Search

The chapter brings together the main insights from the Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective (YARG) study, as presented in the current volume. It starts by discussing the sample used in the study and in the chapters of the volume; after this, the findings about worldviews are explored, and the chapter concludes with some observations pertaining to methodology. Throughout the chapter, the focus is on the need to challenge the often taken for granted categories and perspectives that are projected onto the world in the Study of Religions, and it is suggested that there are important methodological implications involved in meeting this challenge.

The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism has caught observers by surprise. Donald Trump’s US election victory, the Brexit referendum in Britain, and President Erdogan’s emboldened power in Turkey...

This article contributes to the growing body of research on the increasing role of judicial systems in regulating politics and religion (‘judicialization of politics and religion’) across the globe. By examining how academic expertise is deployed in anti-extremist litigation involving Russia’s minority religions, this article reveals important processes involved in this judicial regulation, in particular when legal and academic institutions lack autonomy and consistency of operation. It focuses on the selection of experts and the validation of their opinion within Russia’s academia and the judiciary, and identifies patterns in the experts’ approach to evidence and how they validate their conclusions in the eyes of the judiciary. Academic expertise provides an aura of legitimacy to judicial decisions in which anti-extremist legislation is used as a means to control unpopular minority religions and to regulate Russia’s religious diversity. As one of the few systematic explorations of this subject and the first focused on Russia, this article reveals important processes that produce religious discrimination and the role that anti-extremist legislation plays in these processes.

Philip Walters stepped down as this journal’s Editor at the end of 2015, after having served for nearly 25 years. Our own early editorial experiences make us deeply appreciative of the formidable a...

As Editors of Religion, State & Society we never fail to be fascinated and inspired by our contributors’ abilities to discern and illuminate multifaceted and unexpected configurations in the human ...

The paper calls for more attention to be paid to the heterogeneous character of new Islamic groups, including the need to avoid assumptions about the origins of radicalism, extremism and recourse to violence adopted by some of them. By focusing on a new movement of young Muslims in the Northern Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria in the period from the 1990s to the early 2000s, we suggest that conceptualising some new Islamic groups as New Religious Movements (NRMs) can sharpen our understanding of the tensions, conflicts and violence often associated with them. This, in turn, can encourage us to take fuller account of factors including their social provenance, the appeal of their beliefs and practices, the demographic characteristics of their membership and the dynamics of their internal and external interactions with the wider society.

The idea of this volume was born out of a series of workshops on Muslim young people in Britain and Russia that took place in 2008–09 in Windsor, Novgorod and Edinburgh, sponsored by the AHRC/ESRC ...

This research compares the treatment of religion, especially minority faiths, by constitutional courts in Russia and Hungary, with the goal of testing an assumption in the literature that such courts in former communist countries protect human and civil rights, including religious freedom. We found that the ability of constitutional courts to fulfil this function depends on the degree of their independence from governments, with the Hungarian Constitutional Court having offered more effective protection for minority religions than its counterpart in Russia. This outcome in Russia has led minority religions to seek redress with the European Court of Human Rights, where they have experienced considerable success.

Over the last decade, Russia’s treatment of her religious minorities has been the subject of domestic and international debate. The origins of the present controversies can best be understood in the context of recent systemic change, and within a broader historical perspective of the relationship between Russian society and religion, particularly at times of modernizing reforms. Moreover, while in the current transitional period societal structures and culture are in flux, reactions to NRMs reveal certain identifiable patterns, assumptions, and trends.

This paper presents a number of important recent cases from Russia involving new and minority faiths. The cases are examined to see how these unpopular groups are dealt within the context of a rapidly changing Russia. Conclusions are drawn about how the legal system in Russia operates concerning minority faiths, using the sociological variables discussed in this issue's introduction.

Introduction: Between death of faith and dying for faith: reflections on religion, politics, society and violence, Madawi Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin Part I: Understanding religiously motivated violence 1. Apocalypse, history, and the empire of modernity, John Hall 2. Martyrs and martial imagery: exploring the volatile link between warfare frames and religious violence,Stuart Wright 3. Violence and new religions: an assessment of problems, progress, and prospects in understanding the NRM-violence connection, J. Gordon Melton and David G. Bromley 4. Of cultists and martyrs: the study of new religious movements and suicide terrorism in conversation, Massimo Introvigne 5. In God's name: practising unconditional love to the death, Eileen Barker 6. The terror of belief and the belief in terror: on violently serving God and nation, Abdelwahhab El-Affendi. Part II: Religiously motivated violence in specific contexts 7. Rituals of life and death: the politics and poetics of jihad in Saudi Arabia, Madawi Al-Rasheed 8. The Islamic debate over self-inflicted martyrdom, Azam Tamimi 9. The radical nineties revisited: jihadi discourses in Britain, Jonathan Birt 10. al-Shahada: a centre of the Shiite system of belief, Fouad Ibrahim 11. Urban unrest and non-religious radicalization in Saudi Arabia, Pascal Manoret and Awadh al-Utaybi 12. Bodily punishments and the spiritually transcendent dimensions of violence: a Zen Buddhist example, Ian Reader 13. Jewish millennialism and violence, Simon Dein. Part III: Reporting religiously motivated violence 14. Sacral violence: cosmologies and imaginaries of killing, Neil Whitehead 15. Journalists as eyewitnesses, Noha Mellor 16. Understanding religious violence: can the media be trusted to explain?, Mark Huband. Index

This chapter addresses the former concerns, whereby the state is invoked as guarantor of constitutional provisions that enable or restrict individual and collective expressions of faith and the degree of equality with which it treats these religious expressions. It explains the issues of religious diversity through reference to Russia's historical legacies of church state symbiosis and oppression of religious minorities. Some leaders of traditional religious minorities embraced the concept of the Russian World with a degree of enthusiasm. The chapter examines how the notion of a shared faith is used by post-Soviet political elites to both underpin their claim to represent Russia's historical statehood and justify restrictions on those opposed to their political monopoly and style of governance. It reveals the post-Soviet states inability to govern a socially and politically diverse society. The vagaries of competition among Islamic authorities, state patronage is to be given to those loyal Islamic leaders who have weightier political and social capital among Muslims.

The expressions of dissent in contemporary Saudi Arabia, whether through violent action or ideological and theological constructions, are well documented today. The very contexts within which violence appears and develops are less well known. If it is essential to read and analyse the Islamic discourses and to observe and interpret the history of Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia, such an elitist focus may overlook more discrete events that might explain the way ordinary people refer to state violence. By widening the scope of political analysis to the ethnographic study of urban delinquency in Riyadh, I hope to more efficiently grasp the nature of the Saudi authoritarian public space.