Women's Studies International Forum 33 (2010) 301304

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Women's Studies International Forum

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / w s i f

From village religion to global networks: Women, religious nationalism and sustainability in South and Southeast Asia

Most of the articles in this special issue derive from an international workshop organised in Delhi in November 2007 by Santi Rozario and Geoffrey Samuel around the theme of women, religion and sustainability in South and Southeast Asia.1 The background to this workshop was the striking increase in politicised religion or religious nationalism (to use Peter van der Veer's term, van der Veer, 1994) in recent years in South and Southeast Asia, as in other parts of the world. Women have been central to this movement in many respects. Since female behaviour (modesty, chastity, etc.) has often been a key signier and boundary marker for these new movements, it is women who have been expected to modify their behaviour in conformity to the new prescription. Women have often been the objects of attack for failing to conform, but women too have in many cases been key supporters of the new movements. At the same time, globalisation and development activities have opened up new employment opportunities for women, often incompatible with the demands of participation in the new religious movements. Religion can be a divisive and destructive force in contemporary South Asia, as elsewhere in today's world. South Asia's religious traditions Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian have provided a basis for destructive forms of communal identication, have encouraged hostility towards outsiders and in extreme cases have justied violence against members of other communities. All the major South Asian religions have also been used to support oppressive and discriminatory attitudes to women. Yet religion in South Asia covers a wide range of complex institutions and forms of behaviour, and to regard them all as always necessarily negative and destructive would be a gross oversimplication. It would also be self-defeating, since religion will undoubtedly continue to be a major aspect of all South Asian societies for the foreseeable future. We need a more nuanced and sensitive approach to South Asian religious life, one which can encompass both positive and negative components, and we hope that this collection will be a stepping-stone towards achieving this.

A particular concern for the workshop, as for the project that gave rise to it, was to understand what happens to those aspects of traditional religious behaviour that can be seen as positive, life-supporting and linked to human and environmental sustainability in the face of these new critiques. What, too, happens to the linkages between women of different communities now that new politicised religious identities drive women towards identication with purer forms of religion, untainted by association with the other religious community? For example, various women's rituals at weddings and births, traditionally common to all religious groups, are now banned by new Islamic movements, who argue these are superstitions and associated with Hinduism. While there have been a number of studies of the negative impact of new forms of Islam and Hinduism, in particular for South Asia, there has been less attention to what may have been of value in the older forms, and how much of this may have survived despite the pressure to reject forms and practices associated with the other community. We also wanted to bring together a substantial body of material on Bangladesh, since much of the anthropological literature on Bangladesh, perhaps reecting the strong regional focus on development issues, tends to treat religion in relatively simplistic and reductionist terms. We feel that if we are to understand the part that religion is playing in women's lives, and how this may affect the present and future development of a society such as Bangladesh, then it is vital to see religion as meaningful and signicant for Bangladeshi women. Bangladesh has its own regional specicity, but many of the issues that are signicant for Bangladesh also recur in the wider South and Southeast Asian context, so we also included a number of comparative papers in the workshop. Our original intention had been to include several papers from Southeast Asia, but in the event only one speaker on Southeast Asia (Maila Stivens) was able to attend. After the workshop, we invited three further Southeast Asian specialists (Mary Ida Bagus, Rachel Rinaldo, and Minako Sakai) to contribute to provide further coverage of this region.

0277-5395/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2010.02.003

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From village religion to global networks: Women, religious nationalism and sustainability in South and Southeast Asia

