Robert Hefner

Boston University | BU · Department of Anthropology

The 'ethical turn' in anthropology has been one of the most vibrant fields in the discipline in the past quarter-century. It has fostered new dialogue between anthropology and philosophy, psychology, and theology and seen a wealth of theoretical innovation and influential ethnographic studies. This book brings together a global team of established...

In an article as relevant now as when it was written, Aleida Assmann (1996: 94) asks: “How in a world of divided creeds is one to find out which is the true belief?” She draws from Gotthold Lessing's character Nathan the Wise to say (ibid.: 95): There are two possible solutions to the problem, that of the fundamentalist and that of the sage. The fu...

Over the past twenty years, educators around the world have worked to devise curricula to educate students about how to live together as citizens in diverse societies. In Muslim educational circles, this task has been made additionally challenging by jurisprudential legacies from classical times that make strict and hierarchical distinctions betwee...

By emphasizing that individual religious freedom depends for its realization on complex social embeddings, the concept of institutional religious freedom provides an important corrective to conventional, individualistic approaches to religious freedom. The concept also helpfully complicates the investigation of religious freedom by encouraging anal...

The ideal of covenantal pluralism is at once timely and challenging. It is timely because, after decades of policy briefs suggesting that free elections and civil society are sufficient to secure democracy, the struggle for pluralist co-existence around the globe remains as unfinished today as ever. The concept is challenging because it leaves uncl...

Pathways to Contemporary Islam: New Trends in Critical Engagement highlights that the current tensions in Islam and the Muslim world are the result of historical dynamics as opposed to an alleged incompatibility between religious tradition and modernity. The emphasis on pathways indicates that critical engagement and contestation have always been i...

Any attempt to explore the relationship between representations of Muslims and public advocacy in modern Western societies must at some point situate both processes in relation to the broader crises of liberal citizenship currently afflicting Western democracies. Calls heard in the 1990s for multicultural citizenship and pluralist “recognition” hav...

Any attempt to explore the relationship between representations of Muslims and public advocacy in modern Western societies must at some point situate both processes in relation to the broader crises of liberal citizenship currently afflicting Western democracies. Calls heard in the 1990s for multicultural citizenship and pluralist “recognition” hav...

Saba Mahmood's untimely passing on March 10, 2018 was a tragic loss for family, friends, and colleagues, as well as for cultural anthropologists inspired by her scholarship over the past two decades. Her influence has been no less far-reaching in contemporary Islamic and gender studies, as well as the anthropology of ethics. It is against the backd...

As the hopeful dreams of the 2011 “Arab spring” have given way to anti-democratic repression in most Arab-majority nations, the question of Islam and democracy in Indonesia has been thrust to the centre of policy and research attention once more. With some 260 million people, 87 per cent of whom are Muslim, Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-maj...

Contrary to its conventional portrayal, capitalism has coevolved with a variety of social structures and moral traditions over its past two centuries. Not singular but many, the new Asian capitalisms illustrate this complexity with particular clarity. Whether with guanxi networks for capital accumulation in Taiwan or Communist sponsorship of privat...

Conversion is the process whereby an individual or group reorients its self‐identification and ethico‐religious affiliation from one religious tradition to another. The process has been a focus of anthropological research for two generations and for Western social science and religious studies for more than a century. However, the concept remains d...

Since Indonesia’s return to electoral democracy in 1998–1999, analysts have spoken of the deepening ‘Islamisation’ of politics, public culture, and personal life in this Southeast Asian nation. Just what these trends entail for citizenship and social recognition, as well as the varied meanings of ‘Islamisation’ itself, are the questions at the hear...

Religion, Law and Intolerance in Indonesia. Edited by Tim Lindsey and Helen Pausacker. London: Routledge, 2016. Pp. 395. $225 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1138100879. - Robert W. Hefner

The understanding of sharia is always sociologically and epistemologically contingent, because it is mediated through a complex and variable array of religious authorities, popular ethical imaginaries, and media of preservation and transmission. This chapter discusses trends in sharia imaginaries in modern Indonesia, beginning in the early twentiet...

