Largest Religious Minority Research Articles

Islamophobia beyond Explicit Hate Speech: Analyzing the Coverage of Muslims in Slovenia’s Public Broadcasting

Religion in Europe has been undergoing two fundamental changes in the past four decades. As a side effect of secularization, religious fields have been pluralizing. On the other hand, religions themselves have taken a qualitative shift towards lived, material characteristics. Focusing exclusively on the diversification of European religious fields, we are interested in the concept of religious literacy as a tool for competent engagement in contemporary religious plural societies. To better understand the role of public media in fostering religious literacy, we offer an analysis of the public broadcaster’s coverage of smaller religious communities in Slovenia. Focusing particularly on Muslims as the largest religious minority in Slovenia, we provide an analysis of 245 episodes, consisting of 540 items, in the 2015–2020 period. We show that the coverage given to smaller religious communities is unevenly spread amongst the communities, with disproportional airtime given to Christian churches and communities. Furthermore, we pinpoint the key qualitative difference in portrayals of Slovenian Muslims and non-Catholic Christians, explaining how the process of racialized Islamophobia may continue beyond explicit hate speech. In conclusion we set out limitations of our study and provide guidelines for future research.

Theatre and Solidarity among the Transnational Alevi Community

The Alevi religious minority makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey, and their history of persecution dates back before the Republic of Turkey. The inception of the Republic of Turkey as a secular nation-state in 1923 was initially promising for the Alevis, but the regime remained implicitly Sunni Muslim. So, the community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging continued to be characterized by precarity as they occupied a category of national abjection. Beginning in the 1960s, the waves of migration from rural areas to urban Turkey and Western Europe gradually transformed the experiences of the Alevi community and they became more visible. With migration, Alevi people’s everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination as well as their need for community-building and solidarity intensified. In Europe, the Alevi diaspora was too often categorized simply as Turkish or Muslim immigrants. Many of them wanted to differentiate themselves from the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority in the diaspora and gain recognition as a distinct group. They organized in their new homelands and established formal and informal networks of transnational solidarity. In the formation and sustenance of these networks and solidarity, theatre has played a crucial role. The plays staged by Alevi community theatres and professional groups in Turkey and its diasporas have focused primarily on the histories of violence and persecution against Alevis. As such, theatre functions as a site for the constitution of public memory and the intergenerational transfer and transformation of trauma and serves the affective politics of community-building and solidarity among the transnational Alevi community. The political economy of these performances is a crucial element of the politics of solidarity, contributing to the sustenance of Alevi cultural producers and their communities.

Of Marriage, Divorce and Criminalisation

In India, where religion-specific laws govern issues of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance, the family laws of Muslims – the largest religious minority – have been a thorny issue in the post-independence period. In recent years, the major intervention in Muslim personal law reform came in the form of the invalidation of instant divorce or triple talaq by the Supreme Court of India. Subsequently, a law was passed that criminalised it. By delving into a close examination of recent judicial activism and by drawing on our ethnographic work with Muslim women in India, we show that it is only by refocussing the debate from judicial discourse to legal practice that the trope of Muslim women’s victimhood and the tired debates about religious freedom versus citizenship rights can be questioned and bypassed.

Turkish imams and their role in decision-making in palliative care: A Directed Content and Narrative analysis

Background: Muslims are the largest religious minority in Europe. When confronted with life-threatening illness, they turn to their local imams for religious guidance. Aim: To gain knowledge about how imams shape their roles in decision-making in palliative care. Design: Direct Content Analysis through a typology of imam roles. To explore motives, this was complemented by Narrative Analysis. Setting/Participants: Ten Turkish imams working in the Netherlands, with experience in guiding congregants in palliative care. Results: The roles of Jurist, Exegete, Missionary, Advisor and Ritual Guide were identified. Three narratives emerged: Hope can work miracles, Responsibility needs to be shared, and Mask your grief. Participants urged patients not to consent to withholding or terminating treatment but to search for a cure, since this might be rewarded with miraculous healing. When giving consent seemed unavoidable, the fear of being held responsible by God for wrongful death was often managed by requesting fatwa from committees of religious experts. Relatives were urged to hide their grief from dying patients so they would not lose hope in God. Conclusion: Imams urge patients’ relatives to show faith in God by seeking maximum treatment. This attitude is motivated by the fear that all Muslims involved will be held accountable by God for questioning His omnipotence to heal. Therefore, doctors may be urged to offer treatment that contradicts medical standards for good palliative care. To bridge this gap, tailor-made palliative care should be developed in collaboration with imams. Future research might include imams of other Muslim organizations.