The collection begins with six papers on Bangladesh. Shelley Feldman's Shame and Honour: The Violence of Gendered Norms under conditions of Global Crisis introduces the Bangladesh section, since its focus on moral regulation as part of the Bangladeshi state provides an important analytic tool to understand both the situation of women in Bangladesh, and the apparent reluctance or inability of the state, despite its relatively democratic nature and pressure from international organisations, to act to defend women effectively against violence. Feldman points to the expansion of religious education, the progressive marketisation and privatisation of the rural economy, and the stress on reducing women's fertility as factors that have revitalised and reinforced the already existing discourse on honour and shame, reshaping the decisions and alternatives open to women. Referring to the work of Philip Corrigan (Corrigan, 1981; Corrigan & Sayer, 1985), she notes that moral regulation is an intrinsic part of any state project. In Bangladesh, civil, religious and customary practice have become conated, leaving women in situations of domestic violence or social ostracism with few alternatives. In such a context, women's suicide may represent a conscious choice when faced by a life of fear, ostracism, and harassment, conditions which undermine women's everyday sociation and security. Ainoon Naher's article examines, on the basis of her eld research from the 1990s, one of the principal manifestations of Islamist2 activity in rural Bangladesh in recent years. This is hostility to Western-funded development activity and specically to the participation of rural women in NGO activities, which has regularly been portrayed as transgressing Bangladeshi norms for female behaviour. Naher shows how these campaigns make sense in the rural context, where they are able to exploit both the destabilisation of the local power structure through NGO activities, and a range of fears and misunderstandings among the rural masses. She also examines a variety of ways in which women have resisted and subverted the campaigns. Naseem Hussain's contribution, on religion, gender and identity politics, focuses more on the urban context, and asks why urban women have increasingly become involved in Islamist movements and have adopted the practice of veiling, previously uncommon in Bangladeshi society. She asks whether this is an indication of a specically Islamic modernity, and whether involvement in these movements can lead to positive opportunities for women. Like Feldman, she stresses the expansion of Islamic education. She also points to the involvement of Islamist movements in building up a modern economic base for its followers, the skilful use of press and mass media, and the increasing presence of Islamic NGOs with Middle Eastern funding. The Tabligh-i Jama'at, a well-known international Islamic organisation with a large membership in Bangladesh, provides rural and urban women with opportunities to socialise, travel, and learn about Islam, while Islamic study or tafsir groups in urban neighbourhoods provide valued facilities for socialisation and recreation, as well as acquiring both Islamic knowledge and useful secular skills. However, while these activities may provide women with some scope for developing critical perspectives on traditional forms of Bangladeshi Islam, they all take for granted a wider acceptance of the patriarchal order.

Sarah White's article is also concerned with the new emergence of women as religious subjects, providing a valuable discussion of the politics of scholarship about Islam and women's empowerment, both in general and in relation to Bangladesh. She cautions however against globalising explanations, using two case studies to demonstrate how Islamic piety can manifest in very different ways. Amma Huzur is a Tabligh-i Jama'at activist who identies with the Tabligh's campaign to purify village culture of its supposed Hindu tendencies, while Afsana Begum, like Amma Huzur respected for her Islamic piety, argues for greater female autonomy and for harmony between Muslims and Hindus. White notes how the Tabligh-i Jama'at, although non-political in orientation, in practice can lay the groundwork to be exploited by radical Islamic political parties such as Jama'at-i Islami. She suggests in conclusion that women's empowerment should be analysed in relation to the social and political context in which it takes place, and to the patterns of enablement and exclusion it generates. Returning to the opening theme of the difcult choices faced by women, Thrse Blanchet's article looks at another situation in which women have had to make hard decisions, that of labour migration from villages in Western Bangladesh for bar work in Mumbai. Blanchet has stressed here and elsewhere that, despite ofcial concerns about lost girls and trafcked women, women's bar work and sex work should not be seen exclusively in negative terms. It has provided some women with options for personal advancement and empowerment closed to them in the village context, and was treated with a degree of de facto toleration during the difcult times of the 1970s and 1980s, when the women's nancial contributions were vital to the community. The returned bar workers do not always submit to the village authorities' attempts to re-establish the moral order, for example by subjecting them to puricatory rituals. Nevertheless, the personal cost paid by these women can be high: border crossings are not easy matters. The last of the six papers on Bangladesh is our own, on gender, religious change and sustainability. Here we examine the relationship between village religion, particularly women's religious life, and the sustainability of the village community, building on a number of studies of what have been called rituals of auspiciousness in the Hindu context. We argue that these practices, with their close connection to agriculture, childbirth, good fortune and everyday success, which are widespread among Muslims and Catholics in Bangladesh as well as among Hindus, can be better seen as concerned with issues of sustainability, with the production and reproduction of the village community through time. They provide contexts for sociality across formal religious boundaries, emphasising women's common engagement in the maintenance of everyday life. This important sector of village religious and cultural activities is opposed by international Islamist movements such as the Tabligh-i Jama'at, whose initial raison d'tre was the purication of such non-Muslim practices (Mayaram, 1997). We suggest that the Islamist critique, though frequently encountered, has not yet succeeded in breaking down the cultural foundations of these practices. Can they provide a signicant resource to resist the globalising tendencies of international Islam and recreate a sense of local commitment to the sustainability of the village community?

