by March 1994 their numbers had increased to around twenty (Seufert, 1997). During the fieldwork that laid the groundwork for this chapter, between 2004 and 2007, in Istanbul alone there were around thirty cemevis. The struggles around the construction of cemevis as alternative places of worship to mosques have engendered heated debates about secularism and religion in Turkey since the early 1990s. Establishing cemevis has not been a smooth process. From the early 1990s cemevi constructions have often been started illegally, and they have gradually become established as ‘cultural centres’, which is the only viable legal status a cemevi can possibly attain today. To this day the Turkish state refuses to recognize cemevis as places of worship, a category reserved exclusively for mosques. Despite the agreement on the part of all participating Alevi organizations to have cemevis recognized as places of worship during a much publicized “Alevi Opening” by the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) between 2009 and 2010, to date there has been no change regarding the official status of cemevis (Köse, 2010). Having cemevis recognized as places of worship has over time become one of the most important aims of the Alevist movement. However, these attempts have been consistently opposed by the state and the Turkish



alevis in cemevis: religion and secularism in turkey29

Directorate of Religious Affairs representatives. They reason that recognising cemevis as places of worship would threaten the unity of the Islamic creed by creating an alternative place of worship to mosque, which then would suggest that Alevism is a separate religion, outside the purview of Islam (Bardakoğlu, 2010; Sofuoğlu and İlhan, 1996). Attaining a legal status for cemevis has been an important component of what is commonly referred to as the ‘Alevi revival’ (Olsson et al., 1998, Çamuroğlu 2000). This revival involved the establishment of organizations that carried Alevi demands into the public sphere and challenged the Turkish state over its privileging of Sunnism as the de facto state religion. Alevist organizations have also exposed the discrimination that Alevis face in the services they receive from the state and opposed compulsory religion classes for Alevi students. An explosive interest in popular and scholarly works on Alevism, the emergence of a number of festivals around symbolically significant Alevi settlements and the establishment of cemevis were the other components of the revival (Vorhoff, 1998). Alevi revival developed parallel to the rise of the identity politics of the Kurdish and Islamic movements that also gained momentum at this period (Ayata, 1997). Another characteristic of the Alevi revival was the central role played by transnational organizations. Şahin (2002) argues that Alevism has ‘gone public’ thanks to the strength of Alevi transnational networks as much as the availability of sociopolitical opportunity structures. Massicard (2003; 2007) defines Alevism as simultaneously trans-state and transnational. Alevist organizations based in Europe, especially in Germany, have provided ideological and financial support and guidance to the Alevist organizations in Turkey (Özyürek, 2009). The demise of political activism in Turkey, combined with the rise of a politics of recognition based on cultural rights in Germany during the late 1980s, led to the establishment of the AABF (The Union of European Alevi-Bektashi Federations) in Germany in 1993. Thanks to Germany’s migration policies, which increasingly tended toward multiculturalism at that time, the AABF was able disarticulate Alevism from Turkish national identity and hence distance itself from the control of the Turkish state. The recognition of Alevis in Germany in 2002 as a separate religious community (Religionsgemeinschaft) independent of Islam was a turning point in defining Alevism as separate religion. Meanwhile, using its recognized status in Germany, the AABF mobilized the German parliament and embassy to lobby the EU to become involved in the struggles over Alevis and Alevism in Turkey (Massicard, 2003). Cemevis appeared in this context as important sites of institutionalization and differentiation in relation to Sunni Islam. The head of the AABF,

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Turgut Öker, remarked: “We have come to realize that Alevis cannot organize without cemevis, just like the Christians need churches and the Muslims need their mosques” (Massicard, 2007: 332). However, to retain the difference with Sunni Islam, Alevi religion was depicted as humanist and tolerant. The participation in cems of men and women together was especially emphasized to underline the progressive and pro-integration aspects of Alevism at the expense of Sunni Islam, which the AABF represented as strict, often fundamentalist, and prone to oppress women (Sökefeld, 2008). Rapid industrialization, population growth, and the mechanization of agriculture resulted in large waves of migration to the urban centres in Turkey after the 1950s (Karpat, 1976; Erder, 1999). Due to their relatively marginalized socioeconomic status, Alevis were represented strongly in migration flows towards urban centres in Turkey and among guest workers seeking employment in Western Europe (Şahin 2002; Kieser, 2004). Migra­ tion and urbanization are processes that bring about place-based struggles to find living space and defend the boundaries of the life-world for groups in fragmented, diverse, contested and dense settings. Movement to urban centres has had serious implications for the lives of Alevi communities. Aksoy and Robins argue that in Turkey the “newcomers to the city choose to live in areas where their compatriots are already established in order to benefit from mutualistic networks of support” (1994: 69). Alevi migration to cities is a case in point. Bozkurt (1993) notes that the first “Alevi neighbourhoods”1 started to emerge on the outskirts of big cities by the end of the 1950s. Tajbakhsh defines the urban as the locus of “the encounter with diversity, strangers, the overlapping worlds of multiple allegiances, networks and identities” (2001: 7). Accordingly, city life involves “intensified exposure to other cultural identities, resulting in conflict, mutual influence and inter­ penetration, or forms of accommodation” (ibid.: 163). For Alevis the greater migration wave of the 1960s resulted in increased contact with the Sunnis: The Alevis’ gradual integration into the wider society – migration to the towns, education, careers in public service – brought them into closer contact, and sometimes in direct competition, with strict Sunnis, from whom they had remained socially separated for centuries. This caused growing tension, especially in the towns of the ethnically and religiously mixed zone 1 However, the established neighborhoods were far from being ghettos. There is no neighborhood, at least in Istanbul, where Alevis comprise the totality of its population, including the infamous Gazi neighborhood.



alevis in cemevis: religion and secularism in turkey31 mentioned above, but also in the large cities further west (van Bruinessen, 2000: 120).

Confined largely to the rural areas with scattered distribution throughout Turkey, Alevi communities lived not only relatively isolated from their Sunni neighbours, but were also separated from other “Alevi communities” (Massicard, 2007). Migrating to city centres entailed the redefinition of the communal boundaries between Alevi and Sunni communities. Maintaining the spatial separation between Alevis and Sunnis has become problematic in the urban setting. Sharing the same living and working space with Sunnis has made it difficult to maintain not only the physical but also the mental distance. Increasing engagement with Sunnis – as neighbours, colleagues, classmates and so on – has brought about significant changes to the reproduction of Alevi communities and restructured Alevi practices, for Alevi communities came under the gaze of the Sunnis, their significant Other and interlocutors. Everyday negotiations of difference required new acts of (b)ordering. A salient outcome of sharing the city space with Sunnis and interacting with them was the fact that Alevi beliefs, practices and institutions are constantly compared to Sunnism – which itself is another unitary construction – and defined on the basis of what they lack by comparison with Sunni Islam, Sunni communities and their practices. It is important to bear in mind, however, that since Sunni institutions have been firmly incorporated to both imperial and republican state apparatuses in the form of ‘official Islam’ (Aktay, 1999), the power relations between the groups are asymmetrical. Living in the cities has not only been conducive to encounters with Sunnis but also with other Alevi communities. This has made it possible to foster a new, larger sense of community, rendering the imagination of ‘an Alevi society’ possible. Interactions between different Alevi communities on the one hand created a larger sense of ‘us’ premised on similarities between different communities. The differences between these communities have become obvious with the expansion of communal boundaries, and this has led to debates about who represents the ‘authentic’ tradition, unspoiled by ‘degeneration’ and/or ‘assimilation’. The expansion of an imagined ‘Alevi society’ has gone hand in hand with the fragmentation and dispersal of local communities in the urban space. City life not only introduced Alevi communities to new forms of socialization through encounters with a number of ‘others’, it also made it difficult to maintain particular performances of Alevi identity such as cem, because a ‘proper, village cem’ ideally required community members to share the same living space in

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order to maintain the mechanism of communal surveillance for the görgü cems.2 However, the continuous migration waves forced migrant groups with similar backgrounds to settle in different parts of the city. While the first-comers were living in the semi-central parts of the city, the newcomers settled on the outskirts of Istanbul, and this dispersal of migrant communities in different parts of the city made the maintenance of rural networks in the cityscape problematic (Bayraktar, 2003). Under these circumstances, it became difficult if not impossible to maintain communal control over fellow villagers when they were scattered throughout the city and easily lost contact with one another. A concomitant feeling of loss pertaining to a tradition which is thought to be fading away has become common among Alevis. This in turn has engendered nostalgia for their places of origin. Village life has come to be depicted as the site of a ‘pure’ community and the ‘authentic’ Alevism that would constitute the vantage point from which the contemporary restructurings could be instigated. Nazmiye was a fifty-four year old Alevi woman from Şiran. She had been living in the Sarıyer district of Istanbul for the last thirty years. Nazmiye described the years of her youth spent in the village with a great sense of nostalgia: “I cannot tell you how much people were close to one another… There was respect for the elders, for the dedes. Is it the case now? The young people are disrespectful …the cems in the village were totally different. I do not find the cems here [in Istanbul] intimate enough.”3 Such approaches to the past lead to a romanticized vision that “posits an idyllic past of unified tradition, certainty, stasis, and a cognitive and behavioural commonality…an ‘original lifeworld’ of traditional absoluteness and fixity, where an individual is…first ‘truly’ at home” (Rapport and Dawson in Morley, 2000: 246). In the life narratives of my many informants, village life appeared as one of harmony, peace and perfect social relations unharmed by the ‘degenerating effects’ of the city life. The life in the village was remembered as the locus of a ‘pure, authentic, original, real Alevism’.

2 Görgü cems are generally conducted once a year, when communal problems are discussed in the presence of the dede and conflicts are resolved. Although it might be acceptable (technically with the permission of the dede to whom one is attached) to attend normal cem ceremonies presided over by different dedes, one must see his or her own dede for Görgü cems. 3 Personal interview, Istanbul, March 2005.



alevis in cemevis: religion and secularism in turkey33

However, this particular enactment of an idealized past engenders an image of rural life as fetishized and situated in an ever recurring, frozen past outside history. The result is the construction of a contrast between the urban and the rural, where the rural is differentiated from the urban not only spatially, but also temporally: visiting one’s home town where Aleviness is preserved ‘pure and authentic’ was, in this sense, is not only a spatial, but also a temporal journey. Urban Cems in Cemevis The emergence and rising number of cemevis in the public space point to an attempt on the part of Alevi communities to inscribe their identity in the urban space. In this regard cemevis complement the visibility of Alevis and Alevism in the public sphere with Alevi visibility in the public space. This situation renders the Alevi presence in urban public spaces recognized and normalized. The institutionalized presence of Alevi communities in the urban public space constitutes a claim of recognition directed at the Sunni majority and the state, and hence a will to be incorporated into the wider social and state institutions. Cemevis in this process materialize as vantage points from which Alevi organizations launch their negotiations with the state for the legal recognition necessary for attaining religious and cultural rights. The emergence of cemevis is also closely related to the urban migration that Alevi communities experienced starting from the 1960s. This resulted in increased contact with both state agencies and Sunni and other Alevi communities. Yet the experience of Alevi communities in the urban space entails conceptualizing their acquiring visibility in the public space beyond the paradigm of the ‘flourishing’ of a suppressed identity, since, as David Morley remarks, “not everyone can feel comfortable in the public sphere in a naturalised and secure way when they become visible as the other” (2000: 119). Sharing the same urban space with Sunnis and their active participation in the public sphere have made Alevis increasingly aware of and anxious about their difference from Sunnis. As a result, the Alevist politics of difference is also predicated on a strong anxiety to stress the similarities between Alevis and Sunnis due to the asymmetrical power relations between the members of the two groups. Cemevis today play a significant role in the Alevist politics of representation: cem ceremonies that are open to the public are organized to promote the image of a moral and credible ‘Other’ in the eyes of Sunnis, and a modern and secular community in the

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eyes of secularist groups, state actors, the media and European Union (EU) representatives, who frequent cemevis to observe cem ceremonies. The language used in cem ceremonies and funeral prayers (Turkish or Arabic), the regulation and distribution of female bodies in congregational halls (mixed with or separate from men) and the costumes that Alevi dedes and hocas wear during the performance of Alevi rites and services (similar to or different from those of imams) are all subjects of fervent debate. The cem ceremony (ayin-i cem) is one of the central and distinguishing communal practices of Alevi communities. Cems are of great importance to the production and reproduction of Alevi communities (Yaman, 2004; Zelyut, 1992). The cem has a variety of localized names: “Ayn-ül Cem, Ayin-i Cem, Cem Ayini, Abdal Musa Kurbanı, Birlik Cemi, Dardan İndirme Erkanı, Koldan Kopan Erkanı, Ali Cemi, Görgü Cemi, İçeri Kurbanı, İkrar Cemi” (Yaman, 2004: 56). There are also regional differences in terms of the categorization and roles of the participants of cems. The cem ceremonies serve many purposes. A cem can be a means of socialization; a vehicle for the transmission of traditions; a way of passing time during long winter days, when contact with the outer world was cut in the rural Anatolia; and lastly, a platform where disputes between community members would be settled by the dedes. There are two kinds of cems: those held only on special occasions, and regular weekly cems. The liturgy of cems and their scheduling varies from region to region. Apart from the cems held on special days, there are cems that mark the end of the harvesting season in the villages (Clarke, 1999; Birdoğan, 2003). When one refers to the differences between the present-day urban cems and cems in the past, there is a risk of romanticizing the rural cem ceremonies as part of a fixed and essentialized Aleviness situated in an ideal past. To avoid this, one needs to pay attention to the re-imagination of past practices in accordance with the contemporary interests and struggles to redraw communal boundaries. Today the cem services, which once corresponded to a kind of organization relevant to the small-scale institutions of local communities, have attained different meanings and uses. To begin with, the practical division of labour (for example, cleaning up the cemevi, cooking and serving the food) that existed among the community members has been taken over by professional employees at cemevis. This situation makes it difficult for participants to take active part in cems and pushes them more and more into a passive stance in how they relate to the ceremony, the dede and the other participants. There have been further changes in the organization of cems, namely in their scheduling, duration and procedures. First, there have been shifts in



alevis in cemevis: religion and secularism in turkey35

the timing of the ceremonies. In village communities, it was generally accepted that there would be no cems in the agricultural season, because during the spring and summer the villagers were busy tending to and harvesting their crops (Birdoğan, 2003). The dede of Sarıgazi Cemevi explained to me the logic of this arrangement as “The flowers have bloomed, [hence] the sofus4 have left.” Special attention was paid to holding the ceremonies on Thursday or Friday nights. The ceremonies started in the evenings and sometimes lasted throughout the night until the morning. In Istanbul, I observed that cems were organized regularly once a week at many cemevis on a calendrical basis throughout the year. Some cemevis also held cems in the day-time during the weekends because those were the only times available for many participants who worked full time during the week. The Şahkulu and Karacaahmet shrines organized cems at the weekends. Cemevis such as Bağcılar, Kartal, Nurtepe and Yenibosna Cemevi held cems every week on Thursday nights, regardless of the season. Mehmet, a board member of the Bağcılar Cemevi, explained the reason for having cems every week throughout the year in the following manner: “It is difficult to find dedes in villages, but this is Istanbul. Cems are held every week because we can find dedes here permanently.”5 The presence of a number of dedes settled and constantly living in Istanbul makes it possible to have dedes in cemevis always available. However, there is no uniform practice regarding the timing of cems, as cemevis such as Okmeydanı, Ihlamurkuyu and Sarıgazi organize cems only during the autumn and winter. Hüseyin Dede of the Sarıgazi Cemevi, told me that the reason they stopped cems in spring and summer was that “people take leave from their jobs, they work, or they go on vacation. Nobody comes [to attend cems].”6 Since numerous dedes have migrated to the cities, many villages have been left without them, and this in turn has influenced the timing of cems in the villages as well. The dedes who live in the big cities go to their villages in the summer, and the cems are no longer organized in the winter, but during the summers. For example, Veli Dede at the Şahkulu shrine complex, told me that in his village his talips7 waited for his return to the village in the summer in order to start the cem ceremonies.8 4 A sofu is a crudely religious person, but the intention is rather to say sofi, which means “Sufi” and here stands for dede. Personal interview, Istanbul, January 2006. 5 Personal interview, Istanbul, June 2005. 6 Personal interview, Istanbul, February 2006. 7 Talips are the followers of dede families. The relationship is traditionally hereditary between the families of the dede and the talips. 8 Personal interview, Istanbul, May 2005.

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Another change that has taken place with regard to the duration of cems is that participants demand that they be shorter. Busy working schedules and often the simple fact that “people get bored” necessitates this. The longest cem ceremony I attended throughout my fieldwork lasted three hours. An administrator from Ihlamurkuyu Cemevi complained about the length of cems: “the dede keeps the cems [lasting] too long. God should be able to understand the prayers quickly, right? Cems continue for two to three hours. I want to [be able to] finish my worship in five minutes and leave.”9 The demand he voiced for shorter cems points to a shift in the meaning of cems. Defining the cem exclusively as ‘worship’ stems from a change in the way the ceremonies are perceived, where chatting, eating, telling stories and settling disputes during cems is excluded from the meetings. Accordingly, the ceremonies begin to look like ritualized prayer proper, leading to expectations and demands that cems be shorter. The belief in the ability of dedes to perform keramet (miracles) has diminished, too. The dedes’ claims of descent from the prophet’s lineage are believed by some to endow them with supernatural powers. Dedes are not only responsible for attending cems, at times dealing with funerals and settling disputes, but they often act as healers and are considered to have magical powers. Some dede ocaks10 are believed to command specific powers. For instance, “some dedes from [the Kureyşan] Ocak are known to lick hot iron or burning stoves during cems. Alevi dedes believe that this gift was given to them by Kureyşan Ocak by birth (Bozkurt, 1993). In certain regions there used to be a practice of drinking the water the dede had used to wash his hands during the cem ceremonies in order to receive a blessing. In urban cems, however, the sacred aura stemming from the very presence of a dede does not often carry the same weight anymore, as the order and structure of the cem have gained in significance over the embodied sacredness of the dede. Another mystical element that has become disapproved of by many is esrime (spirit possession). Bozkurt (1993) explains esrime as follows: In this mourning part [of the cem] someone from the society (toplum) or the dede is possessed…loses his [consciousness] completely. Jumping on his knees, he beats his knees. Foam comes out of his mouth…in Alevi society possession is considered to be sacred. The person who is possessed is considered to have attracted the blessing of the holy ones on him. (ibid.: 95)   9 Personal interview, Istanbul, March 2006. 10 Each dede lineage is organized around what is called an “ocak,” which literally means “hearth, household.” Ocak represents the dede lineage that is established by a claimed descendant of the prophet.



alevis in cemevis: religion and secularism in turkey37

I witnessed an esrime during a cem ceremony I attended at the Yenibosna Cemevi. A young man, who later told me that he was in the semah group11 of Karacaahmet Cemevi and who attended cems regularly at different ceme­ vis, became possessed during the ceremony and started to scream loudly and hit his knees very hard. He was shouting uncontrollably and crying as well. What I noticed was the feeling of unease and disapproval all around me. The old men sitting next to me were shaking their heads, and the dede warned the young man “to stop acting excessively (aşırı)” several times, pointing to the desire for self-control and discipline during the ritual. Concomitant with this rationalization has been the standardization of Alevi beliefs and practices. The most important factor behind this standardization has been the increasing importance of the ‘printed word’ over the ritual transmission of the liturgy, transforming it into a “standardized doctrine” (Gümüş, 2004). In line with the emergence of new institutional centres, there has been a propensity towards unifying different cem practices and in so doing creating standardized cem ceremonies valid in all cemevis throughout Turkey. As such, the dedes in many cemevis are given notes from which they read the prayers and the hymns. The organization of the service is the same at all the cemevis attached to the certain federations and foundations. In Germany too, the Commission of Dedes (Dedeler Kurulu) working under the Alevi Bektashi Unions Federation of Germany targets the “bringing of order to the variability of the ordering of the twelve services for the first and the last time…[and] designating the days of the beginning and end of Alevi festival days” (ibid. 522). This will to unification is another step towards turning cems into standardized prayers. In an attempt to “save the cems from disappearing,” regional liturgies that have developed through different historical and geographical processes are being undermined. Curiously, Alevi traditions are being abandoned in an attempt to recover and protect Alevism(s). Yet not everyone is eager to have standardized cems. A bağlama12 teacher from the Bağcılar Cemevi complained how cems were being turned into “merely prayers,” referring to the cems he had attended in the CEM Foundation: A cem is a space where people are given knowledge about worship. If this turns into a Sunni mentality in the way that you will bend and rise, now you will sing a hymn, then you will bend, everything is going to be monotonous and formalist (şekilci). You will have done the same things for a limited time  11 Semahs are ritual dances that constitute an important part of the cem ceremony. 12 Bağlama is a long-necked lute that is specific to Anatolia. It is played in the cem ceremonies.

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murat es span. By performing the same hymn in every cem this [the cems] will become monotonous. When you enter places like that, you cannot have the feeling. There is more of talk about the zahir [the outside, the visible, truth accessible to everyone] than batın [the inside, hidden, truth accessible to the chosen ones].13

This bağlama teacher contrasted namaz, the codified, standardized Sunni prayer, with cem ceremonies by invoking one of the most frequently circulated Alevi criticisms directed at the practice of namaz in his attempt to defend the multiplicity of liturgies in cem practices. According to this point of view, what distinguishes the cem from the namaz is the difference between the two forms of prayer in terms of intentions and feelings. What matters during the cem is to have a clean heart, mind and soul rather than mere bodily cleanliness or the ever repeated ‘monotony’ of bodily movements. Lastly, after the opening of cems to strangers, certain Alevi practices have been abandoned due to the risks they caused in encounters with Sunnis. For instance, drinking alcohol in cems has overwhelmingly been excluded from cemevis, a very delicate issue that is often used to question the extent to which Alevis are ‘good Muslims.’ This practice was already not common to all Alevi communities (Şanlı, 2004), but many communities ceased performing it, despite the fact that the tradition is still alive in some villages (Yaman, 2004). In urban cemevis, even mentioning the possibility of using alcohol during cems is out of question. Mosques are the ‘Other’ of cemevis. Just as Alevism is defined on the basis of what it ‘lacks’ in comparison to Sunnism, cemevis have been defined in terms of what they ‘lack’ compared to mosques. Cemevis are places that are defined on the basis of a real or imagined lack (of legitimacy, history, legal status or financial means), of absence (of a unitary architecture, a community), of incompleteness (of symbolic and material construction) and of danger (of police raids, Islamist attacks and legal ambivalence regarding their status). This means cemevis are constructed discursively as what mosques are not, yet with reference to mosques, still. Accordingly, mosques appear as models to be emulated or rejected, depending on the political orientation of the organization that is operating the cemevi, but their referential significance cannot be ignored. Cemevis have, partly for this reason, become increasingly similar to what mosques signify for Sunni

13 Personal interview, Istanbul, January 2006.



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communities: places of worship. In the process, not only have certain practices been eliminated, but new ones have been invented. A good example of these novel practices is Ramadan Cems/Prayers (Ramazan Cemi/ Namazı). The administrators of Alibeyköy Cemevi were forced to initiate Ramazan Niyazı (an alternative term to namaz) because of the demand for them from Alevis living in the area: “We did not want to start it, but it is better than sending them to a mosque”, the director of the cemevi told me. Then he concluded in a joking manner: “Soon we will start having namaz in the cemevi in order to prevent them from going to mosques.” A board member from Okmeydanı Cemevi complained about the demands of the congregation: “They are coming [here] and asking why there is no Ramadan namaz. Was there such a thing as Ramadan namaz in your village? Why are you inventing things in order to please the Sunnis?”14 Conclusion The above discussion should not be read as yet another story of linear secular modernization. This account of the cemevis actually challenges the assumption that urbanity is necessarily the site of secularization that undermines religion and religious institutions and/or marginalizes previously ‘religious/pious’ communities by shifting community members’ primary belonging towards other affiliations and communities, including the nation. I would like to challenge the truism that a rural community ‘melts’ in the face of modernization or simply ‘becomes modern’ by leaving its traditional baggage behind. What happens is actually a process through which shifting categories of religion and secularism, modernity and tradition, are constantly negotiated by Alevi communities in their urban struggles (Erdemir, 2005). Such struggles work through the situated and vernacular meanings and articulations of the ‘modern’, the ‘secular’ and ‘religion’. Hence, in this chapter I suggest that urbanization is not necessarily conducive to secularization understood as the decline of religion, but, as the Alevist politics of place shows, it can lead to the secular/ized formation of religion as a formula: script-based belief, religious personnel with codified knowledge, and standardized forms of worship neatly confined to distinct places of worship. That is, Alevis are forced to act in a religious frame of reference which is secular. Even though there is a dominant narrative of individualization, a loosening of communal control over individuals and 14 Personal interview, Istanbul, December 2004.

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the decline of the authority of religious leaders in the urban setting, there is also a story of establishing the necessary cultural and material capital to initiate a process of the reorganization and redefinition of Alevism as religion. There have been widespread efforts recently to define Alevi beliefs, practices and communities in a systematic and monolithic fashion. Such unitary tendencies have to do with the shifting location of Alevi beliefs and practices from the semi-isolated life-worlds of various Alevi communities to become part of the public realm. One of the outcomes of the movement of various Alevi communities to urban centres has been the need to redefine what it means to be an Alevi because the ambiguous and multiple meanings of Aleviness have posed difficulties regarding the incorporation of Alevis into the wider society. In this sense, constructing cemevis that are modelled on mosques points to a process through which Alevis are being Alevized just as Sunnis were Sunnified under the monolithic and centralized control of state-sponsored, secularized Islam in Turkey. The definition of a ‘place of worship’ brings together restrictions in the spatial configuration of cemevis, namely the confining of Alevi practices to the realm of secularized religion and the exclusion of any other activity or practice that has a stake outside this secularized realm of the ‘religious’ as ‘politics’ or ‘culture’. The discursive battle that revolves around the construction of cemevis operates through binaries such as culture versus religion, Alevism versus Sunnism, cemevi versus mosque, dedes versus imams, and so on. Nonetheless, these oppositional frameworks fall short of explicating the complexity of this process, which is based on constantly shifting boundaries of difference. Losing their authority as the descendants of the prophet, dedes are compelled to become professional clerics like Sunni imams, while cems are redefined exclusively as religious rites or ceremonies and standardized as formalized prayers. While secularist Alevis tend to appropriate Alevism as a culture, the restructuring of Alevi practices points to a process that is leading to the emergence of a ‘religion’ of Alevism as diverse Alevi beliefs and practices are selectively archived codified, standardized and fixed by institutionalized centres. First, whereas previously Aleviness was experienced through group practices, it has now become more of an individual matter – and individuals can shift their alliances and seek new belongings by associating with groups other than those they inherited. In this regard cemevis draw our attention to the concentration and territorialization of Alevism on the one hand, and its dissemination on the other. Secondly, as practice and belief become separated, some Alevis opt to learn the ‘philosophy’ of



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Aleviness, and consequently there emerges a ‘belief without practice, religiosity without practicing’ that is articulated by the absence of ‘feeling’ in the face of Alevi practices. Alevism has been reformulated as religion (not as a religion) and been ascribed a place in the secular model, and a compartmentalized one at that. Dressler notes that “[t]he objectification of Alevism, resulting from the appropriation of post-1980 languages of religious authenticity in Turkey and the opportunities offered by the status of ‘religious community’ in Germany, takes on increasingly specific religious forms” (2008: 303). What he calls “Alevi religionizing” relies on approaching Alevism through a “language which is based on the dichotomy of the secular-religious” (ibid.: 304). Indeed, the restructuring of Alevi beliefs and practices points to a process through which Alevism emerges as religion. Parallel to this, approaching cemevis foremost as ‘places of worship’ has, at this point, come to be taken for granted among Alevis, prevailing over other meanings and aspirations regarding these places. As experiencing one’s Aleviness ceases to be embedded in the realm of the everyday through the displacement of cem ceremonies from home spaces to cemevis, participation in Alevi rituals and cem ceremonies becomes more of a self-conscious practice, that is, a matter of personal conscience and deliberation. In the cemevis I visited, participants in cem ceremonies were expected to perform ‘prayers’ within clearly demarcated time limits through an increasingly unified cem liturgy. I would argue that this points to an emerging Alevi religiosity that is based, as Talal Asad remarks, on “the construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible in belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time” (1993: 207). The increasing fragmentation of social space into neatly demarcated places for housing, recreation, entertainment, education, sport, religion and so on is a sign of secularization. In the lives of Alevis, this tendency manifests itself through the displacement of cem ceremonies from home spaces to cemevis. Constructing Aleviness as religion helps exclude it from the realm of the everyday and gives it a designated place in the secularist dichotomy between sacred and profane. In the process, cems have become something external to everyday life, with careful boundaries based on limitations of time and space. This situation points to a reinstitutionalization process characterized by the increasing specialization and professionalization of communal services. The ways in which Alevism is reinstitutionalized through cemevis point to the organization of a secularized way of life for Alevi communities. The performance of Aleviness is being displaced from the realm of intimate habitual practice into the anonymous setting of

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cemevis. And this could only be possible by initially defining Alevism within the framework of religion, as religion exclusively. To put it differently, it was essential to define Alevism on religious grounds first in order to secularize it later. In this reformulation, the sacred becomes crystallized as religion through the systemizing and homogenizing effects of the doctrinization and standardization of beliefs and practices. Following this, Alevism as religion finds its place, being positioned at its exclusive location: the cemevi. References Aksoy Asu, and Kevin Robins 1994. “Istanbul between Civilization and Discontent.” New Perspectives on Turkey 10: 57–74. Aktay, Yasin 1999. Türk dininin sosyolojik imkanı. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Asad, Talal 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ayata, Ayşe 1997. “The Emergence of Identity Politics in Turkey.” New Perspectives on Turkey 17: 59–73. Aydın, Ayhan 2003. Erenler kitabı. İstanbul: ASPAŞ Genel Dağıtım. Bardakoğlu, Ali 2010. 21. yüzyıl Türkiyesi’nde din ve Diyanet. İstanbul: DİB Yayınları. Bayraktar, Ulaş 2003. “Formelleşen hemşehri dayanışma ağları: İstanbul’daki hemşehri dernekleri.” Toplumbilim 17: 107–118. Berkes, Niyazi 1998. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. London: Hurst & Co. Birdoğan, Nejat 2003. Anadolu’nun gizli kültürü Alevilik. İstanbul: Kaynak Yayınları. Bozarslan, Hamit 2003. “Alevism and the Myths of Research: The Need for a New Research Agenda.” In P.J. White and J. Jongerden (eds.), Turkey’s Alevi Enigma: A Comprehensive Overview. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Bozkurt, Fuat 1993. Aleviliğin toplumsal boyutları. Ankara: Tekin Yayınevi. Çamuroğlu, Reha 2000. Değişen koşullarda Alevilik. İstanbul: Doğan Kitapçılık A.Ş. Casanova, José 2009. “Secularism and Secularisms.” Social Research 76(4): 1049–1066. Clarke, Gloria L. 1999. The World of the Alevis. New York: AVC Publications. Dressler, Markus 2008. “Religio-secular Metamorphoses: The Remaking of Turkish Alevism.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76(2): 280–311. Erdemir, Aykan 2004. Incorporating Alevis: The Transformation of Governance and Faithbased Collective Action in Turkey. Harvard University: PhD thesis. —— 2005. “Tradition and Modernity: Alevis’ Ambiguous Terms and Turkey’s Ambivalent Subjects.” Middle Eastern Studies 41(6): 937–951. Erder, Sema 1999. “Where do you hail from? Localism and Networks in Istanbul.” In Ç. Keyder (ed.), Istanbul: Between the Local and the Global. Lanham, etc.: Rowman Littlefield Publishers. Gümüş, Burak 2004. “Alevi hareketleri ve değişen Alevilik üzerine.” In İ. Engin (ed.), Alevilik. İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi. Kara, İsmail 2004. “Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı: devletle Müslümanlar arasında bir kurum.” In Y. Aktay (ed.), Modern Türkiye’de siyasi düşünce 6: İslamcılık. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Karpat, Kemal 1976. The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization. London etc.: Cambridge University Press. Kieser, Hans-Lukas 2004. “The Alevis’ Ambivalent Encounter with Modernity: Islam, Reform and Ethnopolitics in Turkey (19th-20th cc).” Paper read at the Conference on Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia or the Life and Times of F.W. Hasluck (1878– 1920). University of Wales, November 3–6, 2001.



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Köse, Taha 2010. “AKP and the ‘Alevi Opening’: Understanding the Dynamics of the Rapprochement.” Insight Turkey 12(2): 143–164. Massicard, Elise 2003. “Alevist Movements at Home and Abroad: Mobilization Spaces and Disjunction.” New Perspectives on Turkey 28/29: 163–187. —— 2007. Türkiye’den Avrupa’ya Alevi hareketinin siyasallaşması. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Morley, David 2000. Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Olsson Thord, Elisabeth Özdalga and Catharina Raudvere (eds.) 1998. Alevi Identity: Cultural, Religious and Social Perspectives. Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Özyürek, Esra 2009. “‘The Light of the Alevi Fire Was Lit in Germany and then Spread to Turkey’: A Transnational Debate on the Boundaries of Islam.” Turkish Studies 10(2): 233–253. Şahin, Şehriban 2002. “Bir kamusal din olarak Türkiye’de ve ulus ötesi sosyal alanlarda inşa edilen Alevilik.” Folklor ve Edebiyat, Sayı 29: 123–162. Şanlı Hasan 2004. Dersimde cem. İstanbul: Tij Yayınları. Seufert, Günter 1997. “Between Religion and Ethnicity: A Kurdish-Alevi Tribe in Globalizing Istanbul.” In A. Öncü and P. Weyland (eds.), Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books. Sofuoğlu, Cemal, and Avni İlhan 1997. Alevilik Bektaşilik tartışmaları. Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Yayınları. Sökefeld, Martin 2008. Struggling for Recognition: The Alevi Movement in Germany and in Transnational Space. New York: Berghahn. Subaşı, Necdet 2002. Alevi modernleşmesi. Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları. Tajbakhsh, Kian 2001. The Promise of the City. London: University of California Press. Tuğal, Cihan 2009. “Transforming Everyday Life: Islamism and Social Movement Theory.” Theory and Society 38(5): 423–458. Üzüm, İlyas 1999. “Günümüz Alevi örgütlenmeleri ve geleneksel Alevilikle ilişkisi.” In İSAM, Tarihi ve kültürel boyutlarıyla Türkiye’de Aleviler, Bektaşiler, Nusayriler: 335–375. İstanbul: Ensar Neşriyat. Van Bruinessen, Martin 2000. Kürtlük, Türklük, Alevilik, etnik ve dinsel kimlik mücadeleleri. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları. Vorhoff, Karin 1998. “‘Let’s Reclaim our History and Culture!’ Imagining Alevi Community in Contemporary Turkey: Die Welt des Islams 38: 220–240. Yalçınkaya Ayhan 1996. Alevilikte toplumsal kurumlar ve iktidar. Ankara: Mülkiyeliler Birliği Yayınları. Yaman, Ali 2004. Alevikte dedelik kurumu ve ocaklar. İstanbul: Karacaahmet Sultan Derneği Yayınları. Yılmaz, Nail 2005. Kentin Alevileri: Reşadiye-İkitelli Örneği. İstanbul: Kitabevi.

SOMALIS IN JOHANNESBURG: MUSLIM TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE CITY Samadia Sadouni Introduction Theories of secularism in the West and in the twentieth century have tended to neglect the visible presence of religion in modern urban spaces. With the increasing movement of international migrants, the city’s religious landscape has been transformed over the last thirty years, not least in Western Europe. Migration is also at the centre of major changes in Johannesburg, southern Africa’s economic hub. In this metropolis, the Muslim religious landscape has undergone major changes with the incorporation of many new immigrants since 1994, that is, in the post-apartheid era. These include South Asians from Pakistan and Bangladesh, subSaharan Africans, who come mainly from Somalia, Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Mali, and to a lesser extent North Africans (Moroccans, Algerians, Egyptians), Bosnians and Turks. This pronounced pluralism in Johannesburg has led to the increased visibility of religion (new religious institutions, religious events and religious festivals in public spaces) and to the creation of diverse territories marked by the settlement of different migrant communities.1 These three intersecting transformational modes of the post-apartheid urban era are also closely linked to transnationalism. This chapter will focus on a particular group, Somali refugees, who add to the diversity of Islam and to the ways of being Muslim in South Africa, thus contributing to the analysis of a group which is still understud­ied. Here I examine how Somalis’ “religious spatiality” (Hervieu-Léger, 2002) has created new Muslim communities and spaces in inner-city Johannesburg. The main argument of this chapter is that religious solidarity, a religious urban environment and aspiration (van der Veer, this volume) represent the main resources for Somalis’ incorporation into their new host city. Somalis have 1 This is nothing new in South Africa: during colonialism South Africans experienced the perpetual negotiation of frontiers and demarcation of territories in order to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’.

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chosen to settle where they can hear the five daily calls to prayer (adhan). In Johannesburg religion has been and still is a source of identity and meaning, as well as of group affiliation and group membership. In this chapter, I will discuss the local and religious urban context, as well as the impact of Somalis on that context. The Post-Apartheid Muslim Religious Landscape: The Case of Mayfair Most Somalis in South Africa are refugees or asylum-seekers who have fled the wars, political conflict, ongoing turmoil and humanitarian crises in Somalia. Forced migrations of Somalis have helped to reshape the neighbourhood of Mayfair, an area close to the Central Business District (CBD) of Johannesburg, where the majority of the population is Muslim. During apartheid, with the introduction of the Group Areas Act, innercity Johannesburg became a White area. Forced removals began in the 1950s in a part of Vrededorp, more popularly known as ‘Fietas’ (Carrim, 1990). Fietas, which began as the Malay Location in 1893, was renamed Pageview2 in 1943; it included different population groups, such as Coloureds, Indians, Chinese, Africans and Cape Malays.3 The inhabitants of the area were relocated to separate racial ghettos in Lenasia, Soweto, Eldorado Park and the western townships. However, some Indians succeeded in remaining in Fietas and Fordsburg,4 adjoining Mayfair. They refused to abide by the apartheid laws and used different political strategies to avoid their relocation to the newly designated Indian areas, such as Lenasia (south of Soweto), Azaadville, Laudium (near Pretoria) and Roshnee (in Vereeniging).5 Scholarly literature has not yet provided a full record and analysis of the political and legal strategies which undermined the apartheid government’s attempts to implement its policy of racial and ethnic segregation and impose its racial human geography. By appropriating their own 2 Pageview was named after the then mayor, Mr J.J. Page. 3 The terms Cape Malay, Indian, Black and White are used in the 2001 Census, even though they are contested. In the specific case of South African Muslims, ‘Cape Malay’ refers to people descended from Muslim immigrants brought to the Cape, initially as slaves, by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century; ‘Indian’ refers to people whose ancestors arrived from India in the late nineteenth century; ‘Black Muslim’ is used to refer to the descendants of the Zanzibari population in the province of Kwazulu-Natal and to local Black converts to Islam. A small number of Whites have also converted to Islam. 4 Fordsburg was originally established in 1887 for White miners. 5 The part of the Transvaal that is centered on Johannesburg was made a separate province called Gauteng after 1994.



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space (Lefebvre, 1991), Indians have rooted their presence (Sassen, 1998) in Johannesburg since the 1900s. Despite several efforts by the state to evict them, they have contributed to the urban planning of the city. When Mohandas Gandhi addressed his Muslim, Christian, Parsi and Chinese supporters in 1908, Johannesburg was the home of a strong Indian community settled around the Hamidia Mosque. Earlier, in 1904, Indians had been forcibly removed from the “coolie location”, an Indian slum west of the inner city which was deliberately burnt down for sanitary reasons. The authorities wanted its former residents to settle about 19 km south of Johannesburg in Klipspruit. However, they refused this evacuation and chose to move to the Malay Location, which became the cosmopolitan area known as Fietas. As soon as they arrived, wealthy Indian merchants invested in the area by acquiring stands and became the main agents for the immigration of African residents by giving them leases (Dugmore, 1993). As we shall see, Indian Muslim landlords would extend this capitalist form of hospitality to Somalis during the post-apartheid period. During the apartheid era, Indian Muslims (mostly Gujarati) continued to oppose the government through a process of the ‘détournement’ of laws that enabled them to shape their community in confrontation with preexisting urban and racial policies. As long as their economic interests and cultural life were protected, Indian leaders were keen to negotiate with the relevant authorities; if this failed, they would take legal action against the particular town council or the government. Indian Muslims, like other religious groups that were discriminated against, went through a process of secularization, in the sense of the separation of religion from national politics over generations during the colonial and apartheid periods. This is best understood as a privatization of community space: on the one hand, this served the interests of the apartheid regime (by conforming to its policy of separation); on the other hand, this helped the Muslim groups to protect particular religious and cultural identities. The racial segregation imposed by the Pretoria regime was in fact seen by conservative and bourgeois Muslim leaders as a way of guaranteeing their freedom of religion and their community initiatives and modes of local and community governance. Secularization here means that the racialized society and state bureaucracy, the latter with its policies of enforced racial segregation, structured the autonomy of religion and influenced the internal organization of a particular religious group. These are the political and cultural alchemies that have enabled the Islamization of community territories with the construction of mosques, madrasas (Islamic school) and Islamic organizations. Within their particular local community borders, Indian Muslim leaders

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used politics to serve the religious interests of their group and its Islamization, even though in society in general, Islam remained apolitical until the 1980s. In that decade, Muslim movements began to participate in the non-racial struggle against apartheid and tried to distance themselves from the ethnic-religious communalism that the apartheid system encouraged (Esack, 1988). Since the 1970s, the Indian presence in the metropolis has been represented and symbolized by the Oriental Plaza mall built in Fordsburg. This marked a new period in the urban engagement of Indian Muslims. The Indian traders who for many years refused to be evicted from 14th Street in Fietas finally decided to move to the Oriental Plaza after drastic forced removals in 1977. However, in the late 1980s a new influx of South African Indian Muslims returned to the inner city area of Johannesburg. They were able to move from the Indian suburbs and townships to Fordsburg and Mayfair by using proxies – White South Africans – to buy houses on their behalf. Today Mayfair, from Hanover Street in the east to Mayfair West, is predominantly Muslim and home to most of the Somalis living in Johannesburg. Not only has the demography of Mayfair changed as a result of Somali settlement, but religious beliefs and practices have also been transformed. For example, Somalis belong to the Shafi’i madhhab (a school of Islamic jurisprudence), which differs from the Hanafi madhhab to which most South African Indian Muslims adhere. We turn now to the periodization of Somali incorporation into the global city that is Johannesburg. The Invisibility and Visibility of Somali Immigrants However, this Muslim space in Mayfair, which Somalis have helped to enlarge and diversify, was not a virgin space for them. Although the study of the different waves of post-apartheid Muslim migration in South Africa is still a burgeoning academic field, we still need to analyse earlier African Muslim migrations. Somalis represent just such a group. They came as the servants of British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer war and then decided to settle in Johannesburg. At this time, they were not classified as a distinct Somali racial group but integrated into the Cape Malay population by the Transvaal authorities.6 A new history of Johannesburg therefore needs to 6 National Archives of Pretoria, LTG_94_97-9. A letter dated 3rd August 1904 sent by ‘Shikh Ahmad Effendi’ to the Transvaal authorities testifies to Somalis’ early presence in Johannesburg. Effendi requested that Somalis should be classified as Cape Malays.



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be told by taking into account earlier Somali migration. This, of course, has implications for urban belonging linked to local histories (see also Burchardt, this volume). Analysis of the narratives of early Somali immigrants shows how memories create a sense of belonging to South Africa in terms that remind us of Lefebvre’s concerns about the inter-related topics of time and space. By emphasising that in the past Somalis were integrated into the Malay community of Pageview, present-day Somali migrants are able to take ownership of the space and claim their “right to the city” rather than rely on their rights as refugees or asylum-seekers. They have embedded their legitimate presence in an invented generational history of settlement which resembles the claims of Malays and Indians to be part of the city. There is a strong relationship between the collective memories of these international Somali migrations and the construction of identities. Those narratives that insist on an earlier presence of Somalis in Johannesburg having been established are either permanently produced or rejected as marginal and embarrassing by several informants. For one group, the use of names like Magodishu, El-Alamein, Sidi Rezegh and Benghazi on the front of different buildings in Coronationville is self-evident proof of the presence and imprint of Somalis in Johannesburg prior to the post-apartheid era. The suburb of Coronationville is linked to the history of Fietas: Coloured residents had to move to this new area near the Coronation Hospital, and it is likely that these buildings were named El-Alamein and Sidi Rezegh in recognition of the service rendered by Coloured troops who fought in North Africa during the Second World War. Somalis who arrived in Johannesburg in 1994 or 1995 appropriated this military history as proof of the earlier migration of Somalis. Today, narratives that emphasize the historical presence of Somalis in Johannesburg represent newer migrants’ aspirations to be socially and politically integrated into the post-apartheid, cosmopolitan city of Johannesburg. Unlike the Indians, Somalis have no figure similar to Gandhi whom they can use as evidence of their historical, political and charismatic presence in Johannesburg. Does this suggest that the historiographies of Johannesburg produced so far only recognize minority groups through their heroes and great leaders? A second group of Somali migrants tend to assert their urban legitimacy by emphasizing their religious beliefs. They link this to local knowledge that portrays the Somali as the symbolic figure of African Islam or the authentic Black Muslim. Even today there are those among the West African Muslim migrants who regard Somalis as the Arabs of Muslim Africa. This cultural symbolism may provide Somalis with the opportunity to take

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revenge on history and finally assert their particular identity and visibility in the new democratic dispensation in terms of religious apologetics, rather than insisting on their historical presence a century ago. However, the underground Somali identity among Cape Muslims or in the Coloured communities of the past can still be seen in present-day Mayfair, which is marked by a Somali Muslim culture that is strongly linked to its ethnic diaspora. However, some members of this second group of Somali migrants do not endorse these narratives of a past Somali presence, rejecting identification with earlier migrations which do not serve their present identity interests and their desire to portray themselves as faithful Muslims. According to one informant, many of these Somalis have escaped charges of murder and other criminal acts by migrating to southern Africa. In this latter case, Somalis refuse to acknowledge the past wrongs of their counterparts (whether imagined or real) or whatever role they may have played in the British Empire. What is important for them is to overcome or deny the memory of an earlier Somali diaspora within their community and to gain legitimacy in the South African Muslim space by emphasizing their faithfulness and authenticity as Muslims. Identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims seems to give them better opportunities to gain economic and political solidarity among South African Indian Muslims. For both groups, representations of the past in their biographies tend to be selective and to serve as a mode of self-production. However, this does not prevent us from using these diaspora narratives as a way of understanding these two modes of being Somali in Johannesburg: on the one hand, the assertion of migrants’ rights to the city (based on a real but reinvented local history); on the other hand, the Africanization of Islam and its idealization through the Somali figure. Both serve a common interest and objective, the incorporation of Somalis into South African Muslim urban areas, in which they succeeded in Mayfair and recently in Lenasia, another Indian area mentioned above. Uncertainty and Somalis’ Survival Strategies Most Somali immigrants in post-apartheid South Africa are refugees who left their country because their safety was threatened after the collapse of the government in 1991 (Menkhaus, 2007; Samatar, 1992). This had a serious effect on the Horn of Africa region where Somalis have sought refuge, particularly in Kenya. The spaces crossed and created by these migrant trajectories constitute experiences and provide embedded memories of



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migration and of refugee practices. Indeed, crossing not only affects the identity of the migrant, it also contributes to the formation of a refugee culture in South Africa that will probably be transmitted to the second generation. The migrant trajectories of most of my informants included the crossing of four or five borders before reaching Johannesburg. These migrant experiences in places of transit such as Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi, together with their home identities, have produced a multi-layered Somali refugee culture in South Africa (Farah, 2000). Indeed, Somalis have contributed to a new Muslim culture in Mayfair through the construction of a Somali mosque and a community madrasa (Qur’anic school), the creation of various Somali community organizations and the establishment of an ethnic mall, Amal, which provides the basis for a Somali-based urban economy. As much as the Somali immigrants add to the cultural and economic diversity of Mayfair, they are also influenced by the South African political context, by their migrant trajectories and by “South African Islam”. Today, the processes of innovation through migration and immigration in South Africa touch on all spheres of Somalis’ life. In Johannesburg, they have learnt how to overcome various barriers (such as those created by gender and clan identities) which would have been more difficult to cross at home. Gender relations, for example, come under great pressure in the context of migration and are being transformed as evidenced by the number of divorces and single-parent families in Mayfair. Somali women have gained a measure of independence through their involvement in small businesses. They work as hawkers, selling vegetables on the streets of Mayfair, or they own shops in the Amal mall, sometimes in partner­ ship  with Somali men. This challenges the ideology of the male bread­ winner and increases the financial independence of women in the community. Some women even venture into African townships, like those near Kimberley, in order to earn better incomes, in the process learning to speak a South African language, which guarantees their relative safety. Even though they have succeeded in crossing different international borders, Somali migrants find that their journey has not ended once they arrive in South Africa. The difficulty of acceptance in South Africa is often emphasized, especially in the African townships, whose inhabitants are often rather hostile to migrant entrepreneurs like Somalis: since the late 1990s, many Somalis have been violently attacked and some murdered. One young Somali described a traumatic situation that anticipated the tragic xenophobic events that occurred in May 2008, leaving 62 people dead and forcing thousands from their homes:

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samadia sadouni South Africa is good and it is not good. Good because there is a government and a job, but there is no peace, the peace Somalis are crying for. The [South African] government comes to a useless point. People who are here for twelve years, they can’t open a bank account. They call them makwerekwere. … It is something embarrassing, something bad. They burnt people with paraffin, they set them alight. It is not fair.

