Split Allegiances: Cultural Muslims and the Tension Between Religious and National Identity in Multicultural Societies

By Liza Hopkins and Cameron McAuliffe

Volume 10, Issue 1, pages 38-58

Abstract

Second generation Australians from a Muslim background have appeared on the political radar recently as a group at risk of disengagement due to their potentially split allegiances. For these young Australians, the traditional tension over diasporic allegiances between the homeland and the country in which they live is further complicated by religious identity. This paper offers two case studies of the second generation of two mainly Islamic, but otherwise very different, ethnonational communities in Australia, Turkish and Iranian. It examines the responses of these groups to the rising essentialisation and ethnicisation of Islam, at the expense of ethnic and sociocultural difference. In particular, the paper focuses on the way secular practice and religious identity converge into ‘cultural Islam’. We use the term cultural Islam as a way of describing those, particularly of the second and third generations in Australia, who proudly claim their Islamic heritage while choosing not to participate actively in religious life.

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Boundaries in Shaping the Rohingya Identity and the Shifting Context of Borderland Politics

By Kazi Fahmida Farzana

Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 292-314

Abstract

In recent years, new waves of ethnic violence in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Burma (Myanmar) have resulted in increased internal displacement and the continued exodus of the Rohingya people to neighbouring countries. At the heart of this problem is the fact that Burma (which the Rohingyas claim as their ancestral land) and Bangladesh (where many Rohingyas are unwelcome and/or undocumented refugees) continue to deny the Rohingyas their political identity, each insisting that the displaced Rohingyas are the responsibility of the other. This study examines the history of the region to explore how political identities are shaped (generally) and how Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, living along the borders, identify themselves in the midst of political sovereignty claims and a social space that exists across artificially drawn borders (specifically). This article argues that the true political identity of the displaced Rohingya refugees can be located in their social memory and their life‐politics in the borderlands. In this social memory, the Rohingyas’ beliefs in ethnicity, identity, and belongingness play an important role in shaping their current identity. Their production of cultural artefacts while in exile suggests a non‐conventional resistance, and the close proximity of the refugees to their homeland creates a completely different psychology of attachment and alienation, which needs further attention in refugee studies. Such an understanding of life‐politics along the border may challenge our current understanding of borderland conflicts within the framework of state‐imposed boundaries. The boundaries of identity may go beyond traditional notions of national borders and the identity of the state.

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Pakistani Nationalism and the State Marginalisation of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan

By Sadia Saeed

Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 132-152

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between nationalism, state formation, and the marginalisation of national minorities through an historical focus on Pakistani state’s relationship with the Ahmadiyya community, a self‐defined minority sect of Islam. In 1974, a constitutional amendment was enacted that effectively rendered the Ahmadiyya community a non‐Muslim minority, in spite of claims by the community that it was Muslim and hence not a minority. This paper attempts to account for this anti‐Ahmadiyya state legislation by arguing that the genealogy of the idea of a Pakistani state is key for understanding the politics of exclusion of the Ahmadiyya community from ‘Muslim citizenship’ ‐ that is, who is and isn’t a Muslim.

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Landscapes of ‘Othering’ in Postwar and Contemporary Germany: The Limits of the ‘Culture of Contrition’ and the Poverty of the Mainstream

By Aristotle Kallis

Volume 12, Issue 2, pages 387-407

Abstract

In the 1930s the National Socialist regime embarked on a chillingly ambitious and fanatical project to ‘remake’ German society and ‘race’ by deploying a peerless – in both kind and intensity – repertoire of ‘othering’ strategies and measures directed at the Jews, the Sinti/Roma, and non‐conformist groups within the Third Reich. At the heart of this campaign was the notion of a ‘zero‐sum’ confrontation between the nation/race and its perceived ‘enemies’: namely, that the existence of these ‘enemies’ within German society threatened the very foundations of the German ‘race’ and posed the gravest threat to its mere survival. To what extent can the experience of the 1930s aggressive, violent, and eventually murderous ‘zero‐sum’ mindset provide crucial insights into contemporary discourses of ‘othering’, linked with the European radical‐populist right but increasingly ‘infecting’ the social and political mainstream? The contemporary ‘ethno‐pluralist’ framing of the discussion divulges the persistence of a similar ‘zero‐sum’ mentality that is nurtured by socio‐economic and cultural insecurity, on the one hand, and powerful long‐standing prejudices against particular groups, on the other. The article explores this ‘zero‐sum’ insecurity mindset in the anti‐immigration ‘mainstream’ discourses in the Federal Republic of Germany, both before and after re‐unification. It demonstrates how – in contrast to the postwar ‘culture of contrition’ with regard to the memory of the Holocaust – this mindset continues to be a powerful political and psychological refuge for societal insecurities that has an enduring appeal to significant audiences well beyond the narrow political constituencies of the radical right.

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