Constructive resilience in response to oppression: the strategy of Bahá’ís in Iran

Abstract Efforts to respond to oppression are often framed as strategies of ‘resistance’ or ‘liberation.’ This paper uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine the assumptions implicit in these strategies and shows that they derive from a realism of ‘normative adversarialism,’ where confrontation is seen as a natural and inevitable approach for achieving social change. The paper then asks what an alternative conceptual lens might yield, where social transformation is reimagined as evolutionary, developmental and integrative. It concludes that, through such a lens, responding to oppression can be recast as an effort of ‘constructive resilience.’ Coined in relation to the systematic persecution of Iran’s largest religious minority—the Bahá’í faith—this term describes a strategy of transcending years of state-sponsored discrimination through activities such as literacy and empowerment initiatives for children and youth in socio-economically marginalized neighborhoods, as well as through a home-based university initiative. Consequently, this paper introduces a shift from confrontation to cohesion as the main driver for social change.

Making Muslims illegible: recoupling as an obstacle to religious enumeration in Germany

Literature on categorization often invokes historical legacies to explain why states adhere to statistical categories that inadequately capture their population, and especially minority groups. The failure of the 2011 German census to produce reliable numbers on the country’s largest religious minority, Muslims, could be viewed as a case in point. However, this ignores the fact that in the late 1980s officials successfully counted Muslims. This article traces how officials changed their approach to Muslim enumeration over the course of designing the 2011 census. Drawing on internal ministerial documents and interviews, I show that the reversal of statistical visibility was the result of a recoupling process. Through this process, old state-religion laws that officials had previously ignored now became rigorously applied to the census. An extra-statistical debate on religious education triggered this recoupling by reviving narrow, legal categories of religion and alerting church representatives and legal experts to imprecise census terms. Using the German case and other empirical examples, I describe a more uneven influence of historical legacies than commonly suggested by research on categorization. Rather than viewing legacies as having a stable, or even growing, influence on categorization, I argue that they only take effect when they become politicized and enforced by powerful actors. I call for a more nuanced analysis of the role historical factors play in determining trajectories of census categorization, especially those that are invoked to explain the reluctance of European states to collect ethno-cultural data.

Arbitrary Detention: A Challenge Faced by Muslim Minority in India

Muslims form the largest religious minority in India. Census of India 2011 registered about 14.4 per cent of India’s total population as Muslims. Being minority Muslims are one of the weaker sections of society and the most oppressed ones. Majority of the Muslims especially youth are going through distress and trauma of terrorism tags. Muslims are the prime targets of anti-national activities and often jailed and killed in fake encounters. They are the most suffered section of the society and a little is being done for their upliftment. An attempt has been made to analyze the condition of the Muslim minority in India in the present democratic scenario. The study mainly focused on the consequences of false charges and fake encounters on the socio-economic conditions of Muslims and their families in India. The study is actually an investigation in some thrust areas in which Muslim section of the society is being demoralized deeply in India. The government of India established The Ministry of Minority Affairs on 29th January 2006 to look after the issues of minority communities and suggest development frameworks for their benefit. The 2017 World Report of the Human Rights Watch1 also finds India as the violator of human rights with respect to freedom and treatment of minorities.1An Indian government agency responsible for collecting and analyzing crime data as defined by the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Arbitrary Detention: A Challenge Faced by Muslim Minority in India

