The Partial Secularisms of Singapore’s Muslim Minorities: Arbitraging Model Citizenship and (In)Complete Selves at the Margins

Orlando Woods and Lily Kong

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023, vol. 113, issue 3, 616-634

Abstract: This article argues that the secular should be understood as a partial construct that is selectively deployed by individuals to structure everyday encounters with difference. The partiality of the secular is pronounced in Muslim minority contexts, in which Muslims must negotiate varying degrees of ontological incompatibility between their religious and nonreligious selves. How religious and secular understandings of “model” citizenship are negotiated throughout the spaces and aspirations of everyday life can provide insight into the partiality of the secular, and how such partiality can create difference where there might otherwise be unity. We illustrate these ideas through an empirical exploration of Singapore’s Muslim minorities. In Singapore, the Muslim population is primarily Malay, but includes non-Malay cohorts as well. Bangladeshi migrant workers form an important minority, as their visa status precludes them from becoming Singapore citizens, and thus removes them from the direct secular structuring of the state. In the mosque, the interfacing of Singaporean Muslims on the one hand, and Bangladeshi Muslims on the other, yields important insights into the assertions of citizenship, and the negotiation of selfhood, that occurs at the religious margins of a state-defined secular society.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2022.2124146 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:113:y:2023:i:3:p:616-634

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2022.2124146

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().