Modern Asian Thought(s): Religion & Politics

by · Published · Updated

Course information

Institution Seoul National University
Course Crs M2641.000500 Lec 001 — Seminar in Modern Asian Thoughts
Credits 3 credits (3-3-0)
Department Dept of Asian Languages and Civilizations
Instructor Assistant Prof. Jean-Thomas Martelli (jtmartelli@snu.ac.kr)
Meets Thursdays 15:30–18:20 · Room 5-205
Level MA seminar · Fall 2026
Readings Hosted at jtmartelli.com/library — you will receive a login in class

Course description

This seminar is about the interactions between politics and religion in Asia at large. The rationale is simple and, I think, hard to argue with: identity politics is rising across Asia, and religion is one of its key markers. Whether we look at a televangelist preaching from Malaysian sanctuary, a church cordon breaking a dictatorship’s nerve in Seoul, a temple consecrated by a sitting prime minister, or a state that writes its constitution in scripture, the entanglement of the sacred and the political is not a residue of the past that modernization forgot to clear away — it is one of the main things happening in Asian politics right now. The seminar takes that entanglement seriously as an object of study: not to celebrate it, not to lament it, but to understand how it works.

Each week follows the same architecture. We go deep into one country case — a single, concrete situation studied closely enough that its texture becomes visible — and then we deliberately open a comparative window onto a second country where the same question takes a different shape, so that the case never hardens into an exception. Every session carries a theoretical anchor (a concept worth stealing and carrying elsewhere: charisma, post-Islamism, political religion, mythopolitics, anomie, the sacralization of politics) and a piece of audio-visual material — documentary or fiction — because film often registers what monographs cannot. Readings are marked † for primary sources and ⋆ for academic readings, and everything is hosted at jtmartelli.com/library.

How this seminar works — the rolling catalogue

A confession before anything else: a syllabus is actually just a form. The interesting decisions — what we read, in what order, and why — deserve better than being locked in the previous July. So this document is built differently from the syllabi you are used to.

What follows below is not a fourteen-week timetable. It is a catalogue of thirty themes — thirty fully-built sessions, each with its case study, its comparative opening, its theory, its readings and its film. We will not do all thirty; we will do twelve. The semester has fourteen meetings:

  • Week 1 is an introduction: to the course, to each other, and to the catalogue itself — a guided tour of the thirty themes, so you know the menu.
  • Weeks 2–13 are twelve themes drawn from the catalogue. I choose them week by week, in response to where our discussions are going, what is happening in the world, and what the group turns out to care about. Each week’s theme is announced at the end of the previous class, so you always know exactly what to read — you simply don’t know it a month in advance.
  • Week 14 is a conclusion and preparation for the oral examination.

Treat the catalogue below, in other words, as the live menu of the semester, not as an archive. Any of the thirty themes may be called; the twelve that are called become the course. Browse the whole catalogue early — partly because the tour in Week 1 will go better, partly because your in-class presentation (see Assessment) can be on any theme we take up, and partly because reading around in it is, frankly, the point.

Assessment

Component Weight
Participation 10%
Weekly reading annotations 10%
One in-class presentation on a semester theme 30%
Final oral examination 50%

Grading is by absolute evaluation, A–F.

Participation (10%) — this is a seminar; it works if you talk. Come having read the compulsory item, ready to be wrong in interesting ways.

Weekly reading annotations (10%) — short weekly annotations on the assigned reading, submitted before class. These are thinking notes, not essays: questions, objections, connections to earlier weeks.

In-class presentation (30%) — once in the semester, you open a session with a presentation on that week’s theme: reconstruct the argument of the readings, bring the case and the comparison into contact, and end with the questions you want the room to fight about.

Final oral examination (50%) — the exam is a discussion of one book:

Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke University Press, 2020) [lib #2184]

A short, ferociously argued genealogy of Hindu nationalism as an attempt to force a "political monotheism" — in Carl Schmitt’s sense — onto a polytheistic, polyphonic religious field, from nineteenth-century Orientalism through Savarkar and Golwalkar to "Hindutva 2.0" as an advertised, media-borne monotheism. It is the rare book that is at once a single-country case study and a portable theoretical machine (Schmitt, political theology, axiomatics of governmentality) that students can carry to Turkey, Iran, Myanmar, or Israel.

The book’s CONTENTS page lists:

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Questions Concerning the Hindu Political 2 The Hindu Nation as Organism 3 The Indian Monotheism 4 Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism Notes Bibliography Index

Chapter headings as printed at chapter openings in the body text (verbatim, minus typographic markup):

  • INTRODUCTION
  • 1 — QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE HINDU POLITICAL
  • 2 — THE HINDU NATION AS ORGANISM
  • 3 — THE INDIAN MONOTHEISM
  • 4 — HINDUTVA 2.0 AS ADVERTISED MONOTHEISM

(For orientation: Basu’s own Introduction glosses ch. 1 as connecting "Carl Schmitt’s concept of political theology with some traditional notions of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood.")

Week 14 is devoted to working through the book together, chapter by chapter, with a one-page in-house exam-prep handout keyed to Basu’s four chapters. No new readings are assigned that week.

Books that were considered and remain warmly recommended

The exam book was not chosen in a vacuum. The following books were seriously weighed for the role; they lost on fit, not on quality, and they mark out the intellectual neighbourhood the exam book sits in. Any of them will deepen your oral.

Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton UP, 2014) [lib #2856]

Rationale: The model comparative study for this course — a historical sociology of how "religion," "secularity," and "spirituality" were jointly produced in the colonial and semi-colonial encounters of India and China, explicitly against Europe-derived secularization theory. It travels across the course’s two biggest regions in a single argument. Why Basu won: Van der Veer’s breadth diffuses seminar discussion across two centuries and two countries; Basu’s single sharp thesis, and its reach into the present digital-political moment, gives a 90-minute oral exam more to bite on.

Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (University of California Press, 1994) [lib #2855]

Rationale: The foundational post-Ayodhya study of religious nationalism as a product of colonial governmentality and print capitalism rather than an atavistic survival — still the reference point every later book (including Basu’s) argues with. Its core claim that religious and national identification are co-produced is fully portable. Why Basu won: Thirty years on, its empirical world (pre-liberalization, pre-television-boom, pre-digital) is a historical stratum; Basu covers the same genealogy and the Modi-era media apparatus students actually live in.

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford UP, 2003; library edition 2012) [lib #31]

Rationale: The theoretical canon of the whole field: the secular as a positive, historically constructed formation with its own disciplines and political theology, not the mere absence of religion. Everything else on this list is downstream of it. Why Basu won: As a set of interlocking genealogical essays with no single case, it is punishing as a stand-alone oral-exam text for MA students; Basu operationalizes the same critique on one concrete, discussable case.

Sumantra Bose, Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge UP, 2018) [lib #1032]

Rationale: A disciplined two-case comparison of the twentieth century’s two great non-Western secular-state experiments and their parallel slide into religious-majoritarian rule under Modi and Erdoğan — the most directly "comparative politics" book on the list, and very accessible. Why Basu won: Its strength is descriptive-analytic synthesis rather than an original theoretical claim, which makes for a shorter oral conversation; it is assigned instead as supporting reading.

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton UP, 2005) [lib #5707]

Rationale: A landmark ethnography of the Cairo women’s mosque movement that rebuilt the anthropology of religion, agency, and secularism from the ground up; its account of pious self-cultivation as politics is among the most portable theory the field has produced, and it brings gender squarely into the course. Why Basu won: Its centre of gravity — ethics of the self within the Egyptian revival — sits one step away from the course’s spine of state power, nationalism, and majoritarianism, where Basu sits exactly.

Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Harvard UP, 2013) [lib #1797]

Rationale: A provocative intellectual history that reads Pakistan’s founding as structurally analogous to Zionism — a polity grounded in conviction rather than ancestral territory — and thereby theorizes religious nationhood well beyond South Asia. Endlessly arguable, which is exactly what an oral exam wants. Why Basu won: Basu addresses the majoritarian (Hindu) side of the same subcontinental question and connects it to the currently governing project, giving the exam more contemporary purchase; Devji is the natural counter-reading and appears in the weekly syllabus instead.

Also considered from the library (the bench):

  • C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford UP, 2014) [lib #2759] — superb colonial genealogy of "tolerance," but too specialised (Arya Samaj / shuddhi debates) for a stand-alone oral.
  • Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (Cambridge UP, 2001) [lib #912] — the media-and-religion classic; assigned as a weekly reading instead.
  • Giorgio Shani & Takashi Kibe (eds.), Religion and Nationalism in Asia: Political Theory in East Asian Context (Routledge, 2019) [lib #5710] — edited volume, so unsuited to a one-book exam; used as a Week-1 frame text.
  • Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics (Oxford UP, 1998) [lib #3022] — the essential Indian secularism debate (incl. the Nandy and Madan positions), but an anthology, not an examinable monograph.

Week 1 — frame readings

Week 1 opens the course with two or three orientation readings on "religion and politics in Asia" as a field, alongside the tour of the catalogue:

  1. Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton UP, 2014) [lib #2856] — Introduction. The single best field-framing text the library holds: argues that European secularization theory does not travel, and that "religion," "secularity," and "spirituality" were jointly produced in Asia’s colonial and semi-colonial encounters. Sets up the course’s comparative ambition (South Asia ↔ East Asia) in one move.

  2. Giorgio Shani & Takashi Kibe (eds.), Religion and Nationalism in Asia: Political Theory in East Asian Context (Routledge, 2019) [lib #5710] — editors’ introduction. Maps religious resurgence × national projects across contemporary Asia — including the East Asian cases the rest of the library covers thinly — and poses the volume’s three lines of inquiry (empirical mapping, analytical vocabulary, normative stakes) that the seminar can adopt as its own standing questions.

  3. Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Allen Lane / Belknap, 2020) [lib #2524] — prologue/opening chapter, as inspiration. Not a religion book, but the course’s model of what "modern Asian thought" looks like in motion: ideas (including religious ones) travelling through pan-Asian networks of exiles, ports, and print, 1900–1929. Assign a short excerpt to set tone and geographic breadth.

    Optional theory primer for students who want it: Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford UP, 2003) [lib #31], introduction only.

THE CATALOGUE — thirty themes

How to read the entries. Each theme below is a complete session: an abstract, a one-country case study, a comparative opening onto a second case, a theoretical anchor, one compulsory item (clearly flagged — this is what everyone must have read), a fuller reading list for presenters and the curious, and audio-visual material.

Legend: † = primary source · ⋆ = academic reading. The [lib #id] markers key each item into the course library at jtmartelli.com/library (login given in class). Items marked [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] are on the acquisitions list (see Appendix); they will be made available before their session runs, or worked around.

Theme 01 — Religion & Populism

Abstract — Rodrigo Duterte cursed the Pope, called God "stupid," and presided over a killing campaign that Catholic bishops denounced from the pulpit — yet he kept the loyalty of one of Asia’s most churchgoing electorates, and many congregations theologized him as an instrument of divine justice. The session treats this scandal as a diagnostic instrument: what exactly does populism do with religion, and religion with populism? Against the standard European story (secular populists borrowing Christian identity as a border-marker), the Philippine case shows religion supplying populism’s moral economy — sin, punishment, deliverance — even when the leader blasphemes. The Pakistani counterpoint inverts the polarity: Imran Khan’s "Riyasat-e-Madina" wraps an anti-elite machine in an explicitly Islamist civilizational idiom. Reading the two together separates populism’s religious style from its religious substance, and asks where emotion, masculinity, and patronage do the real work. The session debates: is religious populism religion mobilized — or religion hollowed out and worn as a costume?

Case study: Philippines (Duterte). The session reconstructs how a foul-mouthed, openly anticlerical president flourished in a Catholic-majority democracy: the drug war framed as purification, congregations reading Duterte as God-sent judgment, and the Church’s fractured response. Students work outward from Duterte’s own words (the 22 June 2018 "stupid God" speech) to the survey and social-psychology evidence on how Filipinos reconciled faith and violence.

Comparative opening: Pakistan widens the lens: Imran Khan’s Islamist civilisationism shows a populism that sacralizes itself rather than fighting the clergy — same anti-elite grammar, opposite religious strategy.

Theoretical anchor: Daniel Nilsson DeHanas & Marat Shterin (eds), Religion and the Rise of Populism (2019) [lib #2820] — the entanglement of sacred symbolism and populist mobilization; read with Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism (2016) [lib #1003] on populism as performative style ("bad manners," crisis, celebrity).

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Kainat Shakil & Ihsan Yilmaz, Religion and Populism in the Global South: Islamist Civilisationism of Pakistan’s Imran Khan (2021) [lib #2846], section "4. The Materialization of Islamist Civilisationism in Khan’s Populism" (heading quoted verbatim from the full text; penultimate section, roughly the final third of the article, before "5. Conclusions").

Readings:

  • ⋆ DeHanas & Shterin (eds), Religion and the Rise of Populism (2019) [lib #2820] — the theory anchor: why even "secular" populisms traffic in the sacred.
  • ⋆ Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism (2016) [lib #1003] — populism as performed style; makes Duterte’s transgressive persona legible.
  • ⋆ Paul D. Kenny, Populism and Patronage (2017) [lib #704] — why populists win in Asia’s patronage democracies; ch. 8 ("Testing the Causal Mechanisms in Additional Cases") covers Duterte and Estrada.
  • ⋆ Cristina Jayme Montiel & Joshua Uyheng, "Mapping Contentious Collective Emotions in a Populist Democracy" (2020) [lib #2517] — the emotional infrastructure of Duterte’s rule.
  • ⋆ Benedict Anderson, "Cacique Democracy in the Philippines" (1988) [lib #4469] — the oligarchic structure populism claims to avenge.
  • ⋆ Walden Bello, "A dangerous liaison? Harnessing Weber to illuminate the relationship of democracy and charisma in the Philippines and India" (2020) [lib #3195] — charismatic authority as the missing variable.
  • ⋆ Fernan Talamayan & John Lee Candelaria, "Populist desires, nostalgic narratives" (2025) [lib #5683] — Marcos golden-age myth as populism’s memory-work on YouTube.
  • ⋆ Faisal Devji & Afiya S. Zia, "Pious, Populist, Political Masculinities in India and Pakistan" (2021) [lib #2385] — the gendered piety of the populist leader (Khan’s "honourable Muslim").
  • ⋆ Ihsan Yilmaz & Kainat Shakil, "Imran Khan: From Cricket Batsman to Populist Captain Tabdeli of Pakistan" (2021) [lib #2847] — compact leader-profile companion to the compulsory article.
  • ⋆ Nicholas Morieson & Ihsan Yilmaz, "A Systematic Literature Review of Populism, Religion and Emotions" (2021) [lib #2831] — field map for student orientation.
  • ⋆ Jayeel Cornelio & Erron Medina, "Christianity and Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines," Politics, Religion & Ideology 20(2) (2019) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the key study of how Christian communities theologized the drug war.
  • † Rodrigo Duterte, speech in Davao City, 22 June 2018 (the "stupid God" remarks) — primary source; video and transcript excerpts via contemporaneous Rappler/Reuters coverage (June 2018).

Audio-visual: A Thousand Cuts (dir. Ramona S. Diaz, 2020) — Maria Ressa vs. Duterte’s disinformation machine [verified]. On the President’s Orders (dir. James Jones & Olivier Sarbil, 2019, PBS Frontline/BBC Storyville) — inside the drug-war police units [verified].

Theme 02 — Religion & Revolution

Abstract — In 1978–79 the largest street protests the twentieth century had yet seen brought down a heavily armed, oil-rich monarchy without a guerrilla army, and installed the modern world’s first self-declared theocracy. Iran’s revolution scrambled every model social science had: revolutions were supposed to be made by vanguards and class coalitions in weakened states, not by mourning processions moving on forty-day cycles, cassette-tape sermons smuggled from Najaf, and crowds facing tanks "with bare hands." The session asks what religion actually did in 1979 — supplied an ideology (Shariati’s revolutionary Shiism), an organization (the mosque network the Shah couldn’t repress), a repertoire (martyrdom, Karbala, Muharram), or something stranger, what Foucault, reporting from Tehran, called a "political spirituality." We read the theorists against the reporters and the participants. Was 1979 a religious revolution — or a revolution that spoke religion because every other language had been silenced?

Case study: Iran. The session reconstructs the 1978–79 mobilization sequence — bazaar, seminary, university, oil workers — and tests structural explanations (Skocpol’s rentier state) against cultural ones (Khosrokhavar’s uprooted peasants and Shia communitarian imaginary, Shariati’s ideology), using Foucault’s on-the-spot reportages as a primary document to be read critically, not deferentially.

Comparative opening: The same months that made Iran’s Islamic revolution made Afghanistan’s communist one (Saur, April 1978) — and there religion became the counter-revolution: the mujahideen jihad shows the identical repertoire (martyrdom, ulama networks, exile leadership) mobilized against a revolutionary state rather than for one.