This quote describes the difficulties faced by Somali migrants in townships and informal settlements, where they have opened shops providing basic commodities and foodstuffs. The so-called makwerekwere (those who speak in an unintelligible language) are seen by Black South Africans as aliens, as outsiders. This term refers in particular to African non-nationals, who, according to Francis Nyamnjoh, are seen as the uncivilized who hailed “from the sorts of places no South African in his or her right mind would want to penetrate without being fortified with bottles of mineral water, mosquito repellent creams and extra-thick condoms” (Nyamnjoh, 2006: 40; Sharp, 2008). Amakhoela (coolies) is the other xenophobic term used to refer to Somalis who are assimilated to Indians, who originally supplied the labour needed on the sugar plantations of colonial Natal in the late nineteenth century. The uncertainty and danger that Somalis encounter in the township have been particularly traumatic for Somali women. One Somali mother and her three children were murdered in their Eastern Cape home in October 2008. News of this brutal slaying, which was condemned by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,7 spread rapidly among Somalis in Johannesburg, who immediately enquired about the well-being of female friends and shopkeepers living in African townships. However, in large cities like Johannesburg the situation is more secure for Somali migrants, most of whom still regard the country as a transit country. Community Protection and Muslim Infrastructures The relatively secure life of Somalis in Mayfair is the result of a Muslim ethic of solidarity and mutual protection which has developed in an urban context. A Somali is more of a stranger in a Black township than in an urban South African Muslim area, where religion has played a major role in the incorporation of Somalis into society. With the exception of one Somali who was murdered in Newtown, near the CBD, the wave of anti-immigrant violence in Johannesburg in May 2008 did not affect Somalis in Mayfair. 7 “UN slams xenophobic killings in SA”, The Star, 8 October 2008, p. 3.



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This human geography of xenophobia needs to be taken into account in order to understand the so far relatively secure situation of Somalis in Mayfair. Some Somalis claimed protection from South African Muslims when a few of their houses in Mayfair were identified as belonging to foreigners and singled out for attack.8 According to one informant, the South African police were also asked to patrol the area at different times in order to prevent the incursion of violent mobs at this time. Somalis have benefited from this protection because South African Indian traders and owners want to protect their investments in a place they previously struggled to preserve from forced removals and to gain recognition of their rights as citizens. This is part of the legacy of apartheid, and is based on community governance, urban productivity and security. The support given to Somali Muslim co-religionists in the name of Islam supersedes ethnic, migrant and national identities. It is in the name of Islamic solidarity that Somalis have been able to rent houses in Mayfair without entering into complicated arrangements to do so. However, as Lefebvre has suggested, the space is also a place where conflicts exist, and in the case of Mayfair the Muslim community is far from being united. Historically grounded ethnic identifications and boundaries continue to divide the Muslim population in South Africa. There is in fact an acknowledgement and mutual recognition by Muslims in Mayfair that theirs is a diverse community. In addition, the protection of Somalis living in Mayfair has sometimes led to patronage politics, which (according to my informants) leads to unfair treatment from landlords charging high rents. This has not, however, prevented Somalis from settling in Mayfair since it is considered a Muslim area and is well equipped with mosques, Islamic schools, Muslim butcheries and shops. In general, Somalis remain attached to their religious belonging and do not seek to settle in other areas than Muslim ones. This is particularly the case for female entrepreneurs representing the “people as infrastructure” (Simone, 2008), who decided to run community businesses such as singlesex hostels accommodating Somali men in three or four-room shared apartments situated in a Muslim and urban neighbourhood. Hostels managed by Somali women have as their first objective the provision of food and shelter for new incomers who can rely on community support in order to start new lives in South Africa. However, they also play a role in the segregation of Somalis from the majority of Blacks. Black hostels in South 8 Interviews with a Somali family in Mayfair, June 2008.

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Africa have a history of undermining the “migrant ethic” of South African black labour and breaking the structure of migrants’ families, who are often left in poor rural areas in the ‘homelands’ (Chipkin, 2007). Somalis who arrived in South Africa in 1995 remember these hostels where they stayed as places of immorality: We were in a hostel, where homeless people are. People are drunk, my first time I have ever seen people who were drunk. In Somalia there is no bottle store. Before South Africa, I’ve never seen, I’ve never seen someone who drinks it. So, you know for me it was an emotional…emptiness.9

This ‘emptiness’ seems to have encouraged Somalis to control acculturation and re-appropriate the post-apartheid structure of the city, which is still based on a segmented ethnic population. In post-apartheid South Africa, people and the spaces they occupy remain marked by ethnicity and religious affiliation, and more recently by migrant origins. This production of space seems not only to threaten the dream of the rainbow nation, but also to reduce the state’s capacity to deal with factionalism or communalism. The communal relations between Somalis and South African Muslims in Mayfair have also been strongly influenced by the ways in which pluralism and immigration into the country were managed. South African Muslim organizations like Islamic NGOs give financial and material support for the integration of Somalis and other migrant groups into Johannesburg. The South African National Zakaat Fund (SANZAF), in charge of the distribution of zakat (obligatory alms) and other charitable financial products, has implemented a South African norm in terms of which the community is seen as the key actor in hosting migrants. This humanitarianism from below, performed by South African Islamic NGOs, is strongly influenced by government migration policies and a sense of communal responsibility. South African migration policies do not support the establishment of refugee camps. Once their status has been granted by the Department of Home Affairs, refugees must seek employment and shelter for themselves (Neocosmos, 2006). Even after the xenophobic attacks of May 2008, the government dismantled refugee camps and asked the refugees to resettle in their ‘community’, a loose term that does not measure the complexity of social links. Both human rights activists and the refugees themselves denounced this decision. Fearing a new wave of violence from their South African neighbours, many refugees refused to return to the urban 9 Interview with A., June 2007, Mayfair.



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townships. However, the same policies which place the responsibility on the community seem to have succeeded in Muslim areas such as Mayfair, where Somalis feel more secure. As one of South Africa’s religious “denominations” (Casanova 2007a), Islam and its moral economy, exercised through the distribution of zakat, continues to be crucial for Muslim migrants. The South African Muslim merchant class and other professionals have been generous in providing funds to a number of Muslim charitable organizations. Even the powerful transnational Islamic missionary movement, Tabligh Jama’at, assists Somalis to adjust to the global city, and its influence appears to be felt even by those who claim not to be members. As a pan-Islamic movement concerned with da’wa (the call to Islam) mainly among Muslims, Tabligh Jama’at (TJ) provides valuable resources to all its members, including Muslim foreigners. Along with Islamic NGOs, it is an actor in the field of religious governance that affects Muslim urban life, at the same time providing the ethos for a social order which is strongly linked to the political narrative of the nation. However, TJ’s interventions are limited to the suburban and inner-city spaces: the townships definitely constitute the frontier for any Muslim activist and organization, and even the TJ seems to be unable or unwilling to cross it. The Somalis of Mayfair who are the members and sympathizers of TJ recognize its power to purify their religious lives and protects them from an imagined African decadence. As already noted, for them the loss of morality is mostly linked to the African township, the ‘location’, as it is commonly called in South Africa. This is how a young Somali refugee narrates his experience as an employee in a Somali shop in a township near Port Elizabeth, where he thought he would be protected by the elders: The other guy he was a teacher, he used to love deen [religion] mashallah, he studied in Arab countries, Saudi Arabia. (…) he stayed in location [township], so I used to know him, he was a sheikh. So when he came to take me, to locations, I saw him [as] different, he throws the khamis [Muslim dress for men]. He took me from that side to that shop, that shop first time to see, (…) I saw a Black people area, it is very quiet, it’s a scaring place. How can you live [here], your guys? So I became shocked (…) I said sheikh I can’t stay here anymore. You can’t take bath nicely, you can’t go to the toilet, and they said take paper, no water. I said no, this life I can’t do this. Then I said I have to leave you, then I went to work in town in the Somali hotel, then the Tabligh came and took me.

For many small entrepreneurs, African townships offer the possibility to earn more money than in cities like Johannesburg, where employment and

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business opportunities are concentrated in the hands of merchant families and individuals with the financial resources to be competitive and organize their own businesses.10 Somalis who decide to live in these townships may have to pay a high price: not only do they risk being murdered, they also run the risk of losing their so-called morality, as this young Somali who joined the TJ emotionally emphasized. Islamic practices and ways of life in South Africa are embedded in an urban existence and have yet to bridge the gap between the modern cities and the townships and informal settlement. This is why Islamic NGOs encounter such difficulties in the township and are not well prepared to deal with the transition from cosmopolitan metropolis to township and informal settlement. Furthermore, they are often trapped in their role of intermediary between the state and the people at the grassroots level. They are often targeted in political protests and sometimes unable as social workers to cope with so-called “service delivery protests”.11 Here two worlds coexist without a common language in which to communicate. The Call to the Diaspora The modes of community construction and religious practice described so far among Somalis in Mayfair are also strongly influenced by another form of solidarity, Somali diasporic solidarity. In the absence of a viable state, the Somali diaspora plays a political role, helping to define the identities of its members and playing a central role in their daily lives. Transnational networks with fellow Somalis have assumed greater significance for Somali entrepreneurs in Johannesburg, especially for those who do not have a passport. Unable to travel outside the country, such entrepreneurs have to rely on relatives and fellow Somalis to obtain goods from Dubai or from elsewhere in Africa. These modes of conducting transnational business are also found among other immigrant groups in South Africa, such as the Senegalese and Congolese, and this tends to provoke the hostility of Black South Africans in the townships, who do not have access to these migration-based resources (Simone, 2004). However, these transnational remittances do not reach the majority of Somalis, who are left marginalized and 10 It is difficult for refugees and undocumented migrants to find employment in South Africa. Most of the Somalis in Johannesburg have invested in small businesses in order to be self-sufficient and have created their own ethnic market. 11 During October 2009, people in townships and informal settlements took to the streets en masse in violent protests over service delivery failures.



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seek to publicize their plight by simultaneously claiming migrants’ rights in the South African city and their right to the political institutions and Somali solidarity of the diaspora. This diasporic dimension of Somali identity helps to explain their attitudes to the refugee camps built and managed by the UN after the xenophobic attacks of 2008. Several media outlets reported on protests by Somalis at the living conditions in these camps and on their demands for better treatment. This has been understood as a way of putting pressure on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to allow them to resettle in countries such as the USA and Canada. However, it is their refugee culture, accumulated through their experience of multiple migrations and encampment, that has shaped their attitudes. Some of the refugees who transited through refugee camps in Kenya witnessed the resettlement of their relatives by the UN or heard about such possibilities. These vulnerable migrants, who had little economic or political power, knew how to assert their presence through the politics of protest in these non-permanent refugee camps. These protests, made possible by the power of their culture and identity as Somali migrants, were also intended to attract the attention of the Somali diaspora to their plight in South Africa. Publicising their situation as refugees was a way of making their suffering known to the world and to the diaspora, which, as we saw, was the only alternative for solidarity when even the TJ or most South African Islamic NGOs were unable to provide aid in informal settlements. Their call via the media was directed at co-nationals who send remittances to relatives in Somalia and in various refugee camps in Africa. Remittances as a religious duty and cultural obligation sent by Somalis living in Europe, Canada and the US are at the heart of diasporic life (McGown, 1999). The UN and the Somali diaspora are external agencies that can play a major role in improving the social and economic condition of refugees. The networks of financial assistance formed throughout the Somali diaspora illustrate a common transnational practice observed in different diasporas, which tends to reproduce itself in rather similar ways in different social contexts. Here the responsibility of government with regard to emigrants is no longer exercised by the Somali state, which has collapsed, but by the Somalis in the diaspora, which is regarded as a new political entity by its members. .

Conclusion The case of Somalis in Mayfair shows how local histories of Somali migrations, the urban context and transnational identities all intersect.

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However, this intersection differs between cities in South Africa, and also between the suburban or inner-city setting and the township. Somalis’ urban aspirations, combined with a claim of belonging to Johannesburg, play a role in the religious fabric and bring new elements into South African urban Islam. These urban aspirations are not only linked to local and national politics, but also to British imperial connections, which brought Somali servants of British soldiers to the emerging global city of Johannesburg in the 1900s. Reinvented histories of the British Empire, combined with South African Islam and diasporic practices, have contributed to the visible presence of Somali immigrants in Johannesburg. Although high rates of crime and other serious obstacles to integration into the economic and political spaces of South Africa have led many Somalis to leave the country, their presence in Johannesburg is now an established part of city life. The development of Somali business networks and the building of places of worship (such as a Somali mosque and a network of madrasas) demonstrate a process of community-building in Mayfair. Somali refugees have made Johannesburg their own place, not least as a result of Muslim solidarity. Somali clan differences remain important in modes of identification, but the construction of a more panSomali identity has helped to secure the protection of South African Indian Muslims and afforded a sense of security (Sadouni, 2009). This religious solidarity has been a main obstacle to rising xenophobia in the city and has helped to secure Somalis’ livelihoods and presence in the religious and economic life of the city. The study of religion is likely to become increasingly powerful in existing and future megacities, especially in South Africa, where the dichotomy between the townships and the cities is central. References Carrim, Nazir 1990. Fietas: A Social History of Pageview, 1948–1988. Johannesburg: Save Pageview Association. Casanova, José 2007a. “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A European Union/ United States Comparison.” In Thomas Banchoff (ed.), Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism. New York: Oxford University Press. Chipkin, Ivor 2007. Do South Africans Exist? Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Dugmore, Henry L. 1993. ‘Becoming Coloured’: Class, Culture and Segregation in Johannesburg’s Malay Location, 1918–1939. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand PhD thesis. Esack, Farid 1988. “Three Islamic Strands in the South African Struggle for Justice.” Third World Quarterly 10(2): 473–498. Farah, Nuruddin 2000. Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora. London: Cassell. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 2002. “Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in Modernity.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(1): 99–105. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.



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McGown, Rima Berns 1999. Muslims in the Diaspora: The Somali Communities of London and Toronto, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Menkhaus, Ken 2007. “The Crisis in Somalia: Tragedy in Five Acts.” African Affairs 106(424): 357–390. Neocosmos, Michael 2006. From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa [online]. Available: http://codesria.org/Links/ Publications/monograph/neocosmos.pdf Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2006. Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa. London: Zed Books. Sadouni, Samadia 2009. “Humanisme spirituel et ONG islamiques en Afrique du Sud.” Afrique Contemporaine 231: 157–170. —— 2009. “‘God is not Unemployed’: Journeys of Somali Refugees in Johannesburg.” African Studies 68(2): 235–249. Samatar, Ahmad I. 1992. “Destruction of State and Society in Somalia: Beyond the Tribal Convention.” Journal of Modern African Studies 30(4): 625–641. Sassen, Saskia 1998. From Globalisation and its Discontents. New York: New Press. Sharp, John 2008. “‘Fortress SA’: Xenophobic Violence in South Africa.” Anthropology Today 24(4): 1–3. Simone, Abdoumaliq 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University Press. —— 2008. “People as infrastructure.” In Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe (eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press.

URBAN ASPIRATIONS IN MUMBAI AND SINGAPORE Peter van der Veer Introduction The city is generally seen as modern and secular. The story behind this notion runs roughly as follows. People get away from the social constraints of their rural backwaters when they move to cities. Then they are free to choose urbane life-styles that are fashionable, au courant, civilized. This storyline of urban migration as a liberation from backwardness can be found again and again in the social sciences. It is a storyline that often not only celebrates liberation but also provides a cautionary tale against anomie, anonymity and other social evils that are the result of the urban decay of social cohesion and other aspects of the move from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. A similar storyline can be found in literary and cultural studies in which the excitements of the modern city, brought about by new spaces of consumption, public displays of fashion, cinema and other forms of entertainment, are celebrated by paying close attention to the threat of prostitution, the nausea (Sartre’s Nausee) created by the lonely crowds in urban life, the destitution of the urban poor. All of this is captured by Henry James’s description of London as a City of Dreadful Delight. Religion does not play much of a role in any of these accounts. In the older modernization theories it is a category that has lost its significance in cities and is thus not worthy of investigation. So, even in the celebrated street-corner ethnography of the Chicago School, there is little to be learned about urban religion. Nevertheless, we know from historians like Hugh McLeod that European cities in the nineteenth century offered ample opportunities for religious innovation and new community formations, while, obviously, there is no way one could conceivably under­ stand  American cities in the past or today without studying the role of Black churches and immigrant religious activities (McLeod 1994, 1996). In cultural studies, that peculiar hybrid of the humanities and social sciences, religion does not signify fun, is old-fashioned, and thus cannot be deemed worthy of discussion. In short the study of urban religion has been neglected, yet it is important to engage seriously with it, since cities are important and they are not easily understood as either secular or fundamentalist.

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The study of religion in cities has already become important because of the urbanization of the globe, a world-historical process that forces the majority of the world’s population to live in cities. Global cities are even more important because, in their particular combination of high finance, huge immigration and entertainment services, they are fantasy spaces that bring together desires of various kinds. It is not that globalization cannot be studied in small cities or in rural areas, but that global cities occupy a particular position in economies and fantasies of scale. The concept of global cities has been developed in the literature, especially in Saskia Sassen’s path-breaking work, to highlight how processes of globalization shape urban economies, especially service economies, unmoor them from the nation state, at least to a certain extent, and relate them to other global cities in urban networks (Sassen 2001). However, I want to revert to the older, cultural concept of exciting world cities as against boring, provincial cities. It is the opposition of excitement and boredom in an economy of desire and consumption that needs to be analysed, besides the usual analysis of opportunity structures, wages and labour shortages, to account for the push and pull factors. Moreover, I am not convinced by Sassen’s notion that global cities become relatively unmoored from the nation state and more connected to a network of other global cities. The nation state has different histories in different parts of the world, and to assume a particular relationship between it and global cities tends to erase those histories and produce a false, universal model. If one looks at Asian world cities, the similarities and differences are readily observable. Singapore is a global city and at the same time a nation state that has been separated from Malaysia. Its history of separation from Malaysia and its geographical location in South-East Asia are crucial to the nature of its globality. Mumbai is India’s most modern city, but also the site of huge slums and pernicious ethnic and religious strife, some of which has to do with regional politics rather than a global network of cities. This chapter moves from the focus on financial markets and service economies to aspirations, desires and fantasies of another kind, primarily religious and civil. I want to compare the location of religion and the construction of belonging in two world cities, Mumbai and Singapore. One needs quite explicitly to refuse to make pre-conceived oppositions between the secular and the religious, both theoretically and empirically. The Western European development of secular societies, although quite variable and often already ill understood, is regularly taken as a model for developments in the rest of the world. This will simply be impossible when one compares cities which belong to societies with strongly differing



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understandings of what in the nineteenth-century came to be called “religious” and “secular”. It is evident that religion is not in retreat and that migration and globalization in general encourage an aspect of religious revitalization. Religion is not “a thing” that can be easily distinguished from other aspects of the flow of social life in cities. It is rather a “lens” through which one can acquire a better view of what urban aspirations are, regardless of whether they are called secular or religious. It is precisely global cities that experience large-scale immigration and related patterns of religiosity that are new and innovative, fuelled by transnational movements that are particularly strong in urban contexts. Adopting Arjun Appadurai’s seminal concept, I use the notion of “aspiration” to point to the ideational character of many of the processes that effect cityscapes and urban movements (Appadurai 2004). This is true for city planning, squatting, migration and gentrification, as well as for the extraordinary role played by religion, the media and creative arts in global cities. The global city provides a space and a platform for religious and ethnic manifestations. The Ganapati Festival in Mumbai and the Pentecostal Prayer Walk in Singapore are instances of large-scale religious processions through the city. What often escapes from both sight and analysis is the nature of public life in cities, which incorporates not only shopping malls, bazaars and cinemas, but also temples, churches and shrines with a number of ancillary charitable activities. Global cities are providing social materials for the innovation of new religious institutions, aspirations and experiments, partly because they contain unexpected combinations of media images and demographic shifts. These global cities sometimes seem highly volatile and prone to riots, rumours and epidemics of social fear. At the same time they also appear to generate surprising new solidarities, new visions of the good life and new ideas about friendship and conviviality. These paradoxical outcomes are not random, but there have been few attempts to recognize them precisely and explain them using fresh ideas and models. Maximum Mumbai Mumbai is generally seen as India’s most modern, most Westernized city, a place to have fun, to enjoy romance, to be free from the bonds of caste and religious community. People often tell you that they are actually not much

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better off by moving to Mumbai from their village, but that it is still much better to be in the city. It is a happening place where one can go out dancing and drinking till far in the night. Mumbai is a colonial city that was known as Bombay till 1995, when the state government of Maharashtra, in which Mumbai is located, ‘indigenized’ the name, or rather turned the vernacular pronunciation into the official name. The state government was then led by a Hindu fascist movement, the Shiv Sena or Army of Shivaji (a famous Maratha warrior of the eighteenth century). This movement, led by Bal Thackeray (who, ironically, did not change his Anglicized name into a vernacular one), had made its political career as champion of the ethnic cause of the Maratha majority in Mumbai, first in language riots in the 1960s against Gujaratis over the control of Mumbai, later in anti-immigrant riots against Tamils over securing government jobs for the Marathas, and over the last twenty to thirty years in communal riots against Muslims. In the latter case the Shiv Sena at some point joined the communal bandwagon of the Hindu nationalist movement, which became powerful all over India and was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party or All India People’s Party. While calling Bombay Mumbai can at one level be read as an anti-colonial gesture, at another, more important level it is a Hindu nationalist gesture. This is illustrated by a recent conflict in which a Muslim lawmaker took his oath in the state assembly in Hindi (a perfectly legitimate nationalist gesture), but was vilified for not doing it in Marathi. In all such conflicts the assembly becomes a site of physical assault and scuffles that are continued outside in the street. The national political developments that led to increasing antagonism between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority culminated in 1992 in an attack on a mosque in the Hindu pilgrimage centre of Ayodhya, which had been built by the Mughal emperor Babar in the sixteenth century (van der Veer 1994). Since the ruling party was the BJP, the state could not be relied on to control the situation. This resulted in nationwide rioting, which also swept through Mumbai in 1992 and again in 2002, leaving thousands of mostly Muslims dead. This massacre, which was allowed, supported and in Mumbai often organized by the police and Shiv Sena politicians, has elicited the response of a series of bomb attacks on major buildings in Mumbai. These terrorist attacks were planned and executed by the major Muslim gang in Mumbai, led by a man called Dawood, who has fled Mumbai first for a while to Dubai, but more recently has moved to Karachi. Such Muslim counterattacks have now become connected to the international enmity between India and Pakistan, as was most recently



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shown by the Laskar-e-Taiba attack on the landmark hotels, the Taj and the Oberoi, which attracted international attention. This all too brief history shows two things quite clearly. First of all, one cannot understand developments in Mumbai without taking the larger national and international developments into account. Mumbai is without any doubt a megacity, one of the largest cities in the world, with up to twenty million inhabitants if one takes Greater Mumbai in account, but it is also part of India (with more than a billion inhabitants, on its way to exceed China as the largest nation state in the world). While there is an unchallenged Hindu majority in Mumbai and in India generally, there is also a very sizable Muslim presence, as well as Muslim neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh, that until independence were part of British India. Secondly, one cannot understand developments in Mumbai if one sees Hindu-Muslim antagonism (which is now a major social factor in the city) as primarily about religious belief and practice. There is no doubt that, for instance, in rioting Muslims are identified by their circumcision and that a religious symbol therefore identifies them ethnically, but this symbol in fact lumps together an extremely differentiated ethno-religious group. Similarly, the Hindus are divided along lines of secularity or devotion, sectarian allegiance, and so on, but with the added importance of caste divisions. Moreover, although the Shiv Sena is an important movement, there are several other movements and parties, including the powerful Congress Party. And, finally, all of them are divided in terms of origin. There are Mumbaikars who have lived for generations in Mumbai and recent Hindu and Muslim immigrants from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Bangladesh, in short from everywhere in South Asia (but insignificantly so from the rest of the world, making the globality of Mumbai in fact a regionality). If we take religion as a lens through which to look at Mumbai, we find ethno-religious divisions that cut across class divisions, but we also find aspirations for the urban context that are derived from religious imaginaries carried by social movements as well as producers in the art scene and entertainment industry. We find urban politics and governance that are focused on space, services and security and mapped on to communal divides, but in which religious understandings of space and movement play a significant role. Besides the more obvious religious imaginaries produced in temples and shrines there is Bollywood, the largest film industry in the world, in which “mythologicals” always play a significant role. Religious processions through the city create arenas of interaction, since they cannot be confined to neighbourhoods that are dominated by just one

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community. They are loud and in your face and the expression of a right to be there. In the extraordinarily cramped housing and transport situation of Mumbai, processions are events of great significance. By far the most impressive festival in Mumbai is the Ganapati Festival, celebrating the Hindu god Ganapati or Ganesha. Ganesha is an immensely popular god in large parts of India, including South India and Maharashtra. Ganesha’s rise to popularity over the centuries could be usefully compared to that of the monkey-god Hanuman, who is also an object of huge devotion and public manifestation in immense statues all over the country. Both gods have been appropriated by a nationalist rhetoric of strength, power and Hindu assertiveness. The interesting thing about the Ganesh festival, as also the growing popularity of the large Vinayak temple, where people already start lining up for worship at 3 o’clock in the morning, is that it is a form of Hindu collective assertion and also individual anxiety-alleviation. Ganesha and Hanuman are gods who cater particularly for people who are taking risks, trying their chances in the world. It is tempting to see this connected to the great opening up of opportunities since the liberalization and globalization of the economy in the 1990s. It is not that urban conditions are less dependent on political patronage than before, but there are more opportunities to make it in the city. A common scapegoat for not making it in the city or for the abysmal conditions of virtually all public services are the Muslims, who are the least socially mobile. Despite these connections, there are no direct causal relationships between changes in the political economy and the rise of particular symbolic repertoires. I would rather argue for weak linkages that alter the understanding of these age-old gods because of the tide of extreme religious nationalism. Minimum Singapore Singapore is a very modern city, incredibly well-organized, and thus to those who prefer the hustle and bustle of undisciplined crowds (in Chinese renao, hot and noisy), a boring city, in which fun is to be found in huge shopping malls and tightly regulated entertainment areas. The image of Singapore is certainly secular, a haven of secular modernity in a sea of growing Islamic assertion in the region. Being Chinese is, in some Confucian readings of Chinese civilization, to be essentially secular, and that is the image that Chinese-dominated Singapore has tried to project.



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Singapore is, like Mumbai, a colonial city, a product of the British need for port cities. It is a much smaller city than Mumbai, with a mere five million inhabitants, but it is much more globalized, functioning as an entrepôt between its vast hinterland, the Gulf, Australia, Europe and the USA. It was decolonized much later than Mumbai when in 1963, with Malaya, Sabak and Serawak, it formed the Republic of Malaysia, from which it seceded two years later to form the Republic of Singapore. Singapore is an independent nation, wedged between Malaysia and Indonesia, and a city-state that is among the wealthiest nations in the world. It is the precarious nature of being a majority-Chinese city that is relatively independent from its largely Muslim-populated surroundings that explains some of its multicultural politics. In Singapore the ethnic categorization of the colonial period, namely Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO), has been continued into the postcolonial period. Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP) has dominated parliament and government since 1959. Singapore offers an interesting model of the policing and containment of immigrants, while being entirely an immigrant city itself. The racialization of immigrant workers (including Chinese from the mainland who are now immigrating) shows a pattern that is becoming visible in China too, with the tensions between the need for migrant workers and the fixity of the hukou residential permit system. Migrant workers are seen as uncivilized, badly dressed and uneducated, as against the higher quality (suzhi) of city people. While it is clear that there is a Chinese majoritarian culture in Singapore, the nature of this culture is not self-evident because Chineseness itself is not self-evident. It is not a ‘natural’ unity of language that constitutes Chineseness, since in the 1960s Mandarin was not the dominant language. In fact Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, like most other ‘Chinese’, spoke Malay and Hokkien (a language from Fujian) at home, learned English in school, but hardly knew Mandarin. In the 1960s, however, the PAP promoted a language policy in which, besides English, a second language (based on ‘one’s race’).was required. For the Chinese majority Mandarin became mandatory, and this was followed in the 1970s by a cultural policy promoting Asian values, as encapsulated in Confucianism. Here Confucianism was not merely Chineseness, but stood for the core of Asian values, meaning an Asian form of communitarian nationalism (Chua Beng Huat 1999). It is good to realize that this constituted a multiculturalist policy that not only tried to transform the cultural identities of the non-Chinese, but very poignantly also those of the Chinese (Goh 2009).

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The entire program was inspired by Harvard philosopher Tu Wei-Ming, who argued that diaspora Chinese carried the true burden of civilization, since that civilization had been attacked and partly destroyed in mainland China. Peripheral Chinese populations, such as those of Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, now became culturally central in a mission civilisatrice in relation to the Chinese homeland. This mandarinization of the Singaporean Chinese entailed both a re-connecting to China, especially after the opening up of China as an important business opportunity, as well as the development of a multiculturalist unity in diversity or harmony under Confucian hegemony. One can say that this project never became entirely successful, since Confucianism is only loosely anchored in daily life and popular religion. In a way, Christianity might be a better candidate for creating multicultural unity, although its Pentecostal and evangelical forms are not precisely harmonious. The most striking aspect of Singapore is its detailed surveillance of the public sphere. The rowdy processions of Mumbai would be entirely unimaginable, and indeed Thaipusam, the major Tamil procession celebrating Subrahmanyam, another son of Shiva, which in South India and Sri Lanka is the occasion of wild possession trances, is heavily policed. This surveillance is often legitimized by referring to an incident in 1964 when a Muslim-Malay procession on the Prophet’s Birthday led to rioting when it passed a heavily Chinese-populated area. Part of the surveillance consists in the reduction of noise levels and the regulation of the time the procession can take, as well as its route. Since many of the construction workers and other cheap labourers are from Tamil Nadu, it is not only religion that is policed here but also the crowd behaviour of young (dark) men. I spoke to several Chinese in Singapore who find Tamils threatening and avoid spaces where they gather. It is not only Tamil festivals that are heavily controlled. In the early 1900s Qian, part of the Hungry Ghosts Festival featuring spirit possession, was attacked for its superstition (mixin) by neo-Confucian reformers and made into a zhuangyi (dressed up for masquerade) festival, which is basically a float procession, in which spirit mediums are replaced by Chinese lion dances (Goh 2009). This competition between decorated floats has been encouraged as a secular Chinese festival during New Year in Singapore since the 1960s, and in the mid-seventies floats from other communities were added to make it more multicultural. As a festival it seems to represent a successful transformation of traditional Chinese ritual into a Confucian civil religion which can also be marketed as an Asian Mardi Gras on the global tourist market.



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While Malay, Chinese and Tamil religious aspirations can only be expressed under tight government control, Christian associations who proclaim their contribution to national respectability seem to have more of a free hand. Among Singaporean evangelical Christians, the concept of spiritual warfare has become popular. This is primarily an idea of the American evangelical preacher Peter Wagner, namely that Christians need to battle the devil in areas which are dominated by non-Christian deities (or forms of the Devil). Prayer fasts of many days are organized in the centre of Singapore, culminating in a coordinated prayer walk coinciding with Singapore’s National Day, indicating a claim to nationalism by the Christian community. The first of these walks was organized in 1998 and drew 40,000 Christians from 79 churches. There is a LoveSingapore network that has continued over the years since 2001 to organize prayer fasts and prayer walks (De Bernardi 2008). None of these has given rise to clashes, despite the fact that they involve prayers directed against the deities of other communities. The claim to nationalism and the orderly nature of the processions seems to have precluded any heavy policing. That nationalism is especially borne out by daily lunchtime prayer sessions in a 30th-floor auditorium overlooking the Parliament House. Conclusion Singapore is often held up as an example, a model, for Mumbai to emulate. The aspiration for public order, for getting the hawkers off the pavements, to get the slums cleaned up, to become a well-ordered city is immense among sections of especially the middle classes in Mumbai. On the other hand, there is also an immense pleasure in rowdy processions such as the Ganapati Festival, in street-food from hawkers, and an intense resistance against changes to the rental housing regulations, and against slum removal. It is really hard to see how, in the fractured politics of patronage in Mumbai and the mobilization of people, anything even vaguely resembling Singapore could be created. Mumbai and Singapore are both colonial cities, products of imperial trade connections, and both are financial centres, as well as port cities for a vast hinterland. Cheap labour in both cases comes from elsewhere, notably in both cases from Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh. The established in both cities claim a particular cultural hegemony by way of ethnicity (Maratha or Chinese) and religion (Hinduism or ConfucianismChristianity). The policing of Others in the Singaporean case, however, also implies a heavy

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policing of the Self. Chinese processions and cults come under similar constraints to Muslim or Hindu processions. In Mumbai there is a certain homogenization of Maratha-ness that is resented especially by Maratha intellectuals, but it is nothing in comparison to the steamrolling of Chinese multiplicity that we find in Singapore. Mumbai, in Suketu Mehta’s apt phrase, is a Maximum City, and perhaps Singapore is accordingly a Minimum City (Mehta 2004). There is a sort of excitement connected to Mumbai, a city of dreadful delight that lacks the well-ordered boredom of shopping in Singapore’s shopping malls. Obviously, there is an immense difference in scale between Mumbai as a mega-city and Singapore as a relatively small global city. What one learns from the comparison of Mumbai and Singapore is first that there is no typical Asian world city and that one has to pay full attention to the historical pathways that have created these cities and their environment. Secondly, in both cases nationalist imaginaries shape many of the aspirations of and in the city. With nationalism it is race, religion and language that are focal points. In both cases it is language policies connected to notions of race and religious culture that have shaped communities and their boundaries. It is not cultural nationalism as such that explains the ways in which religions are allowed to manifest themselves, but the nature of state–society relations. These relations have historically been produced by British imperialism but have had very different results that have to do with the ability of Singapore to disconnect itself from Malaysia and to regulate immigration through very strict policing. Housing in Mumbai is often controlled by ethno-religious communities, while in Singapore the state has an ethnic distribution policy for public housing. State-formation is clearly a very significant element in understanding the differences between Singapore and Mumbai. It is the state that transforms diverse religions and ethnicities in a Chinese-dominated ‘harmonious’ multiculturalism, whereas in Mumbai the state is not much more than a resource for conflicting political patronage systems that are partly criminalized. Both Mumbai and Singapore are often imagined as secular cities, but it is striking how in both cases political designs on the city are inspired by notions of religion and civilization that have originated in the imperial encounter (van der Veer 2001). To turn Confucianism into a civil religion has been a project in China and in the Chinese diaspora since the late nineteenth century. To turn Hinduism into a form of religious nationalism has similarly been a political project in India starting in the same period. In



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both cases religious imaginings of majoritarian belonging are crucial to the formation of multiple forms of secularity and secularism. References Appadurai, Arjun 2004. “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition.” In Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (eds.), Culture and Public Action, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chua Beng Huat 1999. “Asian-Values-Discourse and the Resurrection of the Social.” positions: east asia cultures critique 7(2): 573–592. De Bernardi, Jean 2008. “Global Christian Culture and the Antioch of Asia.” In Lai Ah Eng (ed.), Religious Diversity in Singapore. Singapore: ISEAS. Goh, Daniel P.S. 2009. “Eyes Turned Towards China: Postcolonial Mimicry, Transcultural Elitism and Singapore Chineseness.” In Daniel P.S. Goh, Matilda Gabrielpillai, Philip Holden and Gaik Cheng Khoo (eds.), Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore. London: Routledge, 2009. McLeod, Hugh 1994. European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930. London: Routledge. —— 1996. Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914. London: Holmes and Meier. Mehta, Suketu 2004. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New York: Penguin. Sassen, Saskia 2001. The Global City, Princeton: Princeton University Press. van der Veer, Peter 1994. Religious Nationalism in India. Berkeley, University of California Press. —— 2001. Imperial Encounters. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

EXCARNATION AND THE CITY: THE TOWER OF SILENCE DEBATES IN MUMBAI Leilah Vevaina In India, the attention paid to the geographies of sacred space has been largely focused on competing communal groups and their overlapping claims to space. Yet in Mumbai, the development and ecology of the city itself have altered the conditions of possibility for the practice of Zoroastrian funerary rituals and have pushed to the fore questions of who is allowed to participate in the rites themselves. The debates about the funerary complex known as the Towers of Silence amongst the Parsis1 (Indian Zoroastrians) reveal emergent fractures within the group, which in turn are revelatory of some of the wider debates about Indian secularism and the ways in which communities are recognized under the law. This chapter will explore the new entanglements that appear when ethno-religious history, communal law and the physical development of an emerging megacity meet on the same terrain: a funerary complex, in south Mumbai.2 It will show how urban sacred space can produce the material context for the ways in which religious practice can be defined. It asks how the changing textures of the urban, which had at one time encouraged the flourishing of ritual practice, has now dramatically shifted the possibilities of being Parsi today. One cannot understand this case, however, without a brief look at the particularities of Indian secularism, as its provisions, along with built space, are the key foundations for the growth and development of the Parsi community in the contemporary urban environment. Within the now global debates on secularism and democracy, India or the Indian Constitution to be more specific, is often heralded as a model of secular federal government that represents an extremely diverse religious and ethnic citizenry. Although some modern legal statutes are direct descendants of their past colonial counterparts, the Constitution itself is specific about its protection

1 The term Parsi in this essay refers both to Parsis as well as “Iranis”, Zoroastrians who migrated to India later than the tenth century. 2 This research is part of a larger dissertation project entitled, “Trust Matters: Parsis and Property in Mumbai”, with generous support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the India-China Institute at The New School.

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of minority groups and has limited the possibility of the government’s reach into the private sphere of the individual, at least in regard to religious and cultural matters. Leaving aside questions of belief, the Constitution focuses on the realm of religious traditions and practices.3 While there is a universal criminal code for all Indians, civil and family law are almost entirely under the purview of religious or tribal laws, that is, communal laws. Most claim that this is a vestigial legal remnant of British colonial policy which was hesitant about promulgating overarching civil law, due either to a lack of knowledge of customs and traditions, or to their caution over inciting agitation. The framers of the post-colonial Constitution retained plural civil law due to fears that minorities would otherwise feel threatened by the possible monopoly of civil law by Hindu-based statutes. One can see how very necessary such a stance was, especially after the atrocities of Partition, but this form of legal pluralism in the domain of civil law, as well as its concomitant tendency to relegate civil law to communal authorities, has very deep and sometimes dramatic implications for minority groups. One such minority are the Parsis of Mumbai, who were early settlers to the city after migrating from the shores of Gujarat. Like other minority groups, within civil legal spheres the Parsis have their own marriage, inheritance and divorce laws, decided upon by their own communal statutes. While the community thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the twentieth century saw not only the end of their financially successful collaboration with the British Empire, but also a steady decline in population and rising pressures on their space and self-identity. A brief historical account will examine how Parsi community identity gathered and solidified its shape in colonial Bombay and has since faced a crisis in the post-colonial city. As the following account will show, urban space has acted at once as an enabler, and later, a constraint, on community practices.4 Parsis were some of the foremost and most successful settlers of Bombay, claiming many spaces in south and central parts of the city that are today highly valued pieces of real estate.5 Although a numerically small minority

3 Derrett 1968. 4 This research is informed by the scholarship of Castells 1977; Ferguson 1999; Foucault 2007; Gupta & Ferguson 1997b; Harvey 1989b; 2003; Holston 1989; Jacobs 1992; Lefebvre 1991; 2003; Low 2006; Smith 2002; 2008; Zukin 1993, who have worked extensively on the relationship of city space and social life, and have shown the intricate linkages between the urban built environment and citizenship, capital, and community. 5 Patel and Masselos 2003.



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in India (69,000 according to the 2001 census),6 they have historically enjoyed disproportionate access to valued real estate throughout Mumbai. Apart from private ownership, large tracts of land are owned and controlled by the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP), an elected body and registered charitable trust that acts as the apex community body. Founded in the seventeenth century, the Parsi Punchayet of Bombay has been the warden of the community’s codes of behavior, funds and trust housing, and the maintainer of the Towers of Silence. Indeed the initial trust of 1884 that established the many roles of the BPP was the endowment of the Tower of Silence property.7 As the beneficiaries of the BPP trusts are Parsis only, the delineation of who counts as a ‘Parsi’ within the group and parallel recognition of the group by the state is crucial to the functioning of this organization and the welfare of the community at large. Parsi historical identity is synchronous with the arrival of boatloads of Zoroastrian settlers from Iran over the tenth century. ‘Parsi’ became the ethnic term used to refer to Iranian Zoroastrians who had come to India’s west coast. Although historically unsubstantiated, the story of how this settler group gained permission to step on the shores of Gujarat continues to be critical to the contemporary self-identity of this group.8 The commonly told narrative tells how the Rajah of Sanjan, Jadi Rana, summoned the Persians to his court and demanded to be told how they could prove that they would not be a burden on nor a threat to the indigenous communities. Replying to their request to practice their religion and till the land, he showed the Persians a jug full of milk, saying that Sanjan, like the jug, was full. In one version of the story, a high priest of the Persians, or dastur, then added a coin to the milk, and said that, like the coin, no one would be able to see that they were there but they would enrich the milk nonetheless. The second version claims that the priest added a pinch of sugar to the milk and claimed that, like the sugar, the Persians, while remaining invisible, would sweeten the lands of Sanjan. In both versions, the Rajah approves their settlement and then addresses their conditions of entry: the newcomers were to explain their religion, promise not to proselytize, adopt Gujarati speech and dress, surrender their weapons and only conduct rituals after 6 Population figures themselves are highly contested depending upon which groups do the counting and who is counted. For example some orthodox groups no longer count intermarried women, whereas I believe the census does account for them but not their children. Current numbers are roughly 60,000 by most estimates and await the results of the 2011 Census of India. 7 The General Trust Deed of 1884. 8 See the discussion in Cereti 1991.

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nightfall.9 It is worth noting that the assimilatory metaphors found in this etiological narrative of rural Gujarat is essentially what we see among the contemporary Parsi community in urban Mumbai. Most Parsis today continue to assume that cultural assimilation to some degree has been vital for their historically peaceful coexistence in India. Even today, Parsis retell this narrative, proud of their relative assimilation into Indian society. One can see, however, that the coin and the sugar offer different modes of assimilation through their respective materialities: the coin remains intact, but raises the level of the milk, while the sugar dissolves and changes the composition of the milk itself. These metaphors of assimilation are apt ways of describing the two main strands of contemporary Parsi debate between the Orthodox, who, like the coin wish to remain ethnically intact, and reform Parsis, who wish to blend in with the rest of Indian society, while claiming to sweeten it. Death in the Infant City When Zoroastrians migrated and settled in Western India, they brought with them many cultural practices to maintain Zoroastrian laws of purity and pollution in their new environment. Dokhmenashini is one consistent ritual that has marked the Parsis in India since their arrival. This traditional Zoroastrian practice involves the excarnation of the dead by leaving the corpse in large towers, or dokhmas, to be eaten by vultures or other carrion birds, or left to desiccate in the sun. To transport the impure corpse, or nasa, are a special occupational class of Zoroastrians called nasasalars, who alone are allowed to touch and move the bodies after the four traditional days of funeral service. The services are officiated by at least two priests, before the body is placed in the dokhma. The proper practice of dokhmenashini thus requires priests, nasasalars, and vultures to devour the body. The practice goes back to at least medieval times in Iran and reflects the Zoroastrian observance of not defiling natural elements with dead bodies, which are considered to be the ultimate impure material. The first dokhma in India was built around 1300 in rural Gujarat to service the burgeoning community there. In the late 1670s wealthier Parsis had received permission to build the first towers of silence and fire temples 9 This story has several different forms and is common lore among Parsis; common to all versions is the contract made between the settlers and Rajah regarding the low profile that the Parsis were to keep.



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in Mumbai. They began to establish powerful support networks for the increasing numbers of Parsi migrants from Gujarat. In contrast to their initial arrival in India to seek refuge, the second phase of Parsi migration from Gujarat to Bombay was spurred on by economic opportunities coupled, with the availability of ritual space in the early colonial city. Parsi settlers to the city tended to settle near older migrants to enjoy proximity to temples and access to communal living spaces. The large migration from Gujarat to Bombay took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, aided by the existence of support networks and employment with public works projects that were established by the Bombay Parsis. This particular historical development of Parsi identity, that grew to maturity within the urban landscape of Mumbai and within the legal structures of colonial India, is critical to the contemporary importance of the dokhmenashini practice.10 As the following section will show, it was the construction of the first towers in early Bombay that spurred on later migration, but it was also fundamental in establishing and orienting other patterns of ethnic settlement in the city. In 1669, an application was made to the British colonial Governer Aungier of Bombay to construct the city’s first tower of silence.11 The petition was made by a wealthy Parsi named Mody Heerjibhoy Vachhagandhi, who had lands on Malabar Hill, “a jungle then infested with jackals and hyenas”, in South Bombay.12 The space was deemed appropriate because it was rather out of the way, with limited access to the top, yet was close to the Fort area where many Parsis had settled. The tower was functioning by 1675, and later other benefactors constructed more towers along with nearby bungalows for prayer services. These benefactors dedicated the towers for use “by every member of the Parsee community professing the Zoroastrian religion as a place for the exposure of the dead and for the performance of other religious rites and ceremonies”.13 By the eighteenth century the majority of Parsis had settled in the Fort area, which, along with the original fortified district, constituted Bombay Town. The prominent families of that time amassed great wealth from their partnerships with the British and began to consolidate their large landholdings.14 Another political factor that encouraged such migration and settlement patterns was British reliance on local community 10 See Palsetia, 2001: Chapter 1; Desai 1977; Dossal 2010. 11 Palsetia 2001: 37. 12 Desai 1977: 44. 13 The General Trust Deed of 1884: 9. 14 Dossal 2010.

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punchayets or committees, to adjudicate smaller claims and intra-community disputes. The institutionalization of the punchayet system into a fully organized body of the Bombay Parsi Punchayet gained further authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as rich Parsi industrialists endowed it with enormous deeds of land and wealth to be held as trust properties for Parsis only, and in specific capacities such as housing, hospitals, sanatoria, etc. The Punchayet slowly evolved the role of formulating binding regulations in the sphere of religious or cultural issues.15 The BPP’s first attempt to consolidate its authority over the rest of the community occurred in 1787, when the British colonial government recognized the leadership of the Parsi Punchayet in Bombay. In contrast to the constraints on religious authorities in other nations, India has from colonial times through Independence depended on communal authority in matters of civil law, as an arbiter between the individual and the state.16 The Parsi case is unique even in the Indian context as the BPP, their apex body, is composed of lay individuals, not priests nor legal scholars. This historical composition of the Punchayet and its power as a legitimate authority over community matters has continually been challenged by lay Parsis on the one hand and the priesthood on the other. As its role has evolved, managing its properties has become one of the focal points of BPP policy in Bombay, as physical space is seen to be extremely critical for the city’s dwindling Parsi residents to be able to continue their practices in perpetuity. Jesse Palsetia, a scholar of Parsi settlement and history in Bombay, sees the building of sacred spaces through charity as a commitment by wealthy Parsi families to create a potential place for the community to prosper.17 A pattern was soon established of Parsi traders and businessmen acquiring wealth, securing large land estates in Bombay from the British, and then donating them to the Parsi Punchayet to be used for communal housing or sacred space upon their death. Because of this unique pattern of the construction of the built environment, Parsi immigration to Bombay actually followed the geography of sacred space, instead of the spatial structures themselves being built for the needs of the community.18 My research on

15 As this chapter is being written, court cases are currently being heard in Mumbai to determine and limit the BPP’s scope in decreeing regulations that have authority over ParsiIrani Zoroastrians. 16 Cohn 1996, Parashwar 1992. 17 Palsetia 2001: 39. 18 Palsetia 2001.



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Parsis takes this claim a step further to say that in Mumbai today, it is the built environment itself that is drastically changing the conditions of possibility for ‘being Parsi’ in the city, as the performance of ethno-religious practice is so tied to access to sacred spaces. Urbanization is indeed providing the conditions of possibility for religious life. Topographies of Practice Researching the Doongerwadi complex at Malabar hill as it is known, has grown increasingly difficult in recent years, as the debate about its functioning has intensified. Site officials, while always wary of non-Parsis on the premises, have become increasingly concerned about community members themselves ‘exposing’ the area with photographs. This fear escalated after a case in which a Parsi woman, Dhun Bharia, leaked photographs of the tower interiors to the press as evidence to support her contention that the Towers were not working. The Mumbai press ran the pictures of decomposing corpses along with torrid headlines.19 Bharia claims that she grew concerned after her mother’s funeral that her body was just lying there, naked and exposed. She maintains that she confronted the BPP and some of the High Priests with her concerns and asked that something be done. After no response, and as a last resort, she released the pictures to the press. Photography has been strictly prohibited ever since and security tightened by the Punchayet. As I am Parsi, I have attended funerals there outside of my research capacity, as well as having been given a guided tour of the grounds with a notebook, while repeatedly assuring my guide that I was not carrying a camera. Doongerwadi is on the highest part of Malabar Hill, an exclusive neighborhood in the southern section of the peninsula. This tower complex encompasses approximately sixty acres of land in what is now one of Mumbai’s most exclusive neighborhoods. From the busy intersection at Kemp’s corner, one can walk or drive up several steep roads, to the first level, where the prayer halls, office and small morgue are located. Along the road one can see lush trees and flowers, and the first level is very well landscaped and maintained. The prayer halls, or bunglis must be rented, and there are a few of different sizes and levels of ostentation to accommodate all economic levels of the community. After the initial days of prayers with the body, the corpse is carried to the towers on the highest level by bearers, 19 Interview with Dhun Bharia, May 2011.