Muslims form the largest religious minority in India. Census of India 2011 registered about 14.4 per cent of India’s total population as Muslims. Being minority Muslims are one of the weaker sections of society and the most oppressed ones. Majority of the Muslims especially youth are going through distress and trauma of terrorism tags. Muslims are the prime targets of anti-national activities and often jailed and killed in fake encounters. They are the most suffered section of the society and a little is being done for their upliftment. An attempt has been made to analyse the condition of the Muslim minority in India in the present democratic scenario. The study mainly focused on the consequences of false charges and fake encounters on the socio-economic conditions of Muslims and their families in India. The study is actually an investigation in some thrust areas in which Muslim section of the society is being demoralized deeply in India. The government of India established The Ministry of Minority Affairs on 29th January 2006 to look after the issues of minority communities and suggest development frameworks for their benefit. The 2017 World Report of the Human Rights Watch[1] also finds India as the violator of human rights with respect to freedom and treatment of minorities.[1] Human Rights Watch is a non-profit, non-governmental human rights organization, known for its accurate fact-finding, impartial reporting, effective use of media, and targeted advocacy.

Socio-Economic Conditions Of Hindu Women In Karachi With Special Reference To Narainpura Karachi

The religious minority constitutes an anomaly within the discourse of national identity in Pakistan. They become an anomaly because their existence as citizens of Pakistan highlights the contradictions within the theory that, the State of Pakistan was created for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Hindus are the largest religious minority in Sindh, but facing discrimination at all levels, i.e., economic, social, political, and legal. They are living as a second-class citizen of the country. While, the women who belong to these minority groups are facing double discrimination, firstly as a woman, and then as a Hindu. It is an exploratory research which was conducted in Narainpur (Karachi), which is one of the oldest residential areas of the city, and represents the largest population of Hindu minority, i.e., 60,000 to 70,000. The entire population of Narainpur comprises of poor and lower middle class, as most of the population works as sweepers, housemaids, laborers in KMC, and sellers. Interview schedule was used to collect data from the respective respondents. Result show that health conditions of the women of this locality needs improvement.

Education and Employment among Muslims in Indian Jammu and Kashmir

Muslims constitute about 14% population of India and are the largest religious minority community spread over the length and breadth of the country. The minority community in question has been relegated to the lowest socio-economic stratum in Indian society especially after the partition and independence of the country. However, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Muslims are in majority constituting about 67% population of the state. In the current study, the Concentration Index of Muslim population, variation in literacy rate and work participation, occupational structure across region and religion, as well as the interrelationship between concentration of Muslim population, literacy rate and work participation in Jammu and Kashmir has been explored and explained. The present study is based upon secondary information obtained from Census 2001 and is also supplemented with government reports, published work wherever necessary. As far as share of Muslims in the sphere of education and employment in the state of Jammu and Kashmir is concerned, they have reported lower share among the population of literates, category of other workers and higher share in the occupational category of cultivators, agricultural labourers, household industry workers and non-workers in comparison to all religious groups. This means that despite being in majority, their situation is similar to their co-religionists at the all India level.

The Muslim Community of Yekaterinburg between the Late 19th and Early 20th Century: Size and Institutions

The article discusses the history of Yekaterinburg city’s Muslim community between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The analysis made with reference to archival sources, statistics, periodicals, and documentary photographs allows the authors to define the Muslim community’s population dynamics and gender composition as well as to distinguish and localise its main religious institutions. It is shown that by the 1890s, the Yekaterinburg Muslim community was officially registered as such and established all the necessary institutions, such as a separate cemetery, and two sites to conduct communal services and prayer. They had their own imam and muezzin and founded Muslim primary and secondary schools. According to the First All-Russian census of 1897, the city’s Muslim community reached almost 700 persons and was the largest religious minority in Yekaterinburg. Most of them were ethnic Tatars engaged in trade. In the early 20th century, the Yekaterinburg Muslim community experienced a rapid development and was running several charity projects. However, they were unable to build their own mosque. The authors argue that the main reason was the relatively low number of male Muslims permanently living in the city — under the required 200. The de facto principle of registration during the 1897 Census as well as its fair time schedule entailed significant overestimation. Nevertheless, due to the position of their spiritual and secular leaders, the Muslim community was able to blend in with the rest of the city’s population, and contributed to its urban development.