Theoretical anchor: Theda Skocpol, "Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution" (Theory and Society, 1982) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the structuralist forced by Iran to concede that "if ever there has been a revolution deliberately ‘made’ by a mass-based social movement, it is the Iranian Revolution" — read against Michel Foucault’s Iran reportages in Dits et écrits Vol. 3 (1994) [lib #718], the strongest contemporary claim that religion was the revolution’s very form, not its costume.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits Vol. 3 (1994) [lib #718] — the Iranian reportage sequence (Corriere della Sera / Le Nouvel Observateur, Sept.–Nov. 1978), in the final quarter of the volume: article no. 245, heading verbatim from the text: "A quoi revent les Iraniens?" (OCR of "À quoi rêvent les Iraniens ?"), flanked by "L’arrnee, quand la terre tremble" (no. 241) and "Une revolte a mains nues" (no. 248). Students read the reportages plus the post-revolution controversy.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits Vol. 3 (1994) [lib #718] — the compulsory reportages: "political spirituality" claimed in real time, weeks before anyone knew how it would end.
  • ⋆ Farhad Khosrokhavar, Les paysans dépaysannés et la révolution iranienne [lib #6694] — the revolution’s under-theorized social base: uprooted rural migrants and how displacement became religious mobilization.
  • ⋆ Farhad Khosrokhavar, La Vision communautaire du pouvoir et la révolution iranienne [lib #6695] — how Iranian Shiism produced a distinctive communitarian imaginary of power; the cultural-sociological counterpoint to Skocpol.
  • ⋆ Siavash Saffari, Rethinking the Islam/Modernity Binary: Ali Shariati and Religiously Mediated Discourse of Sociopolitical Development [lib #5598] — the revolution’s chief ideologue read as a theorist of alternative modernity, not a throwback.
  • ⋆ Nahid Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (2017) [lib #5304] — revolutionary anthems and mourning chants: the sensory machinery of 1979 and its afterlife.
  • ⋆ Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire (2012) [lib #94] — al-Afghani’s pan-Islamic genealogy: the long intellectual arc behind "revolt against the West," connecting Iran to the seminar’s Asian frame.
  • † Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar (Mizan Press, 1981) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the velayat-e faqih lectures (Najaf, 1970): the doctrinal blueprint, in print translation.
  • † Ali Shariati, "Red Shi’ism (the Religion of Martyrdom) vs. Black Shi’ism (the Religion of Mourning)" [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire; English text accessible via shariati.com] — the pamphlet that turned mourning into insurgency.
  • ⋆ Theda Skocpol, "Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution" (Theory and Society, 1982) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the anchor article; assign with her States and Social Revolutions framework in mind.
  • ⋆ Charles Kurzman, The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the anti-explanation: why every retrospective theory fails the test of what participants could know in 1978.
  • ⋆ Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the standard social history; background reading for students new to Iran.
  • ⋆ Janet Afary & Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (2005) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the prosecution’s brief against the compulsory reading; assign the two together.

Audio-visual: Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007) — the revolution and its consolidation from a leftist family’s living room; excerpt: the fall of the Shah and the first veiling scenes. Iran and the West, episode 1 (BBC/Brook Lapping, prod. Norma Percy, 2009) — Peabody-winning oral history with the surviving decision-makers of 1979.

Theme 03 — Religion & Subversion

Abstract — What happens to religious dissent when the state itself is a theocracy? In post-1979 Iran, the regime owns the mosques, writes the sermons, and polices the veil — so opposition has had to reinvent itself inside religion’s own vocabulary: reformist clerics arguing that the Islamic Republic betrays Islam, Green Movement marchers chanting Allahu akbar from rooftops against a government elected in God’s name, Sufis cultivating an inwardness the state cannot audit, women turning compulsory hijab into the regime’s most visible point of failure. This session flips Theme 02: religion no longer makes the revolution, it unmakes the revolutionary state — slowly, laterally, through what Asef Bayat calls "non-movements" and the "post-Islamist turn," the moment a society that lived political Islam concludes it wants religion and democracy, not religion as rule. From Khatami to the Green Movement to "Woman, Life, Freedom": is Iranian dissent secularizing — or is it the most religious critique the Islamic Republic has ever faced?

Case study: Iran. The session tracks dissent under theocracy across three generations — the reformist 1990s (Soroush, Khatami), the Green Movement of 2009, and Mahsa Amini 2022 — asking at each step whether opposition works through religion, against it, or beneath it (Bayat’s quiet encroachment of the ordinary).

Comparative opening: South Vietnam in 1963 offers the mirror image: there Buddhist monks — culminating in Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation — subverted a secular-Catholic state from a religious minority-majority position, showing that religion’s subversive grammar (martyrdom, processions, sacred bodies against the state) travels across confessions and regime types.

Theoretical anchor: Asef Bayat’s twin concepts of post-Islamism and non-movements: Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (2007) [lib #3214] and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2010) [lib #1709] — both in the library, both built centrally on the Iranian case.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (2007) [lib #3214], ch. 3, heading verbatim from the text: "THE MAKING OF A POST-ISLAMIST MOVEMENT — Social M ovem ents and Sociopolitical Change in Iran, 1 9 7 9 –1 9 9 7" (i.e. "The Making of a Post-Islamist Movement: Social Movements and Sociopolitical Change in Iran, 1979–1997"; book pp. 49–105, roughly the first third of the volume). The chapter opens on "the irony of Iran": the revolution that Islamized from above produced the Muslim world’s most remarkable reform movement.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic (2007) [lib #3214] — the compulsory chapter; post-Islamism as both engine and embodiment of Iranian change.
  • ⋆ Asef Bayat, Life as Politics (2010) [lib #1709] — "quiet encroachment": how ordinary practice, not organized opposition, erodes theocratic control.
  • ⋆ Negin Nabavi (ed.), Iran from Theocracy to the Green Movement (2012) [lib #2140] — historians and sociologists taking stock after 2009; good survey spine for the session.
  • ⋆ Paola Rivetti, Political Participation in Iran from Khatami to the Green Movement (2020) [lib #2141] — longitudinal ethnography of how activists survive between openings and crackdowns.
  • ⋆ Hamid Dabashi, The Green Movement in Iran (2011) [lib #2142] — the engaged insider-diaspora reading: 2009 as civil-rights movement, not counter-revolution.
  • ⋆ Abbas Milani, The Green Movement (2010) [lib #2139] — short, immediate, and usefully at odds with Dabashi on what 2009 wanted.
  • ⋆ Ramin Jahanbegloo, Farhad Khosrokhavar et al., Civil Society and Democracy in Iran [lib #6692] — dissident intellectuals (Ganji, Eshkevari) theorizing their own predicament; several authors are former prisoners of the regime.
  • ⋆ Seema Golestaneh, Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (2023) [lib #4202] — mystical inwardness as a zone the Islamic Republic cannot fully govern.
  • ⋆ Hossein Kermani, #MahsaAmini: Iranian Twitter Activism in Times of Computational Propaganda (2023) [lib #4610] — the 2022 cycle: dissent, platforms, and regime counter-messaging.
  • † Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, trans./ed. Mahmoud & Ahmad Sadri (Oxford UP, 2000) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the reformation-from-within primary text: religious knowledge as human, fallible, revisable.
  • ⋆ Narges Bajoghli, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (2019) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the view from the other side: regime media producers trying to win back a subverted generation.
  • ⋆ Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (1999) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — clerics debating feminism in Qom; gender as theocracy’s internal fault line.

Audio-visual: The Green Wave (Ali Samadi Ahadi, 2010) — animated documentary assembled from blogs, tweets and phone footage of the 2009 uprising. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011) — Panahi under house arrest, filming the ban on his filming; subversion reduced to its purest gesture.

Theme 04 — Sects, Cults & New Religious Movements

Abstract — South Korea is at once one of Asia’s most vibrantly Christian societies and the world’s most prolific incubator of "cults": the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, Shincheonji, JMS, and dozens of messianic offshoots all sprang from the same Protestant soil that produced the planet’s largest megachurches. This session asks what a "cult" actually is — analytically, not polemically. Working with Weber’s account of charismatic authority and its routinization, and with the South Asian guru literature as a portable model of personalist religious authority, we trace how new religious movements crystallize where rapid modernization, a crowded religious marketplace, and millenarian expectation intersect. Korea’s lineage runs deep: the nineteenth-century Tonghak faith was already a syncretic "new religion" that shook a state. Falun Gong shows the mirror case — a state so alarmed by an NRM that it built a persecution apparatus around it. The session debates: is "cult" a sociological category, or only ever a weapon in struggles over religious legitimacy?

Case study: South Korea. The session maps the ecology that produces Korean messianic movements — from Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogyo through the Unification Church to Shincheonji — against the backdrop of Korea’s explosive Protestant growth, and examines how the state, mainstream churches, and mass media police the boundary between "church" and "cult" (the 2020 Shincheonji COVID scandal and the 2023 JMS revelations as flashpoints).

Comparative opening: Falun Gong in China widens the lens: there the boundary-drawing is done not by rival churches but by a party-state that classifies an NRM as xiejiao ("heterodox teaching") and mobilizes the full security apparatus against it.

Theoretical anchor: Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947 tr.) [lib #1073] — charismatic authority and its routinization; operationalized through Jacob Copeman & Aya Ikegame (eds.), The Guru in South Asia (2012) [lib #2369], whose account of guru-ship as a portable "principle" of personalist religious authority travels well beyond South Asia.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt — Michael J. Seth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016) [lib #1943], ch. "Religion 1876–1910" (Albert L. Park; chapter 5, early in Part I "Late Chosŏn," roughly the first fifth of the volume). The chapter reconstructs Korea’s religious ferment at the moment of forced opening — including Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogyo, the archetypal Korean new religion — and shows how competing religious parties still fight over this history to legitimize present-day claims.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Michael J. Seth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016) [lib #1943] — compulsory chapter above; also ch. 7 on the 1894 Tonghak Rebellion (Carl Young) for the NRM-that-shook-a-state precedent.
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Aya Ikegame (eds.), The Guru in South Asia (2012) [lib #2369] — the "multifarious guru" as an analytical toolkit for personalist religious authority, directly transposable to Moon and Lee Man-hee.
  • ⋆ Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947 tr.) [lib #1073] — the foundational statement on charisma and its routinization into sect and church.
  • ⋆ Chetan Bhatt, Liberation and Purity: Race, New Religious Movements, and the Ethics of Postmodernity (1997) [lib #5510] — critical theory of late-twentieth-century NRMs, purity and identity; the session’s bridge from "cults" to identitarian religious politics.
  • ⋆ Matthew Wood, Spiritualité et pouvoir (2021 French tr. of Possession, Power and the New Age, 2007) [lib #2543] — sociology of authority in loosely-bound "nonformative" spirituality; the control case against which tightly-bound sects stand out.
  • ⋆ Raphaël Voix, "Dans l’attente du vrai leader: Apocalypse et régénérescence en Inde hindoue" (2019) [lib #1663] — ethnography of a Bengali sect awaiting its deceased leader’s return; a precise structural mirror of Shincheonji eschatology.
  • ⋆ Meera Nanda, The God Market (2009) [lib #941] — how liberalization inflates a religious marketplace; frames the "religious economy" reading of Korean Protestant competition.
  • ⋆ Priyanka Pathak-Narain, Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev (2017) [lib #2264] — the guru enterprise as business empire; sets up comparison with Moon’s chaebol-like conglomerate.
  • ⋆ Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (1984) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the classic empirical demolition of the brainwashing thesis, studied on the Korean-born Unification Church itself.
  • ⋆ Timothy S. Lee, Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea (2010) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the standard account of Korea’s evangelical explosion, the soil from which the sects grew.
  • ⋆ David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (2008) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the authoritative history of Falun Gong, qigong, and the state’s campaign.
  • ⋆ Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — takes Falun Gong seriously as religion, the analytic move the session defends.

Audio-visual:

  • In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal (dir. Cho Sung-hyun, 2023, Netflix/MBC) — docuseries on four Korean self-proclaimed messiahs, including JMS; excerpt from episode 1.
  • Ask No Questions (dirs. Jason Loftus & Eric Pedicelli, 2020) — investigation of the 2001 Tiananmen self-immolation and CCP anti-Falun Gong propaganda; use critically, noting the directors’ proximity to Falun Gong media.

Theme 05 — Religious Networks & the State within the State

Abstract — In 1997, a Turkish preacher’s followers were quietly told to "move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing"; by 2013 they ran much of the police and judiciary, and by July 2016 Turkey’s government blamed them for a coup attempt that killed 250 people. The Gülen movement is the century’s most spectacular case of a religious network growing inside a secular state: schools, exam-prep networks, media empires and pious business federations that recruited cadres into the bureaucracy for four decades — first against the Kemalist establishment, then in alliance with Erdoğan’s AKP, then in an "existential clash" with it. This session treats religion not as ideology but as organization: how brotherhoods build parallel hierarchies, why states court and then purge them, and what "infiltration" even means when the infiltrators sincerely believe they are serving the nation. When a devout network staffs the state, who has captured whom?

Case study: Turkey. The session reconstructs the Gülen (Hizmet) movement’s trajectory — Nurcu roots, the education-to-bureaucracy pipeline, the 2002–13 AKP alliance against the military, the corruption probes, and the post-2016 purge of 150,000+ officials — as a strategic problem in network–state relations, not simply a morality tale told by either side.

Comparative opening: India’s RSS offers the mirror image: a cadre network a century old that captured the state through elections rather than examinations, yet is likewise described — by admirers and critics alike — as a "state within the state" staffing institutions with its swayamsevaks.

Theoretical anchor: Steven Klein & Cheol-Sung Lee, "Towards a Dynamic Theory of Civil Society: The Politics of Forward and Backward Infiltration," Sociological Theory (2019) [lib #3190] — the session’s conceptual frame for two-way infiltration between civil society and state; paired with Steven Brooke, "From Medicine to Mobilization" (2017) [lib #481] on why religious service-provision networks accumulate reputational and organizational advantages that parties and states covet.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ M. Hakan Yavuz, Erdoğan: The Making of an Autocrat (2021) [lib #3694], ch. 6, "The Existential Clash: Erdoğan versus Gülen" (heading verbatim from the book’s table of contents, p. 206; the chapter sits in the final third of the book, between "The Annus Horribilis (2013)" and "Erdoğan’s ‘Seduced Coup’ and the Presidential System").

Readings:

  • ⋆ M. Hakan Yavuz, Erdoğan: The Making of an Autocrat (2021) [lib #3694] — the compulsory text; chs. 5–7 narrate alliance, clash and purge with the AKP letting "Gülenists run the bureaucracy."
  • ⋆ Steven Klein & Cheol-Sung Lee, "Towards a Dynamic Theory of Civil Society: The Politics of Forward and Backward Infiltration" (2019) [lib #3190] — the theory of mutual infiltration the session applies to Hizmet.
  • ⋆ Steven Brooke, "From Medicine to Mobilization: Social Service Provision and the Islamist Reputational Advantage" (2017) [lib #481] — why service networks convert welfare into political capital.
  • ⋆ M. Hakan Yavuz & Ahmet Erdi Öztürk (eds), Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey (2020) [lib #2835] — multi-author anatomy of the AKP’s transformation of the Turkish state after the Gülen rupture.
  • ⋆ Haldun Gülalp, "Globalization and Political Islam: The Social Bases of Turkey’s Welfare Party" (2001) [lib #3981] — the pre-AKP social coalition from which both Erdoğan and the Gülenists emerged.
  • ⋆ Antonino Castaldo, "Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey" (2018) [lib #2837] — situates the purge within Turkey’s authoritarian slide.
  • ⋆ Toygar Sinan Baykan, Yaprak Gürsoy & Pierre Ostiguy, "Anti-populist coups d’état in the twenty-first century" (2021) [lib #2809] — the July 2016 coup attempt in comparative perspective.
  • ⋆ Sumantra Bose, Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (2018) [lib #1032] — the bridge text for the Turkey–India comparison.
  • ⋆ Walter Andersen & Shridhar Damle, The RSS: A View to the Inside (2018) [lib #960] — the comparative case: the Sangh’s cadre network and its relationship to the Indian state.
  • † Hartosh Singh Bal, "The Takeover: How the RSS is infiltrating India’s intellectual spaces" (2019) [lib #1477] — investigative long-form documenting institutional capture, Sangh-style.
  • ⋆ Waleed Ziad, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (2021) [lib #4923] — historical depth: how a Naqshbandi network sustained a trans-state moral order long before the modern bureaucratic state.
  • ⋆ M. Hakan Yavuz & John L. Esposito (eds), Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement (Syracuse University Press, 2003) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the founding scholarly volume on Hizmet, written in its optimistic phase.

Audio-visual: Killing Ed: Charter Schools, Corruption and the Gulen Movement in America (dir. Mark Hall, 2015) — excerpt on the movement’s US charter-school network as transnational organizational strategy (verified: IMDb tt4945466).

Theme 06 — Religion & Democratization

Abstract — In June 1987, riot police ringed Myeongdong Cathedral while students sheltered inside; priests and nuns formed a human cordon, and the standoff broke the Chun Doo-hwan regime’s nerve. A year earlier in Manila, a cardinal’s radio appeal had put nuns in front of Marcos’s tanks on EDSA. Why did churches — minority institutions in Korea, a fractured hierarchy in the Philippines — become the load-bearing walls of Asia’s most celebrated democratic transitions? The session works through the mechanics: sanctuary and sacred space the state hesitates to violate, transnational protection (Rome, the World Council of Churches), moral authority accumulated by not being a party, and theologies (minjung, liberation) that turned suffering congregations into "subjects of history." It then follows the ledger forward: churches that midwife democracy acquire IOUs, and both countries are now governed by the heirs of the dictators the churches helped depose. The session debates: when religion delivers democratization, who ends up owning the democracy?

Case study: South Korea. The session traces the Protestant and Catholic opposition under Park Chung Hee’s Yusin state and through 1987 — the National Council of Churches’ human-rights discourse, minjung theology, Myeongdong Cathedral as sanctuary — asking what churches contributed that students and workers could not: protected space, foreign eyes, and a moral language of rights.