This epilogue reminds us that the study of capitalist rationalization and religious ethical imaginaries has to take into account that things have changed significantly since Weber. Modern capitalism is now transnational and intensely consumerist, while religion has become pluralized and agonistic. What we see is the emergence of new forms of religi...

Volume 2 of Christianity and Freedom illuminates how Christian minorities and transnational Christian networks contribute to the freedom and flourishing of societies across the globe, even amidst pressure and violent persecution. Featuring unprecedented field research by some of the world's most distinguished scholars, it documents the outsized rol...

Contemporary anthropological studies confirm the core premise of Peter Berger’s “two pluralisms” hypothesis: that the most consequential feature of religion and ethics in our late-modern age is not religion’s secularizing decline, but the globalization and co-existence of powerful discourses of secularity and religiosity. Two generations of anthrop...

All of the historical religions emerged in a context of religious plurality and, at times, bitter inter-religious rivalry. In our late modern age, the challenge of plurality has become all the more pervasive. This paper examines the varied traditions of knowledge and practice developed by Muslim jurists, political leaders, and religious thinkers to...

Contrary to the earlier forecasts of secularization theory, religious practices and ethical imaginaries are flourishing across the Muslim world. But Muslim scholars and intellectuals disagree on the question of how to deal with the pluralization in mind and society that marks our age. This paper examines the ways in which contemporary Muslim engage...

In the tradition of Western social sciences to grow a sense of " hard " about the secularization : the removal of religion from public life ; religion is only a private matter of each person ; he did not have a significant social role .The idea of secularization or the desecration of the Muslim reformer Indonesia has made Islam is not synonymous wi...

The continuing Islamization of Javanese society ranks as among the most complex and politically consequential in the world. For one thing, there are today some 100 million ethnic Javanese, 97 percent of whom are Muslim. Thus, Islamic resurgence among Javanese is of global significance. A relatively recent influx of Islamic-studies scholars as well...

In Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the word, issues of religion-state relations have long loomed large, in part because of zig-zag shifts in this country's politics and associated challenges for religious tolerance, social freedoms, and citizenship. Although it is only in the past decade that research on Indonesia has been explici...

This state-of-the-field overview of Pentecostalism around the world focuses on cultural developments among second- and third-generation adherents in regions with large Pentecostal communities, considering the impact of these developments on political participation, citizenship, gender relations, and economic morality. Leading scholars from anthropo...

Recent Indonesian history offers a panoply of trends with regards to the politics of Islamic law. On one hand, since the 1940s Indonesia has witnessed campaigns by small but militant Islamist groups dedicated to a notably unreformed and anti-liberal version of Islamic law. On the other hand, Indonesia also has one of the largest and most sophistica...

What type of law is shari‘a? Does Islam require its implementation by the state? Can the shari‘a be compatible with modern democracy and pluralist citizenship? Or is the law effectively human-rights-restricting with respect to women, non-Muslims, and Muslims who profess a non-conforming variety of the faith? These are among the questions addressed...

This chapter examines the question of Islam and democracy by way of four arguments. First, when empirical measures rather than imagined civilizational traits are referenced, it turns out that there is no democracy deficit in the broader Muslim world; a significant number of non-Arab Muslim countries have made impressive headway toward consolidating...

Two years into the uncertain transitions of the "Arab Spring," it is remarkable just how few Middle Eastern analysts have thought to look to post-Soeharto Indonesia for clues as to how Islam and Muslims may be accommodated in passages from authoritarian rule. In part the oversight reflects Indonesia's continuing perceived marginality in the global...

With its four decades of economic growth and its booming middle class, Indonesia has become something of a paradigmatic case in research on Islam, economic globalization, and blended subjectivity. As the literature under review confirms, Indonesia’s Muslim middle class is the world’s most avid consumer of “Islamic” self-help and life-coaching liter...