Injustice and Persecution: Forced Migration of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan

Sufism, secularism, pluralism, and religious tolerance are few for the unique features Sindh had always been known for around the globe. When the rest of Pakistan was devastated by sectarian genocide and targeted persecution, there was much to be learned from Sindh. People of Sindh have always been pluralistic and tolerant, but state sponsored seminaries house ethnic Punjabi or Pashtun Mullahs from Punjab and KPK provinces who target, harass and persecute Sindhi Hindus. The continued incidences of violence against the largest religious minority group Sindhi Hindus have created a sense of insecurity among them. They are subjected to kidnapping for ransom, forced abductions and conversions of their women. These trends forcing the indigenous dwellers to abandon their motherland. The aim of this study is to highlight the targeted discrimination and persecution of Sindhi Hindus which force them to abandon their own homeland Sindh. It also evaluates the underlying causes behind criminal activities and what are the possible motives of perpetrators. This study concluded that state sponsored religious seminaries that house ethnic Punjabi or Pashtun Mullahs from Punjab and KPK provinces are involved in the persecution of Sindhi Hindus. This is a conspiracy against indigenous people of Sindh to convert them into minority on their own homeland. By altering the demography of Sindh, they can undermine the political strength of Sindhis and make them defenseless to protect their natural resources, culture, language and their real and historical identity. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s5p11

India's Muslims, lived secularism and realising citizenship

This article examines the dissonance between Indian secularism in theory and secularism in practice for India's largest religious minority of Muslims. Marginalised and discriminated against in everyday life, India's Muslims are frequently constructed simply as victims without recourse to agency. This article challenges this narrative by documenting how Muslims living in Varanasi in North India actively sought to realise their citizenship and a sense of meaningful participation in society. The empirical insights illustrate that despite the failure of state secularism to protect the Muslim minority from discrimination and facilitate their realisation of equal citizenship, these Muslims did not reject the principle of secularism nor seek an alternative. To the contrary, the rhetoric of secularism offered spaces of opportunity through which Muslims could become political, challenge normative narratives and articulate themselves as citizens. The article develops an understanding of multiple and plural Muslim citizenship strategies that are enacted simultaneously across different spaces and scales within the state and society, where notions of the self and citizenship are always in the process of becoming.

Housing Inequality in Socially Disadvantaged Communities

Affirmative action to compensate discrimination has been the agenda of public policies towards the socially disadvantaged communities in India. This article examines why the scheduled castes/scheduled tribes (Dalits) and the largest religious minority (Muslims) have lower living standards, as measured by floor area and facility index, relative to the mainstream population. The econometric estimates are based on unit record data, over 54,000 households’ survey from urban India. This article estimates living standards using regression analysis and measures gaps using Oaxaca decomposition. Results show that causes for the low living standards of the Muslims are similar to that of the Dalits. This study concludes that income improvement strategies and enhancement of occupational hierarchy would be one of the recommended strategies to reduce housing poverty and disparity among the minority and the Dalits. In addition, improvement of minority and Dalit concentrated slum settlements would be also significantly helpful to reduce housing inequality.

