Islam and freedom of religion: Anthropology, theology and clashes of universalisms in contemporary Malaysia

Abstract

In 2006 a forum to discuss Article 11 of the Malaysian constitution on religious freedom sparked a major and unexpected pushback. Many Muslim and Malay NGOs and concerned citizens argued that they were defending Islam from the onslaught of liberalising forces in Malaysia. The clash between what could be termed liberal human rights discourses and/or reformist Islam and reactionary Islam is also one about Islamic theology in Malaysia. It is an example of how theology can be internally divisive and presents a problematic case study for an anthropological encounter and engagement with multiple theologies, debates about history and the anthropological project. This article charts one path for the encounter between an anthropologist and his ethnographic other that aims to understand these diverse perspectives and also seeks to understand both the project of writing an anthropology of Islam that incorporates Islamic theology and Muslims' lifeworlds that form the basis for it.

Anthropological theologies: Engagements and encounters

“…Anthropology, as Malcolm Haddon () and John Morton () demonstrate, when conceived as an unconscious form of religious performance, marks a transformative instance where the secular‐rationalist boundaries between theology and anthropology coalesce and become indistinguishable. Throwing anthropological epistemologies into relief against pagan, Islamic and Christian theologies, Rachel Morgain (), Gerhard Hoffstaedter () and Philip Fountain () illuminate productive fissures and interrogate the borders separating the secular and the religious. They do so by examining the positioning of the anthropologist, through attentiveness to ethnographic detail and by identifying instances of transgression between faith and life.…”

Afterword: Let's keep it awkward: Anthropology, theology, and otherness

“…My guess is that this branch of theology would make for a very interesting anthropological dialogue partner and one that could well help us clarify even further our own relations with otherness. This volume as a whole, and Haddon's (2013) and Hoffstaedter's () articles in particular, remind us that those relations are no more settled or simple now than they have ever been.…”

“…These two concerns need not be linked. Hage's () crucial recent article (which Gerhard Hoffstaedter () draws on to good effect in his contribution here), for example, shows that it is possible to push the second, critical concern decisively forward without any interest in the first. And precisely because these two impulses need not be bundled together, it is a welcome surprise to find that all of the articles here hold to keeping something like both of them alive at once—tying the study of religion (though again, not always Christianity) to a concern for the critical force of the anthropological attention to otherness and using this twin foundation as the basis for staging various encounters between anthropology and theology.…”

“…Even in Malcolm Haddon's (2013) article, which is focused most centrally on a particular ritual—the Hare Krishna sankirtana rite of public proselytism by means of chanting—the author is careful to set this ritual practice in the context of the worked out system of ideas that inform its practitioners understanding of it. Likewise, Hoffstaedter () draws out the intellectual stakes involved in disputes over Islam and movements for social justice in Malaysia—disputes that others would be quick to divest of all theological importance in their rush to focus on the antagonistic social relations that mark them.…”

Theology as an Ethnographic Object: An Anthropology of Eastern Christian Rupture

“…Reading theology as part of an ethnography is a timely analytical move within social scientific study of religion for which there is disciplinary precedence in, for example, Evans-Pritchard (1937) approach to Azande witchcraft belief as a culturally acting logic. Likewise, in the Anthropology of Islam, Hoffstaedter (2013) has demonstrated the important role of theology in the success and political implications of NGO intervention. 13 Such a position can be affirmed from two different theoretical positions.…”