Multifaith Space: Religious Accommodation in Postcolonial Public Space?

Abstract

While Multifaith Space (MFS)—or shared religious space—is endemic in South Asia, in “the West” it is both a symptom of and an agent of change within the contemporary secular landscape. For here MFS arise, on the one hand, partly from the unspoken impetus within postcolonial Western society, institutions and other agencies to accommodate religious needs and practices and, at the same time, to do so in the most convenient, cost-effective, and “accommodating” (“invisible and non-threatening”) way. Consequently, in the West, MFS are symptoms of social change and also the practical adaptation to the “problematic” presence of faith in our postcolonial multicultural communities, as well as holding the potential, at least, for needful inter-religious and theological development.

This chapter will begin by referencing the presence of MFS in South Asia and then give an overview of their subsequent development in the West; explore the drivers for MFS; and tease out the possibilities MFS hold for new forms of harmonious inter-religious encounter in global postcolonial urban communities. They refuse or subvert any endeavour at circumscription we might have by our attempts to create or privilege particular preformed or tribal “places” or “texts”—religious and spiritual identities—of our own and offer instead places of flux, transition, and “crossing.”

MFS are “cleaving spaces”: suggesting both the centripetal “cleaving together” of what is alike and desires union, as well as the centrifugal “splitting or forcing apart” of what is “viscerally incompatible.” Whether devised by secular non-religious motivation or driven by religious desire for interfaith co-operation and collaboration, MFS may well hint at a postcolonial utopia where strangers become sojourners and where the human and the divine together can create re-generative spaces fit for the future of humanity.