This special issue navigates crucial concerns facing plural societies today. Pluralism constitutes an important feature of modern society and poses challenges that must be taken seriously and transformed into shared opportunities to realize a more just and egalitarian world order. This does not mean that the world before was not pluralistic. The world has never been monolithic, but today we experience pluralism in new, unavoidable ways. Oftentimes, the pervasiveness of pluralism, be it religious, ideological, racial, ethnic, etc., triggers tensions, conflicts, and even violence. This is increasingly the case because new developments and innovations in communication, transportation, and manufacturing have become global phenomena that not only accelerate daily life, but also give rise to deep anxieties as the growing disparity in wealth between rich and poor exacerbates societal pressures close to home. What happens in one part of the world can easily be accessed and ‘felt’ in other parts. As the world has become highly interconnected and crowded, political, racial, ethnic, and religious boundaries are now being renegotiated and reconstructed. This pluralism also affects the personal identity of the individual, who may have to live in several different realities at once. In order to deal with the complex situations arising from these ‘contending modernities’, we need to bring people from diverse cultures and across religious traditions together around shared social and political challenges.
One such effort to address the pressing challenges of pluralism is the interdisciplinary research and education initiative Contending Modernities based at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA. Founded by R. Scott Appleby and co-directed by Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities seeks to ‘generate new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways in which religious and secular forces interact in the modern world’. Special attention is given to ‘how Islam and Catholicism have understood, accommodated, altered, and resisted the radical transformations that have characterized the modern world’, as the two largest global religious communities, Muslims and Catholics, play a pivotal role in shaping and responding to globalization and an increasingly pluralistic world. Through a variety of innovative engagements, including working groups focusing on ‘science and the human person’, ‘global migration and the new cosmopolitanism’, ‘authority, community and identity’, and ‘madrasa discourses’, as well as scholarly interventions on its blog, Contending Modernities intends to foster public deliberations and open new paths forward for constructive collaboration across religious communities and between religious and secular actors. Although this research initiative is first and foremost a scholarly enterprise, ‘it also aims to inform public discourse, influence educational content and practice, and place scholarship in the service of informed policymaking, broadly construed’. For more details, please visit https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu, which highlights the perspectives of scholars, opinion leaders, and students working across differences to learn from others and to accomplish shared goals.
All of the articles included in this special issue represent the results of research projects undertaken by the Contending Modernities ‘Authority, Community, and Identity’ working group, one of several research units the Contending Modernities initiative has instituted in the past few years. The geographical focus of this working group is Indonesia: a complex case study of cultural diversity, with over 300 ethnic groups, more than 700 living languages, and 6 officially recognized religions (i.e., Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism). Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, with the fourth highest population on the planet, scattered across 6,000 inhabited islands. Arguably, Indonesia offers rich opportunities for research on the preconditions for, and obstacles to, peaceful coexistence. Of course, we cannot assume the attitude of mere ‘co-existence’, but rather we should move beyond it to promote ‘pro-existence’ in the sense of dynamic interactions and cooperation across the lines of religious and ethnic divisions. The theoretical framework undergirding the research interest of the Indonesia working group is, first, to recognize the complexity inherent within diverse social contexts. This diversity occurs not only between particular religious traditions and cultures, but also within them. This, in turn, requires a broad spectrum of approaches addressing different markers of diversity, be they religious, ethnic, legal, political, etc., which will allow us to capture the intricacy of religious, and to some extent ethnic and legal, pluralism in Indonesia.
This special issue reflects precisely these approaches. The six articles are united by an overarching concern for a constellation of ‘religious issues’ in the context of intra- and inter-religious relations, as well as their intersection with other dimensions of modern life. To fully take religious pluralism in Indonesian society into account, the articles reflect a broad research scope, open the door to different key loci of exploration, and employ various methodological designs. They tackle ‘religious issues’ at both the societal and governmental levels or a combination of both. At the societal level, the first three articles shed light on such issues as inter-religious marriage, the transformation of perspectives through inter-religious learning, and controversies regarding Jesus between Muslims and Christians. In the first article, Mohamad Abdun Nasir examines inter-religious marriage in Lombok and locates the source of contention between religious and secular (state) authorities. Eckhard Zemmrich interrogates the dominant Western approaches to theorizing inter-religious encounters and offers new perspectives on the ways in which young people can change their view of others. For their part, Mega Hidayati and Nelly van Doorn-Harder examine the conditions under which Muslims and Christians in Indonesia can (or cannot) discuss the figure of Jesus. The next two articles, by James B. Hoesterey and by Moch Nur Ichwan, Arskal Salim and Eka Srimulyani, elucidate the state and civil society’s efforts to promote ‘moderate Islam’ abroad, while domestically the country implements discriminatory Islamic laws against minority groups. The final article, by Mun’im Sirry, advances several pertinent insights into Muslim students’ attraction to radical groups and explores their ability to deradicalize themselves without necessarily converting to secular ideologies.
With this broad rubric, I hope this special issue featuring research emerging from Contending Modernities will energize serious conversations about religious pluralism in Indonesia, in particular, and the changing dynamics of authority, community, and identity in the modern world, in general. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the leadership of Contending Modernities for the trust they put in me to coordinate the Indonesian working group. Special thanks go to the contributors to this special issue, who have displayed patience and good cheer over the lengthy period of time between the writing phase and the final product.