2023/10/13 by Darieva, Tsypylma
paper · doi:10.58002/hqn6-e350
This paper explores religious place-making as part of informal religious pluralization in autocratic Azerbaijan and examines how restrictive top-down state regulations may affect less institutionalized faith communities. It does so by focusing on the process of negotiation and a set of religious practices aimed at the symbolic and material appropriation of urban spaces. How do less institutionalized ‘practitioners’ and urban religious leaders respond to the shrinking space for religious freedom, and how are faith practices mediated in concrete spaces? To answer these questions, I provide two empirical examples of religious place- making in Baku, a vernacular Shia sacred site on the one hand, and the Bahai community, a non-Muslim religious minority, on the other. Without suggesting that these examples exhaustively capture the dynamics around religious pluralization, I draw attention to the interplay between the ideological power of state interventions and informal and creative religious place-making in the city. The contribution identifies the restrained visibility of folk shrines and the invisibility of Bahai practitioners that become part of an urban social reality and mundane use of urban and residential spaces. By sharing space with non-religious actors, religious practitioners use a variety of urban spaces on a temporary basis.