Thank you very much. Viola, Professor Tim. It's my pleasure being here. So Professor

Tim and I, we already know one another for quite a while and we share this interest in

mobility, also commercial mobility. In my title there you see the term shopping, commerce

and business, but also to not only view this from the commercial point of view, but also

from the religious point of view and the blurring of the boundaries between commercial activities

and religious activities. And in the context of mobility, also the blurring between, in

my case, study tourism and pilgrimage and migration. So yeah, thank you very much for

this nice introduction. I'm hesitating to share my screen because it's nice to see the

audience. So hello to all of you, but I guess I should share my screen so that you can see

some of the mainly images that I have in my presentation for today. I changed the title

of this talk a little bit. It's gifts from the Middle East, but it's also gifts for the

Middle East because I'll be talking about shopping and consumption, but also about charity.

So charity is maybe something that we could see as a gift for the Middle East. And you

see here two photos of Indonesian women. The right photo shows two women on a Palestine

solidarity rally in Jakarta who collect donations for Palestine. And in the other photo you

see a group of women, also some men in the background, who are part of a pilgrimage travel

group to Jerusalem. And on this photo you see them in a souvenir shop in Jericho where

they look at cosmetics. So these are the two examples, consumption or shopping and charity.

And this talk is mainly an edition of numerous examples. And I hope that I can make some

sense of these examples in terms of gender identities and also class affiliation and

how there is an intersection between gender identities,

what it means to be a woman in particular,

and what it means to be a religious woman.

I will mainly talk about Muslim women,

but also about Christian women,

and the intersection with class affiliations in Indonesia.

So apart from the examples from my research,

I will also provide a lot of background information

and context from Indonesia.

So first of all, some background.

Why Indonesia?

I don't know if you're familiar with Indonesia.

I think it's always nice to start with a map.

In red, you see here the Indonesian archipelago.

Indonesia, in the context of religion,

is often seen as a periphery, even though it's

home to the largest Muslim community in the world.

It's often seen as a periphery.

Whereas the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East

is the historical center of Islam, and not only of Islam,

but also of Judaism and Christianity.

So this is actually a European map from a German theologian,

actually, from Bunting.

And this is, of course, not a geographically accurate map,

but it's a mental map.

It shows Jerusalem at the center of the world.

And then Europe, Asia, and Africa as continents surrounding it,

not yet mentioning America somewhere only on the margins.

So this is an example of mental maps which have existed

throughout history that sometimes the pure facts,