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The issues raised in these six papers on Bangladesh recur in the seven remaining papers in our collection, three of which relate to South Asia (Pakistan and India) and four to Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia). They are refracted through the different local cultural and religious contexts of these various societies, providing a range of illuminating parallels and comparisons. Rowena Robinson's article, on India, takes up a theme of Feldman's and Blanchet's contributions, of women forced to make difcult choices in circumstances not of their own making. Robinson's paper deals with the aftermath of anti-Muslim violence in Mumbai and Gujarat, and presents the voices of a number of Muslim women in each case. She explores how these women have coped with the impact of the violence of the Hindu Right and the consequent erosion of their security and lifeopportunities, but also to the problematic responses of the male leadership of their Muslim communities. She argues that the women have distanced themselves from both state and community, while making tentative moves to build up links with Muslim community organisations. If Muslim women in Gujarat and Mumbai have had to face an unsympathetic and hostile state dominated by the Hindu right, women and men in Pakistan are increasingly faced by a society in which the process of building a modern state has been, in Pnina Werbner's words, erratic and incomplete, and where Islam is as much a cause of division as unity. Her contribution, focussing on women's pilgrimage to the Su shrine of Ghamkol Sharif extends the discussion in Rozario and Samuel's article of the role of Christian and Muslim saints' shrines in Bangladesh. Werbner argues that Su orders, while avoiding the rhetorics of nationalism and of the global Islamic community, nevertheless build up, in contexts such as pilgrimage, the moral relationships between strangers from different regional, ethnic and class backgrounds which are the essential preconditions of nationhood. Women, despite the restrictions of their everyday lives, play a full part in this inclusive, peaceful civic culture based on sharing, communication and respect. The third South Asian paper, by Navtej Purewal and Virinder Kalra, presents material from both India and Pakistan, deriving from work in areas of the Punjab on both sides of the IndiaPakistan border. Their argument again connects with the themes of Rozario and Samuel's paper, looking at women's popular religious practices as both central to religious life and as cutting across boundaries between ofcial religious communities (here Sikh, Muslim and Hindu). Their main examples are the Teean festival in East (Indian) Punjab and women's shrine practices in West (Pakistani) Punjab. Purewal and Kalra rightly point to the problematic nature of the concept of popular practices, a term which tends to go along with a dismissal of much of women's religious practice as cultural rather than religious. In reality this vernacular Punjabi religion continues to exist on both sides of the border, and provides the possibility of a less monolithic and divisive understanding of religious identity and belonging. The rst of our Southeast Asian articles, by Maila Stivens, brings us back to issues raised in Shelley Feldman's and Naseem Hussain's contributions, concerning the state as a moral project. Stivens analyses the celebrated custody dispute concerning Maria Hertogh, a Dutch girl raised by a Muslim Malay woman,

