Jörg Haustein

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• Dr
• Professor at University of Cambridge

Historians of Pentecostalism are often faced with a number of problems specific to the movement, most importantly its fragmented diversity and its providential outlook. The sources they encounter therefore contain many conflicting claims about the past and miraculous assertions, which are difficult to integrate into an academic historiography. Crea...

For the first time in Ethiopia's history, the head of state is not a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but a Protestant. Moreover, Hailemariam Desalegn, who was sworn into the office of the prime minister following Meles Zenawi's death in the summer of 2012, is a Pentecostal, and more significantly a Oneness Pentecostal, belonging to the Apo...

In 1991 the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) introduced policies aimed at recognizing the country's long-standing religious diversity, providing a public arena for religious groups, and maintaining a sharp division between religion and the state. This further eroded the traditionally dominant position of the Ethiopian Ortho...

Contributed by scholars from diverse traditions and perspectives around the world, this article evidences both unifying and diversifying impulses in Christian ethics and moral thinking. Christian ethics is understood as both lived experience and academic study reflecting upon practice, deploying moral norms, engaging present-day issues, and more. M...

Modern Ethiopia is a highly religious country with a complex history of religion and state. It inherited a political theology of Ethiopian Orthodox exceptionalism that had been hardened in confrontations with Muslim and Catholic powers but proved inadequate to govern the multi-religious and multi-ethnic nation state which was formed from the end of...

This chapter discusses how the German preoccupation with “Arabdom” led to a paranoid classification of Kiswahili as a language contaminated by “foreign” and “Mohammedan” thought. This already began with the earliest missionary translations onward, pushing to replace the widely used ʿAǧamī script with Roman letters as a way to curb “Semitic” and Mu...

This chapter details how the foundational legal order for the colonies emerged from a German constitutional conflict, which led to the creation of a sphere of “native law” outside of German legislative and judicial control. Applying this fiction of “native law” to the cosmopolitan environments of the East African coast first led to a racial demarca...

This chapter looks at German scholarship of Islamic law in Africa and shows how it systematically elided local Muslim jurisprudence. Whereas Orientalists initially endeavoured to compile and codify the prevailing Islamic precepts for Muslims in German East Africa, they paid little attention to local scholarship and practices. This changed little th...

This chapter looks at how a notion of “political Islam” emerged in German East Africa in the second half of German colonial rule. Whereas before, East African Muslims were often characterised as “docile” and politically compliant, the chapter shows how missionary warnings against an “Islamic danger” took hold with the so-called “Mecca letter affair...

This chapter studies the German debate of East African slavery and examines its relation to colonial images of Islam as well as to the call for “Christian civilising” through labour. The chapter shows how an anti-“Arab” abolitionist platform quickly gave way to a perceived “labour issue” as Germans struggled to force an African subsistence economy...

This chapter traces the genealogy of the German government schools from which the colonial administration recruited most of its non-German personnel. Originating from the perception that “religious resistance” prevented the success of mission schools along the coast, these schools were heavily contested because they did not provide religious educat...

This introductory chapter begins lays out the book’s main research problem in dialogue with previous scholarship and offers. In doing so, it establishes why the thorough study of the colonial Islam debate is key to reducing their influence on contemporary histories of Islam in Africa. The chapter then proceeds to provide a brief historical survey o...

This chapter traces how the initial reaction to the “Mecca letter” gradually congealed into a more sustained policy of surveilling and regulating Islam. Apart from continued agitations by missionaries and other parts of the colonial public, the emergent Islamic Studies around Carl Heinrich Becker was instrumental here because he occupied a middle p...

This chapter examines how Islam was invoked in the demarcation of ethnic and racial identities in German East Africa. The German acquisition and subsequent military conquest of the Tanganyikan coast was accompanied by the discursive construct of “Arabdom,” a social category that was overdetermined by stereotypes of Semitic culture, slavery, and “Mo...

This chapter closes the study with epistemological reflections on the study of colonialism and Islam. It argues that scholars must avoid a double play of simultaneously deconstructing and positing Islam as a historical knowledge category in their analyses of colonial archives. Instead, they should embrace a critical genealogy of both colonialism an...

Religious affiliation is almost universal in Ethiopia, which means that religions amass significant political capital but may also act as potential catalysts for conflict. After five decades of ostensibly secular politics—first under a socialist dictatorship and then driven by the EPRDF’s strict insistence that religion and state be separated; reli...