Comparative opening: The Philippines’ People Power (1986) supplies the paired case — a majority church whose hierarchy swung late but decisively — and, via the Marcos restoration of 2022, the sobering afterlife of church-brokered transitions.

Theoretical anchor: Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy (2015) [lib #2869] — how churches convert moral authority into political influence; supplemented by Robert M. Fishman, "How Civil Society Matters in Democratization" (2017) [lib #3178].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations under God (2015) [lib #2869], ch. "Weapons of the Meek: How Churches Influence Policy" (heading quoted verbatim from the full text’s table of contents; Chapter 2, immediately after the Introduction — the TOC places it at pp. 22–61).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations under God (2015) [lib #2869] — compulsory; the theory of churches’ "weapons of the meek."
  • ⋆ Celso M. Villegas & Myung-Ji Yang, "Making Narratives of Revolution" (2013) [lib #3206] — the direct Philippines–South Korea comparison: how middle classes narrated their revolutions.
  • ⋆ Mohammad Ali Kadivar, "Mass Mobilization and the Durability of New Democracies" (2018) [lib #3198] — why Korea’s long, organized mobilization produced a sturdier democracy than pacted transitions.
  • ⋆ Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (2005) [lib #689] — the developmental-militarized state the churches were up against.
  • ⋆ Meredith L. Weiss & Edward Aspinall (eds), Student Activism in Asia (2012) [lib #800] — ch. 5 "South Korea: Passion, Patriotism, and Student Radicalism" and ch. 10 on the Philippines situate the church–student alliance.
  • ⋆ Jiwon Suh, "Human Rights and Corruption in Settling the Accounts of the Past" (2023) [lib #5601] — how the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia judged their dictatorships afterwards.
  • ⋆ Robert M. Fishman, "How Civil Society Matters in Democratization" (2017) [lib #3178] — sets the boundaries of post-transition inclusion.
  • ⋆ James Loxton, "Why We Elect Former Dictators and Their Children" (2026) [lib #6839] — Marcos Jr. and the electoral afterlife of the regimes the churches helped topple.
  • ⋆ Christopher Rowland (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (1999/2007) [lib #2849] — the global theological current that minjung theology localizes.
  • † Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (ed.), Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Orbis, 1983) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the movement’s primary theological document; preface by James H. Cone.
  • ⋆ Paul Y. Chang, Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979 (Stanford, 2015) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the standard account of how repression pushed Christians, lawyers, and journalists into the movement.
  • ⋆ Robert L. Youngblood, Marcos Against the Church (Cornell, 1990) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the Philippine church–state confrontation that prepared EDSA.

Audio-visual: 1987: When the Day Comes (dir. Jang Joon-hwan, 2017) — the June Uprising, including the Myeongdong Cathedral sanctuary and the Catholic Priests’ Association’s disclosure of the Park Jong-chul torture cover-up. A Taxi Driver (dir. Jang Hoon, 2017) — Gwangju 1980, the movement’s founding trauma.

Theme 07 — Secular Religions

Abstract — In 1927 Mao catalogued the "religious authority of town and village gods" as one of the four ropes binding the Chinese peasant; forty years later, a hundred million Red Guards waved his little red book like a talisman, confessed before his portrait, and danced the loyalty dance. This session takes seriously the claim that Maoism functioned as a political religion: not metaphorically, but as a working system of sacred texts, rituals, martyrs, confession, and eschatology installed in the space cleared by the destruction of the old gods. Through Gentile’s "sacralization of politics" we ask what the concept explains — and what it flattens. North Korea’s Juche pushes the case to its limit: a doctrine that out-lived world communism by fusing Marxism-Leninism with familism, Confucian legacies, and an immortal Father. If secular regimes routinely manufacture the sacred, the session debates: is "political religion" an analytical category with real purchase, or a Cold War polemic that mistakes obedience for belief?

Case study: China. The session reads Mao’s 1927 assault on "religious authority" against the Mao cult at its Cultural Revolution apogee — the rituals, the quasi-scriptural canon, the Red Guard experience from below — and follows the cult’s afterlife in post-Mao official memory and popular re-sacralization of Mao.

Comparative opening: North Korea’s Juche and the Kim personality cult show the durable, dynastic variant: a "political religion" that survived de-Stalinization, the Sino-Soviet split, and 1989, by grafting the leader cult onto familism and indigenous religious idiom.

Theoretical anchor: Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (2006) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the canonical statement of the "sacralization of politics"; engaged through José Pedro Zúquete, "Missionary Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Populism" (2013) [lib #2904], which works explicitly in Gentile’s tradition and extends it beyond twentieth-century totalitarianisms.

Compulsory (one of): † primary source — Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927) [lib #4503], section "7. OVERTHROWING THE CLAN AUTHORITY OF THE ANCESTRAL TEMPLES AND CLAN ELDERS, THE RELIGIOUS AUTHORITY OF TOWN AND VILLAGE GODS, AND THE MASCULINE AUTHORITY OF HUSBANDS" (section 7 of 14, roughly the middle of the text; full text in library, also freely available via the Selected Works / Marxists Internet Archive). Mao’s program for dethroning the village gods — "it is for the peasants themselves to cast aside the idols" — is the session’s opening exhibit: the iconoclasm that preceded the new cult.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Gao Yuan, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution (1987) [lib #3835] — a middle-school Red Guard’s firsthand chronicle (opening ch. "The Hold of History"); the lived liturgy of the Mao cult.
  • ⋆ Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (2008; Eng. tr. 2012) [lib #4] — what unquestionable charisma cost: the famine as a catastrophe of faith and fear inside the party-church.
  • ⋆ Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (2011) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the definitive archival study of how the cult was built, managed, and escaped control.
  • ⋆ Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (2006) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — theoretical anchor; the sacralization of politics across fascism, communism, and democracy.
  • ⋆ José Pedro Zúquete, "Missionary Politics" (2013) [lib #2904] — in-library operationalization of Gentile: myths, rites, and mission in modern mass politics.
  • ⋆ Sergei O. Kurbanov, "North Korea’s juche ideology: indigenous communism or traditional thought?" (2019) [lib #1402] — reads official Juche texts against Confucian classics and Ch’ŏndogyo; is Juche communism, tradition, or theology?
  • ⋆ Charles K. Armstrong, "Familism, Socialism and Political Religion in North Korea," Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6.3 (2005) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire; cited in lib #1943] — the article that names the North Korean case a political religion.
  • ⋆ Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (2004) [lib #5750] — narrative history of the Kim cult from founding myth to famine.
  • ⋆ Taewoo Kim, "Actualized Stigma: The historical formation of anti-Americanism in North Korea" (2017) [lib #991] — ritualized hatred as the negative liturgy of the North Korean sacred order.
  • ⋆ B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race (2010) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the revisionist reading of North Korean ideology as race-based sacred narrative rather than communism.
  • ⋆ Elizabeth J. Perry, "The Populist Dream of Chinese Democracy" (2015) [lib #3020] — the mass-line’s afterlife: how Xi-era discourse re-mobilizes Maoist sacrality.

Audio-visual:

  • Morning Sun (dirs. Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé & Richard Gordon, 2003) — inner history of the Cultural Revolution through the generation "born red"; excerpt on the cult’s rituals and songs.
  • Under the Sun (dir. Vitaly Mansky, 2015) — a Pyongyang family staged by their own minders as their daughter prepares for the Day of the Shining Star; the political religion filming itself.

Theme 08 — Political Islam

Abstract — Abul A’la Maududi never won an election that mattered, yet no thinker did more to define what an "Islamic state" would concretely be: a founder who coined "theo-democracy," opposed the creation of Pakistan, and then spent three decades trying to capture the state he had rejected. This session takes political Islam seriously as political theory and party organization rather than as pathology: Maududi’s Jama’at-e-Islami as a Leninist-style vanguard for God, Zia-ul-Haq’s state-led Islamization that outflanked the Islamists from above, and the blasphemy regime that outlived them both. Against the Pakistani story the session sets Southeast Asia, where the world’s largest Muslim-majority state produced mass Islamic organizations that mostly chose civil society over the vanguard. Why did the same scriptural repertoire yield a captured state in one place and "tolerance without liberalism" in another — and is Islamism transformed, defeated, or simply absorbed when the state itself turns pious?

Case study: Pakistan. The session follows the ideology-to-party arc: Maududi’s political theory, the Jama’at-e-Islami’s conversion from holy community to electoral machine, its courtship and rivalry with Zia’s military Islamization (1977–88), and the long afterlife of the Objectives Resolution and blasphemy laws as the durable residue of political Islam in state form.

Comparative opening: Indonesia and Malaysia supply the counterpoint: Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah’s "civil Islam" versus UMNO’s state-sponsored Islamization — evidence that the decisive variable may be the state’s own strategy, not Islamist doctrine.

Theoretical anchor: Maududi’s political theory read through Humeira Iqtidar, "Jizya against Nationalism: Abul A’la Maududi’s Attempt at Decolonizing Political Theory," Journal of Politics (2020) [lib #2522]; with Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (2007) [lib #3214] supplying the "post-Islamism" thesis against which the Pakistani case is tested.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan (1994) [lib #6087], Part 1, ch. 2, "From Holy Community to Political Party" (heading verbatim from the table of contents and chapter head, pp. 28–46; early in the book, immediately after ch. 1 "The Quest for a Holy Community").

Readings:

  • ⋆ Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i Islami of Pakistan (1994) [lib #6087] — the compulsory text; the definitive organizational history of Maududi’s party.
  • ⋆ Humeira Iqtidar, "Jizya against Nationalism: Abul A’la Maududi’s Attempt at Decolonizing Political Theory" (2020) [lib #2522] — Maududi as political theorist, not caricature.
  • ⋆ Humeira Iqtidar, Secularizing Islamists? Jama’at-e-Islami and Jama’at-ud-Da’wa in Urban Pakistan (2011) [lib #1801] — ethnography arguing Islamist competition paradoxically secularizes.
  • ⋆ Mariam Abou Zahab, Pakistan: A Kaleidoscope of Islam (2020) [lib #2272] — the sectarian landscape (Deobandi, Barelvi, Shia, jihadi) in which the JI is one player.
  • ⋆ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (2002) [lib #4464] — why the traditional scholars, not only the Islamists, shape Pakistan’s religious politics.
  • ⋆ Christophe Jaffrelot, "Secularization without Secularism in Pakistan" (2012) [lib #5083] — the state’s oscillation between instrumentalizing and containing Islam.
  • ⋆ Adeel Hussain, Revenge, Politics and Blasphemy in Pakistan (2022) [lib #3565] — the blasphemy regime as political Islam’s most durable institutional legacy.
  • † Report of the Court of Inquiry… Punjab Disturbances 1953 (Munir Report, 1954) [lib #6106] — primary source: the state interrogates the ulama on "who is a Muslim?" after the anti-Ahmadi riots; Maududi under cross-examination.
  • † Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Islam in South Asia in Practice (2009) [lib #459] — primary-text reader for seminar excerpts on South Asian Islamic political thought.
  • ⋆ Jeremy Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (2016) [lib #6493] — the comparative anchor for Indonesian civil Islam.
  • ⋆ Colm Fox & Jeremy Menchik, "Islamic political parties and election campaigns in Indonesia" (2023) [lib #5979] — how Islamic parties actually campaign when they must win votes.
  • ⋆ Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (2007) [lib #3214] — the post-Islamism thesis the session stress-tests against Pakistan.

Audio-visual: Among the Believers (dirs. Hemal Trivedi & Mohammed Ali Naqvi, 2015) — excerpt on the Red Mosque madrasa network as political Islam’s pedagogical infrastructure (verified: IMDb tt4504626, Tribeca 2015).

Theme 09 — Cosmopolitan Islam

Abstract — Before Islam became the name of a state ideology, it was the name of a world. This session follows Muhammad Iqbal — poet in Urdu and Persian, philosopher trained in Cambridge and Munich, reluctant politician in Lahore — as he dismantles both territorial nationalism and the Caliphate to imagine a Muslim political fraternity that is neither nation nor empire. Around him swirls the larger nineteenth- and twentieth-century universe of Muslim cosmopolitanism: al-Afghani’s restless anti-imperial itinerancy from Cairo to Istanbul, the Indian Khilafat agitation that made Ottoman sovereignty a mass cause thousands of miles from Anatolia, and the Indian Ocean circuits of scholars, pilgrims and exiles. The session treats "pan-Islamism" not as proto-fundamentalism but as one of modern Asia’s great experiments in thinking politics beyond the nation-state — an experiment that produced Pakistan, among other paradoxes. If Iqbal rejected both the Caliphate and the territorial nation, what exactly did he found — and can a religious universalism ever institutionalize itself without betraying its cosmopolitanism?

Case study: South Asia — Muhammad Iqbal. The session reconstructs Iqbal’s trajectory from the pan-Islamic laments of his poetry to his 1930 Allahabad address, reading him (with Kapila and Devji) as a theorist of Muslim republican sovereignty who broke with Arabia-centred global Islam. Students confront the irony that the most cosmopolitan of Muslim thinkers became the retrospective "founder" of a territorial state.

Comparative opening: The session opens outward to the itinerant pan-Islamism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Iran–Egypt–India–Istanbul) and the Khilafat movement, in which Indian Muslims — and some Hindus — mobilized for a Caliphate most had never seen.

Theoretical anchor: Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (2021) [lib #2805], on fraternity and sovereignty as the core categories of the "Indian Age"; paired with Faisal Devji, Secular Islam (Political Theology article) [lib #3107], which reads Iqbal as secularizing Islam from within.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (2021) [lib #2805], ch. 6, "The Philosophical Discovery of Muslim Sovereignty" (verbatim heading; the Iqbal chapter, roughly the final third of the book, opening on Iqbal’s epigraph "A Prophet is only a practical poet").

Readings:

  • ⋆ Faisal Devji, Secular Islam (Political Theology; year not recorded in index) [lib #3107] — the sharpest short rereading of Iqbal as a thinker of Islam without clerical or territorial authority.
  • ⋆ Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (2013) [lib #1797] — Pakistan as an idea-state founded against land and history; the afterlife of Iqbal’s abstraction.
  • ⋆ Faisal Devji, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (2025) [lib #6844] — the full arc of pan-Islamism, jihadist universalism and its exhaustion.
  • ⋆ Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (2012) [lib #94] — ch. 2 ("The Strange Odyssey of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani") for the comparative opening.
  • ⋆ Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal (eds.), Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism (2020) [lib #4519] — Indian Ocean circuits of Muslim universalism against imperial cartography.
  • ⋆ Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020) [lib #2524] — the clandestine inter-Asian networks (including Muslim ones) that carried anti-colonial cosmopolitanism.
  • ⋆ Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, A Hindu Champion of Pan-Islamism: Lajpat Rai and the Khilafat Movement (2022) [lib #5517] — pan-Islamism’s strange allies: a Hindu nationalist defending the Caliphate.
  • ⋆ Yasmin Saikia, Hijrat and Azadi in Indian Muslim Imagination and Practice (2017) [lib #6354] — the 1920 hijrat as lived cosmopolitan practice linking nationalism, internationalism and exile.
  • † Muhammad Iqbal, Kulliyat-e Iqbal [lib #5661] — the poetry itself ("Shikwa"/"Jawab-e-Shikwa", the Urdu collected works); seminar reads two poems in translation.
  • † Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930; expanded Oxford ed. 1934) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — public domain; full text on archive.org and via the Iqbal Academy Pakistan.
  • ⋆ Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (2015) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — five post-1857 Indian Muslim exiles who built the trans-imperial Muslim public sphere.
  • ⋆ Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (2017) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — how "the Muslim world" itself was invented under imperial globalization.

Audio-visual: Jinnah (dir. Jamil Dehlavi, 1998; Christopher Lee as Jinnah) — excerpt on the League years, to debate how cinema territorializes what Iqbal left abstract. [Verified via WebSearch.]

Theme 10 — Religion & Civil War

Abstract — The doctrine most explicitly committed to non-violence presided over one of Asia’s longest and cruellest wars. This session asks how Theravada Buddhism became entangled with the Sri Lankan state’s twenty-six-year war against Tamil separatism: monks blessing offensives, the Mahavamsa chronicle recycled as military charter, "Sinhalatva" ideology fusing race, island and dharma — while the avowedly secular LTTE built its own sacralized cult of martyrs, cemeteries and suicide. Religion appears here not as the war’s cause but as its grammar: the idiom in which killing, dying and remembering were made meaningful on both sides. The session then crosses the Bay of Bengal to Myanmar, where monastic movements like 969 and Ma Ba Tha turned the same tradition into a machinery of anti-Muslim exclusion culminating in the Rohingya expulsions. Does religion cause civil war, legitimate it after the fact, or simply supply the deepest available language for enmity — and would these wars have been less absolute without it?

Case study: Sri Lanka. The session works through the Buddhist legitimation of the war (Schalk’s "Simhalatva"), the anthropology of wartime democracy and violence (Spencer), and the LTTE’s mirror-image sacralization of martyrdom (Roberts, Natali) — treating both the state’s Buddhism and the Tigers’ "secular" death-cult as religious formations.

Comparative opening: Myanmar widens the lens: the 969 movement and Ma Ba Tha show militant monasticism operating without a civil war of the Sri Lankan type — persecution of the Rohingya as religiously framed violence under military tutelage.

