Religion Dispatches
…. But not just physically better prepared, ritually as well. Before I left Indonesia, I worked to get a lot closer to the required five times daily prayers than was my own norm. I cannot function normally through out the day without that pre-sunrise fajr prayer, but honestly speaking none of the others have that same regularity. They are more touch-and-go inconsistent. Making this decision while still in Indonesia was a piece of cake. Everywhere y…
Read More…r what their religion. There are also different greetings. In Malaysia and Indonesia, the day of celebration translates into Hari Raya. They both give some variation on that greeting I described when I talked about forgiveness: maaf zahir dan batin, “forgive me any offenses, whether knowingly or unknowingly.” They also say selamat Hari Raya, selamat being the sort of universal word for peace, good, safety, etc. In Arabic they say kullu ‘aamin wa a…
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…about the time some Christian fundamentalists said that he 2005 tsunami in Indonesia was punishment for, in the words of one, “worldliness, materialism, hedonism, uncleanness and pleasure-seeking”? Where are these self-proclaimed prophets of Godly vengeance now? Do storms only evince heavenly displeasure when they land on blue states? Finding the hand of God in the vagaries of barometric pressure has a time-honored history, after all. Hurricane Ka…
Read More…side for them). I can think of two powers that would have to be involved: Indonesia and Turkey. Indonesia, because it is the world’s largest Muslim democracy, and is far enough away to be presumed neutral. More important still is Turkey, the power in the region with the diplomatic skill and flexibility to handle this charge. If we ask ourselves, who else would the Egyptian people trust, we would find ourselves forced to admit that in the last wee…
Read More…f a memorandum from President Obama charging US foreign policy agencies to promote LGBT rights said that US efforts have been important to activists promoting equality and facing persecution around the world. Read the Washington Blade’s report here. On Wednesday, the Daily Beast hosted an event called Quorum: Global LGBT Voices that featured interviews with more than 25 activists from around the world to talk about “what is happening on the front…
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…rongman that the fundamentalists I’ve been writing about have supported in Indonesia and Brazil. And Guatemala. And Honduras. And the Philippines. And Uganda. The reality is, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, both of whom I marched against—I got beat up by cops because I was so furious about what they were doing in the Middle East in particular—they were not fascists. They were imperialists. And there’s more than one kind of bad under the sun….
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…e early history of modern yoga as a response to Orientalist stereotypes of India as despotic, unscientific, mystical, effeminate, and in need of Western domination, science, reason, and masculinity. Yoga became a means through which Hindu nationalists could display Indian strength and independence in response to these Orientalist representations, which were used to support the colonial project. Nevertheless, the story of yoga’s popularization does…
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…emarkable book of essays, Utopias in Conflict: Religion and Nationalism in India (University of California Press, 1990), Embree showed how secular and religious visions of the Indian nation were fundamentally in competition, though he understood that the religious versions had their own political motivations. In a separate essay, he ruminated over the partition of India in 1948 and the creation of Pakistan. Though ostensibly an attempt to keep Mus…
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…gious relationships, so much of that ended when I announced I was going to India. They couldn’t believe I was trading in my white Jesus card for yoga,” says Rogers. “I started a new spiritual journey of understanding what it means to be a woman of color and the divinity in that. I just don’t believe in rule books anymore.” When she returned to the U.S., she found yoga classes here to be lacking spiritual resonance. “I went to the mountaintop, I le…
Read More…at his mother called their “ignorance” and “baggage” that they “bring from India.” They also began attending meetings of PFLAG in Toronto. May Warren wrote about the couple in The Star in April: Growing up in India, the Agarwals said, had no exposure to LGBTQ people and didn’t think that they knew any in their Canadian community. But once Rishi came out, they realized five of their friends’ sons were also gay. “Nobody would talk about it. They jus…
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