Articles

What do the terms or concepts “civil state,” “secular state,” and “religious/Islamic state” mean? How can we understand the existing or possible relationships between religion/Islam and the state or politics in the Arab-Islamicate contexts based on the aforementioned concepts and their relationship to the concept of democracy? These were the two main questions that the conference “The Relationship between State and Religion in Arab and Islamic Contexts: The Civil State, the Secular State, and the Religious/Islamic State” sought to address, exploring multiple possibilities and perspectives. These two questions, as well as other related questions, deal with two distinct and overlapping aspects of the actual and/or potential relationship between the state and/or politics and religion/Islam. They include both a descriptive aspect, that seeks to reveal “what is,” and a normative aspect that shows, from an ethical, political, and philosophical perspective, “what should be.”

The papers presented at the conference covered studies on the relationship of religion with the state in many Arab Islamic countries (Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, etc.), as well as reflections and theoretical discussion from various academic disciplines and different political perspectives in Arab and Islamic countries. These papers attempted to answer the following questions: What are the forms and implications of the relationship between state and religion in Arab-Islamicate contexts? How could/should we theoretically approach the concepts that express this relationship? What is the relationship between state and religion in intellectual and political Arab and Islamicate contexts? In what sense and to what extent can we talk about a state as civil, secular and/or religious/Islamic? Does secularism mean the separation of religion (or church) from state, politics, or sovereignty? Or does it mean the separation of religious and political authorities? What are the practical and conceptual differences between these definitions and meanings of secularism? Can the concept of “civil state” be a complementary, substitute, or alternative concept to those of “secular state” and “religious/Islamic state”? In what sense and to what extent can each of these states be democratic?

Housamedden Darwish. “Conference Report: The Relationship Between State and Religion in the Arab and Islamicate Contexts: Civil State, Secular State, Religious/Islamic State.” 9-10 December 2021, Leipzig University, 2023.

This paper critically discusses the pioneering formulation of secularity and secularism in the Arab-Islamicate world(s) found in Butrus al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria (1860–1861). The paper relies on the conceptual framework adopted and developed by the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at the University of Leipzig. According to this conceptual framework, secularity, as an analytical concept, concerns what is. It refers to the institutional and practical differentiation, and the theoretical or epistemological distinction, between the religious and the non-religious. This paper provides a conceptual analysis of secularity, secularism, and secularization, highlighting the differences between them, as well as the epistemological and methodological requirements for drawing a distinction between them in modern and contemporary Arab thought. It also reflects on the linguistic and historical context, looking at the concepts of secularity and secularism in Arab thought prior to al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria.

Darwish, Housamedden. “The Pioneering Formulation of the Concepts of Secularity and Secularism in the Arab-Islamicate World(s): Butrus Al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria.” Religions 14, no. 3:286 (2023): 286.

The eleventh century brought a new political order to the eastern Islamic lands. It would be a mistake to assume that the political and scholarly elites of the era were merely sleepwalking into a new world. The intellectual record preserves a fierce debate among competing conceptions of legitimate rule and good governance, often linked to varying theologies of what was conceived as true “Islam.” What brought the intellectuals, the mystics, the clerics and the politicians together was the realization that without an overarching Islamic umbrella, the polity could not hold. The chapter also highlights the double function of religious discourse, at the same time critic and savior of the Abbasid polity. More importantly, the practical regard of intellectual debates, in the modern academy considered as an exclusive purview of Western intellectual history and the key to the emergence of modern politics in the West, is brought under sharp relief.

Yavari, Neguin. “Progressif et illibérale: La critique ash’arite de l’état politique au XIe-siècle.” In Liberté de parole: Les elites savantes et la critique des pouvoirs, Orient et Occident, VIIIe-XIIIe siècle, edited by Makram Abbés, and Marie-Celine Isaïa, 361–76. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023.

