Session 8: Individual Papers: States, Religion, and Discourses of the "Other"

Organizer: Raka Ray, University of Califonia, Berkeley

Chair: Paula Richman, Oberlin College

Pakistan’s Madrassahs: Teaching the Alphabets of Jihad?

Ali Riaz, Illinois State University

Religious education in Muslim countries has come under scrutiny after the tragic events of 9/11. In the wake of terrorist attacks, discussions on ties between Islamic religious educational institutions, namely Madarssahs, and radical militant groups have featured prominently in the media. However, in the frenzied coverage of events, a vital question has been overlooked: why Islamic educational institutions whose traditions date back thousands of years have been transformed drastically? This paper attempts to seek an answer to this question through an examination of Madrassahs in Pakistan, the second largest Muslim nation in the world. Pakistan has seen a phenomenal increase in Islamic religious schools since its independence. In 1947, the country had 245 religious schools, by 2000 the number stood at 6,761; and by September 11, 2001, it stood at 6,870. There has been a 2,745 percent increase over 55 years, or on average 120 schools per year have come into existence. The paper argues that while encouragements from successive regimes, an unremitting flow of foreign funds (especially from Saudi Arabia), and the absence of governmental oversight are the principal factors in the dramatic rise in numbers, the transformation of Madrassahs into schools of militancy and the recruiting ground of global Jihadists is intrinsically linked to the political developments of the nation. Ruled by military regimes for more than half of its independent life and acting as the "frontline state" in war against communism, the nation has never addressed two factors—sectarianism (i.e., the conflict between adherents of the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam) and regionalism (i.e., the emphasis on the regional identities of the people of various provinces)—which have made the country ungovernable and increasingly turned it into a breeding ground for transnational terrorists.

Fundamentalism, the Curriculum, and National Identity: Lessons from India

Marie Lall, University of London

This paper discusses how the Indian BJP-led government rewrote the curriculum and changed the text book content in BJP-led states in order to form a particular national identity and create the ‘other’ in order to suit their ideology and the politics of the day. If these nationalist policies were to be implemented nationwide, India’s multicultural heritage would be destroyed from below by teaching children to see India as solely a product of Hinduism.

Drawing both on original Indian textbooks and on recent literature on the relationship between nationalism and globalization, the paper will propose the argument that fundamentalization in general, and curricular fundamentaliszation in particular are state-controlled discursive mechanisms through which to contain and deflect potential dysfunctionalities produced by the effects of globalization in societies. The structural transformation in the social and economic sectors of society with its winners and losers are in our view supported by discursive strategies through which blame and responsibility for detrimental effects can be deflected from the policy of structural transformation itself.

Regressive Anti-Hindutva? The James Laine Affair within and besides Election 2004

Spencer A. Leonard, University of Chicago

In early 2004, the Sambhaji Brigade, the male youth wing of the social reformist Maratha Seva Sangh, attacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune causing considerable damage to its book collections, catalogs, and reference aids. The perpetrators did not, for the most part, flee the scene when police arrived, but rather went peaceably to jail to dramatize their political protest against the scholarly assistance that the institute had provided to American research scholar Dr. James Laine. As a result, Laine’s book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, was banned by the Maharashtra State Government, thereby signaling its acceptance of the Sambhaji Brigade’s aims, if not its means.

My study focuses on the Laine affair and the attack on the Bhandarkar Institute as political and media events. The study proceeds from a thorough analysis of five mainstream English and Marathi language newspapers, the Shiv Sena daily Samna, Marathi weeklies Maharashtra and Chitralekha, in addition to a wide variety of more disparate writings in Marathi including writings in the Sambhaji Brigade’s own mouthpiece publications. Drawing upon this large body of materials I will first outline the highly curious and involved party political dynamics surrounding the affair in the context of the elections, and then proceed to the actual rhetoric and content of the public debate, attempting to highlight salient dimensions of the fetishized cultural memory and authoritarian identity politics that have in recent years come to substitute for substantive political debate in Maharashtra.

Between Security and Conflict: Governments and Muslim Minorities in Asia

Sandra Leavitt, Georgetown University

While contestation is inevitable between groups, especially in culturally diverse countries, violent conflict is not. Asian governments have chosen different policies toward their Muslim minorities—with significantly different outcomes. In several cases, collective action by Muslim minorities against governments has turned violent and become entrenched, notably in Thailand and the Philippines. In other cases, governments and Muslim minorities enjoy mutually supportive relations, Sri Lanka and Singapore being two such examples. These conflicts affect government legitimacy, national stability, international trade and security, and efforts to democratize, not to mention the well-being of millions of Muslims. Scant research—and no cross-national research—has been conducted on government policies toward Muslim minorities in Asia, despite their significance for intrastate political stability and international security.

This paper utilizes quantitative methods to ascertain key factors that contribute to tension or harmony between Asian governments and their Islamic minority populations in China, Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, India, and Sri Lanka. These countries offer a spectrum of policy outcomes: success, mixed, and failure. Analytic focus is on the types and degree of discrimination or favoritism—including economic, geographic, political, cultural and religious. The status of Asia’s Muslim minorities relative to other societal groups within each state are correlated with stated grievances, political aims, governance and economic systems, political organization, and health of civil society more generally. Data is derived from the Minorities at Risk dataset, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III, Polity IV project, World Values Index, and the World Bank and other governmentally provided statistics.

The Other Side: Tajik Discourses of the Afghan Border

Jonah Steinberg, University of Pennsylvania

The international boundary between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, like most borders, divides historically-unitary populations who share language, religion, and ethnic affiliation. In this paper I will draw upon ethnographic data collected during recent fieldwork to explore the ways that the populations of the Pamir mountains of Gorno-Badakhshan on the Tajik side of this border perceive their counterparts on the Afghan side. I will discuss the historical formation of this border, its role in the present moment, and its possible futures. This discussion will focus in particular on the process by which the international boundary has created two widely-divergent societies from a once-unified sphere of interaction. I will argue that the power of this border, like others, in the daily cultural lives of local societies, derives from the disciplinary power (Foucault 1977) of the nation-state, a power which subjects eventually come to impose upon themselves; that the Isma’ili Muslim, Pamiri-speaking residents on the Tajik side of this border conceptualize the residents of the other side as a version of themselves at an earlier stage in an imaginary evolutionary history (Fabian 1983; Said 1979); and that through these dynamics, the residents of the Tajik Pamir come to see the inhabitants of the Afghan side, once their kin, as a cultural other which is a wild, primal, and organic variant of self (Lacan 1977). Thus a single population becomes two wherein one sees the other as a photonegative of the self, a dialectical reflection and complement of the self rather than an autonomous entity.