Theoretical anchor: Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia (2007) [lib #400], on how electoral democracy and political violence feed each other; framed by Adam Baczko & Gilles Dorronsoro, Pour une approche sociologique des guerres civiles (2017) [lib #2978], for a sociology of civil war beyond greed/grievance; with Stanley J. Tambiah’s Buddhism Betrayed? (1992) as the canonical missing anchor to acquire.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ John R. Hinnells & Richard King (eds.), Religion and Violence in South Asia: Theory and Practice (2007) [lib #1176], ch. 6, "Operationalizing Buddhism for political ends in a martial context in Lanka: the case of Simhalatva" (verbatim heading; Peter Schalk’s chapter, opening Part 2, just past the middle of the volume).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Jonathan Spencer, Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia (2007) [lib #400] — the theoretical spine: democracy, violence and the state seen from Sri Lanka.
  • ⋆ Neloufer de Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and Narrative in the Armed Conflict (2007) [lib #710] — how the war saturated everyday culture, advertising and memory on the government side.
  • ⋆ Michael Roberts, Tamil Tigers "Martyrs": Regenerating Divine Potency? (2005) [lib #418] — the LTTE’s cult of the fallen as recycled religious potency inside a "secular" movement.
  • ⋆ Cristiana Natali, Building cemeteries, constructing identities: funerary practices and nationalist discourse among the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (2008) [lib #971] — martyrs’ cemeteries as the Tigers’ sacred landscape.
  • ⋆ Giacomo Mantovan, Combattants et victimes en temps de guerre et d’exil (2018) [lib #709] — how Tamil exiles in France narrate combat and victimhood; the war’s diasporic afterlife.
  • ⋆ Fazeeha Azmi, Cathrine Brun & Ragnhild Lund (eds.), Young People’s Everyday Politics in Post-conflict Sri Lanka [lib #1700] — what "post-war" means for the generation that inherited it.
  • ⋆ Bart Klem & Bert Suykens, The Politics of Order and Disturbance (2018) [lib #2075] — public authority and violent contestation as ordinary politics in South Asia.
  • ⋆ Adam Baczko & Gilles Dorronsoro, Pour une approche sociologique des guerres civiles (2017) [lib #2978] — the civil-war theory frame the session tests against the religious material.
  • ⋆ Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (1992) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the classic statement of the problem, by the war’s greatest anthropologist-son.
  • ⋆ Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (2017) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — Burmese Buddhist political thought in its own vocabulary, for the comparative half.
  • ⋆ Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (2017) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — reportage-driven account of 969, Ma Ba Tha and the road to the Rohingya expulsions.

Audio-visual: No Fire Zone: In the Killing Fields of Sri Lanka (dir. Callum Macrae, 2013) — excerpt on the 2009 endgame [verified via WebSearch]; The Venerable W. (dir. Barbet Schroeder, 2017 Cannes release) — excerpt on Wirathu’s sermons for the Myanmar comparison [verified via WebSearch].

Theme 11 — Digital Evangelists & Religious Influencers

Abstract — Religious authority in Asia no longer flows only through seminaries, lineages and pulpits: it streams. The session centres on Zakir Naik — the Mumbai-born, medically trained Salafi-style televangelist whose Peace TV claimed audiences in the hundreds of millions, and who has lived in Malaysia since 2016 under permanent residency while India has pursued his extradition since 2018 (Malaysian courts still seized of the matter as of late 2025). Naik’s "science proves the Qur’an" idiom, his memorised cross-scriptural proof-texting, and his celebrity-preacher stagecraft exemplify a new figure: the deterritorialised religious influencer whose congregation is an algorithmic public. Against him we set India’s godman economy — Ramdev’s yoga-nationalist TV empire, Asaram’s downfall — and Korea’s wired Christianity, asking what Hirschkind’s cassette-sermon counterpublics become when the cassette is replaced by the recommendation engine. Does digital mediation democratise religious authority, or concentrate it in charismatic monopolies that states can neither license nor silence? The session debates: who certifies the preacher when the platform has replaced the seminary?

Case study: Malaysia. Zakir Naik, an Indian citizen and fugitive from Indian money-laundering and hate-speech charges, has since 2016 preached from Malaysian sanctuary, protected by permanent residency and courted by Malay-Muslim politicians even as Malaysia’s multi-religious coalition politics makes him radioactive. His case fuses televangelism, transnational Islamic celebrity, and the diplomatic economy of asylum. (Facts verified July 2026: PR granted mid-2010s; extradition request pending before Malaysian judicial process, per Malaysian High Commissioner statement of October 2025.)

Comparative opening: Open with India’s online godmen — Ramdev’s satellite-TV yoga nationalism and the criminal collapses of Asaram Bapu and Gurmeet Ram Rahim — to show that the influencer-preacher is a cross-confessional Asian form, not an Islamic peculiarity; Korea’s app-mediated megachurch Christianity supplies a third data point (library gap, see below).

Theoretical anchor: Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (2006) [lib #3901] — mediated preaching as ethical self-cultivation and counterpublic formation; paired with Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2008/2010) [lib #55] on deculturated, exportable religiosity — Naik’s idiom par excellence.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Hirschkind [lib #3901], ch. "Cassettes and Counterpublics" (ch. 4, ~p. 105) — read against a Peace TV lecture.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (2006) [lib #3901] — sermon media build ethical counterpublics
  • ⋆ Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance (2010) [lib #55] — globalised religion severed from culture
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Aya Ikegame (eds.), The Guru in South Asia (2012) [lib #2369] — the guru as multipliable, mediatised form
  • ⋆ Amanda Lucia, Innovative Gurus: Tradition and Change in Contemporary Hinduism (2017) [lib #2518] — guru innovation as market adaptation
  • ⋆ Andrea Jain, Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (2020) [lib #2862] — spiritual commodification and neoliberal religiosity
  • ⋆ Priyanka Pathak-Narain, Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev (2017) [lib #2264] — journalistic anatomy of a media-made godman
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Bhuvi Gupta, "Awakening Hindu nationalism through yoga: Swami Ramdev and the Bharat Swabhiman movement" (2019) [lib #2338] — TV yoga as political mobilisation
  • ⋆ Merlyna Lim, Social Media and Politics in Southeast Asia (2025) [lib #5957] — the Malaysian/Southeast Asian platform-politics context
  • ⋆ Vika Gardner, E. Carolina Mayes & Salman Hameed, "Preaching Science and Islam: Dr. Zakir Naik and Discourses of Science and Islam in Internet Videos," Die Welt des Islams 58(3) (2018) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the key peer-reviewed study of Naik’s method
  • ⋆ Gary R. Bunt, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority (2018) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • ⋆ Heidi Campbell (ed.), Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (2013) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]

Audio-visual: Kumaré (Vikram Gandhi, 2011) — a filmmaker invents a guru and acquires real followers; screen alongside primary footage of a Zakir Naik Peace TV lecture (widely available; students compare rhetorical apparatus).

Theme 12 — Religion & Gender

Abstract — No garment in modern politics carries more theoretical freight than the Iranian chador. Made compulsory by one revolution (1979) and contested by another (the 2022 Woman-Life-Freedom uprising after Mahsa Amini’s death in morality-police custody), the veil has been read as false consciousness, as pious self-fashioning, and as a battlefield standard by turns. This session refuses the liberation/oppression binary. With Saba Mahmood we ask whether agency can inhere in the cultivation of submission; with Leila Ahmed we historicise how "the woman question" became the ground on which colonialism, nationalism and Islamism all fought; with Satrapi’s Persepolis we watch a girl grow up inside the revolution’s dress code. India’s Sabarimala temple-entry conflict shows that the gendering of sacred order is not an Islamic monopoly. If piety can be chosen, and unveiling can be coerced (Reza Shah, 1936), where exactly does women’s freedom of religion reside? The session debates: can a feminist defend both the right to veil and the right to burn the veil?

Case study: Iran. From Reza Shah’s forced unveiling (1936) through Khomeini’s compulsory hijab (1983) to the Green Movement and the Mahsa Amini protests, the Iranian state has made women’s bodies the visible index of its religious legitimacy — producing, in response, the most theoretically sophisticated women’s movement in the Muslim world.

Comparative opening: India’s Sabarimala controversy (Supreme Court, 2018) — menstruating-age women’s entry into an ascetic god’s temple — shows a democracy’s courts, not a theocracy’s police, adjudicating the same question of gendered sacred order.

Theoretical anchor: Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005) [lib #5707]; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992) [lib #6548].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Mahmood [lib #5707], ch. 5 "Agency, Gender, and Embodiment" (~p. 153).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (2005) [lib #5707] — agency beyond the liberatory subject
  • ⋆ Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (1992) [lib #6548] — the colonial genealogy of the veil debate
  • ⋆ Emma Tarlo & Annelies Moors (eds.), Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion (2013) [lib #3971] — veiling as aesthetic and market practice
  • ⋆ Hossein Kermani, "#MahsaAmini: Iranian Twitter Activism in Times of Computational Propaganda" (2023) [lib #4610] — the 2022 uprising’s digital front
  • ⋆ Paola Rivetti, Political Participation in Iran from Khatami to the Green Movement (2020) [lib #2141] — where women’s activism sits in Iranian politics
  • ⋆ Negin Nabavi (ed.), Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (2012) [lib #2140] — background on the Islamic Republic’s contested evolution
  • ⋆ Nivedita Menon, Secularism as Misdirection (2023) [lib #4893] — Sabarimala and the feminist critique of secular framing
  • ⋆ Amrita Basu & Patricia Jeffery (eds.), Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (1998) [lib #2283] — women as agents of religious politics, not only its objects
  • † Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2000–03; Eng. tr. 2003–04) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the session’s primary-source graphic memoir (JTM floated it in the design transcript)
  • ⋆ Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (1999) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — clerics arguing fiqh with a feminist anthropologist

Audio-visual: Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, 2007); Divorce Iranian Style (Kim Longinotto & Ziba Mir-Hosseini, 1998).

Theme 13 — What is a Theocracy?

Abstract — "Theocracy" is a word everyone uses and almost no one defines. Rule by God? By clerics? By a law claimed to be divine? Saudi Arabia, this session’s case, complicates every definition: its 1992 Basic Law declares the Qur’an and Sunna to be the constitution, yet the state is a dynastic monarchy in which the ulama are salaried subordinates — a theocracy without clerical rule, arguably a "royal theocracy" in which the king polices God’s law and God’s law legitimates the king. Bhutan, the comparative opening, offers the inverse: a Buddhist dual system (chhoe-sid-nyi, the joint order of dharma and polity) that voluntarily constitutionalised itself in 2008. Reading political theology (Schmitt’s heirs), Sahlins on the divinity of the "original political society," and Zaman on ulama as custodians of change, we ask whether the pure type exists anywhere — even Iran runs elections. The session debates: is theocracy a regime type at all, or just the accusation modern states hurl at rivals who locate sovereignty above the people?

Case study: Saudi Arabia. The Al Saud–Wahhabi compact (1744) fused tribal conquest with religious mission; today the state that claims custody of Islam’s two holiest places jails the very clerics it once empowered, while MBS’s top-down "moderation" shows religious law to be an instrument of sovereign will — theocracy as monarchy’s costume.

Comparative opening: Bhutan’s chhoe-sid-nyi — the dual sovereignty of Buddhist order and worldly ruler under the 2008 constitution — shows a non-Abrahamic path where the religion-state fusion dissolved itself into constitutional monarchy rather than hardening into clerical rule.

Theoretical anchor: Aakash Singh, Péter Losonczi & Mika Luoma-Aho (eds.), The Future of Political Theology (2011) [lib #6164]; Marshall Sahlins, "The original political society" (2017) [lib #2065] — sovereignty was divine before it was human; Dingxin Zhao, "The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China" (2009) [lib #5503] as the East Asian control case.

Compulsory (one of): † primary source: Basic Law of Governance of Saudi Arabia (Royal Order A/90, 1 March 1992), esp. Art. 1 ("its constitution is the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet") and Arts. 5–8 on monarchy and shura — English text freely accessible via constituteproject.org (Saudi Arabia 1992, rev. 2013).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Singh, Losonczi & Luoma-Aho (eds.), The Future of Political Theology (2011) [lib #6164] — what "political theology" can still mean
  • ⋆ Marshall Sahlins, "The original political society" (2017) [lib #2065] — kingship and cosmic hierarchy before the state
  • ⋆ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (2002) [lib #4464] — clerics between state service and religious authority
  • ⋆ John L. Esposito & Emad El-Din Shahin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (2013) [lib #460] — reference frame across cases
  • ⋆ Amir H.Y. Salama, "Ideological collocation and the recontextualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11" (2011) [lib #1845] — how "Wahhabi" is discursively made
  • ⋆ Calvert Jones, "All the King’s Consultants: The Perils of Advising Authoritarians" (2019) [lib #3149] — the technocratic face of divine-right modernisation
  • ⋆ Amélie Le Renard, Le privilège occidental (2019) [lib #2827] — Westerners inside the Gulf’s moral order
  • ⋆ Negin Nabavi (ed.), Iran: From Theocracy to the Green Movement (2012) [lib #2140] — the clerical-republic contrast case
  • ⋆ Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2002; 2nd edn 2010) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the standard critical history
  • † Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government (Velayat-e Faqih, 1970), in Hamid Algar (tr.), Islam and Revolution (1981) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the century’s one explicit blueprint for clerical rule
  • ⋆ Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan (2013) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — for the comparative opening

Audio-visual: Saudi Arabia Uncovered (James Jones, PBS Frontline, 2016); Wadjda (Haifaa al-Mansour, 2012) — the first Saudi feature by a woman, everyday life under religious governance.

Theme 14 — Religion & Caste

Abstract — Is caste the essence of Hinduism or its colonial caricature? In 1936 B.R. Ambedkar answered with a speech so incendiary the reformist organisation that commissioned it refused to let him deliver it: caste cannot be annihilated without dynamiting its scriptural warrant, "the religion of rules." Gandhi’s rejoinder — that varna is defensible even if untouchability is sin — staged the debate this session re-enacts. Around it we array the great theoretical quarrel: Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, which made purity/pollution the deep grammar of Indian civilisation, against Dirks’s Castes of Mind, which made modern caste an artefact of the colonial census. The session then walks the argument into the present through the caste-in-cinema debate — from Bollywood’s savarna gaze to Pa. Ranjith’s Dalit assertion in Tamil film — and through Ambedkar’s own exit: mass conversion to Buddhism in 1956. If caste survives conversion, migration and secular law, is it a religious institution at all? The session debates: can Hinduism be reformed into casteless-ness, or was Ambedkar right that annihilation requires apostasy?

Case study: India. The world’s largest democracy constitutionally abolished untouchability (Art. 17) while retaining — in personal law, temple governance, marriage markets and film studios — the ritual hierarchy Ambedkar called "an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt." Rohith Vemula’s 2016 suicide letter made the university its newest crematorium.

Comparative opening: Nepal — the world’s last Hindu kingdom until 2008 — codified caste in its 1854 Muluki Ain and now debates hierarchy inside a secular republic (Gellner’s "persistence of hierarchy"), proving caste’s religious grammar travels across state forms.

Theoretical anchor: Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (1966/1970) [lib #631] versus Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (2001) [lib #642].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: B.R. Ambedkar [lib #306], ch. "Annihilation of Caste: An Undelivered Speech, 1936" (annotated Navayana edn, 2014); pair with the appended exchange "A Vindication of Caste by Mahatma Gandhi" / "A Reply to the Mahatma by B.R. Ambedkar".

Readings:

  • ⋆ B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936; annot. edn 2014) [lib #306] — the foundational indictment
  • ⋆ Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (1970) [lib #631] — hierarchy as religious ideology
  • ⋆ Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind (2001) [lib #642] — caste as colonial construction
  • ⋆ Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (1999) [lib #448] — the historian’s synthesis between the two
  • ⋆ Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion and the Social in Modern India (2014) [lib #5045] — how "religion" was invoked to shield caste from reform
  • ⋆ B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957) [lib #169] — the conversion alternative
  • ⋆ Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (2013) [lib #1301] — the scriptural record read against itself
  • ⋆ Sree Govind Bharatvaraj, Contemporary Anti-Caste Cinema: Pa. Ranjith, Dalit Movements, Cultural Assertion (2026) [lib #6907] — the caste-in-cinema debate, Dalit side
  • ⋆ Biswajit Das & Debendra Prasad Majhi (eds.), Caste, Communication and Power (2021) [lib #2929] — caste in media representation
  • ⋆ David Gellner et al., The Persistence of Hierarchy: Paradoxes of Dominance in Nepal and Beyond (2024) [lib #6711] — the comparative opening’s text
  • ⋆ N. Sukumar, "Red Sun in the Blue Sky: Rohith Vemula’s Utopian Republic" (2016) [lib #1690] — bridge to Theme 18

Audio-visual: Sairat (Nagraj Manjule, 2016) — inter-caste love and honour killing, by a Dalit director; India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart (Stalin K., 2007) — untouchability practised across four religions.

Theme 15 — Confucianism as a Religion of Social Stratification

Abstract — Is Confucianism a religion, an ethic, or a machinery for ranking human beings? The category itself was invented at Oxford: Max Müller and James Legge filed "Confucianism" among the world religions, and Weber indicted it as the rational ethic of adjustment that blocked capitalism in China. Yet the tradition’s living core — the five relationships, filial piety, the examination meritocracy, the mandate of heaven — reads less like a soteriology than a cosmology of hierarchy: everyone ordered, everyone owed. This session follows Dingxin Zhao’s account of the Confucian-Legalist state, in which empire fused moralising scholars with punitive law for two millennia, then crosses to Korea, where Chosŏn neo-Confucianism produced history’s most thoroughgoing Confucian society — yangban aristocracy, ancestor rites, gendered seclusion — whose afterlives structure South Korean corporate life, and where "Asian values" debates (Lee Kuan Yew contra Kim Dae Jung) weaponised Confucius against democracy. Japan remains the question mark: Confucian furniture without Confucian religion? The session debates: if a tradition sacralises hierarchy but has no church, no salvation and perhaps no god — what exactly makes it a religion?