Increasing secularization, pluralization, and individualization have done much to weaken denominational identities and traditional religiosity in most Western countries since the 1960s, with the effect that—to echo Niklas Luhmann—being religious requires purely religious reasons. This also applies to young people, for whom religion is still an option, but precisely one option among others, and according to Charles Taylor quite a challenging one. In our article, we want to focus on young people who actively engage with faith and religion, and who take up a different position with regard to religion than their peers during their adolescence. The data are in-depth interviews with families with three generations present. We will explore the ways in which teenagers (aged 12–19) and young adults (aged 22–25) are confronted with religious issues, as well as how they decide upon these issues and justify their decisions. We will argue that both the societal context and the life phase of adolescence or young adulthood make it likely that a person will base decisions regarding religion upon the criterion of authenticity. Our findings demonstrate that especially positioning towards the question of belief can be a lengthy and conflictual process. We identified two main forms of religiosity that are socially accepted in contemporary society: deriving a sense of social responsibility from faith and transforming and translating belief and religious experience into secular contexts

Gärtner, Christel, and Linda Hennig. "Faith, Authenticity, and Pro-Social Values in the Lives of Young People in Germany." In Religions 13:925 (2022).

This essay explores the Asokan politico-moral ethic, called Dhamma, and the role of moral and intellectual leadership in it both within the king’s own territory and beyond it. It shows that one of the central aspirations of Asoka’s Dhamma is a form of universalism, to shape the global order by sending emissaries all over the world. At appropriate junctures, it shows similarities of Asoka’s views to Xunzi’s as enunciated and compared by Yan Xuetong in this volume with Kautilya’s political vision. Kautilya provides somewhat of a contrast to Xunzi, whereas Asoka and Xunzi share many similarities. A comparison between Xunzi and Asoka is equally interesting, perhaps even more appropriate. At the core of Asoka’s edicts lies his conception of Dhamma, a set of precepts about how to lead a good individual and collective life. Dhamma is generally understood in India’s scholarly tradition to mean “law.” But in a recent essay, Patrick Olivelle has proposed that Dhamma be reconceived as civic religion, a term revived by Robert Bellah, after Rousseau first coined it in his classic work, The Social Contract.

Bhargava, Rajeev. "Ashoka’s Dhamma as a Project of Expansive Moral Hegemony." In Bridging Two Worlds, ed. Amitav Acharya, Daniel A. Bell, Rajeev Bhargava, and Yan Xuetong. California: University of California Press, 2023.

The analysis in this article suggests that M G Ranade’s reflections in his essay about the ‘Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra’ are significant because they offer a site to unravel shifts from a premodern to a modern conception of moral order on the Indian subcontinent, in the context of the encounter with colonialism.
For its role in allowing such unravelling, and for the way it permits attention to hitherto neglected dimensions of Ranade’s comparison between bhakti and the Protestant Reformation, this article argues for the value of investigating Ranade’s reflections through the framework of translation. While doing the above, the article also seeks to gesture toward methodological issues involved in the study of ideas and clusters of concepts that bear transtemporal resonance and relevance.

Lamba, Rinku. “Engaging Bhakti As/in Translation: An Outline of a Methodological Approach to Analyse Ranade’s Views About the 'Saints and Prophets of Maharashtra'” Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung, no. 7 (2022): 128–60.

This article explores the Hindu thought of Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), a prominent actor-thinker in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and often considered an ideological ancestor of Savarkarite Hindutva. Focussing on Rai’s thought between the 1880s and 1915, it argues that at the same time that Hindu beliefs and practices were undergoing a process of ‘religionisation’ in the late nineteenth century, in a prominent strand of thinking about Hindu identity, represented by Rai, Hindu religion was being ‘thinned down’. It was being defined less by reference to theological detail and complexity and more in broad and simple terms. Second, Hinduism also underwent a process of ‘culturalisation’. It was decoupled from faith and practice and re-formulated as secular ‘culture’. In Rai’s definition of Hindu identity, Hinduism progressively lost ground to ‘Hindu culture’, which by 1909 formed the centrepiece of his imagined ‘Hindu nation’. ‘Hindu culture’ served to include within Rai’s ‘Hindu nation’ various groups of Indians who were not followers of Hinduism, and simultaneously excluded India’s Muslims and Christians. Yet, I argue that this Hindu nationalism remained different from Savarkarite Hindutva. Through its examination of Rai’s thought, the article makes broader analytical points. One, that Hindu identity can be defined in various senses—thickly religious, thinly religious, broadly non-religious and ‘cultural’, apolitical, openly political, or implicitly political. Second, the thinning of religion can be viewed as a form of both religionisation and secularisation, and the secularisation of Hinduism via its culturalisation was co-eval with the larger process of religionisation. Third, it challenges the dichotomy drawn by Hindu nationalists and secularists alike between the process of secularisation and articulations of Hindu nationalist identity. Finally, Rai’s thought reveals that the secularisation and culturalisation of Hindu identity can culminate in a conception of ‘Hindu nationalism’ distinct from Hindutva.

