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| 1 |
ID:
160066
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although Pakistan was created as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims, religious freedom was one of its founding principles. Seventy years later, Pakistan is better known for religious extremism and the persecution of Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities. Pakistan's blasphemy law is a state-sanctioned tool of religious oppression used to target members of minority faith communities whether Ahmadiya, Christian, Hindu, or Shiite, as well as Sunnis who criticize the law. This paper discusses the blasphemy law and other laws that have led to the state of religious oppression in Pakistan.
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| 2 |
ID:
160072
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| Summary/Abstract |
Recent efforts to prevent cow-slaughter in India have prompted U.S. concern about violations of religious freedom. But although the politics of cow protection poses a significant threat to disadvantaged groups in India, efforts to ameliorate that threat through an international policy of religious freedom also carry serious risks. This paper reviews reports issued by the U.S. Department of State's Office of International Religious Freedom and by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. It argues that by unnecessarily portraying the politics of cow protection in terms of a stark conflict between Hindus and Muslims, they threaten to undermine the goal of reducing anti-minority discrimination and violence in India.
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| 3 |
ID:
160065
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| Summary/Abstract |
Article 370 of the Indian constitution gives the northern province of Jammu and Kashmir special status within the union. Today that provision forms a nucleus of fierce political contention between secularists and religious nationalists in India, despite the manifest whittling down of the article's most significant aspects. This development is counterintuitive: the original intent of the article's introduction had no relation to questions of religion. This essay attempts to understand this unanticipated role, as a marker of the state's secularity or lack thereof, the article has come to play in Indian politics. It contends that the seeds were sown even at the time of shaping the Indian constitution of a perspective that viewed the people of Jammu and Kashmir according to their religious affiliations.
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| 4 |
ID:
160070
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper challenges the popular perception that Bangladesh has become the latest battleground between secularism and Islam and problematizes the simplified understanding and the binarization of religion and secularism in Bangladesh. It argues that extant discussions on the one hand overlooks the historical background of the interactions of religion and while on the other hand, it ignores the extant multiplicity of both Islamic practices and the understanding of secularism. The author calls for a nuanced understanding of the complex historical and contemporaneous developments regarding relationships between religion and politics.
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| 5 |
ID:
160068
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the experience of religious minorities in Myanmar between 2011 and 2017 in the context of the 2008 constitution and a new system of governance. It highlights the precarity of religious minorities and argues that neither the constitution nor the state were reliable sources of protection or redress during this period. The first section considers the multiple identities of religious minorities with regard to citizenship and national belonging. The second section elucidates how an enabling environment for Buddhist nationalism emerged and what types of actions state and non-state actors have taken with regard to religious minorities. The final section addresses the 2008 constitution and rule of law in Myanmar in order to understand the challenges for religious minorities in securing justice and protection.
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| 6 |
ID:
160069
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| Summary/Abstract |
Post-civil war, Buddhism has gone from being a privileged religion in Sri Lanka to a hegemonic religion. If the ethnic conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam calcified Sinhalese Buddhist sensibilities, the comprehensive victory over the group has emboldened Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists who insist on majority superordination and minority subordination. This essay discusses how the nationalist ideology undergirding Sinhalese Buddhist majoritarianism has exacerbated religious intolerance especially towards the island's Muslims and Christian Evangelicals.
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| 7 |
ID:
160067
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| Summary/Abstract |
How do we understand the 15th amendment of the Bangladeshi Constitution that restored the principle of secularism and simultaneously (re)inscribed certain populations as outside the cultural nation? I approach this question through a close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates of 1972. The precarious state of minorities, I contend, is not a symptom of an incomplete or failed secularism but a feature of the violence inherent to the nation-state form. The Bangladeshi example suggests not only that minority is a profoundly unstable category but that some minorities are visibly critical to national self-fashioning while others must be invisibilized as national others.
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| 8 |
ID:
160071
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| Summary/Abstract |
Over the years, Pakistan's notorious blasphemy laws have been a central instrument for the persecution of religious minorities. While these laws are colonial in origin, they exist today within the context of a general Islamisation of laws, which combined with the state's inability to hold a monopoly over violence have contributed to growing anarchy in the country. This paper traces the evolution of Pakistan's religious nationalism, presents debates around the blasphemy laws and their implementation, and considers the possibilities for reform.
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