which led to 18 people being killed in street riots in Singapore in December 1950, and a series of subsequent Malaysian custody cases, as arenas for contests about the status of religion and nationality within Singapore and Malaysia. While alerting us to the complexity of Islam in Malaysia, she argues for the importance of family, marriage and the custody of children for the mutually entangled processes of religious and national boundary-making. The last three articles are all based on eld research in Indonesia, and take up some of the issues discussed in Naseem Hussain's and Sarah White's articles about the individual consequences of Islamic piety for women. Mary Ida Bagus looks at the intensication of HinduBalinese religious and cultural identity in the aftermath of the October 2002 terrorist bombings in Bali. Ajeg Bali, an indigenous movement to promote an exclusionary and intolerant HinduBalinese religious identity, has met with mixed reactions among Balinese. Ajeg Bali has opened up some new possibilities for women, for example through the new forms of sociality constituted by travelling singing-groups (persantian). In general, though, its impact on women is problematic, since it endorses the conservative and patriarchal Balinese adat (traditional law) at the expense of national law, which gives women more protection. Ajeg Bali has nevertheless created a climate of religious nationalism to which Balinese women have to respond and in terms of which they have to frame their personal strategies, and Ida Bagus presents a number of case studies to illustrate how this works in practice. Minako Sakai looks at the impact of emergent Islamic nance on female traders in Central Java. The establishment of Islamic banking in Indonesia in the early 1990s has been followed by the development of a new sector of cooperative Islamic nance institutions (Baitul Maal wat Tamwil, or BMT) with strong support from Islamic civil organisations. There were believed to be around 3200 of these by 2006, mostly providing micronance-type loans, though in some cases competing with normal banking services. Sakai examines one of the larger BMTs, which was set up with aims of povertyalleviation and social justice in urban Yogyakarta, in some detail. As with other BMTs, the organisation combines a charitable organisation (baitul maal) providing a health clinic, scholarships and microcredit with a savings and nance scheme (baitut tamwil). The latter also incorporates activities to promote Islamic solidarity and social justice. The baitut tamwil also has a scheme to support Indonesian female migrant workers. While the organisation as a whole is not explicitly directed to women, in practice it has mostly beneted female workers without access to the formal banking sector. Rachel Rinaldo's article, based on eldwork with women in Jakarta, looks at the consequences of the global Islamic revival for women's political subjectivity. She contrasts the women in Rahima, a Muslim women's rights NGO, and in the PKS, an Islamic political party. Both groups are enthusiastic and committed Muslims, for the most part from welleducated middle-class backgrounds. However, the Rahima members' conception of piety is centred around action for social justice, whereas PKS members are working for a state that will promote and implement Islamic values such as proper female behaviour and comportment. Rinaldo places the PKS in the context of both the heavy government restrictions on political action in Indonesia in the 1980s,

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From village religion to global networks: Women, religious nationalism and sustainability in South and Southeast Asia
2 The term Islamist has been used in a variety of ways in the literature, with some authors (e.g. ) making a systematic distinction between Islamist movements (e.g. Jama'at-i Islami) aimed at political transformation and neofundamentalist movements (e.g. Tabligh-i Jama'at) aimed at personal piety. In these papers it is used as a general term for contemporary Islamic revival movements with a socially and religiously conservative orientation, including both of Roy's categories.

under which religious groups provided a relatively safe context for political activity, and the social and career opportunities which Muslim organisations such as the PKS offer to their members (particularly female members) today. Rinaldo suggests that Rahima and PKS represent distinct Muslim political subjectivities, inuenced by global discourses of religion and feminism, seeking to reshape state and society, and reect conicting positions within global Islam. As the articles in this special issue show, South and Southeast Asian societies today are complex environments, constituted by local histories and cultural practices as well as by global intellectual, political and religious movements. They offer a variety of possibilities for women from different social, ethnic and economic backgrounds. For some women, options are harsh and limited. For others, new religious movements may offer the chance of education, social mobility and the effective deployment of personal agency. For the most part, though, patriarchal authority remains rmly in place, while the new religious movements undermine traditional linkages between members of different religious communities, erecting in their place new forms of sociality which act to exclude as much as to include. Whether these divisive forces can be countered by a growing awareness of our common humanity and our common interests in a just and sustainable society remains to be seen. We believe that the articles presented here provide, at the very least, an illuminating insight into the present state of affairs. Endnotes
1 The workshop was part of an Australian Research Council-funded project (Muslims and Christians: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in the Asia Pacic Region) on which Rozario and Samuel have been working since 2005.

References
Corrigan, Philip (1981). On moral regulation: Some preliminary remarks. Sociological Review, 29, 313337. Corrigan, Philip, & Sayer, Derek (1985). Introduction. The Great Arch: English State Formation As Cultural Revolution (pp. 113). London: Basil Blackwell. Mayaram, Shail (1997). Resisting regimes: Myth, memory and the shaping of a Muslim identity. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Roy, Olivier (2002). Globalised Islam: The search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst and Co. Van der Veer, Peter (1994). Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Geoffrey Samuel Santi Rozario School of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University, UK Corresponding author. School of Religious and Theological Studies, Cardiff University, Humanities Building, Colum Road, Cardiff CF10 3EU, UK.