Destined for clicks: YouTube is driving an astrology boom in Pakistan
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Folk practices were how religion always tended to practiced until the rise of globalization and literacy pushed more "Puritanized" forms of all religions.
Barely 50 years ago your village Maulvi or Pandit was a barely literate man who's job mostly consisted of farming, lay preaching, mediating disputes, and teaching the 3Rs.
Same way how a significant portion of practicing Muslims in the Balkans would also drink alcohol, eat pig, or not cover women's hair until the 90s.
> Folk practices were how religion always tended to practiced until the rise of globalization and literacy pushed more "Puritanized" forms of all religions.
More intellectual, more lead from the centre, more heierachical, rather than "puritan", I would say. The rise of globalisation and literacy has made Christianity less puritan (the same may not be true of Islam) globally (not sure about the US).
Also, it was not just popular with illiterate villagers in the case of monotheistic religions, in SOuth Asia of elsewhere. Kepler and Galileo were court astrologers at some point in their lives, and I think there are similar people (i.e. intellectuals who were astrologers) in the Muslim world.
That also makes it all the more interesting that it is happening now. Youtube is getting people to abandon tenets of their religion.
Adherants of all religions (except for the recent converts) would continue to use traditional customs and norms, but would use ethnic specific terms (eg. Getting an Aineh was always a thing among Paharis of all major religions - Islam, Hindu, Sikh)
> rather than "puritan", I would say
I think "Textualist" a la Constitutional Law is a better term.
At least in modern South Asian Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, reformist movements like Ahl-i Hadith, Akali, Arya Samaj, and the Mahabodhi Society respectively.
> That also makes it all the more interesting that it is happening now. Youtube is getting people to abandon tenets of their religion
That's the issue. My grandparents peers did aineh, my parents peers did aineh, and my peers might or might not.
I argue that a textualist interpretation of religion is closer to abandoning tenets of religion (as religion is the codification of folk beliefs and traditions), and the fact that most of the textualist movements are barely 100 years old, they are the "new" movements deviating from traditional norms.
I think we have different experiences of SOuth Asia because we have experience of different ends of it - mine is of Sri Lanka.
> I argue that a textualist interpretation of religion is closer to abandoning tenets of religion (as religion is the codification of folk beliefs and traditions), and the fact that most of the textualist movements are barely 100 years old
I think that varies with religion. Texts have always been central to Christianity and Islam, and both originated (as did Buddhism) as ideas propounded by definite historical foudners rather than being a codification of folk beliefs.
Lots of people in Pakistan? Could be dangerous, let's feed them garbage and keep them in ignorance. Back home? Hide astrology entirely.
Funny how the US fought the Taliban but some factions in the US want some tenets of the Taliban applied across the nation.