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who are then followed by a procession of mourners, who walk in twos with a white handkerchief held between them. The dokhmas themselves are massive, open, circular stone-walled structures with a well in the middle. In the past only male Zoroastrian mourners were allowed to walk up to the towers, but today, female Zoroastrians follow as well. Non-Zoroastrians are not allowed in the prayer hall itself, nor near the towers, nor are they allowed to even see the face of the corpse after the prayers, but are allowed to pay their respects in a separate hall.20 After walking further up the hill to the towers, the body is placed on a stone slab about knee high from the ground, for the mourners to say their final prayers, and is then taken through a gate to the designated tower.21 After about one hundred feet, it is impossible to see the set of towers themselves due to the thick vegetation and landscaping. One can glimpse the top of the solar panels amid the various tree branches.22 The mourners can then return to the prayer hall, or go to the fire temple also on the upper level of the premises. Parsis are one of the only Zoroastrian communities in the world that have retained this practice for a majority of its members, and yet, due to several fundamental changes in the physical and ecological landscape of Mumbai, as well as within the community, the future of this practice is under constant debate. The lines of the debate not only reflect differing views of correct religious practice, but also an ongoing tug of war between lay Parsis, the Punchayet, and the priesthood, as well as reflecting to what extent a secular court will interfere in the practices of this micro-minority. Death by Numbers As much as Parsi identity and status were at one time marked by economic success and philanthropy, since the end of the Second World War, a new imaginary has taken hold. Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnography addresses the transformation of the Parsi self-perception from contributor to Indian modernity to one saturated with the sentiment of decay and anxieties 20 Although this is said to be strictly adhered to and enforced, on my visits it was clear that many of the staff who maintain the grounds are non-Parsi, and the complex itself is traversed daily by residents and visitors of Godrej Baug, a neighboring Parsi colony, in order to access the main road. 21 There are designated towers for different bodies, based on type of death. For example, women who die in childbirth are placed separately. 22 Solar panels are currently being used to speed up the process of decay by drying the bodies faster.



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about community decline.23 She traces what I call the sweet or rich milk turning sour and rancid. Indeed, this newer trope is evoked in all kinds of media, relating the ever-decreasing numbers of Parsis in Mumbai and the world. Although the numbers themselves are hotly contested, the sentiment of decline was almost ubiquitously expressed in my interviews. Older Parsis joke that, just like touching a white tiger for good luck, one should do the same to Parsis before they are extinct.24 In the following section, which will discuss the evidence and probable causes of this demographic decline, we will see the strong ties between community reproduction, that is, marital practices and child bearing, and the built environment expressed through the anxiety over the lack of space within the city of Mumbai. Although several theories of the demographic decline of the Parsis circulate, including low fertility rates, and the genetic consequences of endogamy, Paul Axelrod has shown that social and historical factors play a greater role in this population decline. He notes that the Parsis of India have experienced one of the most dramatic declines in population ever recorded outside of Europe.25 In his study, Axelrod found that Parsis not only have a history of late nuptiality, but also low nuptiality. Seeing a close correlation between marriage practices and levels of education, Axelrod found that 35% of those educated above high school never married, and the average age of marriage for women who have completed college was 27.1.26 This late age for marriage can be seen as early as the 1890s. Interestingly, the nuptiality patterns of rural Parsis were found to be similar, and Axelrod sees late marriage and non-marriage as “part of a comprehensive strategy that the Parsis have developed as a minority in India”.27 The survey of young Parsis conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found similar patterns to Axelrod’s in that Parsis, mostly involuntarily, choose to live in extended families and more and more desire ‘love marriages’, as opposed to those arranged by family members. Much energy goes into finding a ‘suitable partner’, who, combined with one’s income, can afford a neo-local flat from either set of parents. Many young Parsis therefore wait to marry until such time as the criteria are fulfilled. This desire for neo-local housing may conflict with the urban social environment of

23 Luhrmann 1996. 24 Interviews with author, 2008, 2010–11. 25 The historical demography of Parsi populations is made possible by their separate enumeration since the first public census in 1872. 26 Axelrod 1990: 404. 27 Ibid.: 406.

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Mumbai with its lack of affordable housing space, characterized by Appadurai as “the most public drama of disenfranchisement in Mumbai”.28 These studies as well as my research, emphasise how constraints on living space provide a kind of material context for Parsi demographic decline. In turn, they are also cited as the reason for the BPP’s ongoing push for new housing. As former BPP Chairman, Minoo Shroff put it, “no house; no spouse.”29 In addition to its effects on demographic decline in Mumbai, spatial pressures in the city also affect the actual practice of dokhmenashini. Although the Towers of Silence were once in secluded areas of Bombay, today the city has literally grown around them, to the discomfort of many of the neighbors. Indeed due to the peninsular nature of the city, population density is incredibly high and expresses itself in a vertical trend of development.30 The towers on Malabar Hill, although massive structures immediately surrounded by trees, are today also bordered by high-rise buildings inhabited by upper middle class Mumbaikers. Some residents of the latter, claim to be able to see the corpses inside and have pressed the city authorities to “remedy” the situation.31 The Mumbai press occasionally also debates the unhygienic nature of the dokhmas with claims that the birds sometimes carry the corpses’ remains to other areas.32 The BPP themselves, while always maintaining that the complex is ecologically sound and hygienic, have themselves made certain that a new building in its neighboring Parsi colony does not have a line of sight into the towers. Critically paralleling the human demographics, the vultures needed to devour the corpses, are no longer present in large enough numbers. One elderly Parsi remarked in an interview that in the 1970s when he was younger, one could see a multitude of vultures lining up on the walls of the dokhmas as soon as the body began to be carried toward it, and today one only sees clear skies dotted by a few kites and crows. Punchayet officials agree that there was a significant decline in the carrion birds. Many vultures are naturally steered away by the city’s congestion and high-rise buildings, and it is hypothesized that the construction noise of a new Parsi

28 Appadurai 2004: 72. 29 Interview with author, July 2008. 30 Masselos 2007. 31 A few years ago, a petition was filed under the Right to Information Act to the Municipal Corporation to uncover if the Complex was hygienically sound. 32 Hinnells 2005: 116.



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colony abutting the complex in the 1980s also discouraged the birds from flying near the site.33 Recently, a more definitive cause has been uncovered that ties Parsi ritual practice and vultures to the treatment of other animals in the local ecology. Diclofenac, a drug used on cattle farms, is found to produce gout, renal failure, and death in the birds when ingested. Although the declining population of three species of South Asian vultures was noted in the 1980s, it was not until 2003 that microbiologists working with the Peregrine Fund and Washington State University, isolated the cause of the decline. The three species were dying after ingesting the carcasses of livestock that had been treated with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used on cattle to diminish the pain of constant milk production and a painkiller given to humans. Further studies show that vultures cannot survive even if less than one percent of the drug is in the carcass upon which they feed.34 While the Government of India banned the drug in 2006, it is estimated that about 5 million animals were treated annually before the ban, and humans continue to take the drug. Apart from their role in Zoroastrian funerary practices, vultures are also an integral part of the ecologies of other religious groups as they help to consume the millions of other livestock that are untouched by Hindus because they are cattle and untouched by Muslims if they are not ritually made halal. The decline in vulture population, while not limited to the city of Mumbai has contributed to the declining viability of the dokhmenashini practice in the city, where it is estimated that three Parsis die everyday. For the Parsis, their own increasing mortality rate, set against the decline of this vital complementary species, is perceived as a crisis that now calls for drastic new strategies. The BPP has invited noted vulture experts to consult them on their options and is investigating other bird species as viable candidates. The Punchayet has since been a part of several debates on what should be done to either continue the practice, or find alternatives, often finding itself caught in the crossfire of orthodox and reformist groups in the community. Towering Debates I argue that proposals put forth by different groups are very reflective of the current fractures in community identity and the priorities of the various 33 Interview with former Punchayet trustee, January 2011. 34 Swan 2006.

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internal groups. They reflect a particularly fatalistic attitude toward urban space, which is seen as inevitably an obstacle in this regard. The orthodox, insist on maintaining the practice of dokhmenashini and therefore their solutions lie with rebuilding the vulture population. Orthodox Parsi public intellectual and recent BPP trustee, Khojeste Mistree has proposed a breeding program for the vultures involving the building of an enormous aviary to surround the towers. Although this solution is very acceptable to most Parsis in theory, others conclude that it would be prohibitively expensive and the threat of disease to the vulture population would remain as long as diclofenac is also being given to humans to combat arthritis. They point out that, even after successful breeding, the vultures would still be at risk because of the prevalence of the drug. A further proposal put forward by Parsi scholar, Homi Dhalla, who wished to retain the practice in some form, was to install solar panels to dry and decay the bodies faster. This solution, although currently in use, is rejected by those who claim that the bodies are then literally “fried” in the summer and left to rot during the cloudy monsoon season. One high priest even likened the practice to solar cremation.35 Many reformists have taken up the option of leaving aside dokhme­ nashini and moving toward cremation. The debate over this option has created huge fissures in the community and has reinforced the battle lines between reformists and the orthodox. Initially, the reformists pro­ posed  the building of an electric crematorium on the grounds of the Doongerwadi complex itself to have their relatives placed there after the traditional prayers had been held. In my interviews with proponents of this argument, respondents claimed that the traditional rite simply is no longer practical nor preferable since the Towers were not functional anymore. “If it were working we would use it, but it’s not”. The calls for the crematorium have put the Punchayet further on alert, as they claim that the installation would violate the trust deed that set up Doongerwadi in the first place for the dokhmenashini practice only. They claim that, besides being doctrinally abhorrent, cremation does not come under the purview of Zoroastrian religious practice, and therefore it is feared that the state might step in and revoke the trust, leaving the precious land and real estate up for grabs. I have heard from one camp that this is a real possibility, while the other camp claims that it is blatant fear-mongering,

35 Hinnells 2005: 117.



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as the Punchayet holds the title to the land and should not fear of losing it.36 The reformists then toned down their proposals and only pursued the idea of having one of the bunglis at the Doongerwadi site reserved for prayers and then having the body taken to one of Mumbai’s existing crematoria. Mourners could then at least retain the space for prayers while still observing the wishes of the dead for cremation. Currently those who opt for cremation conduct the prayers in their homes or rent expensive venues to accommodate the mourners. It is important to note that, even for the reformists, who wish to move away from the practice of dokhmenashini, the tradition of prayer rituals and the location of those prayers remain extremely critical. The place of Doongerwadi in the Parsi imaginary is still vital to their self-understanding of how funerals should be performed.37 One might argue that the Punchayet itself is caught between its sacred and secular missions. Because of its designation as the authority over ParsiZoroastrians under the law, it must uphold certain religious traditions, but the Punchayet is also the largest private landowner in Mumbai and is constantly trying to negotiate how to develop its holdings to maintain its corpus funds for the original objects of the trust. This unique position puts further pressure on the Punchayet to manage the practice of dokhmenash­ ini carefully within the context of an overgrowing megacity and the boundaries of Indian law. Indeed the Parsis have a long and exalted history of taking community matters to courts and are known to be especially litigious and argumentative.38 Apart from being a disproportionate number of litigants in India, Parsis have an overrepresentation within the judiciary itself as lawyers and judges. As such many seemingly private or intracommunal disputes between lay Parsis, the priesthood, and the Punchayet are fought in the public sphere through the Indian legal system.39 The following discussion of recent legal cases will exemplify how authority in the Parsi community continually oscillates between several actors, showing the 36 Interviews with author, September – October 2010. The land is held by the BPP under inami or special tenure. In 1969, the Government of Maharashtra did try to dissolve these tenures and reappoint the land for public use. After much lobbying from a joint body of trusts as well as the Indian Merchants’ Chamber and Property Owner’ Association, lands were exempt as long as they be part of a trust and used for the objects specified in the trust. Desai 1977: 118–9. 37 Walthert 2010. 38 Sharafi 2010. 39 My dissertation research shows that this constellation of authority is perpetuated by the incredible amounts of real estate and funds that are endowed in trust property, which confuses the assumed distinctions between private and public, religious and secular.

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kind of entanglements that can exist for intra-communal disputes under India’s particular form of secularism. Performing Identities The constellation of the religious and secular spheres in India is a direct result of the British colonial policy of indirect rule, which, unlike for instance the French policy, places religion, and authority over religion, squarely in the public sphere.40 As Bhargava has shown, religious groups are authorized collectives under civil law, and organizations like the Punchayet are invested with some authority over their respective constituencies. Under the Indian constitution, cultural rights for minority groups (religious or ethnic) include their respective rights to preserve and develop their culture through institutional arrangements. So minority groups must first present an idea or some kind of authoritative ensemble of beliefs and practices that constitute their ‘culture’ and then create institutional structures to nurture and develop these practices further. Veena Das claims that a subject who enjoys rights as a minority is a dual subject, at once an individual and not, “because in order for them to preserve and enjoy their culture, the collective survival of traditions becomes an important condition”.41 This objectification of ‘culture’ forces the individual to navigate between his or her dual legal personalities especially in the realm of the domestic and intimate spheres.42 Das insists that this unique relationship between the law and some codified notion of religious practices constitutes a kind of double life of culture consisting of: its potential to give radical recognition to the humanity of its subjects as well as its potential to keep the individual within such tightly defined bounds that  the capacity to experiment with selfhood - which is also a mark of humanity – may be jeopardized.43

These two potentialities are increasingly being negotiated by Parsi and other Indian women, who are caught most often between the double personalities of cultural rights.44 It is interesting that in the example discussed

40 Bhargava 1998. 41 Das 1995: 87. 42 See also Clifford 1988, Povinelli 2002. 43 Das 1995: 91. 44 See also, Basu 1999; Menon 1999.



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below, as well as the controversial Shah Bano affair in the 1990s,45 it is increasingly women’s appeals for rights beyond their religious authorities that is forcing a critical questioning and rethinking of the implications of Indian secularism and challenging the boundaries of what can be said and done within their own traditions. Under the law and in community practice, Parsi cultural identity is further layered by the conflation of the term Parsi as both a religious and an ethnic identification. Since their arrival in India, the Parsi community has limited access to its sacred spaces to Parsi-Zoroastrians only.46 No one other than a Parsi may enter a fire temple or attend prayers in the Towers of Silence complexes. Following a legal judgment in 1908 was established that, as a traditionally patrilineal religion, Zoroastrianism, and Parsi identity, can be passed from a Parsi-Zoroastrian father to his children whether his wife is a Zoroastrian or not.47 Hence marriage out of the community for a woman becomes very problematic, as she could be seen as renouncing her Parsi identity and hence be excluded from Parsi spaces. The children of a Zoroastrian father may be given a navjote, (Zoroastrian initiation) and as such, be accepted into the religion and enjoy rights of access. But exogamy for women and the rights attached to it are hotly debated in the community and relate closely to the politics around sacred space. The Mumbai Parsis tend to be the strictest about disallowing intermarried Parsi women to participate in any Parsi rituals outside the home.48 Traditionally, the Punchayet has used the right to bar entry to the Tower of Silence and the practice of dokhmenashini as tools with which to discipline the community, as their control of sacred space is a key aspect of their authority.49 Since the 1990s, however, the Punchayet has been caught somewhere in the middle of the debate, as more attention in the press and litigation put pressure on it to make an authoritative decision about the rights of intermarried women. 45 For further details and analysis of this case, see Engineer 1987; Agnes 1999. 46 The term also includes later Zoroastrian migrants who refer to themselves as Iranis. 47 The judgment in Petit v. Jeejeebhoy, also referred to as the Parsi Punchayet Case of 1908, is a landmark judgment for the community. The case was actually brought to establish election procedures for the BPP, but also included a petition for the rights of the non-Parsi spouse of JRD Tata to access Panchayat funds and properties. Whilst deciding against the rights of non-Parsi spouses, the judgment went beyond the case to establish the rights of intermarried Parsi men to have their children counted as Parsi, but not the same for women. See also Judgments 2005; Sharafi 2010; Walthert 2010. 48 It is noteworthy that Parsis in the rest of India vary between the more orthodox and liberal stances. 49 Palsetia 2001: 82; Desai 1977.

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In 1990, this issue exploded within the community when Roxan Shah, a Parsi woman and practicing Zoroastrian who had married outside of the community, was killed in a car accident and had her remains ini­ tially  refused at Doongerwadi.50 At first the Punchayet refused on the grounds that she had married a Jain and had thus effectively renounced Zoroastrianism. But partly due to her young age, and the circumstances of her death, her parents and many in the liberal and reform circles flooded the Punchayet with angry letters. Orthodox Parsis maintained that she had chosen to marry out of the religion and had thus actively renounced her rights as a Zoroastrian, and therefore, according to religious custom, should be excluded from entering sacred spaces.51 In many interviews, respondents stated that this policy was “the law of the land”, referring to the Judgment of 1908 and the custom that a woman takes on her husband’s communal identity at marriage. As almost one in three Parsi women marry outside the community, liberal Parsis argued that such customs are against equality and effectively further decrease the extant population of Parsis in Mumbai, as the woman and her children are then effectively not counted as Parsis. Eventually, under much pressure from the liberal side, the Punchayet issued a statement that allowed for intermarried women to practice dokhmenashini, but their remains would only be placed in one particular tower in the complex and not with the bodies of other dead Parsis.52 A key condition for this was that the families of the deceased provide a sworn affidavit recording the woman’s practice of the Zoroastrian religion until her death.53 Liberal Parsis, although temporarily assuaged, later pointed out that if a woman were to marry outside, she would then automatically be excluded from certain fire temples, not be able to perform the ritual practice of the religion outside of her home and thus not be able to provide the evidence required. The requirement to perform and give evidence of one’s religion as a criterion of entry reminds us of what Povinelli calls “the cunning of recognition”, that is, the law’s ability to recognize and authorize only certain ensembles of practice, usually ones that are near impossible to 50 See Palsetia 2001, 321–325 for more details. 51 This position is held as ‘Parsi custom’ even if the couple marriages under the Special Marriage Act of 1952 which does not require any legal renunciation of religion from either party, giving them a purely civil marriage. 52 The Chotra or smallest enclosure is “used for doubtful cases” for those that have suffered capital punishment and for those that had renounced their faith (Desai 1977, 45). 53 In 2010, the Panchayat added another obstacle for intermarried women, who abrogate their rights if they take the surnames of their husbands upon marriage.



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perform.54 As the above has shown, for Parsis this performance of identity is fundamentally constituted by the access to sacred space in city. In response to these pressures a few intermarried women of means and influence and their supporters formed the Association of Inter-Married Zoroastrians (AIMZ) in 1991. Their mission is to advocate and protect the rights of intermarried Zoroastrian women and to have their children initiated into the religion. For example, they campaign against the policy that an intermarried Parsi woman cannot sit in the prayer bungli at the Tower of Silence and must pay her respects in the hall with non-Parsis. Since their establishment they have also found several Parsi priests who are willing to perform navjote ceremonies for children of mixed marriages. A few of these priests are also willing to perform obsequial prayers in cases of cremation, although not at the Doongerwadi site itself.55 Orthodox Parsis in Mumbai insist that the dokhmenashini practice at Doongerwadi is critical to religious life and must be maintained at any cost. To orthodox groups, cremation and intermarriage represent a watering down of an ethnic identity that is already under great threat of disappearance. As Khojeste Mistree, has noted, “if ethnicity goes, the identity goes, and if the identity goes, we believe our religion will die.”56 This conflation between ethnic and religious identity by orthodox Parsis is key to their insistence on traditional ritual practice. Like the coin in the milk, the orthodox insist on an exclusive and self-contained identity. More liberal, or reformist Parsis, some of whom even accept converted Zoroastrians, hold that if religious ritual does not adapt to changing realities, there will no longer be a community to nurture. They point to the high numbers of intermarried Parsis and those that emigrate and adapt as examples of people who find the strict practice too difficult to continue in present-day society. For them the sugar must dissolve to sweeten the milk. As cases of intermarriage and cremation grew in number, the High Priests and orthodox community members began to push back through several initiatives. In 2009, a group of High Priests castigated two priests for performing obsequial ceremonies for cremated Parsis and for initiating the children of Parsi mothers who had married out of the community. The newly elected BPP board, led by its two prominent orthodox trustees, 54 Povinelli 2002. James Clifford (1988) also recalls this double bind in his discussion of the trial of Mashpee Indians. 55 Interview with author, February 2011. 56 Khojeste Mistree quoted in Reddall, Braden. “Endangered vultures highlight Parsi culture clash.” Reuters. August 26, 2005.

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including Mistree, issued a resolution banning these two “renegade priests” from performing ceremonies at the Towers of Silence complex and at the two temples under BPP management.57 The High Priests maintained that priests who perform ceremonies for those “that have wrongly chosen the cremation route where dokhmenashini is available, are by their very actions” weakening the faith.58 Two lay Parsis took up the matter and challenged the legitimacy of the ban in the Bombay High Court, claiming that it overstepped the BPP’s purview. They petitioned the court, in an Originary Summons, to interpret the Trust Deed of 1884, and ascertain whether the BPP had a right to bar priests from its premises. They claimed that the ban interfered with their own rights as beneficiaries of the trust, since the BPP was not vested with the right to decide on religious issues and should restrict its powers to the financial and administrative, that is to the secular, functioning of the trust. After many legal maneuvers in court and quite nasty debates in the Parsi press, the judgment in March 2011 was quite farreaching in its implications. Sitting through the last days of the case in the hallowed chamber of the Bombay High Court – fittingly the very chamber that the 1908 case was decided – was a tension filled experience. The court was full not only with the litany of lawyers for both sides in their black robes, but also several of the BPP trustees, members of the press, and other interested onlookers. Chief Justice Chandrachud read out a portion of the judgment to gasps in the audience. The previous days had been so contentious and hard fought that the verdict seemed to take everyone by surprise. Following its interpretation of the deed, the court confirmed that: the property shall be held upon trust at all times for ever and the trustees shall permit and suffer the land, towers and structures to be used by every member of the Parsi community professing the Zoroastrian religion as a place for the exposure of the dead and for the performance of religious rites and ceremonies.59

The court found that the deed confined the functions of the trustee to the administration of the trust alone, even where the trust has a religious 57 While the BPP oversees only two of Mumbai’s 49 temples, a few other temple trustees also supported the ban. One of the priests, Framroze Mirza, has accepted the ban and taken no part in the case. The other, Khusroo Madan, while also not being a party to the case, has not accepted the ban and continues to practice at other venues. In an interview he also expressed anxiety about a petition being circulated to have him evicted from his home in a Panchayat housing colony (October 2010). 58 Letter from the High Priests to the Trustees of the Punchayet, on August 29, 2009. 59 Judgment Kanga v. BPP, March 11, 2011.



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purpose. As such, the trust has no right to ban any one from the premises if they fit the description of a beneficiary of the trust.60 Further, the trustees had no right to disallow a Parsi from choosing any “duly ordained Priest” to perform ceremonies at the site.61 The judge commented that, as cremation and obsequial prayers are allowed in places where a dokhma is unavailable, the practices themselves could not be said to be irreligious.62 During the hearing it was established that, although some viewed the performance of cremation prayers as misconduct by the priest, those ceremonies were never conducted on the properties of the BPP itself, therefore the ban was not due to misconduct on the premises, and was an overreach of the Punchayet’s authority. In favour of the BPP and the orthodox view, however, the judgment is clear that the deed establishes Doongerwadi for the “exposure of the dead”, making the appeals for an onsite crematorium, or perhaps even for prayers for those who wish to be cremated, moribund. The case and the judgment further solidify the multiplicity of Parsi authority in Mumbai, giving weight and power to lay Parsis, priests, and the Punchayet. Above all, at the center of the case, remains the question of access to space and the importance of the location of religious practice. The Judgment was clear in empha­ sizing  the sacred nature of the Tower of Silence complex, as well as the importance of maintaining religious rituals, but at the same time did acknowledge that the decline in the vulture population was a factor in perpetuating the movement away from dokhmenashini. The judge frequently commented that the opposing sides, and indeed the community at large, should refrain from taking these kinds of matters to court and should attempt to resolve them through non-legal means. Nonetheless, the BPP, spearheaded by its two orthodox trustees, filed an appeal to the Supreme Court of India, and both parties have agreed to mediation procedures. 60 This Judgment will have bearing on other current cases such as one brought by an intermarried Parsi woman, Goolrukh Gupta, who is suing her local punchayet in Gujarat for the right to attend the prayer ceremonies for her parents upon their deaths at the local Tower of Silence, as she claims she remains a beneficiary of the trust. 61 Judgment Kanga v. BPP. March 11, 2011. 62 Parsi cemeteries have existed and still function in many other Indian cities and towns with relatively large populations but only where dokhmenashini is unavailable. In the 1940s a huge controversy brewed in Bangalore when a dokhma was newly built where there was an existing cemetery. Some proponents of dokhmenashini tried to have the cemetery closed down and burial discontinued. In 1947 the Mysore High Court ruled that the courts could not discontinue the use of the cemetery, as this would be interfering in religious affairs. See Desai 1977: 154–9.

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Along with the geography of sacred space that led Parsis to migrate from rural Gujarat and orient themselves in an infant megacity, the law has continued to be a kind of technology of religious practice. Sharafi has shown that Parsis have turned to the courts to adjudicate community matters, both religious and secular, since colonial times and this pattern continues today.63 As the above also shows, this is perhaps due to the tripartite structure of authority within the community, with the Punchayet, lay Parsis, and the priesthood all struggling to define and defend their notions of tradition and the correct practice of dokhmenashini. Being removed from religious spaces shows the double bind that Parsi women experience when the same authority structure that is supposed to ensure their communal traditions becomes one that removes them from their natal communities. I find Saba Mahmood’s invocation useful here. In her description of the mosque movement and the idea of tradition in Egypt, Mahmood, evokes Michel Foucault’s understanding of tradition as a discursive formation: a field of statements and practices whose structure of possibility is neither the individual, nor the collective body of overseers, but a form of relation between past and present predicated upon a system of rules that demarcate both the limits and the possibility of what is sayable, doable, and recognizable as a comprehensible event in all its manifest forms.64

This idea of a tradition seen as a kind of relation of constructed boundaries  and limits of the possible is clearly evoked in the debates about Doongerwadi. Like an ecological system, the concept of tradition is one that includes actors working in concert within changing boundaries of possibility. In terms of tradition and sacred space, I would add to this concept the understanding of ecology and the built environment as both enabler and constraint of discursive practices. While cremation is already a practiced option for deceased Parsis, it is extremely unlikely that it would become a sanctified policy that the Punchayet would encourage or uphold in the future. The practice of dokhmenashini, although contested by some, still seems to be a critical pillar in the understanding of the community in its own eyes and for others, and the Tower of Silence complex itself holds much symbolic power for Parsis and their spatiality in the city. If the ritual practice were to devolve into cremation, a funerary process practiced by 63 Sharafi 2010. 64 Mahmood 2005: 114–15.



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millions of other Indians, and if the Doongerwadi site were to become defunct for the practice of excarnation, would the religious protection offered to the land be removed from this prime piece of real estate? Would being Parsi be emptied out of its spiritual content and become a secular label? Would the Parsi community cease to be, both in their own eyes and under the gaze of the state? References Primary Sources General Trust Deed (1884) of the Funds and Immoveable Properties of the Bombay Parsi Punchayet. The Bombay Parsi Punchayet. Judgments: Petit vs. Jeejeebhoy 1908, Saklat vs. Bella 1925: Reprint of Original Judgments With Explanatory Articles and Supplementary Judgments. Bombay: Parsiana Publications. Jamsheed Kanga and Anr. v. Parsi Punchayet Funds and Properties and Ors. Appeal No. 256 of 2010. High Court of Judicature at Bombay. O.O.C.J Secondary Sources Agnes, Flavia 1999. Law and Gender Inequality: The Politics of Women’s Rights in India. New Delhi & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, Arjun 2000. “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai.” Public Culture 12(3): 627–651. —— 2004. “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition.” In V. Rao and M. Walton (eds.), Culture and Public Action. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— 2003. “Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.” Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Axelrod, Paul 1990. “Cultural and Historical Factors in the Population Decline of the Parsis of India.” Population Studies 44(3): 401–419. Basu, Srimati 1999. She Comes to Take Her Rights. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bhargava, R. 1998. Secularism and its Critics. New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Castells, M. 1977. The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach. Transl. Alan Sheridan. London: Edward Arnold. —— 1978. City, Class, and Power. New York: Macmillan. Cereti, Carlo G. 1991. An Eighteenth Century Account of Parsi History: The Qesse-ye-Zartostian-e Hindustan. Naples: Instituto Universitario Orientale Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici. Clifford, James 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derrett, J.D.M. 1968. Religion, Law and the State in India. New York: The Free Press.

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Desai, Sapur Faredun 1977. History of the Parsi Punchayet 1860–1960. Bombay: R.M.D.C. Press Pvt. Ltd. Dobbin, Christine 1970. “The Parsi Punchayet in Bombay City in the Nineteenth Century.” Modern Asian Studies 4(2): 149–164. Dossal, Mariam 2010. Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope: Mumbai 1660-Present Times. New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engineer, A. 1987. The Shah Bano Controversy. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Los Angeles et al.: University of California Press. Foucault, M. 2002. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. —— 2007. “Questions on Geography.” In Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography. J. Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds). Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson 1997b. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press. Harvey, D. 1989b. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— 2003. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge. Hinnells, John R. 2005. The Zoroastrian Diaspora: Religion and Migration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holston, J. 1989. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, J. 1992. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books. Lefebvre, H., R. Bononno and N. Smith 2003. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— E. Kofman and E. Lebas 1996. Writings on Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell. —— and D. Nicholson-Smith 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Low, S. M. 2000. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. —— 2006. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture. Malden: Blackwell. Luhrmann, T. M. 1996. The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a Postcolonial Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Masselos, James 2007. The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power. USA: Oxford University Press. Menon, Nivedita (ed.) 1999. Gender and Politics in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Palsetia, Jesse S. 2001. The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in Bombay City. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing. Parashar, Archana 1992. Women and Family Law Reform in India: Uniform Civil Code and Gender Equality. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Patel, S., and J. Masselos 2003. Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Rao, V. 2007. “Proximate Distances: The Phenomenology of Density in Mumbai.” Built Environment 33(2): 227–248. Salvatore, Armando 2007. “Authority in Question: Secularity, Republicanism and ‘Communitarianism’ in the Emerging Euro-Islamic Public Sphere.” Theory, Culture & Society 24(2): 135–160. Sharafi, Mitra 2010. Colonial Parsis and Law: A Cultural History. Governmental Research Fellowships Lectures 2009–10. Mumbai: K.R. Cama Oriental Institute. Sheth, D. L., and G. Mahajan 1999. Minority Identities and the Nation-state. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.



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Smith, D.E. 1998. “India as a Secular State.” In R. Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Smith, N. 2002. “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 34(3): 427–450. —— 2008. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Swan, Gary E. et al. 2006. “The Toxicity of Diclofenac to Gyps Vultures”, Biology Letters 2. 279–282. Van der Veer, Peter, and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.) 1999. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walthert, Rafael 2010. “Problematisierte Patrilinearitaet bei den ParsInnen in Mumbai”. Gender 1/2010: 9–27. White, David L. 1991. “From Crisis to Community Definition: The Dynamics of EighteenthCentury Parsi Philanthropy.” Modern Asian Studies 25(2): 303–320. Zukin, S. 1993. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

PART 2

URBAN DYNAMICS OF MIGRATION, RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND TRANSNATIONAL RELIGION

CONNECTING THE LOCAL, NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL POWERS OF A RELIGIOUS YOUTH ORGANISATION IN BERLIN Synnøve Bendixsen Introduction While urban ethnographers have tended to focus on ethnicity and class as ways of mobilizing group solidarity and social networks in the urban sphere, there has recently been an increased focus on religion as a potential factor for segregation and a source for belongingness in the urban sphere. The ‘return of religion’ in urban research is mainly a result of the ‘rediscovery’ of Islam among a generation of young Muslims who have been born and educated in Europe.1 The perception that the urban is per se secular has been proved to ignore the continued and renewed power of religiosity among the urban population (van der Veer 2009) and thus provided a dismantled image of the urban mosaic. Labour migration, which is largely an urban phenomenon, involves people taking their religions and cultural perceptions from one place to another and, more often than not, changing their relationship to religious and cultural ideas and perceptions in the very same move. The new locality not only represents new economic opportunities and changed life chances, it also dismantles the traditional ties to religious authorities and customs (Schiffauer 1988). Without centralizing institutions defining the authoritative doctrines, Muslims continue to act within an increasingly pluralistic, modern society in ways that are multiple, varied and sometimes inconsistent (Casanova 2001). Simultaneously, religious ‘faith communities’ continue to play an important role as spaces where religious knowledge, values and norms are not only mediated, but also negotiated. This chapter discusses how the urban is experienced by a group of religiously minded young people with different ethnic backgrounds who have been born and educated in Germany, showing how their everyday lives in

1 However, urban research also includes other religious groups, such as Jewish and Christian ones. Roy (2004: 6) has linked the ‘return to Islam’ among Muslim youth in Europe to other contemporary religious revivalisms, including born-again Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and New Age religions.

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their urban environment are formed by their participation in a Muslim ‘faith community’. The Muslim youth organisation ‘Muslimische Jugend in Deutschland e.V.’ (“Muslim Youth in Germany”, hereafter MJD), comprising approximately fifty branches across Germany, is the second largest Muslim youth organisation in Germany, after Milli Görüs (IGMG). The chapter suggests first, how this religious ‘faith community’ continuously shapes Muslim youth’s religious identifications, and secondly, how this youth organisation connects religious knowledge, consumption and ideas from the transnational, national and local levels.2 The Local Level Established in 1994, the MJD is directly inspired by a similar youth group based in the United Kingdom.3 Fatima (31) recalls sitting around a camp fire discussing: “Would it not be great if you lived in Hamburg, but on going to Aachen would know where you can find other young Muslims who are actively practising their religion?”4 One of the main reasons why the MJD was established, according to Fatima, was dissatisfaction with the mosques and organisations established by their parents. Despite internal modifications in the late 1990s, the latter mostly remained ethnically and nationally determined, anchored in national ties to their countries of origin, instead of to the worldwide Muslim community, the umma. Growing up in the 1990s, Fatima experienced that her peers found the mosques boring, and many only participated out of respect for their parents (cf. Babès 1997 on France; Jacobsen 2006 on Norway). The religious lectures were given in the languages of their parents, which not all young people are fluent in, and the imams were largely unfamiliar with German conditions. Fatima, like other religiously active young people, feared the

2 The data for this paper derive from a longer period fieldwork (March 2005 to June 2007) with forty young female Muslims in Berlin, many of whom participate in the MJD. During this period of time, I participated in the weekly meetings and the regular events organised by the MJD. This was part of my PhD thesis, “‘It’s like doing SMS to Allah’: Young Female Muslims Crafting a Religious Self in Berlin”, submitted in February 2009. 3 Similar Muslim youth organisations exist in Austria, Italy, France, Sweden and Norway. The MJD is represented at the European level by FEMYSO (Forum European Muslim Youth and Student Organisation), established in Leicester (UK) in 1996. 4 All names have been altered according to correct ethical guidelines to protect the anonymity of interviewees and conversational partners.



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negative impact this could have on the religiosity of their own generation.5 Instead, the creation of new structures of learning should make possible new ways of identifying as Muslims in Germany.6 The MJD exemplifies a generational shift in the practice of Islam in Europe, due to its approach to Islam and its teaching methods.7 In particular four aspects are unique. First, it is ‘multi-culti’, that is, its members are inter-ethnic.8 Most members of this group in Berlin have been born or raised in Germany with parents of different nationalities, including Bosnia, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine and Sudan.9 An important aim is that the young people should identify themselves above all as Muslims, and then potentially by ethnicity or nationality. Secondly, the organisation is Germanspeaking, since most of the participants feel more proficient in the German language. The focus is to change the commonly held idea that to be both German and Muslim is an oxymoron. The ideology behind the MJD embraces the thought that Islam should be a path and a possible way to integrate, without assimilating, into German society. Thirdly, the organisation has an elected shura (consultation/committee), but is independent of the mosques and does not employ imams (prayer leaders). Instead the young Muslims make references to the Koran, to books, hadiths (the stories or traditions based on Mohammed’s life), the internet and TV. Fourthly, it is 5 Fatima also expressed a feeling that religious education in the institution of the family had failed, and that this was partly because the parental generation in Germany is the ‘Atatürk generation’ which had not received a “proper religious education”. In her opinion the older generation lacks teaching abilities because they were uneducated and tended to mix religion with traditional customs from their villages. 6 The MJD appeals to both religiously active and non-active young men and women (socalled ‘born Muslims’) by inviting pop star Sami Yusuf and Ammar 114 (a German converted Hip Hopper) to ‘Islam Connecting People’ events, and by arranging graffiti workshops in mosques. This generation of well-educated and socially active youth have been called ‘popMuslims’ (cf. Gerlach 2006), a term the author adopts a distance from for two main reasons. First, many of the young people I worked with discussed this book and felt that this terminology did not show respect for them and their activities. Secondly, the term not only neglects, but also takes our attention away from how the religiosity of young people is part of a complex process in which young people actively interact with religious sources. 7 The MJD states their goal as being “to integrate Muslim youth by providing an opportunity to develop their creativity and talents as young German Muslims in the German language”. Own translation from the German from the leaflet ‚Selbstdarstellung der Muslimischen Jugend in Deutschland e.V.‘, April 2003. See also the MJD homepage, www .mjd-net.de, accessed 23.10.06. 8 In Berlin, the term ‘multi-culti’ is politically ‘thick’, most often related to migration and integration policies directed towards young people with migrant backgrounds living in Berlin and initiatives to ‘integrate’ them. The young make use of this term about themselves, mostly in a positive manner, but sometimes jocularly. 9 The group is also frequented by the children of mixed marriages, e.g. mother German and father Egyptian, and converted Germans.

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organised by and for young people (15 to 30 years old), and the weekly local meetings are prepared by the participants.10 Bringing in the Urban The local factions have gender-segregated weekly meetings, one day for the men (the ‘brothers’), another for the women (‘sisters’).11 The majority of its participants do not live in Kreuzberg, but in other parts of Berlin, including Neukölln, Wedding and Spandau.12 The focus of this chapter is on the female participants of this organisation. In the weekly meetings the young women read together from the Koran in Arabic, followed by a German translation, and present Powerpoint presentations of the contemporary value of different hadith to their own lives in Germany. In the teaching of Islam, they make use of book sources which address Islam in a universal way, including sacred texts like the Koran. During the seminars, the teaching and practice of Islam takes place within a quest for the ‘real’ or ‘true’ Islam, in contrast to the Islam of their parents, which young people regard as being mixed with ‘tradition’ (cf. Bendixsen 2009; Karakasoglu-Aydin 2000; Nökel 2002; Roy 2004; Venel 1999). The focus on knowledge and self-discipline as the ‘correct way’ to Islam can be found among young people in several European societies (cf. Sahlin 2003), as well as in Islamic movements in Turkey and Egypt (Mahmood 2005).13 This particular religious consciousness can be understood as being realized through a process of modernization, where the expansion of liter10 A high proportion of MJD participants belong to an upwardly mobile part of the migrant population either because of their parents’ education, or because of their own success in the German educational system. The structure of the organisation may perhaps explain its popularity among educated youth: participants are expected to contribute with religious presentations and discussions of understandings of religious knowledge. 11 A weekly meeting in Berlin often attracts no more than ten young females, although the annual national meetings must set a participation limit of approximately 1200. According to the official membership figures, there are 600 members nationwide (in 2007), two thirds of whom are female. This does not correspond with those who actual participate in the meetings. Some Muslim youth groups situated within different mosques and organizations are unofficially attached to the MJD, and the organization is active in the German media and public life at the national level. Consequently, the group’s significance is far greater than its membership figures might indicate (Bendixsen forthcoming). 12 The highest densities of inhabitants of Muslim orientation in Berlin are in the neighbourhoods of Neukölln, Wedding and Kreuzberg. 13 Recent research on young Muslims in Europe has generally indicated an increase in the idea of a ‘pure’ Islam among the younger generation versus a ‘traditional’ or ‘cultural’ Islam that is mostly practised by their parents’ generation (Roy 2004: 36).



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acy and education contributes to reducing dependence on more traditionally defined religious authorities to make sense of one’s religion (Eickelman and Piscatori 1992; Ismail 2004).14 The young people also bring the local, urban context in which they live into the weekly meetings. Since 11th September 2001 the media, both national and globally, and the German political focus on Islam and Muslims have been framed in a stereotypical way, where in particular women with headscarves are viewed as either ‘traditional’ and ‘unwilling to integrate’, or as the ‘victims’ of Muslim men’s oppression. This leads sometimes to uncomfortable and discriminatory everyday situations in the German sphere for these young women. To counter this, MJD leaders sometimes initiate role-playing or workshops on how best to answer ‘typical’ questions they are confronted with, such as: “What do you say when someone is coming up to you and ask if it isn’t warm under the headscarf?” At one weekly meeting for the young women, for example, the MJD group constructed a role-play on how best to react in urban situations: Introducing the role play, the leader, Fadwa (23), says: “This one is on the subway, we all know this situation”. Nawar (17): “Ah, yes, finally at a specific place and also the subway – such an important place.” Hamida is volunteering, and Fadwa instructs her: “You are sitting on the subway, and we are non-Muslims and you are yourself.” Two of the girls start staring at Hamida, whispering to each other, and continue to stare [though they are both shy and so they sometimes only laugh]. “Just a second”, Hamida is saying, reaching for her mobile phone and are putting the headphones of her mobile in her ears: “I forgot this! I am always listening to music on the subway, so that I don’t hear what they are saying.” One of the girls says: “She is doing the right thing”. The role play is followed by a discussion of how the others would react in such a situation, which all of the young females recognised.

This sort of role-play can be understood as practising how to react and feel more secure in the urban space as a kind of ‘tactic’ (de Certeau 1984).15 Commenting that Hamida is doing ‘the right thing’ indicates that ignoring 14 The organization also has some similarities with the da’wa movement in Egypt, studied by Mahmood (1998, 2002, 2005), in terms of its pedagogy, its attraction to women and its politics of piety. In Egypt, however, the da’wa movement includes setting up neighborhood mosques, Islamic educational institutions and printing presses, and social welfare organizations. On the renaissance of da’wa movements in Muslim societies, see also Metcalf (1982) and Peacock (1978). 15 Goffman argues for the importance of practising: “In a performer’s acquisition of a particular competence, the first step attempted is often easier and simpler than any he will take in the serious world (…). The first phase of training thus affords the learner some protection from the anxiety produced by incompetent performances (…)” (Goffman 1974: 64–65).

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the gaze or talk of others can sometimes be the best solution. Through similar practices, the women learn how to be ‘streetwise’ (Anderson 1990), developing a kind of ‘street etiquette’, ‘cultural capital’ (cf. Bourgois 2003: 135) or ‘savoir faire’ which they can apply in different situations.16 Knowing how to behave in public is more than relating to faceless others or merely accepting the stereotypical and negative gazes. Learning how to behave on the streets within a ‘safe’ space, young people develop a ‘condition of self’ in public. The feeling of mastering situations in the street, which is the aim of these ‘rehearsal’ tactics, can provide these young women with a feeling of safety and self-confidence. MJD organisers recognise that social interaction in the street does not take place in an abstract space, but rather in a place sutured of social codes and possibly uncertain interactions, and that social practice is something one can learn. The micro-politics of street communication take different forms. For example, at one MJD meeting Leila (21) is making a presentation when she says: When we are sitting in the underground and there are no other Muslims, one feels like an outsider and does not dare to take the Koran out to read. Why are we ashamed of ourselves to do that? People are looking anyway.

Leila then refers to a verse in the Koran and a history from the life of Muhammad, where the moral is that one should be proud of who one is, including in front of other people. She continues: What did Umar Ibn al-Khattab [the second Caliph] do when he took up [converted to] Islam, or what did a young man do at a university – praying in the middle of the university? When everyone is doing this, there is a (positive) chain reaction. Trust yourself. Just do it.17

Leila makes here a direct link between historical time and today: born in the year 580, Umar converted on the same day as he planned to assassinate Muhammad and later became the second Caliph (634–644). Accordingly, his conversion improved the confidence of the Muslims in practicing Islam openly, as nobody dared to obstruct Umar’s prayers at the Ka’abah. Daring to perform their religious practices visually in the street can also influence other Muslims to perform their religion openly. The emphasis within the youth group, that it is ‘normal’ to be a practising Muslim openly, is the starting point of an effort to take Islam into the public sphere and out of its 16 This ‘cultural capital’ is distinguished from Bourdieu’s cultural capital in that, to a small degree, it is translatable between different social fields. 17 Notice here the similarity to the ‘Nike’ commercial slogan, “Just do it”.



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abnormality. Visibility of the practice of Islam becomes here a feature in the struggle for recognition in which visibility can become a source of power and the invisibility or suppression of the visible act becomes a sign of subjugation (cf. Fraser 1999: 119). This can also contribute to increased community feelings among religiously active Muslims in public (Bendixsen 2009). While several researchers have correctly emphasised the experiences of discrimination that veiled women in several European cities experience, it is worth noting that the veil can in some instances also constitute symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991) or a resource. There are certain moments or interactions where wearing a veil can feel like an advantage or where spaces are translated into an ethnoscape (Appadurai 1996).18 In a discussion of the difficulties that occur when veiling, Julie (28), a German convert, emphasised that she also experiences positive reactions on the street, including admiration and comments from other Muslims. She recalls comments from other (unveiled) Muslims, who told her: I also want to wear the headscarf at one point. As a veiled woman on the street, one can also be considered a moral role-model; everything is projected in the women that oneself – whether man or women – has not (yet) achieved morally, spiritually or religiously.19

The headscarf can contribute to presenting women as positive ‘significant Others’ for other (non-veiled) Muslims. Similarly, Nökel argues, in her research on Turkish migrants in Germany, that “[t]o be successful despite wearing a headscarf is the ultimate sign of personal recognition and personal identity politics, different from simply assimilating” (Nökel 2006: 430). Julie adds that she sometimes meets particularly encouraging and friendly faces from non-Muslims in the street, something that for her indicates some form of solidarity with the stigmatised. Being visually a practising Muslim can be turned into relevant experiences for certain positions or jobs.20 There are cases where veiled young 18 By ethnoscape, Appadurai (1996: 33) means “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals constitute an essential feature of the world and appear to affect the politics of (and between) nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree”. With this concept, Appadurai draws our attention to how the reproduction of group identity is changing socially, territorially and culturally as a consequence of migration and regroupings in new locations (ibid.: 48). 19 E-mail exchange May 2007. 20 Karakasoglu-Aydin (1999) suggests that several Muslims of the second generation with a Turkish background would like to be teachers, a career in which they can also turn their

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people are preferred as employees, either because a shop owner wants to portray a religious image, or because she or he personally prefers employees to be veiled. When Ines (20) decided that she wanted to become a social worker and tried to enter a Protestant school to acquire such an education, she told me: There are not many Muslims doing social work, or there are some, but they don’t bring their religion to their work, ‘cos they don’t practice it, or they don’t know how to pass on their religion correctly. Like when the children ask about it, they should be told what is correct and not wrong. And it’s important. You know why? ‘Cos, when you say where you come from, you are talking about belonging, and like, when you ask me who I am, I don’t really know. Like I’m not German, I’m not Lebanese, and I’m not Palestinian. I don’t know where I come from. Like, it’s important to look where your parents come from, to know the culture, the history and such. I don’t know my own language well; I have not been raised with it. (…) Like, my parents thought it was important that I became integrated here, and that is why I have a German name and such. But I still miss something. Like, that is why you have these young criminals and such; they have problems, ‘cos they don’t know where they belong. (…) I said this at [the interview for] the Protestant school - I said that it’s important, and she said that she would write very positively about me. I am so excited.21

Many of Ines’, friends who also wear a headscarf asked her whether it would not be difficult to be accepted by a Christian school. Ines argued that, on the contrary, they paid attention to her voluntary work and her personal intentions during the interview. Ines was accepted by the school and turned out to be the only one with a headscarf, which is situated in former East Berlin. For a long time she had difficulties in finding friends, something that changed once she got back her first homework (where she used her knowledge of Islam to answer the task) with a top grade. After this, the other students started to talk to her and wanted to cooperate with her. She realised afterwards that they were ‘afraid’, not knowing how to talk to her. She explains: “Before they considered me to be different. After all, I am different!” Thus, while her religiosity (it was a Protestant school) and her migrant background became a symbolic capital or resource in the way she framed it, at the point when she entered the social work education, it was traumas into a constructive force. She found that several intended to provide assistance to the rising migrant generation in the German educational system through their bilateral knowledge and institutional and life experiences. Many felt an obligation to become role models for ‘migrant’ youth and to show the majority non-Muslim society that they can participate in the wider society. 21 Field notes, 4th July 2004.



