1. Introduction Mirjam Kunkler and Shylashri Shankar; 2. Secularity I: varieties and dilemmas Philip Gorski; 3. The origins of secular public space: religion, education, and politics in modern China Zhe Ji; 4. The formation of secularism in Japan Helen Hardacre; 5. Law, legitimacy, and equality: the bureaucratization of religion and conditions of belief in Indonesia Mirjam Kunkler; 6. Secularity and Hinduism's imaginaries in India Shylashri Shankar; 7. Secularity without secularism in Pakistan: the politics of Islam from Sir Syed to Zia Christophe Jaffrelot; 8. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and secularization from below in Iran Nader Hashemi; 9. The politics of Jewish secularization in Israel Hanna Lerner; 10. A Kemalist secular age? Cultural politics and radical republicanism in Turkey Asli Bali; 11. Enigmatic variations: Russia and the three secularities John Madeley; 12. Piety, politics and identity: configurations of secularity in Egypt Gudrun Kramer; 13. The commander of the faithful and Moroccan secularity Jonathan Wyrtzen; 14. Conclusions: the prevalence of the 'marked state' Mirjam Kunkler and John Madeley; 15. Afterword and corrections Charles Taylor.
This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.
Mirjam Kunkler is a senior research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). Before joining SCAS, she taught Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey, where she also directed the Oxford-Princeton research cluster on 'Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi'i Islam' and co-directed the Luce Program on 'Religion and International Affairs' for several years. Her publications include Democracy and Islam in Indonesia (co-edited with Alfred Stepan, 2013), and many articles, inter alia in Party Politics, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the American Behavioral Scientist, Jahrbuch des OEffentlichen Rechts, the Asian Studies Review, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Democratization, and the Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion. John Madeley taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science for some three decades. Starting as a specialist in the government and politics of the Nordic countries, during the second half of his career he concentrated on researching and teaching the linkages between and contrasting patterns of religion and politics, especially across Europe's fifty-odd countries. In addition to many journal articles and book chapters, he edited Church and State in Contemporary Europe: The Chimera of Neutrality (with Zsolt Enyedi, 2003), Religion and Politics (2003) and Religion, Law and Politics in the European Union (with Lucian Leustean, 2010). Shylashri Shankar is the author of Scaling Justice: India's Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws and Social Rights (2009), and co-author of Battling Corruption (2013). In the past she has been a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and a co-convenor of a research group at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany. She is currently working on A Food Biography of India (forthcoming).
'With much learning, empirical range, and analytical acuity, this
rich consideration of religion's qualities and effects profoundly
extends Charles Taylor's influential scholarship on the origins and
character of modern secularity in the West. Placing decisions by
states across the globe at the center of the often surprising
formations that constitute modernity, the volume's essays
powerfully show how religious institutions and faith shape the
public sphere, and illuminate how systems of belief, law, and
participation orient national practices and identities. Must read!'
Ira Katznelson, Columbia University, New York
'This collection of studies is a remarkably important contribution
to understanding the ways in which Charles Taylor's delineation of
the emergence of a secular age is, or is not, replicated in
non-Western areas of the world.' David Martin, Fellow of the
British Academy
'The West pioneered and to a large extent institutionalized a
distinction between secular and more religious or sacred affairs.
This has influenced the rest of the world, but also taken on
different character in different settings, shaped by both
innovations and different histories. This outstanding book is the
best source for appreciating both the diversity of secularisms and
the ways they all inform what Charles Taylor identified as our
secular age.' Craig Calhoun, President of the Berggruen Institute,
California
'The book ambitiously and innovatively recasts Charles Taylor's
classic account of the secularization of the conditions of belief
in the modern North Atlantic in a near-global perspective. State
power was crucial to realize elite initiatives at critical
junctures to reduce religion's public roles in societies where
these efforts did not draw broad support. But the authors find that
state-led transformative projects made religious belonging crucial
to citizenship in ways that hindered the secularization of the
conditions of belief in most Asian, East European, and North
African societies. Comprehensively comparative analyses of forms of
secularity, we learn, should focus on how state regulation
crucially determines religion's influence over political authority
and public life, and thus the feasibility of unbelief. Combining
the fine-grained and contextually sensitive approaches of area
specialists with an overarching and coherent conceptual vision,
this fine volume advances the cutting edge of multi-disciplinary
research on global secularities and public religion and should
become a major reference work.' Narendra Subramanian, McGill
University, author of Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural
Pluralism, and Gendered Citizenship in India
'This is a timely set of interventions for an age where the very
fabric of the state vis-a-vis religion, 'God' and secularism is
becoming central in debates not only within the academic community
but well-beyond - among politicians and political parties, and now
even inside the spaces of foreign and international development
policy. This book lays out an important analytical and practical
approach to understanding the complexities of competing narratives
by means of close factual analysis of particular cases and
comparison between them. This is a necessary read in today's
times.' Azza Karam, United Nations Population Fund
'A strong, well-argued book at the heart of current local and
global debates on the relationship between state and religion.
