Religious Media, Devotional Islam, and the Morality of Ethnic Pluralism in Mauritius

SummaryPluralism in Mauritius illustrates the special role religious traditions can play for dynamics of ethnicity. They do so in constituting moralities of coexistence that cannot be easily subsumed under the role of religion as an ethnic marker. To illustrate this point, this paper focuses on the circulation of religious media and their emphasis on religiously grounded notions of the common good, and addresses the importance of a media-sustained public sphere for the modalities of ethnic pluralism in Mauritius. The media-driven dynamics of ethnic and religious pluralism also highlight performatively constituted morality comprising of both affective and meaningful dimensions of the public sphere, as they are evident in Mauritian engagements with religious media.