Civil Islam tells the story of Islam and democratization in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation. Challenging stereotypes of Islam as antagonistic to democracy, this study of courage and reformation in the face of state terror suggests possibilities for democracy in the Muslim world and beyond. Democratic in the early 1950s and with rich pr...

This chapter explores the connection between Islam, democracy, and human rights in theory and practice. The idea of shari`a, or divine law, remains a touchstone in internal Muslim debates about human rights. For most of Islamic history, shari`a has served not as a basis for theocracy, but rather as a religious and moral frame of reference for secul...

In May 1998, at the height of the Asian financial crisis, President Muhammad Soeharto of Indonesia was forced from office, bringing to an end some thirty-two years of authoritarian rule. The political movement that pushed Soeharto from power was an awkward and only temporary coalition of pro-democracy students, Muslim civic associations, and establ...

One of the more striking trends in global religion during the final decades of the twentieth century was the resurgence in religious piety and observance across broad swaths of the Muslim world. This renewed religious vitality confounded those who had long forecast that, under the conditions of modernity, religion is destined to decline until, as o...

One of the most important developments in Muslim politics in recent years has been the spread of movements calling for the implementation of shari'a or Islamic law. Shari'a Politics maps the ideals and organization of these movements and examines their implications for the future of democracy, citizen rights, and gender relations in the Muslim worl...

1 Several commentators were quick to place much of the blame for the radicals' rise on madrasas, religious schools devoted to the study of Islamic traditions of knowledge. A widely cited article in the New York Times Magazine reported that in Pakistan, "There are one million students studying in the country's 10,000 or so madrasas, and militant Isl...

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without ref...

Large portions of East and Southeast Asia are in the throes of a historically unprecedented upsurge in religious observance and association. Many of the new varieties of religiosity are more popular, voluntary, and laity based than the religions of yesteryear. Many are also marked by the heightened participation of women, and an emphasis on inner-w...

Political Islam in Southeast Asia. By MeansGordon P.. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2009. xi, 444 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $32.00 (paper). Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand. By McCargoDuncan. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. xxv, 235 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $21.00 (paper) - Volume 69 Issue 2 - Robert W. Hefner

One of the great coincidences of late last century was the emergence of a ‘third wave’ of democratization at the same time that much of the world was undergoing a powerful religious revival. Although religious organizations played a supporting role in democratic transitions in Spain, Poland, the Philippines, and Indonesia, many political analysts s...

The transmission of religious knowledge (ʿilm) has always been at the heart of Islamic tradition. The Qurʾān and Ḥadīth abound with general references to the importance of learning, as well as the specific injunction that believers study and follow the ethical path God has provided. Since earliest times, the transmission of knowledge from teacher t...

Unparalleled in its range of topics and geographical scope, the sixth and final volume of The New Cambridge History of Islam provides a comprehensive overview of Muslim culture and society since 1800. Robert Hefner’s thought-provoking account of the political and intellectual transformation of the Muslim world introduces the volume, which proceeds...

On the eve of the modern era, Islam, not Christianity, was the most globalised of the world’s religions. Muslim-majority societies stretched across a broad swath of Old World territory from West Africa and Morocco in the west to China and the Malay archipelago in the east. Several pieces were to be added to the map of the Muslim world after the eig...

The last stand of South-East Asia’s independent Muslim polities took place at the turn of the twentieth century. In South-East Asia’s new cities, the expansion in popular literacy combined with migration and population growth to create restless Muslim publics, eager to explore new modes of piety and politics. The twentieth century introduced a new...

Recent studies link the problem of cultural transmission to the larger issue of how we conceptualize cultural history and integration. I address this question here by examining reproduction and change in lava's only surviving Indic priesthood. The conflict of meanings characteristic of priestly and popular ritual culture in modern Tengger has a his...

Although it is themost populous country in theMuslim world, Indonesia has long been overlooked in scholarly discussions of modern Muslim legal thought. This neglect has been compounded by the fact that western scholarship on this Southeast Asian country has been dominated by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists rather than scholars...