In-Person Panel PS3.3

Exploring Religious Dynamics: Sectarianism, Constitutional Freedoms, and Language Policies in South and East Asia

Malevolence Multiplied: the Pakistani Manipulation of Sectarianism in East Pakistan and Baluchistan 

Mark Briskey

Sectarianism has been referred to as a “lazy, convenient and deeply Orientalist form of a new sectarian essentialism of conventional wisdom in the West” to explain political unrest and violence in MENA and other locations such as South Asia (Hashemi & Postel, 2017).  This proposed paper draws upon this new scholarship on sectarianism as well as older Gramscian concepts of hegemony and Anthony Smith’s ethno-religious and ethno-nationalist theories to examine Pakistan’s troubled history of security dilemmas.  The chapter examines Pakistan’s political instability in which movements, uprisings and inter-sectarianized conflict has occurred within an environment in which elites have deflected popular demands for political change by invoking security fears of sectarianism.  This paper looks at how this authoritarian response frequently supported by powerful international partners was significant in the vivisection of Pakistan in 1971 in which the new independent nation of Bangladesh was established as well up to the current day in the ongoing conflict in Baluchistan. To illustrate the features of an authoritarian Pakistan in which the fear of sectarianism has been featured as a threat to national unity since its establishment in 1947 the proposed chapter draws upon evidence and observations of members of an array of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Baluch and other observers as well as diverse foreign and domestic observers. The paper concludes that the manipulation of fears of sectarianism has remained a key aspect of a Pakistani realism that is inherently wrapped together with the manufacture of other tropes of fear and insecurity. 

Why and How the Freedom of Religion Clause Was Included in the Meiji Constitution?: Inoue Kowashi and French Legal Thought 

Koichiro Matsuda 

Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution stated, "Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief.” This provision is premised on a close study of religion-related provisions and theories in Western law. Meiji government bureaucrats paid particular attention to the juxtaposition of the code of state religion and the code of religious freedom in the laws of Western countries. Despite this knowledge, the drafters of the Constitution did not dare to include a clause on state religion. I will focus on Inoue Kowashi, a pivotal figure among the drafters, and his research into French jurisprudence. It enabled him to avoid making Shinto the state religion and included a religious freedom clause while at the same time attributing the administrative authorities the power to supervise religious institutions. Previous studies on the clause on religious freedom in the Meiji Constitution have not identified the sources to which Inoue actually referred. My paper aims to clarify the formation process of the concept of treating religion as an administrative issue by cross-checking the notes in the Inoue Kowashi documents with the original French documents translated and cited therein.

Mapping Landscapes of Religious Power in Modern Indonesia:  Tan Hong Boen and Clifford Geertz 

Lewis Mayo, Julian Millie 

This paper examines two different attempts – one forgotten and the other famous – to map landscapes of religious power in Modern Indonesia.  Both works were the product of investigations in East Java conducted in the 1950s, a time when the Indonesian Republic had secured its independence, but was yet to experience the ferocious violence of the 1960s. The forgotten work comprises the Malay and Chinese-language accounts produced by the Javanese Peranakan Chinese writer Tan Hong Boen about the sacred mountain Gunung Kawi and the saints whose graves on that mountain endow it with religious power.  While contemporary pilgrims to Gunung Kawi, be they of “Chinese” or of “Indonesian” background, continue to revere the site and the holy figures buried there, few of them, arguably, are aware of the attempts in the 1950s by Tan Hong Boen and his collaborators to set forth what was known about the saintly individuals entombed on the mountain. The famous text is The Religion of Java by Clifford Geertz, a classic anthropological account of Javanese spirituality produced from fieldwork done by Geertz and other social scientists.  The paper examines connections and contrasts between the landscapes of Indonesian religious power that these two texts project.