Altogether, the chapters make a remarkably coherent whole where the
meeting of sociological concepts and grounded realities unfolds in
a flow that gives meaning to our deepest concerns. This is a most
welcome book in a troubled era that needs global solutions for
globally-created dilemmas.' Fatima Sadiqi, University of Fez,
Morocco, President of the Association for Middle East Women's
Studies (AMEWS)
'This edited volume is extraordinarily well researched, coherent
and inspiring, and it is therefore probably the best contribution
to this body of scholarly work so far. ... It thoroughly engages
with the question of what the 'secular' could mean and look like
outside the Christian world where it was always a cognate term of
the (Christian) notion of religion; it identifies institutional
configurations, critical junctures and pathway dependencies of
secularity in the areas under study; and it explores the question
of how legal and political regulations of religion and 'conditions
of belief', e.g. the forms and possibilities of worldview
pluralism, are related to one another. ... this book is a
monumental accomplishment and highly recommended to students of
law, secularism, globalization, and transregional sociology.'
Marian Burchardt, Oxford Journal of Law and Religion
'This is a book to be read, marked and inwardly digested. It is not
to be rushed. There is a huge amount to take in over a wide canvas
of ideas as well as places. Persevering readers will be richly
rewarded for their efforts, for which reason I recommend it very
warmly.' Grace Davie, Social Forces
"If you read one new book on secularization this year, it should be
A Secular Age beyond the West. Mirjam Ku nkler, John Madeley, and
Shylashri Shankar have compiled a marvellously coherent collection
of essays that breaks important new ground in the comparative study
of secularization. The strengths of this collection are many. Each
chapter, on its own, is rich and suggestive. Yet the volume is more
than the sum of its parts. It is rare that an edited volume
displays such terrific thematic unity across the chapters.' Damon
Mayrl, Sociology of Religion
'The accomplishment of A Secular Age Beyond the West is difficult
to overstate, especially given the immensity of the project
undertaken. The amalgamation of conceptual and empirical rigor,
geographical reach, and historical sensitivity the book offers is
unmatched in the latest generation of scholarship on secularization
... The book's comparative-historical methodology should be
underlined as a major contribution to the prospect of an emergent
field of global secularity studies. While anthropologies of
secularism (Cannell, 2010) tend to emphasize the uniqueness and
incommensurability of each country/tradition, A Secular Age Beyond
the West works consciously towards developing a common vocabulary
for cross-religious and cross-regional comparisons, seeking to
overcome an essentialized 'West and the Rest' distinction.'
International Sociology
'Six of the case studies offer a nuanced portrait of Islam. Taken
together, they help us appreciate the relevance of the state in the
shaping of secularity in these societies. More importantly, they
serve as a very well-informed rebuttal to the facile theses that
look at a reified Islam incompatible with modernity ... This
collection of empirical studies and the in-depth theoretical
discussions that frames it make this volume a model for the genre.'
Andre Laliberte, University of Ottawa
'To do justice to the important topic of secularism requires a
multidimensional perspective. A Secular Age beyond the West answers
this need by looking at secularism from different cultural and
geographic experiences through the expertise of scholars who are
able to dive in depth into primary sources.' Selcuk Esenbel,
Bogazici University
'A Secular Age beyond the West is an important and impressively
conceptualized volume. Too often non-Western experience is excluded
from broad theoretical discussions of the nature of, and
relationship between, religion, secularism, and culture ... In this
rich volume editors Mirjam Kunkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri
Shankar assemble an excellent group of scholars to explore the
implications of Taylor's concepts in an array of countries beyond
the West.' Frank Ravitch, Michigan State University College of Law
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