Chiara Formichi - Religious Pluralism, State and Society in Asia

Taking a critical approach to the concept of religious pluralism, this book examines the dynamics of religious co-existence in Asia as they are directly addressed by governments, or indirectly managed by groups and individuals. It looks at the quality of relations that emerge in encounters among people of different religious traditions or among people who hold different visions within the same tradition. Chapters focus in particular on the places of everyday religious diversity in Asian societies in order to explore how religious groups have confronted new situations of religious diversity. The book goes on to explore the conditions under which active religious pluralism emerges (or not) from material contexts of diversity.

Chiara Formichi is Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a PhD in the History of Southeast Asia from SOAS (University of London). Her publications include Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and political Islam in 20th century Indonesia (2012) and the edited volume Shiism and Beyond: Alid piety in Muslim Southeast Asia.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner, Professor at the City University of New York and Director of the Centre for Religion and Society at the University of Western Sydney

State Management of Religion in Indonesia

Myengkyo Seo

Religious Pluralism, State and Society in Asia

Edited by Chiara Formichi

First published 2014

by Routledge

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And by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 selection and editorial material, Chiara Formichi; individual chapters, the contributors.

The right of the editor to be identified as author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Religious pluralism, state and society in Asia / edited by Chiara Formichi. pages cm. (Routledge religion in contemporary Asia series ; 2)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Religious pluralismAsia. 2. Religion and stateAsia. 3. Religion and sociologyAsia. 4. AsiaReligion. I. Formichi, Chiara, 1982- editor of compilation. II. Kersten, Carool. Urbanization, civil society and religious pluralism in Indonesia and Turkey.

BL1033.R46 2013

201.5095dc23

2013010147

ISBN: 978-0-415-83884-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-88756-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by FiSH Books Ltd, Enfield

CHIARA FORMICHI

CAROOL KERSTEN

MARK R. MULLINS

LIANG YONGJIA

PHYLLIS GHIM-LIAN CHEW

WAI-CHI CHEE

ANN GRODZINS GOLD

MANUEL VICTOR J. SAPITULA

YEOH SENG GUAN

HEW WAI-WENG

JANET STEELE

JULIA DAY HOWELL

ANGELA RUDERT

Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew has authored many books on language, education, women's studies and comparative religion. Her latest books are titled Emergent Lingua Francas (New York: Routledge, 2009) and A sociolinguistic history of early identities in Singapore: from Colonialism to Nationalism (Basingstroke: Palgrave, 2013). An applied linguist, she has served on the international advisory boards of such as Teaching Education, Asian EFL Journal, Asia TEFL Journal and Gendering Asia. She is the project advisor for Instep, the textbook and audio-visual series used in Singapore schools since 2001. She is currently Principal Researcher for the National Institute of Education project on Religious Ideologies and Literacy Practices.

Wai-chi Chee has a PhD in Anthropology from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and currently teaches at the same department. Her research interests include migration, education, globalization, governance, grassroots activism, ethnicity, culture and identity, and youth. Geographical areas of her research include Mainland China, Hong Kong, and South Asia. Her dissertation addresses how Mainland Chinese and South Asian teenage migrant students adapt to schooling and life in Hong Kong. She has published articles in Asian Anthropology, Ethnography and Education, Multicultural Education Review, and Taiwan Journal of Anthropology.

Julia Day Howell has a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University, and is now Professor of the Sociology of Religion in the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at the University of Western Sydney. She has worked for over thirty years on movements of religious reform in Indonesia, and on New Religious Movements both in Indonesia and the West. Her early research focused on conversions of Javanese people to the newly recognized Hindu and Buddhist religions, and on the eclectic mystical groups. In the 1990s she turned her attention to mainline Islam, pioneering studies of the urban Sufi revival and contemporary forms of spirituality among urban cosmopolitans, and contributing to emerging studies of Islamic televangelism and the marketing of Islamic personal and business development programs. Her edited volume, Sufism and the Modern in Islam (with Martin van Bruinessen), has been translated into Indonesian, as have numbers of her articles and chapters.

Chiara Formichi is Assistant Professor in History and Religion at the Department of Asian and International Studies at City University of Hong Kong. Her recent publications include Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in 20th Century Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV, 2012) and