Bhargav, Vanya V. “From Theology to Culture: Secularisation in Lajpat Rai’s ‘Hindu Nationalism,’ 1880s–1915.” Interdisziplinäre Zeitschrift für Südasienforschung, no. 7 (2022): 91–127.

Focusing on the Swahili New Year’s festival, my article discusses the position of spirits in between religion and politics in the society of Zanzibar. New Year’s rituals maintained reciprocal relations between humans and spirits, and these relations defined local identities and legitimized the use natural resources. In this respect, Zanzibar spirits resembled ancestors in other African contexts, but they were conceptualized as entities distinct from humans, as Koranic djinns or shaytans. For many Zanzibar Muslims, relations to spirits were everyday affairs, although these practices were classified as custom (mila) only, as opposed to proper religion (dini). Only adherents of reformist Islam considered them as idolatry (ushirikina), and condemned them generally. This modern religious critique of spirits in turn defined their political significance. After the revolution of 1964 overthrew the Sultanate, the socialist ruling party proclaimed an African nationalism, while the opposition linked Zanzibar identity with the Islamicate world and joined forces with reformist movements. While some spirits proclaimed socialist identity, the socialist party started performing political rituals at the New Year’s festival in the 1980s, and in 2002, the president of Zanzibar declared that the festival represented the culture (utamaduni) of all the people of Zanzibar.

Echtler, Magnus. "Sozialistische Dämonen? Sansibarische Geister zwischen Islam, Magie und Identitätspolitik." Ökumenische Rundschau 71, no. 4 (2022): 535–48.

Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church (NBC) in 1910, and this new institution distinguished itself from mission Christianity not least through the markedly different moral economy. With the church headquarters at the outskirts of Durban (South Africa), the church catered to black Africans, dispossessed of their land and forced into the capitalist labor system. To them, Shembe preached a Protestant work ethic, while at the same time condemning involvement in city life and striving to acquire land and attain economic autonomy for his congregations. With female adherents running away from fathers and husbands, he started out as a 'thief of women', but soon gave religious support to the patriarchal authorities of chiefs, who granted the church land in native reserves in turn. Prohibiting members from joining labor unions, the church connected cities and mines with rural homelands and contributed to the stabilization of the migrant labor system. In addition, Shembe preached moral ethnicity, and hence partook in the creation of Zulu nationalism. The ambiguous moral economy of the NBC persisted during apartheid capitalism and post-apartheid neoliberalism. My essay focuses on preaching and the heterotopic character of the large gatherings of the NBC, and I will also connect church morals with the wider Zulu traditionalist milieu and, given the preoccupation of classic moral economy with riots and revolutions, conclude with some observations on the 2021 unrests in South Africa.

Echtler, Magnus. “Moral Economy in the Nazareth Baptist Church, South Africa.” Journal for the Study of Religion 35, no. 2 (2022): 1–25.

This discussion will review two recent publications on religion, politics, and the law in Japan, specifically the postwar period. Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, by Jolyon Thomas, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2019, and the second book we will be discussing is by Mark Mullins, Yasukuni Fundamentalism: Japanese Religions and the Politics of Restoration, which was published in the Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture book series along with the University of Hawai‘i Press in 2021.

Mullins, Mark R., Jolyon B. Thomas, and Matthew D. McMullan. “Review Discussion: Religion, Politics, and the Law in Postwar Japan.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 49, no. 1 (2022): 115–46.

This article presents a provisional survey of Buddhists and Buddhist organizations in Aotearoa/New Zealand, identifying their key characteristics in terms of national origin, ethnicity, and areas of geographical concentration. We draw on three decades of the New Zealand census (1991-2018) to analyze demographic data about those who identify as Buddhist, and information from the NZ Charities Register to identify general characteristics of the diverse range of Buddhist organizations in the country. Based on this demographic data, we identify three main types of Buddhist institutions: (1) centers/temples serving heritage or “migrant” communities from Asian countries with Buddhist heritage; (2) centers which we refer to as “Pākehā/Multi-ethnic” because they serve newer Buddhists (“converts”) who are primarily but not exclusively Pākehā (NZ European), and (3) “multi-ethnic” organizations that include varying combinations of heritage and non-heritage Buddhists. Within each of the three categories we see diverse organizational forms and streams of distinctive Buddhist traditions, including sectarian, ethnic, and hybrid forms, each of which have contributed to a diverse religious landscape in significant ways. Most Buddhist centers are in urban areas, with 70 percent in or near Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The main Buddhist traditions are almost equally represented across these institutions with 35 percent identified as Mahayana, 32 percent as Theravada, and 35 percent as Vajrayana (and 0.7% as mixed). The number of Buddhists in New Zealand has increased over the past three decades from 12,705 to 52,779, and approximately 80 percent identify with at least one of the Asian ethnic groups. Buddhists constitute only 1.1 percent of the total population, with at least 134 centers of varying sizes across the country. However, Buddhism may be exerting a cultural influence beyond these numbers, as recent research identified Buddhists as the “most trusted” religious group in contemporary New Zealand. In presenting this preliminary survey, we aim to provide a base for more in-depth investigations.

