Religious Authority in the Urban Mosque

Cover Image, American Ethnologist: The Journal of the American Ethnological Society Volume 52, Issue 2 May 2025.

In an article in American Ethnologist, Chris Chaplin writes about Islamic activism and the ethics of “being present” in Eastern Indonesia. The following is the article’s abstract:

In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive relationships they build across these neighborhoods. But “being present” in the mosque pertains to more than physically existing in a space; it speaks to the processes and strategies through which activists draw from local Islamic histories, legal codes, nationalist tropes, and moral anxieties to make and remake an ethical image of Islamic belonging. Such practices reveal the relational, spatial, but also contingent nature of contemporary religious authority. Moreover, they refocus anthropological analysis onto the experiential and collective moments through which new moral worlds emerge.