Religion Dispatches
…asure are frivolous acts — for women. Gilbert has a spiritual awakening in India, having travelled to the ashram of her ex-boyfriend’s guru. Ultimately, Hinduism’s teaching of the sacred in all of us resonates deeply in her. And yet, I must admit, it is much easier to stomach this message when it is proclaimed by the poor masses of India versus from a white woman from the United States. In a similar vein, the depiction of Hinduism in the ashram se…
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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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…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…
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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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…s lived in distinct territories, and the Ottomans never ruled over greater India, a Muslim minority in India, under British rule, resented and feared British colonial aggression against an important symbol of their faith. So Shia and Sunni Muslims joined together to support what was traditionally a Sunni institution, the Caliphate. Fast forward a few decades to the Pakistan Movement, which grew out of concerns for the status of Muslim minorities i…
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…xuriates in the rich food of Italy; tries to still the “monkey-mind” at an Indian ashram; and embarks on a torrid love affair with a Brazilian in Bali. But the real journey, she writes, is inward. Italy is explicitly centered on “pleasure,” India on “devotion,” and Bali on “balance.” By the end, Liz has discovered the “physics of the quest”: If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your…
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…gion may be the only guiding principle, the only social, moral, even legal code to abide by. Somalia, for example, has been a “failed state” since 1991; this is a place where the presence of the state and accompanying service provision is virtually nonexistent. Griswold shows how the story of the rise of al-Shabaab—an Islamist militia currently wreaking havoc with horrific efficacy across Somalia and now outside its borders (the group claimed resp…
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…l codes. Tunisia’s anti-sodomy laws are derived from the 1913 French Penal Code, while section 347 of the penal code in Christian Cameroon is a French colonial law. Similarly, the Ottoman adoption of French codes would ban the köçek. Across the Muslim world, many of the laws criminalizing LGBTQ+ people are direct relics of colonial law. It would take generations to gradually align the region with European colonial sexual values through a shift in…
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…gal equality: The government continues to retain Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalizes sex between men. The law is sandwiched between codes that ban sex with corpses (Section 377) and sex with animals (Section 377B) in the Penal Code, indication of official attitudes towards homosexuality in the wealthy city-state. Convictions under 377A allow for two-year prison terms. In a bid to placate both liberals and conservatives, the governme…
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…at contribute to the Global Equality Fund, a public-private partnership to promote LGBT rights around the world that the State Department manages with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Uruguay in July hosted the first global LGBT rights conference to have taken place in Latin America. Uruguayan Minister of Exterior Relations Rodolfo Nin Novoa, Special U.S. Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons Randy Berry and more than 150 activ…
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