An absent presence: experiences of the ‘welfare state’ in an Indian Muslim mohallā

This paper examines the everyday experiences and perspectives of Muslim Ansāris (weavers) in urban north India with respect to the ‘welfare state’. The case of a recent health insurance scheme, initiated by the Indian government, constitutes the paper's focus. Narratives around the scheme expressed by residents in a majority Muslim mohallā (neighbourhood) in Varanasi illustrate the ways in which the state's presence was more often experienced through its perceived absence and inaccessibility. But even whilst such experiences represented broader patterns of neglect, locally interpreted as the upshot of being India's largest religious minority, this community was not stricken by a sense of absolute alienation and nor did individual or collective actions exhibit outright disaffection towards the state. More appropriately, ‘defensive agencies’ informed by degrees of pragmatism, acceptance and resilience, were articulated in an effort to protect, as well as improve the future capacities and ambitions of the neighbourhood residents where the state had seemingly failed. The paper concludes however with a word of caution about celebrating such agency, and reflects on the potential for transformative politics by Muslims in urban India.

Muslim Female Work Participation in West Bengal, India

Occupational structure of people is one of the significant determinants of human group disparities in socio-economic development. Various development indicators substantiate that women lag behind men in most of yardsticks that measure gender justice and human development, occupation is one of them. A country or society can’t realize its dream of becoming super power by ignoring the better half of the humanity. This study aims to investigate Muslim women work participation in West Bengal based on population census in 2001, as the results have indicated that Muslims constitute 13.4 per cent of the country and 25.25 per cent of West Bengal’s population. Indeed, it is the second largest religious minority community in the country. Sex ratio among Muslim population is 933 in West Bengal, which is higher than the national level. Illiteracy rate of Muslim women is higher and they have not been able to take full advantage in society. There also exists a wide gap between males and females work participation rate. Besides, a significant proportion of Muslim women are recorded as unskilled in the state. Keeping these points in view the present study analyses Muslim women work participation in West Bengal in general and by occupational groups in particular.

Review of The Baha’is of Iran: Socio-Historical Studies edited by Dominic P. Brookshaw and Seena Fazel

The Baha'is of Iran: Socio-Historical Studies. Edited by Dominic P. Brookshaw and Seena Fazel. London: Routledge (Routledge Advances in Middle East and Islamic Studies), 2008, xv + 283 pp.Despite the fact that, since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the Baha i Faith has been the largest religious minority in Iran, and despite the significant role that members of this community have played in important fields in modern Iranian history (such as education, health, women's advancement, and so on), the historiography on modern Iran, up to a decade ago, was devoid of any serious and thorough study of this community. The main reason for this academic abnormality has been the fact that no Iranian regime or government ever recognized the Baha'i Faith, because recognizing it would mean acknowledging that the same God who sent previous prophets (among whom are Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad) has sent a new prophet. This, in itself, would practically mean pulling down one of the main pillars of the Islamic religion, namely that the Prophet Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets.Furthermore, for the Shi a (who have comprised the vast majority of the Iranian people since the Safavid period, in the sixteenth century) and especially the Shi'i clerical establishment, it would have meant acknowledging that God has sent down a new order in which there is no necessity for clerics. It is due to this main reason that anything related to the Baha i Faith or to Baha is has become taboo in Iran, and this, obviously, includes any study that sheds light on any constructive and positive role the Baha'is have played in Iran. One should, therefore, welcome this book, which is one of the more serious attempts not only to shed new light on the Baha i community in Iran, but also to analyze its role in the development of modern Iran.The book in question is a collection of eleven articles. The articles concern the latter Qajar, the Pahlavi, and the Islamic Republic periods. Thematically, they concern a range of subjects such as the conversion of other religious minorities in Iran to the Baha'i Faith; Baha'i ideas on, and the role of Baha is in, the promotion of the status of women, the advent of modern education, health, and constitutionalism; the persecution of the Baha is in Iran; and secular and Islamist anti-Baha i discourse in Iran.Apart from converts from the majority Shi'i population in Iran, converts to the Bahai Faith also came from the other two recognized religions. Mehrdad Amanat and Fereydun Vahman, in their articles, try to analyze the reasons that brought Jews and Zoroastrians, respectively-namely, members of two recognized and protected minorities in Iran-to convert to a new religion which not only was not officially recognized by the state and the Shi'i clerical establishment, but which also came out of Shi'i Islam and which had been persecuted in Iran during most of its history since its inception.According to Mehrdad Amanat, the main reasons Iranian Jews converted to the Baha i Faith seemed to be their messianic expectations coupled with the belief that their own religion did not provide the means to meet the challenges posed by the modern world. For those Jewish converts, the Baha i Faith seemed to meet those expectations and challenges. Messianic expectations as a reason explaining conversion to the Baha i Faith seems not to have been limited only to Iranian Jews, but as Vahman explains, also applied to Iranian Zoroastrians. Also, coming from an Iranocentric religion, members of the Zoroastrian community in Iran were attracted to the Baha i Faith because of its Iranian character (that is, its use of Persian as a sacred language alongside Arabic; the adoption of Naw-Ruz, the Iranian New Year, as the Baha i New Year as well; Iran being the birth place of the religion; and so on).Each of the next four articles in the book concerns Baha i perspectives and roles in a major field. The first article in this group could fit into the field of gender studies; in it the author, Dominic Brookshaw (who is also one of the co-editors of the book), surveys some 250 letters sent between 1870 to 1921 by Baha'u'llah and Abdu'1-Baha to Baha'i women from prominent Baha'i families in Iran and India. …