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her cleverness and success at school which won her the acceptance of the other students.22 Local, National and Transnational Connections The transnational aspects of migrants and Muslims in Europe have increasingly been analysed (see Amiraux 2003; Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994; Césari 2004; Faist 1998; Østergaard-Nielsen 2002). The term ‘transnational’ is meant to capture the processes through which immigrants (re)produce social fields across geographical, cultural and political borders (Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1994: 7). It emphasises the multiplicity of relationships, including familial, economic, social, organisational, political and religious ones, developed by migrants who transcend their countries of residence (ibid.), particularly promoted through new technological developments. Transnational and global flows form part of shaping young people’s religious cultures in terms of religious authorities, fashion and Islamic consumption. Religious ideas and concepts accessed online or through cable TV are further debated and (re)interpreted locally in the MJD. The general structure of this religious youth organisation consists of a ten-member shura, which meets regularly in different German cities or towns.23 It is responsible for all MJD activities and represents the MJD nationwide.24 However, the organisation does not promote already determined religious instructions, but draws on a variety of transnational (charismatic) figures whom they believe follow an “Islam of the middle way”, including Tariq Ramadan, Yusuf al-Quardawi and the Egyptian television preacher Amr

22 It is noticeable that in this instance Ines drew on her cultural capital (knowledge of Islam) in her school work, which most of the time only represents symbolic capital within the religious (and ethnic) social field. This is one of the few instances in which I noted a young person convert his or her religious knowledge into symbolic capital outside the religious or ethnic social fields. 23 Currently the shura consists of fifty per cent men and fifty percent women, who are elected every two years in a membership meeting. 24 Carrying out the assignments is delegated to the different AGs or working groups within which the young people are organised. The MJD also sends out Friday e-mails nationwide and arranges regional and national monthly and annual seminars targeting Muslims from all over Germany. New branches in cities or towns are either initiated centrally, meaning that the MJD targets an area for a new branch, or young people approach the shura with a request to establish an MJD branch in their region. These young people will then receive guidance and advice from the shura, a branch handbook with guidelines, and offers to participate in seminars for religious education and youth leaders.

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Khaled.25 The messages of these authorities are not followed entirely; whereas some aspects of al-Quardawi’s teachings, such as “women are allowed to travel alone”, are pursued, his ideas on the situation of Palestinians are rejected. Furthermore, whereas some members respect Khaled’s profile, others find him objectionable and too populist. Like most organisations, the MJD has developed a particular organisational culture or content, which the new shura will carry on, but also modify.26 The local branches are connected at the national level not only through the larger national meetings, but also through a handbook on how to arrange their weekly meetings, as well as the professional and continuously updated MJD homepages.27 In their daily lives, the influence of the media on the process of forming an understanding of one’s identity and life world is central for these young people in their search for an ‘authentic’ Muslim self. The young girls use Websites, online Muslim branded clothes, or German-based religious, ethical products, such as T-shirts with “I love my prophet”, and Arabic TV shows new ways of tying one’s headscarf.28 Youtube video clips on religious themes by ‘Baba Ali’, a young, American-Iranian Muslim, are enjoyed by young people in Berlin, situating them within a world-encompassing religious youth culture.29 25 Authorities such as the controversial Swiss Tariq Ramadan, the Egyptian TV star Amr Khaled and Yusuf al Quardawi, and the use of new technologies, including satellite TV and the World Wide Web, become relevant both during the meetings and outside them. Yusuf al-Quaradawi is considered to be one of the main intellectual characters in the contemporary Islamic revival (Mahmood 2005: 61). The style of Khaled in particular is youthful, with his clean shaven face, dressed in jeans and polo shirts or in a suit and tie. Bayat suggests that he “simultaneously embodies the hipness (rewish) of Amr Diab (Egypt’s most revered pop star), the persuasion power of evangelist Billy Graham, and unsubtle therapy of Dr Phil, American popular talk-show host” (Bayat 2002: 23). The popularity of these figures among young people across Europe may be one reason for several similarities among the second generation of Muslims within Europe, despite the different European immigration policies and migration histories. 26 According to the leader of the shura, changes in what is religiously acceptable and what is not (such as whether or not Hip Hop at religious meetings is suitable) may be understood in light of the organisers becoming more experienced, becoming adults and thus being less afraid of doing something ‘incorrect’. 27 Furthermore, in case of problems with the local authorities or a local mosque, the national shura sometimes sends someone to that area to aid the local MJD representative. 28 Popular online links are www.MuslimGear.com, TheHijabShop.com, TheNasheedShop .com, TheMuslimBabyShop.com and TheHalalHealthShop.com at http://www.dukkaan.net. 29 Since 2006 ‘Baba Ali’ has appeared online in video-blogs. Dressed in cool T-shirts, interacting youthfully with the camera in a stand-up comedian style, this young, AmericanIranian Muslim represents a new form of authority. At one MJD presentation, to explain her point, Somaya referred to ‘Ummah Films’ on YouTube and the film cut ‘the Haram police’, suggesting that the other girls should “check out this funny – and even attractive – guy.”



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Although the fashion for young people to veil in the urban space is partly locally interpreted, the donning of the veil is for many a transnational practice. Deciding to veil can be less painful and unproblematic in countries where the majority population are Muslims. Sometimes relatives in Turkey, Syria or Egypt expect girls to wear the headscarf on certain occasions. More importantly, young people can “get used to it there” since they encounter few negative gazes or questions about “why they veil”. Back in Germany many continue veiling, either because they are now “used to it” or feel “attached to it”.30 Conclusion The pluralization and fragmentation of religious authority in the Islamic tradition (Eickelman and Piscatori 1992) is not promoting secularization in its place. Rather, it is making possible an expansion of religious education. Educated Muslims are consequently given or are constructing spaces in which to participate in discussions of Islamic tradition and how Islam is compatible with democracy, civil society and human rights (Casanova 2006: 29). Such spaces tended to be filled only by Muslim intellectuals or the traditional ulama. According to Casanova (2001), Islam here follows the confrontation of all world religions in reacting to modernity, partly by repositioning its traditions in an attempt to fashion its own version of modernity. The ‘turn to Islam’ among contemporary young people can be considered an urban phenomenon that is also taking place in cities like Cairo (Ismail 2006) and Istanbul (Sanktanber 2002). A city offers a variety of religious spaces representing different religious orientations and congregations and providing particular ‘infrastructures of action’ (Ismail 2006: 12). Identifying with religion in the urban sphere is not simply a consequence of being alienated in the anonymous urban space and the weakening of The authority of the 33 year old Web designer Ali Ardekani, known as ‘Baba Ali’, derives, I believe, from his eloquent ability to communicate clearly many of the contemporary problems and urgent issues that young people experience in their everyday lives, while playing on the generation gap and the relationship to non-Muslim surroundings. 30 Gökariksel and Secor (2009) have investigated the transnational aspects of veiling fashion. They argue that: “Today, veiling and its regulation take place within a transnational legal context that produces ‘European’ and ‘Muslim’ spaces at both local and global scales. The production, sale, and consumption of veiling-fashion are part of the growing transnationalisation of Muslim identity and political practice (Soysal 1994; Ehrkamp and Leitner 2006; Samers 2003; Jackson et al. 2004; Nagel and Staeheli 2004; Silvey 2006; Staeheli and Nagel 2006)” (Gökariksel and Secor 2009: 9).

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community structures when one moves from the rural to the urban. The urban offers mobilizing opportunities for religious organizations to situate their message within social antagonism and positions, a characteristic that has historically always been a part of the urban landscape (Ismail 2006: 112–113). In fact, urban Berlin makes it possible to choose which of the variety of religious spaces one wants to participate actively in. More importantly, while young people’s religiosity is part of the global renewal of Islam, its expression becomes localized and fine-tuned to these youth’s daily lives, their challenges and opportunities. While visual signs of religiosity can contribute to negative responses from the non-Muslim majority, they can simultaneously represent an opening to potential (religious) networks, friendships and solidarity. References Amiraux, Valérie 2000. “Jeunes musulmanes turques d’Allemagne: voix et voies d’individuation.” In Felice Dassetto (ed.), Paroles d’islam: individus, sociétés et discours dans l’Islam européen contemporain. Paris: Maisonneuve-Larose. —— 2003. “Discours voilés sur les musulmanes en Europe: comment les musulmans sont-ils devenus des musulmanes?” Social Compass, 50(1): 85–96. Anderson, Elijah 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Appadurai, Arjun 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Babès, Leïla 1997. L’islam positif: la religion des jeunes musulmans de France. Paris: Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Ouvrières. Basch, Linda G., Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-Colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers. Bayat, Asef 2002. “Piety, Privilege and Egyptian Youth.” ISIM Newsletter 10, July: 23–24. Bendixsen, Synnøve 2009. “Being Muslim or being ‘German’? Islam as a New Urban Identity.” In Glenda Tibe Bonifacio and Vivienne SM. Angeles (eds.), Gender, Religion and Migration: Pathways of Integration. Lanham: Lexington Books. —— forthcoming. The Religious identity of Young Female Muslims in Berlin. An ethnographic study. Brill: Leiden. Boubekeur, Amel 2005. “Cool and Competitive Muslim Culture in the West.” ISIM Newsletter 16, Autumn: 12–13. Bourgois, Philippe 2003. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casanova, José 2001. “Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective Reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam.” Social Research 68(4): 1041–1080. Césari, Jocelyne 2004. “Modernisation of Islam or Islamisation of Modernity: Muslim Minorities in Europe and the Issue of Pluralism.” In Jamal Malik (ed.), Muslims in Europe: From the Margin to the Centre. Münster: Lit Verlag. de Certeau, Michael 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eickelman, Dale F., and James Piscatori 1992. “Preface.” Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori (eds.), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage: Migration and the Religious Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.



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Faist, Thomas 1998. “Transnational Social Spaces out of International Migration: Evolution, Significance and Future Prospects.” Archives Européennes de Sociologie 39(2): 213–247. Fraser, Mariam 1999. “Classing Queer: Politics in Competition.” Theory Culture Society 16(2): 107–131. Goffman, Erving 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Gökariksel, Banu, and Anna J. Secor 2009. “New Transnational Geographies of Islamism, Capitalism, and Subjectivity: The Veiling-fashion Industry in Turkey.” Area 41(1): 6–18. Ismail, Salwa 2006. Review of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. American Anthropologist 108(3): 603–604. Karakasoglu-Aydïn, Yasemin 2000. Muslimische Religiosität und Erziehungsvorstellungen: eine Untersuchung bei türkischen Pädagogikstudentinnen in Deutschland. Frankfurt/Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation. Metcalf, Barbara D. 1997. “Women and Men in a Contemporary Pietist Movement.” Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu (eds.), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. London: Routledge. —— 1982. Islamic Revival in British India, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nökel, Sigrid 2002. Die Töchter der Gastarbeiter und der Islam: zur Soziologie alltagsweltlicher Anerkennungspolitiken. Eine Fallstudie. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. —— 2006. “Micropolitics of Muslim Women in Germany.” N. Göle and L. Ammann (eds.), Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran, and Europe. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press. Peacock, James L. 1978. Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam. Menlo Park: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company. Roy, Oliver 2004. Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Colombia University Press. Saint-Blancat, Chantal 1997. L’islam de la diaspora. Paris: Bayard. Salih, Ruba 2003. Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women. London: Routledge. Sanktanber, Ayşe 2002. “‘We Pray Like You Have Fun’: New Islamic Youth in Turkey between Intellectualism and Popular Culture.” In Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayşe Saktanbe (eds.), Fragments of Culture. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Schiffauer, Werner 1988. “Migration and Religiousness.” In T. Gerholm and Y. Lithman (eds.), The New Islamic Presences in Western Europe. London: Mansell. Van der Veer, Peter 2009. Comparative Study of Urban Aspirations in Global Cities. Gottingen: Keynote. Venel, Nancy 1999. Musulmanes françaises: des pratiquantes voilées à l’université. Paris: L’Harmattan. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva 2002. Transnational Politics: The Case of Turks and Kurds in Germany. London: Routledge. Internet sites www.mjd-net.de, accessed 24.10.05. www.MuslimGear.com, accessed 13.05.06. www.dukkaan.net, accessed 09.06.07. http://ummahfilms.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-ummah-films-video-you-wont-hear.html, accessed 20.10.08.

RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATIONS, RELIGIOUS INNOVATIONS AND DENOMINATIONAL IDENTITIES IN CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL CITIES José Casanova Stadtluft macht frei (City Air Makes Free) This is an old medieval Germanic saying, grounded in the legal-political fact that following the medieval burgher revolutions, peasants who were able to stay for one year and one day within the protected walls of the city, gained freedom from feudal bondage. More broadly such a saying points to the liberation possibilities and the great opportunities which cities, particularly the large urban conglomerations which Georg Simmel called “metropolis” and we today would call global cities, tend to offer for individuals and groups to remake themselves and to start anew. But as in Marx’s analysis of the dialectics of “free wage labor” under the capitalist mode of production, “free” labor has the double connotation of being “freed” from serfdom or bondage, but also that of being free to be bought and to be sold, which under capitalist conditions for those who own no other means of production than their labor power means the compulsion to have to sell one’s labor power on the market in order to survive. It is crucial to maintain this dialectic ambiguity in mind when analyzing the dual process of liberation from old structures and the opportunity but also the compulsion to enter or create new ones which every process of urbanization entails, and more so than ever in our global cities. When it comes to religion, theories of urbanization grounded in theories of Western European secularization and modernization have tended to view only the moment of liberation from religious tradition and from religious bonds which the move to large cities may entail while ignoring the opportunities for religious innovations and individual and collective religious transformations and new community formations which cities may offer. This was clearly a shortsighted view based on an ideologically secularist and simplistic reading of processes of European urbanization in the 19th and 20th centuries which ignored the broader comparative historical experience and was fixated on a supposedly world-historical process of transition from “tradition” to “modernity” and from “Gemeinschaft” to “Gesellschaft” (Casanova 2011a).

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Yet, as Max Weber himself had pointed out, all the great historical religious traditions were born in great urban centers and the continuous dynamics of religious innovation in all religious traditions found their natural space in cities rather than in the country side. It is not by chance that “pagan” (paganus) meant originally simply “country bumpkin,” since at first within the Roman Empire one could only find Christians in urban centers. This which is true for ancient Christianity is equally true for the reform movements of Medieval Christianity, for the Protestant Reformation, for 18th century Pietism, for 19th century Evangelicalism, or for contemporary global Pentecostal Christianity, all were primarily urban phenomena. But the same would be true for Buddhism or for Islam, from their origins to the present. It is undeniable, however, that much of the experience of modern Western European urbanization has been associated with radical secularization, expressed most succinctly in the famous statement of the leading post World War II French Catholic sociologist, Gabriel Le Bras, that the moment a French peasant sets foot in Paris’ Gare de Montparnasse, he stops going to church.1 Crucial was the fact that once one left behind the rural territorial parish, one not only ceased being a practicing Catholic in France, but one simply became irreligious. There was practically no alternative of being religious in any other way. Notwithstanding the existence of small Protestant and Jewish religious minorities the basic alternatives were to be either religiously Catholic or irreligiously secular. Undoubtedly, the process of secularization throughout continental Europe is associated with the liberation from the confessional bonds of the territorial rural or urban parish and in this respect the process of secularization in Europe takes primarily the form of de-confessionalization (Casanova 2009). In the European context, secularization means above all liberation from confessional affiliations and identities, of the kind which were first determined by the previous process of religious and confessional territorialization across Europe that resulted from the post-Reformation religious civil wars and the imposition of the Westphalian principle cuius regio eius religio. This principle, moreover, was already institutionalized with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain by the Catholic Kings in order to constitute a religiously homogeneous national territorial state. 1 “Et enfin, je dirai en troisième lieu que l’attraction des villes a une influence ruineuse sur la religion des rureaux (…) Je suis pour ma part convaincu que, sur cent rureaux qui s’établissent à Paris, il y en a à peu près quatre-vingt-dix qui, au sortir de la gare Montparnasse cessent d’être des pratiquants” (Gabriel Le Bras 1956: 480).



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Repeated ethno-religious cleansing and territorialized confessional religious boundaries have been two interrelated structural consequences of the dynamics of state formation in early modern Europe. Europe solved the problem of religious diversity through emigration, by expelling or by letting their religious minorities flee their home countries to find refuge first in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then overseas. Northern Europe became homogeneously Protestant. Southern Europe became homogeneously Catholic. In between there emerged a bi-confessional buffer zone formed by Holland, Germany and Switzerland, where it became obvious that it was impossible or too costly to get rid of the large Catholic or Protestant minorities. Some form of modus vivendi developed, but usually based on similar principles of territorial confessionalization, cantonalization, or pillarization. The principle of freedom of religion became institutionalized in Europe only much later, beginning in the 19th century and in many cases only after World War II with the incorporation of the individual principle of religious freedom into the UN Declaration of Human Rights. One could argue that implicit in the freedom, i.e. compulsion of religious minorities to emigrate was the emergence of the modern conception of religion as something which cannot be imposed or coerced and which individuals carry with them, in their private consciences. It is this modern sectarian and secular principle which was to gain full institutionalization first in those American colonies, where some of the radical Protestant sects, such as Quakers and Baptists, became influential minorities, and eventually after independence in the entire United States with the extension of the dual clause of the First Amendment, protecting the no establishment of religion at the state level and the free exercise of religion in society. In contrast to European cities, eighteenth century American colonial towns, already before independence, were characterized by a vibrant religious super-diversity. This was true of New York and Philadelphia, as well as of Providence, R.I. and Charleston, S.C. Moreover, even in the colonies which had established churches such as Congregational Massachusetts or Anglican Virginia only the elites belonged to the established church and therefore the majority of the population never had confessional affiliations nor was territorialized into the parish system. The churching of the American population took place after independence through continuous immigration and through the revivalist conversions and evangelical campaigns associated with the Second Great Awakening (Finke and Stark 1992). It is estimated that before independence less than 20 percent of the American population belonged to churches or sects, that is, had any

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religious affiliation. By the 1830’s, however, over 60 percent of the American population already belonged to some religious denomination. Baptists, Methodists and Catholics, had been only tiny minorities at the time of inde­ pendence, each constituting approximately only 1 percent of the population. By the 1840s, however, the three had become by far the largest American denominations, many times the size of the old established colonial churches (Congregational, Anglican, and Presbyterian) and constituting already more than 50 percent of the population. But along with them there were already dozens if not hundreds of old European sects and new American denominations (Wuthnow 1988). The name itself, denomination, as well as the system of religious denominationalism is an American invention which has no equivalent in any European language. It is usually translated either as confession, or as sect, but it actually has a radically new connotation, which is not captured by the old European terms. Denomination is simply the name which I assume as the member of a voluntary religious association and the one by which I am recognized by others. Institutionally crucial is the fact that it is a system of mutual recognition of groups in society without state recognition or regulation. Indeed while American strangers typically tend to inquiry or to reveal to one another their religious denominations, the American state has no right to enquire or survey the religious denomination of its citizens. Crucial is the fact that while in Europe processes of modernization and urbanization were historically associated with un-churching, deconfessionalization and drastic secularization, in the United States processes of urbanization and modernization have been continuously associated with processes of churching, denominational affiliation, and religious revivals. Through continuous immigration the system of denominational pluralism which was at first an internal Protestant model has expanded to incorporate first all the religions of Europe and today all the religions of the world. Indeed one could venture to assume that there is no religion anywhere in the world which does not have some congregational presence in the United States. Moreover, it has been repeatedly observed by immigration scholars that immigrants today as much as in the 19th century tend to become more religious in America after immigration than they were in their home countries. That means that religion in America is not a traditional residue called to disappear with progressive modernization, but is a modern response to the challenges confronting immigrant groups that have to find a space in a religiously diverse society. Immigrant religions are not simply traditional ethnic remnants but are actually creative transformations of religious resources in novel contexts. The various branches of



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English Protestantism were radically transformed in America and the same happened to immigrant Catholicism, to immigrant Judaism, and is happening today to Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism (Casanova 2007). Surveys of American religion reveal two persistent characteristics of the American religious system. The first is the high level of religious belief (over 90% of the population declare belief in God), of religious affiliation (around 80% of the American population declare some religious denominational affiliation), and of individual and collective religious practice (over 70% pray regularly and over 50% participate in congregational religious services at least once a month). The second remarkable characteristic is the highly competitive and dynamic fluidity of American religious pluralism. According to the 2008 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Survey, more than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have switched their religious affiliation since childhood. If change in Protestant denomination is included, the number of adults who have switched their religious affiliation rises to 44 percent (Casanova 2011b). This is a phenomenon totally incomprehensible in the European confessional context, where the only relevant change is unchurching and confessional secularization, not the change in religious affiliation. Two principles are central to American religious denominationalism: a) The principle of individual voluntary congregation and association of lay people, so that even religions which have no such congregational associational tradition, such as Catholicism, Hinduism or Buddhism, tend to adopt the form in the United States and b) the principle of formal equality of all denominations which tends to undermine the traditional European distinction between church and sect, as well as that between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, that is, true and false religion (Warner 2005). Of course, the power dynamics of majority-minority relations have always been operative  in Christian Protestant America as evidenced by the prolonged nativist  campaigns against “Romanism” or against “Mormonism.” But majoritarian Protestantism has been continuously undermined from within but its own fragmentation into myriad denominations constituted along ecclesiological-theological differences but also along class, ethnic and racial lines (Niebuhr 1975). Indeed, it is the interlocking dynamics of racial and religious denominationalism which has structured the character of group relations in American history. But while racial denominationalism was structured along a rigid, hierarchical binary system segregating a large hegemonic and privileged white majority and the oppressed underprivileged black minority, the system of religious denominationalism was based on a much more fluid, in

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principle egalitarian, super-diversity. Steven Vertovec has coined the term “super-diversity” to characterize the extreme pluralization of minorities, which is increasingly characteristic of European mega-cities (Vertovec 2007). But in fact European super-diversity is still characterized by an increasing pluralization of minorities confronting still relatively homogeneous national majorities. In the case of American religious denominationalism, the Protestant majority itself was fragmented into hundreds of denominations and the most suspect, i.e., un-American, religious minority, the Catholics, have constituted since the 1840’s the largest American religious denomination, roughly from one fourth to one fifth of the American population. Moreover, the Catholics themselves were fragmented, at least congregationally if not hierarchically, into dozens of rigidly separated ethno-linguistic parishes: Irish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Hispanic etc. The new post-1965 immigration has contributed not only to an even greater pluralization of the existing religious super-diversity, but more importantly, coming as it did on the heels of the civil rights movement, to an increasing pluralization of the American system of racial denominationalism, undermining in the process the binary black-white racial system. Today, the so-called “minorities” (Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc.) constitute already a majority of the population in every large American city. I have lingered on this comparison between European and American processes not in order to contrast an idealized model of urban religious pluralism with the European model of urban secularization, but in order to make two basic points. The first point is that social theories of urbanization were blinded by the European experience to ignore completely the significance of religious groups, religious movements and religious dynamics in modern processes of urbanization. This urban secularist blind spot is evident in the fact that even the Chicago school of urban studies, despite its ethnographic focus on immigrant and ethno-racial group dynamics, missed completely the religious dimension of these urban processes in Chicago or elsewhere in America. Yet it should be obvious that in the same way that one cannot seriously study the African American experience and its community dynamics without studying the Black churches, one cannot study practically any immigrant group in America without paying attention to its religious dynamics (Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). This is true of older immigrant groups as well as of the two newest and largest immigrant groups in America, Mexicans and Chinese. While it may have been possible in the past, as the work of Weishan Huang (2010) and Kenneth Guest (2003) has shown, today it is no longer possible to study Chinatowns in New York or



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elsewhere without paying close attention to their increasingly diverse religious dynamics. The second main point is that if one finds such fundamental transatlantic differences between Europe and the United States in otherwise similar and comparable processes of modernization, urbanization and secularization within the Christian West, the more one should expect differential dynamics which will tend to follow neither a European nor an American model, elsewhere. A comparison of Quebec and Brazil, two post-confessional post-Catholic societies illustrate the same dual divergent pattern. Up to the 1960’s, Quebec had been a homogeneous confessional Catholic society, arguably the region with the highest levels of religious belief and practice not only in Canada but in all of North America. In one single generation, as a consequence of “the quiet revolution,” Quebec underwent a drastic process of secularization. State, nation, and the population of Quebec were de-confessionalized. The new secular state not only had taken over from the Church education, health care and most social services but it supplanted the Church as “the embodiment of the French nation in Canada” (Seljak 1996). Religious practice and affiliation plummeted and today Quebec is arguably the most secularized region of North America. A population which had been previously homogeneously Catholic had become in short order homogeneously secular and post-Catholic. As in Western Europe, the only dynamic of religious pluralism was brought in by the new immigrants. Paradoxically, as indicated by the “Report of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on Reasonable Accommodation of Minorities,” laicist assumptions now prevalent among the post-Catholic population are the source of tensions with the new immigrant religious minorities, particularly with Muslims (Bouchard and Taylor 2008). Since the 1960’s Brazil has experienced its own quiet secular revolution. Brazil has also ceased being a confessional Catholic society. But deconfessionalization of state, nation and population has not led to drastic homogeneous secularization but rather to an explosion of religious pluralism of all kinds. Brazil remains the largest Catholic society and a dynamic center of global Catholicism. But simultaneously it has become a dynamic center of global Pentecostalism and a dynamic global center for the transformation of Afro-American religions. Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s global cities, exhibit increasingly pluralist religious dynamics. One finds side by side divergent Catholic trends from liberation theology to thriving charismatic communities, divergent Protestant trends from the historical denominations to Mormons,

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Jehovah Witness, Pentecostal churches and Neo-Pentecostal megachurches, Afro-Brazilian movements such as Umbanda and Candomblé, new Amer-Indian religious movements, and immigrant diasporas communities of all kinds, Jewish, Muslim and Bahá’ís, Christian Middle Eastern, Eastern Orthodox, and Greek-Catholic, Japanese Buddhist and Chinese Taoist, as well as new Brazilian syncretic cults such as La Comunidade Espírita O Vale do Amanhecer near Brasilia or O Templo Ecuménico Espírita de la Legion de la Boa Vondade en Brasilia.2 Moreover, permeating all the religious phenomena in Brazil one finds the ubiquitous, syncretic and protean espiritismo. While Brazil may be an extreme case, one can observe similar processes of religious pluralization throughout Latin America (Levine 2012). Moreover, a global comparative look at post-colonial global cities throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America would seem to indicate that the ‘new world” paradigm of religious innovation and pluralization appears more adequate and fruitful than the old European paradigm of secularization and religious decline.3 Indeed, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and other emergent socio-economic powers such as South Africa are all characterized by diverse patterns of religious pluralism (Gossaert and Palmer 2001; Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012). One can offer a series of general analytical-theoretical observations, which may account for the increasing rather than decreasing relevance of religion in contemporary global processes of urbanization: a)  The globalization of religious-secular domains and their diverse institutionalization The genealogical and teleological European theories of secularization were grounded on the basic premise that “religion” was a “primitive,” “ancient,” or “traditional” universal human phenomenon which was bound to weaken, if not altogether disappear, and be superseded by the secular. The more modern a society became the less religious and the more secular it would also become. The theory could not account for the possibility that societies were becoming increasingly both more religious and more secular, that indeed global modernization was accompanied everywhere by the diverse 2 The literature is immense. Cf. Camargo (1973); Burdick (2004); Carranza (2011); Mariz (2001); Mariz and Machado (1998); Mariz and Campos (2011); Antoniazzi (2004); Pierucci (2000) and (2004); Ricardo Mariano (2000); Oro, Corten, and Jean-Pierre Dozon (2003); Almeida (2009); Prandi (1991); Motta (1994) and (2002); Gomes Marques (2009). 3 See Velho (2009); Freston (2004); Coleman (2000); Robbins (2004); Cannell (2006); Martin (2011).



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institutionalization of religious and secular domains and that religion in this respect rather than being a “traditional” phenomenon shared by all pre-modern societies, was a very modern construction that accompanied everywhere the globalization of the Christian Western religious-secular divide. Indeed, in the last two decades numerous voices have emerged in anthropology and religious studies, challenging the most fundamental premise shared by the entire scientific study of religion since it began to emerge in the 17th-18th centuries. Namely, that religion rather than being a supposedly universal, trans-historical and transcultural social phenomenon, is actually a relatively modern construction. Or at least, that the category of religion itself, as an abstract and general phenomenon, is of relatively recent origin. That in fact, the classification of social phenomena through the binary distinction religious/secular, is what constitutes the modern global religious field in the first place and that in this respect religion or at least our conception of it is a product of secular modernity.4 The modern “secular-religious” system of classification that emerged out of the transformation of Western Christianity and which we tend to characterize as a process of secularization has now become globalized, entering in dynamic transformative interaction with all non-Western systems of classification, pre-axial as well as axial. All the religio-cultural systems, Christian and non-Christian, Western and non-Western are now being transformed through these global interactive dynamics. Following Charles Taylor (2007) one can understand this process as the global expansion of the secular immanent frame. In this respect, not only the so-called “secular” societies of the West but the entire globe is becoming increasingly more secular and “disenchanted” in the sense that the cosmic order is increasingly defined by modern science and technology, the social order is increasingly defined by the interlocking of “democratic” states, market economies, and mediatic public spheres, and the moral order is increasingly defined by the calculations of rights-bearing individual agents, claiming human dignity, liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet, comparisons of secular Europe and religious America or the evidence of religious revivals around the world make clear that within the same secular immanent frame one can encounter very 4 The names of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Russell MtCutcheon and Jonathan Smith in religious studies, Talal Asad and Peter van der Veer in anthropology, Tomoko Mazusawa in history, Hent de Vries in philosophy and Peter Beyer in sociology serve as important milestones in those debates.

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diverse religious dynamics (Berger, Davie, and Fokas, 2008). In this respect, the disenchantment of the world does not entail necessarily the disenchantment of consciousness, the decline of religion or the end of magic. On the contrary, it is compatible with all forms of re-enchantment and religious revival. What is increasingly less tenable is a secularist reading of the historical process of secularization. As a modern philosophy of history secularism turned the particular Western Christian historical process of secularization into a universal teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief, from primitive magical irrational religion to modern rational post-metaphysical secular consciousness. Even when the particular role of internal Christian developments in the process of secularization is acknowledged it is not to stress the particular contingent nature of the process, but rather to stress the universal significance of the uniqueness of Christianity. According to Marcel Gauchet’s (1997) striking formulation, Christianity is “the religion to exit from religion.” The paradox is that the globalization of the Western secular-religious regime leads not to the exit from religion but rather to all kinds of novel religious transformations. Indeed, what characterizes the contemporary global moment is not only the fact that all forms of human religion, past and present, from the most “primitive” to the most “modern” are available for individual and collective appropriation. Equally relevant is that fact that increasingly they must learn to coexist side by side in today’s global cities. This contemporary social fact tends to put into question all teleological schemes of religious rationalization and development which tended to place “primitive” and “traditional” forms of religion as older human cultural forms to be superseded by more modern, secular, and rational ones. b) The progressive consolidation of an international human rights regime, with individual religious freedom as its core principle Paradoxically, with its institutionalization first in the West and with its ensuing globalization, the secular immanent frame becomes the very guarantor of the post-axial secular/religious system which guarantees the equal, non-hierarchic free exercise of religion to all forms of religion, pre-axial, axial and post-axial. The sacralization of human rights and the sacralization of the right of each and all individuals to religious freedom serves as the constitutive principle of such a post-axial global pluralist religious system.



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One finds, of course, a tremendous variety of secular regimes of separation of religious and political authority as well as of state management of religious pluralism, along with very different patterns of majority/minority relations which are mainly structured by different forms of nationalism and by different immigration regimes. In this respect, the US “wall of separation” is significantly different from the French system of laïcité. Notwithstanding the fact that post-Ottoman Turkey and post-colonial Senegal tried to adopt the French model of laïcité, the ensuing secular regimes and the systems of management of religious pluralism in these two Muslim majoritarian societies diverge significantly from each other and from the French model. In their responses to Western colonialism the modernizing elites in India and China crafted radically different projects of secular modernization. India relied on the mobilization of religion and religious identities as a positive anti-colonial resource, while the various Chinese regimes have tried to erase all forms of traditional Chinese religion as an obstacle to modernization. Both strategies had very different consequences in divergent patterns of institutionalization of secular states, state management of religious pluralism, nationalist projects and majorityminority relations. We could point for example to similarly divergent secular-religious dynamics in Indonesia and Malaysia, in South Africa and Nigeria, or in Russia and Ukraine. Yet, the secular state management of religion is everywhere under siege, or at least in need of substantive revision as it confronts the expansion of the principle of individual religious freedom, as well as increasing religious pluralization and new transnational religious dynamics linked to immigration and globalization. However, even though the principle of religious freedom as a basic human right is becoming globalized, this does not mean that “religious freedom” as a norm or aspiration is necessarily interpreted or understood everywhere in the same way. It may mean different things in different countries, cultures and religious traditions – and these different meanings may well be in conflict with one another. The individualist principle of religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and right of conversion may be in fundamental tension with a communitarian understanding of the collective rights of peoples, minorities and groups to protect and preserve their traditions and cultures from imperial, “universalist” or majoritarian predatory practices. The ensuing tensions turn religion everywhere into a contested public issue. Moreover, the expanding transnational human rights regime encoun­ ters  broad resistance on the part of states that aspire not only to the

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monopolistic control of the means of violence, but also to the control of religious groups and cultural identities over their territories. Equally resistant may be religious authorities or “churches,” in the broad Weberian sense of the term, in so far as they claim or aspire to religious monopoly over their civilizational or national territories. In such cases one may expect conflicts – at times violent – over “religious liberty” “evil cults,” “religious defamation,” or “blasphemy.” c) Dynamics of democratization of religious authority Yet everywhere one can also witness, in all religious traditions, processes of fragmentation, pluralization and democratization of religious authority. The traditional hierarchic division between the high culture of religious literati and ordinary popular folk religiosity is under siege in all large urban centers. Contemporary processes of urbanization are accompanied by the competitive appropriation of religious resources in group differentiation and congregational associations, as well as by religious innovation and cosmopolitanism from below. The very distinctions between high and low, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and religion and magic are ever more difficult to maintain or to enforce without resistance or conflict. Let me offer as concluding illustration of all these points an ethnographic observation from a vibrant Umbanda congregation in Sao Paulo, Templo de Ordem Iniciática do Cruzeiro Divino (OICD), founded in 1970 by the Umbanda priest Pai Rivas, alias medical cardiologist Dr. Francisco Rivas Neto, and expert in tantric medicine and Indian mysticism also known as Mestre Arhapiagha. The title of one of his books, Sacerdote, Mago e Medico. Cura e Autocura Umbandista points to his triple persona as pre-axial magician, axial priest and post-axial secular global preacher of human equality and fraternity among all religions, peoples and cultures.5 The motto of his OICD congregation, which has also a branch in Planaltina, Distrito Federal, is “Somos todos diferentes, mas nao somos desiguais” (We are all different, but we are not unequal). He is also the founder of the Faculdade de Teologia Umbandista (FTU), adjacent to the temple, accredited in 2003 by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture as an institution of higher learning, which has the motto “Educando para uma Cultura de Paz” and publishes the Journal, Teologia de Convergencia. The vibrant religious ceremony I attended, full of singing and dancing, started at 9pm and lasted for several hours well past midnight. The ceremony started with a solemn universalist humanist homily by Pai Rivas 5 See Rivas Neto (1994, 1996, 2002a and 2002b).



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stressing the dignity and equality of all human persons without regard to class, race or gender, the need for the recognition of the equality and diversity of all religions and cultures of humanity as the basis for peaceful global coexistence, and a critique of instrumental reason and the need to recover the sacred relationship to nature which is central to the African religious traditions in order to face responsibly our global environmental challenges. This was followed by the ritual ceremonial welcoming of the Orisha Exu, in which a large congregation of approximately 80 priestly male and female co-celebrants, all with the same white sacerdotal tunics co-participated in the preparation of the altar to Exu. Those were clearly the initiated members of the congregation, co-participants in the Umbanda priesthood, but also members of a voluntary congregation offering fellowship, mutual help and solidarity to all its members. A much larger audience of circa 200 followers or observers were attending the ceremony either out of curiosity, seeking the cure of physical and spiritual ailments, or seeking fellowship and hoping to undergo initiation and thus become full members of the congregation. In the longest part of the ceremony, willing members of the audience were directed to approach dozens of smoking and drinking shamanistic priests in a public circumnavigating ritual combining at different moments ecstatic exorcism and possession, healing rituals, private therapeutic confession and spiritual direction. The ceremony ended with a procession onto the courtyard accompanied by singing, drum beating, and dancing while the high priest Pai Rivas enacted arcane sacro-magical rituals invoking the Orishas of the Yoruba religious tradition. Pre-axial, axial, and post-axial religious rituals and principles were all fused and intertwined in a syncretic spiritist post-modern ceremony to which anybody, black or white, male or female, native Brazilian or foreigner could have access. All this took place in Villa Alexandria, a middle class residential neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil’s modern megalopolis, and multicultural and global financial center, in the vicinity of Congonhas airport. References Almeida, Ronaldo 2009. A Igreja Universal e seus demônios. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome. Antoniazzi, Alberto 2004. Por que o panorama religioso no Brasil mudou tanto? São Paulo: Paulus. Berger, Peter, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe?: A Theme and Variations. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.

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Bouchard, Gérard and Charles Taylor 2008. Building the Future. A Time for Reconciliation. Abridged Report. Gouvernement de Québec. Burdick, John 2004. Legacies of Liberation: The Progressive Catholic Church in Brazil. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate. Cannell, Fenella (ed.) 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Camargo, Cândido de P.F. 1973. Católicos, protestantes, espíritas. Petrópolis; Vozes. Carranza, Brenda 2011. Catolicismo Midiático. Aparecida, SP: Editora Idéias & Letras. Casanova, José 2007. “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism.” In Thomas Banchoff (ed.), The New Religious Pluralism and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press: 59–83. —— 2009. “The Religious Situation in Europe.” In Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (eds.), Secularization and the World Religions. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: 206–228. —— 2011. “The Religious Situation in the United States 175 Years after Tocqueville.” In Miguel Vatter (ed.), Crediting God: The Fate of Religion and Politics in the Age of Global Capitalism. New York: Fordham University Press: 253–272. —— 2011. “Religions, Secularizations, Modernizations.” Archives Européennes de sociologie/ European Journal of Sociology, LII, 3: 488–508. Coleman, Simon 2000. The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finke, Roger, and Rodney Stark 1992. The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Freston, Paul 2004. Evangelical and Politics in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (ed.) 2008. Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press. Gauchet, Marcel 1997. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gayer, Laurent and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds.) 2012. Muslims in Indian Cities. Trajectories of Marginalisation. London: C Hurst & Co. Gomes Marques, Erich 2009. Os Poderes do Estado no Vale do Amanhecer: percursos religiosos, práticas espirituais e cura. Dissertation in Anthropology. University of Brasília. Gossaert, Vincent and David A. Palmer, 2001. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Guest, Keneth J. 2003. God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York’s Immigrant Evolving Community. New York: New York University Press. Hagopian, Frances (ed.) 2009. Religious Pluralism, Democracy and the Catholic Church in Latin America. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Huang, Weishan 2010. Between Nations: the Roles of Religion in the Formation of Identity and Cultural Incorporation of Immigration Life. Ph. D. Dissertation, New School for Social Research, NYC. Le Bras, Gabriel 1956. Etudes de sociologie religieuse. Vol II, Paris: PUF. Lehmann, David 1996. Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformations and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Levine, Daniel H. 2012. Politics, Religion & Society in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne, Rienner. Lincoln, C. Eric and Lawrence H. Mamiya 1990. The Black Church in the African American Experience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mariano, Ricardo 2000. Neopentecostais: Sociologia do novo pentecostalismo no Brasil. São Paulo: Edições Loyola. Mariz, Cecília Loreto 2001. “Católicos de Libertação, Católicos Renovados e Neopentecostais.” In Cadernos CERIS, n. 2: 11–47. Mariz, Cecilia L. and Maria das D.C. Machado 1998. “Mudanças recentes no campo religioso brasileiro.” Antropolítica, 5: 21–43.



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Mariz, Cecilia L. and Roberta B.C. Campos 2011. “Pentecostalism and ‘National Culture’. A Dialogue Between Brazilian Social Sciences and the Antropology of Christianity.” In Religion and Society. Advances in Research, vol 2: 106–121. Martin, David 2011. “Pentecostalism: Transnational Voluntarism in the Global Religious Economy.” In The Future of Christianity. Surrey, UK: Ashgate: 63–83. Motta, Roberto 1994. “ Ethnicité, nationalité et syncrétisme dans les religions populaires brésiliennes.” Social Compass, 41 (1): 67–78. —— 2002. “L’expansion et la reinvention des religions afro-brasilennes: Réenchantement et decomposition.” Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions, 117: 113–125. Niebuhr, H. Richard 1975. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: New American Library. Oro, Ari P. André Corten, and Jean-Pierre Dozon (eds.) 2003. Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus: Os novos conquistadores da fé. São Paulo: Paulinas. Pierucci. Antônio Flávio 2004. “ ‘Bye bye, Brasil’: O declínio das religiões tradicionais no Censo 2000.” In Revista Estudos Avançados de Universidade de São Paulo, vol. 18, n. 52, set/ dec: 17–28. —— 2006. “Ciências sociais e religião – a religião como ruptura.” In Faustino Texeira and Renata Menezes (ed.), As religiões no Brasil: Continuidades e Rupturas. Petrópolis: Vozes. Prandi, Reginaldo 1991. Os candomblés de São Paulo. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec. Rivas Neto, Francisco 1994. Exu – O Grande Arcano. São Paulo: Aquaroli Books. —— 1996. Fundamentos Hermeticos de Umbanda. São Paulo: Editora Icone. —— 2002. Umbanda – A Proto-Sintese Cósmica. São Paulo: Editora Pensamento. —— 2002. Sacerdote, Mago e Medico. Cura e Autocura Umbandista. São Paulo: Icone Editora. Robbins, Joel 2004. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–143. Seljak, David 1996. “Why the Quiet Revolution was “Quiet”: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960.”CCHH, Historical Studies, 62: 109–124. Taylor, Charles 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Velho, Otávio G. 2009. “Missionization in the Postcolonial World: A View from Brazil and Elsewhere.” In Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press: 31–54. Vertovec, Steve 2007. “Super-diversity and its implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29: 6: 1024–54. Warner, R. Stephen 2005. A Church of Our Own: Disestablishment and Diversity in American Religion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wuthnow, Robert 1988. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

THE GEOPOLITICS OF RELIGIOUS SPATIALITY AND FALUN GONG’S CAMPAIGN IN NEW YORK Weishan Huang Introduction Falun Gong burst into public view on April 25, 1999, as 10,000 to 15,000 practitioners gathered quietly and unannounced outside the central government offices in Beijing, China, to present a mass appeal requesting government acceptance of their practice. Falun Gong was introduced to China in 1992 by Mr Li Hongzhi.1 It boasts 100 million followers, 39 general instruction offices, 1,900 ordinary instruction offices and 28,000 practice sites, all formed within seven years of being introduced to China before 1999.2 (Schechter 2000:41) Before FLG was banned by China’s government, it was approved and highly recognized by the China Qigong Scientific Research Society (CQSRS), a semi-governmental organization. The affiliation with CQSRS indicates that Falun Gong was recognized and accepted by the government in this earlier period.3 The Chinese government tended to sponsor qigong as evidence of “Chinese science”, as a point of national pride to promote nationalism and as a tool with which to challenge Western science. Indeed, prior to the crackdown on the practice, qigong promotion was a national project in China before 1999, and the widespread adoption of Falun Gong accompanied the fashion of qigong fever (Palmer, 2009; Ownby 2008). 1 Li is the founder of Falun Dafa (Falun Gong). His background has two opposing story lines, one provided by the Falun Dafa Research Society, the other by the government of the People’s Republic of China. According to the Falun Dafa Research Society, Master Li was born into an intellectual family on May 13, 1951, in the city of Gongshuling, Jilin Province, China. He received instruction at the age of four from a Buddhist master. According to the information provided by government-sponsored media in China, Mr Li’s birthday is July 27, 1952, and he was a former factory employee. 2 This is also a controversial description. Why did millions of people join FLG? The gong practice itself produces a mythical and religious experience. Many practitioners report healing miracles, and some practitioners experience feelings which they cannot explain. Both miracles and “holy” emotions serve to bring practitioners into an altered state of consciousness they consider sacred. 3 Through it Li established the Falun Dafa Research Society to provide a formal link between his teachings and the qi gong network in China. The society allowed him to create training centres and contact locations to propagate his teachings.

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In this chapter, I am interested in the practice of Falun Gong’s spiritual spatiality in the urban setting of New York’s public space, mainly its qigong exercises undertaken in city-wide public parks, its parades in immigrant communities and its on-the-street human rights campaigns in Manhattan, New York. Although the routine practices at private households or worksites are also important, they will not be the focus in this chapter. “Religious” or “spiritual spatiality” refers to Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s geopolitics of religious spatiality in the search of the question of the relationship between religion and space. She identifies three registers within this question, which are the territorial modalities of the communalization of religion, the geopolitics of the religious and the religious symbolizations of space. In Hervieu-Léger’s words, The geopolitics of the religious, which embraces the history of religious conquests in all their forms, the study of how concrete forms of ‘pastorizing’ are implemented in territories gained, the analysis of the intercommunity conflicts and relationships generated by these movements, the identification of forms of resistance, compromise and cohabitation that are aroused in a given space by the distribution and restructuring of the balance of power between religious groups and transitions, and the phenomena of exile, emigration, refuge and dispersal into diasporas connected to religious conquests. (HervieuLéger 2002: 99)

Falun Gong (FLG) is not a church-based religion but a new religious movement originally emerging from China in 1992 and exiled overseas after 1999. The first part of this chapter will give a brief description of FLG’s history and practice. The second part will give an ethnographic account of FLG’s spatial practice in New York, particularly in public parks in both old and new immigrant communities, as well as in popular tourist sites in Manhattan. In the end, by examining a set of campaigns relating to places, this chapter seeks to understand the relationship between the wider city and the strategically spatial practices of Falun Gong and how the transnationalization of its practice confronts and is incorporated into its diverse host society. Qigong Body and Cultivation Falun Dafa or Falun Gong, which can be translated as “Practice of the Dharma Wheel”, is a type of qigong, a central element of traditional Chinese medicine. According to the book Zhuan Falun, Falun Gong is an advanced cultivation system of the Buddhist School but is not limited to Buddhist teachings. It serves as an intensive physical and spiritual practice that requires practitioners to cultivate their Xinxing. Falun Gong’s teaching



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of Dharma (Buddhist Law) can be summarized in three words: ZhenShan-Ren (truthfulness, benevolence, and forbearance). The process of cultivation is thought to be one in which the practitioner assimilates him- or herself to a higher level, Zhen-Shan-Ren, which is the essence of the universe.4 Practitioners believe that its cultivation is guided by this supreme nature and is based on the principles of the universe’s evolution. As Li Hongzhi’s teaching states, “Falun Buddha Fa also includes cultivation of the body, which is accomplished by performing the exercise movements of the Great Consummation Way—a great high-level practice of the Buddha School.” In the end, the exercise and cultivation are intended to achieve consummation. Li Hongzhi also stated in his “Falun Buddha Fa” lecture in Europe in 1998: “It’s because our Fa can truly enable people to consummate, truly save people, and allow you to truly ascend to high levels in the process of cultivation. Whether it’s your realm of mind or the physical quality of your body, the Fa truly enables you to reach the standards of different levels”.5 Falun Gong is a practice focusing not only on the spiritual mind, but also on attempts to transcend what is considered the profane body. There is an inner logic connecting a human being’s mind and body. One can gain virtue (De) from one’s benevolent behaviour when one has honourable thoughts. This De can materialize and be part of one’s physical body. Qigong practice is not a new phenomenon, and it has been popularly practised in both private and public places in Asia. Nevertheless, this is one of the very rare cases in which a spiritual group has developed its practices into a mass movement. Park Exercises and Group Cultivation Like many other qigong groups, FLG practitioners practice in public areas, such as local parks. But there are a number of differences between FLG and other qigong groups. FLG requires reading the books and sutras of FLG, as well as practising its teachings within a group. Master Li encourages new practitioners to practice together in addition to practicing privately at home. A conventional group practice takes place at an assistant’s household and in local parks. 4 The Book Falun Gong. http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/flg.htm 5 Li Hongzhi, Falun Buddha Fa, Teaching the Fa at the Conference in Europe. May 30–31, 1998, in Frankfurt, Germany. English version. http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/europe 1998a.htm

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This routine ‘conventional’ meeting forms members’ sense of fellowship and community. It is also the key element in helping Falun Gong grow as a collective force. Each site functions as a nucleus. Master Li provides the answer as to how FLG developed this unique type of conventional group practice. His article, “Environment,” in the book, Essentials for Further Advancement, states the necessity of conventional practice:6 The cultivation practice form that I have left for Dafa disciples ensures that disciples can truly improve themselves. For example, I ask you to do the exercises as a group in parks in order to form an environment. This environment is the best way to change the surface of a person. The lofty conduct that Dafa disciples have established in this environment—including every word and every deed—can make people recognize their own weaknesses and identify their shortcomings; it can move their hearts, refine their conduct, and enable them to make progress more rapidly. Therefore, new students or self-taught disciples have to go to the practice sites to do the exercises. There are currently about 40 million practitioners in China participating daily in group exercises at the practice sites, and there are tens of millions of veteran disciples who do not go to the practice sites very often (for veteran disciples, this is normal, as this results from their state in cultivation practice). Nevertheless, as new disciples, you should never miss out on this environment. This is because all those whom you come into contact with in society are everyday people. What is more, they are everyday people who have undergone a rapid decline in human morality. In this big dye vat, people can only drift along with the current.

