Abstract
This chapter examines a blasphemy trial on Lombok in 2010, in which a Muslim who claimed to have received revelations from the Angel Gabriel was charged with the offense of “insulting Islam” and accused of pretending to be a “false prophet”. Probing the ontological conflicts involved in this case, the chapter argues that courts are important sites of contemporary “religion-making”. Using this trial to show incommensurable worlds are being coproduced by courts and religious authorities, the chapter engages critically with anthropological positions that ontologize difference, suggesting that such approaches risk feeding into a violent politics of religious difference, being ill-suited for capturing the deep plurality within translocal religious traditions, such as Islam.
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Telle, K. (2016). False Prophets? Ontological Conflicts and Religion-Making in an Indonesian Court. In: Bertelsen, B., Bendixsen, S. (eds) Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_4
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