God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society
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God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520959323 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/09/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Dinah Griego is Project Coordinator of the Luce Project on the Role of Religion in Global Civil Society at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
John Soboslai is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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God in the Tumult of the Global Square
Religion In Global Civil Society
By Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, John Soboslai
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95932-3
CHAPTER 1
The Social Turmoil of the Twenty-First Century
CRISES OF IDENTITY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND SECURITY
VISITING THE OLD CAMPUS OF Shanghai University in the heart of the city is like taking a trip back in time. The red-brick buildings are neatly arranged around a central campus lawn, with wide walkways lined by old trees. The buildings' turreted walls remind one of what the student ambience must have been like in the 1920s, when the university was founded as a rival to the missionary colleges that were sprouting up throughout China. The Baptist missionary organization had created a college with a similar name, the University of Shanghai (now merged with East China Normal University), which was meant to be a Christian witness to the Chinese people. It was part of the great missionary movement that swept out from America and Europe and encircled the world, with the dream of making a distinctly Western form of Protestant religiosity the global norm.
That did not happen, of course, though there were a few converts, and a fledgling Christian community blossomed. But the movement spurred educated Chinese into creating their own independent universities, and the old Yanchang campus of Shanghai University is a monument to an earlier generation's dream of modern education. Later it was socialist education that dominated the curriculum, as China became part of the global socialist milieu. Today, however, the campus is surrounded by symbols of yet another globalization, a new economic one. The sleepy red-brick campus is dwarfed by a circle of high-rise buildings and brightly lit shops. The stores announce their wares for an upscale, globalized clientele: scarves from Hermès, handbags from Louis Vuitton, and watches from Rolex.
These days very few students actually study at the old campus of Shanghai University. The small campus has been abandoned for a new location ten kilometers north, the bustling Baoshan campus, itself something of a small city of high-rise buildings of modern architectural design. Over forty thousand students are enrolled, a fourth of them in graduate and professional schools. Shanghai University has become a part of contemporary China, and that means being open to new ideas and commercial possibilities from around the world. It is also increasingly attracting international students, including many from the United States and Europe.
In response, the university has created new graduate programs in English, international business, and international finance. It has also created a global studies graduate program and a center for the study of global affairs. Shanghai University was the first in the country to embrace global studies as a field; others have more recently been established in Beijing and Shantou.
What has come to Shanghai University is not only global studies but also globalization as a phenomenon, as it has to the rest of Shanghai. The municipality has, after a few decades of astounding growth, become one of the world's great global cities. If you stand at the bund — the levee at the edge of the Huangpu River that lines the downtown area of old Shanghai — and look behind you, you will see a wall of old British buildings that were once the most important in the city. Twenty years ago, that was the heart of Shanghai, and when you looked across the river, you saw a few buildings, but mostly rice paddies and empty fields. Today the Pudong region across the river has one of the world's most impressive skylines. At the center of the forest of skyscrapers is the 121-story Shanghai Tower, reaching, it seems, halfway to the moon; it is the tallest in China and, for a time, the second tallest building in the world, after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
The building boom in Shanghai is entirely due to the globalization of production and trade that has made China one of the world's largest producers of consumer goods. The boom began when globalization began, in the last decade of the twentieth century. This was also, according to the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the true beginning of the twenty-first century. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global era. Even before that date, however, the world had begun to change in profound ways. The softening of the divide between the Communist and non-Communist worlds was only part of the transformation. A more significant dimension was the rise of new transnational forms of economic production, distribution, and financing, coupled with the instant communications of the internet and massive demographic shifts made possible through the easing of travel restrictions and the rise of inexpensive air travel.
On the one hand, the era of globalization provided new opportunities. Take cell phones, for instance. Twenty years ago in rural China, telephones were virtually nonexistent. Today even the remote pedicab driver has one in his hand. The world is at his fingertips. Computer technology has made low-cost, worldwide communication available to nearly everyone. Relatively inexpensive goods produced through global production networks are sold everywhere to a grateful consumer public — who try to ignore the harsh realities of workplaces such as the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, and the troublesome labor conditions around the world. Accompanying this global consumerism, a whole new generation of global youth emerged who shared a common popular culture of music, videos, and fashion. Rural teenagers in China's Xinjiang Province insist on wearing Nike shoes. Globalization has, in a sense, pulled the world more closely together.