The Master gives instructions clear to practice within a group. The environment works as an element of group pressure to encourage new practitioners to continue their practice. Meanwhile, group practice can give new members a chance to receive advice from senior practitioners. The routine meetings help members to form a sense of fellowship and community, with each site functioning as a nucleus that can create offshoots. By 2001 there were more than forty practice sites in New York City, with each site providing free lessons or practice schedules up to seven days a week. This means that, on a weekly basis, there were more than a hundred Falun Gong activities taking place city-wide. In a word, practitioners are more than just a large mass of followers. They are gong practitioners with a collective faith and world view. They are members of a cultivation group with a clear sense of community, and call themselves Falun Dafa disciples. 6 Li Hongzhi, “Environment”, first released on October 17, 1997. Now published as one chapter of the book, Essentials for Further Advancement, p. 52.



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In 2001, the organizers of the Lunar New Year’s Parade in Flushing, NY, had a very heated dispute over whether they should allow FLG to join the parade. The Chinese Americans from Taiwan, Taiwanese Americans and Korean Americans had been the major participant groups for years. This was the first year that Chinese groups from China (PRC) intended to join the activities in Flushing, and they strongly protested at FLG’s involvement in the parade. The Taiwanese community insisted on letting FLG participate because they understood the dispute as connected to a territorial conflict with Chinese mainlanders; therefore, they wanted to support FLG as a means of adopting their own radical stance against the “invasion” of Flushing. Finally, after these multi-ethnic community leaders reached agreement by voting, the resolution was passed that FLG should be invited to join but could not demonstrate their gong during the parade march. FLG practitioners’ experience of encountering the Chinese commu­ nity in Manhattan was not so simple. On April 21, the day before the 2001 FLG annual New York conference, practitioners held a demonstration in Chinatown. Their stance was that Chinese people were being influenced by propaganda from the PRC government and that this influence on the Chinese people was much stronger than on any other ethnicity. To “clarify the truth” to the Chinese community in New York was, therefore, very important. Their demonstration was held right after their group practice. About 500 practitioners joined the morning group practice, but the police only permitted 300 people to march in the protest due to the difficulty of navigating Chinatown traffic. Practitioners wore yellow and walked peacefully, carrying huge signs bearing messages such as “Truthfulness, Benevo­ lence, and Forbearance,” and “Stop Persecution of FLG Practitioners in China”. They deliberately prepared Chinese signs for Chinatown residents, but practitioners did not expect to encounter an anti-FLG group outside China. A small group of about twenty people told me that they were with the United New York Fukein Association7 and represented a very large overseas mainland-Chinese population who are strongly against this “evil cult”. FLG marchers intended to demonstrate their gentle exercises on the street after a short walk. The aim was to show the public who they are and to remove 7 Fukein Association is the hometown association of Fujiang Provice in New York. The spelling ‘Fukein’ is the original spelling of the organization.

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public misunderstandings. The Fujiangese community leaders brought a huge sign saying “Cherish Your Life. Don’t Self-Immolate.” and waved fire extinguishers in the direction of the practitioners. The Fujianese leaders continued to humiliate and yell at the practitioners from the sidewalk during the course of the march. They actually broke the law in doing so since they did not apply for a march permit as FLG had. In the end, the police asked the Fujiangese leaders to leave or face arrest. From that day, FLG practitioners became very cautious about unexpected Chinese opponents. The April 21 incident shows us a scene of territorial conflict in Chinatown. Falun Gong practitioners believed that many Chinese immigrants did not read English newspapers, therefore, they thought that they did not understand the truth of Falun Dafa and the real reason for their persecution in China. Having suffered most from the Chinese government’s “evil” propaganda, the Falun Gong practitioners felt they needed to “clarify the truth” to this group of people. However, the chair of the Fukein American Association, Delu Zheng, commented, “Why cannot practitioners practice privately without coming out in public?” He and the other Fujiangese consider the practitioners to be conspirators, assisted by the American government, to destroy the Chinese government. Chair Zheng said, “They come out here today as they protested in front of Zhongmanhai [the Central Chinese government in Beijing] two years ago.” These newly empowered Fujiangese community leaders are very close to the Chinese general consul in New York, one of them having developed close ties in order to advance their business investments in China. Their close connection to members of PRC governing institutions gave them the initiative to stand out on the street and start the territorial struggle.8 The Manhattan Project: A Global Network in Actions The following ethnography tends to demonstrate the transnational dyna­ mic of this faith community. I would like to use Falun Gong (FLG) as a case study to demonstrate an example of increasing religious influence extending from the margins to the metropole and to challenge the stereotype that international contemporary religious manifestations are secondary to the primarily economic phenomenon of globalization, as Thomas J. Csordas demonstrated in Transnational Transcendence (Csordas 2009). 8 Community groups tend to utilize public events like parades to establish their claim as the legitimate representatives of the Chinatown community in NY.



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As I mentioned earlier, New York City had become the centre of Falun Gong resistance after the Chinese government’s declaration in 1999 that FLG was an evil cult. The FLG leadership established its transnational campaigns whereby FLG members went back to China to protest against government policy, particularly to Tiananmen Square, where they attempted to engage in public action to push China to “clarify the truth.” It also established television stations and a daily newspaper with headquarters in New York. One afternoon in January 2005, I met an elderly woman on the corner of 43rd Street and 6th Avenue handing out flyers related to the illegal detainment and torture of FLG practitioners in China. Speaking Mandarin, I asked her where she was from. “I don’t know where I am”, she replied. “I meant to ask which state you travel from?” I answered as I reframed my question. She answered, “I don’t know which state I am in right now. I don’t speak English”. I later found out from our conversation that she had flown from Taiwan with a group of practitioners to the United States, although she didn’t know whether she was in New York City or somewhere else. I was surprised to find out that a large contingent of Taiwanese practitioners were participating in a long-term campaign, in addition to participating in annual FLG experience-sharing conferences with many other non-Asian practitioners from European countries. I decided to change my plans and followed this elderly woman as she rejoined her group. We walked to 45th Street and 6th Avenue and joined a group of about twenty people who displayed pictures and tools of torture. They also reenacted torture on the sidewalk. The actors and actresses in the torture exhibitions were also part of the Taiwanese crew. I interviewed the ‘leader’ of the group, Mrs Yang, on the sidewalk. She was a retired teacher from Kaohsiong City, Taiwan. The rest of the group was also from Kaohsiong City or nearby towns. At this point I decided to switch to speaking Taiwanese in order to integrate into the group. She was a relatively senior practitioner, and her experience was the reason why she was the leader of this group. Mrs Yang didn’t speak much English, but there were one or two Englishspeaking Chinese practitioners who were assigned to the group in order to explain the messages and exhibition to passers-by. The majority of the crew were women, only three of them being men. The volunteers had signed on for a month, paying their own travel and living expenses. They brought their own lunch boxes, which contained mostly some bakery goods, and tended not to drink water in order to avoid frequent visits to the restroom. Their housing was rented by local practitioners in New York. Most of the crew did not know where they lived, nor how to travel from their apartment

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in Brooklyn to Manhattan. However, they did not seem nervous about their living conditions. They knew that they were in New York to participate in the collective movement; therefore, they followed the footsteps of their crew leader, Mrs Yang. Every morning, they left the apartment in Brooklyn at 7 am, travelling to the same location on weekdays. At weekends, they joined others running what they called the “Great Wall” of pictures and sign displays that they had put up in different locations. They followed this routine for a whole month. Mrs Yang said that not all of the practitioners in Taiwan could join them. It took a two-month waiting period for this group to go on the trip. “There were more than two hundred of us who wanted to come. We had to wait for New York coordinators to arrange the housing. We paid for the rent with thirty other people. We sleep on the floor with sleeping bags or a simple covering. We are here to clarify the truth”. When I talked to other Taiwanese practitioners, they all said that they were here to zheng fa (clarify the truth). Most of them were informed of the event by senior practitioners. It was easier in Taiwan, where telephones, e-mail and daily practices could maximize communication. Some said that there were a lot of evil spirits above Manhattan Island and Beijing. Since they could not go to Beijing, they came to Manhattan. A few high-profile volunteers, who were Chinese practitioners in America, explained to me that Manhattan is the centre of the world economy and media and therefore that New York is the best place for the Zheng Fa campaign. “Besides the main purpose of stopping the persecution, we would like the world to know the real meaning of Falun Dafa. Our master has great compassion. We don’t want the non-believers to carry the consequence of misunderstanding Falun Dafa. We would like to correct their attitude. The negative thoughts or actions against [Falun Dafa] will bring negative consequence to their Karma”, said Shi, a practitioner. FLG bases many of its important activities in New York City because it is a centre of global communication and public relations. Here they can put pressure on the Chinese government while simultaneously promoting Falun Gong’s role as a peaceful meditation practice. New York City, where the Master was exiled and still resides, is the chosen city for the mission of ‘clarifying the truth’. Practitioners from around the world take time off from work and fly in at their own expense to participate in New York-area demonstrations, group meditations and street photo campaigns. This global campaign was transnational in nature, mobilizing practitioners from all over the world between 2004 and 2005. Falun Gong’s political advocacy in New York City includes a large contingent of Chinese Falun Gong practitioners from other places or countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and



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Singapore. As the home of the reclusive Master Li, New York is also seen by many practitioners as a pilgrimage site and a key location for promoting Falun Gong’s identity and message, particularly about challenging China’s religious policies. At the same time as sending regular practitioners into the streets, Falun Gong launched other political campaigns that included lobbying efforts, and media and legal campaigns. Falun Gong’s work in New York City in the last decade can be classified into ‘hard’ street campaigns, such as street protests, rallies, sit-in demonstrations, marches, photo and torture exhibitions, and ‘soft’ campaigns, such as cultural events, film screenings, media outreach and clarifying the truth in commercial films, governmental organizations and educational institutes. Hard campaigns take advantage of the structural opportunity of being permitted protesting in the United States. Permits in New York are easily obtained, due to the protected right of citizens to express their political agendas freely in public spaces, although the duration and exact location are subject to negotiation between the permit applicants and the local police authorities. Soft campaigns take advantage of the structural opportunity offered by the fact that the city has a great concentration of transnational networks through its various economic and social activities. Practitioners have adopted cultural outreach as a strategy to remove the label of ‘evil cult’ that had been given to them. One of the forms of strategic outreach was to present themselves through ethnic and cultural performances in people’s daily lives. Religious Pluralism in the American Religious Landscape This chapter to some extent echoes editors Becci, Burchardt, and Casanova’s call to bring urban space back into the study of religions. Urban spaces and the practice of religion are extremely transnationalized, and many of these processes are conceptualized as aspects or consequences of globalization, such as international migration. Becci, Burchardt, and Casanova suggest examining how cities are the context for situated enactments and simultaneously sites at which the local develops its own agency in generating the context for actions (Burchardt and Becci, introduction). This question has encouraged us to look at the ways in which a set of issues relating to place establishes itself in the belief system that connects the relations of a given religious community to its past and its future (Hervieu-Leger, 2002). The above ethnographic account tends to look at FLG’s concrete practice of the occupation and management of spaces in New York City

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during its eighteen-month campaign. Here I would like to address a little further what is meant by FLG utilizing the structural opportunities offered by the city to advance its cause. Earlier studies have shown that modern American cities are diverse, cosmopolitan and commercial, a combination which was long consid­ ered inhospitable to religion. Some scholars have pointed out that, since World War II, changes in American cities have been so fundamental as to be termed ‘urban restructuring’. During the same period, organized religion has been undergoing a widespread, pervasive change that is now commonly called the restructuring of American religion. Both struc­ tural changes are further linked to the social transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, which extended the presumption of individual autonomy and the moral legitimacy of personal choice at the expense of traditional collective authorities, including religion (Wuthnow, 1989; Livezey 2000). What accounts for the dramatic alterations in the religious preferences of people living in the city? Immigrants play an important role. Since 1965, immigration has dramatically changed the religious landscape of the United States. Today, the encounter between people of different religious traditions takes place in the city and its neighbourhoods. Throughout its history, New York has always been a city of immigrants and one of the gateway cities to the United States. The flow of immigrants has not only changed the demographics of New York, it has also revitalized the practices of faith groups. The ethnographic field described above, Flushing, NY, has been called “the most extreme case of religious pluralism in the world” by historian Scott Hanson. In a residential neighbourhood and commercial district of about 2.5 square miles, there are half a dozen Hindu temples, two Sikh gurdwaras, several mosques, Japanese, Chinese and Korean Buddhist temples, a Taoist temple, over a hundred Korean churches, Latin American evangelical churches, Falun Gong practitioners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, as well as some of the oldest churches and synagogues in the city—overall, nearly two hundred different places of worship densely concentrated in a small, but heavily populated and busy urban neighbourhood.9

9 Scott Hanson’s lecture, “A New York City Neighborhood is a World of Religious Diversity,” in 2008 at the Bureau of International Information Programs. http://www .america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2008/August/20080819162731xjsnommis0.5391199.html and Scott Hanson at The Pluralism Project. Website http://pluralism.org/affiliates/ shanson/.



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Unlike Europe, where processes of modernization and urbanization were historically associated with un-churching and secularization, in the United States urbanization and modernization have been continuously associated with processes of churching, denominational affiliation and religious revivals. Through the continuous flow of immigration, the system of denominational pluralism has expanded to incorporate first the religions of Europe and today all the religions of the world. Immigrant religions are creative transformations of religious resources in novel contexts (Casanova 2010). For example, Catholic Mexicans have revitalized American Catholicism today, and similar processes are happening to Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Casanova pointed out that racial and religious denominationalisms are the two important dynamics that have structured the character of group relations in American history. Racial denominationalism was structured along a rigid, hierarchical, binary system that segregated a large hegemonic and privileged white majority from the oppressed, underprovided black minority. The system of religious denominationalism was based on a much more fluid, in principle egalitarian, super-diversity. Steve Vertovec has coined the term ‘super-diversity’ to characterize the extreme pluralization of minorities which is increasingly characteristic of European mega-cities. Yet European super-diversity is still characterized by an increasing pluralization of minorities facing relatively homogeneous national majorities. One interesting concept of super-diversity is experiencing similar changes in urban settings in both North American and European cities and patterns of diversification among ethnic groups themselves (Vertovec 2007). As for American religious super-diversity, it can be understood, first of all, as the fragmentation of the Protestant majority into hundreds of denominations, as Casanova has pointed out. Catholics were also fragmented into dozens of rigidly separated ethnic-linguistic parishes, such as Irish, French, German, Italian, Polish, Croatian and Hispanic. Secondly, post-1965 immigration has continuously contributed to an even greater pluralization of existing religious super-diversity (Casanova 2010). This relatively egalitarian and super-diverse religious environment in New York has provided great leverage for new religious movements, including immigrant religious movements. We have witnessed the ‘representations’ and ‘encounters’ of diversity in the parades and festivals of Chinatown. Do these terms try to normalize or harmonize differences or conflicts? When FLG faced the challenge of being included in the Lunar New Year Parade for the first time, they relied on the ‘street ruling’ of policemen. They later turned to the Commission of Human

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Rights of New York City (CHRNYC) and requested a supporting letter from the city office. CHRNYC issued a standard letter to demonstrate the principle of being ‘inclusive’ of differences. The disputes remained unsolved and led to even more violent conflicts on the Main Street in Flushing in 2008.10 The Political Body in Urban Public Spaces My research has shown that the Falun Gong utilizes the structural opportunities offered by a global city to advance its cause. Since harassment has extended to the streets of New York, Falun Gong has also sought assistance from the New York City Government. ‘Embracing diversity’ is definitely a politically correct principle when it comes to diversity management strategies, which includes religious diversity. For example, during Thanksgiving weekend, Mayor Bloomberg wished New Yorkers an Eid Mubarak, while millions of Muslim New Yorkers also gathered with their families to celebrate Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest times of the year for people of Muslim faith and a time of special focus on charitable giving. “New York’s religious and ethnic diversity, and our appreciation of and respect for that diversity, is a big part of why this is the greatest city in the world”, said by Mayor Bloomberg.11 When it comes to Ramadan, New Yorkers will also receive similar greetings from the Mayor’s office. Public exhibitions and cultural parades on the city’s streets have enabled the organization to enter the global public sphere and shape a place for themselves in local, national and global landscapes. Several factors, including immigration, have contributed to making the city optimal for the publicizing of the practice and persecution FLG suffers in China within urban spaces, from neighbourhood parks to popular tourist sites. As Smith states, human agency operates at multiple spatial scales, and is not restricted to local territorial or socio-cultural formations; the very concept of the urban thus requires re-conceptualization as a social space that is a pregnant meeting ground for the interplay of divers localizing practices of regional, national, trans­ national, and even global scale actors, as these wider networks of meaning,

10 A routine FLG street campaign, the “Clarify Truth Campaign”, extended to street disputes for weeks in 2008. 11 “Mayor Bloomberg wishes New Yorkers an Eid Mubarak.” http://www.nyc.gov/portal/ site/nycgov/menuitem.c0935b9a57bb4ef3daf2f1c701c789a0/index.jsp?pageID=mayor _press_release&catID=1194&doc_name=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nyc.gov%2Fhtml%2Fom% 2Fhtml%2F2009b%2Fpr511-09.html&cc=unused1978&rc=1194&ndi=1



falung gong’s campaign in new york141 power and social practice come into contact with more purely locally configured networks, practices, meanings and identities. (Smith 2005: 245–246)

Falun Gong is a unique movement in that it has emerged as a global community of committed followers. They engage in public, collective, political actions in major cities utilizing the organizational capabilities of information and communication technology. Since the persecution in China, New York City has become the centre of the group’s resistance efforts. Because of media coverage between 2000 and 2003, many can easily recall the image of Falun Gong qigong demonstrations. Having witnessed the politicizing process of qigong in major cities of the world, the peaceful image is combined with scenes of practitioners in yellow T-shirts, carrying yellow banners, performing on the main streets of major cities. One of the three missions (Three Things) of Falun Gong practitioners is to declare the truth about Falun Dafa and its persecution.12 In the early stage of the confrontation with the Chinese government, and for years on every Saturday, practitioners held sit-in protests in front of Chinese consulates worldwide. Collective actions performed by followers wearing yellow T-shirts as they perform the five-movement qigong exercise accompanied by Falun Gong music have become Falun Gong’s global campaign signature. Among the New York practitioners, one can find many elderly men and women (the majority of members are female); however, there is a group of young professionals who, as international students in the U.S. in the field of natural sciences, became employed in the U.S after graduation and now play key volunteer ‘leadership’ roles in the movement. Until 2001, the majority of practitioners were still Chinese or Chinese Americans, with one Hispanic group meeting in Queens and one Russian-American group meeting in Brooklyn. A few Caucasians and a few Taiwanese can be found in all groups. However, at the 2001 annual New York conference, there were practitioners from all over the world, including Asia, Europe and other areas. The global aspect of participants at New York events was mainly noticeable between 2001 and 2007. Falun Gong’s presence in New York is marked by highly visible political activism. With the Chinese government’s 1999 declaration of Falun Gong as a cult, there was a crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners across China. Falun Gong groups around the world have worked assiduously to mobilize public opinion against the Chinese government and to advocate religious 12 The Three Things: the three things Master Li asked practitioners to do are to study the Fa (the teachings of Falun Dafa), to send forth righteous thoughts, and to clarify the truth about Falun Dafa and about the persecution to the people of the world.

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freedom and human rights in China. New York is a key node in this global campaign. These petitions are later delivered to the offices of senators and congressmen and -women. This is what Smith said, indicating a need to conceptualize “the locality as the place where localized struggles, and alternative discourses on the meaning of ‘global conditions’ are played out” (Smith 2005: 241). How does this victimized group generate pos­itive public opinion that strikes back against the Chinese government? In FLG’s case, the city itself is a useful conceptualization of local sites of cultural appropriation and resistances to its global political conditions (Smith, 2005). We can differentiate FLG campaigns from their routine activities and other special campaign projects in Manhattan. Special campaign projects include Falun Gong members organizing daily meditations on the sidewalk across the street from the Chinese consulate on 42nd Street. Other mass campaigns include performers in the Times Square subway station, who enact religious persecution dramas by constructing cages to hold Falun Gong practitioners, and who display graphic photographs of purported violence and abuse perpetrated against members in China and to distribute literature on China’s policies and practices. Besides marking spaces all over the city, Falun Gong representatives contact the faculties of New York-area universities to open ‘dialogues’ about FLG’s situation. Members canvass the city’s numerous street fairs, parades and processions. Practitioners use their qigong demonstrations to campaign for the right to their practice. They also ask for endorsement from the general public in the form of petitions to stop persecution. Conclusion: Locating Neighbourhood Disputes in a Global Milieu There are two conclusions that can be drawn from this research. The first is that Falun Gong’s movements use the structural opportunity of a global city to advance its objectives. The public exhibitions and cultural parades on the city’s streets have served to bring Falun Gong’s practices to the global public sphere so they can find a place in New York’s, America’s and the world’s religious landscape. Secondly, in order to understand the politics of diversity within ethnic Chinese politics, we will have to locate the immigrant community in a global milieu. In the conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese government, that tension has been translated to the streets of New York City, which unveils the politics of immigrant communities as a reflection of domestic politics in their home countries. For the first conclusion, New York City has been chosen as a city to advance Falun Gong’s cause because of its global locality. An immigrant



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global city has a special meaning. A global city reflects a new geography of the centralization of transnational capital, or the creation of a new hub of networks through its various economic and social activities. New York City represents one of the most complex entities of globalization, as the linkages binding the city can develop global network ties through more than social-economic means. Studying faith-based immigrant organizations, such as Falun Gong in New York City, is important because the city is at the centre of cultural, political, economic and religious networks, which provide us with the chance to study the structure of a newly established global denomination. Secondly, in order to understand the politics of diversity within ethnic Chinese politics, we will have to locate immigrant communities in a global milieu. In the conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese government, that tension has become a testing variable for the interactions of immigrant groups on the streets of New York City. This does not mean that the political struggles in immigrant communities in New York are merely an extension of domestic politics. For example, the only possible ‘social fields’ in which we can find and study the political competition between Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants are actually in diasporic societies, as there is no ground for this political contention in either China or Taiwan. How can we unpack the community conflicts mentioned above that acknowledge the reality of Asian geopolitics? The Flushing Lunar New Year’s Parade had clearly become a public arena for Asian geopolitics. In 2001, a Korean group did not speak with another Korean group because they could not agree with each other’s representatives for community leadership. A Chinese group was angry with a Taiwanese group because the latter was granted the official permit to hold the Flushing Lunar New Year Parade from the Flushing police department, which was considered a sign of leadership in the Asian community in Flushing. Among the Taiwanese American groups, a pro-Taiwan-independence group has had a very tense relationship with a pro-KMT group (it has divided into pro-KMT/ PFP/NP groups) for years. The newcomer Chinese immigrants in Flushing have created new political power in this Asian community. As Smith said, at the current transnational moment “the politics of everyday life” need to be opened up more widely as social and political imaginaries. In transnational cities people’s everyday urban experiences are affected by wider phenomena, practice and networks, which defy easy boundary setting. Multiple levels of social practice now inform the urban politics of everyday life throughout the world (Smith, 2005).

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The attitudes of different groups reacting to the FLG incident can help us understand the spectrum and transition of these groups’ political orientations. Although there were some extra rules binding this religious group, sensitivity to FLG’s background of political persecution in China did not create strong objections from other community groups. However, restraints from the Chinese Consulate in New York have increased since FLG’s march in Manhattan’s Chinatown in April 2001. Many Chinese American merchants wish to maintain or establish close ties with Chinese consulates in order to benefit their current or future business investments in China. The dispute over the 2001 Flushing Lunar New Year’s Parade was settled with the police verdict, but the precedence this incident creates makes certain that there will be conflicts in the future in this ethnic community. The Chinese government tries to use the label of evil cult in reference to Falun Gong to define what is right and what is wrong and what the rules of society are. Immigrant patrons in Flushing also try to define and redefine their boundaries within the host society on a yearly basis by organizing Lunar New Year parades. The Lunar New Year celebration is a way of celebrating ethnic pride and also setting a boundary from solar calendar users. Accepting or denying the participation of Falun Gong sets a political boundary on religious tolerance or intolerance. With regard to non-Chinese non-believers, FLG hopes to demonstrate a positive image of a political and religious life-style choice by practicing qigong in public spaces and outside of immigrant communities. FLG has set out practice sites in public and private spaces throughout the whole city in order to contest the labels attributed to it by the Chinese communist regime. Their counter-discourse effort (Clarifying the Truth, Zhen Fa) is one of their three major missions in the last decade. There are various layers of meaning in FLG’s practice of resistance in public spaces. Despite all of the tensions with parade committees and restrictions on how they are allowed to represent themselves, Falun Gong practitioners insist on walking down main streets with other community groups, holding their heads high. The April 21 parade incident shows us a scene of territorial conflict in Chinatown. Having suffered most from the Chinese government’s propaganda, the Falun Gong practitioners felt they needed to “clarify the truth” to this group of people by fighting for participation and recognition in the public sphere. By participating in the community parades, they have successfully rejected the power and influence of China’s government and the Chinese consulate in New York. They rejected the power by rejecting the labels and names applied to them by their oppressors. This kind of self-claim is protected under the urban pluralist



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and multicultural policies that are intended to promote tolerance, understanding and respect for different identities. For FLG practitioners, putting themselves out in public is a form of resistance, denying that they are the secret followers of an evil cult or the practitioners of mysterious rituals. They demonstrate their qigong practices in the parks and parades as a strategy of resistance, a strategy which not only rejects the power of labelling, but also states that the practice of Falun Gong is not merely a life-style choice but also a right. References Casanova, José 2002. Immigration and Religion in a Global Age. New York: New School for Social Research. —— 2003. “Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective.” In L.W. Grace Davie and Paul Heelas (eds.), Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular, and Alternative Futures. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. —— forthcoming. “Analytical Summary and Findings of RIINY Project.” Chan, Cheris Shun_ching 2004. “The Falun Gong in China: A Sociological Perspective.” The China Quarterly 179: 665–683. Ching, Julia 2001. “The Falun Gong: Religious and Political Implications.” American Asian Review 19(4): 2. Csordas, Thomas J. (ed.) 2009. Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foner, Nancy 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fraser, Nancy 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26: 56–80. Hanson, Scott 2008. Lecture on religious diversity in America. http://www.america.gov/ st/texttrans-english/2008/August/20080819162731xjsnommis0.5391199.html and http:// pluralism.org/affiliates/shanson. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 2002. “Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in Modernity.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26(1): 99–105. Kivell, Jonathan 2002. “The Birthplace of Religious Freedom: Continuing to Welcome the World’s Faith.” Queens Tribune (New York). Online available at http://www.queens­tribune .com/anniversary2002/religion.htm. Accessed 22/10/2012. Li, Hongzhi 1997. Zhou Falun. Hong Kong: Falun Dafa Press. Lin, Jan 1998. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Livezey, Lowell W. (ed.) 2000. Public Religion and Urban Transformation. New York: NYU Press. Ownby, David 2008. Falun Gong and the Future of China. New York: Oxford University Press. Palmer, David A. 2007. Qigong Fever. New York: Columbia University Press. Schechter, Danny 2000. Falun Gong’s Challenge in China: Spiritual Practice or “Evil Cult?” New York: Akashic Books. Sennett, Richard 1992. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: WW Norton & Company. Smith, Michael P. 2005. “Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global.” J. Eade and C. Mele (ed.), The Urban Sociology Reader. New York: Routledge. Vertovec, Steven 1999. Migration and Social Cohesion. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Wuthnow, Robert 1989. The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.

PART 3

RELIGION, ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

RELIGIOUS INVOLVEMENTS IN A POST-SOCIALIST URBAN SPACE IN BERLIN1 Irene Becci The street I grew up on, there were bullet holes in our stop signs – if you ever get to a stop sign with bullet holes in it that means “go!” […] We had this church on our corner […] and they put a sign on their fence to welcome people into the city. I don’t think they got the double meaning of the sign because the sign said : “God allows you turns, now it would be a good time to make one”. I don’t think they got it. Travon Free, comedian and writer, April 23rd, 2011 at the Laugh Factory, Long Beach, California.

Following Michel de Certeau’s distinction between place and space, one can say that cities contain multiple urban places and an infinity of spaces. While place is simply the physical environment, space is the outcome of people’s practices to appropriate a place, “a practiced place” (Certeau 1984: 117) and the “product of the subject’s interaction with the existing environment” (Reynolds and Fitzpatric 1999: 65). In this chapter I focus on the perspectives of the actors involved and shall therefore draw on the notion of space. The urban space I studied is located in one of the eastern districts of Berlin.2 My reflections here are based on an ethnographic account of the ways in which religious actors integrate themselves into an urban place, with its specific problems and social inequalities. I shall first offer a short description of the urban space in question with respect to its post-socialist character and the presence of religious communities and practices, understood here as agents of civil society. My focus will be on a Baptist congregation. On the basis of interview material and observations, I shall offer some insights into the extent to which this congregation adapts to and is inspired by the urban character of the space by discussing its actions, selfperceptions and ambitions.

1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of Brill and Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka for the insightful hints and comments on my chapter. For this text I draw partly on the last chapter of my book, Becci 2012: 152–165. 2 In order to guarantee anonymity, in this text I use only pseudonyms.

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An urban space, and the one I studied in particular, is not only shaped every day by the actors who live there, it is also the outcome of multiple layers of historical processes that influence and are influenced by these actors’ daily activities. The city of Berlin illustrates strikingly well the way in which historical processes are imprinted in the urban space. Historians studying Berlin’s religious past stress that, as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century, large sections of its inhabitants were clearly turning to a more secular way of life.3 The secular character of the city was reinforced during the more than forty years in which Berlin was divided after World War II. The districts in the east and the west have undergone very different urban transformations.4 While a capitalist model of development was dominant in the west, marked by resistance and tension, in the eastern part of the city—the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—a utopian socialist urban architecture was tried out. Blocks of flats were located in the city centre, arranged around politically important squares or avenues. The government preferred to build large new estates in the city centre to house working-class families rather than renovate buildings dating from before 1945, which the socialist ruling party considered to be “a reminder of capitalist living conditions, which were supposed to have been overcome by socialism” (Häussermann 1996: 219). After the collapse of the GDR within the eastern part of the city, changes occurred to different degrees. Unlike during the socialist period, today housing is no longer “subject to social housing rules and regulations” (Häussermann 1996: 228). The regulations follow economic criteria: since the large estates that were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s offer cheap housing, it is in those areas that the low-income sections of the population are concentrated. By contrast, the neighbourhoods which have older buildings, in particular those close to the city centre, have been modernized, the refurbished houses being too expensive for those on low incomes to afford.5 My research was located in a so-called Kiez6 which can be reached by inner-city train in only a few 3 In 1874, only 20% of couples had a Protestant wedding and only 62% of new-born babies were baptized. Wehler, 1973: 119. See also McLeod, 1996. 4 See, for example, Eckardt, 2005. 5 The process of gentrification in East Berlin has been extensively documented (see e.g. Holm and Brent 2002). 6 In northern Germany, the word Kiez refers evocatively to a neighbourhood demarcated by local residents, who usually name it after a main street. It forms a kind of distinctive unity with which its residents identify and which conveys the spirit of a village to the area.



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minutes from Alexanderplatz, the square which was the heart of the capital of socialist East Germany. While major railway lines intersect where one gets off, people avoid looking at each other. On arrival, travellers usually rush outside the unfriendly station into the streets or to the nearby fastfood stands. South of the station runs a long street adorned with shops and restaurants. During the GDR period, this street was one of the liveliest places in the capital. While in the northern part of the area huge prefabricated houses and the buildings of the former Ministry for State Security, which now host the state security museum, impress the visitor, the houses to the south, most of them five-storey buildings, were all built before World War II. The roughly five to six thousand inhabitants living in this neighbourhood can be described as socially disadvantaged.7 They face a multilayered marginality: economic, cultural and political.8 Neither tourists nor students are attracted to the area. The reverse side of this situation is that, ironically, for people who share these marginal social positions, such as ex-offenders, the area appears to be attractive. Indeed, I myself had never come to this area before spending a year there as an anthropologist in a rehabilitation programme for released prisoners. Like numerous other neighbourhoods in East Berlin, the area is undergoing massive state-planned restoration, since the houses, which had originally been built for manual workers, are now outmoded. As a result, the social and demographic profile of the area and its architecture have been well documented.9 However, this restoration does not mean the gentrification of this area, as has happened in other parts of East Berlin.10 The unemployment rate is high. There are no cinemas, no theatres. Some of the squares become animated when the market takes place a couple of times a week. The busiest hours are when pupils are going to or coming  from school. However, this is not a ‘typical’ tension-ridden urban area,  comparable to those of ‘global cities’,11 which are characterized by   7 Cf. TOPOS 2007.   8 According to Loïc Wacquant (1996), an urban area is in a state of advanced marginality if it meets different criteria, some of them being the functional disconnection of neighbourhood conditions from macro-economic trends; territorial fixation and stigmatization; spatial alienation and the dissolution of place; the loss of a viable hinterland; and the symbolic fragmentation of marginalized populations. The area which is at the center of this article does correspond to this description, but only to some degree. It can therefore be qualified as marginal, but not as being in state of advanced marginality. 9 Since 1997 TOPOS, an urban investigation bureau commissioned by the municipality has been closely following developments in this area. 10 See Holm 2006. 11 Sassen 1991.

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overpopulation and massive migratory movements. On the contrary, this area runs the risk of social decline, given that a number of houses have been left empty and are becoming cheaper and cheaper. Another important characteristic is that the percentage of nonGermans, including non-East-Germans, is very low: in 1989, the proportion of foreign immigrants in East Berlin was about 1.6%.12 While this figure has risen since then, it remains well below 10%.13 Among the non-German residents of the area, the attention is mainly on Turkish shopkeepers— when they are the victims of right-wing attacks—or the Vietnamese. In 1996 and 1997, the media widely reported violent deaths which were presumed to have been committed by rival Vietnamese gangs.14 Even today, the term ‘Vietnamese mafia’ resounds among the local inhabitants, and people do not show great surprise when they witness hefty police arrests in the area. Cigarettes on the black market are often sold by Vietnamese at the entrance to underground stations, shopping malls and supermarkets.15 The main concerns that have arisen here since the fall of Socialism include the concentration of and increase in right-wing extremism in public,16 black-market activities and related violence and unemployment. Some people do not seem to mind the rather desolate state of this urban space—in fact, it seems to be the very thing that attracts them. This, for example, was the case for the ex-prisoners who lived at the halfway house I observed. Since 1997, this secular housing programme has hosted over hundred ex-prisoners, giving them valuable support after they were released. Ex-inmates often move to large cities after they come out of prison, where they can live in anonymity. The fifteen ex-inmates in the programme, who were all quite isolated from their families and who had received very little education, actually made extensive use of the urban space. As they had recently been released from prison, they had no jobs or social networks. They spent most of the day outside: they liked to sit on the benches in the squares or in front of warehouses, but often felt ill at ease inside shops, which they found ‘too crowded’. 12 Kemper 1998: 1771. 13 TOPOS 2007: 84–85. 14 Cf. Berliner Zeitung, 6.6.1997 “Schießerei unter Vietnamesen” (Gunfight among Vietnamese), in the local news column. 15 The Vietnamese find themselves in a peculiar situation: after 1989 those who had been hired as workers by the GDR received no residence permits, contrary to migrants from South Vietnam, who benefited from having refugee status. Cf. among others Bui 2003. 16 Cf. in particular Luzar 2006.



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The area could be characterized with reference to Michel Foucault’s (1984) concept of ‘heterotopia’, which is ‘another type of place’, reserved for a particular part of the population (the unemployed, ex-inmates, rightwing extremists, the homeless, residents without permits) or to ‘odd’ activities (‘hanging out’, trafficking). Also, according to the investigation office mentioned earlier the area does not appear to have a unity which could foster some kind of local identity (TOPOS 2007: 86).17 The authors of the report argue that the low number of non-Germans and the lack of a distinct identity make it possible for right-wing activists to appear in public spaces as a dominant force, without being disturbed in any way.18 Norbert Elias (1965) pointed to the difficulty which socially disadvantaged areas have in controlling their public image; in this area the struggle to shape an image is at least as intense as the political struggles in the streets. While the media portray the area as a ‘no-go’ area, a centre for right-wing extremism,19 and regularly report, in some detail, violent events linked to these groups or the so-called Vietnamese gangs, the local inhabitants are clearly frustrated that other, more peaceful and joyful aspects are systematically ignored.20 Their reaction is to downplay the importance of right-wing activities and violence in general, while the political authorities generously finance local programmes promoting anti-racism. While I observed the rehabilitation programme for ex-offenders, I noted a number of occasions that illustrate this kind of reaction. Right-wing propaganda had obviously also reached the ex-offenders who were living in the halfway house. Only some openly displayed xenophobic attitudes, but a number of them had received flyers calling for demonstrations in memory of one or other Nazi event, which they kept in their flats. Their social workers were aware of this, but were not willing to address the issue in a specific way because they 17 TOPOS 2007: 86. 18 For the different relationships with space in Berlin with regard to right-wing extremism, see Shoshan 2008. 19 On the notion of right-wing extremism in Germany, I refer to Jaschke, 2001: 30, according to whom the following elements are characteristic of right-wing attitudes, behaviours or actions: a view of human beings as socially unequal on the basis of racial or ethnic considerations, the striving towards the ethnic homogeneity of people, a rejection of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights, as well as of the value of pluralism inherent in liberal democracy, a stress upon the priority of the community over the individual, the submission of citizens to the state and the aim to abolish democracy. On right-wing activities in Eastern Germany, see Stöss 1996. 20 This was, for instance, the case during my fieldwork in Summer 2006, when the football World Cup took place in Germany: cf. “World Cup Guide Highlights Germany’s Racist Hotspots”, Deutsche Welle, 3 May 2006. Cf. http://www.soccerblog.com/2006/05/the _tourist_guide_to_germanys.htm, last accessed 11.2.2012.

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feared that the inhabitants would then feel they were being even more stereotyped. The manifest occupation of this urban space—in acoustic and aesthetic terms—by right-wing extremists stands in sharp contrast to the political discourse and orientation of the local authorities. Since the re-unification of Germany, political power has been in the hands of left-wing parties. The local authorities have sought to keep the socialist past alive by naming streets and squares in the area after local socialists who had been victims of the Nazi regime. One of the district mayor’s policies is to support anti-racism by reuniting different local civil forces around this issue. All the activities which have this aim refer to the area as a Kiez, which stands in sharp contrast to the image of a violent ‘no-go’ area. While, to quote Häussermann, one key characteristic of socialist cities was the “non-existence of local self-government” (1996: 222), locality is now crucial for issues of governance. One of these policies culminated in the formation of a local ‘Forum’—a movement formed in 2006 to coordinate and encourage social and cultural activities in the Kiez.21 The Forum’s stated aim is to improve the quality of life in this urban space – precisely so that it becomes a well practiced place. Its members—both individual citizens and associations22—meet five times a year to discuss local problems, such as the impact of restoration work on everyday life. Another aim of the meetings is to get to know the different associations that are active in the area (care homes for the elderly, homeless shelters, childcare facilities, schools, commercial enterprises). Also, having at its disposal some funding from the local government, the Forum regularly finances cultural initiatives. It was here that I was able to follow the ways in which a particular religious community became involved in civil action. Religious Involvement in the Post-Socialist Urban Space: Between Socialist Legacies and Personal Aspirations While most of the former socialist states have seen an impressive resurgence of religious practices (Casanova 1994, Hann 2006) and the institutional empowerment of religious institutions, the situation in Eastern 21 In 2007 I participated in the Forum as a member of the rehabilitation programme for ex-convicts. 22 At the time of my fieldwork, neither Vietnamese nor Turkish residents participated in the Forum.



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Germany,23 and especially in Berlin, is quite distinct. Secularism has been a dominant feature of life in the city. Socialism accentuated this trend and, although since 1989 religion has been re-established at the institutional level and various evangelical groups have attempted in vain to re-Christianize the East German population, the erosion of religion has continued at the social level (Pollack 2000). This, for instance, is reflected in the fact that there are in the Kiez a remarkably high number of religious buildings: two belong to the main Protestant church, one to the Baptist community, while another is a Neo-Apostolic church, although fewer than a quarter of the area’s inhabitants belong to any religious community at all and the attendance rate are even lower. Indeed, the case of the former GDR probably represents one of the most highly secularised societies in history. In contrast to West Germany, where about 70% of the population are affiliated to Christian churches, the religious norm in Eastern Germany is ‘non-belonging’.24 Religious practices or beliefs outside religious institutions show no signs of revival either. The socialist government accelerated or ‘forced’ (Karstein, Schmidt-Lux, Wohlrab-Sahr 2009) a secularization process that had started much earlier, but which then became part of East German identity and self-perception. The two parts of Germany thus developed two types of secularism: in the east secularism is strongly influenced by the socialist past, with the lower social classes especially remaining solidly sceptical about religion. In the west, secularism was socially not that widespread and reflected rather an intellectual attitude. This secular environment needs to be taken very seriously when studying religion. Indeed, following Talal Asad’s theoretical framework (Asad 2003) stressing the intricate links between the religious and the secular, we need to understand the secular in order to grasp the social location of religion. In the German post-socialist version of secular space, community-oriented values, such as the family or neighbourhood, coexist and to some extent overshadow the newly individualistic way of life in a market-oriented society. I suggest that the more a religious community embodies and transmits these values—as tends to be the case in small and locally embedded communities—the closer it comes to East Germans. The religious communities that are present in the Kiez achieve this aim to different extents. After presenting them briefly, I shall concentrate on

23 With Eastern Germany I refer here to the society and territory of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), while East Germany is synonymous for the GDR. 24 Cf. Wohlrab-Sahr and Schmidt 2003.

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the Baptist congregation, in particular on how it participates in the civil activities which are seeking to tackle the major social problems in the area. The building of the Lutheran church in the Kiez provides key insights into its history and self-perception. The Lutheran Church was one of the few churches that, in 1978, the GDR government permitted to reconstruct its damaged buildings in East Berlin. There was, however, a restrictive condition: there was to be no tower so that nobody would recognize the building as a church. A crucifix now stands in front of the church, but it remains a modest building. By contrast, the government allowed the Apostolic community to build their church on a corner of the main street, after its previous chapel had been destroyed; it had ‘unluckily’ been located at a site in the north of the district that the Stasi or secret police needed to expand their buildings (see Halbrock 2009). The government wanted to disarm its critics, who had spoken out about the demolition of a sacred building by offering this small religious community a disproportionately large building (see Grübel and Rademacher 2003). The Apostolic church is accordingly the most visible one in this urban space, but it does not convey the same openness to the Kiez as the other two churches do, as it is very much oriented towards the members of its own community, most of whom live outside the area. The Baptist community in the Kiez is very small: officially, only 135 members live in the area or nearby districts. In 2008, this congregation made a big point of celebrating its 75th anniversary in the Kiez, which it thereby emphasised having been a part of since pre-socialist times. In fact, shortly after the political changes of 1989, a number of Western evangelical groups came to Eastern Germany to Christianize this new field, but their efforts proved quite unsuccessful. In order to set itself off from other evangelical groups, the Baptist congregation in the Kiez stresses that it shares its experience of the GDR with the other residents. Under the socialist regime, the German Baptist community was split into two groups, and the government obstructed communication between Baptists in West and East Germany respectively. The Baptists in East Germany slowly developed their own organizational structures and orientation, which were different in some respects from those of their Western counterparts, as in decision-making processes within the community (Marchlowitz 1995). The re-unification of Germany did not erase these differences: on the contrary, the Eastern Baptists started to stand up for them and no longer considered them simply a necessary adjustment following their forcible separation from the West. The building of the Baptist community in the Kiez is large and modern. A big crucifix is located at the gate. According to the pastor, the



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congregation’s identification with the Kiez is very strong.25 They organize regulary festivities, free weekly aerobic training, they host cultural activities and play-time, or various support groups in the church rooms. However, members try to reach out to also the space around the church in various ways: religious services in the railway station—“just next to McDonald’s”, as the pastor said. A tactic26 which the Baptists often use is to link their presence to other main attractions in the area. For example, a large choir of thirty people sang the Gospel, with over 150 people attending the service. For the organizers it was very important to be placed next to McDonald’s, so that a lot of people—“who were only on their way to get some fast food”—could stop and maybe “enter a church for the first time in their lives”, as the pastor said at one of the meetings of the Forum in January 2007. Indeed, going to church to attend an ordinary religious service requires a proactive attitude towards religion, which is absent in the area. Therefore, their activities in the church are open for all the adults and children in the area. The Baptists also organize presents for the children of the imprisoned women in a nearby correction facility. Ever since the Forum was constituted, the Baptist pastor has played an active part in it. The Baptist congregation was the only religious group that belonged to the Forum; some members of the Lutheran church participated as individual citizens. The Baptists’ collective involvement arose from the congregation’s attitude towards the Kiez, as the pastor affirmed: As a parish, we want to be, in a very conscious way, a local parish (als Gemeinde auch Kiezgemeinde sein)… this means, and my predecessors did this, too, that we try to be on good terms with the local urban administration and with the other congregations and the Christian churches in this Kiez.

Being part of this urban space is even interpreted as part of a divine plan: “We are not here by coincidence, not in this street nor in this Kiez. On the contrary, we want to find out what we can offer to the district here and to 25 The Baptist pastor I interviewed in March 2007 is a West German who particularly liked the challenge of working in a very secular environment. At the time of the interview he had been the pastor of this parish for six years. He considered the fact that this was a city to be a facilitating factor in his integration into the East. 26 Here I shall use the expression ‘tactic’ as opposed to ‘strategy’, with reference to Michel De Certeau’s and to Henri Lefebvre’s theoretical distinctions. For them, strategies are concerted actions that are put into action by groups whose existence thereby “becomes historical, such that everyday life is suspended and transformed” (Schilling, 2009: 194), while tactics are linked to the everyday. The latter concerns individuals’ action in environments that are defined by strategies. Tactics are ruses or other practices that prevent the everyday from stagnating.

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the people of this district.” During the meetings the pastor often stood up to express his opinion—he was obviously an experienced preacher—and to introduce the Baptist community to those present. As he told me, it was much easier for him to discuss religion with East Germans because they did not know who the Baptists were and therefore had no pre-conceptions, unlike the West Germans, who were usually prejudiced against any religion other than Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism. After a number of meetings, the pastor was elected as one of the speakers of the Forum, and he offered to provide the church hall for the Forum’s meetings, arguing that it was larger than the rooms of a local agency. Surprisingly to me, this offer was well received, making the Baptist community one of the most visible groups to participate in the Forum. The lunches, concerts and activities for children and young people organized by the Baptist congregation in the urban space are always supported by the Forum. When it came to discussing ways to fight right-wing violence in the area, a non-white member of the Baptist community stood up in front of the other activists, who were all white. In contrast to other political initiatives, the Baptists offered to mediate between the local people and the right-wing extremists. They had a lot of faith in their capacity to influence people, while the other participants in the Forum were sceptical and thought them rather naïve. The latter, who included the Lutherans, instead proposed initiatives that would help locals protect themselves from or prevent right-wing violence. The Baptists, however, wanted to make contact with the right-wing extremists and hoped that their faith would facilitate change. A member of the Baptist congregation who works as a volunteer in a prison where he is in daily contact with right-wing extremists explained this attitude: I see everybody as a child loved by God, with a way of life and a view of life that can be changed, and I really love the guys here and I have literally learned here what it means that God loves the sinner but not the sin.27

He and other members of the congregation were convinced that the Christian faith is capable of bridging the psychological paradox of ‘hating the sin without hating the sinner’.28 They approached people with a discourse of change—possibly conversion—and community. To convert is 27 Radio “Antenne Brandenburg”, Apropos, 1.7.2008, Frei von Sucht frei von Gewalt : Die Wohngruppe “Suchtfrei leben” in der JVA Brandenburg. 28 I refer here to George Herbert Mead’s idea which he developed in his essay on punitive justice: that human beings impulsively tend to associate an offence with the person who committed it and that “[it] is quite impossible psychologically to hate the sin and love the sinner”. “The Psychology of Punitive Justice” p. 592.



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one of the possible tactics one can use to satisfy one’s aspirations to find a religious community within a highly secular urban context (cf. Van der Veer 2009). The following excerpts from an interview (conducted in September 2006) with Hans,29 an East German ex-inmate, who converted to Baptism and is now a member of the observed congregation, illustrate very well, in my opinion, Austin-Broos’s affirmation that the convert is on a “quest for human belonging” (Austin-Broos 2003: 2) and is looking for closeness and recognition in a community. Commitment to Community and Locality as Individual and Collective Tactics in the Urban Space Hans had been an alcoholic during his youth. In the spring of 1989, he was imprisoned near Berlin for murder and sentenced to over fifteen years in prison. During the last seven years of his imprisonment he participated in group therapy for alcoholics, which was organized by a committed Baptist, himself an East German ex-convict. Through this contact, Hans decided to convert to Baptism. His sentence was reconsidered after the Wende, with the result that he was released early, in 2000. Although there is a Baptist congregation closer to where he lives in East Berlin, he chose to be part of the congregation I was observing, “because”, he said, “here, the people are OK for me”, and they had become a kind of ‘replacement’ for his family. He found it particularly important that the members of the congregation knew his life-story and separated his person from the crime he had committed. Contrary to what he had experienced in prison, the congregation offered him “human warmth and care”; he was not simply a name there, but a person. He appreciated the fact that, when meeting members of the congregation, “they want to know how you are and welcome you warmly. I never experienced such a community before.” Given that social isolation is one of the major concerns that ex-prisoners face after they have been released from prison, such connections are highly valuable. Research confirms that the social network and family relations of ex-inmates tend to fade during their periods of detention and are no longer there when they leave prison 29 ‘Hans’ was in his early forties when the interview took place. His father “was in the Party”, as he put it, and “at home, religion played no role at all”, which was, he explained, the inevitable consequence of the fact that “he grew up in East Germany”. For years he had been an alcoholic. He had attended a Christian rehabilitation programme during the GDR period, when he started to become interested in religious questions despite his strongly atheistic family background.