McAra, Sally, and Mark R. Mullins. “Buddhism in Aotearoa New Zealand: Multiple Sources and Diverse Forms.” Journal of Global Buddhism 23, no. 2 (2022): 161–84.

The Heisei period provides a convenient frame for thinking about the impact and significance of one new religious movement, Aum Shinrikyō, which was registered as a religious corporation in August 1989. Its official status was revoked just six months after it launched the 20 March 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, and its conclusive end came with the conviction of founder Asahara Shōkō and six of his close followers and their execution in July 2018. Although it remained a small movement, its violence towards society contributed to a sense of social crisis and generated a significant political response that revealed something about the nature of Heisei Japan. The calls for moral and patriotic education, as well as legislation enacted by the political establishment (LDP), suggest that crisis moments prompt some to return to the reservoir of traditional values and seek to reassert them into public life and institutions.

Mullins, Mark R. “The Life and Death of a Heisei Religious Movement: What the Aum Shinrikyō Affair Revealed About Japanese Society.” In Japan in the Heisei Era (1989-2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Noriko Murai, Jeff Kingston and Tina Burrett, 206–17. London: Routledge, 2022.

The contributions in this rich volume are manifold. This afterword begins with an outline of how the volume both expands on and advances the study of non-religion. The volume does not only augment scholarly understanding of central questions within the interdisciplinary study of non-religion by illustrating and analysing the diversity of non-religion beyond the simple binary of the religious and the none. It also illuminates new avenues for exploring how sceptical publics are formed through the lenses of aesthetics and affects, emotions and embodiment, and materiality and media. This afterword then takes up the volume’s more implicit focus on silences and visibilities, normativities and normalisations and the implications that these subjects have for further research on sceptical publics. To that end it discusses the use of ‘emancipatory’ analytical vocabulary – awareness raising, silence breaking, coming out, reclaiming and self-empowerment – within the study of non-religion. To conclude, and drawing on Joel Lee and Dorothea Weltecke’s recent work, the afterword reflects on why and how we might seek to locate sceptical publics beyond organised atheism, secularist activism, other declamatory genres of self-representation and the respective public controversies or legal prosecutions. How do we approach non-religious figurations that are constituted by ‘logophobic’ and ‘unwordy’ ways of life? Which kinds of media and forms of publicity are at stake here?

Quack, Johannes. "Afterword: Paradox Laxity and Unwordy Indifference: Non-Religious Figurations Beyond Emancipatory Narratives and Declamatory Genres." In Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-Religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism', edited by Jacob Copeman, and Mascha Schulz, 339–52. London: UCL Press, 2022.

In this chapter, we explore how cultural forms – specifically theatre performances, but also related performative genres – function as articulations of the secular for our interlocutors. We analyse the specific kinds of secular imaginations that are produced through cultural work, as well as the ways in which such activism contributes to the fostering of secular and non-religious publics in the region. In our analysis, cultural activism is not only, nor necessarily, a vehicle for explicit secularist messages, nor is it a monolithic project that aims to produce a singular secularised public sphere. Instead, culture provides a medium through which secular conversations, self-cultivation and identification among a certain group of secularly oriented interlocutors can take place. Ultimately, we argue that cultural secularism should be understood in terms of the subjectivities, communities, genres and publics that become constituted, and recognised as secular per se, through such performances.

Bradbury, James, and Mascha Schulz. "Performing the Secular: Street Theatre and Songs as ‘Secular Media’ in Bangladesh and West Bengal." In Global Sceptical Publics: From Non-Religious Print Media to ‘Digital Atheism', ed. Jacob Copeman, and Mascha Schulz, 71-96. London: UCL Press, 2022.