On the other hand, there are new problems. The ease of mobility and transportation, coupled with the erosion of the power of the nation-state, undercuts national identities. The same Nike-wearing teenager in Xinjiang might very well be participating in protests against what he and his friends regard as the Chinese central government's incursion into traditional Uighur Muslim culture. At the same time, the emergence of transnational economic and organizational networks that are outside the control of national governments create new challenges of accountability. The fear of many Chinese government officials about the Muslim protests in western China is that they might be connected with the strident jihadi ideology of Muslim extremism that has troubled other parts of the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The spread of radical ideologies associated with terrorism and the potential for environmental and other disasters on a global scale have produced new concerns about public security.
In the global era, then, these have been the critical issues: identity, accountability, and security. Each of these touches on religion in some way, and for each of them, religious ideas and communities have provided solutions. In the remainder of this chapter we will look at the religious aspects of each of these global issues in turn.
SEARCHING FOR SOCIAL IDENTITIES
One of the participants in both our Delhi and Santa Barbara seminars is a prominent Indian scholar who studied at Berkeley before establishing his career at Delhi University. He speaks fluent Chinese and for years has done research in a region in China that is part of a larger project on Chinese-Indian comparative development. So he travels frequently to China. But he also travels frequently to the United States, since both of his children came to America for higher education and have settled into comfortable careers in California and New Jersey. Their families are well established here, and their children are being raised as American kids.
So we asked him, "With what country do you identify — India, China, or the United States?" "I am Indian, of course," he said, "and proudly so. But my heart is also in China and the United States." And then he added, "I guess I am becoming a citizen of the world."
His story has become a common one. The increasing mobility of people and the ease of global communications make it possible for everyone to live everywhere, while maintaining contacts with family and friends who may be living everywhere else. As a result, huge new multicultural populations are emerging around the world that have mixed identities — grounded in their new homelands but in touch with traditional regions that are often beyond the seas.
Take Southern California as an example. The greater Los Angeles area is home to over 600,000 residents of Filipino ancestry. This makes it the largest Filipino city outside of the Philippines, and the seventh largest Filipino city in the world. In addition, over 500,000 Persians live in the greater Los Angeles area, a number equal to the twelfth largest city in Iran. And over 3.5 million people in the greater Los Angeles area are of Mexican ancestry, which makes Los Angeles the second largest Mexican city in the world. Also living in Southern California are massive numbers of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Asian Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Africans, newly migrated Europeans, and members of various Middle East, Caribbean, and South American communities. Los Angeles is truly a global city, and it is a microcosm of the world's diverse nationalities.
People who pull up stakes and move to Los Angeles and other parts of the world are often divided in their loyalties between their new homes and their familiar ground. But even people who do not move are affected by globalization's assault on traditional national identities. The effect of globalization on Thai nationalism was observed by one of our seminar participants, Surichai Wun'gaeo, director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and professor of sociology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, who remarked that even rural Thai people are challenged by globalization and that people around the world are no longer "trapped by national identities," because increasingly they participate in global economic production and distribution chains.
But it is not just economic change that is undermining traditional national allegiances. The mass media of videos, television, and movies, along with social networks provided by the internet, also challenge the usual lines of national communication. The political scientist Karl Deutsch once observed that national cohesion is built upon the national integration of communications networks. In an age of global communication, therefore, these nationalist ties are broken and, in some cases, all but obliterated. As distinguished Indian political scientist J. P. S. Uberoi noted in our Delhi seminar, today one's social identity is fluid, determined in part by changing global circumstances.
National identities persist, of course. This is especially so during international sporting events, such as the Olympics or the World Cup, when nationalistic loyalties merge with the fanaticism of sports enthusiasm. But nationalism can also emerge at other times, in surprising moments. Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, went through a new burst of nationalism, one in which the Russian Orthodox Church played a significant role. Indonesia, after the departure of the Dutch colonial rule, seemed destined for disintegration, since it was a somewhat artificially created unity of over seventeen thousand islands. At present, the sense of national unity in Indonesia seems to be enjoying a new popularity, fueled in part by religious leaders seeking to promote their positions through nationalist politics.
