MEUS · Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings

This comparative ethnographic project asks, how do people of different faiths coexist in cities? Questions of coexistence take on urgency in a time of increasing religiously-inflected flashpoints across the globe. How can we think about religious coexistence beyond prevailing frameworks of tolerance or conflict? MEUS will explore multi-religious encounters in non-secular urban contexts, ie. areas where there is a state religion or where religion has salience in the public sphere. Research will be organised into three complementary and contrasting sub-projects in South Asia (Karachi), East Africa (Nairobi), and Southern Europe (Palermo). The sites are similar, having served historically as encounter sites for major religions, but differ in their vantage points on religious pluralism. The project has two objectives: 1)to examine what modes of religious co-habitation emerge in aspiring urban settings; and 2)to develop a cross-regional comparative framework about religious pluralism that de-centers secular-liberal ideas of tolerance and opens space for alternate modes of coexistence. MEUS will ask: How do people of different religious faiths coexist in cities? What tensions and contestations does such coexistence articulate or give rise to? Do aspirations for socioeconomic mobility engender encounters with religious others and, if so, how do people make sense of this contact? MEUS is novel in its ethnographic and comparative frame. Its interventions within debates on pluralism will challenge the monistic tendencies of studies of religion (eg. the anthropology of Islam) and counter the hegemony of secularism in ideas on coexistence. MEUS is cognizant that the current work on coexistence, outside of liberal contexts, is largely regional and interpreted as exceptions to the norm. Instead, MEUS pushes against the limits of regional comparisons to develop a cross-regional, historically sensitive understanding of coexistence with the aim of provincializing secularism.