The 2011–2014 controversies between the Ethiopian Government and Muslim communities on the role of Islam in Ethiopia have highlighted the precarious nature of religious relations in Ethiopia. Statements by public figures and religious leaders recently have drawn attention to the nature and scope of the Ethiopian secular state order. This paper describes the recent Muslim protest movement and th...

This paper refers to the ambivalence of secularization in order explain why Cultural Christianity can show both a liberal and illiberal character. These two faces are mostly due identity functions that, not only faith-based religion, but particularly culturalized version entails. Proceeding from this, it will be demonstrated here how turn into concrete marker or resource for collective identity...

This article has as its main focus the supererogatory nightly prayers, the traweh prayers, as they are performed in the world’s largest Muslim nation, Indonesia. These prayers are of immense importance to the Javanese Muslim community, and are often regarded as constituting an obligatory part of the Islamic religion. In the article, the author describes how these prayers are performed in both m...

This article examines the nature of the destruction of built environments. Such destruction should be seen as a distinct form of violence: urbicide. This violence comprises the destruction of shared spatiality which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous communities. Urbicide, insofar as it is a destruction of heterogeneity in general, is thus a manifestation of a ‘politics of exclusi...