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Paper short abstract:

Genealogies in Islam are known as media channeling authority from one person to another across time and space. Focusing on Indian Ocean networks in Islamic Java, I discuss interactions between genealogies and other claims to authority that bypass the established infrastructure genealogies provide.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have noted that genealogies of descent and transmission or initiation play an important role in the spacio-temporal imagination of Muslims as they provide the imaginal and institutional infrastructure for linking disparate historical moments across vast geographic areas with the teachings and power of the Prophet Muhammad and his Revelation in seventh-century Arabia. Spread across the Indian Ocean world by traveling sayyids, Sufis, and scholars (Ho 2006, Alatas 2020), this genealogical infrastructure has often organized power relations by validating hierarchies among Muslims and Muslim communities (Green 2012; Birchok 2015). Yet in the Malay-Indonesian world, genealogies often coexist alongside a very different practice of connecting with the sacred history of revelation and claiming its authority: Qur’anic figures feature in narratives and appear to Southeast Asian Muslims to convey God’s knowledge and blessings (Brown 1970; Iskandar 2011), thus creating additional, narrative relays that likewise channel knowledge and blessings from the prophetic past to the present. These figures include especially Nabī Khiḍr, Moses’s mysterious companion in the Sura of the Cave, who has unique access to God’s knowledge. Frequently the teacher of Java’s kings and wali in traditional Javanese literature (Soeratno 1978; Meyer 2021), Khiḍr is known to this day to meet with select individuals (Quinn 2018). Drawing on my ethnographic field research in Yogyakarta, I ask what meaning Javanese Muslims assign to the appearance of Khiḍr, especially in relation to more institutionalized infrastructures of genealogical linkage. I argue that Khiḍr’s presence simultaneously relativizes these conventional links, underscoring divine freedom irreducible to conventional genealogies, and legitimizes them, since Khiḍr is most commonly known to appear to individuals who are already part of their reach. By thinking through these ambiguous relations, this paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of genealogy and the infrastructures of authority in the Indian Ocean world.

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This paper analyses the multilingual communicative infrastructure of the Catholic Church to discuss how a global religion is enabled by translational scaffolding.

Paper long abstract:

The Catholic Church has an unprecedented commitment to communication in multiple languages across various formats. The history, scope and extent of this multilingualism is unparalleled: from multilingual Twitter to contemporary stories on Vatican News, the Catholic Church reaches out to millions of people on a daily basis in their own native language. This multilingual effort is largely hidden and unacknowledged even though it is a fundamental infrastructure for a global religion. This paper will discuss the translational structures in place to enable multilingual religious communication in the Catholic Church. Although much is known about the institutional multilingual infrastructure of international organisations such as the EU or the UN (Pym 2000; Tosi 2003; Trebits 2009; Biel 2014; Drugan, Strandvik et al. 2018), the multilingualism of the Catholic Church has been largely ignored and investigations of translation structures have been largely confined to the Bible.

Using findings from the research project PIETRA (ERC grant 101001478) this paper will analyse how translational scaffolding allows for global communicative capacities which transcend the institutional centre. The processes involved in supporting multilingual output reveal how a collective is enabled despite linguistic difference. The mediation between the religious centre and regional locations through translation is not without its difficulties, however, as cultural and linguistic difference challenge the desire for a united religious community. Consistency of message across multiple languages, cultures and formats can put demands on the communicative apparatus of a universalizing religion. The paper will show how the tension between the need of religious authorities to control their message and the desire to communicate it as widely as possible is particularly acute at moments of technological change in the communication apparatus, placing additional strains on the capacities of the infrastructural linguistic scaffolds.

