My interest in China’s Muslim minorities began during my graduate studies when I participated in a project titled “Faith and Trust in the Emerging Market Economy of China,” convened between 2006-2008, that explored how religious beliefs and practices influence trust between individuals and institutions in China’s developing market economy. I saw through fieldwork in Beijing, Zhengzhou, and Guangzhou—cities with vibrant Islamic traditions that date back centuries—glimpses into the role faith plays in China’s Muslim communities. This immersive experience profoundly shaped my research agenda. In ..read more

Looking back at the last eight years of the relationship between Donald Trump and evangelical Christians, it seems that both everything and nothing has changed. The Christian right has replaced the worn-out moniker of the Moral Majority with MAGA. But, as powerful as Trumpism is today, my argument from 2016 holds up: this group is hurtling towards its demise. And now, that prediction is born out in the data: among Americans sixty-five and older, 18% are white evangelicals, compared with just 9% of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine. Trump brought about a resurgence of the Christian right p ..read more

The UCSIA Summer School is a one-week mentoring programme that encourages doctoral and postdoctoral students to explore interdisciplinary ways of analysing the relationship between religion, culture and society. Key elements of the programme are expert lectures, paper presentations by the students and individual tutoring by the faculty. The UCSIA Summer School 2024, titled God on Our Side? Questioning Theological Narratives of Nationalism, Populism and Conservatism, marks the start of a three-year cycle of summer schools, focused on the entanglements of religion and politics, the communi ..read more

In 2004, four US college students were arrested for stealing a book. A rare first edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America was stored in special collections at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where the students were enrolled. Dressed in clumsy disguises as rare book collectors, the students seized the book after physically assaulting a librarian; they escaped awkwardly with it down the library stairwell, running into their getaway vehicle, a minivan, parked outside. This weird and funny, yet unsettling, tale of a failed heist is recounted in the film American Animals, w ..read more

I write this essay as I witness the sudden death of the nation of my birth. Khartoum, Sudan’s capital city on the Nile, has been engulfed in the black smoke and fast-moving flames of a chaotic war between two political rivals, each with his own powerful army claiming control of the territory. In a few short weeks in mid-2023, foreigners evacuated, embassies closed, and tens of thousands of survivors fled for safety anywhere they could go outside the city. “Pray for us,” Samira, a Sudanese friend and peace activist, recently said to me amidst this violence in Khartoum. It was before she fled he ..read more

Secularism requires that the state be separate from, and neutral vis-à-vis, religious groups. The state must also protect the religious freedom of all citizens, regardless of their beliefs. As demonstrated by scholars such as Jean Baubérot and Roberto Blancarte, although marked by different historical trajectories, all liberal democracies espouse the principles of secularism. In liberal democracies, states have gradually distanced themselves from churches that sought to retain moral and political influence over societal choices. In so doing, these states have, in a context of increasing divers ..read more

On January 17, 2023, BBC World aired the first episode of its controversial two-part miniseries titled India: The Modi Question. The series investigates Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s troubled relationship with India’s Muslim minority. The first episode centers on Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat riots of 2002 that led to the brutal massacre of approximately two thousand Muslims. It begins with an ominous call by an anonymous Hindu nationalist advocating genocide against Muslims. Strikingly, this Hindu nationalist does not explicitly mention Muslims. Instead, he uses the term “nonbeliev ..read more

In spring 2021, unprecedented intercommunal and police violence broke out in Jerusalem and other cities across Israel. Known as the “Dignity Uprising” (habbet al-karamain Arabic) or “Operation Guardian of the Walls” (mivtza shomer homotin Hebrew), the events resulted in arson attacks on houses and vehicles, multiple casualties, and the murder of Jewish and Palestinians residents. This violence inside the Green Line, the Israeli international border that existed from the 1948 War until the 1967 Six-Day War, is regarded as a traumatic watershed in the recent history of Jewish-Arab relations.&nbs ..read more

The Egyptian government pledged in 2017 to allocate 1.27 billion EGP ($71 million) for the preservation of Jewish heritage. Restoring the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria topped the government’s priorities. It reopened in 2020 at a cost of 60 million EGP. This major undertaking coincided with a decision by the Ministry of Antiquities to register hundreds of Jewish artifacts from the country’s synagogues, a process that began in 2016. Government-sponsored projects under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with an overt emphasis on communal spaces important to religious minority groups have not ..read more

Jumping across time and space and traversing religious practices, the essays in this forum present glimpses into the diversity and complexity of Asian American religious life. Our venture into the multiverse that is Asian American religions is an opening through which to discern identity formation and community building, as well as patterns of prejudice and discrimination, offering new perspectives and enriching knowledge about different ways of being. Such a lens also helps to critically assess Asian American religions as significant threads in the fabric of American life. The study of Asian ..read more