Music as the Sound of the Secular

Abstract

Few debates have maintained as persistent and passionate a level of interest and international scope—whether in the United States, France, or Turkey—as that around secularism. A cursory glance at the titles alone of books and articles on the subject tells us that this is a debate in which serious personal and political stakes are invested. At the very least the debate has been generated by the recognition that a new language of politics is needed to understand the role of religious self-expression in the public sphere. The received wisdom about distinctions between the putatively mutually exclusive domains of public and private, or sacred and secular, simply does not hold water any more. The secularism debate also raises issues of fundamental significance to the very “personality of the state,” as Talal Asad has characterized it. In France, the laicite debate has highlighted how the claim of a minority population to don items of clothing (a right denied by the secular government in Turkey with a majority Muslim population), which it sees as fundamental to its religious self-expression, has challenged the state's own image as a secular republic. In the United States, controversy has been ignited by challenges to the boundary line between private religious practice and the public domain of the state, whether it relates to school prayer or the ongoing battles between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists.