Chapter 5 begins with a brief overview of the Constitutional Revolution before turning to the role of non-Muslims in the struggle. It begins by exploring the motivations behind religious minorities supporting the revolution. Then it looks at the various ways they contributed – such as providing financial and military assistance, engaging in social initiatives, and establishing cultural institutions like anjomans (associations), schools, and political parties. The chapter highlights the significance of anjomans and explores how transnational networks reinforced the revolutionary cause, with Armenians from the Caucasus and Parsis from India playing especially prominent roles. Finally, it addresses the violence directed at non-Muslims during periods of unrest, underscoring the precariousness of their position even as they participated in the revolutionary movement.

As in other parts of Southeast Asia, the power of ancestral spirits and the spirituality of the place are both distinct, constitutive elements of the domestic and communal ritual activity in Vietnam. In the realm of death remembrance, the homebound ancestral relics are typically contrasted to the displaced souls of the dead and their supposedly homeless existence. However, the notion of home that structures this existential divide is complicated by the experience of a long civil war and the war-caused mass human dislocation, both physical and political. This chapter explores the question of displacement in death, focusing on the shrine for the earth god where people routinely make small offerings on behalf of the wandering souls of the dead today. It will ask if an alternative idea of home is found in this ritualized act and, if so, what the act of remembrance can tell us about the ethics of hospitality.

We trace the evolution of statistics from its origins in the seventeenth century, contrasting twentieth-century data sets and approaches with those seen frequently today. This discussion motivates the approach taken in the book, which focuses on the bias--variance tradeoff as opposed to unbiased estimation, and on finite-sample guarantees as opposed to asymptotics, which can often be misleading in problems whose difficulty is controlled by several parameters. We introduce the decision-theoretic framework that underpins our assessment of the performance of statistical procedures, and discuss the concepts of minimaxity and adaptation. One of our perspectives is to seek to understand the behaviour of methods with respect to as wide a class of data generating mechanisms as possible, and in particular under model misspecification --- where an idealised model that motivates a procedure fails to hold. We discuss the use of the book for teaching and prerequisites for students, concluding with notation used throughout the book.

In late 2021, as schools and colleges in the Indian state of Karnataka resumed in-person classes after nearly two years of institutional closures provoked by the pandemic, a new script for continuing the work of exclusion had to be prepared. Prolonged educational disruption and a forced digital outsourcing of curricular processes had already borne out a nationwide ‘crisis’ in terms of increasing school dropouts, especially among the socially deprived (and those further economically precaritized by the Covid outbreak). Because the pandemic made apparent how the same viral ‘cause’ can exacerbate historical differences in ‘impact’ on the basis of populations’ rights of access to infrastructures – for example, the physical site of the hospital or the school or the college – the state's script for a return to ‘normalcy’ was first dressed up in a shared existential predicament of man, and then in the myth of a common national destiny, a uniform(ed) national-secular humanity.

Both government-funded and private pre-university colleges in Karnataka – enrolling students for higher secondary schooling – started denying Muslim women students entry into classrooms if they insisted on wearing the hijab over prescribed uniforms. College administrators and government officials insinuated, over different moments in the course of the controversy, that formal dress codes had been in existence for a long time and therefore the recent demand for a hijab exception must have been provoked by ‘outside support’ from radical Islamist organizations. While, in principle, the restriction of a freedom for any amount of time cannot become the justifying ground for maintaining status quo, the irony of this inversion of juridical logic is glimpsed in the verdict of the Karnataka High Court on this matter.

This chapter asserts that J. M. Coetzee’s ostensibly surprising turn to questions of religion in “The Jesus Novels” should have been anticipated from his trajectory of concerns since the novels of the late 1990s. Through a genetic reading of Disgrace that extensively uses Coetzee’s notebooks and drafts for the novel, I show how this work posits the reality of souls, human and nonhuman, and imagines how that reality can reorient the self away from abusive uses of others and toward practices of care. This reading of Disgrace traces how Coetzee dismantles previous forms of Western perception through an anti-epiphany, opening the way for belief in souls to produce a better form of life and seeing others. The chapter closes by considering how the Jesus novels further develop the life of spiritual contemplation that Coetzee’s late style explores.