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This paper analyses the use of Roman Catholic infrastructures by the Byzantine Catholic Church in North Macedonia. It aims at testing the thesis of an on-going Latinisation as a strategy of modernisation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on how Eastern Catholic Churches (ECC) use the infrastructure of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). ECC are often neglected when considering the Catholic Church which is often only associated with the RCC. Because the ECC belong to the network of the RCC, i.e. they accept the dogmatic theology and the hierarchy, especially the pope as their head. Due to their historical emergence from Orthodox Churches, they also have their own characteristics as they celebrate the liturgy according to the Eastern rite, venerate icons and their priests are allowed to marry before their first ordination. Standing between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, ECC use infrastructures of both major churches to draw and cross boundaries. This applies especially to ECC in countries where all three churches co-exist, for example in North Macedonia. Using the infrastructure of the RCC consciously can be determined as Latinisation which for some ECC means a strategy of modernisation in terms of westernisation. This paper aims at testing this thesis exemplified by the Byzantine Catholic Church in North Macedonia. Since its origins in 1859, this Church has overlapping infrastructures with the RCC in terms of organization. Besides hierarchical structures, this case study analyses the infrastructure of theological education, and of the religious practice including the design of the churches and saint veneration. Hence, this study aims to answer the question: Which infrastructure of the RCC does the Byzantine Catholic Church in North Macedonia use? Methodologically and in terms of content, this study is based on qualitative empirical research which complements the desideratum of the research literature on the Byzantine Catholic Church specifically in Macedonia.

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This paper traces the modern history of statutes governing oversight of Hindu pilgrimage temples in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. It identifies continuities between the period of British rule and contemporary Uttarakhand and analyzes intractable contradictions in Indian secularism.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2021, the state government of Uttarakhand, India withdrew the Chār Dhām Devasthānam Management Board Act, a law passed only two years prior to bring fifty-three temples in Garhwal, a linguistic/cultural region in the Indian Himalayas, under state government authority. Supporters of this bill had sought to ensure transparency in the management of these major pilgrimage temples. Temple officiants and others with established financial and political interests in these sites vehemently contested the law’s efforts to expand India’s “state-temple-corporate nexus” (Nanda 2011) into the pilgrimage zones of the Himalayas, formerly administered according to diverse local traditions. From 1817, when the British assumed authority over the small Tehri Garhwal kingdom in which the temples lay, until 1939, when an act similar to the 2019 law established oversight of the Badrinath and Kedarnath temples, a series of contradictory agreements involving the Badrinath rawal (high priest), the Raja of the “native state” of Tehri Garhwal, and British officials charged with administering the kingdom’s affairs reveal the incongruities at the core of the notion of a modern Hindu state. Just as British officials were caught between the imperative to avoid involvement in the religious affairs of their Hindu subjects and the moral demands to provide good governance to those it ruled, partisans in the 2019-2021 debate differed on whether to privilege the “traditional” rights of those attached to the temples or the transparent and ethical accounting of their finances. Drawing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reports deposited in the India Office Collection at the British Library, theories of Indian secularism (Dressler and Mandair 2011), and economic theorization of South Asian religion (Birla 2009; Iyer 2018; Nanda 2011), this paper argues that the debates over the 2021 Chār Dhām Devasthānam Management Board Act rehearse the tortured Indian secularism and reveal again its intractable contradictions.

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Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I will focus on the role of Ashara Mubaraka in community development within Dubai and among Bohras globally. In 2004 this international event, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, took place in Dubai, generating new urban and community development in the area.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I will focus on the role of Ashara Mubaraka in community development within Dubai and among Bohras globally. Ashara Mubaraka is a particular way of the Bohras to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, as a siginificant marker of Shia Islam. For the Bohras, the annual Ashara Muburaka is an international event, where as many from the community as possible travel to one particular place where the dai spiritual leader has decided to be for the commemoration. In 2004, this event took place in Dubai, for the first and only time in the Gulf (other places have been various cities in India, East Africa, the US and in 2022 London). At this time, a new mosque was just inaugurated in a new and scarsely populated area in the then outskirts of Dubai city, and the gathering took place around this mosque. This also prompted many Bohras from India and elsewhere to decide to move to Dubai, and Bohras thus took part in developing this new area. Today there is also one Bohra school and a residential complex built by the community and specifically for Bohras in the neighborhood. In the presentation I will discuss what such infrastructure – mosque, schools and residences – mean to the community, and how this builds on the event of Ashara Mubaraka as generative (following Kapferer 2015), and as a social technology of community development.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the formation of Bohra Muslim infrastructures of piety from 1880s-1980s and its connection to the gradually strengthened position of the da'i, the Bohra spiritual authority. The Bohra case casts light on the relation between modern technology and traditional religious authority.