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(Celinska 2000, Condry 2007). As Howard Becker wrote, when “a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider” (Becker 1963: 1). In Hans’s case this was most evident, as his crime had consisted in causing the death of a family member. He told me: Because it happened in our family and […] I have tried to re-establish contact with the family, I wanted to talk to them, I sent a pastor to see them. I have [pause] sent letters, others wrote letters for me, I have written letters myself, but they were so concerned and embittered (verbittert) that no contact was possible. In a way that is understandable, from a human point of view, I mean purely from the point of view of the way feelings work, but somewhere […] I think they miss a chance in a way to clear the decks (mal rein’ Tisch zu machen) because I don’t want to accuse anybody or whatever, that’s far from what I want, I just want to belong to the family again, so that they say: ‘Listen, you did this, we cannot forgive this; that’s unforgivable, but you’re are part of the family again.’ I don’t want to live with these people, or anything, I don’t want that. I would just like to […] be part of the family, be accepted by the family.

Hans wanted exactly what the Baptists were offering, a sense of belonging:30 to be accepted – recognized as a lovable person, despite his crime or, to put it differently, his sin. After being released, ex-convicts often first look for a place where they can live in anonymity and thus hide the stigma of imprisonment. Cities are most appropriate for this, but within a city, the ex-inmates I observed look for communities that can help them to reorient their aspirations and become emancipated from the stigma. A religious or spiritual community allows them to feel recognized as persons in the very fundamental sense theorized by Axel Honneth (1995), without hiding their past. When talking about Hans, the Baptist pastor insisted that in his congregation there was no prejudice because somebody had been in prison or so, not at all. We say it openly, and he wanted us to tell the congregation that he was coming to our services at the end of his imprisonment. We told him that week, ‘You will be released, may God bless you, and we know that you have been in prison for more than fifteen years [sic]’—he also wanted us to say it openly; the congregation has no problems at all with that—not at all. 30 Here and in the following pages I dwell on the concept of „belonging“ as theorized by Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka that is, as “an emotionally-charged social location – that is position in a social structure, experienced through identification – by both perception and performance, through social connectedness and material and immaterial attachments” (2012: 12 – my translation).



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The pastor had a sound theological explanation for this, which was based on a fundamental distinction between the church’s morality and biblical morality. According to him, within the church, the notion of guilt has a moral component; from a biblical point of view that’s not the case… The Bible sees guilt as a question of lifestyle: am I able to manage my life myself, or do I refer to the One who has created me? That’s why I don’t want to talk to these people in a different way from the way I talk to other people: where do I feel safe, who knows me the way I am, who loves me the way I am and who understands me? […] The Bible says that we need to be responsible for what we do, but also that God can liberate us. The Bible is much less moral than we humans are, and the Church also contributes to moralizing religion in a way that I find very uncomfortable. It is not my way of preaching… I am not the judge who says you were wrong or you need to do it differently. I really want people to live in a way which makes them responsible for themselves and realize that life is much more than moral laws or moral categories.

By counting Hans as one of its members, the congregation proves to itself that it is able to deal with and connect with the local urban space. The pastor’s words, particularly his refusal to judge, also convey a message of liberation to Hans. In this Baptist community, the past he spent in prison is no longer a stigma for Hans, and he has the experience that he belongs. The congregation offers and thus also receives a sense of belonging which is here clearly two-sided: a belonging to a religious community and a belonging together in and to a local urban space. Relationships within this community stand in sharp contrast to the aggressive relationships in everyday urban life. However, the surrounding urban space is not rejected. On the contrary, the Baptist congregation articulates its self-understanding with regard to the urban space, which it helps to shape in a very reflexive way, as the pastor explained: We, the leaders of the congregation, meet for a weekend once a year and have a look at the studies of the district […] here in the Weitlingkiez we have a lot of patchwork families, a lot of single parents, a lot of alcoholism and also right-wing extremism, and these things, they are lurking at the doorstep, they always also influence the way we want to shape our parish. […] If right-wing extremism is a concern here, it is also our concern…

This Baptist congregation thus both adapts to and is modelled by the urban space. Its members are very concerned about the needs of the Kiez and want to buy more land around the church to build “maybe a meeting centre… really something for the Kiez where people can rent rooms and use them for self-help groups or meetings, for working on projects, or something like that.”

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The congregation’s projects actively involve and refer to the local urban space and empower residents by offering them a protected arena where they can meet and organize activities. By making this offer, the congregation gains a deep local embeddedness. As Hans aspires to be fully part of this community – which is vital for his change – he also learns to be concerned with issues linked to the urban space. After my release, when I got to know this congregation, I practically started my life again, also through the congregation; there are people who like me, people I trust… I have a completely different life from the one I used to have, I am not used by others any longer … nor by my own parents, as it used to be […] that’s all different now, and through this faith one somehow hopes that it will be better at some point, that—let me say it like this—one will receive reparation for something.

As Hans’s narrative of and comment on his religious conversion shows, the community offers him an extremely positive sense of both belonging and change. Such a religious change occurs, however, within a very secular context, which pushes Hans to justify himself constantly: I was in the process of learning to stand up for what I believe …. I hear a lot about ‘Your God does not exist’, or I experience some kind of hostility. […] The Bible says that everything will be better. OK, … that’s what it says. But whether it will really be like that, I don’t know either. I will see it when the time comes, but I can stand up for it and say, ‘OK, that’s what the Bible says and that’s how it will be.’ I don’t know if it will be like that, I still have my doubts, but I have the hope. I would say that it will be better after—after this whole tale of woe (Leidensgeschichte) of mine, from my childhood until my imprisonment and also during my imprisonment, that at some point something will come.

Although Hans considers himself a very religious person today, he remains spontaneously sceptical and understands very well that his beliefs can easily be questioned. Through the community he is learning, as he says, to stand up for his beliefs against a hostile environment, while the community receives a proof of its local importance and therefore relevance and legitimacy – it feels truly connected to the locality. Depending on what a person is striving for, belonging to a community can offer him or her a range of sources of personal empowerment. Hans’s account shows that, for him, being part of the Baptist community answers his quest for the recognition of his identity and offers him a place within society, a substitute family, the ability to take personal responsibility, a sense of collective boundaries, norms and, finally, hope in life. As he said:



religious involvements in berlin163 For me, believing was formulated anew the day I entered the parish, that is, when I became a member of the congregation in [the Kiez] through baptism. The first time I introduced myself, that was in 2000 … I had mixed feelings: will the congregation accept me the way I am, or will they say, ‘No, we don’t want to have anything to do with you, this guy should go to another congregation’, or whatever. And I was lucky; in the congregation, from the infants to the elderly, everybody is represented there; we are a very well-structured congregation from the point of view of age—there are also young people, adults, elderly people, and therefore the congregation is also quite lively. And then I had to invent everything anew for myself because there are also rules when you are in the congregation […] It’s different from sitting in prison and hearing about it and doing stuff for myself, but as soon as you are baptized, you also carry a certain responsibility within the congregation. Community also means responsibility […] and for me responsibility always used to mean ‘you have to do this or that’, and if you did not do it, you were punished. […] Through faith we are a big community (Gemeinschaft); everyone has his talents and abilities, and they can be put to use in the congregation … I found it great that they accepted me and they—many of them know my story […] not all of them, but the majority with whom I talked, they know my story, that is, also my crime and how I came to the faith… I now have a substitute family (Ersatzfamilie) in the congregation.

Hans’s religious conversion coincided with his prison release, but it had been a long time in the preparation. In his a posteriori reconstructed narrative, his interest in Christianity had been a constant presence in his life, which had first been hindered by socialism, then by the prison institution, but was finally revived by meeting committed Baptists. Socialist scepticism of non-scientific beliefs still remains with him, but is now combined with a personal position he has taken. Not surprisingly, these two major life events, together with the sudden entry into a post-socialist urban context, accentuated in Hans the need for clarification and mental re-organization. The narrative of conversion organizes time into a ‘before and after’, an inside (the parish) and an outside (the secular urban world seriously questioning his beliefs). What happened before his conversion is relatively unimportant: what counts seriously is his current religious commitment. Social responsibility, undoubtedly framed within a missionary account, is an important value in this community, therefore it becomes one for Hans, too. As a member of the congregation, Hans tried to connect his experience in prison to his religious life and took friends from prison to the church services with him. One of them, the pastor told me, now comes to the services regularly… He just came out of prison, after more than fifteen years. I did not really ask what he did; one can imagine if it got him fifteen years. We helped him, just after he had come out of prison, to put

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Both Hans and the Baptist congregation seem to define themselves through tactical narratives of commitment to community (the congregation or the Kiez) in the urban space. While the congregation gives Hans a substitute family, his life story confirms to the congregation that faith really does produce change. Conclusion Being so closely integrated in the community and giving it so much importance can also have a reverse side, as an older member of the Baptist congregation told me when he talked about his experience of assisting an imprisoned Baptist who was excluded from the congregation for his repeated sexual crimes. In this narrative of conversion, recidivism indeed has no place: When the first Baptist congregation was formed in Berlin in 1837, they did some work with alcoholics. They had recognized the social needs in Berlin… but once these people had stopped drinking and become members of the community and then became recidivists, they were dropped […], and one would say, if someone has become a Christian, he has to behave himself.

The retired pastor being quoted here had been socialized in the GDR and had a much more moderate idea about the role of the Baptist community in the city, in some contrast to the more mission-oriented younger generation. The analysis of the Baptist congregation’s involvement in a Berlin urban space shows that there can be different ways for a religious community to relate to the secular urban environment. Certainly, while Baptists are relatively successful in coping with their secular urban environment by adopting the tactics of closeness and locality, other religious agents, such as the Lutheran church, act on a more institutional level. The two types of action are, however, embedded in the same urban space, which confronts, compares and integrates them in both contextual and cyclical ways. If the congregation I observed continues to get involved into the political and cultural activities of the Kiez the way it is doing right now, the question is whether the community will transform the urban space or whether the urban space will reclaim its ‘heterotopic’ character and push the human capacity of ‘hating the sin but loving the sinner’ to its limits and thereby transform the community. By welcoming people into their congregation



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and at the same time into the city district, the congregation shows itself and others its local belongigness. This belongingness, however, is not yet a “belonging together” as the one of the word’s meanings indicates. The many heterotopic ways the actors relate to the urban space remain variate and disparate. References Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Standford: Stanford University Press. Austin-Broos, Diane 2003. “The Anthropology of Religious Conversion: An Introduction.” In Andrew Buckser and Stephen Glazier (eds.), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Becci, Irene 2012. Imprisoned Religion. Transformations of Religion during and after Imprisonment in Eastern Germany. Farnham: Ashgate Bernt, Matthias, and Andrej Holm 2002. “Gentrification in East Germany: The Case of Prenzlauer Berg.” German Journal of Urban Studies 41(2): 125–150. Bui, Pipo 2003. Envisioning Vietnamese Migrants in Germany: Ethnic Stigma, Immigration Origin Narratives and Partial Masking. Münster: LIT Verlag. Celinska, Katarzyna 2000. “Volunteer Involvement in Ex-Offenders’ Readjustment: Reducing the Stigma of Imprisonment.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation 30(3–4): 99–116. Condry, Rachel 2007. Families Shamed: The Consequences of Crime for Relatives of Serious Offenders. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. de Certeau, Michel 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eckardt, Frank 2005. “In Search for Meaning: Berlin as National Capital and Global City.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 13(2): 189–201. Elias, Norbert, and J. L. Scotson 1965. The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems. London: Frank Cass & Co. Foucault, Michel 2001 [1984]. “Des Espaces Autres.” In his Dits et Ecrits II, 1979–1988. Paris: Gallimard. Grübel, Nils, and Stefan Rademacher (eds.) 2003. Religion in Berlin: ein Handbuch, Berlin: Weißensee Verlag. Halbrock, Christian 2009. Stasi-Stadt – Die MfS-Zentrale in Berlin-Lichtenberg: ein historischer Rundgang um das ehemalige Hauptquartier des DDR. Berlin: Christoph Links. Hann, Christopher 2006. The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag. Häussermann, Hartmut 1996. “From the Socialist to the Capitalist City: Experiences from Germany.” In Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Ivan Szelenyi (eds.), Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Holm, Andrej 2006. “Urban Renewal and the End of Social Housing: The Roll Out of Neoliberalism in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg.” Social Justice 33(3): 114–128. Honneth, Axel 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Jaschke, Hans-Gerd 2001. Rechtsextremismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit: Begriffe – Positionen – Praxisfelder (2nd edn.). Opladen: VS-Verlag. Karstein, Uta, Thomas Schmidt and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr 2009. Forcierte Säkularität, Religiöser Wandel und Generationendynamik im Osten Deutschlands. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Kemper, Franz-Josef 1998. “Restructuring of Housing and Ethnic Segregation: Recent Developments in Berlin”, Urban Studies 35(10): 1765–1789.

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Lefebvre, Henri 1991 [1974], The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Luzar, Claudia 2006. Rechtsextremismus in der Weitlingstraße – Mythos oder Realität? Problemaufriss im Berliner Bezirk Lichtenberg. Berlin: ZDK Gesellschaft Demokratische Kultur. Marchlowitz, Birgit 1995. Freikirchlicher Gemeindeaufbau: geschichtliche und empirische Untersuchung baptistischen Gemeindeverständnisses. Berlin: de Gruyter. McLeod, Hugh 1996. Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870–1914. London: Holmes and Meier (Europe Past and Present). —— 1997. Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— and Werner Usdorf (eds.) 2003. The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pfaff-Czarnecka, Joanna 2012. Zugehörigkeit in der mobilen Welt. Politiken der Verortung. Göttingen: Wallstein. Pollack, Detlef (ed.) 2000. Religiöser und kirchlicher Wandel in Ostdeutschland. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Reynolds, B. and J. Fitzpatric 1999. “The Transversality of Michel de Certeau: Foucault’s Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse.” Diacritics 29: 63–80. Sassen, Saskia 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shoshan, Nitzan 2008. “Placing the Extremes: Cityscape, Ethnic ‘Others’ and Young Right Extremists in East Berlin.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16(3): 377–391. Stöss, Richard 1996. “Rechtsextremismus.” In Oskar Niedermayer (ed.), Intermediäre Strukturen in Ostdeutschland. Opladen: Leske+Budrich. TOPOS Stadtforschung. 2007. Sozialuntersuchung Sanierungsgebiete Weitlingstraße, Berlin: TOPOS. Van der Veer, Peter 2009. Comparative Study of Urban Aspirations in Global Cities. Göttingen: Keynote. Wacquant, Loïc 2006. Parias Urbains: Ghetto, Banlieus, Etat. Paris: La Découverte. —— 1996. “The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications.” Acta Sociologica 39(2): 121–139. Wehler, Ulrich 1973. Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, and Thomas Schmidt 2003. “Still the Most Areligious Part of the World: Developments in the Religious Field in Eastern Germany since 1990.” International Journal of Practical Theology 7: 86–100.

BELONGING AND SUCCESS: RELIGIOUS VITALITY AND THE POLITICS OF URBAN SPACE IN CAPE TOWN Marian Burchardt Introduction For classical sociologists of religion, religious vitality in urban centres represents one of the most disturbing phenomena. Here, one would expect creativity and innovation, if only because of the difficulties in mobilizing urban followers, but hardly growth.1 And yet, since for a long time cities have been regarded as the quintessential embodiments and spatial compressions of modernity, and since the sociological imagination still had to develop an understanding of modern religion, the urban context and religion have remained antidotes. In fact, cities functioned as the containers of processes out of which was constructed the notion of modernity. They were seen simultaneously as modernity’s outer frontier relentlessly grinding traditional relationships of power and community, authority and identity. As the centres of capitalist modes of production and consumption, sovereign state power and cultural emancipation, cities were invariably thought of as recasting people as autonomous individuals and modern citizen-subjects, thereby also providing a paradigm for the transformation of society at large. In this sense, urbanization became not only a descriptive term denoting the growth of urban populations relative to rural ones, but also a concept assembling the key features of modern society. Within these processes, religion was assumed to be one of the main victims, not least because urban models of community and cultural style would undermine religious participation and belief.2

1 Following Hugh McLeod (1995), the orthodox view on the intimate connection between urbanization and secularization was seriously challenged by ‘revisionist historiography’ emphasizing the variety of religious situations, the ability of churches to adapt and respond to social change, the emergence of new missionary strategies and institutions, and thus creativity. He also points to the need to move beyond a historical framework based on growth and decline, and to focus instead on the change from relatively homogeneous religious cultures to the polarized and relatively fragmented religious structures that are characteristic of contemporary cities. 2 See Le Bras, quoted in Berger (2001).

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Empirically, African cities never featured in this narrative. It could claim some plausibility for the great metropolitan centres in the industrialized West such as New York, Paris or London (McLeod 1995),but for African cities it would only become meaningful as a future fantasy projected along the lines of ultimate global convergence, as a possible result of modernity’s military, colonial and hegemonic cultural expansion. As we now know, however, such convergence of urban social forms is unlikely to take place in the foreseeable future (Simone 2004), and the highly diverse scenarios of religious vitality in African cities provide a fairly reliable indicator of this. If anything, African cities are stages for, to adapt a phrase by Finke and Stark (1992), the “churching of Africa” in the sense that “in Christianity (but increasingly also Islam and even in African historical religions) formal selforganization is the obvious context for belief and ritual” (van Binsbergen 2004: 90). As far as South Africa is concerned, religion is, of course, not the first thing that comes to mind when considering the interface between urban dynamics and governance, social inequality, community and culture. Here, contemporary urban studies are almost exclusively concerned with investigating the patterns of continued residential segregation, wrought by colonial­ ism and the apartheid regime as urban legacies of ‘spatialized racism’, and with exploring the current crises of urban governance as manifested in ubiquitous crime and gang violence. The picture that emerges, especially for Cape Town, the country’s second biggest city, is shockingly static; it is one in which “the racial/cultural dividing lines laid down by apartheid are real and were really felt and imagined” and in which “the pull inward, away from the boundaries, is still forceful” (Besteman 2008: 14). Next to national identity, race remains the primary category of cultural membership, and for the overwhelming majority of urban South Africans it continues to determine economic circumstances, life chances and their place in the city. At the same time, however, South Africa is one of the most religious countries in the world when measured in terms of levels of religious belief, membership and participation (Garner 2000). Scholars working in the tradition of the Manchester School of anthropology noted a long time ago that in South Africa urban spaces had become distinctly Christian spaces (Meyer 1981). In fact, colonial authorities and African communities, albeit in highly diverging fashions, explicitly constructed urban spaces in specific cultural opposition to the rural homesteads. According to these studies, urbanization led to processes of cultural change whereby the homestead was profiled as the place of ancestral and ethnic belonging. Rural traditionalist resistance to both colonial penetration and Christian missions thus



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carved out urbanity as the condition under which Christianity could thrive. Simultaneously, particularly for the Christian converts whom Meyer called “school people”, it was the city where notions of modernity and Christianity were superimposed on one another. If we follow such narratives that position urbanity as a space for religious innovation, instead of relying on ideas of de-traditionalizing modernization, religious vitality in South African cities becomes much less surprising. What are in question, then, are the transformations whereby Christianity is being transposed on to the canvas of post-apartheid urban modernity. It has been argued that religious vitality is only “in need of explanation” as long as one departs from a framework in which religious decline is taken for granted and non-religion is seen as the norm (Berger 1999). Conversely, I suggest that religious vitality, change and decline are equally in need of explanation, as all of these phenomena are the products of complex and sustained patterns of social practice, of contradictory social forces that often operate simultaneously within the same social groups. In this chapter I will analyse how, in the South African city of Cape Town, religious vitality is produced by religious practices that are bound up with the ways in which religious spaces and urban spaces mutually constitute and configure one another. In other words, I suggest we read urban dynamics by looking at how they are expressed in a multiplicity of religious relationships – between and within churches and congregations, believers and religious charities – and to understand religious dynamics through the ways in which they are constantly worked out in and through the city. This implies positing not the inherited sociological categories of particular churches or religious movements, national contexts, or transnational networks as the unit of analysis, but the city itself. I argue that such a perspective also helps uncover an urban dynamism that tends only to be concealed by the exclusive focus on economic and racial inequalities. Nevertheless, religious vitality emerges from, and must be situated within, the broader social context of the challenges that people in Cape Town, as elsewhere, face in their everyday lives. The transition to democracy has brought with it a host of new aspirations and desires. It has destabilized inherited cultural and political vocabularies with which to engage in social interaction, spawned new waves of rural-urban migration into the city’s townships, and urged people to rework concepts of community and redefine their relationships with urban authorities. Despite all efforts to redress apartheid-era social injustices, however, in 2002 still almost 50% of Cape Town’s Blacks, almost one third of its Asians and Indians and one fifth of its Coloureds lived below the household subsistence level (Besteman

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2008: 18). In some townships such as Khayelitsha, unemployment rates reach a staggering 70%. In this context, everyday challenges can be neatly summed up in the notions of belonging and success. The question is thus how practices of acting upon these challenges shape and are shaped in the religious field. This chapter is divided into three sections. In the following section I will briefly introduce the notions of belonging and success and situate them in the urban context. I will then consider how these notions are inscribed in urban transformations in the city of Cape Town. In the main part of this chapter I will introduce three different Christian churches and examine how, in them, the challenges of belonging and success are acted upon, how such practices are embedded in complex webs of urban relationships, and how they contribute to religious vitality.3 Belonging and Success No sociological categories seem better suited to describing and explaining current urban dynamics than the twin aspirations of belonging and success. The notion of belonging points to forms of making and getting access to communities, cultural membership, solidarity and identity. However, more than the terms ‘identity’ and ‘community’, with their rather static connotations (van der Veer, this volume), ‘belonging’ captures the fluid nature of the processes whereby urban residents situate themselves in supportive social networks. Such processes engender translocations, precipitated by volatile structures of opportunity, and create the circuits within which belonging is constantly deterritorialized and reterritorialized both within and beyond the city (Mbembe and Nuttall 2004: 351). The ‘hypermobility’ of Cape Town’s poor (Robins 2002) has far-reaching consequences for household organization in that it has generated a model of ‘domestic fluidity’ (Ross 2005), but it has also implications for religious practices and forms of belonging. Part of what, on the surface, appears to be ‘shopping for religion’ (van Binsbergen 2004), that is, the rapidly shifting patterns of religious affiliation in people’s life-courses, is therefore probably less a product of superficial attachment or changing religious interests than simply of unstable livelihoods and patterns of residence.4 3 This chapter is limited to a discussion of Christianity. It must be emphasized that Cape Town is home to a sizable Muslim population, as well as to other religious groups. 4 However, this might be quite different in rural contexts. Kirsch (2004: 699), for instance, observed that “conducting fieldwork on African Christianity…I learned that members of



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Success, on the other hand, is often construed in terms of utility maximization and the rational pursuits of interest in environments conceived as competitive markets.5 Therefore, the notion of success seems to lend itself easily to conventional economistic interpretations of urban transformations, which view the urban fabric as resulting from the site-specific mobilization of labour, the spatial distribution of (mostly) service industries and unequal real estate markets.6 What such perspectives miss is that neither the pursuit of economic success nor its agent, homo economicus, exist in pure forms but are shaped by both opportunity and social relationships. In other words, it is crisscrossed and thwarted by complex considerations that situate material strategies in pre-existing contexts of solidarity. The variability of these contexts ensures that strategies of success escape uniform patterns, anchoring them within diverse perceptions that recast certain pathways as promising and certain goals as achievable. While with some confidence we can construe belonging and success as universal analytical categories, they are simultaneously bound up with local histories and confronted within contextualized and situated practices. This understanding strongly resonates with van der Veer’s suggestion that we view urban aspirations as built on social imaginaries of context and as ideational processes that shape cityscapes and urban movements (van der Veer, this volume). As I will try to show, in the South African context this interplay of aspirations and cityscapes has undergone dramatic changes in the past twenty years or so. Planned Belonging: Post-apartheid Transformations In his book Liquid Modernity (2000: 110ff.) Zygmunt Bauman relates the story of the South African architect George Hazeldon and his dream of a city in which the perished utopias of community would be creatively retrieved. In Hazeldon’s vision, a residential real-estate project called Heritage Park to be realized on a site of roughly two square kilometres near Cape Town, people would leave their houses without having to fear prophet-healing churches in the rural areas of southern Zambia were very willing to change denominational affiliation when they were not satisfied with the performance of a particular church; indeed, the frequency of such changes was comparatively high.” 5 For an in-depth discussion of concepts of success in sociological theories of action, see Habermas (1982). 6 For an analysis of urban transformations in Johannesburg along these lines, see Murray (2008).

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the disturbing presence of strangers. Replete with shopping malls, restaurants, churches and recreational opportunities, Heritage Park would allow the pursuit of all the essential activities of daily life (with the exception of work) within its confines, in absolute security and with a feeling of safety. As Bauman notes, in purchasing a house in Heritage Park, potential residents are also paying for a revived vision of the community it allegedly offers. The possibility of this community, however, rests on the merciless policing of its symbolic and material boundaries through electric barbed wire, walls, monitoring cameras and heavily armed private security forces. Inside it there is nothing that would require negotiation or engagement, as differences are kept outside. As a result, the sociological meaning of the city as a form of human settlement that engenders the probability of encounters with strangers (Sennett 1978: 39) evaporates. Bauman’s remarks concisely capture the interplay of belonging and success as it unfolds in contemporary Cape Town. And yet they are in dire need of historical and political contextualization. In this regard it is important to remember that, until the late 1960s, social life in Cape Town was generally considered less racialized than in other South African cities. The political ideology of so-called “Cape Liberalism”, inherited from British colonialism, provided the city with a sense of trans-racial cohesion that made Capetonians believe they lived “segregated but not separated”. This sense of cohesion also led to a certain delay in the implementation of the infamous Group Areas Act introduced in 1951 as one of the cornerstones of apartheid’s segregationist policies. However, with the highly symbolic destruction of the hitherto ethnically mixed District Six, located in the city centre, in 1968, residential segregation gradually came close to completion. With the exception of Lower Wynberg, all of the central business districts and residential zones located along the slopes of Table Mountain were restricted to white ownership. Property-owning Coloured communities residing in these areas were forcibly removed and resettled in desolate, low-value townships in the open wastelands of the Cape Flats, while Black residents in both the city and the townships were subjected to even more severe restrictions. As a result of numerous factors, Cape Town is now South Africa’s most segregated city, and economic inequalities have even increased since the political transition of twenty years ago (Besteman 2008). Perhaps because of this apparent lack of dynamism, Cape Town has never attracted much scholarly attention compared to Johannesburg, for instance (Murray 2008). If the urban fabric is understood as emerging from both planned intervention and unpredictable, always inchoate forms of self-organization,



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South African cities are certainly the epitome of the fantasies of the rationality of urban planning. “Planning”, write Mbembe and Nuttal (2004: 357), “is perceived as that which not only recasts notion of citizenship on a terrain of racial difference but also serves to delineate different city spaces separated by boundaries of class.” Yet these divisions are also reflected in the distribution of religious affiliations across these class-delimited city spaces. As of 2001, 84% of the members of African Independent Churches in Cape Town were Blacks; the largest group among the Muslim population were the Coloureds (86%), while White members in the Dutch Reformed Church still amounted for 59% (Bekker and Leilde 2004: 11). This reminds us that the city embodies not only, as has often been stated, the spatialization of social inequalities, but also the spatialization of cultural difference and religious diversity. The virtual duplication of South African urban spaces into the city and its townships has enormous implications for questions of urban belonging, as, particularly for township dwellers, it raises concerns about the concept of the city and its boundaries as such. As a space of exclusion, “the township is both of the city and not of the city” (Mbembe and Nuttal 2004: 357). As a result, for the residents of Cape Town’s townships, the ‘city proper’, or the city minus its townships, is indeed a place of extreme ambivalence. At its best, it is a place where work as wage labour is performed. For the majority of township dwellers, however, it is a place where, if only for their lack of money, they have no business whatsoever. And it is precisely as a result of this that they project upon it both their fantasies and their anger. These contradictions are palpable, despite the fact that Capetonians in the townships are generally proud of “their city”. With the arrival of the ANC in government in 1994, the imperative of urban planning became even more urgent. Now, however, it was designed as a means of redressing the social injustices inherited from apartheid. For Black political activists this implied a major paradigm shift. During the 1980s a powerful but strongly suppressed grassroots movement of civic organizations had emerged that aimed to resist the Black local authorities instituted by the apartheid state as the latest incarnation of indirect rule, as well as at establishing alternative structures of self-organization. With the ending of apartheid, these networks of grassroots democracy were increasingly disempowered and, given the ANC’s emphasis on a strong and centralized state, were reduced to advisory bodies (Huchzermeyer 2004). In the process, Cape Town’s civic organizations slowly shifted from platforms of resistance into civil society-based urban development agencies (Beck and Demmler 2000).

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At the same time, however, Cape Town’s townships started witnessing levels of crime and organized gang violence of apocalyptic proportions that constantly undermined positive notions of belonging and the governmentally sponsored spirit of collective progress. As Robins has argued (2002), strategies of resistance to both the apartheid system and the Black local authorities under the slogan “make the townships ungovernable” dating from the 1980s now backfired. While the inability of the apartheid state to keep township revolts under control contributed to its eventual demise, its democratic successor has not yet managed to re-establish that control. As a result of this complex history, the vision of Hazeldon the architect that Bauman relates became very powerful for Cape Town’s middle and upper classes, ultimately being realized and variously replicated. Building a Church in the Township It is this broader context of material impoverishment, physical insecurity and social instability that defines the ways in which aspirations for belonging and success intersect with religious innovation and vitality. A very typical example is the “El Shaddai” church located in Khayelitsha’s neighbourhood of Town Two. Khayelitsha itself was formally recognized as a township in the middle of the 1980s in response to the massive influx of impoverished Xhosas from the Eastern Cape province and the homeland of Transkei, who squatted along the N2 national highway. Today Town Two is relatively safe, and quite of few of its residents are convinced that this is because, at the beginning of the 2000s, the local community took policing and justice into its own hands by forming vigilante groups.7 The church was founded in 2004 following a divine inspiration experienced by Pastor Monwabisi Maqogi. It registered with the municipality a year later and has been growing ever since. Maqogi is a former freedom fighter and member of the ANC’s military wing. In the mid-1980s he converted to Pentecostal Christianity, while his continued concern with social justice and his religious motivations later coalesced in the founding of the church. These biographical markers are reflected in the way he is referred to as either “the general” or “the man of faith” within the local community of Town Two, each designation indicating respect. In terms of its theological orientation, El Shaddai has a strongly Pentecostal outlook, and members understand themselves as born-again 7 On the emergence of vigilante groups in Cape Town, see Robins (2002).



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Christians. At the same time, however, there are also rituals, such as the lighting of candles during prayers or extended prayer retreats of the elders in the bush, which scholars usually construe as characteristic of African Initiated Churches (AICs). El Shaddai clearly rejects the clear-cut distinction, let alone outright and sustained opposition, between Pentecostalism and AICs that seems so pronounced in many other African countries (Meyer 1998, Marshall 1991, 1998). The fact that in urban South Africa the boundaries between generally (neo-) traditionalist AICs and Pentecostal Christianity are less developed than in most other societies in sub-Saharan Africa is closely linked to its urban political history. Contrary to the interpretation of AICs as proto-nationalist movements, South African AICs were considered rather apolitical during the apartheid era (but see Comaroff and Comaroff 1997). The township-based struggle for political liberation, in turn, was relatively secularized in that it was framed in terms of modernist political ideologies such as socialism and democracy, and only in a subordinated way involved the revitalization and political recognition of indigenous cultural traditions. Since the political transition, this has slowly changed with the construction of ubuntu as a universal and legal underpinning of the Truth and Recon­ciliation Commis­sion (Wilson 2001), Thabo Mbeki’s ‘African Renaissance’ campaign (Posel 2005), and more recently, Jacob Zuma’s ostentatious Zulu neo-traditionalism (Robins 2006). Because of the great legitimacy that neo-traditionalist positions can claim in public debates in the name of the ‘re-Africanization’ of South African society, the notorious Pentecostal attacks on African traditions, particularly ancestor worship, are rather marginal to Pentecostal discourses when compared to settings elsewhere in the continent. Another aspect of the anthropological literature on the development of Pentecostal Christianity in Africa that needs to be reconsidered in the light of the case of El Shaddai is its conceptualization of growth and expansion in predominantly urban environments (for a review, see Meyer 2004, also Onuoha, this volume). In this context, growth was conceived in terms of the increasing importance and expansion of Pentecostal media networks (Marshall 1998), but even more significantly as the creation of new congregations, including their places of worship. The fact that the “planting of churches”, to use Pentecostal jargon, requires land and also involves contestations over urban property, however, has hardly been problematized.8 8 Certainly there are also tendencies among Pentecostal congregations to use private homes as places of worship. Unless believers come together on a rather spontaneous basis, however, the underlying idea is almost always to build a church eventually as a physical structure.

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In Town Two, prices for building sites on which to construct a church were so high that for more than two years El Shaddai had to rent a crèche for its Sunday services, as well as its other collective activities. At various times during these years, the church elders identified suitable plots of land that were for sale, only to realize later that it would be impossible to collect enough money from the congregation actually make a purchase. Conversely, it seemed difficult to motivate the invariably poor members of El Shaddai to donate money for the construction of a church and the purchase of land when there was no tangible vision about where to build it. It was only in 2007 that a large donation by a member of an American “foster congregation” re-energized the process, and eventually a plot was purchased. Subsequently, members engaged in voluntary work to construct a makeshift building out of wooden panels and corrugated iron, mostly materials taken from abandoned shacks. The result was a shack church that was hardly distinguishable from the surrounding structures. As a physical structure, the church of El Shaddai was fully submerged in the surrounding cityscape. Together with the numerous other Pentecostal and African Independent shack churches, it seemed to form something of a hidden religious topography. It was only with funds from another donation by American visitors that a proper church building was erected in 2008. Unfinished Migratory Passages? Like almost all his church’s members, Pastor Maqogi originates from the Eastern Cape province. Even though he had already moved to Cape Town in 1985, he maintains close relationships to his rural-based kin and often travels to Eastern Cape villages to provide social ministries. Most of his church’s members, however, only arrived in the city after the end of apartheid, some very recently, and apart from the Sunday services, many also participate in religious and social outreach activities. As far as youth is concerned, Pastor Maqogi sees working with them very much as social work, as a way of at least temporarily integrating ‘uprooted youngsters’ into civil life in Town Two. While in this sense the church has created a dense network of urban religious relationships, these also reach back into their places of origin, for instance, when members’ rural relatives join the religious services Pastor Maqogi offers on his visits. Urban members, of course, themselves also participate in his services in the countryside during their longer visits to their places of origin, which may last for several months. It therefore seems that the patterns of permanent dual residence and religious participation



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stabilize one another. Both are bound up with a mode of belonging that simultaneously bridges and differentiates the city and rural spaces. Whether the conceptualization of this mode of belonging as incomplete urbanization and unfinished migration is a modernist trope, however, is an open question. Especially among the members of the comparatively small group of Blacks whose families have lived in Cape Town for many generations, newcomers are commonly perceived as in need of becoming ‘properly urbanized’. For them, these migrants do in fact come close to what Becker (2008: 258) has described as ‘rural urbanites’. The differentiating elements can be elucidated especially by looking at the biographical accounts in which the motives for migration and the aspirations underlying them are tightly woven into individual narratives. Biographical accounts of migrants reveal that economic motives for migration – unemployment, poverty and poor future prospects in the rural areas – are typically linked to far more encompassing ideas: hopes for selfimprovement, upward social mobility, consumption, self-realization and personal freedom. If interviewees thus declared, “I was looking for a better life”, their notion of success was mostly framed through what Ferguson (1999) had called “expectations of modernity”. Looking back in retrospect – that is, from the city to the rural home – the Eastern Cape is described as particularly backward, poor and abominable, as a place where one is denied opportunities as much through their structural absence as through the limitations imposed by kinship obligations and what now appears to be ‘traditional culture’ in general. Cape Town and the entire Western Cape province are indeed highly prosperous compared to the Eastern Cape. Yet economic inequalities within the metropolitan area are such that for most migrants opportunities for upward mobility never materialize. Despite these disappointments, ideas about Cape Town and the Eastern Cape hinterlands were invariably recast in narrative accounts through the binaries of modernity and backward tradition, wealth and poverty, promise and abjection.9 The positive associations that El Shaddai’s members make in relation to both Pentecostal Christianity and the city are rooted as much in the vibrant religious gatherings as in specific religious innovations, particularly in 9 The immediate hinterlands of the city of Cape Town are, of course, the Western Cape and are perceived as such by those who have migrated to the city from within the province. However, for the majority of Khayelitsha’s migrants originating from the Eastern Cape, which is located almost 1000 km to the east, the Western Cape is almost absent from their mental maps. For them it is merely a transit zone to be crossed on their travels between the city and their place of origin.

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terms of social ministry. In El Shaddai, many of them are dedicated to issues of health care and social healing, particularly HIV/AIDS. Next to the typical church choir, women’s and youth groups, the church runs various HIV/ AIDS support groups, which regularly organize public awareness campaigns around the disease. El Shaddai was indeed one of the first Pentecostal congregations in Cape Town to become progressive and proactive on AIDS. These innovations in turn intensify contradictory relationships to people’s places of origin. Pheliswa, an HIV-positive member, related that her Cape Town-based sister, who was also infected, never disclosed her disease to her rural-based mother and family until her death. She also mentioned finding it hard herself to talk about her disease in the Eastern Cape context because of prevailing conceptions of HIV as caused by demons. In this way, negative interpretations of aspects of inherited cosmology and the idea that geographical distance from family members was in fact beneficial again constituted the city-based church as a supreme space of belonging. What people see when looking back, of course, depends on the experiences they have made after their arrival in Cape Town and on how they interpret them. If upward social mobility materializes but conflictual relationships with city-based kin and community prevail, people feel they may have traded success for social belonging. In these cases, but even more so if the material life situation does not appear to improve, religious communities – especially the Pentecostal congregations scattered across the townships such as El Shaddai – emerge as primary cultural spaces where a new sense of self is forged. It was especially in the innovative ways in which El Shaddai addresses social problems that the church community was envisaged as a space of unconditional belonging for the socially marginalized. During one of the outreach workshops, an HIV-positive female member of the congregation emphatically argued: The church is for everybody! You see, the people interpret the church wrong (…) because Jesus’ feet were even wiped by the hair of a prostitute. Don’t you have that in the Bible somewhere? It means that Jesus was a down-to-earth person. Jesus didn’t have his own people. We are all the same when we worship. Jesus didn’t know any discrimination.

There is an interesting spin here in the way she construed the Christian church as beyond any discrimination. In the first place, she referred to discrimination against HIV-positive people. As a linguistic signifier, however, the term derives its force from its use in all kinds of situations in which people feel deprived, from the anti-apartheid struggle to widespread public debates about the non-discriminatory nature of the new nation. Meanwhile



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discourses and accusations of racial discrimination, mainly among the Black and White sections of the population, have again proliferated in the city, especially in the wake of the victory of the predominantly White Democratic Alliance in the last provincial elections. Does Christianity have the potential to bridge urban divisions and the seemingly reified images and imaginations about ‘the Other’? Connecting City and Townships As mentioned above, in El Shaddai we find a pattern in which the urban space is constituted and symbolized through a series of particular oppositions to the rural places of origin in the Eastern Cape Province. We find an entirely different scenario in the case of the church of Khanyisa (literally meaning “church” in Xhosa), located about ten kilometres towards the city centre in the township of Gugulethu. Khanyisa has been established in the context of the evangelical New Frontiers movement originating in the UK which is, according to its self-description, “a worldwide family of churches together on a mission to establish the Kingdom of God by restoring the church, making disciples, training leaders and planting churches”. In terms of local history, however, Khanyisa, just like its Khayelitsha-based neighbour, Uzukho Lwakhe, has largely been a product of the engagement of the wealthy city-based church Jubilee precipitating a much stronger orientation towards the city. Located in the central neighbourhood of Observatory, Jubilee is very much Khanyisa’s mother church. While under the apartheid regime’s segregation policies Observatory was designated a White district, its population is now decidedly mixed. This mixture is also reflected in the composition of the congregation, and within its own discourse the church self-consciously hails itself as truly reflecting the South African rainbow nation. Moreover, since Observatory is centrally located at equal distances from predominantly White suburbs and some of the more central Xhosa-speaking and Coloured townships alike, it also attracts religious commuters from many surrounding parts of the city.10 The church building is a huge modern 10 In this context, it is important to note that the townships that are in closest proximity to the city centre are also the most affluent ones in terms of income and basic services. On the city map, social inequality is organized in concentric circles. The consecutive activities of squatting, building shacks, establishing livelihoods and making claims to the upgrading of the informal settlements into proper neighbourhoods predominantly takes place on the fringes of the city. This implies that those who commute to Jubilee reside in relatively privileged townships.

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structure providing space for more than five hundred believers. The multilingual Sunday services are performed in English, Xhosa, Afrikaans and French. Characterized by inherited Pentecostal features such as collective singing accompanied by a rock band and frequent and highly ecstatic exclamations of praise, the services provide the stage for people to report on the results of outreach crusades and the ‘saving of souls’. In a way, one could say that Jubilee’s congregation is indeed a microcosmic instantiation of South Africa’s fantasy of a rainbow nation, of people of all colours coming together, including upwardly mobile Blacks and Coloureds who have moved away from material misery. The material success of Black and Coloured members was indicated for most in the fact that they did manage to make a living in one of the central neighbourhoods. The presence of these people in the church showed that they crossed the racialized dividing lines. Simultaneously, however, the links between spatialized social inequality and religious affiliation remained unchallenged, as religious affiliation is, first of all, local and connected to residence and – by implication – income. Furthermore, especially among the younger members of the church, success was not only cultivated through conspicuous consumption but also through a particular way of constructing their own cosmopolitanism, at once modern and Christian, in opposition to life in the townships. This became evident in focus-group discussions with Black student members in which people debated social problems in Cape Town’s townships ranging from HIV/AIDS and rape to crime and drug abuse. In these debates there was a sense that their own lives were much closer to London and New York than to the townships a few kilometres down highway N2.11 Moreover, people and life in the townships were invariably constructed in terms of a “not yet” condition (Ferguson 1999), with their own modernity as the role model. From their perspective, it was now the townships that occupied a position of backwardness that was conceived as both material and cultural in a strongly intermingling fashion. When addressing the lives of “their brothers and sisters” in the townships, people adopted a discourse of advocacy, of speaking “on behalf” of them, which only widened the gap

11 In a way this was, of course, true. For example, one member of Jubilee, a student at the University of Cape Town, told me that she had had the chance to participate in an international exchange programme organized and financed by the church. On her visit to London she made the acquaintance of a young man, a member of a UK-based sister church, and was already planning her marriage and life with him in the UK. As she had no family in the townships, there was no reason whatsoever for her to go there.



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further. The difficulties with identification were also complicated by the way in which the townships were recast within a broader notion of Africa as a terrain of traditions to be overcome. Two conclusions can be drawn from these observations. First, the ambivalent relationships between urban spaces and rural areas as cultural spheres that we found in the case of El Shaddai are replicated, if variously, in the construction of relationships between the city and the townships as they emerged from debates among members of Jubilee’s congregation. All of these contradictory relationships within the city and with ancestral homes entailed contestations of vernacular South African notions of modernity. These contestations arise from ambivalent ideas about the connections between ‘indigenous culture’ and backwardness in the post-apartheid city. Second, Christianity constitutes a space of belonging for members of historically opposed ethnic or racial groups, especially as it offers a vocabulary of identity that transcends and ignores historical divisions.12 However, relationships between the city and the townships are negotiated not only in debates and discourses among members of the congregation, but also through activities of exchange organized in the religious arena. As far as the relationships between Jubilee and Khanyisa are concerned, these are manifested in the organization of transport for some members of Khanyisa so they can occasionally participate in the Jubilee Sunday services, as well as, on a much larger scale, in Jubilee’s provision of financial support for welfare work implemented by Khanyisa. Again, and similar to El Shaddai, much of this revolves around support for HIV-positive people and other marginalized groups and has given rise to the Izandla Zethemba initiative. A fair share of the religious vitality in Cape Town’s townships can be explained by the dynamism within these kinds of faithbased welfare activities.13 Contested Meanings of Success: Faith-based Benevolence Cape Town’s Gugulethu township is home to the ‘JL Zwane’ Presbyterian Church, named after a much-venerated reverend. During my first visit, asking passers-by on my way for directions to the “Presbyterian Church” was not much help. To most residents it is known as the “JL Zwane Centre”, 12 Jubilee, for example, claims to have struggled to build a ‘non-racial fellowship’ as early as the 1980s. 13 People volunteering for Khanyisa told me that, if ‘clients’ have no established religious affiliation prior to their contact with Khanyisa, there is a fair chance of their conversion.

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while officially the term ‘centre’ only denotes organizational units that provide services to the local community. Founded as a joint project between the church and the University of Stellenbosch in 1994 with the aim of enhancing growth and development, the ‘centre’ has progressively overshadowed the religious life of the church community itself. Because of the dominance of activities in the domain of social services, both the ‘centre’ and the church are effectively equated with them in popular perception. While from the outside the impressive belfry clearly points out the religious character of the place, walking through the interior of the modern premises, it was in fact impossible to differentiate the ‘centre’ from the ‘church’, the secular from the sacred. The building is made up of numerous offices and breakaway rooms, situated around the central worship hall, and the entire spatial organization of activities provides evidence of the extent to which social service orientation and faith are interwoven. Contestations over belonging and success, and negotiations over the very meanings of these notions, take place within Cape Town’s religious congregations and churches as the traditional loci of the religious ritual proper, but also within the burgeoning domain of faith-based charitable organizations (FBOs).14 As mentioned above, the urban social context in which the motivations to engage in faith-based welfare work are forged is characterized by poverty, a lack of public services and high levels of crime. This explains why phrases such as “giving people a perspective”, “getting youth off the streets” or simply “giving them something to do” are central to the vocabulary through which FBO staff members express their concerns. Most of the people working for FBOs are unemployed and contribute to the projects on a voluntary basis, and the majority of them are women. In order to sustain this volunteerism, these organizations depend on a highly idealistic and emphatic discourse of solidarity and mutual support. Praise of this solidarity by FBO leaders and programme managers is frequent, but so are complaints about high turnovers of staff because of volatile commitments and ensuing problems in reliably organizing activities. This has important implications for the ways in which notions of belonging and success are constructed and negotiated in faith-based volunteer activism. 14 Within all religions of salvation, religious benevolence has a long history and is pivotal to religious life as such (Weber 1972). In Africa the creation of organizational appendages of churches such as religious schools and hospitals dates back to the early days of the missionary project. Here it was closely linked to what Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) have called ‘the civilizing quest’, that is, the entire complex of activities geared towards putting an end to the material misery of Africans through the teaching of modern methods of health care, education and business.