Zusammenfassung Als pseudo-sprachliche Artikulation mag Zungenrede der Semantik entweichen, als zentrales theologisches Konstrukt der Pfingstbewegung ist sie jedoch mit Bedeutung überladen. Dieser Beitrag stellt die Diskussion um pfingstliche Glossolalie aus historischer, theologischer und sprachphilosophischer Perspektive vor und zeigt, wie das Ri...

A Global History of Religion aims to trace connections, controversies, and contingencies in the emergence of “religion” as a global category. Its main intention is to de-center European epistemologies of religion by drawing out a more intricate global and plural genealogy. This is a very complex endeavour, however, especially when one leaves the re...

This article examines the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework as a political project in tension with its universal and multilateral aspirations to serve as a counterbalance to narrow populist visions increasingly dominating global politics. Building upon Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of populism and their notion of ‘radical democracy’, we co...

The burgeoning literature on religion and development tends to frame development as a project of post-WWII secular modernism and hence postulates a new ‘discovery of religions’ in development discourse. This perception is based on a two-fold forgetfulness of history. On the one hand, the colonial genealogy of development in the ‘civilising mission’...

Review of Dana L. Robert (ed), African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives, and Challenges (Pietermaritzburg, Cluster Publications, 2018)

This article analyses a Muslim missive, which was circulated in German East Africa in 1908. Erroneously dubbed the “Mecca letter”, it called believers to repentance and sparked a religious revival, which alarmed the German administration. Their primarily political interpretation of the letter was retained in subsequent scholarship, which has overlo...

Religion is a major cultural, social, political, and economic factor in many official development assistance (ODA) recipient countries. After decades of being ignored by global development processes, greater portions of development aid are now channeled via faith-based organizations, and religion is increasingly recognized as a human resource rathe...

When Germany occupied Tanganyika in 1889, the mobilising rhetoric was built around ending slavery, which in turn was framed religiously, as a “Muslim” institution to be ended by “Christian civilisation.” However, while the German colonisers subsequently suppressed slave-raiding and the large-scale slave trade, they never abolished slavery itself or...

Die Evangelikalen sind eine der am schnellsten wachsenden religiösen Bewegungen weltweit und gewinnen zunehmend auch im deutschsprachigen Raum an Bedeutung. Dieses Handbuch vermittelt erstmals in deutscher Sprache einen Gesamtüberblick über die christlichen Gruppen, die im weitesten Sinne unter dem Begriff »Evangelikalismus« zusammengefasst werden...

This article revisits central questions arising from Pentecostal actors' development practices. These were raised during the final panel discussion of the 2014 GloPent conference on "Pentecostalism and Development". The four panel participants, all development actors from various organisational and religious backgrounds, considered whether Pentecos...

Die Annäherung zwischen der pfingstlichen und der etablierten akademischen Theologie ist inzwischen in beide Richtungen zu beobachten: pfingstliche Ansätze werden in klassischen Debatten rezipiert und pfingstliche Theologen rezipieren den Theorie- und Methodenkanon der etablierten historisch-kritischen Theologie. In der deutschen Theologie hat eine...

Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity has become an increasingly noticeable phenomenon in Ethiopia, which coincides with the significant rise of Protestantism in the past two decades. In contrast to the ubiquity of this new religious factor and the public debates it inspires, the movement has hardly been addressed in Ethiopian Studies. This cont...

This article revisits the issue of historiography in Pentecostal studies, seeking to connect this debate to recent theories of history coming from postcolonial and poststructuralist thought. I argue that the historian of Pentecostalism should seek not only to reconstruct past events, but, more than that, to offer a historical analysis of Pentecosta...

The article explores Pentecostal embodiment practices and concepts with regard to Holy Spirit baptism and demon possession. The studied material is connected to a specific and highly controversial debate in Ethiopian Pentecostalism, which revolves around the possibility of demon possession in born-again and Spirit-filled Christians. This debate run...

The growth and spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is one of the more salient features of Ethiopia’s recent religious history. However, this process has hardly been addressed by academic studies in the past. Based on original field work and archival research, Jörg Haustein presents the fi rst detailed history of Ethiopian Pentecostal...

In recent months, the conflict in Tigray has dominated most analyses of Ethiopian politics. The scale of that crisis makes this understandable, but it remains important to keep analysing the inter-communal tensions and conflicts lines that had already emerged all over the country before the fighting in Tigray and continue to persist in parallel. Th...