ABSTRACT
The multidimensional and multi-faceted nature of globalization exerts a significant impact on the dynamics of collective identities. It has given rise to new identities while conferring a new ‘importance to religious and ethnic identities in the shaping of global, national and local spaces’ (BokserLiwerant 2002: 254). In a diasporic context, this phenomenon becomes amplified as immigrant groups transform their religion in ways that look like local adaptations but that are also related to transnational and global movements (Beyer 1994). Such are the cases of Hindus and South Asian Muslims in the United States who have found multiple ways of adapting their religion to the American context (on Hindus, see Kurien 2007; on South Asian Muslims, see Mohammad-Arif 2002a) but whose socio-religious organizations should be understood in the larger framework of the global forms and reinventions of contemporary Hinduism and Islam.1