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First of all, voluntary engagement in faith-based organizations itself provides crucial pathways for the practical realization of belonging in the sense that it gives access to a community constructed around the mutual recognition of the value of unpaid work outside the household. Very typically, Capetonian volunteers described their sense of belonging by drawing on idioms of mutual care and reciprocity, transposing kinship notions into the faith-based domain (“This is like my real family”) or simply stating that “Here I feel like at home”. Through these descriptions, they also differentiated the practices and experiences of voluntary work from paid work organized through the labour markets, which would rarely be merged with emotive notions of home. On the individual level, the aspects associated with solidarity would often be articulated through the concept of calling. Martha, for example, worked as an HIV/AIDS counsellor for Izandla Zethemba. Martha’s engagement has been shaped by family experiences with AIDS, especially her brother’s infection and illness. During this period, she was working as a carer for HIV-positive children, an activity she perceived as psychologically stressful and exceeding her capabilities. She remembered that initially she didn’t feel strong enough to work with HIV-positive adults either until eventually “God said Go! I am going to put words into your mouth!” Later she remarked that “When I go to do the home visits, I am always excited […] And I’m like friends with them. […] I don’t say they are my clients, you know, like I am doing a job and they must be so respectful to me. We are friends, we speak openly!” While personal narratives of a calling of this sort underpin both solidarity and belonging, they also reveal alternative notions of success. This is linked to the fact that, by constructing spaces for volunteering, faith-based organizations fashion new public roles for their members. These are seen as highly subjectively rewarding, particularly if they merge Christian identities with modernist concepts of somehow professionalized, albeit unpaid work. Importantly, though, such constructions tend to break down precisely at the moment the livelihoods through alternative income on which they depend are rendered precarious. Simultaneously, it must be noted that the empathic discourses of solidarity and the collective notions of belonging are continuously under pressure because some faith-based organizations offer material supplies of various sorts to both volunteers and the beneficiaries of their projects. The most important assets are those linked to income-generating projects wherein organizations provide materials, for instance, for producing jewellery or handicrafts. Whenever volunteers are able to enter consumer

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markets with their products, concern over competitiveness and ‘who gains how much’ emerge and render notions of volunteering, as well as the cherished ideas of belonging and solidarity associated with them, highly contested. Likewise, conflicts may emerge when those who seem less committed take greater shares of the food parcels that many organizations distribute. Other religious organizations, in turn, supply T-shirts with religious slogans to their members. In township discourse one finds routine accusations either that religious groups “capture” members with their T-shirts, or alternatively, that people only bow their heads to pray with these groups opportunistically to acquire one of these shirts. An entirely different process takes place when volunteers construct their volunteerism in faith-based organizations in terms of an internship, hopefully placing them on the threshold of a professional career. Especially among the younger volunteers, this is in fact a typical construction. Even if such constructions highlight individual orientations towards success, they are rarely seen as undermining community solidarity. The distribution of such faith-based welfare organisations across the city strongly reflects the spatial patterns of urban social inequality. FBOs providing income-generating projects, feeding schemes, psychological counselling, home-based health care or all sorts of HIV/AIDS relief activities are predominantly located within the impoverished townships in the Cape Flats inhabited by Coloured and Black populations. However, those FBOs that are affiliated with, and financed by, particular churches such as the Anglican Church or Jubilee often have their headquarters in the wealthy city neighbourhoods. There is thus a specific configuration of functional relationships inscribed in the religious cityscape between the zones of afflu­ ence and those of poverty. While decision-making concerning resource  allocation, fundraising etc. takes place in neighbourhoods like Claremont, Newlands or Rondebosch, project implementation happens in the townships. The spatial patterns of urban economic inequality are, of course, also manifest in the comparative wealth of the mostly mainline churches’ parishes and their distribution across the city. Wealthy parishes are invariably located in the former White neighbourhoods. Some of them have formed partnerships with parishes in the townships. If the resource flows from city to township that are enabled through these partnerships reach a certain size, projects typically morph into the sort of specialized faith-based organizations mentioned above. As a result, the same religious moral economy whereby people from the North Atlantic provide material goods and services to Africans through their donations to international faith-based



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humanitarian networks in the name of global brotherhood is thus being replicated within the confines of the city itself. These partnerships between religious groups in the city and the townships, as well as between North Atlantic and township congregations, and the resource flows they set in motion also affect the movements of people in and between the townships. Interviews with social workers at the ‘JL Zwane Centre’ revealed that information about the centre’s programmes for HIV-positive people spread quickly beyond Gugulethu’s boundaries. As a result, the programmes came to attract people from across the Cape Flats. This scenario offers some interesting points of comparison with the solidarity and material support that Muslims of Indian descent lend Somali migrants in Johannesburg’s district of Mayfair that Samadia Sadouni describes in this volume. The complex interplay of different ethnicities but shared religious identity provided the context for the ambivalent integration of Somalis into the same neighbourhood. Here too, a shared religious identity was construed as a bridge across other lines of difference as a way of mobilizing solidarity. But the status of minority communities seemed to afford their practices of solidarity a much greater sense of urgency than we would be able to find among Christians as the majority community. In Cape Town, the rapidly growing structure of faith-based ‘institutionalized altruism’ and benevolent practice runs virtually parallel to the existing religious denominations and has profoundly reworked the religious cityscape. This also affects the popular perception of particular churches, and in Cape Town’s townships in some measure, of Christianity as such. From the perspective of the dynamics of religious vitality and secularization, two competing trends are particularly salient. On the one hand, the voluntary involvement of believers in faith-based organizations has fortified the place of religion in the urban fabric and extended its boundaries, not least because it also draws people into traditional kinds of religious participation from which some would otherwise abstain. On the other hand, the increasing engagement in civil society-based welfare activities has also drawn religious actors into the dynamics of institutional isomorphism. That is, through assuming mundane tasks, even when recasting them in religious terms, they have become much more similar to nonreligious organizations to the extent that the boundaries between the secular and the religious have become progressively blurred. Recurrent debates among volunteers about the specific “Christian values” they are meant to convey through their work remind us that these boundaries are in fact constantly contested.

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In this chapter, I have tried to pinpoint the complexities arising from the challenges of belonging and success as they take shape in the townships of Cape Town. My argument was that viewing the practices within which these challenges are acted upon as both embedded in and generating local forms of religious vitality opens up a conceptual space for thinking about how religious spaces and urban spaces intersect, and in a sense how religious membership recasts the city and urbanity as a differentiated space of opportunities. The fact that locally religious dynamics seem strongly drawn towards the interface of religious practice and public social activism of some sort might be a South African peculiarity in need of explanation. In Cape Town, just as in many other African cities, there is a huge space between the state on the one hand and individuals and communities on the other. Because of the weak institutional capacities of urban authorities and government, the quest for the regulation of religious activities is often comparatively low. Precisely for that reason, the ways in which the twin aspirations of belonging and success unfold in the religious field often result in the fashioning of new forms of religion that are public but at once remote from the state (Casanova 1994). Conversely, religious groups and churches easily fashion themselves as those who provide what the urban authorities cannot. This may concern social services, but for some it is also a vision of the city as a whole. Undoubtedly, religious groups engage in formulating ideals of civic bonds. What seems to differentiate South African cities from other cities on the continent is that here organized religion ties in with non-religious traditions of civic engagement and activism. Moreover, it re-channels the remnants of a not-yet fully sobered up nationalist discourse on collective progress, which promises both belonging and success, but repeatedly fails to fulfil the expectations it raises. References Bauman, Zygmunt 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Clemens and Stefanie Demmler 2000. “From Resistance to Development.” Basisnahe Nichtregierungsorganisationen in Südafrika. Hamburg: Institut für Afrika-Kunde. Becker, Felicitas 2008. Becoming Muslim in Mainland Tanzania. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Bekker, Simon and Anne Leilde 2004. Faith in Cape Town: Identity, Cooperation and Conflict. Stellenbosch: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Berger, Peter L. 2001. “Reflections on the Sociology of Religion Today.” Sociology of Religion (Special Issue: Religion and Globalization at the Turn of the Millenium) 62(4), 443–454.



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—— (ed.) 1999. The De-secularization of the World. Washington D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center. Besteman, Catherine 2008. Transforming Cape Town. Berkeley etc.: University of California Press. Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myth and Meaning of Urban Life in the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Finke, Roger and Rodney Stark 1992. The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Garner, Robert C. 2000. “Religion as a Source of Social Change in the New South Africa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 30(3): 310–343. Kirsch, Thomas G. 2004. “Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief.” American Anthropologist 106(4): 699–709. Marshall, Ruth 1991. “Power in the Name of Jesus.” Review of African Political Economy, 52 (November): 21–37. Marshall-Fratini, Ruth 1998. “Mediating the Global and the Local in Nigerian Pentecostalism.” Journal of Religion in Africa 28(3): 278–315. Mbembe, Achille and Sarah Nuttall 2004. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis.” Public Culture 16(3): 347–372. McLeod, Hugh (ed.) 1995. European Religion in the Age of the Great Cities 1830–1930. London and New York: Routledge. Meyer, Birgit 1998. “ ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past’: Memory and Postcolonial Modernity in Ghanian Pentecostal Discourse.” In R. Werbner (ed.), Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books. —— 2004. “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–474. Murray, Martin J. 2008. Taming the Disorderly City: The Spatial Landscape of Johannesburg after Apartheid. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Posel, Deborah 2005. “Sex, Death and the Fate of the Nation: Reflections on the Politicization of Sexuality in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Africa 75(2), 125–153. Robins, Steven 2002. “At the Limits of Spatial Governmentality: A Message from the Tip of Africa.” Third World Quarterly 23(4): 665–689. —— 2006. “Sexual Rights and Sexual Cultures: Reflections on ‘the Zuma Affair’ and ‘New Masculinities’ in the New South Africa.” Horizontes Antropológicos 12(26), 149–183. Ross, Fiona 2005. “Model Communities and Respectable Residents? Home and Housing in a Low-Income Residential Estate in the Western Cape, South Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 31(3): 631–648. Sennett, Richard 1978. The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books. Simone, Abdoumaliq 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham and London: Duke University Press. van Binsbergen, Wim M. J. 2004. “Challenges for the Sociology of Religion in the African Context: Prospects for the Next 50 Years.” Social Compass 51(1), 85–98. Weber, Max 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriß einer verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr.

POROUS BOUNDARIES: HINDU-MUSLIM DEMARCATION AND CROSSINGS IN DELHI Ajay Gandhi Introduction In the city, the presence of the stranger and the culture of mutual indifference can be comforting. You are never alone in the crowd; yet it may provide respite in anonymity. Of course, there are other aspects of city life: one can become alienated from others who are so different from oneself. It can happen that the crowd, far from being indifferent, becomes too interested in specific subjects and particular bodies. We know from research on sectarian or communal violence in Indian cities that mixed demographics and collective sentiment can be expressed as fixations, as the drive to identify, punish, and purge (Das 2006). The crowd on the street, at one moment relatively calm, can turn, during ethnic or religious clashes, into a vengeful mob. In mixed city areas, neighbours who share water taps and gossip can, and have, killed one another over banal differences that become intolerable ones. Given how common this has become in urban India, especially since the late 1980s, neighbourliness and urban heterogeneity have been little explored. Diversity is an unassailable fact in such places in terms of caste, religion and language. A visitor to an Indian metropolis will immediately be struck by the sheer variety of body shapes, skin tones, dress styles and dialects. Yet anthropological studies of Indian city life often organize life into discretely bounded socialities. Even when populations live and work in mixed, fluid settings—such as the market or factory—the lens on the city tends to be sociologically compartmentalized (cf. Kumar 1988, Lynch 1969). These studies unfold within relatively homogeneous families, shrines and alleyways, even when people spend much of their daily life dealing with those who are different from themselves. I think this may be why a commonly asked question in the aftermath of communal violence in Indian cities is: why do neighbours kill? We tend to read mixed spaces as ones where people clearly understand each other, or at least leave each other alone. This is a classic liberal sentiment: people should present themselves transparently, and avoid intervening unduly in another’s affairs. Yet it is worth dwelling on whether people actually

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present themselves in public in such a manner; and if they do think they  know one another, why familiarity should not breed resentment (Zizek 2005). On the first point, on the neighbour’s similarity or alterity, consider, even during peaceful times in relatively prosperous areas, how much one really knows others. In Sylvia Vatuk’s study of a middle-class Hindu mohalla or neighbourhood in Meerut, a city in Uttar Pradesh, residents talk uncertainly about the boundaries and norms of their neighbourhood: one man’s mohalla is large, another’s very small, and each man has his own mohalla, which overlaps rather than exactly coinciding with his neighbours…. Reference to fellow-residents of the mohalla in their role as neighbors is rarely intended to include every resident of the bounded space within the named neighbourhood…. The mohalla is commonly referred to as a moral community, a group agreed as to right and wrong and having a body of custom and a character. But what the agreed values or the mores of the mohalla really are, is uncertain. Much contradiction attends the subject. (1972: 150–151)

The question of who one’s neighbours are, and the degree of one’s commonality with them, can indeed be vexing (Appadurai 1998). It seemed similarly uncertain when I conducted my fieldwork in Old Delhi, between 2007 and 2009. In the area’s male-dominated bazaars, most traders and white-collar professionals (such as accountants and brokers) live outside the old city. During the day, these bazaars are both tightly interlinked in terms of these merchant trading networks and scenes of swirling difference, with customers, truckers and migrant workers flooding in and out. The bazaars are not strictly policed; at most, a rather skinny and boredlooking security guard, complete with rumpled uniform and makeshift baton, is stationed near an entrance. At night, the bazaars are more clearly taken over by migrants, who keep loading, processing and shipping goods, and by others who sleep in upstairs storehouses. Amongst these workers too there is a great deal of difference, with discrete teams of labourers from particular villages or even extended households bumping up against those from another state, speaking a different language and of a different caste. The labour mandis, where construction workers sit waiting for specific jobs, are also mixed, with a variety of Muslim and Hindu castes and sub-groups present. Even in the old city’s more residential and less commercial parts, there is much flux in the demographic composition. Since the 1970s, many Muslims who had roots in the old city before Partition in 1947 left the area. This was partly the product of what was seen as an increasing anti-Muslim



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bias on the part of the state authorities. The Emergency programs of the 1970s, for example, had faced violence when authorities demolished traders’ stalls in the Meena Bazaar and dilapidated quarters near Turkman Gate (Tarlo 2003). Many of the old city Muslims affected by these interventions moved to other Muslim enclaves in Delhi, in the eastern and southern parts of the city. For Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, this move out of the old city accelerated after communal violence became more frequent during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In their place, Muslims from north Indian cities like Moradabad and Kanpur, arrived after the 1980s to settle in Old Delhi. In short, Delhi’s old city is a place of radical heterogeneity, and sometimes of mutual unintelligibility. My purpose in this chapter is to detail inter-personal relations in such a context between Hindus and Muslims. Dense, pluralistic cities often imply a high degree of clarity and segregation in terms of identity. For example, religious ascription in India is commonly spoken about as if it over-determines ordinary conduct. It is true that talk of religious differences in urban India is widespread, and in this chapter, I discuss the emphatic assertion of religious boundaries. I detail how Muslims and Hindus imagine different food preferences, bodily types and religious rituals inhering in the other’s community. However, I also seek to highlight how these imagined formal boundaries are undermined in practice by partaking and poaching of that which is seen to belong to, or is representative of, the other community. In other words, I aim to highlight the pervasive crossing of religious boundaries. This dynamic is necessarily structured by the unequal prerogatives of a milieu where Hindus are more numerous and advantaged than Muslims. My ethnographic examples draw on mostly non-discursive aspects of Hindu-Muslim relations that centre on the body, food, pollution, and ritual practices. In underlining the non-discursive dimensions of cross-religious engagement, I build on scholarship that has sought to decentre the emphasis on scriptural and textual bases for understanding religious identity. In a study of how Muslims and non-Muslims in Delhi act on dreams and visions of Muslim saints, Anand Vivek Taneja critiques anthropologists such as Talal Asad, who emphasize the discursive as authorizing and structuring religious practices. Instead, he notes that “We need to broaden the idea of ‘tradition’ to include dreams and visions, bodily movements and senses, ethical dispositions, and modes of affect” (2012: 574). Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, in his ethnography of Hindu violence against Muslims in Ahmedabad (2012), examines how geographic segregation, notions of sacrifice and ahimsa, and idioms of disgust and repulsion are

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marshalled in imaginings of religious identity. He too focuses on how somatic sensations and scripts inflect religious selfhood. An example is how the smells and meat-eating of Ahmedabad’s Muslim old city evoke bodily nausea in certain Hindus, and are internalized through the culturalized idiom of alagi (Ghassem-Fachandi 2012: 178). This chapter seeks similarly to move beyond a textual and over-hermetic approach to practices seen as representative of distinct religious communities. As Nita Kumar has argued, identity is not shackled to scripture, but is often found in modes and styles that move across formal sociological or discursive boundaries (1989). Her work has gestured towards a “cultural fund common to both Hindus and Muslims. In the case of celebratory styles, for instance, there is a common response to certain sensory forms: lights, sound, crowds, openness, all-night participation. In the case of identity, there is a way of emphasizing the local, immediate, and the contextual” (Kumar 1989: 165). Focusing on what is shared within collective life complicates the analytical reflex to place Muslims and Hindus in selfcontained silos. The Secular Promise of the Modernist City In India, the twentieth-century experience of city-building was defined by official attempts to transcend the past. The nation’s history needed to be properly understood and disseminated, of course. But especially in the postcolonial world, history was associated with insularity, division and stagnation. In India, residues of the feudal past were manifested in terms of religious tension, specifically between Hindus and Muslims. Nationalist leaders thought timeless identities or age-old grudges threatened Indian unity vis-à-vis the British. This fear was stoked by spectacular episodes of urban violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Pandey 1992). Riots instigated by religious symbolism or slights often broke out from the “black town”, native quarters, or old city, where the mass of Indians lived (Khilnani 1999). Yet the residual afterlife of the old city, in opposition to the conventional history of metropolitan modernity, did not negate religion. Old Delhi today still contains Jain pilgrimage sites, Hindu temples and Sikh gurudwaras hundreds of years old. Tens of thousands of Sikhs use Old Delhi’s streets for processions to commemorate their faith’s martyrs. Similar numbers of Hindus come from across New Delhi to the old city during the Hindu festival of Dusshera. Each year, a Ramlila, a stage retelling based on the



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Ramayana epic, unfolds before hundreds of onlookers at the parade grounds, just across from the Mughal Red Fort. Despite these Jain, Sikh and Hindu markers, in Delhi, as in other north Indian cities, Muslims are perhaps the one religious community most associated with the old city. Old Delhi’s Muslims, unlike those who left for Pakistan after 1947, are not seen as embodying education and refinement, and many work in the informal sector and in low-paid occupations. Nevertheless, major mosques and shrines, as well as prayers and processions during Eid and Muharrum, are significant factors conditioning the area as a Muslim enclave. This pejorative association of the Old City with subversive Muslims deepened after the events of the Emergency in the mid-1970s. Officials denied that there was any explicit bias against Muslims, and in the official literature, housing demolition and population control programs did not mention Muslims specifically. Yet state intervention in these areas fostered a sense of antagonism towards them “as a result of the tense political situation in spring 1976, the conspiracy theory appealed not only to Muslims as a perfectly credible explanation” (Krafft 1993: 105). After the Emergency, many Hindus in the old city moved to more spacious accommodation in New Delhi’s colonies. Muslims too had read the intentions of the state in terms that necessitated living in Muslim enclaves, for reasons of personal safety. Consequently, Old Delhi became a much more segregated place: Muslims were concentrated in its southern half, in neighbourhoods such as Matia Mahal and Turkman Gate, with the comparably smaller Hindu population in places such as Sita Ram Bazaar. Zakir, an elderly trader in the Meena Bazaar, had witnessed these gradual shifts. He said, “After the Emergency, people here thought that one should only live with their own people (Emergency ke baat logon ne socha ke apne log ke saath rehne chahiye). Where there was a mixed population, afterwards bit by bit people went to live only with their own community”. The Emergency’s legacy in Delhi’s old city was manifested in fraught government–community relations. The 1980s and early 1990s were particularly tense, in Delhi and across north India. Riots and killings occurred, for example, in 1987 between Hindus and Muslims in the old city. Afterwards, a research collective interviewed witnesses and victims, writing that: in trying to control the riots, the Delhi Administration, the Delhi police and the CPRF (Central Reserve Police Force) betrayed not only utter negligence of duty and responsibility, but an aggressive bias against the Muslim population, which was manifested in widespread terrorisation of Muslims, indiscriminate police firing on Muslims, leading to the killing of innocent people,

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ajay gandhi and harassment of thousands of their community who were trapped inside the curfew-bound lanes of the walled city for days together without any access to the basic amenities (PUDR 1987: 4).

Though by many accounts the atmosphere has improved in the past decade and there is more rapport between the police and the community, Muslims within the Old City remain suspect, their loyalties and commitment to modernity in question. During religious festivals and national holidays, the Old City is heavily policed and the movements of people restricted because it is a “sensitive area” with a “minority population” – government and police code for a predominately Muslim area. Consider this story from India Today, a prominent current-events magazine: The walled city of Shahjahanabad. The Jama Masjid area. It’s a little island with many names and an even greater number of stories. Every alley in this northern enclave of the national capital has had its date with history. These days it is keeping its tryst with a somewhat less romantic destiny: terror. This teeming ghetto opposite the Red Fort is a welter of clogged streets, bustling bazaars and shady hotels. It is also a convenient sanctuary for jehadis. Through 2000, agencies… arrested Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agents, many of them Pakistanis, with strong links in Delhi’s old city. (Chakravarty and Menon 2001).

How, then, do relations between Hindus and Muslims unfold at ordinary times, and from within the old city These narratives—of the old city as religiously defined and communally sensitive space—do not provide us with the best guide. Instead, I want to suggest that, despite the interests of the postcolonial state in constructing modern city-spaces to transcend religion, and despite a long history of Hindu–Muslim violence, that everyday life in the old city exhibits both identity demarcation and crossing. Methodological and Theoretical Caveats A few caveats and qualifications are in order. The following ethnographic discussion is not about religion in a formal sense. The instances where religion is expressed blur linguistic facility, ethnic identification and religious prac­tice.  In this sense, religion, ethnicity and language are conjoined in everyday use. Most people describing what constitutes a Sikh, Hindu or Muslim use terms such as religion (dharam) or community (mulk or qaum). A term like biradree is used to denote endogamous castes within the larger community of Muslims in the old city (such as the distinction between qureshis or butchers, and mansoori or oil pressers). Given that one’s biradree is



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associated with kin groups, Muslims and Hindus often speak metaphorically in terms of distinct inheritances or blood relations. The English term culture, as well as the term sanskriti, is commonly employed to describe heritage or custom. Much of what follows consists of people making remarks about themselves and others relationally. There is, as I hope to show, no essential or eternal identity that one enacts as a Muslim or Hindu. Rather, people’s reflections signal both the constitution of an identity in relation to another group, institution, or polity as well as its incompleteness and contingency. Here I follow William Mazzarella, who talks of how institutions mediate their relationship to subjects: “mediation is at once perhaps the most fundamental and productive principle of all social life precisely because it is necessarily incomplete, unstable, and provisional” (2009: 302, emphasis in original). Echoing this, my informants are intensely self-conscious about the gaze that is turned upon them; indeed, this sense of being watched and evaluated by others – one’s own community members, religious authorities, state representatives, ordinary people of other communities – is constitutive of their own selves. To be a Hindu or a Muslim does not mean to be a self-contained and separate person, but to engage in constant self-reflexivity on what actually constitutes one’s own culture, history and difference: “identities, individual or collective, are always constituted in relation to a group, real or imagined” (Benei 2008: 177). This is especially true in Delhi’s old city, where it is almost impossible to avoid regularly interacting with members of different communities. Difference is asserted, but only within a context where it is intruded upon, questioned and made unsure of itself. This does not mean that people’s identities as Hindu or Muslim (and indeed, their caste or regional backgrounds) are not commented on, when known. As Shankar Ramaswami has shown, antagonistic jokes and stereotypes are deployed in mixed settings of Hindus and Muslims to enact ‘othering’, yet this coexists with forms of mutuality and border-crossing (2007). Ethnic purity and religious absolutism are punctured by what Oskar Verkaaik, dis­cussing sectarian differences in urban Pakistan, calls “scepticism, bargaining, humour, irreverence, and unfinished conversations” (2004: 139). In the remaining part of this chapter, I focus on Hindu and Muslim assertions vis-à-vis the imagined religious other. Some of these statements encompass the realm of rumours and folk stereotypes that in other circumstances provoke violent riots and the search for “dead certainty” (Appadurai 1998). Yet perhaps we need a better understanding of when rumours do

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not lead to purification, a theory to explain the selective heightening of difference. Muslims, for example, may in much of India be thought of as “archetypically antagonistic but rarely acknowledged as such in ordinary dealings” (Benei 2008: 187). Below, I consider how the articulation of ineradicable differences between Hindus and Muslims is often simultaneously subverted. The Barbershop and the Law Early in my fieldwork, I met a young Muslim man in his twenties, Mehboob, who worked in a barber’s shop in the Bapu Bazaar. Above its entrance, a hand-painted sign read, “Salim Kating Saloon”; translatable as Salim’s Cutting Salon. Not a few young men liked to spend money on interesting haircuts. Migrants generally went to a roadside barber, a nai. These itinerant barbers, who carried their tools with them, were most evident on Sundays, when workers were off duty. One could see workers being shaved or having their hair cut on the roadside while squatting outside a shuttered shop entrance, or above a street drain. The haircut that most migrants wanted was a simple cut (sadha kat), and if they sought to get their facial hair trimmed, it would be simply to get their moustache cleaned up (mooch saf karna). It was not just that these workers tended to have limited funds, and that those with family commitments were under pressure to save money and send it home. These workers also saw spending too much time on one’s appearance as self-indulgent, even corrupting of one’s masculinity. Older, more sober workers especially saw personal grooming as a matter-of-fact, efficient affair (satasat mamla).1 However, young workers, especially those who were estranged from their families, unmarried, or seen as loafers (chalte-firte admi, ghumna-firte admi), embraced an elaborate taxonomy of hair styles. These workers, when they had money, liked to go to the more expensive “saloons”. These barber shops were usually cramped, adorned with all manner of film posters, had music or a Bollywood film playing on a small TV in the corner, and were seen as somewhat luxurious. There, workers learned about the latest 1 Alter (1992) mentions, in a study in the north Indian city of Banaras, how men who patronize the barber’s shop or hairstyling salon are regarded as morally corrupt. These places make “a sophisticated, sensuous technology readily available to a broad-based consuming public” (1992: 239). Too much attention to one’s grooming is criticized as a “narcissistic passion of meticulous precision” (ibid.).



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fashions, which they circulated amongst other men. When I did fieldwork, for example, the more sober hair-styles included the fauji (soldier), katora (bowl), and mushroom. More ambitious styles included the Gambler (associated with an old masala film), Salman (after Salman Khan, a Bollywood actor) and Mithun (after Mithun Chakrabarty, a film star of the 1980s). Mehboob’s shop was on the way from the Delhi Metro station to my field site, and I sometimes had tea with him if no customers were inside his cramped, two-seat salon. Once we got into a discussion about Muslims, fashion and style. There were a number of well-known Muslim hair stylists in Delhi. A chain called Habib’s was found in a few of the better markets, and a beauty products line started by Shahnaz Hussain was also popular. When I asked Mehboob why many Hindus were prepared to have their hair cut by a Muslim, and to explain the popularity of Muslim stylists, he said: “Muslims don’t have any restriction when it comes to cutting nails, eating meat, cutting hair, washing clothes” (Musalmanon mein kisi chiz pabandi nahin hain, jaise nakhoon katna, meat khana, baal katna, kapra dhona). Mehboob echoed an understanding of Hindus that I heard from other Muslims. Hindus were seen as caught in an ever-differentiated set of injunctions about purity and pollution. Hindus had complex rules about which days they could wash their clothes and cut their hair; they had various gods to placate and rituals to complete. Mehboob’s use of the term, pabandi, was resonant of the modern. It was both an everyday and legal term, meaning restriction, ban, obligation law, or constraint. It could be used to describe a husband’s dictates about when his wife left the house and where she went; it could also be used in terms of a religion’s formal injunctions, or mazhab ki pabandi. Mehboob used it to suggest that Hindus were caught, in their everyday choices, in a web of constraints. At least in some domains, Muslims weren’t as subject to qualms about the body’s drives and appetites. Muslims were, of course, preoccupied with other rules and obligations. I discussed, with both Muslim migrant workers and more established residents, stereotypes of Muslims as lacking in self-control and behaving in an un-modern manner, by having too many children, or refusing to inoculate their children with polio drops. Many noted that, regarding reproduction and divorce, Muslims were subject to their own law, which they generally saw as fair. Zakir, in the Meena Bazaar, for example, argued that Muslim marriage rules were more progressive than Hindu ones: “In our marriages, there is a proper contract, according to which one’s wife can get a divorce, and get whatever money was agreed upon at the marriage”.

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Ahmed, another trader in the Meena Bazaar, echoed this formulation. As he saw it, Each religion has its own law (har mazhab ka apna kuch kanoun hota hain). And the government does not tolerate interference by other communities into their affairs. Similarly, for certain matters we also follow our own law, not the state’s. Just as Sikhs wear their religiously prescribed dagger, the talwar, and Hindus go to temples, we also follow our own law. (Isi terah hum kuch mamle mein apna kanoun mante hain, desh ka nahin. Jaise Sikh log apne saat talwar rakte hain, Hindu log manderon mein jaate hain, hum bhi apne niyamkanoun mante hain).

The problem, according to Muslims, was not that they were un-modern, but that Hindus sought to universalize their own particularity. As an editor at the Urdu newspaper, Al-Yaum, told me, If someone tells us that we are second-class citizens, then we will act accordingly. Instead of a secular state they should officially proclaim a Hindu state, then we will at last know what our status truly is. However, now if I go to a government office and my name is Iqbal, then the attendant will behave differently, and if someone else, a Hindu guy, Ramlal, goes to him, then he will behave differently. He will take 10 rupees from him to get his job done and 100 rupees from me.

The Seduction of Difference It was not uncommon to hear Hindus and Muslims remark on their innate differences. These differences were often asserted in terms of food, hygiene and language, yet close observation revealed how such borders were qualified in practice. Take Krishna, a middle-aged functionary for the Congress party, who worked for a councillor in a municipal zone close to the Meena Bazaar. A member of a Scheduled Caste, he had been born and brought up in the old city. He said that when he was younger he often passed through Muslim enclaves, but over time he had found himself being physically revolted by its smells and sights. It was the Muslim’s proximity to and ease with animals, and their seeming disinterest in modern hygiene, that bothered him. Even when rich Muslims live in large quarters, outside you will always find a goat tied up. And in their alleyways, outside of shops, you will find slaughtered bullock meat hanging. Those people really live in filthy surroundings— they even throw bones just there where they live! (Chahiye kitne hi bada kothi mein rethe ho, bahar bakri zaroor bandi rahegi. Aur gali mein dukan ke bahar bhais ka maas tanga hota hain… woh log bahut gandagi mein rathe hain—hadi wahin faink deta hain!).



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On another occasion, he talked of Muslims’ lack of discomfort living close to many others: “In one flat, you will find two Muslim families—and each family will have 7 or 8 children (ek ghar mein do parivar rethe hain—aur ek parivar mein sat-aath bachche hain). They will say of children, that it is God’s will”. His comments echoed notions of Muslims as outside the nation’s developmentalist teleology (cf. Ghassem-Fachandi 2009) His strong language did not mean that Krishna felt himself to be a Muslim-hater. In his office, he had calendars of Guru Nakak, Sikh saints, another of Mecca and Medina, and one of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess. As a Congress functionary he was committed to a “secular” form of governance, meaning even-handed treatment of different communities rather than religion’s non-presence in decisions of government. When I commented on the three calendars, he said, “It looks good… people will think that we don’t have an antagonistic feeling towards any religion” (yeh accha lagta hain, ki log hama kisi dharma ke prati virodh ka bhawana nahin dhekenge). Despite Krishna’s antipathy towards Muslims’ reproduction and hygiene, when he purchased meat for his household, he went to the Muslim mohallas he complained about. The reason was that Krishna believed that Muslim butchers, who practiced halal slaughter, where the blood was drained slowly from the animal’s carcass after its throat was slit, was healthier than the Hindu practice of jhatka, literally meaning blow, where the animal was killed without blood drainage. The dichotomy between halal and jhatka killing had become institutionalized in north India during the colonial period. At the main abattoir in Delhi, called Idgah, just outside the old city, Muslim butchers were cordoned off from Hindu ones based on this distinction. This separation of butchering practices, however did not mean that Hindus only bought from butchers in their own community. Krishna, for example, preferred to buy from halal butchers: “[When Hindus butcher the animals] by giving it a single blow, the blood remains inside the animal and that can be a cause of illness, whereas the halal method means that blood does not remain inside and so there is no fear of getting sick” (jhatka mein janwar ke ander khoon rasakte hain, jo bimari ka karan hosakte hain, jab ki halal mein sarir mein joi khoon nahin rathe hai, isliya bimari ka dhar nahin rethe). This was echoed elsewhere. For example, one Hindu trader in the nearby Khari Baoli said, when asked about having to go through the Muslim area just a few hundred metres beyond his shop entrance, “I really get scared, and if you ask anyone this question, they will give you the same answer. The fish smell coming from their area is unbearable” (Mujje dhar lagta hai, aur

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agar aap yeh bath kisi se bhi pouchega, to yeh answer hoga. Ek to maachli ka smell zyada athi hain, unki basti se). This feeling was, among Hindu residents in Old Delhi, common: a sense that Muslims’ sensorial dispositions were radically incommensurable with theirs. Some scowled when noting the billowing smoke that hung over the Meena Bazaar, coming from charcoal used to cook pieces of goat meat and liver; others talked of their unease with seeing disembowelled carcasses of animals hanging outside butcher shops or bloody goat’s heads as they picked their way through Muslim neighbourhoods. And yet this did not stop Hindus from going to chickenfry joints or kebab stalls located well inside the Muslim mohallas of the old city.2 In this same area there were a few Sufi dargahs, or tombs of well-known Muslim saints, where visitors prayed for relief from supernatural or physical illness. Though the Meena Bazaar was itself largely a proletarian and Muslim space, the Sufi dargahs within its proximity, most notably that of Kalimullah Shah, were also visited by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs. Non-Muslims came from across the city to pray for relief from their family or physical problems and receive a tabeez, a magic amulet. In the Fatepuri Masjid, north of the Meena Bazaar, I approached the son of the mufti, who dispensed similar ritual solutions to non-Muslims. Named Amin, he explained how his father would receive Hindus, desperate to solve their persistent bad luck. I watched his father receive visitors in a side room of the main mosque. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs gathered together on the floor, waiting patiently to tell the mufti about their sapna or dreams, their suspicions of being afflicted by buri nazar or the evil eye. The mufti would recite a few aayats, lines or quotations from the Koran, and give them a tabeez to wear close to the body. This practice, of Hindus seeking out Muslim places of worship for healing purposes, is not unusual in north India (Taneja 2012). I knew a Punjabi Hindu trader in Khari Baoli who had developed diabetes. His wife asked him after other treatments had failed to go to one of the area’s dargahs and obtain a tabeez. Yet when I asked him about this, the trader said somewhat defiantly that a tabeez was merely another superstitious practice. As he said, Hindus had their spurious “god-men” and numerology, and Muslims had their dargahs and their Allah—and both could be distorted by opportunists. Still, the man was going regularly to a dargah to make a divine wish 2 See Benei (2008: 202) for an example from Maharashtra of Jains and Hindus with nonvegetarian family members nevertheless mentioning “dietary practices as the epitome of difference” vis-à-vis Muslims.



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(iccha or mannat) to the interred saint. The trader’s disdain for religious superstition, it seemed, did not make him either less of a Hindu or less likely to patronize a Muslim shrine. An arena where community distinctions were more forcefully articulated along Hindu-Muslim lines concerned language. Hindustani, a composite mixture of Urdu and Hindi, had been widespread across north India throughout the period of British colonialism. However, the Indian state made efforts to purify Hindi after Partition in 1947, rooting out Persian and Urdu words and officially sanctioning other terms with a Sanskritic basis. Urdu, though one of more than a dozen official languages in India, became Pakistan’s sole official language. In Delhi, the readership of the Urdu press, much of it concentrated in the old city before 1947 and read widely by Hindus, collapsed. Urdu was designated a “Muslim language”, the few Urdu-medium newspapers or schools being solely based in Muslim localities. One Hindu man I knew was a policeman who patrolled the Meena Bazaar. Speaking of Muslims, he noted: “Their speaking style is distinct—double meaning occurs and confusion ensues. A lot of things [they say] we don’t even understand. Their culture and our culture are totally different” (Unko bolne ka tarika alag hota hai—double meaning aur confusion hojata hain. Bahut kuch samajh mein nahin aata. Unka culture, aur hamara culture, bahut alag hain.) For him, not only was Urdu a distinct language, it was utterly alien to Hindus. The confusion this man hinted at was a feeling that Muslims could at any moment be unwittingly offended by Hindus. There was, of course, no problem in communication between most Hindus and Muslims in everyday life in Delhi. Indeed, some people who commented on their discomfort with Muslim areas of Delhi still went to Muslim hairdressers or tailors. They would have come out with bizarre haircuts and ill-fitting clothes if there was so much confusion between Hindi and Urdu speakers. And the Hindu image of Muslims as speaking an alien language was itself illusory; many Muslims spoke Hindi perfectly well. Still, the sense of double meaning came from a belief that Muslims, and especially their leaders, were likely to find offence in what Hindus said about their community. A refrain I heard was that national expectations that Muslims sing India’s national anthem or abide by family planning targets, were invariably interpreted as threats. This conjoining of purported Muslim prickliness and a fear of their language was brought out in a controversy during the build-up to national elections in 2009. Varun Gandhi, of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, was running as a BJP candidate. Despite his lineage within a secular

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Congress family, he egged on supporters of the Hindu nationalist party, by playing to fears of Muslims. In March 2009, for example, he said at one rally, “These people have such scary-sounding names… Karimullah, Mazha­ rullah… If you ever encountered them at night, you’d be scared…” (hum to jaante nahin hain… badey daraawne naam hotey hain inke… Karimullah… Mazharullah…. agar raat ko kabhi dikh jaayen… to darr rahen hain…).3 Despite the claim that Urdu caused confusion and fear, it was also paradoxically seen as a “sweet” language, more melodious than Hindi, and with rich associations in the history of love poetry (ghazals) in the subcontinent; Urdu terms and dialogue are widely used in Bollywood films. This same sweetness of language could become a threat, however, particularly in the rumours of Muslim men wooing and sleeping with Hindu women. Narratives of inter-religious marriages or elopement were often said to be the result of Muslim men conning Hindu women into relationships under the pretence of being Hindus; only later, once the woman had been seduced, did she find out that her seemingly Hindu partner was in fact a Muslim (cf. Vohra 2007). Speculations on the styles that Muslim men exhibited hinged on their presumed use of Urdu shayaris or love poetry. Yet Hindus I met enjoyed their own mastery of Urdu couplets, and read books sold by street hawkers with titles such as Top Romantic Shayari and Diwanon ki Shayari (“Crazy in Love” poetry). Among Muslims too, certain features of the prototypical Hindu were repeatedly stressed as different. I came to know one Muslim man, Mohammed, a bodybuilding gym owner. When we initially met, he went to some length to explain how Muslim and Hindu body types were different, stemming from their different dietary habits. Muslims had tougher bodies, from eating the masalas ground into meat, while Hindus had softer bodies, from imbibing so much milk and clarified butter. Later on, when I asked him if we could meet to talk about more general issues within the Muslim community in the old city, he agreed. In a long monologue, he insisted that, whatever their education and modernity, Old Delhi’s Muslims ultimately followed their own culture, based on religiously prescribed law (niyam-kanoun). He said that Islam was, by any standards, a modern religion: “From 1400 years ago till today, women and men have been equal in property matters, and have equal rights to pray. No other religion has this. That is why it is the most secular religion of all” (chaudah sau sal pale bhi auroton ko purusho ke baraaber mein, aur namaaz mein baraaber ka darja diya gaye, aur kisi 3 “EC Notice for Varun Gandhi Hate Speech”, Outlook Magazine, March 16, 2009.



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dharma nahin aisa hain. Isliya sab se secular religion hai). He continued, “every religion has their own law, whether it is Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh. That is why the state should not interfere within that law” (har dharam ka apnaapna kanoun hai, chahiye woh Hindu ho, Musalman ho, ya Sikh ho. Isliya hukumut ko unke kanoun mein dakhal nahin dena chahiye). Months later, I met Mohammed at a bodybuilding competition. We sat in a tent, and he told me about the flurry of weddings that had occurred over the previous months, the height of the Indian wedding season. For him, the aesthetic sensibility of Muslim weddings borrowed heavily from Hindus. As he said, “We do a lot of the community rituals exactly like Hindus. We put the groom on the horse on his way to the marriage hall, women put mehndi on their hands, and ladies gather and sing prior to the marriage” (kafi sara riti-rivaj hum log Hinduon jaise karte hain. Jaise ghodi pe baithna, mehndi karne, ladies sangeet karna). These were stock elements of the Hindu wedding in Delhi. Yet such cultural practices were employed with a disregard for whether they had Muslim or Hindu associations. Muslims saw such sublimation as reflecting the history of Islam in India. Mr Ali, a property builder in Ballimaran I met through the mufti of Fatehpuri Masjid, narrated how Muslims had ended up building Old Delhi. According to him, the Mughals, coming from Central Asia, had converted Hindus and ended up absorbing their various rituals: “The Muslims here come from the outside. They married the local women, teaching them about Islam. This is how, one way or another amongst Muslim women, one can see Hindu rituals being carried out today” (hamare Musalman yahan bahar se aayate. Yahan ke auroton se nikah kiya aur une Islam sikhaya. Isliye kahin na kahin Muslim auraton mein bhi thodi bahut Hindu ka riti-rivaj dekha jasakte hain.) Conclusion A coordinated shooting and bombing spree was carried out by Pakistanis in Mumbai in 2008, killing over 170 people. Indian newscasts noted that the terrorists did not look obviously Muslim—no skullcaps or turki-topis (Turkish fezs) to mark them. The fez was, after Indian independence, a commonly circulated sign of Muslimness, a visible marker that the state could apprehend and contain. Yet the turki-topi was rarely worn by Indian Muslims after the mid-twentieth century.4 In other externally produced 4 Amin (2004) and Roy (2007) both discuss popular and official portrayals of Indian Muslims post-1947. In government films, commercial advertisements and political posters,

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representations, such as Congress Party ads, knitted skullcaps marked Muslims as separate from other groups. Muslims who were clean-shaven, wore jeans and running shoes, like the attackers in Mumbai, could not be neatly compartmentalized and disavowed. The desire for clearly articulated religious identities in urban space was brought out simultaneously in Delhi. In September 2008, the Delhi police killed some young Muslims in a Delhi enclave, Jamia Nagar. These were “encounter killings”, official euphemism for targeted assassinations. Authorities were after Muslims thought to be behind bombings earlier that month in Delhi. The Delhi police, parading other Muslims apprehended during that “encounter” before the media, masked them in red keffiyahs, called ‘Arabic scarves’. The scarves were read as a sign of Arab terrorism. They are not generally worn by Indian Muslims. Perhaps this was the point: that Muslims and their alterity needed to be clearly marked using a globalized sign. The killings were not unlike other such events where Muslims were targeted by Indian authorities. Yet the awkward contrivance of dressing Muslims in scarves, in my view, signals not the obvious separation but rather the desperate inability to delineate religious boundaries. I have described a space, Old Delhi, that is similar to many other urban spaces in India: pre-colonial enclaves where Muslims, migrant workers and others live and work. These enclaves are critical to the economic and symbolic life of the larger city, and they are remarkably heterogeneous. The fact that religious life remains an important, though not determining factor in daily life has been the issue with which this chapter has sought to grapple. In Old Delhi, residents and workers may assert the importance of religious difference and then completely ignore it in where they pray or what they eat. Both demarcation and border-crossing is frequently witnessed in places like Old Delhi, as I have attempted to show. It is not that people don’t have judgements, or make strong, divisive statements, that identify what a Muslim temperament is or what features are found in a Hindu body. But these are almost always tentative and incomplete. Old Delhi is not, in this retelling, a necessarily optimistic or upbeat place; the oft-called for liberal sentiment of brotherhood, or bhaichara, can seem elusive amidst mutual antipathy. There are myriad spatial divisions that mark the old city and histories of communal violence that have left stains on its social geography. But Delhi’s old city contains a kind of grudging conviviality that is both urban and religious. Such spaces are the Muslim became explicitly—perhaps over-explicitly—marked, through different dressstyles, manners and other overt means.



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open to difference—perhaps even more than the modernist cities of the secular age. References Alter, Joseph 1992. The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Amin, Shahid 2004. “On Representing the Musalman.” In Sarai Reader 2004, 92-97. New Delhi: Sarai. Appadurai, Arjun 1998. “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization.” Development and Change 29: 905–25. Benei, Veronique 2008. Schooling Passions: Nation, History and Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chakravarty, Sayantan, and Amarnath Menon 2001. “Hideouts of Terror.” India Today, January 8. Das, Veena 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis 2012. Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Khilnani, Sunil 1999. The Idea of India. New Delhi: Penguin. Krafft, Thomas 1993. “Contemporary Old Delhi: Transformation of a Historical Place.” In Thomas Krafft Eckart Ehlers (ed.), Shahjahanabad/Old Delhi: Tradition and Colonial Change, 93–119. Delhi: Manohar. Kumar, Nita 1988. The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— 1989. “Work and Leisure in the Formation of Identity: Muslim Weavers in a Hindu City.” In Sandra Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980, 147–170. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lynch, Owen 1969. The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India. Delhi: National Publishing House. Mazzarella, William 2009. “Affect: What Is Is Good For?” In Saurabh Dube (ed.) Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, 291–09. London: Routledge. Pandey, Gyanendra 1992. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. PUDR [People’s Union for Democratic Rights] 1987. “Walled City Riots: A Report on the Police and Communal Violence in Delhi, 19–24 May, 1987.” Delhi, June 1987. Ramaswami, Shankar 2007. “Togethering Contra Othering.” South Asian Popular Culture 5(2): 117–28. Roy, Srirupa 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Taneja, Anand Vivek 2012. “Saintly Visions: Other Histories and Historyʼs Others in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 49 : 557–90. Tarlo, Emma 2003. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. London: Hurst & Company. Vatuk, Sylvia 1972. Kinship and Urbanization: White Collar Migrants in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Verkaaik, Oskar 2004. Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vohra, Paromita (director) 2007. Morality TV and Loving Jehad. India. Zizek, Slavoj 2005. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” In Slavoj Zizek, Eric Santner and Kenneth Reinhard (eds.), The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 134–90. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

‘EXIT’ AND ‘INCLUSION’: THE CHANGING PARADIGM OF PENTECOSTAL EXPRESSION IN THE NIGERIAN PUBLIC SPACE Godwin Onuoha Introduction This chapter draws on concepts in political and social analysis to shed light on contemporary manifestations of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the Nigerian public space. Its point of departure is an examination of the changing forms of Pentecostal expressions in Nigeria, and how these are deployed as forms of ‘exit’ and ‘inclusion’ in the Nigerian public space. This necessitates on the one hand capturing the multiple dimensions through which the public space shapes Pentecostal practices in Nigeria, and on the other hand how these spaces are in turn shaped by Pentecostal practices, aspirations and imaginations. One of the central arguments of this study is that these engagements and expressions do not occur in a historical vacuum. Rather, Nigerian Pentecostalism unveils its own dynamic character and peculiarities, which gives vent to various political, social and economic outcomes in urban spaces. The background for these developments relates to the context provided by the transnationalisation and globalisation of Pentecostalism, its unmooring from the specific context of its emergence, and its reinvention in specific ways within the context of the collective and individual innovations and transformations that urban spaces offer. Hence, Pentecostalism gives vent to the ‘reconstruction’ and ‘appropriation’ of the urban (in social, economic and political terms) as a site for the expression of new religious innovations. Since the second half of the twentieth century, and as part of a worldwide movement which gathered steam in the 1960s, there has been an explosion of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements1 of North American 1 Pentecostal movements are denominational and Charismatic movements are transdenominational, and there are variations in terms of their church structure, doctrine and practice. However, for analytical purposes, most scholars tend to lump these movements together on the basis of their most fundamental features, such as the shared emphasis on ecstatic experiences available to the believer and the shared doctrinal emphasis on spiritual warfare, an ongoing struggle between God and evil spirits, and the promotion of rituals of ‘deliverance’. This study treats both terms as a single category and deploys them interchangeably for the purposes of examining how they have played themselves out in the

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origin in different parts of the globe (including much of Africa). While earlier Pentecostal movements in Nigeria comprised an admixture of foreign and indigenous movements, the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of African instituted and independent ‘Pentecostal’ or ‘Charismatic’ movements, which have increasingly forged ties with their North American partners. Characterised by a gospel of faith, healing, prosperity and diverse miracles, this new form of Christianity has garnered a large following in Nigeria. Nigeria is officially secular and is Africa’s most populous country, but it occupies a prominent role in the ‘making’ and ‘re-making’ of Pentecostal movements across the continent. Pentecostal and Charismatic movements are presently regarded as the single largest social movement in Nigeria,2 and the most dominant sociocultural force in urban centres across the country.3 Cities and urban centres across Nigeria host the continent’s fastest growing Pentecostal movements. They have become a major force to reckon with in the sphere of religion, and most importantly, they constitute a formidable category in the social, political and economic spheres. Pentecostalism has rapidly proliferated within the context of the decline of African economies through the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) of the last two decades and the attendant contestations over scarce resources in urban centres. The entrenchment of economic reforms spurred political and social hardship, which was attended to by low wages and a low quality of life, the absence of social services, the withdrawal of the welfare frontiers of the state and the crisis of citizenship. These developments have provided the context for the proliferation of Pentecostal churches with various strands of the ‘prosperity gospel’, particularly in urban centres. In light of the uncertainties occurring in the Nigerian state, Pentecostal movements emphasise the possibilities of redemption, promises of hope and a new present. The ‘prosperity gospel’ maintains that Christians should be wealthy, healthy and successful, and that a ‘believer’ has the right to all these through the positive confession of faith. This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section sets out the introduction, the main issues and the objectives of the study. The second articulates the interplay between Pentecostalism, urban spaces and Nigerian public space. For further elaboration, see Robbins (2004: 117–43), Meyer (2004: 447–74). 2 This is a definition based on a broader usage of the term to capture groups that have explicit socio-political objectives as their primary goals, and those with a more indirect and tacit social, political and economic objectives. 3 For an elaboration of this argument, see Marshall (2009).