Case study: China and Korea. Mao’s "Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius" campaign tried to bury the sage; Xi’s China builds Confucius Institutes and cites harmony against liberalism. Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) out-Confucianised China itself, and contemporary Korean age-rank grammar, chaebol paternalism and ancestral rites are its residue.

Comparative opening: Japan functions as the seminar’s deliberate question mark — Tokugawa neo-Confucianism ordered samurai ethics and status law, yet modern Japan classifies Confucianism as morality, not religion, testing every definition the session proposes.

Theoretical anchor: Max Weber on the Chinese literati and the ethic of adjustment — via Stephen Kalberg (ed.), Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity (2005) [lib #938]; full source The Religion of China [acquire]; Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State (2015) [lib #1237].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Zhao [lib #1237], ch. 12 "Neo-Confucianism and the Advent of a “Confucian Society”" (~p. 331).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History (2015) [lib #1237] — how scholars plus law ruled an empire
  • ⋆ Dingxin Zhao, "The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China" (2009) [lib #5503] — Confucian legitimacy logic, then and now
  • ⋆ Max Weber (ed. Kalberg), Readings and Commentary on Modernity (2005) [lib #938] — Weberian frame for religion and rationalisation
  • ⋆ Eugene Park, A Genealogy of Dissent: The Progeny of Fallen Royals in Chosŏn Korea (2018) [lib #3119] — status order in the most Confucian state
  • ⋆ Djun Kil Kim, The History of Korea (2005) [lib #263] — survey backbone for the Korean case
  • ⋆ Michael Seth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016) [lib #1943] — Confucian legacies into modernity
  • ⋆ Kim Dae Jung, "Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values," Foreign Affairs (1994) [lib #6528] — the democratic rebuttal to Confucian authoritarianism
  • † Fareed Zakaria, "Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew," Foreign Affairs 73(2) (1994) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the provocation Kim answers; assign as paired primary source
  • ⋆ Sergei O. Kurbanov, "North Korea’s juche ideology: indigenous communism or traditional thought?" (2019) [lib #1402] — Confucian deep structure in the least likely place
  • ⋆ Sam Crane, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao (2013) [lib #4571] — what the classics say to moderns
  • ⋆ Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia (2014) [lib #2856] — spirituality/secularity comparison, China against India
  • ⋆ Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (2013) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the definitive study of the session’s title question
  • ⋆ Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea (1992) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — how a society was re-engineered by doctrine

Audio-visual: Confucius (Hu Mei, 2010) — PRC prestige biopic, itself evidence of state re-sacralisation; In the Name of Confucius (Doris Liu, 2017) — the Confucius Institute controversy.

Theme 16 — Blasphemy

Abstract — In Pakistan, an accusation can be a death sentence before any court convenes. Section 295-C of the Penal Code (1986) prescribes death for defiling the Prophet’s name; no one has been executed under it, yet dozens have been lynched around it — and its defenders, from the murderer Mumtaz Qadri to the TLP movement canonising him, treat the law itself as devotion. This session treats blasphemy not as medieval residue but as a modern legal technology: colonial section 295-A (1927, enacted after the Rangila Rasul affair) invented the offence of "outraging religious feelings," and postcolonial states on both sides of the border have industrialised it — Pakistan against Ahmadis and Christians like Asia Bibi, India through an expanding jurisprudence of hurt sentiments. With Adeel Hussain’s genealogy, Neeti Nair’s Hurt Sentiments, and the 1954 Munir Report’s astonishing finding that no two ulama could agree on who counts as a Muslim, we ask what work "wounded religion" does for states and mobs alike. The session debates: does blasphemy law protect the sacred, or manufacture it?

Case study: Pakistan. From the colonial 295-A through Zia-ul-Haq’s 295-B/C amendments to the Asia Bibi acquittal (2018) and the TLP’s street veto, blasphemy has become the sovereign question of Pakistani politics — capable of assassinating governors (Salmaan Taseer, 2011), toppling ministers and closing capitals.

Comparative opening: Indonesia’s 2017 conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor Ahok showed the same mechanics — mass mobilisation converting an electoral rivalry into a blasphemy trial — inside Southeast Asia’s supposedly pluralist giant (Menchik’s "godly nationalism").

Theoretical anchor: Adeel Hussain, Revenge, Politics and Blasphemy in Pakistan (2022) [lib #3565]; Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler & Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Hussain [lib #3565], ch. "Transgression" (ch. 4; the book’s arc runs "Rebirth — Betrayal — Sin — Transgression — Punishment — Redemption").

Readings:

  • ⋆ Adeel Hussain, Revenge, Politics and Blasphemy in Pakistan (2022) [lib #3565] — the intellectual history of the law’s passions
  • ⋆ Neeti Nair, Hurt Sentiments: Secularism and Belonging in South Asia (2023) [lib #5367] — 295-A’s career across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
  • ⋆ Kathinka Frøystad, Arild Engelsen Ruud & Paul Rollier (eds.), Outrage: The Rise of Religious Offence in Contemporary South Asia (2019) [lib #1809] — ethnographies of taking offence
  • ⋆ Kathinka Frøystad & Vera Lazzaretti, "Introduction: Containing Religious Offence beyond the Courts" (2021) [lib #2660] — offence management outside law
  • ⋆ Naveeda Khan, Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012) [lib #5364] — the Ahmadi question and the open texture of Pakistani Islam
  • † Report of the Court of Inquiry… Punjab Disturbances of 1953 (Munir Report, 1954) [lib #6106] — primary source; the definitional impasse at pp. on "who is a Muslim"
  • ⋆ Ali Usman Qasmi, "A Master Narrative for the History of Pakistan" (2019) [lib #1041] — ideological state-formation behind the laws
  • ⋆ Jeremy Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (2016) [lib #6493] — the comparative opening’s frame
  • ⋆ Asad, Brown, Butler & Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? (2009) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — blasphemy, injury and free speech after the cartoons affair

Audio-visual: The Accused: Damned or Devoted? (Mohammed Ali Naqvi, 2020) — Khadim Rizvi’s TLP and the Asia Bibi case; Among the Believers (Hemal Trivedi & Mohammed Ali Naqvi, 2015) — inside the Red Mosque network.

Theme 17 — Conversion & Proselytization

Abstract — South Korea received Protestant missionaries in 1884; a century later it was sending them — by the 2000s the world’s second-largest missionary exporter after the United States, dispatching evangelists from Mongolia to Afghanistan (where the 2007 Taliban kidnapping of 23 Korean missionaries became a national trauma). How did a Confucian-Buddhist society become a "missionary superpower," and why does its evangelical expansionism sit so comfortably with compressed capitalist modernity? Against Korea’s outbound zeal the session sets India’s inbound anxiety: a country whose anti-conversion laws — euphemised as "Freedom of Religion Acts" — criminalise conversion by "force, fraud or allurement," and whose ghar wapsi campaigns treat every Christian or Muslim as a Hindu awaiting return. William James gives us conversion as inner experience; Berger, Sahoo and colleagues give it to us as social transaction — caste exit, healing, reservation arithmetic. If conversion is the acid test of religious freedom, both cases fail it interestingly. The session debates: is the right to convert (and to proselytise) the core of religious liberty, or its Trojan horse?

Case study: South Korea. Roughly a fifth of South Koreans are Protestant; Seoul hosts some of the world’s largest congregations; and Korean missions fuse salvation with development aid and the American imperial circuit (Han’s "shifting geographies of proximity"). Evangelism became the export industry of a converted nation.

Comparative opening: India inverts the case: a dozen states’ anti-conversion statutes, ghar wapsi reconversion drives, and the Niyogi Committee’s old suspicion of the missionary make conversion the most policed religious act in the republic.

Theoretical anchor: Peter Berger & Sarbeswar Sahoo (eds.), Godroads: Modalities of Conversion in India (2020) [lib #2946]; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) [lib #6003] on conversion as psychic event — read against its sociological critics.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Berger & Sahoo [lib #2946], ch. 9 "Reservation and Religious Freedom: Understanding Conversion and Hindu–Christian Conflict in Odisha and Rajasthan" (Sarbeswar Sahoo, ~p. 222).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Peter Berger & Sarbeswar Sahoo (eds.), Godroads (2020) [lib #2946] — conversion’s Indian modalities, from healing to reservation
  • ⋆ C.S. Adcock, Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (2014) [lib #2759] — how shuddhi made "conversion" a political category
  • ⋆ Chad Bauman, Anti-Christian Violence in India (2020) [lib #2936] — the coercive policing of conversion
  • ⋆ Anshul Trivedi, "Ancient Faiths, Modern Anxieties: Savarkar, Ambedkar and Gandhi on the Issue of Conversion" (2022) [lib #3506] — the Indian debate at its source
  • ⋆ B.R. Ambedkar, Buddha or Karl Marx (1956) [lib #612] — conversion as emancipation strategy (bridge to Theme 14)
  • ⋆ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) [lib #6003] — the classic phenomenology of conversion
  • ⋆ Michael Seth (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History (2016) [lib #1943] — Christianity’s Korean career in context
  • ⋆ R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries (2018) [lib #6687] — novel; faith, cult and loss among Korean-American students
  • ⋆ Timothy S. Lee, Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea (2010) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the standard history of the case
  • ⋆ Ju Hui Judy Han, "Shifting Geographies of Proximity: Korean-led Evangelical Christian Missions and the U.S. Empire," in McGranahan & Collins (eds.), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the missionary superpower theorised
  • ⋆ Ju Hui Judy Han, "Urban megachurches and contentious religious politics in Seoul" (2015) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — megachurch urbanism

Audio-visual: Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007) — grief, evangelical conversion and the scandal of grace in a Korean town; Cannes Best Actress (Jeon Do-yeon).

Theme 18 — Religion, Social Anomie & Suicide

Abstract — Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) founded sociology on a scandal: the most private act obeys social laws, and religion’s true function is not doctrine but integration — Protestants killed themselves more than Catholics not from theology but from thinner social glue. This session takes his categories — egoistic, altruistic, anomic, fatalistic — to the region where they now bite hardest. South Korea has led the OECD in suicide for most of two decades and simultaneously leads the world in fertility collapse; Japan coined karōshi and built a Suicide Countermeasures law; both are societies where compressed modernity dissolved the ritual and familial architectures Durkheim thought held people to life, replacing them with examination hells, precarious work and what Chang Kyung-Sup calls "productive maximization, reproductive meltdown." India’s counterpoint — Rohith Vemula’s caste-marked campus death, Vidarbha’s indebted farmers — shows anomie stratified by hierarchy rather than dissolved community. If religion protects by integrating, what happens when churches boom (Korea) while suicide climbs? The session debates: does Durkheim survive East Asia — or does East Asia demand a fifth type of suicide?

Case study: East Asia. South Korea (OECD’s highest suicide rate; elderly and exam-age peaks; total fertility below 0.8) and Japan (the 1998 surge after the Asian financial crisis; the volunteer patrols of the "suicide cliffs") as laboratories of anomie under compressed modernity.

Comparative opening: India’s suicides are institution-specific rather than society-wide — the university (Rohith Vemula, 2016) and the cotton belt (Vidarbha’s indebted farmers) — anomie channelled by caste and credit rather than by lonely affluence.

Theoretical anchor: Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897; Eng. tr. Spaulding & Simpson, 1951) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire; public-domain English text accessible via Internet Archive]; operationalised for the region by Chang Kyung-Sup, The Logic of Compressed Modernity (2022) [lib #5641].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Chang [lib #5641], ch. 7 "Productive Maximization, Reproductive Meltdown" (~p. 125) — read with Durkheim’s chapter on anomic suicide alongside.

Readings:

  • † Émile Durkheim, Suicide (1897), Book II chs. 2–5 (egoistic/altruistic/anomic types) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the anchor
  • ⋆ Chang Kyung-Sup, The Logic of Compressed Modernity (2022) [lib #5641] — South Korea as multiplex theatre society
  • ⋆ Seung Cheol Lee, "Magical capitalism, gambler subjects: South Korea’s bitcoin investment frenzy" (2022) [lib #3103] — speculative despair as an anomic form
  • ⋆ Timo Harrikari & Pirkko-Liisa Rauhala, Towards Glocal Social Work in the Era of Compressed Modernity (2020) [lib #6398] — the welfare response
  • ⋆ Junko Kitanaka, Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — how Japan medicalised social suffering
  • ⋆ N. Sukumar, "Red Sun in the Blue Sky: Rohith Vemula’s Utopian Republic" (2016) [lib #1690] — the Indian campus counterpoint
  • ⋆ Satish Deshpande, "The Public University after Rohith–Kanhaiya" (2016) [lib #845] — institutional anomie named
  • ⋆ Ranjana Padhi, Those Who Did Not Die: Impact of the Agrarian Crisis on Women in Punjab (2012) [lib #2951] — survivors of the farm-suicide economy
  • ⋆ Sarthak Gaurav & Thiagu Ranganathan, Accidental Gamblers: Risk and Vulnerability in Vidarbha (2023) [lib #4435] — debt, risk and rural death
  • ⋆ Piers Vitebsky, Living without the Dead (2017) [lib #2552] — what is lost when the dead are deritualised; religion’s integrative work made visible

Audio-visual: Saving 10,000: Winning a War on Suicide in Japan (Rene Duignan, 2012).

Theme 19 — Religious Space: Temples, Churches & Schooling

Abstract — Fifty metres separate the Gyanvapi mosque from the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Banaras — fifty metres of iron grilles, CCTV, court orders and armed police. Sacred space, this session argues, is never simply found: it is produced, contested, securitised and taught. Vera Lazzaretti’s ethnography of that compound shows the state itself becoming custodian of a frozen sacrality; Ayodhya (1992) shows what happens when the freeze breaks; Anand Taneja’s Delhi ruins show sacrality flourishing precisely where the state forgets. Victor Turner supplies the theory — ritual space as liminal machine that makes communitas — and Diana Eck the devotional optics of darśan, sacred sight. The session’s second axis is pedagogy as sacred space: the madrasa (Pakistan’s Red Mosque network, Zaman’s ulama), the RSS shakha, the missionary school — architectures that reproduce religion by enclosing childhood. If a temple can be nationalised, a mosque securitised and a school sacralised, the session debates: is sacredness a property of places at all — or of the conflicts fought over them?

Case study: India. Banaras’s Kashi Vishwanath–Gyanvapi compound — pilgrimage corridor above, disputed cellars below, an Archaeological Survey report weaponised in court — condenses the politics of sacred built space; Ayodhya’s Ram temple, consecrated in 2024 on the Babri mosque’s site, shows the endgame.

Comparative opening: Pakistan’s madrasa network — from neighbourhood Qur’an schools to the militant Red Mosque complex — poses the schooling half of the question: religious space as the infrastructure of transmission rather than of worship (Nelson [lib #736]).

Theoretical anchor: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969) [lib #1560]; Diana Eck, "Seeing the Sacred" (from Darśan) [lib #7077].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Vera Lazzaretti, "The Burden of Security: Moral Frictions and Everyday Policing in a Contested Religious Compound" (2020) [lib #1929], section "Security at the Kashi Vishvanath-Gyan Vapi Compound".

Readings:

  • ⋆ Vera Lazzaretti, "The Burden of Security" (2020) [lib #1929] — everyday securitisation of a shared shrine
  • ⋆ Anand Vivek Taneja, "Nature, History, and the Sacred in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi" (2013) [lib #2761] — sacrality in the state’s blind spots
  • ⋆ Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (1969) [lib #1560] — liminality and communitas as spatial operations
  • ⋆ Diana Eck, "Seeing the Sacred" (1998) [lib #7077] — darśan: sacred space as visual exchange
  • ⋆ Avishek Jha, "Religiosity, Space-making, Exclusion: ‘Kanwar Yatra’ Celebrations in a North Indian City" (2024) [lib #5146] — mobile sacred space annexing the street
  • ⋆ Collective, ISHARE: The Indian Subcontinent’s Shared Sacred Sites (2015) [lib #662] — shrines held in common before partition into "communities"
  • ⋆ Matthew Nelson, "Religion, Politics, and the Modern University in Pakistan and Bangladesh" (2009) [lib #736] — madrasa and campus as rival sacred pedagogies
  • ⋆ Shantanu Kulshreshth, "Kaam: Youth, religiosity, and the cultural production of work in a North Indian madrasa" (2024) [lib #5805] — inside the madrasa’s moral economy
  • † Alok Tripathi / ASI, Report on Disputed Structure at Gyanvapi (2024) [lib #6177] — primary source: archaeology conscripted by litigation
  • ⋆ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam (2002) [lib #4464] — who owns the schooling of the sacred (cross-listed from Theme 13)
  • ⋆ Robert W. Hefner & Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • ⋆ Kim Knott, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (2005) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the spatial-theory toolkit

Audio-visual: Ram ke Naam / In the Name of God (Anand Patwardhan, 1992) — the Ayodhya movement filmed before the demolition; pair selected minutes of Among the Believers (Trivedi & Naqvi, 2015) for the madrasa axis if not screened in Theme 16.

