In-Person Panel PS6.6

Religious Education, the State and Politics

Religion as Coping Mechanism: The Journey, Experience, and Negotiations of Southeast Asian and South Asian Migrants and Compromised Fertility in Both Worlds 

Nelly Martin-Anatias, Sharyn Graham Davies

Compromised fertility is a medical and a social issue (Inhorn and van Balen, 2002). As a social issue, religion can form a coping mechanism for people experiencing compromised fertility. In this chapter we explore how Southeast Asian and Sri Lankan migrants experience compromised fertility, showing that religion is evoked to make this journey easier. The focus of our study investigates the participants’ experience in accessing the fertility treatment while negotiating their identities as migrant and new residents in NZ. We explore several important findings from our research. First, migrants are often entangled with their traditional values acquired in their birth countries. Second, living in a new country, they often feel uninformed about how the health system works and for many participants, this often results in the missed fertility opportunities. Third, the participants’ efforts to bear a child is often met with structural challenges. To find comfort during the difficult times, participants see religion as a space to find comfort and solace to make sense out of their compromised fertility. Thus, we show how religious provides a space to understand their compromised fertility while trying to negotiate life in their new home.

Indonesian Australia Muslims: Securitisation and the Use of Space 

Farida Fozdar, Illa Nihati

This paper explores results from an ARC study of the impacts of the Australian government’s securitisation measures on migrant Muslim communities’ sense of belonging. Focusing on a case study of Indonesians in Western Australia, the paper takes a (im)mobilities lens to consider how such measures have impacted the communities targeted. Perhaps surprisingly, the Indonesian community tends not to see these measures as relevant to them. Their concerns centre around everyday settlement issues and internal community fractures, with surveillance and security minimised. Issues with parking, an oddly consistent theme raised by most participants, are analysed to consider the policing of space by the wider population, and its perception by this community as a greater impost than government surveillance measures, and instances of everyday racism.

Resistance to English Language Education in Indonesian Islamic Education

Abdurrosyid Abdurrosyid 

In response to the status of English as global language, the Indonesian state has established policy to fast-track the learning of English in Indonesia, including in the country’s Islamic educational institutions. This matches with a growing expectation of parents that pesantren and madrasah will provide instruction in English for their children.  

This paper focusses on resistance to the teaching of English amongst Indonesia’s Islamic community. Based on the author’s research amongst educational institutions and educators in Indonesia, this paper examines the ideological motives that lead some institutions to reject the teaching of English, and which compel a generation of educators to creatively produce teaching materials and strategies that neutralise elements of ELT that are regarded by some educators as harmful to Islamic values. 

The research contributes to a number of fields: knowledge of world Englishes; Indonesian state education policy; and the development of Islamic education in Indonesia.

Talaqi: Face to Face Islamic Learning in the Bureaucratic Era

Julian Millie

Since Indonesian independence, the Republic’s Ministry of Religion has steadily become more deeply involved in Islamic education. The paper reflects on the nature of the changes brought by bureaucratisation to Islamic education. Indonesia’s education policy aims to implement values such as quality at scale, equality of access, standardisation of curricula and teacher qualifications and so on. In contrast, many Islamic institutions structure their pedagogy around spiritual and genealogical hierarchies, and maintain teaching methods that affirm those hierarchies. As the standardising impetus of the nation state makes inroads into Islamic education, what are the implications for the distinctiveness of Islamic education, where ideas of the common good are framed not around citizenship but around cosmological aspirations for individual and group? 

This article focusses upon a unique and fundamental aspect of pesantren education: the face to face conveyance of knowledge between a distinguished teacher and pupil (talaqi). This is inimical to the standardised norms applied in the bureaucratised education system. As the pesantren becomes more deeply dependent on national education systems and resources, institutions take greater care to structure institutional activities around talaqi, insuring the distinctiveness of Islamic education, and maintaining the specific institution’s authentic connection to the past through genealogy and remembrance.