A Worldly Vernacular: Urdu at Osmania University

AbstractTwinned as Urdu has become with the fate of India's largest religious minority, Muslims, and with the emergence of the independent state of Pakistan, for which Urdu is the official national language, the story of Urdu holds a peculiar place and a special significance in histories of the subcontinent. Stories of the Urdu language are dramatic, bound up as they are in questions of politics, the fate of Hindus and Muslims and the vicissitudes of both the Urdu and the Hindi languages. Though Hindi–Urdu language politics are an important part of these languages' colonial history, this article emphasizes another story. For, like the other vernaculars of south Asia, Urdu had to contend as much with English as with Hindi, and it is that story that is emphasized here. This article details how early-twentieth-century Hyderabad's Urdu educators engaged with questions of native education, language, and Western science. It highlights the discussions and disagreements that accompanied this educational project as Urdu advocates re-evaluated their language and its sources of authority, attempting to make the Urdu language a worldly vernacular, useful for more than the subcontinent's Muslim population.

Parental Religious Rights vs. Compulsory Religious Education in Turkey

AbstractDespite parents having primary responsibility, it remains the State's duty to ensure its citizens' education. The orientation of the State's education can be secular can religious; however, the State – having the discretion on curriculum – should comply with human rights principles by promoting pluralism and refraining from indoctrination. In this respect, discussions around religious education have been, and are, highly controversial. This has especially been the case for countries such as Turkey, which have pronounced religious minority groups in their territories. In this regard, the Alevis of Turkey, as the largest religious minority in the country, have been the main actors of a long lasting legal struggle to strive for respect for their freedom of religion as well as parental religious convictions. This article aims to answer to what extent Alevis in Turkey can assert their parental right to religious education through invoking international human rights law, particularly under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

State-Dialogue with Muslim Communities in Italy and Germany - The Political Context and the Legal Frameworks for Dialogue with Islamic Faith Communities in Both Countries

Estimates of the number of Muslims in EU Member States vary widely, depending on the methodology and definitions used and the geographical limits imposed. Excluding Turkey and the Balkan-regions, researchers estimate that as many as 13 to 20 million Muslims live in the EU: That is about 3.5 - 4% of the total EU population. Muslims are the largest religious minority in Europe, and Islam is the continent's fastest growing religion. Substantial Muslim populations exist especially in Western European countries, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Scandinavian Countries. Europe's Muslim populations are ethnically diverse and Muslim immigrants in Europe hail from a variety of Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries, as well as Turkey. Most Muslim communities have their roots in Western Europe's colonial heritage and immigration policies of the 1950s and 1960s used to counter labor shortages during the period of reconstruction after World War II. These policies attracted large numbers of North Africans, Turks, and Pakistanis. Furthermore, in recent years, there have been influxes of Muslim migrants and political refugees from other regions and countries, including the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.