Theme 20 — What is Secularism?

Abstract — The seminar closes on its master concept. Secularism promised a neutral state above the gods; Talal Asad answered that "the secular" is itself a formation — a positive project that redefines, disciplines and produces religion rather than merely leaving it alone. India is the crucial test: a constitution with no wall of separation but a state that reforms temples, administers waqfs, codifies personal laws and calls the arrangement "principled distance" (Bhargava) — an achievement its critics Madan and Nandy famously declared alien, "a gift of Christianity," powerless before mass devotion and complicit in new intolerance. Turkey supplies the second model — laiklik as state capture of religion through the Diyanet, now inverted by Erdoğan into religion’s capture of the state — and China the third: state atheism that licenses five religions and manages the rest as security threats. Three states, three ways of not separating. After Ayodhya’s consecrated temple and Xinjiang’s demolished mosques, the session debates: is secularism a universal grammar with local accents — or, as Nandy insists, an ideology whose time has passed?

Case study: India. From Nehru’s reformist state through the Shah Bano affair, Ayodhya, and the 2019–24 sequence (Art. 370, CAA, temple consecration by a sitting PM), Indian secularism’s "principled distance" has been tested to destruction — yet remains the only vocabulary its defenders and critics share.

Comparative opening: Turkey’s laiklik — Atatürk’s abolition of the caliphate and bureaucratisation of Islam — and China’s managed state atheism bracket the Indian case: one secularism that governs religion too much, one that denies it standing at all.

Theoretical anchor: Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003) [lib #31]; Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (1998) [lib #3022] — which reprints the Indian debate’s canonical triad: Taylor’s "Modes of Secularism," Madan’s "Secularism in Its Place," and Nandy’s "The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleration."

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Asad [lib #31], ch. 1 "What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?".

Readings:

  • ⋆ Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (2003) [lib #31] — the secular as formation, not absence
  • ⋆ Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (1998) [lib #3022] — the Indian debate in one volume (Taylor, Madan, Nandy, Chatterjee, Bilgrami, Sen)
  • ⋆ Ashis Nandy, "An Anti-secularist Manifesto" (1995) [lib #4047] — the sharpest indictment, from within
  • ⋆ Sumantra Bose, Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (2018) [lib #1032] — the session’s exact comparison, book-length
  • ⋆ Cécile Laborde, "Minimal Secularism: Lessons for, and from, India" (2021) [lib #2282] — normative theory meets the Indian record
  • ⋆ Christophe Jaffrelot & Aminah Mohammad-Arif (eds.), Politique et religions en Asie du Sud: le sécularisme dans tous ses états? (2012) [lib #3442] — South Asian secularisms surveyed
  • ⋆ Nivedita Menon, Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South (2023) [lib #4893] — against the concept’s alibi function
  • ⋆ Stefan Binder, Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India (2020) [lib #2171] — lived unbelief under Indian secularism
  • ⋆ Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (2018) [lib #5450] — the state-atheist genealogy behind the Chinese model
  • ⋆ José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — deprivatisation, the other master narrative
  • ⋆ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the immanent frame (his short "Modes of Secularism" is in [lib #3022])
  • ⋆ Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (2009) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — assertive vs passive secularism, the laiklik toolkit
  • ⋆ Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the red, black and gray religious markets of state atheism

Audio-visual: Takva: A Man’s Fear of God (Özer Kızıltan, 2006) — piety and secular modernity collide in Istanbul; Final Solution (Rakesh Sharma, 2004) — Gujarat 2002 and the breakdown of the secular compact.

Theme 21 — Religion & Diaspora: Hindu Nationalism Abroad

Abstract — In 1989, more than 100,000 Hindus gathered in an amphitheatre in Milton Keynes — the largest Hindu nationalist assembly ever held outside India — to consecrate bricks for a temple in Ayodhya they would never visit. In 2024, Narendra Modi inaugurated the BAPS Swaminarayan mandir in Abu Dhabi, a Hindu temple gifted land by a Gulf monarchy that bans proselytisation. Diaspora, this session argues, breaks the Asian mold: religion abroad is unmoored from territory yet more territorial than ever, funding, lobbying and dreaming the homeland’s sacred geography from Leicester, New Jersey and Dubai. Benedict Anderson’s "long-distance nationalism" names the structural condition — politics without accountability, identity without residence — while Edward Anderson’s archive of the UK Sangh shows the organisational machinery: shakhas, camps, charity, "model minority" respectability. The session debates: does distance radicalise religious nationalism by freeing it from consequences, or domesticate it into heritage, philanthropy and real estate?

Case study: India–UK–Gulf. The British Sangh Parivar (HSS, VHP-UK) from East African expulsions to the 2022 Leicester violence; and the Gulf mandir economy, where the Swaminarayan movement builds monumental Hindu presence inside Muslim monarchies on the backs of Indian migrant labour ([lib #4790], [lib #6387], [lib #6583]).

Comparative opening: The Tamil diaspora’s Great Heroes’ Day in London and Paris — where LTTE martyr commemoration is "much holier than religion" — shows a second Asian nationalism sacralised precisely in exile ([lib #6969]).

Theoretical anchor: Benedict Anderson, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics (1992) [lib #6244]; Glick Schiller & Fouron, Georges Woke Up Laughing (2001) [lib #5162] for the concept’s ethnographic elaboration.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Edward Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora (2023) [lib #4790], ch. 4 — "From Milton Keynes to Ayodhya: The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Global Campaign for the Ram Temple" (roughly a third of the way into the book).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Edward Anderson, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora (2023) [lib #4790] — the definitive history of the UK Sangh, from videsh to vishwa
  • ⋆ Benedict Anderson, "Long-Distance Nationalism" (1992) [lib #6244] — the theoretical charter: identity politics without accountability
  • ⋆ Christophe Jaffrelot & Vijayta Lalwani, "Le mouvement Swaminarayan, le Sangh Parivar et la diaspora hindoue" (2025) [lib #6387] — BAPS between sect, Sangh and state
  • ⋆ Raymond Brady Williams, Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism (2018) [lib #6390] — the sampradaya that became a global temple-builder
  • ⋆ Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (2021) [lib #6583] — Indian belonging without citizenship in the Gulf
  • ⋆ Andrew Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (2025) [lib #6582] — the labour substrate of Gulf Hinduism
  • ⋆ Aparna Agarwal, "The Phatic Labour of Mandir Management" (2025) [lib #6374] — women’s community-work as political infrastructure, UK/India
  • ⋆ Bidisha Biswas, "Negotiating the Nation" (2010) [lib #1156] — US diaspora contests over Hindutva
  • ⋆ Arkotong Longkumer & Edward Anderson, "’Neo-Hindutva’" (2018) [lib #4073] — the concept for Hindutva’s deterritorialised forms
  • † Rashmi Samant & Chris Blackburn, Fact Finding Report on Leicester Violence 2022 (2023) [lib #6245] — primary source: read as an advocacy artefact of diaspora information war, not as findings
  • ⋆ Ingrid Therwath, "Cyber-Hindutva: Hindu Nationalism, the Diaspora and the Web," Social Science Information 51(4) (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • ⋆ Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]

Audio-visual: India at a Crossroads: 100 Years of the Hindu Nationalist RSS Movement (DW Documentary, 2025) — includes the movement’s global reach; Mississippi Masala (Mira Nair, 1991) — the twice-displaced Indian diaspora’s politics of community and purity, fiction counterpoint.

Theme 22 — Orthodoxy & Power in Russia: Church–State Symbiosis in the Big Asian Country

Abstract — Seventy years of state atheism ended not in secularity but in symbiosis: the Russian Orthodox Church consecrates missiles, blesses the invasion of Ukraine as "metaphysical struggle," and supplies the Kremlin with a civilisational vocabulary — Holy Rus’, traditional values, the decadent West — that no ideology of the party-state ever matched. Victoria Smolkin’s history of Soviet atheism supplies the session’s paradox: the Bolsheviks discovered that "a sacred space is never empty," and their failure to fill it prepared the Church’s return as the state’s meaning-making organ. Russia here figures as "the big Asian country": an Orthodox civilisational state whose church–state entanglement invites systematic comparison with Hindutva’s India and the CCP’s managed religions rather than with Western establishment clauses. Grzymała-Busse shows how churches convert moral authority into policy influence precisely by appearing above politics. The session debates: is the Moscow Patriarchate an instrument of the Kremlin, its ideological author — or its captive?

Case study: Russia. From Khrushchev’s antireligious campaigns and the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism to Patriarch Kirill’s "Russian world" (russkii mir), the cathedral of the Armed Forces, and the Church’s sacralisation of the Ukraine war ([lib #5450], [lib #3123], [lib #3127]).

Comparative opening: Kinnvall & Svensson’s paired reading of India’s and Russia’s "hunger for certainty" ([lib #5852]) makes the India–Russia comparison explicit: two post-imperial states re-enchanting sovereignty through majoritarian religion.

Theoretical anchor: Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy (2015) [lib #2869]; Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (2020) [lib #2857].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (2018) [lib #5450], ch. 6 — "The Communist Party between State and Church: Soviet Atheism and Socialist Rituals" (roughly the middle of the book).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty (2018) [lib #5450] — why state atheism lost, and to whom
  • ⋆ Anna Grzymała-Busse, Nations under God (2015) [lib #2869] — the mechanics of clerical influence on policy
  • ⋆ Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2018) [lib #3123] — Ilyin, eternity politics and the Kremlin’s civilisational turn
  • ⋆ Catherine Belton, Putin’s People (2020) [lib #3127] — the KGB milieu that instrumentalised the Church
  • ⋆ Françoise Thom, Comprendre le poutinisme (2018) [lib #4356] — poutinisme as ideology, with its Orthodox component
  • ⋆ Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, La verticale de la peur (2023) [lib #5019] — order and allegiance in Putin’s Russia
  • ⋆ Catarina Kinnvall & Ted Svensson, "’Hunger for certainty’" (2024) [lib #5852] — India and Russia compared: masculinity, misrecognition, ontological security
  • ⋆ Deepanshu Mohan & Abhinav Padmanabhan, Strongmen Saviours (2023) [lib #3982] — India, Turkey, Russia, Brazil: the political economy of sacralised strongmen
  • ⋆ Peter van der Veer & Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion (2020) [lib #2857] — Europe/Asia comparative frame
  • † Giuliano Da Empoli, Le mage du Kremlin (2022) [lib #3649] — fiction as primary source on the Kremlin’s ideologues
  • ⋆ Kristina Stoeckl & Dmitry Uzlaner, The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (2022) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • ⋆ Irina Papkova, The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics (2011) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]

Audio-visual: Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014) — church–state–mafia symbiosis in a Barents Sea town; Putin’s Witnesses (Vitaly Mansky, 2018) — the regime’s self-fashioning filmed from inside.

Theme 23 — Sacred Lands: Ayodhya · Makkah · Karbala · Kashmir/Ganga-Himalaya

Abstract — Nations defend borders; religions consecrate lands — and modern Asian politics happens where the two maps are forced to coincide. Ayodhya, a small pilgrimage town, became the gravitational centre of Indian politics because Hindu nationalism translated a devotional utopia (Rama’s city, imagined for centuries in text and yatra) into a territorial claim adjudicated by archaeologists and the Supreme Court. Van der Veer’s "Peregrinations" supplies the theory: pilgrimage built sacred territory long before nationalism, and nationalist discourse annexes those itineraries to produce the sacred Father-land. The session then widens the map: Makkah as monopolised centre of a global umma; Karbala as portable land — carried in mourning assemblies from Iraq to Tehran to Mumbai; Kashmir and the Ganga-Himalaya as landscapes where ecology, deity and sovereignty fuse. Distinguish throughout: land as centre (Makkah), as wound (Karbala, Ayodhya), as body (Ganga). The session debates: can a sacred land ever be shared — or does sacralisation make sovereignty indivisible?

Case study: India — Ayodhya. From Lutgendorf’s textual-utopian Ayodhya through the 1992 demolition to the 2019 verdict and 2024 consecration: how a landscape of imagination became title, ASI trench and temple-state showpiece ([lib #7032], [lib #7026], [lib #6067], [lib #7025]).

Comparative opening: Karbala — through Rahimi’s history of Moharram performance in Iran ([lib #6967]) — shows the inverse operation: a sacred land reproduced anywhere through ritual mourning, territory made portable rather than possessed.

Theoretical anchor: Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (1994) [lib #2855], esp. ch. 4 "Peregrinations" on pilgrimage and the construction of sacred territory; Diana Eck, Darśan (1998) [lib #7089] for sacred geography as devotional practice.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism (1994) [lib #2855], ch. 4 — "Peregrinations" (roughly 44% into the text: "In this chapter I want to explore the construction of territory in nationalist discourse").

Readings:

  • ⋆ Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism (1994) [lib #2855] — pilgrimage, territory, nation: the anchor text
  • ⋆ Philip Lutgendorf, "Imagining Ayodhyā: Utopia and its Shadows in a Hindu Landscape" (1997) [lib #7032] — Ayodhya before the bulldozers: a devotional utopia
  • ⋆ Deepak Mehta, "Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya" (2015) [lib #7026] — how proper names carried the dispute
  • ⋆ Christophe Jaffrelot, "The Hindu Nationalist Reinterpretation of Pilgrimage in India" (2009) [lib #2649] — yatra politics and its limits
  • ⋆ Babak Rahimi, Senses of Mourning: Moharram Performances in Shiʿi Iran (2026) [lib #6967] — Karbala as sensory, portable sacred land
  • ⋆ Scott Kugle, Hajj to the Heart: Sufi Journeys across the Indian Ocean (2021) [lib #3742] — Makkah from the ocean: the hajj as South Asian itinerary
  • ⋆ Chitralekha Zutshi, Kashmir (2019) [lib #5053] — the contested valley in brief
  • ⋆ Avishek Jha, "Religiosity, Space-making, Exclusion: ‘Kanwar Yatra’" (2024) [lib #5146] — Ganga water on the move, annexing the street (cross-listed from Theme 19)
  • ⋆ Vera Lazzaretti, "The Burden of Security" (2020) [lib #1929] — the securitised shrine, Banaras (cross-listed from Theme 19)
  • † Snippets of Supreme Court Judgment (Ayodhya Verdict) [lib #6067] — primary source: faith as evidence in law
  • † Narendra Modi, "Rama’s Sacred Abode" (2025) [lib #7025] — primary source: the state’s own sacral geography
  • ⋆ Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the full argument that "India" is a pilgrim-made land

Audio-visual: Ram ke Naam / In the Name of God (Anand Patwardhan, 1992) — Ayodhya before the demolition (if not screened in Theme 19); Inside Mecca (Anisa Mehdi, National Geographic, 2003) — the hajj as managed sacred centre.

Theme 24 — Temple Economies: Wealth, Management, Endowments

Abstract — When vault B of Thiruvananthapuram’s Padmanabhaswamy temple was inventoried in 2011, the reported trove — perhaps a trillion rupees — made a single shrine richer than most Indian states’ annual budgets. Temples are not just sacred spaces (Theme 19) or sacred lands (Theme 23): they are firms, landlords, employers, trusts and, in India, part-nationalised enterprises run by state Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments departments — a secular state administering gods. Meera Nanda names the resulting formation the "state–temple–corporate complex": liberalisation did not privatise religion, it fused temple wealth, government patronage and corporate philanthropy into a banal, everyday Hindu nationalism of tourism corridors and VIP darshan queues. Against this, the anthropology of the gift (Copeman, Bornstein) asks what dana, seva and donation do that markets cannot. With the deity a legal person ("idols in law") and the priest a salaried employee, the session debates: who owns a god — the devotee, the trust, the state, or the deity itself?

Case study: India. Tirupati’s Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams as Asia’s richest shrine-corporation; Kerala’s Devaswom boards and the Padmanabhaswamy litigation; the Kashi Vishwanath and Ayodhya corridors as state-built devotional infrastructure ([lib #941], [lib #5810]).

Comparative opening: The Islamic waqf — South Asia’s other great religious-endowment regime, bureaucratised by colonial and postcolonial states alike — poses the same question of pious property under secular administration (Kozlowski [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]).

Theoretical anchor: Meera Nanda, The God Market (2011) [lib #941] — the state–temple–corporate complex; Jacob Copeman & Dwaipayan Banerjee on the gift’s political life ([lib #2536]).

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu (2011) [lib #941], ch. 3 — "The State–Temple–Corporate Complex and the Banality of Hindu Nationalism".

Readings:

  • ⋆ Meera Nanda, The God Market (2011) [lib #941] — globalisation’s temple boom, institutionally anatomised
  • ⋆ Gautam Patel, "Idols in Law" (2010) [lib #5810] — the deity as juristic person: the legal core of temple property
  • † Supreme Court of India, Sastri Yagnapurushadji (1966) [lib #6392] — primary source: the court defines "Hindu" to govern a Swaminarayan temple
  • ⋆ Sriya Iyer, Anand Shrivastava & Rohit Ticku, "Holy Wars? Temple Desecrations in Medieval India" (2017) [lib #6051] — temples as wealth and target: the economic-history longue durée
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Dwaipayan Banerjee, "Actual and Potential Gifts" (2021) [lib #2536] — the critique and shadow-life of religious giving
  • ⋆ Erica Bornstein, Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (2012) [lib #6342] — dan, seva and NGO-form philanthropy
  • ⋆ Srirupa Bhattacharya, "Groundwater, Gurus, and Governmentality" (2019) [lib #3226] — seva as neoliberal development regime
  • ⋆ Tulasi Srinivas, Winged Faith (2010) [lib #4090] — the Sathya Sai movement as transnational religious enterprise
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Aya Ikegame, "Guru Logics" (2012) [lib #4774] — the guru as economic and political form
  • ⋆ Gwilym Beckerlegge, "Celebrating Heritage, Promoting Tourism, and Relocating Svāmī Vivekānanda" (2020) [lib #5924] — memorials, tourism and devotional infrastructure
  • ⋆ C.J. Fuller, Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple (1984) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the priesthood as occupational economy
  • ⋆ Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (1981) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the temple as redistributive polity

Audio-visual: OMG – Oh My God! (Umesh Shukla, 2012) — a shopkeeper sues God: Bollywood’s satire of the religion business; PK (Rajkumar Hirani, 2014) — the godman market anatomised for a mass audience.

Theme 25 — Religious Mythopolitics: Ruling Through Epic

Abstract — In 1993, surveying the rubble at Ayodhya, Sheldon Pollock asked a question historians had mostly avoided: what exactly does the Rāmāyaṇa have to do with political power? His answer — that from the twelfth century onward the epic furnished Indian rulers with a ready-made political imagination, a theology of righteous kingship (Rāmarājya) fused to a demonology of the enemy (the rākṣasa) that could be projected onto new adversaries at will — gave the phenomenon its concept: mythopolitics. Myth here is not decoration laid over politics; it is a working technology of rule, activated at precise historical junctures. This session takes the concept and runs it forward: the Doordarshan Ramayan serial of 1987–88 that assembled a national audience for a single telling of the story on the eve of the Ramjanmabhumi movement (Rajagopal); the muscularization of Hanuman on posters and windshields (Lutgendorf); the epic’s stubborn plurality (Richman’s "many Rāmāyaṇas") as the very resource mythopolitics must flatten. Barthes and Lévi-Strauss supply the theory of how myth naturalizes; Thapar the historian’s rejoinder on epic and history; and the session extends the seminar convenor’s own work on mythopolitics and irenic imaginaries beyond India — to the civilisational myth China’s party-state writes for itself. It debates: can a modern state rule without a myth, or only pretend to?

Case study: India. The Rāmāyaṇa as political language: Pollock’s medieval genealogy of Rāmarājya and demonization; the 1987–88 televised epic and the audience it assembled; Ayodhya as imagined utopia and mobilizing site; Hanuman’s iconographic militarization ([lib #2138], [lib #912], [lib #7032], [lib #7033]).

Comparative opening: Zhang Weiwei’s The China Wave ([lib #3945]) shows mythopolitics at civilisational scale — the party-state’s five-thousand-year narrative engineered so that one-party rule reads as culture rather than politics; the vishwaguru idiom ([lib #3948]) is India’s answering myth for export.

Theoretical anchor: Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India" (1993) [lib #2138] — the source of the concept; Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) [lib #204] on myth as depoliticized speech; Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955) [lib #4151].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic reading: Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India", The Journal of Asian Studies 52(2), 1993 [lib #2138] — read in full.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Sheldon Pollock, "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India" (1993) [lib #2138] — the concept’s source text
  • ⋆ Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (2001) [lib #912] — the serialized epic and the split public it made
  • ⋆ Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (1991) [lib #6385] — the plurality mythopolitics must flatten
  • ⋆ Philip Lutgendorf, "Imagining Ayodhyā: Utopia and its shadows in a Hindu landscape" (1997) [lib #7032] — the ideal city before and after its demolition squads
  • ⋆ Philip Lutgendorf, "My Hanuman Is Bigger Than Yours" (1994) [lib #7033] — iconographic inflation as political symptom
  • ⋆ Romila Thapar, "Epic and History: Tradition, Dissent and Politics in India" (1989) [lib #6023] — the historian against the mythographers
  • ⋆ Romila Thapar, "Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity" (1989) [lib #6053] — how a "Hindu community" was retro-projected onto the past
  • † Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957) [lib #204] — primary theory: myth as depoliticized speech (library copy in French; English translations widely available)
  • ⋆ Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955) [lib #4151] — the structuralist baseline
  • ⋆ Dorothy Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity (2002) [lib #4791] — identity myth as authority claim, read comparatively
  • ⋆ Dhirendra K. Jha, Golwalkar: The Myth Behind the Man, The Man Behind the Machine (2024) [lib #5892] — myth-making around the mythmaker-in-chief
  • † Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Society Under Siege (2015) [lib #3491] — primary source: the siege myth in pamphlet form
  • ⋆ Kate Sullivan de Estrada, "What is a Vishwaguru?" (2023) [lib #3948] — the export myth of the world-teacher
  • ⋆ Zhang Weiwei, The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State (2012) [lib #3945] — the Chinese civilisational myth, read as both analysis and artefact

Audio-visual: Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan (Doordarshan, 1987–88) — excerpts from the serial that nationalized the epic; Ram ke Naam / In the Name of God (Anand Patwardhan, 1992) — the mobilization it fed (cross-listed with Themes 19 and 23).

Theme 26 — Political Syncretisms: Dargahs, Shared Shrines, and the Government of Mixture

Abstract — At Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, Hindus and Muslims petition Muslim jinn-saints with photocopied letters, in a ruin the state classifies as protected archaeology. At thousands of dargahs from Sindh to the Deccan, the shrine of a Sufi saint anchors devotion that ignores the census’s religious columns. This session takes syncretism seriously as politics: shared sacrality is not leftover tolerance awaiting purification but a positive religious form — with its own authorities, economies and ethics — that states, reformists and nationalists work hard to unmix. Susan Bayly shows saints, goddesses and kings composing one South Indian religious-political field before "Hindu" and "Muslim" hardened; Gilmartin and Lawrence dismantle "Turk and Hindu" as identities read backwards into Islamicate South Asia; Taneja shows enchantment surviving in the modern state’s blind spots. Against romance, the session weighs the purifiers: Tablighi and Sangh alike treat the dargah as frontier. It debates: is the shared shrine an alternative political theology — or merely the space the state has not yet sorted?

Case study: South Asia — India. Delhi’s dargah landscape and Firoz Shah Kotla’s jinn petitions ([lib #798]); the Chishti shrine network; and the everyday policing, litigation and reform pressure that sorts mixed devotion into communities.

Comparative opening: Pakistan offers the sharpest second case: a state founded for Islam whose most vital religiosity remains shrine-based — Marsden’s Chitral and the Sufi-state accommodations traced in Ewing & Corbett ([lib #1501], [lib #2299]).

Theoretical anchor: David Gilmartin & Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu (2006) [lib #3470]; Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (1989) [lib #4838].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Anand Vivek Taneja, Jinnealogy (2017) [lib #798], ch. 6 — "Stones, Snakes, and Saints: Remembering the Vanished Sacred Geographies of Delhi" (roughly 57% into the text).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Anand Vivek Taneja, Jinnealogy (2017) [lib #798] — jinn, archives and shared sacrality in post-Partition Delhi
  • ⋆ David Gilmartin & Bruce Lawrence (eds.), Beyond Turk and Hindu (2006) [lib #3470] — against reading identities backwards
  • ⋆ Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (1989) [lib #4838] — the pre-colonial South Indian religious-political field
  • ⋆ Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Islam in South Asia in Practice (2009) [lib #459] — the practice-first sourcebook
  • ⋆ Katherine Pratt Ewing & Rosemary Corbett (eds.), Modern Sufis and the State (2020) [lib #2299] — Sufism’s political entanglements, South Asia and beyond
  • ⋆ Magnus Marsden, Living Islam (2005) [lib #1501] — Muslim religious experience beyond the madrasa/shrine binary
  • ⋆ Marc Gaborieau, Un autre islam: Inde, Pakistan, Bangladesh (2022) [lib #5493] — the French ethnological synthesis
  • ⋆ Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age (2019) [lib #5482] — the longue durée that made mixture the norm
  • ⋆ Collective, ISHARE: The Indian Subcontinent’s Shared Sacred Sites (2015) [lib #662] — the visual atlas of shared shrines (cross-listed from Theme 19)
  • ⋆ Anand Vivek Taneja, "Nature, History, and the Sacred in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi" (2013) [lib #2761] — the article-length entry to Jinnealogy
  • † William Dalrymple, Nine Lives (2009) [lib #9] — literary reportage: nine devotional lives across the syncretic spectrum
  • ⋆ Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (2010) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — Malerkotla, the town that did not riot

Audio-visual: Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) — Bombay cinema’s founding syncretic myth; Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam (Simon Broughton, 2005) — Dalrymple’s tour of the dargah’s sound-world from Turkey to Pakistan.

Theme 27 — Religious Diplomacy: Exporting a Faith, Branding a State

Abstract — For half a century, Saudi Arabia ran what may be history’s largest religious foreign-aid programme: mosques, imams, textbooks, scholarships and printed Qur’ans dispatched from Jakarta to Kosovo, promoting a specific, Salafi-inflected Islam as the faith’s default setting. Lacroix’s history of Egyptian Salafism shows the mechanism at ground level — Gulf money, returning migrants and a "Salafi awakening" that rewired an old religious field. Religious diplomacy, this session argues, is not soft power with incense: it is the export of religious authority itself, remaking who may speak for a tradition abroad. The comparative half examines Buddhism as statecraft — China and India competing over relics, Nalanda, Lumbini and the Dalai Lama’s succession — and India’s own saffronising diplomacy, where the vishwaguru brand and a re-Hinduised foreign service turn civilisation into an instrument. The session debates: when states export religion, do they command it — or does the exported religion, like Frankenstein’s Salafism or exiled Buddhism, escape its sponsor?

Case study: Saudi Arabia. The petro-dawa complex — Muslim World League, mosque-building abroad, imam training — and its Asian reception from Pakistan to Indonesia; read through Lacroix ([lib #5446]) and the post-9/11 recontextualisation of "Wahhabi-Saudi Islam" ([lib #1845]).

Comparative opening: Buddhist diplomacy supplies the mirror case: China and India instrumentalising a shared heritage — relic tours, Buddhist circuits, Nalanda revival — traced in Tansen Sen’s connected history ([lib #4967]) and Zhang’s public-diplomacy survey [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire].

Theoretical anchor: Kira Huju, "Saffronizing Diplomacy" (2022) [lib #5097] — religion inside the diplomatic corps itself; Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance (2015) [lib #55] — deculturation as the condition of exportable religion.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Stéphane Lacroix, Le crépuscule des saints: histoire et politique du salafisme en Égypte (2023) [lib #5446], ch. 2 — "L’Égypte postnassérienne : un « réveil salafiste »" — the Gulf-financed remaking of a national religious field.

Readings:

  • ⋆ Stéphane Lacroix, Le crépuscule des saints (2023) [lib #5446] — how Saudi-linked Salafism colonised Egypt’s religious field
  • ⋆ Kira Huju, "Saffronizing Diplomacy: The Indian Foreign Service under Hindu Nationalist Rule" (2022) [lib #5097] — religion capturing the diplomats
  • ⋆ Amir H.Y. Salama, "Ideological Collocation and the Recontextualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam post-9/11" (2011) [lib #1845] — the discursive battle over "Wahhabism"
  • ⋆ Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance (2015) [lib #55] — why deculturated religion travels best
  • ⋆ Tansen Sen, India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017) [lib #4967] — Buddhism in the India–China relationship, ancient circuits to modern diplomacy
  • ⋆ Kate Sullivan de Estrada, "What is a Vishwaguru?" (2023) [lib #3948] — India’s civilisational pedagogy abroad (cross-listed from Theme 25)
  • ⋆ Sebastian Haug & Supriya Roychoudhury, "Civilizational Exceptionalism in International Affairs" (2023) [lib #3947] — Indian and Turkish claims compared
  • ⋆ Kishan Rana, "India’s Diaspora Diplomacy" (2009) [lib #5196] — the diaspora as diplomatic instrument (cross-listed from Theme 21)
  • ⋆ Christophe Jaffrelot, "Transnational Learning Networks Amongst Asian Muslims" (2014) [lib #1398] — the circulation infrastructure beneath state dawa
  • ⋆ Krithika Varagur, The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project (2020) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the reported anatomy of Saudi dawa in Indonesia, Nigeria, Kosovo
  • ⋆ Peter Mandaville (ed.), Wahhabism and the World (2022) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the scholarly audit of Saudi religious export
  • ⋆ Juyan Zhang, "Buddhist Diplomacy: History and Status Quo," CPD Perspectives, USC Center on Public Diplomacy (2012) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire; open-access PDF]

Audio-visual: Saudi Arabia Uncovered (James Jones, PBS Frontline, 2016) — undercover inside the kingdom exporting its orthodoxy; Sufi Soul (Simon Broughton, 2005) — the Islam that Saudi dawa was built to displace (cross-listed from Theme 26).

Theme 28 — Religion & Terrorism: ISIS and Aum Shinrikyo

Abstract — Two catastrophes bracket this session. In 1995, a Japanese new religion with PhD chemists gassed the Tokyo subway to jump-start the apocalypse. Twenty years later, the Islamic State governed millions while streaming beheadings — a caliphate as media object. Between them lies the field’s central quarrel: is "religious terrorism" driven by theology, or is religion the idiom through which political rage, generational nihilism and organisational logic express themselves? Darryl Li’s ethnography of transnational jihad refuses both the terrorism frame and the apology: jihad appears as a flawed universalism — kin to peacekeeping and non-alignment — whose fighters the Global War on Terror then remade into a legal category of enemy. Gambetta and Hertog’s engineers, Fair’s Lashkar canon, and Aum’s laboratory élite all complicate the madrasa-poverty folk theory: the operatives are educated, modern, often converts to intensity. The session debates: does taking perpetrators’ theology seriously explain religious violence — or launder its politics?

Case study: ISIS (Iraq–Syria, with Asian recruitment from Central, South and Southeast Asia): the caliphate as state-building, media enterprise and apocalyptic claim — approached through Li’s jihad-universalism and Devji’s global-Islam arc ([lib #1799], [lib #6844]).

Comparative opening: Aum Shinrikyo (Japan) is the indispensable control case: a Buddhist-Hindu-apocalyptic synthesis, born in a rich secular democracy, whose sarin attack forced Japan to rethink religion’s legal place — proof that "religious terrorism" is not an Islamic property.

Theoretical anchor: Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy (2019) [lib #1799]; Clark McCauley & Sophia Moskalenko, "Mechanisms of Political Radicalization" (2008) [lib #4347] for the process model; Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] for the cosmic-war thesis to argue against.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy (2019) [lib #1799], Part II, ch. 7 — "The Global War on Terror" (final chapter: how a legal-military category remade jihad’s meaning).

Readings:

  • ⋆ Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy (2019) [lib #1799] — jihad as universalism; the GWOT as its counter-universalism
  • ⋆ Diego Gambetta & Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (2015) [lib #1899] — the education–extremism puzzle
  • ⋆ C. Christine Fair, In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (2019) [lib #6227] — reading a jihadist organisation through its own canon
  • ⋆ Clark McCauley & Sophia Moskalenko, "Mechanisms of Political Radicalization" (2008) [lib #4347] — the pathways model
  • ⋆ Faisal Devji, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (2026) [lib #6844] — the arc within which ISIS made sense
  • ⋆ Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance (2015) [lib #55] — deculturation and the nihilist turn (cross-listed from Theme 27)
  • ⋆ Farhad Khosrokhavar, "La jeunesse féminine djihadiste et le désir du don" (2018) [lib #6691] — the gift of the self: women’s jihadism
  • ⋆ John Carlson & Jonathan Ebel (eds.), From Jeremiad to Jihad (2012) [lib #2870] — religion and violence in America: the mirror to hold up
  • † Alex Strick van Linschoten (ed.), Poetry of the Taliban (2016) [lib #328] — primary source: militants’ own aesthetic self-understanding
  • ⋆ Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2000) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — cosmic war, performative violence
  • ⋆ Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (2000) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the scholarly anatomy of Aum
  • ⋆ Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (2000) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — victims and perpetrators in their own words

Audio-visual: A (Tatsuya Mori, 1998) — inside Aum after the attack, filmed from the members’ side; City of Ghosts (Matthew Heineman, 2017) — Raqqa’s citizen-journalists against the ISIS media machine.

Theme 29 — Religion & Well-Being: Yoga from Spiritual Discipline to Soft Power and Wellness Industry

Abstract — On 21 June 2015, 35,000 people performed asanas with Narendra Modi on Rajpath while the UN observed the first International Day of Yoga — a spiritual discipline reborn as state ceremony, diplomatic brand and multi-billion-dollar industry in a single choreography. This session follows yoga’s triple transformation. Singleton shows that "traditional" postural yoga is a modern hybrid of hatha traditions, European gymnastics and nationalist physical culture; Jain shows how it was branded into consumer spirituality — and how "yogaphobia" and Hindu-origins polemics fight over its ownership; Alter and Copeman track Baba Ramdev converting pranayama into mass politics and Patanjali into a swadeshi FMCG empire. Well-being, here, is never innocent: it is the register in which religion enters secular institutions (the office mindfulness session, the school yoga class, the UN resolution) while denying it is religion at all. The session debates: when a spiritual discipline becomes wellness, who is appropriating whom — the market, the state, or the tradition itself?

Case study: India. Ramdev’s Bharat Swabhiman movement and the Patanjali empire; the AYUSH ministry and International Day of Yoga as soft-power apparatus; yoga’s simultaneous nationalisation (Hindu heritage) and universalisation (secular wellness) ([lib #2198], [lib #2338], [lib #2863], [lib #2264]).

