Papers

• Asian religions challenged and transformed by COVID-19: Comparison and New Research Style Jérémy Jammes Sciences Po Lyon

  It is a truism to state the pivotal role of religious practices in Asian societies. However, the COVID-19 health measures of social distancing and confinement implemented in the different countries have inevitably resulted in the suppression or restriction of public gatherings and participation in religious rituals, including mass, baptism, pilgrimage, Friday or Sunday prayers, family celebrations during and after the month of Ramadan, anniversaries of deities in Taoist and Buddhist temples and so on. I will regard how some religious communities in different parts of Asia have been imaginative and resilient in giving birth to a series of local alternatives to this vacuum of ritualized sociability. These responses and the overall health situation have often been engendering a virtualization of worship which inevitably raises debate on the effectiveness of these online services at the care and spiritual level, but also on the digitalized material that scholars should mobilize to get access to the religious life in time of COVID-19.

• COVID-19, Fatwas, and Socio-religious Praxis: Muhammadiyah’s Social Engagement and Mission in Coping with the Outbreak in Indonesia Andar Nubowo École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

  This paper highlights Muhammadiyah’s religious and social engagement and praxis in dealing with the pandemic in Indonesia. As Indonesia’s largest modernist Islamic organisation with approximately 30 million members, Muhammadiyah has been challenged to prove its progressive understanding of Islam during the COVID-19. Since March 2020, the organisation has issued religious fatwas and policies to adjust their worship and social activities during the outbreak. However, conservative elements oppose these fatwas and policies by stating that COVID-19 is being made by the global conspiracy to destruct Islam. Through its networks and resources, Muhammadiyah keeps issuing fatwas to boost public awareness of the virus’s dangers and mortality and protect and save lives. The paper, thus, seeks to discover why and how the organisation adopts new practices in their rituals, new sites of worship and, at the same time, fights against religious ignorance and hoaxes around the COVID-19. It also seeks to determine how Muhammadiyah mobilises its networks and resources to deal with the outbreak and opposition. Finally, it examines the organisation’s relationship with state actors and non-state actors, nationally and internationally, to face the impacts of such a very contagious virus. Drawing upon Muhammadiyah’s official fatwas, policies, statements, and socio-religious praxis, this paper finds that Muhammadiyah’s social mission, caring, and engagement during the pandemic are based on its progressive and rational belief system.

• Negotiating public space and spirits’ protection: Traditional religions in times of COVID-19 in Taiwan Fiorella Allio Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  Based on a comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted during two particular periods of 2020 and 2021 in Taiwan, this paper examines how the COVID-19 epidemic has initially been reinterpreted and handled within rituals dedicated to the Gods of Epidemics that called upon the mediation of Taoist officiants, and within other community celebrations based on local temple networks that remain within popular religion. These practices and beliefs, which are widespread and alive in Taiwan, activate conceptions such as contagious danger, epidemics, illness, and their symbolic prevention or ways of recovery. Turning to the spring of 2021 and the management by the authorities of a severe rise in the epidemic ? which had been remarkably contained until then ?, the paper assesses their impact on temples’ activities and celebrations. The official scale of alert levels clearly became the gauge for containing, constraining or prohibiting temple gatherings and the use of public space, therefore engaging temples and authorities to negotiate their mutual relationship. Interestingly, it seems that the entire epidemic crisis turned out to be a new lever for the state for penetrating traditional community institutions, a means of asserting the value of “scientific progress,” but also, for those bureaucrats who may have inherited Confucian preconceptions from the past, a means of dismissing “superstitions.” By crossing these two stages of observations and reflections this paper aims to highlight the evolving impact of the COVID-19 on the relations between society, popular religion and the State.

• The digital age in time of COVID-19: a new gate for Indonesian women ulema gender Samia Kotele École Normale Supérieure de Lyon

  The political downfall of the Suharto’s “New Order” in Indonesia (1998) opened the way for democracy, human rights and for the participation of political Islam previously banned under the authoritarian rule of the regime. Women condition became the receptacle of the crystallization of tensions between various political actors trying to project their ideology through body’s regulations. Women Indonesian ulema (Muslim clerics) developed since the 1990s an alternative Islamic gender theology to address gender issues along a social reformist project. The outbreak of the pandemic emphasized the increasing reliance of Muslim communities on social media when practicing their faith. Leading to the development of an online religious authority, this “cyber-Islamic environment” largely dominated by men’s religious discourse, became since the first lockdown a space taken over by women ulema in Indonesia. Indonesian women’s historiography correlates times of crisis with the expansion of women’s agency in the public space. Through a study of online preaches, publications, live and seminars this presentation will question the investment of the digital sphere by paying attention to their dissemination of knowledge and performance of selfhood and negotiations.

Abstract

Keywords

• COVID-19
• Digitalization
• Religion
• Rituals
• Social Change