• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 999

Part of Session 116: God in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Ethnolinguistic and Religious Identity Negotiation of Muslims in Singapore

Authors: Said-Sirhan, Yurni Irwati
Submitted by: Said-Sirhan, Yurni Irwati (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

The Malay community as an ethnic group constitutes the majority of the Muslim population in Singapore. Although Arabic, a non-official language, is also learnt for the purposes of Qur’an reading and prescribed prayers, the Malay language, the state-assigned mother tongue for the Malay community, is the default language used in many Islamic religious classes in Singapore, despite the pervasive use of English in national schools, at work and in intercultural interactions. Malay is more than just the language spoken by the majority of Muslims in Singapore; it has come to index Islamic identity in this multicultural, cosmopolitan society. Malays have always linked English, a language that many of them are also competent in as a result of Singapore’s bilingual policy, with the more ‘public’ domains. Reinforced by the state’s ideology that English is a ‘western’ language encoded with ‘western’ values, it is not the preferred choice among many Malays for the teaching of Islamic values. Many Malays would concur that ‘being Malay’ equates to ‘being Muslim’, and that Malay culture, including the language, revolves around Islam. Before the Romanized Malay script was made the official script of the Malay language in Singapore, the Jawi script, adapted from Arabic orthography, was widely used by the Malays in reading and writing. Such conflation of Arabic orthography, which is symbolic of the Islamic faith, with Malay language has been fundamental in constructing particular ethnoreligious identity among Malays. This indexicality of ethnolinguistic identification and religiosity has also been perpetuated through official identification documents, where Singaporean Malays could choose to have their names written in Jawi below the Romanized script in their identity cards (NRIC) to reflect their ethnoreligious identity, and the media, where calls for prayer as well as religious sermons are broadcast in a national Malay radio stations. The national Malay language newspaper also features several articles and question-and-answer on Islam. Malay, being the default language used in most mosques for Friday sermons and religious classes, is thus ascribed much power by the local Malay-Muslim community. This paper argues that the dominance of the Malay language in the religious realm of the Malays leads to Islam being perceived as a ‘given’ among the Malays, which then marginalizes other non-Malay Muslims within the Singaporean Muslim community itself. Through an analysis of participants’ dialogic stancetaking (Du Bois 2007: 163) in an ethnographic study, this paper aims to show how the nuances of such ethnolinguistic identification and religiosity among Muslims in Singapore get played out in interactions as they align towards their “local identity categories” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005: 591). 

References

Bucholtz, Mary and Hall, Kira. 2005. Identity and Interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7: 585-614.

Du Bois, John. 2007. The stance triangle. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, ed. Robert Englebretson. pp. 139-182. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.