Comparative opening: China’s qigong boom — and the state’s violent about-face against Falun Gong — is the essential second Asian case: the same body-cultivation revival, ending not in soft power but in suppression (Palmer [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]).

Theoretical anchor: Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga (2014) [lib #2201] and Peace Love Yoga (2020) [lib #2862]; Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (2010) [lib #3931] for the genealogical critique.

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (2014) [lib #2201], ch. 4 — "Branding Yoga".

Readings:

  • ⋆ Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga (2014) [lib #2201] — from counterculture to pop culture: the branding of a discipline
  • ⋆ Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (2010) [lib #3931] — the modern invention of postural yoga
  • ⋆ James Mallinson & Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (2017) [lib #3930] — the premodern sources, against both nationalist and wellness myths
  • ⋆ Joseph Alter, "Pahalwan Baba Ramdev: Wrestling with Yoga and Middle-Class Masculinity" (2020) [lib #2198] — the body politics of the yoga tycoon
  • ⋆ Jacob Copeman & Bhuvi Gupta, "Awakening Hindu Nationalism through Yoga" (2019) [lib #2338] — Bharat Swabhiman as political mobilisation
  • ⋆ Jyotirmaya Tripathy, "Consuming Indigeneity: Baba Ramdev, Patanjali Ayurveda and the Swadeshi Project" (2019) [lib #2863] — nationalist FMCG
  • ⋆ Priyanka Pathak-Narain, Godman to Tycoon (2018) [lib #2264] — the reported biography Patanjali sued to stop
  • ⋆ Nandini Gooptu, "New Spirituality, Politics of Self-empowerment, Citizenship and Democracy" (2016) [lib #982] — wellness as citizenship training
  • ⋆ Andrea Jain, Peace Love Yoga (2020) [lib #2862] — neoliberal spirituality and its dissenting possibilities
  • ⋆ Ronald Purser, McMindfulness (2019) [lib #4582] — the Buddhist-derived wing of the wellness complex
  • ⋆ Patrick McCartney, "The Not So United States of Yogaland" (2021) [lib #4772] — yoga’s global imaginaries and their politics
  • ⋆ Stewart Home, Fascist Yoga (2025) [lib #6471] — the far-right underbelly of wellness
  • † Baba Ramdev, Mera Jeevan, Mera Mission (2019) [lib #6934] — primary source: the guru’s self-narrative (Hindi)
  • † UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/69/131, "International Day of Yoga" (11 December 2014) — primary source, open access at undocs.org

Audio-visual: Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (Eva Orner, 2019) — the wellness industry’s charisma economy at its most predatory; Wild Wild Country (Chapman Way & Maclain Way, 2018) — Rajneesh: Indian spirituality, American utopia, armed commune.

Theme 30 — Martyrdom: The Karbala Paradigm, Palestine, and the Suicide-Bombing Debates

Abstract — Every year, millions weep for a battle lost in 680 CE. The Karbala paradigm — Husayn’s exemplary death re-lived in Moharram mourning — shows martyrdom to be less an event than a technology of memory: a template through which later deaths (revolutionary, national, sectarian) become meaningful, mobilising, and contested. This session moves from that template to its modern politicisations: Iran’s 1978–79 revolution, when mourning crowds became insurrectionary multitudes (Rahimi); Palestine, where commemoration organises national time and the shahid’s poster is infrastructure; and the LTTE’s Great Heroes’ Day, a secular martyrology "holier than religion." The suicide-bombing debates are handled with deliberate scholarly care: Asad’s question is why "our" horror at suicide bombing exceeds horror at greater state violence; Gambetta, Pape and Khosrokhavar dispute how much religion explains at all; Fassin traces how trauma and testimony remade the martyr as victim. The session debates: is martyrdom a theology of sacrifice, a nationalist technique — or the weapon of those who have only their deaths to give?

Case study: Palestine. The political career of the shahid — commemoration, posters, funerals, prisoners’ hunger strikes — as national institution under occupation; anchored by Khalili’s Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] with Fassin ([lib #2472]) and Kanafani ([lib #4681]) in the library.

Comparative opening: Iran supplies the paradigm itself: Rahimi’s history of Moharram performance shows how Karbala mourning became the sensory grammar of revolution ([lib #6967], [lib #6694]).

Theoretical anchor: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire], with his Formations of the Secular (2012) [lib #31] in hand; Babak Rahimi, Senses of Mourning (2026) [lib #6967].

Compulsory (one of): ⋆ academic excerpt: Babak Rahimi, Senses of Mourning: Moharram Performances in Shiʿi Iran (2026) [lib #6967], ch. 3 — "The Touch of the Revolutionary Multitude: The Tactile Politics of the Crowd in the 1978 Moharram".

Readings:

  • ⋆ Babak Rahimi, Senses of Mourning (2026) [lib #6967] — Karbala performance from Qajar takiyeh to pandemic Tehran
  • ⋆ Maria Rashid, Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army (2019) [lib #3918] — the state’s own martyrdom machine
  • ⋆ Michael Roberts, "Tamil Tiger ‘Martyrs’: Regenerating Divine Potency?" (2006) [lib #418] — sacralised death in a secular nationalist movement
  • ⋆ Cristiana Natali, "Building Cemeteries, Constructing Identities" (2008) [lib #971] — LTTE funerary politics
  • ⋆ Giacomo Mantovan, "’The Great Heroes’ Day is Much Holier for Us than Religion’" (2026) [lib #6969] — diaspora martyr commemoration (cross-listed from Theme 21)
  • ⋆ Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, "Martyrs and Living Martyrs of the People’s War in Nepal" (2018) [lib #1484] — Maoist martyrology without God
  • ⋆ Dilip Menon, "A Prehistory of Violence? Revolution and Martyrs in Kerala" (1999) [lib #552] — the communist martyr tradition
  • ⋆ Lipin Ram, "Martyrdom and Democratic Politics: The Communist Movement in North Kerala" (2017) [lib #551] — martyrdom inside electoral democracy
  • ⋆ Farhad Khosrokhavar, "Les paysans dépaysannés et la révolution iranienne" (2018) [lib #6694] — who died for the Iranian revolution
  • ⋆ Didier Fassin, "The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony" (2008) [lib #2472] — from martyr to trauma victim in Israel–Palestine
  • † Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (1984) [lib #4681] — primary literary source: death without witness, the anti-martyrdom
  • ⋆ Laurent Gayer & Ingrid Therwath, "Modelling Exemplarity in South Asia" (2016) [lib #1483] — the exemplary death as South Asian political form
  • ⋆ Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the indispensable provocation
  • ⋆ Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine (2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — commemoration as national politics

Audio-visual: Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad, 2005) — forty-eight hours of two would-be bombers: the debate dramatised; The Attack (Ziad Doueiri, 2012) — the aftermath from the surgeon-husband’s side.

Appendix — acquisitions

The course library holds the very large majority of the catalogue’s readings. The items below, flagged [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] in the theme entries, are the running acquisitions list, per theme. They are being sourced; where a theme is called before its acquisitions land, substitutes from the library will be announced with the theme.

Theme 01 — Religion & Populism
  • Jayeel Cornelio & Erron Medina, "Christianity and Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines," Politics, Religion & Ideology 20(2), 2019.
  • Jayeel Cornelio & Ia Marañon, "A ‘Righteous Intervention’: Megachurch Christianity and Duterte’s War on Drugs in the Philippines," International Journal of Asian Christianity 2(2), 2019.
  • Nicole Curato (ed.), A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency (Cornell SEAP/Ateneo, 2017).
  • David T. Buckley, Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines (Columbia University Press, 2017).
Theme 02 — Religion & Revolution

Skocpol "Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution" (1982); Kurzman The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran (2004); Abrahamian Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982); Mottahedeh The Mantle of the Prophet (1985); Arjomand The Turban for the Crown (1988); Afary & Anderson Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005); Khomeini Islam and Revolution (trans. Algar, 1981); Shariati On the Sociology of Islam (trans. Algar, 1979).

Theme 03 — Religion & Subversion

Soroush Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam (2000); Bajoghli Iran Reframed (2019); Mir-Hosseini Islam and Gender (1999); Mahdavi Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution (2009).

Theme 04 — Sects, Cults & New Religious Movements
  • Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Blackwell, 1984)
  • Timothy S. Lee, Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010)
  • David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
Theme 05 — Religious Networks & the State within the State
  • M. Hakan Yavuz & John L. Esposito (eds), Turkish Islam and the Secular State: The Gülen Movement (Syracuse UP, 2003) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • M. Hakan Yavuz, Toward an Islamic Enlightenment: The Gülen Movement (Oxford UP, 2013) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Joshua D. Hendrick, Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World (NYU Press, 2013) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Berna Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement (Stanford UP, 2007) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
Theme 06 — Religion & Democratization
  • Paul Y. Chang, Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979 (Stanford University Press, 2015).
  • Robert L. Youngblood, Marcos Against the Church: Economic Development and Political Repression in the Philippines (Cornell University Press, 1990).
  • Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (ed.), Minjung Theology: People as the Subjects of History (Orbis Books, 1983).
  • David T. Buckley, Faithful to Secularism: The Religious Politics of Democracy in Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines (Columbia University Press, 2017) — shared want with Theme 01.
Theme 07 — Secular Religions
  • Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  • Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton University Press, 2006)
  • Charles K. Armstrong, "Familism, Socialism and Political Religion in North Korea," Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6.3 (2005)
  • B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (Melville House, 2010)
Theme 08 — Political Islam
  • Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford UP, 2001) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the Pakistan–Malaysia comparison of state-led Islamization; ideal bridge text for this session.
  • Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton UP, 2000) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Abul A’la Maududi, The Islamic Law and Constitution (trans./ed. Khurshid Ahmad, Islamic Publications, Lahore, 1955 and later eds.) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the primary statement of "theo-democracy"; scans widely available via Internet Archive.
  • Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (Hurst, 2009) [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] — the identity-and-Islam framing of Pakistan’s state trajectory (her review of Iqtidar is in the library, [lib #6110]).
Theme 09 — Cosmopolitan Islam
  • Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930/1934) — primary text (public domain online, but acquire a print/critical edition).
  • Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Harvard UP, 2015).
  • Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard UP, 2017).
  • Javed Majeed, Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2009).
  • Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din "al-Afghani" (University of California Press, 1968) — primary sources for the comparative opening.
Theme 10 — Religion & Civil War
  • Stanley J. Tambiah, Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  • Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (University of California Press, 1996).
  • H. L. Seneviratne, The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
  • Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2000).
  • Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic Nationalism, Institutional Decay, and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka (Stanford University Press, 2004).
  • Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
  • Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ (Zed Books, 2017).
Theme 11 — Digital Evangelists & Religious Influencers
  • Vika Gardner, E. Carolina Mayes & Salman Hameed, "Preaching Science and Islam: Dr. Zakir Naik and Discourses of Science and Islam in Internet Videos," Die Welt des Islams 58(3), 2018.
  • Gary R. Bunt, Hashtag Islam: How Cyber-Islamic Environments Are Transforming Religious Authority (University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
  • Heidi Campbell (ed.), Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds (Routledge, 2013).
  • Ju Hui Judy Han, "Urban megachurches and contentious religious politics in Seoul" (2015) — Korean digital/megachurch leg of the comparison.
Theme 12 — Religion & Gender
  • Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (L’Association, 2000–03; Eng. tr. Pantheon, 2003–04) — floated by JTM in the design transcript; not in library.
  • Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press, 1999).
Theme 13 — What is a Theocracy?
  • Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 2002; 2nd edn 2010).
  • Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government (1970), in Hamid Algar (tr.), Islam and Revolution (Mizan Press, 1981) — already listed under Theme 02; cross-relevant here.
  • Karma Phuntsho, The History of Bhutan (Random House India / Haus, 2013) — for the Bhutan comparative opening.
Theme 14 — Religion & Caste
  • none.
Theme 15 — Confucianism as Religion of Social Stratification
  • Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (tr. Hans H. Gerth, Free Press, 1951).
  • Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton University Press, 2013).
  • Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (Harvard University Asia Center, 1992).
  • Fareed Zakaria, "Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew," Foreign Affairs 73(2), 1994 — pair with Kim Dae Jung’s reply [lib #6528].
Theme 16 — Blasphemy
  • Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler & Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Townsend Center/University of California, 2009; 2nd edn Fordham, 2013).
Theme 17 — Conversion & Proselytization
  • Timothy S. Lee, Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010).
  • Ju Hui Judy Han, "Shifting Geographies of Proximity: Korean-led Evangelical Christian Missions and the U.S. Empire," in Carole McGranahan & John F. Collins (eds.), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), 194–213.
  • Ju Hui Judy Han, "Urban megachurches and contentious religious politics in Seoul" (2015) — also listed under Theme 11.
Theme 18 — Religion, Social Anomie & Suicide
  • Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897; tr. John A. Spaulding & George Simpson, Free Press, 1951) — the session anchor; English text also accessible via Internet Archive.
  • Junko Kitanaka, Depression in Japan: Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress (Princeton University Press, 2012).
  • (Also flag: Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) absent from library — needed for the course’s theory shelf generally.)
Theme 19 — Religious Space: Temples, Churches & Schooling
  • Robert W. Hefner & Muhammad Qasim Zaman (eds.), Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (Princeton University Press, 2007).
  • Kim Knott, The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis (Equinox, 2005).
Theme 20 — What is Secularism?
  • José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
  • Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2007) — his "Modes of Secularism" essay is already held inside Bhargava (ed.) [lib #3022].
  • Ahmet T. Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  • Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (Oxford University Press, 2012).
  • T.N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Oxford University Press, 1997) — his 1987 JAS essay "Secularism in Its Place" is held inside [lib #3022].
Theme 21 — Religion & Diaspora
  • Ingrid Therwath, "Cyber-Hindutva: Hindu Nationalism, the Diaspora and the Web," Social Science Information 51(4), 2012.
  • Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (Rutgers University Press, 2007).
  • Steven Vertovec, The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns (Routledge, 2000).
  • Chetan Bhatt & Parita Mukta (eds.), "Hindutva in the West: Mapping the Antinomies of Diaspora Nationalism," special issue, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(3), 2000.
Theme 22 — Orthodoxy & Power in Russia
  • Kristina Stoeckl & Dmitry Uzlaner, The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (Fordham University Press, 2022).
  • Irina Papkova, The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011).
  • John Garrard & Carol Garrard, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia (Princeton University Press, 2008).
  • Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford University Press, 2019).
Theme 23 — Sacred Lands
  • Diana Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (Harmony Books, 2012).
  • Michael M.J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1980) — the "Karbala paradigm."
  • Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Theme 24 — Temple Economies
  • C.J. Fuller, Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
  • Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
  • Arjun Appadurai & Carol A. Breckenridge, "The South Indian Temple: Authority, Honour and Redistribution," Contributions to Indian Sociology 10(2), 1976.
  • Franklin A. Presler, Religion under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
  • Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Theme 25 — Religious Mythopolitics
  • No blocking acquisitions — the session is fully covered by the library.
  • NOTE: the convenor’s own mythopolitics / irenic-imaginary papers (U16 line) are not in this index under his name — fold in from personal files.
  • NOTE: the library’s copy of Pollock, "Ramayana and Political Imagination in India" (#2138) carries only the article’s first page in its text sidecar — replace with the full article PDF.
Theme 26 — Political Syncretisms
  • Anna Bigelow, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010).
  • Carla Bellamy, The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place (University of California Press, 2011).
  • Jackie Assayag, At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India (Manohar, 2004; French orig. 1995).
Theme 27 — Religious Diplomacy
  • Krithika Varagur, The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project (Columbia Global Reports, 2020).
  • Peter Mandaville (ed.), Wahhabism and the World: Understanding Saudi Arabia’s Global Influence on Islam (Oxford University Press, 2022).
  • Juyan Zhang, "Buddhist Diplomacy: History and Status Quo," CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy, USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 2012 — open-access PDF on uscpublicdiplomacy.org.
  • Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press, 2002).
  • Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017).
Theme 28 — Religion & Terrorism
  • Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, 2000).
  • Ian Reader, Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyō (Curzon / University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).
  • Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (Vintage, 2000).
  • Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Hurst, 2005).
  • Olivier Roy, Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State (Hurst, 2017).
  • Fawaz Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Theme 29 — Religion & Well-Being (Yoga)
  • Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2004).
  • Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
  • David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (Columbia University Press, 2007).
  • (Primary, no acquisition needed: UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/69/131, "International Day of Yoga," 11 Dec 2014 — undocs.org.)
Theme 30 — Martyrdom
  • Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press, 2007).
  • Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
  • Farhad Khosrokhavar, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs (Pluto Press, 2005; French orig. 2002).
  • Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005).
  • Michael M.J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1980) — also flagged under Theme 23.
Frame-text and exam-shortlist checks

Checked and NOT held for Week 1: José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]; any Juergensmeyer overview [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire].

Checked in the index and NOT held (would have been considered for the exam shortlist):

  • Mark Juergensmeyer (any title, e.g. Global Rebellion / The New Cold War?) — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] (other Norris/Inglehart items held, e.g. #1891, but not this book)
  • Ahmet Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire]
  • Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] (only the 2001 pan-Asianism article #5685 is held)
  • T. N. Madan (monograph, e.g. Modern Myths, Locked Minds) — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] (the Nandy/Madan anti-secularist positions are accessible via Bhargava #3022 and Nandy’s "An Anti-secularist Manifesto" #4047)
  • Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion — [NOT IN LIBRARY — acquire] (Formations of the Secular #31 is held)