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The State and the Social Life of Islam in Indonesia – Dr. Ismail F. Alatas

REGISTER NOW Relationships between the state and organized religion are commonly explained in secular political terms, whether as politicization or co-optation of religion. Both explanatory paradigms presuppose rigid distinctions between the political and the religious, and between state and society, thereby foreclosing explorations into the polyvalent character of the state and religion as reproduced in and through multiple social […]

On Secularity, Muslim Immigrants and the Post-Lutheran Mindset – David Thurfjell

ABSTRACT Over the last couple of decades, the religious map of northern Europe has been redrawn. In Scandinavia, people previously formed by Lutheran state-church systems have today become among the most secular in the world. At the same time, immigration has pushed these countries in an opposite direction, making them multi-religious in an unprecedented way. […]

ISLAM AND THE SPICE TRADE: PROFIT AND PROPHECY IN THE GLOBAL MIDDLE AGES

Shipwrecks, smuggling, and… Islam? What if we retold the story of the spice trade—oft appreciated as a catalyst for Europe’s “Age of Discovery”—through the eyes of the late medieval Muslim merchants and scholars who mixed Islam and business across the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean? And what might the maritime corridor that linked the […]