Religious involvement and the social competence and adjustment of Indonesian Muslim adolescents

This study assessed the relation between religious involvement and multiple indices of competence in 183 eighth- and ninth-grade Indonesian Muslim adolescents (M = 13.3 years). The authors assessed spirituality and religiosity using both parent and adolescent reports, and social competence and adjustment using multiple measures and data sources. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that parent and adolescent reports of religiosity and spirituality yielded a single religious involvement latent variable that was related to peer group status, academic achievement, emotional regulation, prosocial behavior, antisocial/problem behavior, internalizing behavior, and self-esteem. The consistency of relations between religious involvement and competence may be in part attributable to the collectivist context of religion in West Java, Indonesia, within which people exhibit strong beliefs in Islam and religion permeates daily life.     

Depression and its relation to loneliness and religiosity in Indonesian Muslim adolescents

This study was initiated to assess the relations between religiosity, depressive symptoms, and loneliness in a sample of 452 Indonesian Muslim 13- and 16-year-old adolescents. Religiosity was operationally defined as participation in required and optional religious activities; Depression was assessed using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale; and Loneliness was assessed using the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Religiosity was negatively associated with depression despite controlling for loneliness, gender, and grade. Religiosity was not associated with loneliness, suggesting discriminant validity in the relation between religiously and depression. It is important in future research to examine the mechanisms by which religiosity serves as a protective factor for Indonesian Muslim adolescents.     

Recasting Gendered Paradigms: An Indonesian Cleric and Muslim Women in the Malay World

This essay examines the ideas of a prominent Indonesian cleric, Haji Abdul Malik Karim Amrullah (Hamka), about the place of women in Islam and in Southeast Asian Muslim societies. I argue that Hamka was engaged in the project of “recasting gendered paradigms,” which involves reinterpreting, reconceptualizing and reconfiguring various dominant understandings about the roles, functions and responsibilities of women in Islam as reflected not only in the Qur'an and the adat (traditional customs), but also in modern discourses about women's empowerment. I show that Hamka's commitment to advocating for women's rights and critiquing prevailing ideas about the place of women in religion and society was a product both of his personal experiences and of the profound social and intellectual shifts that characterized his day and age.     

Tropes in space

Tropes are particular features of concrete objects. Properties—the extensions of predicates—are primitive resemblance classes of tropes. Friends of tropes have been criticized for failing to answer three questions. First, are there fundamental items other than tropes? Second, what criteria determine whether some tropes are all and only the features of some one object? Third, can trope classes be formed adequately using only primitive resemblance? Trading on the spatiotemporal status of tropes, this essay offers new responses to each of these questions. The novel thesis is that there is a sui generis property called ‘markedness’, whose tropes “mark” certain locations in an ontologically basic way. The spatiotemporal distribution of markedness tropes fixes the distribution of familiar characterizing tropes like mass and charge, and characterizing tropes are bundled by being co-contained in the location of a maximally connected markedness trope. This novel theory of trope bundling is defended by appeal to theoretical utility: it is ontologically parsimonious and solves outstanding problems involving co-location and resemblance class construction.     

Intersectional cosmopolitanism: Muslim women’s engagement with polygamy on Malaysian and Indonesian screens

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates how the diverse realities of Muslim women fray the concept of ‘Muslim cosmopolitanism’ in Southeast Asia. By comparing how Malaysian Muslim women interpret polygamy in Malaysian and Indonesian screens, this article problematises the idea of a unified cosmopolitanism experienced by Muslims from the Malay world. Based on findings from interviews with 25 educated women, this article shows that media representations of polygamy and Muslim femininity can differ even between two Southeast Asian countries sharing common gendered and religious practices. It argues that the women’s understanding of polygamy is based on the intertwinement of their ethnic, gendered and classed subjectivities that are not necessarily informed by their religious beliefs per se but rather by the broader socio-political contexts in which they live. Through this embodiment of intersectional cosmopolitanism, they not only disrupt existing notions of ‘Muslim cosmopolitanism’ but highlight the heterogeneous experiences of Muslims within Southeast Asia.     