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aspirations in the Nigerian public space. The third delves into the background of Pentecostalism in Nigeria, with a view to exploring the conditions and circumstances of its deployment, both as a means of ‘exit’ and ‘inclusion’ in the Nigerian public space. The fourth section empirically unveils the role of the media in the ‘making’ and ‘re-making’ of Pentecostal movements in Nigeria, and the conclusion briefly sums up the arguments. Pentecostalism, Urban Spaces and Aspirations Urban spaces have been conceptualised as local sites of cultural appropriation, accommodation and resistance to global conditions which are experienced, interpreted and understood in the daily lives of its inhabitants (Smith 2005: 246). These may involve producing new harmonies, aspirations for a new life and novel forms of conviviality. While absurdities and contradictions have not been totally absent from these spaces, in the emergent scenario, flows and inter-connections intermesh in particular places and times in a manner that gives each context its own unique dynamism and tenor (Ibid.: 247). Interactions in the urban space are endless, unpredictable and in constant flux. The challenge is to examine each context strategically in a bid to unravel the logic of relationships, the structural make-up and tensions peculiar to it, and how these shape spaces of work, worship and other spatial arrangements. Urban centres in Nigeria have been central to the influence of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the last three decades. Pentecostal symbols and rituals now feature prominently in public offices, institutions and functions, and their banners, handbills, billboards and signposts dot major urban centres across the country. They have become a major force to reckon with in the sphere of religion, and most importantly, they constitute  a formidable category in the social, political and economic spheres. In the spheres of business and education, these movements have established institutions that have either replaced, supplemented or supplanted government-owned institutions.4 These developments lend credence to 4 There are numerous examples of such developments in Nigeria. But two prominent examples that stand out are the Living Faith Ministries, which occupy a vast tract of land that houses the ‘Faith Tabernacle’ (a 50,000-seat sanctuary), a primary school known as Kingdom Heritage, with branches in twelve other Nigerian cities, a secondary school called the Faith Academy, and a university known as Covenant University. The church also runs the Gilead Medical Centre and Dominion Publishing House, which has published over seventy

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the view that Pentecostal movements are increasing providing alternative economic and social institutions in urban centres across Africa with the aim of replacing inefficient state institutions (Gifford 1998). Through several outlets, Pentecostal movements have constantly acted as a conduit for health, welfare and educational programmes. They have increasingly gained a veritable platform for visibility in the Nigerian public space because they control the bulk of the time, energy and resources of their adherents. While urban spaces and cities serve as centres of cosmopolitan exchange, they are also salient sites for analysing the current re-negotiation of citizenship and different forms of identity (religious, ethnic, class, youth). Cities and urban centres which have hitherto served as the melting pots of parochial identities have been hijacked by dominant interests and ideologies and transformed to centres of self-affirmation. The urban space harbours the consequences of these religious expressions as they are played out in daily urban life, and generate ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ possibilities for the transformation of citizens. Given the fact that Pentecostal identities are particularly strong in urban contexts, urban centres provide a strategic arena for the innovation of new Pentecostal ideas, aspirations, institutions and experiments, as well as a stage on which these processes define and shape the urban context as a whole. Cities remain important for the development of citizenship owing to the fact that they provide the space where processes that ‘decisively expand and erode the rules, meanings and practices of citizenship occur’ (Holston and Appadurai 1999: 2). Cities provide the context in which identities of territory and contract become conflated with those not only of race, class, culture and gender, but also religion, giving rise to both progressive and reactionary movements. Moreover, it also books and two million copies of Christian books on various aspects of Christian faith, Christian living and business life. The church has a total staff strength that stands at over 2,000 employees in Nigeria alone. Another prominent example is the 12,000 acre Redemption Camp facility of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). The camp is a town in its own right. It has residential facilities for staff and members wealthy enough to buy. Apart from its educational institutions, comprising the Redeemer’s University of Nigeria (RUN) and a secondary school, many of its parishes scattered around the country run Day Care Centres and Nursery Schools. The RCCG has a community bank called the Haggai Community Bank, and many of its parishes also run clinics. It also runs Dove Media, a company set up to oversee the church’s television, radio, internet and publishing ventures. The church is currently making preparations to produce its own films with scriptural themes, using secular actors in the lucrative Nigerian home video industry, known as Nollywood. Generally, Pentecostal churches in Nigeria are becoming increasingly associated with job creation, career and skills development, as well as with the provision of welfare services, maternity education and marriage counselling in the Nigerian public space.



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provides the space for the creation of a ‘counter-public sphere’ where the invention and circulation of ‘counter-discourses’ by members of a religious identity are enacted. ‘New’ Christianity: The Changing Paradigm of Pentecostal Expressions in Nigeria In recent times, notable contributions have been made by Brouwer et al. (1996), van Dijk (2000), Gifford (1998), Marshall-Fratani (1993) and Droogers (2001) on the proliferation of literature on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in Africa, and the peculiar character of Nigerian Pentecostalism has been specifically emphasised by Kalu (2004), Obadare (2006) and Adogame (2010). However, three streams of Pentecostal origin can be distilled from the literature, and each stream has engaged with the Nigerian urban space in specific ways. The first stream captures the emergence of classical Pentecostal churches which were largely products of Western missionary activity. These include the Four Square Gospel Church, the Assemblies of God, the Apostolic Faith Mission and the Apostolic Church, which were introduced into Nigeria in the 1930s and 1940s. This phase was also characterised by interactions with indigenous Pentecostal forms, known as Aladura.5 The Aladura churches include the Cherubim and Seraphim and the Church of the Lord, which were established in 1925 and 1929 respectively. Kalu (2002: 122) argues that the intermingling of the classical and the traditional were rooted in the ‘power question’ in African cosmology, the thirst for deeper spirituality and re-awakening which was lacking in mission Christianity and which it could not provide. Therefore, the reinforcement of the tenets and inclinations of the indigenous Aladura churches became necessary, and this was applied with a Pentecostal bent. This intermingling led to the establishment of the Salem Gospel Mission and the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) in the 1950s. The second stream, which covers two decades, the 1970s and 1980s, could be regarded as the beginning of modern Pentecostalism in Nigeria. This period witnessed the rise of inter-denominational campus fellowships in Nigerian tertiary institutions, notably the University of Ibadan and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) (Ojo 1998, 28). Led by a new class of educated elites, this revival started in Nigerian universities and was characterised by the Holy Spirit baptism and speaking in tongues 5 Yoruba for ‘practitioners of prayer’.

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as a basis for a deeper religious experience. These movements were also influenced by Charismatic literatures and the works of Kenneth E. Hagin, Oral Roberts, T. L. Osborn, Kenneth Copeland and Robert Tilton (Gaiya 2002: 6). By the mid-1970s, these religious revivals had mushroomed in southern Nigerian university campuses, spread into the wider society and crystallized into churches. The Deeper Life Bible Church founded by W. F. Kumuyi and the ministry of Arch-Bishop Benson Idahosa were remarkable products of this phase. The third stream dates back to the period beginning in 1990, which was characterised by the advent of revival leaders who had left university and had carried their ‘new’ enthusiasm with them into the workplace. Notably, the leaders of these new movements were professionals in their own right who felt that the existing churches were ‘lukewarm’. As a result, they established alternative organisations to challenge the traditional Pentecostal movements. The era was marked by an emphasis on the prosperity gospel and faith, deliverance, miracles and healings. Some prominent churches that emerged during this period include Mountain of Fire and Miracles (1989), Christ Embassy (1991), Fountain of Life Church (1992), House on the Rock (1994) and Daystar Christian Centre (1995). As upwardly mobile, young and educated professionals, the leaders of these churches have set up corporate structures of governance and have appropriated different media outlets in the process of evangelising. This phase has come to define the enduring character and essence of the Pentecostal movement in Nigeria. The central argument in this chapter is pursued through an examination of the manner in which the Pentecostal explosion witnessed in the Nigerian public space has played out over time. This approach aims at engaging the specific characteristics of Pentecostalism in Nigeria by capturing the complex historical conditions for its development and the specificity of its effects in the urban spaces. ‘Exit’ and Parallel Constructions of Belonging Accounts of grassroots movements (ethnic, religious or political) which are anti-state or anti-system in nature, with various political, social, economic or religious objectives that are often beyond the control of the state, are replete in the study of African societies (Haynes 1997). These groups interact with the state by shunning it and defining themselves in relation to economic, political and cultural systems which transcend it, thereby, inundating the state with its claims and mobilisations (Bayart 1991; 1997).



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These processes are viewed as forms of ‘exit’, disengagement or retreat from the state by disaffected segments of society into alternative and parallel social, cultural, economic, political and religious systems which are fabricated in society and compete with those of the state (Azarya 1988, 1994; Azarya and Chazan 1987; Bratton 1989; Young 1994). These tendencies increasingly manifest themselves as strategies for coping with an overbearing and inefficient state (Du Toit 1995). Whether as individuals or groups, people ‘exit’ the state for different reasons. First, this could be attributed to enduring indigenous African norms of social organisation, which may have emerged based on the inability of the state to protect the interests of ordinary people in the pre-colonial era and to defend them in situations of adversity. These tendencies then develop and take the form of hometown associations, ethnic solidarity movements, cultural organisations, community development associations, credit societies and so on. Secondly, withdrawal could be the result of the exclusion, deprivation, oppression, domination and alienation of individuals and groups into parallel systems beyond the control of the state, which offer alternative access to social reproduction, empowerment, self-worth, security and defence against the ineffectiveness of the state. Thirdly, the inequitable integration of African countries into the global capitalist system have initiated a process in which African countries have become susceptible to global forces and trends, which constantly conditions local developments. The empirical forms of ‘exit’ from the Nigerian state have assumed different dimensions over time. As Marshall (2009: 97) observes, the mid-1970s marked a turning point in Nigeria’s post-colonial trajectory, leading to a situation in which the effects of the civil war, the oil boom which followed it, the oil crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the disastrous political events of the Second Republic distorted the dominant values and fabric of the Nigerian public space. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the full impact of the structural adjustment programme had taken root, there was a remarkable, dramatic and unprecedented level of exit from the Nigerian state, coinciding with the visible explosion of present-day Pentecostalism. The context in which Pentecostalism developed in Nigeria was heavily steeped in political instability, economic recession and social tensions, not only because structural adjustment was a programme of economic reform, but because it also had its own political and social conditionalities. The period was marked by an increase in the construction of parallel economic systems, the proliferation of ethnic and kinship organisations, grassroots movements and NGOs, the expansion of the scope of ‘self-help’ efforts

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performed by these groups, the emergence of secret cults and other deviant networks and institutions of higher learning, and expressions of religious fundamentalism, which all attested to the high levels of exit within the Nigerian public space (Osaghae 2001). Based on certain empirical factors, Osaghae (2001: 28–30) attributes the massive exit from the Nigerian state to the following factors. First and foremost, the economic decline, coupled with foreign debt and the demands of structural adjustment that characterised this period, emasculated the state and eroded its capacity to provide jobs, subsidise education and health care, maintain social services, protect lives and property, and ensure payments to civil servants. Second, the unprecedented level of violence unleashed on society by the unpopular military regimes and self-styled dictatorships of the Babangida (1985–1993) and Abacha (1993–1998) years led to the suppression of existing and potential sites of opposition. Third, the perceived capture of state power by regional and religious hegemonies, and the marginalization and exclusion of others, notably southerners, ethnic minorities and non-Muslims, from enjoying the benefits of belonging to the state further fuelled these tensions. Fourth, there was also a high degree of insensitivity to the sufferings of the masses, accentuated by a lack of responsiveness and accountability by successive military regimes in Nigeria. Fifth, there was corruption and the virtual collapse of governmental structures and agencies, giving rise to a situation which aggravated the legitimacy crisis confronting the state. The failure of the state as an agent of modernisation enlarged the space and provided the context in which pan-ethnic associations, market women’s associations, credit societies, farmers associations, secret cults, religious and spiritualist organisations, and neighbourhood associations emerged to replace the state in the provision and supply of basic needs. These uncertainties created the atmosphere for many Nigerians to turn to the religious sphere to articulate and prescribe spiritual remedies for the political and economic problems that were plaguing the nation (Kalu 2002, 127). The discourse of change and solution which characterised prosperity messages, breakthroughs, miracles and healings resonated deeply among the Nigerian masses at this time (Marshall 1991). In an African world view in which the influence of the supernatural has remained dominant, the contextualisation of the Pentecostal message resonated deeply within the Nigerian masses. Hence, from just ten Charismatic groups in 1974, the number increased to over 2000 in 1997 and to about 5000 in 2000 (Ojo 2004: 23). Pentecostal movements have established their permanent bases in cities and urban centres across Nigeria, making the



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country the home of the largest Pentecostal activity on the continent. Presently, there are large concentrations of Pentecostal churches in major Nigerian cities like Abuja, Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Zaria, Jos, Benin City, Port Harcourt, Ilorin, Kano, Enugu, Abeokuta, Onitsha, Warri, Owerri, Umuahia and Calabar among others. As Ojo (1988: 183) points out, the activities of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements have been largely centred on cities due to the necessity ‘of giving ultimate meaning to city life by transforming the problems of the cities into bases for their sustenance’. Nigerian Pentecostals organise crusades, revivals and retreats in the cities and urban centres in order to provide solutions to problems like barrenness, lack of accommodation, unemployment, financial difficulties, deliverance from ancestral curses and various sicknesses and diseases, among other things. In order to maintain a focused message, Pentecostalism emphasises the vivid contrast between the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the city. The challenges accompanying urban life and the need to find ‘deliverance’ from its tensions and insecurity account for the growing member­ ship  of these movements. Pentecostal movements exert an enormous influence in urban centres as a result of the uncertainties associated with city life, where people are removed from their rural and traditional beliefs and are confronted by new challenges and issues in the urban areas. Most people tend to modify their cultural backgrounds when they confront other cultural values in the cities, or when the existing structures fail to address their problems. Even within the Christian faith, and in the Pentecostal fold, individuals who sometimes find all their spiritual needs rarely met in one denomination or congregation tend to seek for other alternatives. One major doctrinal emphasis among Pentecostal Christians is the belief in divine healing and divine health. This belief is powerfully developed within the context of the African cosmology and belief in spirits, ancestors and supreme beings, where the life of the ‘ordinary man’ is constantly being obsessed by fear of the unknown, witches, perceived enemies and the need to escape from a world dominated by evil forces. Pentecostal churches lay claim to superior power over these forces and tend to confront the root causes of these problems. The present condition of medical facilities in the country, and the poorly developed, poorly managed and inadequate government health-care systems, has added another dimension to the situation. Even where private health care is available it is often very expensive, so that people hang on to Pentecostal churches’ claims to heal and do miracles as a way of inspiring the hope of a simpler, easier and less expensive way out of their predicaments.

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‘Inclusion’, Political Christianity and the Theology of Engagement Being a key constituency within the civil society movement, Pentecostals have always voiced their opinions on issues pertaining to religion and politics. Gifford (2004, 12) argues out that, in the years between 1989 and 1992, when one-party states and military dictatorships collapsed in Africa in the quest for ‘Africa’s second liberation’, mainline churches were at the forefront of the leading institutions that were pressing for reforms.6 Current Pentecostal involvement in Nigeria and its complex political consequences point to the projection of a highly political agenda into the collective public space. In what Marshall (2009: 14) refers to as ‘a new form of righteous authority that presents itself as the unique path to individual and collective salvation’, contemporary Pentecostalism in Nigeria projects the image of an invading army, seeking to have an impact not only on personal lives, but also on the political, economic, religious and social systems. Adogame (2005: 130) captures and accounts for the larger process of the ‘Christianization’ of the public space in Nigeria by highlighting a Christian scramble for a public role in Nigeria. At the core of this engagement with the public sphere is what Kalu (2004: 259) refers to as the ‘theology of engagement’. A dual shift ‘from a basic insistence on the secularity of the Nigerian state to an affirmation of the imperative to Christianize it, and a quiet but significant abdication of the former position of Christians’ involve­ ment in public office’ typifies these tendencies (Obadare 2006: 668). The call for engagement was also echoed in the words of Matthew Ashimolowo (2007: 9), founder and Senior Pastor of the Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), London. He states that: Previously, when there was a corporate, local or national event, it was viewed that pastors were only good enough to say the opening and closing prayers. However, these days pastors should increase their capacity to be multidisciplined. In these last days Christian leaders will preach, heal the sick, and they will go forward to open banks, schools, universities, corporate companies and so much more. This will occur as they increase their capacity.

Within this context, Pentecostal churches and their followers have come to constitute a major factor in Nigeria’s social, economic and political life. The relevance of the Pentecostal movement beyond the ‘ordinary’ religious sphere poses a challenge to the understanding of the Nigerian public space

6 The term ‘mainline churches’ here refers to the Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Methodist churches.



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as one of outright political expressions. The Pentecostal movements tend to adopt a different meaning of what is ‘political’ by raising moral questions geared towards the transformation of individuals and institutions within society. However, Pentecostal involvement in politics has never been as intense as it has been since the emergence of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic in 1999. The presence and visibility of Pentecostals in the Nigerian public space have grown visibly since 1999, and they have played an increasing role in the debates and conflicts that have characterised the Nigerian public space. The engagement of Pentecostalism with the everyday tissue of Nigerian life was further heightened by the emergence of President Obasanjo at the polls and his swearing-in ceremony on 29 May 1999. The occasion was heavily immersed in the traditions of Christian Pentecostalism (Obadare 2006: 669), and for many Christians within the Pentecostal fold, the emergence of Obasanjo was seen an ‘act of God’ that forced a compromise in which the hegemonic ruling elite in northern Nigeria was compelled to hand over power to the south, particularly after the 12 June 1993 debacle and the need to bury the ghost of that era. Obasanjo at this time was transformed into a messianic figure on account of his personal experiences and spiritual rebirth (in Pentecostal parlance this means being ‘born again’) while in the cells of Nigeria’s erstwhile dictator, General Sani Abacha. As Ojo (2009: 14) confirms, Christian Pentecostal leaders collectively ‘adopted Olusegun Obasanjo as a symbol of Christian control of the political space, believing that he was an answer to prayers about the ending of oppression and misgovernance, and the ending of a Muslim political dominance’. There was widespread belief in Pentecostal circles that God had preserved Obasanjo’s life while he was in prison so that he could lead the country. The then Minister of Solid Minerals, Oby Ezekwesili, was quoted in the Guardian on Sunday (cited in Obadare 2006: 670) as saying: And so God took that person, took him away into jail and the enemies thought they were the ones doing it: they took him into jail and when he was there, he had an encounter. The President had an encounter; he had an encounter all in the agenda of God to resurrect the nation. He brought him out after the encounter and then orchestrated a lot of things. God himself orchestrated a lot of things and took a person, who now had understood what total submission to the Almighty really is: that no matter your height or position, there is none greater than the Almighty God. At that place of revelation, he could use him. He now set up events and got him back into the covenant of the nation. What do you think it was about? It was for the re-building to start (‘A daughter of Zion: Oby Ezekwesili speaks on what it takes to be a Christian in public office’, Lagos, 1 January 2006, emphasis added’).

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These developments heralded the collective adoption of Obasanjo as an embodiment of God’s divine response and as a symbol of Christian control of the public political sphere in Nigeria (Ojo 2004, 2).7 On assuming office, the Obasanjo administration quickly moved to recover lost ground by organising a regular Christian service to pray for Nigeria, a Christian chapel was built and a Baptist chaplain appointed. The observance of regular morning devotions with prominent public leaders in attendance was a symbolic gesture which testified to the need to construct the Presidential villa as a bastion of Christianity against contrary forces. With reference to the role played by prominent Pentecostal leaders in engaging with the public space, it is pertinent to mention the impact of the RCCG in the religious sphere, as well as in the social, political and economic spheres. The obvious influence of the overseer, Enoch Adeboye, who was recently named as one of the ‘50 Most Influential People in the world’ by Newsweek Magazine, was crucial in the government’s quest for political and spiritual legitimacy. The RCCG remains one of the fastest growing Pentecostal churches globally. The church has outposts in 110 countries around the world, with 14,000 branches (5 million members in Nigeria alone), 360 branches in Britain, and about the same number in U.S. cities like Chicago, Dallas and Tallahassee, and missionary activities in China, Pakistan and Malaysia (Newsweek, 5. 1. 2009). The RCCG is not only a church, it is also a franchise. The aim of the church, according to its leaders, is to have a branch in every street in Nigeria, and even now they can boast two or three churches in some streets. In an interview with Newsweek, Adeboye maintained that: ‘In the developing world we say we want churches to be within five minutes’ walk of every person, in the developed world, we say five minutes of driving’. The church has its own university (although it is not the only one of its kind in Nigeria), bank, secondary and primary schools, hospitals, and so on. Other influential Pentecostal leaders in Nigeria, like Chris Oyakhilome of Christ Embassy, Matthew Ashimolowo of Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), Mike Okonkwo of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM), David Oyedepo of Living Faith Ministries (Winner’s Chapel) and Taiwo Odukoya of the Fountain of Life 7 In spite of the ‘spiritual halo’ which surrounded the advent of President Obasanjo, an anti-climax was to emerge in the Pentecostal movement. In April 1999 Tunde Bakare, the founder and Pastor of the Lagos-based Latter Rain Assembly, prophesied against the tide of events that Obasanjo would not be sworn in as Nigeria’s president. However, a consortium of sympathetic pastors immediately denounced Bakare’s prophecy, and also visited Obasanjo’s residence in Ota to pray for him and to nullify the negative impact of Bakare’s prophecy.



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Church, all played significant roles in providing the spiritual façade that masked the Obasanjo administration (Ihejirika n.d.). The proximity between political and religious leaders, which Obadare (2006) captures as the ‘Pentecostal Presidency and the Theocratic Class’, was real during the Obasanjo presidency. Haynes (1996: 6) identifies this tendency and argues that ‘leading religious figures are very often class actors in partnership with political elites to seek to achieve mutually advantageous goals’. Among other things, this goal includes ‘the tendency for political elites to seek spiritual power and for spiritual leaders to develop substantial material power’ (Ellis and Ter Haar 2004: 99). Elsewhere, the alliance between U.S. presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. and the Religious Right or Christian Coalition attests to this assertion. In African states, presidents like Paul Biya of Cameroon and the late Fredrick Chiluba of Zambia have also forged alliances with Christian groups in the past. As Gifford (1993: 186–215) argues, the ability of state leaders to appropriate the message of a movement they identify with has been played out in African countries like Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Togo. It is pertinent to recall the administration of President Fredrick Chiluba of Zambia, which came into office with great hope and prospects in 1991. His declaration that Zambia was a Christian nation provided a moral platform for Pentecostals and Charismatics to penetrate the country’s political space as a social force, but it soon became a travesty. As it would appear, President Chiluba only cultivated the Pentecostal identity to mask his intolerance of political opposition and the corruption and mismanagement that characterized his administration. In Ghana, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches maintained close relations with Rawlings’ government and provided the regime with moral and religious clout despite its poor socio-economic record. The late president of Ghana, John Atta Mills, had close links to a Nigerian Pentecostal leader, who played a crucial in his ascent to the presidency in 2009. The Nigerian scenario did not prove any different. Since the advent of Obasanjo in 1999, Pentecostal discourses have been powerfully reflected in the social, economic and political spheres of the country. Halfway into his first term, President Obasanjo allegedly claimed to be ‘waiting on God’ to give him the mandate to run for a second term in office. All the through the years of Obasanjo’s misrule (1999–2007), the Pentecostal constituency hardly showed any sign of protest to his administration. In spite of the misrule of his first four years, at the expiration of his first term in office, Bishop Mike Okonkwo, the then president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), implored all Christians to vote for Obasanjo for a second term since

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he was a member of the fold. After Obasanjo attended one of the Holy Ghost Services of the RCCG in December 2003, Enoch Adeboye likened him to the biblical Prophet Elisha, whom God had ‘specially ordained’, and declared the visit to be ‘the fulfilment of God’s prophecy on the church, and the beginning of new song in the church’ (cited in Ojo 2004: 20). Even though most Nigerians were openly contemptuous of the infamous third term attempt of President Obasanjo, in May 2006 the president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, declared that seeking a ‘third time in office is not a crime’.8 This brought out in bold relief the general response of Pentecostal and Charismatic leaders to political events, which is devoid of any critical opinion about governance. Prior to his election in 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan also attended the Holy Ghost Service of the RCCG to receive guidance and success at the polls, and he has since been closely associated with the church’s programmes. The struggle between Pentecostalism and Islam in Nigeria has recently taken a critical turn. In the past, Nigerian Pentecostals constantly criticised periodic religious riots in northern Nigeria, the incessant sectarian killing of Christians and the burning of churches in the Muslim north, and have also made political pronouncements and taken different positions in the heated and conflictual multi-religious climate in Nigeria. Of particular importance was the controversy surrounding the membership of Nigeria in the Organisation of Islamic Conference in 1986. Christians condemned in unison the attempt to foist Islam on Nigeria through press statements in the electronic and print media, and the issue became the focus of prayer meetings nationwide. The imposition of Shari’ a law in some northern states in Nigeria, statements credited to the late Sheikh Gumi and the views expressed by former President Shagari and the former Head of State, General Buhari, have all been challenged by the Christian community and Pentecostals alike.9 Prior to the advent of the Obasanjo administration, the apparent domination of federal politics by the Muslim north has provided

8 A notable exception to this was Chris Okotie, another Pentecostal pastor and leader of the Household of God Church in Lagos, who, claiming to be acting under the divine mandate of God, challenged Obasanjo to the presidency at the 2003 elections under the platform of the Justice Party and repeated the feat at the 2007 elections, though he was unsuccessful on both occasions. 9 The late Sheikh Gumi was an Islamic scholar and former Grand Khadi of the Northern Region of Nigeria, who once declared that Muslims would never allow a non-Muslim to be president of Nigeria. Former President Shehu Shagari and former Military Head of State General Muhammadu Buhari (both Muslim northerners) recently stated that Muslims should not vote for non-Muslims in Nigeria.



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the basis upon which Pentecostals associate Islam with Satanic powers, misrule and corruption. In January 2010, the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) was formed to challenge the hijacking of power which took place after the sudden disappearance of President Umaru Yar’Adua (a Muslim northerner) and to force a handover to Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the oil-rich south. Pentecostalism, Media and the Public Space in Nigeria Supporting the proliferation and influence of Pentecostal movements in Nigeria is the dominant presence of their leaders in both the print and electronic media. The media serves as a veritable outlet for Pentecostal movements to mould individuals and citizens collectively. As Ihejirija (n.d.) observes, there is a social agenda in the: creation of pathways through which the Pentecostal churches in Nigeria can ascend from the fringes to the centre of the national public sphere in order to assume control of the social hegemonic power hitherto monopolised by the state. With such powers these religious movements will be in the position of formulating national symbols, shaping citizens according to their vision of an ideal society.

What can be referred to as the Pentecostal social agenda was articulated by one of the leaders of the Pentecostal fellowship of Nigeria in an address presented to its members in 1992. Among other things, he stated that: Brethren, may I tell you that the strategy we are going to use to win Nigeria has to be the strategy of an invading army. When an army wants to take over a nation, they have certain characteristics; they don’t make noise, like so many of us are doing…. Look at the ones who are really doing substantial work in Nigeria today…. They have started building churches, house fellowships are spreading, they are winning people all over the place… people who are working while others are sleeping and they take over the essential things, they don’t just go and kidnap the president. They take over the media, the radio, the television stations, they convince the rich people, the businessmen, they get the students, they get backings, because when they take over it is the market women and the students they will tell ‘come and demonstrate it if you are in support.’ If you want to take over Nigeria you better win the students, win the market women, the media, the broadcasters, the rich, the poor and the press. (Cited in Ihejirika, n.d)

The use of the media resonates deeply with the Pentecostal social agenda in Nigeria. The presence of Pentecostals in the electronic media dates back to the mid-1970s, when Bishop Benson Idahosa of the Church of God

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Mission began his television broadcast on Mid-West Television in Nigeria. It was regarded as ‘the first, largest and most successful project in televi­ sion evangelism in Africa’ (Lyon and Lyon, 1991: 111). However, in the course of the 1990s the use of the electronic media by Pentecostals pro­liferated, and presently the media is almost synonymous with Pentecos­talism in Nigeria. Preachers now buy airtime on local, national and private televi­sion and radio stations, or buy spaces in newspapers to propagate their message. Notable ones include Tunde Bakare of the Later Rain Assem­bly, Chris Oyakhilome of Christ Embassy, Matthew Ashimolowo of King­ sway International Christian Centre (KICC), Enoch Adeboye of RCCG, Mike Okonkwo of The Redeemed Evangelical Mission (TREM), David Oyedepo of the Living Faith Ministries Worldwide, T. B. Joshua of Synagogue Church for All Nations (SCOAN) and Sam Adeyemi of Daystar Christian Centre. A common feature of these media adventures is that most of the programmes that are aired are always Bible teachings, gospel songs and claims of miraculous healings. But the proliferation of these Nigerian televangelists has impacted enormously on the Nigerian public space. The incomes generated by local, national and private stations from these sources have become huge, and it estimated that about forty percent of the revenue which accrues to state and privately owned television and radio stations is derived from religious broadcasts (Ihejirika 2004). These broadcasts do not necessarily win over new converts to these churches, but as research shows, they are targeted at their members, who increasingly identify with the church and its leaders (Hoover 1998; Ihejirika 2004). The increased visibility of these preachers tends to elevate them and their churches to the centre of the ‘socio-religious public sphere’ in Nigeria, thereby giving them the leverage to formulate public symbols and attitudes (Ihejirika n.d.). Invoking the name of God and using Pentecostal rituals like prayer and fasting have dominated the commencement of national projects, like elections, national conferences and even national football matches in Nigeria. Hence, the essence of the media embrace in Nigeria may not necessarily be geared towards conversion, but rather, towards a more symbolic role of aiding people to articulate issues of life better, discover better meanings inherent in belief systems and work out how to apply them to their individual lives. The use of overhead banners, glossy wall posters, stickers and handbills that dot every corner of the street is indicative of the tendency to imprint Pentecostal symbols in the Nigerian public space. At the beginning of every year, these media advertisements carry different inscriptions like: My year of financial success’, ‘My year of breakthrough’, ‘My year of empowerment’,



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‘My year of increase’, ‘My year of exploits’, ‘My year of promotion’, ‘My year of expansion’, ‘My year of prosperity’, ‘My year of success’, and so on. Even the type of aggressive evangelism sometimes promoted by slogans like ‘All Nations for Christ Crusade’, ‘Nigeria for Christ’ and ‘Total Take Over’ is indicative of a fundamentalist bent which is capable of triggering conflict with other religions in the public space. Conclusion This chapter has attempted to capture the extenuating circumstances under which Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity made an ‘exit’ and ‘engaged’ with the Nigerian public space. The central aim has been to use the urban space as an analytical space to understand the complex twists, turns and manifestations of Pentecostalism in Nigeria. The immediate background for this is the exploration of relationships linking the transnationalisation and globalisation of Pentecostalism, the shift from the specific context of its emergence, and the reinvention of Pentecostalism in specific ways in the context of the collective and individual innovations and transformations which the urban spaces offer. Pentecostal movements have come to play a central role in urban spaces, where they have displayed a resilient form of associational life in the face of the immense failure of the state. Pentecostal movements have also forged a dynamic relationship and engagement with the body politics in recent times. For the Pentecostal constituency in Nigeria, after several years of ‘exit’ into alternative forms of belonging occasioned by the withdrawal of the state and the harsh realities of structural adjustment, the advent of a Christian president from the south offered opportunities to re-engage with the immediate political context. This signalled the long-held desire for a spiritual and geographical shift of power at the centre. This has invariably heightened political instability, posed a challenge to national integration, and accentuated the Christian/ South versus Muslim/North power struggle that is inherent in national politics. References Adogame, Afe 2005. “Politicization of Religion and the Religionization of Politics in Nigeria”. In Chima Korieh and Godfrey U. Nwokeji (eds.), Religion, History and Politics in Nigeria: Essays in Honour of Ogbu U. Kalu. Oxford: University Press of America. —— 2010. “How God Became a Nigerian: Religious Impulse and the Unfolding of a Nation.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 28(4): 479–498. Ashimolowo, Matthew 2007. Increasing Your Capacity. London: Mattyson Media.

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Azarya, Victor 1988. “Re-Ordering State-Society Relations: Incorporation and Disengagement”. In Donald Rothchild and Naomi Chazan (eds.), The Precarious Balance: State and Society in Africa. Boulder: Westview Press. —— 1994. “Civil Society and Disengagement in Africa”. In John Haberson, Naomi Chazan, and Donald Rothchild (eds.), Civil Society and the State in Africa. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner. —— and Naomi Chazan 1987. “Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29(1): 106–131. Bayart, Jean François 1991. “Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory.” In James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics. London and New York: Longman. —— 1997. “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People’.” Third World Quarterly 18(1): 53–72. Bratton, Michael 1989. Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associational Life in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Brouwer, Steve, Paul Gifford and Susan D. Rose 1996. Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. New York: Routledge. Droogers, André 2001. “Globalisation and Pentecostal Success”. In André Corten and Ruth Marshall-Fratani (eds.), Between Babel and Pentecost: Transnational Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America. London: Hurst and Co. Du Toit, Pierre 1995. State-Building and Democracy in Southern Africa: A Comparative Study of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Ellis, Stephen, and Gerrie Ter Haar (eds.) 2004. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. London: Hurst & Company. Gaiya, Musa A.B. 2002. The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Occasional Paper, University of Copenhagen: Centre of African Studies. Gifford, Paul 1993. “Reinhard Bonnke’s Mission to Africa, and his 1991 Nairobi Crusade.” In Paul Gifford (ed.), New Dynamics in African Christianity. Ibadan: Sefer. —— 1998. African Christianity: Its Public Role. London: Hurst and Co. —— 2004. “Pentecostalism and Public Life”. Paper presented for discussion at the workshop on “Pentecostal-Civil Society Dialogue on Public Accountability and Governance”, 18 October, Agip Recital Hall, Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos, Nigeria. Haynes, Jeffrey 1996. Religion and Politics in Africa. London: Zed Books. —— 1997. Democracy and Civil Society in the Third World: Politics and New Social Movements. Cambridge: Polity Press. Holston, James, and Arjun Appadurai 1999. “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship”. In James Holston (ed.), Cities and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hoover, S.M. 1988. Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church. London: Sage. —— 1987. “Religious Television Audience: A Matter of Significance or Size?” Review of Religious Research 29(2): 135–51. Ihejirika, Walter C. (n.d.). “Media and Fundamentalism in Nigeria”: World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). http://www.waccglobal.org/en/20052-christian -fundamentalism-and-the-media/530-Media-and-fundamentalism-in-Nigeria.html (Accessed: 6 February 2010). —— 2004. An Audience Ethnography on the Role of the Mass Media in the Process of Conversion of Catholics to the Pentecostal Churches in Nigeria. Rome: Gregorian University. Kalu, Ogbu 2002. “Preserving a Worldview: Pentecostalism in the African Maps of the Universe.” PNEUMA: Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies 24(2): 110–137. —— 2004. “Sharia and Islam in Nigerian Pentecostal Rhetoric, 1970–2003.” PNEUMA: Journal of the Society of Pentecostal Studies 26(2): 242–261.



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Lyon, Andrew, and Harriet D. Lyons 1991. “Religion and the Mass Media”. In Jacob P. Olupona and Toyin Falola (eds.), Religion and Society in Nigeria: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. Ibadan: Spectrum Books. Marshall, Ruth 1991. “Power in the Name of Jesus.” Review of African Political Economy 52: 21–37. —— 2009. Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Marshall-Fratani, Ruth 1993. “Power in the Name of Jesus: Social Transformation and Pentecostalism in Western Nigeria Revisited.” In Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan (eds.), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth Century Africa: Essays in Honour of A. H. M. Kirk-Greene. London: Macmillan. Meyer, Birgit 2004. “Christianity in Africa: From African Independent to PentecostalCharismatic Churches.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 447–474. Obadare, Ebenezer 2006. “Pentecostal Presidency? The Lagos-Ibadan ‘Theocratic Class’ and the Muslim ‘Other’.” Review of African Political Economy 33(110): 665–678. Ojo, Matthews A. 1988. “The Contextual Significance of Charismatic Movements in Independent Nigeria.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 58(2): 175–192. —— 1998. “The Church in the African State: The Charismatic/Pentecostal Experience in Nigeria.” Journal of African Thought 1(2): 25–32. —— 2004. “Pentecostalism, Public Accountability and Governance in Nigeria”. Paper presented for discussion at the workshop on “Pentecostal-Civil Society Dialogue on Public Accountability and Governance”, 18 October, Agip Recital Hall, MUSON Centre, Onikan, Lagos, Nigeria. —— 2009. “African Spirituality, Socio-Political Experience and Mission”. Paper presented at the West African Consultation on Edinburg 2010 at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, March 23-25: 1–19. Osaghae, Eghosa 2001. “Exiting from the Existing State in Nigeria.” In Simon Bekker, Martine Dodds and Meshack Khosa (eds.), Shifting African Identities. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council. Robbins, Joel 2004. “The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 117–143. Smith, Michael Peter 2005. “Power in Places: Re-theorizing the Local and the Global”. In Jan Lin and Christopher Mele (eds.), The Urban Sociology Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Van Dijk, Rijk A. 2000. Christian Fundamentalism in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Pentecostalism. Occasional Paper, University of Copenhagen: Centre of African Studies. Young, Crawford 1994. “In Search of Civil Society”. In John Haberson, Naomi Chazan, and Donald Rothchild (eds.), Civil Society and the State in Africa. Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner.

Newspapers and Magazines (all published in Lagos, Nigeria, except otherwise stated). The Week, Daily Sun, Newsweek Magazine, The News

INDEX Africa 8, 11, 17, 18, 50, 56, 57, 120, 168, 175, 181, 182, 208, 210, 211, 216, 222 see also South Africa African 2, 7, 11, 12, 16, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 55, 118, 125, 168, 170, 173, 175, 176, 186, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 219 AKP (Justice and Development Party) 28 Alevis, Alevism 18, 25–42 Amr Khaled 108 Apostolic community, Apostolic church 156, 211 aspiration 12, 13, 15, 19, 41, 45, 49, 58, 61–71, 123, 154, 159, 160, 169–171, 174, 177, 186, 207, 209–211 Baptist congregation, Baptist community 6, 8, 149, 155–159, 161, 164 Bauman, Zygmunt 171, 172, 174 belonging 5, 9, 11, 39, 40, 49, 53, 58, 62, 71, 99, 106, 159–162, 165, 167–186, 207, 212–215, 223 Berlin 5, 6, 8, 14, 17, 99–110, 149–165 body 5, 75, 76, 78–80, 82, 85, 92, 130–131, 140–142, 189–191, 197, 200, 202, 204, 223 Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) 75, 78, 79, 82–85, 87, 89–91 BPP. See Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) Brazil 119, 120, 124, 125 Buddhism 7, 114, 117, 139 Cape Town 17, 167–186 capital, capitalism 4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 19, 40, 74, 88, 104–107, 143, 150, 151, 194 Casanova, José 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 15, 27, 55, 99, 109, 113–125, 139, 154, 186 Cem 25, 28, 31–38, 41 Cemevi 25–42 Certeau, Michel de 103, 149, 157 charismatic 25, 49, 107, 119, 207–209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 219, 220, 223 Chicago school 3, 16, 61, 118 Christianity 19, 68, 69, 99, 114, 121, 122, 163, 168–170, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181, 185, 208, 211–212, 216, 218, 223 churches 6–8, 30, 61, 63, 69, 115, 116, 118, 120, 124, 138, 155–157, 167, 169–173, 175, 176, 179, 182, 184–186, 208, 210–212, 215, 216, 218–222

citizenship 5, 15, 74, 173, 208, 210 collective boundaries 162 colonial cities 64, 67, 69, 77 community 3, 28, 47, 61, 73, 100, 113, 130, 153, 167, 190, 210 conversion 104, 115, 123, 158, 162–164, 181, 222 cremation 84, 85, 89–92 cultivation 27, 130–132 culture 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 40, 50, 51, 57, 67, 70, 86, 106, 108, 124, 168, 177, 181, 189, 195, 201–202, 210 Dede 28, 32, 34–37 Delhi 5, 189–205 demographic decline 81, 82 demonstration 133 denominational, denominationalism 15, 113–125, 139, 171, 207, 211 deterritorialization 13–15, 170 diclofenac 83, 84 discursive formation 92 disengagement 213 disgust 191 diversities 6, 9, 14, 15, 17–19, 26–28, 30, 45, 48, 51, 68, 115, 118, 125, 138–140, 142, 143, 173, 189 dokhma 76, 80, 82, 91 dokhmenashini 76, 77, 82–85, 87–92 Doongerwadi 79, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91–93 ecology 73, 83, 92 empowerment 154, 162, 213, 222 esrime 36, 37 ethnicity 10, 14, 19, 54, 69, 89, 99, 101, 133, 194 excarnation 73–93 exit 10, 122, 207–223 Faith-based organization (FBO) 10, 183–185 faith community 100, 134 Falun Gong 10, 15, 129–145 FBO. See Faith-based organization (FBO) fluidity 117, 170 Flushing, NY 133, 138, 140, 143, 144 Foucault, Michel 12, 74, 92, 153 fundamentalism 214 funerary practice/ritual 73, 83, 92

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Gemeinschaft 3, 29, 61, 113, 163 German Eastern Germany 153, 155, 156 Western Germany 156 Gesellschaft 3, 61, 113 global cities, globalization 1, 5, 12–17, 48, 55, 58, 62, 63, 66, 70, 113–125, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143, 151 governmentality, governmentalities 10 hadith 101, 102 headscarf 103, 105, 106, 108, 109 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 13, 45, 130, 137 heterotopia 153 Hindu-Muslim engagement 5, 65, 189–205 HIV/AIDS 178, 180, 181, 183–185 holy spirit 211 identification 2, 10, 13, 50, 53, 58, 87, 100, 130, 157, 160, 181, 194 identity 11–14, 18, 26, 29, 31, 33, 46, 50, 51, 57, 58, 74, 75, 77, 80, 83, 87–89, 105, 108, 109, 137, 153, 155, 162, 167, 168, 170, 181, 185, 191, 192, 195, 210, 211, 219 immigrants 4, 45, 46, 49–51, 56, 58, 61, 64, 65, 67, 105, 107, 116–120, 130, 134, 138, 139, 142–144, 152 inclusion 18, 207–223 individual, individualism 4, 18, 20, 25, 32, 39, 40, 56, 66, 74, 78, 86, 92, 105, 113, 115, 117, 121–123, 138, 153–155, 157, 159–164, 167, 177, 183, 184, 186, 195, 207, 213, 215–217, 221–223 inter-denominational 211 intermarried women (exogamy) 75, 87–89 Islam 9, 19, 25–27, 29–31, 38, 40, 45–51, 53–58, 66, 99, 101–110, 114, 117, 139, 168, 202, 203, 220, 221 Istanbul 10, 25, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 109 Kiez 150–157, 161, 163, 164 Koran 101, 102, 104, 200 legal pluralism 74 Li Hongzhi 129, 131, 132 litigation 87 local, locality 1–20, 31, 34, 46, 47, 49, 50, 57, 58, 77, 83, 91, 99–110, 131, 135, 137, 140–142, 150–155, 157–165, 171, 173, 174, 179, 180, 182, 186, 192, 201, 203, 209, 213, 216, 222 London 6, 61, 168, 180, 216 Lutheranism, Lutheran Church 156–158, 164, 216

Manhattan, NY 130, 133–137, 142, 144 Martin, David 6, 120 McLeod, Hugh 6, 8, 61, 150, 167, 168 media 34, 57, 63, 81, 102, 103, 108, 129, 136, 137, 141, 152, 153, 175, 204, 209, 210, 212, 220–223 megacity 65, 70, 73, 85, 92 migrant, migratory 32, 45, 50, 51, 53, 54, 67, 101, 102, 106, 190, 196, 197, 204 migration 1, 2, 9, 10, 14, 18, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 45–51, 54, 56, 57, 61, 63, 77, 99, 101, 105, 108, 137, 169, 177 military 49, 168, 174, 214, 216, 220 Milli Görüs 100 miracles 36, 129, 208, 212, 214, 215 MJD. See Muslim Youth in Germany (MJD) modern, modernity, modernization 1, 26, 45, 61, 73, 99, 113, 138, 150, 167, 192, 211 mosque 7, 25, 28–30, 38–40, 47, 51, 53, 58, 64, 92, 100–103, 108, 138, 193, 200 movements 14, 16, 27–30, 38, 40, 45, 48, 55, 63–65, 91, 92, 102, 103, 114, 118, 120, 130, 131, 136, 139, 141, 142, 152, 154, 169, 171, 173, 175, 179, 185, 191, 194, 207–219, 221, 223 Muhammad 104, 220 multiculturalism 5, 18, 29, 70 Mumbai 3, 12, 61–71, 73–93, 203 Muslims 9, 25, 46, 64, 83, 99, 114, 185, 190, 214 Muslim youth 99–102 Muslim Youth in Germany (MJD) 100–104, 107, 108 narrative 1, 2, 8, 12, 32, 39, 49, 50, 55, 75, 76, 162–164, 168, 169, 177, 183, 194, 202 nasasalars 76 Nation-state 1, 5, 6, 13, 14, 62, 65, 119 navjote 87, 89 Neo-Apostolic Church 155 New York (NY) 6, 10, 115, 118, 129–145, 168, 180 Nigeria 9, 45, 123, 207–223 non-discursive encounters 191 NY. See New York (NY) Ocak 35, 36 orthodox 3, 5, 11, 19, 75, 76, 83, 84, 87–89, 91, 99, 117, 120, 124, 167 Paris 3, 6, 114, 168 Parsi 12, 47, 73–93 Pentecostal, Pentecostalism 16–18, 63, 68, 114, 119, 120, 174–178, 180, 207–223 pilgrimage 25, 64, 137, 192

index229 political 2, 3, 8, 9, 13, 18, 27, 29, 38, 46–51, 55–58, 64, 66, 70, 77, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113, 123, 136, 137, 140–144, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 169, 172, 173, 175, 193, 201, 203, 207–209, 212–214, 216–221, 223 politics of place, politics of recognition 15–17, 26, 29, 39 pollution 76, 191, 197 postnational 15 priests, high priests 7, 8, 76, 78, 79, 89–91, 125 prison 152, 158–161, 163, 217 privatization of religion 3, 27 Protestantism 117 public space 33, 45, 130, 137, 140–142, 144, 153, 207–223 qigong 129–131, 141, 142, 144, 145 Québec 6, 119 racial segregation 47 recognition 2, 3, 10, 12, 18, 26, 27, 29, 33, 49, 53, 75, 86, 88, 105, 116, 125, 144, 159, 162, 175, 183 reformation 114 reformist 19, 83–85, 89 Religious authorities 78, 87, 99, 103, 107, 109, 124, 195 boundaries 18–20, 115, 191 decline 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 120, 169 diversity 9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 115, 138, 140, 173 imaginaries 65 innovation 1, 8, 18, 19, 61, 113–125, 169, 174, 177, 207 knowledge 99, 100, 102, 107 minority/minorities 114, 115, 118, 119 movement 118, 120, 130, 139, 169, 221 pluralism 15, 117–120, 123, 137, 138 procession 63, 65 revival 6, 99, 116, 121, 122, 139, 212 spaces 17, 92, 109, 110, 169, 186 symbols 7, 65, 130, 192 vitality 9, 167–186 repulsion 191 resistance 16, 18, 69, 123, 124, 130, 135, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 168, 173, 174, 209 Roxan Shah 88 rural 1, 4, 5, 26, 27, 31–34, 39, 54, 61, 62, 76, 81, 92, 110, 114, 167–171, 176–179, 181, 215 sacred space 9, 12, 18, 25, 73, 78, 79, 87–89, 92 Sao Paulo 119, 124, 125 Sassen, Saskia 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 47, 62, 151 secular, secularism, secularization 1, 25, 45, 61, 73, 99, 113, 139, 150, 167, 192, 208

Simmel, Georg 4, 113 Singapore 3, 61–71, 137 social inequalities 17, 19–20, 149, 168, 173, 179, 180, 184 socialism, post-socialism 150, 152, 155, 163, 175 social network 99, 152, 159, 170 solidarity 3, 9, 19, 45, 50, 52, 53, 56–58, 99, 105, 110, 125, 170, 171, 182–185, 213 South Africa 5, 19, 45–48, 120, 123, 168, 175; see also Africa South African 9, 46–58, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 186 spatiality 2, 92, 130 spatialization 13, 14, 173 state, state religion 9, 27, 29 structural opportunities 137, 138, 140, 142 success 2, 7, 19, 68, 74, 80, 84, 102, 105, 107, 144, 164, 167–186, 208, 214, 220, 222, 223 Sunnism 29, 31, 38, 40 tactic 103, 104, 157, 159–164 Tariq Ramadan 107, 108 Taylor, Charles 119, 121 territorial, territorialization 1, 2, 13, 14, 16, 40, 114, 115, 130, 133–134, 140, 144, 151 topographies 7, 12, 19, 79–80, 176 tourism 8 Tower of Silence 12, 73–93 tradition 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 18, 19, 25–27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37–39, 68, 74, 76, 84–87, 89, 92, 99, 101–103, 109, 113, 114, 116, 117, 120–125, 130, 138, 167–169, 175, 177, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191, 211, 212, 215, 217 transnational migration 1, 9, 14 transnational, transnationalism 1, 6, 9, 10, 14–19, 26, 27, 29, 45, 55–57, 63, 99–110, 123, 130, 134–137, 140, 143, 169, 207, 223 trust (trustee) 73, 75, 77, 78, 83, 84, 89–91, 93, 104, 160, 162 Turkey 17, 18, 25–42, 101, 102, 109, 123 university, universities 83, 104, 142, 180, 182, 209–212, 216, 218 veil 105, 109 Vertovec, Steven 118, 139 vultures 76, 82–84, 89, 91 Weber, Max 14, 114 Yusuf al-Quardawi 107, 108 zheng fa 136 Zoroastrian 73, 75–78, 80, 83–85, 87–90