Yet it is also true that the global era is a time when the notion of the nation-state is under stress. This is an occasion for other social identities to come to the fore, often with political force. After the U.S.-led military invasion toppled the secular regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, the strident new politics of the country crystallized around religious and ethnic identities — Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs, and Kurds — and the insurgency led by the movement called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in 2014 was determined to tear the nation apart. When one of the authors of this book interviewed Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in 2004, the affiliates of religious parties said that they believed in a united Iraq, but they wanted to make sure that their communities were in what they regarded as their proper leadership roles within the new society. The leaders of each of the communities magnified their own group's importance in Iraq's new political configuration, leading to internal squabbles and worse — violent ethnic strife that came to a head in the 2014 conflict. In the aftermath of the secular nationalism of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, each group wanted a religious and ethnic nationalism that would reflect its own sense of communal identity.
The quest for social identity in an era of globalization has led to a paradox with regard to nationalism and the idea of national community. On the one hand, the idea of a single national identity is weakened in an era of globalization in which competing social identities are easily available through, for instance, communications media. China has been notorious in its attempts to control its citizens' access to media from outside. On the other hand, the challenges of globalization can foster a sense of national pride over what is distinctive about a national culture in the homogeneity of global society. This nationalism can flourish when it is fused with the dominant religious identity of the nation.
An example of this revival of nationalism in religious form is found in several countries in South Asia. Pakistan, for instance, was intended to be a secular state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a founder of the nation, was a refined lawyer who had lived in London and became leader of the Muslim League, the political voice of the Muslim community in South Asia during the last years of British colonial rule. He was a quintessential cosmopolitan, who had no desire to create a state based solely on religious ideas. But Jinnah was also determined to protect the Muslim community against what he perceived to be a hidden pro-Hindu agenda in the politics of the nominally secular Congress Party in India. What he initially wanted was a kind of federal system in India that would allow Muslim-dominated regions to have more autonomy in a unified India. What he got when the British withdrew was a whole new nation based on a shared religious identity and political leaders who used religion as a way of shoring up their own nationalist credentials.
Perhaps no political leader in Pakistan did more to pander to conservative Muslim support than Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who led the country from 1977 to 1988, after instituting a coup against his mentor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Zia established shari'ah law, outlawed marginal and heretical religious movements, and subsidized the mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government in neighboring Afghanistan. One legacy of the Zia regime has been the covert Pakistani support for extremist Muslim political movements in Afghanistan. First the mujahideen and then the Taliban have been quietly supported by elements of the Pakistan military and intelligence services. The ideas of the Taliban are related to the Deoband Muslim reform movement in South Asia, which attempted to purify and standardize the teachings and practices of Islam. These reforms were interpreted by groups such as the Taliban in a rigid and uncompromising way. The movement was not only an agent of religious standardization but also became the political wing of the Pashtun tribal community, large numbers of which were within Pakistan's own western borders. Mollifying the Taliban, then, was a way of currying favor with the critical Pashtun community.
At the same time that Pakistan was developing a more strident Muslim political posture, religious nationalism was also surfacing within India. In some ways, the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 1990s was the reemergence of a religious strand of Indian nationalism that extended back to the early part of the twentieth century. One of the early voices for Indian independence came from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, president of the Hindu Mahasabha and advocated a concept of Hindu culture that he called Hindutva as being the basis of Indian national identity. He once entered into a debate with Mohandas Gandhi over the efficacy of using violence in the struggle for India's freedom. Despite Savarkar's efforts, Hindu nationalism was not a major element in India's nationalist movement. After independence, several political parties took up the banner of support for Hindu causes, notably the Jan Sangh, but it was not until the 1990s that a new movement of religious consciousness led to spectacular political successes for the BJP.
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Excerpted from God in the Tumult of the Global Square by Mark Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, John Soboslai. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Thinking about Religion in the Global Age
1 • The Social Turmoil of the Twenty-First Century: Crises of Identity, Accountability, and Security
2 • Religion Tumbles and Turns: How Religion Has Been Affected by Global Forces
3 • Religion Resists and Soothes: Religious Responses to Globalization
4 • Cosmopolitan Religion at Work: How Religious Values Support Global Citizenship
5 • The Annoying Certainty of Global Views: The Dangers of Cultural Imperialism
Conclusion: God in the Global Square
Notes
Bibliography
List of Workshop Participants
Index