ABSTRACT The academic study of religion in the United States is in crisis as departments close and tenured faculty are terminated. Simultaneously, we are witnessing not only an unprecedented alliance between religion and politics at the federal level, but the turning of many non‐religion scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals to religion as the last possible explanation for otherwise inexplicable current events. Religion scholars, looking to defend their field, have begun reappraising its history and, in some cases, reviving definitions of religion as a meta category of human activity that transcends time and place. This essay analyzes various attempts by such authors within and without the field to deploy religion as a distinctively useful category for understanding our current moment; it argues that such deployment often assumes a comprehensive definition of religion that is both context‐dependent and a universal feature of human life. The essay thereby traces both popular (mis)conceptions of the field of religious studies and longstanding conflicts within the field over its shared goals and core principles. The goal of the essay is not simply to document the different aspects of the field's current crisis. Rather, it is to explore how that crisis is reshaping the way we think about our work and enabling us to identify new imperatives and possibilities for the field's future.
ABSTRACT In religious festivals celebrated at many sites across South Asia, colossal wooden vehicles known as “temple‐cars” convey images of deities and saints in a rapturous procession. Temple‐cars have garnered a disciplinarily fragmented body of scholarship that has treated them primarily as mobile temples by privileging their superstructures over their wheeled wooden bases. This essay thematically synthesizes existing scholarship through a “ground‐up” approach centered on the vehicle's mobility. Reframing the temple‐car first as a ritual transport ( vāhana ), the essay critically surveys three dimensions of temple‐car cultures in South Asia: the vehicle's architectural logic; its sociopolitical function in procession; and its capacity to produce sacred space. The vāhana paradigm, as this essay preliminarily argues, offers a more productive framework for understanding how temple‐car processions affect religious and political life across South Asia.
ABSTRACT Child marriage in Pakistan is routinely framed as a collision between immutable ‘classical Islamic law’ and ‘modern human rights’. This review article challenges that binary by advancing a precise argument: the operative dispute is a contest over interpretive authority —who holds the institutional and discursive power to translate premodern Sunnī juristic concepts— bulūgh (puberty), wilāyat al‐nikāḥ (marital guardianship) and khiyār al‐bulūgh (the option to repudiate upon maturity)—into the statutory language of a postcolonial state. Synthesizing scholarship on classical Ḥanafī fiqh, colonial legal transformation and contemporary Pakistani legislation, the article demonstrates that invocations of ‘the Ḥanafī position’ in current Pakistani debates are highly selective, systematically decoupling guardian authority from the classical safeguards—harm ( ḍarar ), suitability ( kafāʾa ) and repudiation ( khiyār )—that originally balanced it. The article integrates Pakistan‐specific evidence: the Council of Islamic Ideology's recommendations, provincial reforms in Sindh (2013), Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the government's Child Marriage in Islam (2020) document, UNFPA demographic data and recent scholarship on sacred justifications. It identifies three understudied areas for future research: the internal plurality of Ḥanafī jurisprudence on guardianship and harm, the empirical sociology of Pakistani family courts, and the institutional uptake of maqāṣid/maṣlaḥa reasoning in legislative and judicial forums. The article concludes that child marriage is a critical observatory for how Islamic legal authority is being unmade and remade in the modern Muslim nation‐state.