Paper long abstract:

This paper traces the historical formation of Bohra Muslim infrastructures of piety from the 1880s to the 1980s and its interrelation with the position of the da'i al-mutlaq, the spiritual authority of the Bohras. In following the establishment and development of the main Bohra fund and institution for pilgrimage, the Faiz al-Husayni, and similar subsequent Bohra efforts, the paper argues that in developing these modern infrastructures of piety, the Bohra leadership was simultaneously developing and strengthening da'i-ship. Beginning in Karachi in the late 19th century, on the pilgrimage route to the shia shrines of Iraq, these infrastructural networks subsequently developed and expanded throughout the Middle East, culminating in the Bohras' "return" to Cairo in the 1970s. The paper zooms in on three moments during this history: (1) the establishment of the Faiz al-Husayni and the initial power struggles between da'is and wealthy reformist merchants; (2) the interwar takeover of the Faiz by the da'i Syedna Tahir Saifuddin as well as his contributions to and own use of these infrastructures; (3) the culmination of the Bohra infrastructures of piety in the revival of the Fatimid "ritual city" from the 1980s onwards.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the ways in which Dawoodi Bohras - a Shia Muslim sect of around one million globally – make sense of their socio-religious identity constituted by multiple strands of intersecting positionalities emerging from their local, national, and transnational contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing primarily on Mumbai, the Bohra community’s religious and administrative ‘headquarters’ the paper is structured around two research question: Firstly, within the socio-political and cultural context of historical and contemporary South Asia how does one account for and examine intra-communal difference and its inter-communal dynamics and implications? Secondly, and more specifically, how and to what extent do the overlaps and entanglements between the Dawoodi Bohra community’s ideas of modernism and traditionalism reflect a narrative of exceptionalism that complicates and problematises categorical identity formation and its politics in India? In doing so, it seeks to simultaneously traverse and unpack a conceptual and methodological tightrope for understanding how the dichotomies of universalism and specificity, mobility and rootedness, authority and individualism, cosmopolitanism and parochialism and, presence and absence inform and complicate the Bohra community’s relationships and dynamics with and within : 1) the locality (Native Town and Bhendi Bazaar); 2) the city (Bombay/Mumbai); 3) the nation (India) and; 4) the community (religious/global/regional/transregional). This shall be done by looking at the ongoing Bohra community-led Bhendi Bazaar urban redevelopment project in Mumbai employing the conceptual lens of critical infrastructure studies. The paper combines the methodologies of ethnographic and archival research, to navigate the past and the present to understand how this current moment of colossal infrastructural dissembling and re-assembling opens-up questions of belonging, memory, nostalgia, aspiration, identity, and politics which provide specific insights into Bohra imaginaries of the self and the other along the four aforementioned registers.

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Paper short abstract:

The paper maps and compares recent community projects in Mumbai, a centre of the Bohra community as well as diaspora localities. Encountering references to the Fatimid legacy it raises the question which ideas inform the construction and infrastructure projects of the community?

Paper long abstract:

August 2022: being given an introductory tour to the shiny new Al-Saadah tower as a first landmark construction in the grand urban redevelopment project of Bhendi Bazaar, a predominantly Bohra neighbourhood in Mumbai, my Bohra host highlights elements of Islamic architecture in the high-rising block. Probed further, a Fatimid architectural legacy is stressed and jaali or ornamental / latticed screens covering the lower windows are referred to as an example of this style.

Initial fieldwork in Mumbai suggests that Fatimid architecture or rather a Neo-Fatimid form plays a major role in the construction of an identity for the Daudi Bohras, i.e. for a community involved in diverse infrastructure projects such as bazaars, universities or mosques across a wide-ranging geographical network spanning the Indian ocean (and beyond).

The paper starts by mapping and comparing recent community projects in Mumbai as a centre of the community as well as various diaspora localities and raises the question which architectural ideas inform the construction and infrastructure projects or (re)development more broadly of the Bohra community?