Neguin Yavari (New York)

It is hardly an exaggeration to claim that even the wind blowing through Nikolaistraße in Leipzig has caught a whiff of ‘secularity as a heuristic concept,’ as outlined in the KFG’s research agenda. Hardly unambiguous, what exactly is the purchase of  ‘heuristic’ in defining as protean a concept as secularity? In this presentation, a student of premodern Islamic history will briefly explain how she caught the whiff, reshaping her ideas and setting her off on new tracks. I will focus on the dialectics of secularity, to argue that heuristically, and as an alternative/counterpart to both religion and secularism, secularity affords an antipode to positivism. The triangulated schema (religion/secularism/secularity) has at its foundation a dynamic historical process, in that it illuminates not the religious or the secular, but the manner(s) in which religiously inflected political discourse determines the political imaginaire in a given context. As a heuristic concept, secularity undermines both a bounded notion of religion and an identifiable domain of the secular, and perhaps most significantly, a notion of the emergence during the Enlightenment, of that inevitable decline of religion called secularization. At its core is an unshakeable focus on historical change, which ‘multiplied,’ upends the positivist flotsam from what is commonly referred to as Orientalism: the determined exclusion of a sizeable chunk of human history and societies from serious consideration. Even if unspoken and heuristic, secularity authors a new geography of the modern world that ‘is not intrinsically prejudicial to religion,’ or to the non-West. To borrow from Jonathan Sheehan, it allows us to consider the Enlightenment less as a birthplace of secularism than as the birthplace of a distinctly modern form of religion whose presence and power continues to shape the present. As such, it circumvents nominalism, a cornerstone of any positivist inquiry, with manifold ramifications for the study of premodern Islamic societies.

Dietrich Jung (University of Southern Denmark)

The term multiple secularities immediately reminds us to Shmuel Eisenstadt’s concept of multiple modernities. However, as a research program it goes beyond Eisenstadt in two crucial points. First, it decentralizes Europe in taking no longer for granted the assumption of modernity/secularities as “product” of the West. It calls for searching – in Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical vocabulary – pre-adaptive advances to modernity in pre-modern cultures beyond the so-called West. Second, the multiple secularities program – at least in my reading – opens for studies that do not only put their focus on the relationship between religion and politics. My paper will take up these two points and develops them further in putting both into the broader context of theories of social emergence. From the perspective of theories of emergence, this is my argument, modernity does not have a specific origin in time and space. Rather, like Karl Jasper’s philosophical idea about the “axial age” and its distinction between transcendence and immanence, modernity appeared in different cultures at different places without these cultures necessarily being in contact with each other. From this perspective, the theoretical framework of the multiple secularities program gave me important and supportive inputs which I will illustrate with examples from Muslim history. However, I also will point to a core problem I nevertheless have with that framework which is the remaining focus on the dichotomy between religion and the “rest” of modern (secular) social realms. This, so my conclusion, is an unjustified prioritizing of religion in social research.

Rinku Lamba (National Law School of India University)

A key lesson I’ve learned from the Multiple Secularities project is to keep open the space for investigating how diverse conceptions of religion can help in comprehending the constitution of the modern. Some conceptions can generate a notion of differentiation of spheres and others can relate with a prioritisation of harmony thus giving to religion the task of harmonising and integrating different spheres of human activity. Let me call the first a differentiation conception and the second an integration conception.

At first I was able to see the two conceptions mainly in an oppositional manner. Also, I tended to associate the differentiation conception more with the historical experience of the modern west, and judged it unsuitable for understanding the historical experience of the Indian subcontinent. However, over time, working with the notion of multiple secularities allowed me to reckon with how focusing on different understandings of religion can illuminate questions of modernity.

For example, probing integrationist conceptions of religion in contexts such as India can shed light on the constitution of the modern in India. It is surely the case that I am gesturing toward how multiple secularities are linked with multiple modernities. But I want to say something more too. It is that more and more, the multiplicity of the modern must be elaborated and not just assumed. And such elaboration requires investigating how the modern came to be in ways that are linked with the notion of religion. In my paper, I want to dwell on reflections about the above, through an analysis of how the categories of dharma, Dhamma and religion became vehicles for the way the moral vision that constituted and indian modernity took hold. I will do this through a normative analysis of the political thought of Rabindranath Tagore and B R Ambedkar.