Muslim Women in the Bosnian Crucible

Exotic tales and dramatic details about Muslim women's views of Bosnian society are uncommon. In fact, few Muslim women in Bosnia are overtly Islamic in appearance or action. Rather, they blend into a secularized society in which Islamic heritage provides traditions and values, not dogma. Despite this assimilation, 12 Bosnian women relate 3 different but connected features of their lives: the effect on sex roles of the political turmoil of the past century, the particular perspective women bring to questions of war and peace, and the rich prewar multiculturalism. Their overarching consensus is that women in Bosnia are equipped for leadership but stifled by an erosion of their status in society. During the communist period, women gained a greater level of freedom and became independent thinkers, even though the communists didn't allow them to exercise the leadership they'd assumed during World War II. With the demise of communism in the late 1980s and the chaos of all-out war in the early 1990s, women were preoccupied with survival. Cultural tolerance emerged as a unifying factor for Bosnian women of different tradition, education, and socioeconomic status, although this was obscured by the outside misconception that the war was caused by ‘age-old hatreds’. On the contrary, religion not only was far from a central identity, but, according to many Bosnian women, it simply did not matter. Yes, they were victims of a ruthless genocide; but Muslim women in Bosnia are also energetic, determined, smart, and savvy.     

Educating the Muslim minority in Western Thrace

A large-scale, interdisciplinary Project for Reform in the Education of Muslim Children (PEM) in Western Thrace, Greece, was implemented during the years 1977–2004. Although PEM was a specifically educational project entailing teaching Greek as a second language, development of educational materials, teacher training and academic outcome, it was bound to involve identity issues and directly or indirectly embrace the entire Thracian community. A historical and socio-political background is provided in order for the reader to understand the way power is negotiated between majority and minority and the controversies that characterize educational policy and instructional practices in such a context of ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity.     

Understanding the Veiling of Muslim Women in the Netherlands

In this study we analyze veiling as an Islamic religious practice among Turkish and Moroccan immigrant women in the Netherlands, investigating whether the strength of religious identity, education, contact with natives, and gender role attitudes can explain who veils and who does not. Confirming stereotypical interpretations of the veil as a religious symbol of a strongly gendered religion, we find that a strong Muslim identity and traditional gender role attitudes are positively associated with veiling. While our results seem to support predictions that contact with natives and education relate negatively with wearing a headscarf, these relationships with veiling are more complex. Education strengthens the positive relation between religious identification and veiling, indicating that most highly educated women endorse veiling as a religious practice if they are more religious. Contact with Dutch, however, weakens the association between religious identification and veiling, meaning socially well integrated women veil less often even if they are religious. We discuss our findings against the background of previous qualitative research on veiling as a religious practice and regarding theories on immigrant religion in Europe.     

Structure of the Indonesian Emotion Lexicon

Based on a prototype approach to emotion concepts, two studies were conducted: (1) to identify the mental state words that Indonesian speakers are most certain name emotions ( perasaan hati ) and (2) to map the hierarchical and family-resemblance structure of the top 124 emotion concepts. As in an earlier study of emotion terms in American English (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987), cluster analysis of sorting data collected in Indonesia revealed five basic-level emotion categories: cinta (love), senang (happiness), marah (anger), kawatir/takut (anxiety/fear), and sedih (sadness). Also in line with the American results, the five basic-level categories formed two large categories at the superordinate level: positive emotions and negative emotions. Each of the five basic-level categories contained several subordinate-level categories, totaling 31 in all. The results suggest that the emotion lexicons, and corresponding conceptualizations of the emotion domain, in Indonesia and the U.S.A. are similar at the superordinate and basic levels but somewhat variable at the subordinate level. This outcome – like other kinds of psychological research on emotions and emotion concepts – suggests that the gross structure of representations of the emotion domain are similar worldwide, perhaps for biological reasons, but that different cultures make different fine-grained distinctions and emphasize different subordinate-level emotion concepts.