“Singers (1941–1982)” examines Argentine popular songs about the Falklands/Malvinas Islands through a systematic analysis of previously unexplored sources: the musical works registry of the Argentine Society of Authors and Composers (SADAIC) from its foundation until 1982. While has focused largely on songs produced after the war, this chapter turns to compositions written before 1982, when military action remained an imagined possibility rather than an immediate reality. Reading song lyrics as historical sources, the chapter shows how popular music articulated an “emotional community” that, through diverse tones and registers reinforced the belief that “the Malvinas were, are, and will be Argentine.” Expressed through an art form accessible to broad audiences beyond intellectual or economic elites, these songs projected a forward-looking vision of sovereignty reather than a retrospective memory of loss. The chapter argues that this repertoire sustained a latent fantasy of recovery helping to explain the widespread popular support for the 1982 invasion, despite the military regime’s deep economic and political crises.

In 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, there was an exponential increase in the number of deaths in the country. These deaths can be explained, among other factors, by the easing of restrictions on social isolation and the delay in purchasing vaccines. In that context, family members and friends had to deal with abbreviated funeral rituals experienced in a context of necropolitics. In this chapter, based on the analysis of the death of Vítor, a forty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor, we see how new protocols aimed at containing the spread of the virus affected the traditional rites, shortening their sequences and phases – thus reducing community participation to a minimum – and, in turn, how they drove the creation of new possible rituals. If, on the one hand, the new possible rites point to a process of creating funerals that combines in-person tributes and the use of new technologies, on the other, they highlight the consequences of mourning experienced in a context of political tension mainly due to the actions of a conservative and denialist government.

This chapter introduces the broad conceptual framework of the processes of subjectivisation within global discourses and connects it to agency. It introduces the idea of situational agency and draws upon Mahmood’s work to suggest that agency can be found in the ‘inhabitation of norms’. the chapter provides a background context to post-genocide Rwandan policies, introducing the key agenda of unity and reconciliation, and presents Rwanda as a post-colonial state. Finally, this chapter problematises the collection and interpretation of field data in a post-colonial setting.

Chapter 2 explores how networks of power both reinforced and blurred social and occupational boundaries for non-Muslims. It examines which professions they were barred from, which they were pushed into, and which they came to dominate. In some instances, demand for goods and services such as music, dance, and alcohol created negotiated spaces where Muslims relied on non-Muslims, illustrating how exclusion and dependence coexisted in ways that unsettled rigid divisions – a dynamic analyzed through the concept of heterotopia. At the same time, although formally restricted from certain trades, non-Muslims were entrusted with sensitive occupations such as banking and currency exchange that required significant trust. Many also became leading merchants or specialized craftsmen, using transnational networks of co-religionists to expand their influence, advocate for greater rights, and secure a stronger position in regional commerce. The chapter introduces some well-established non-Muslim trading firms.

The central theme of Chapter 1 is the negotiation between non-Muslims’ sense of belonging and the degree of recognition granted by Muslims and state authorities. It examines the tension between national and religious identities and the legal frameworks that shaped non-Muslims’ lives, including the concept of dhimma/zemmeh, the payment of the non-Muslim tax (jezyeh), judicial procedures, and the valuation of blood money (diyeh). Particular attention is given to the Treaty of Torkamanchay and its consequences for non-Muslim Iranians, especially the establishment of the “Department of Diverse Peoples” within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to handle their cases. Patterns of migration and displacement also form part of this discussion. The chapter further argues that the emergence of the Babi and later Bahaʾi faith in Iran unsettled and redefined perceptions of all non-Muslims in Iranian society.