Multiple Secularities Research Articles

Contesting Power as Political Theology: Traditionalist Islamic Preaching and Post-Secularism in the West

Traditionalist Islamic preaching in the West is not limited to the normative aspects of theology, law, and ethics. In addition, it addresses the most pressing social and political issues that Muslims are currently confronting in the West; it also challenges Western modernity in general and secularism in particular. Two critical sermons of secularism delivered by two of the most well-known traditionalist Muslim preachers in their respective countries—Hamza Yusuf in the USA and Hani Ramadan in Switzerland—are analyzed in this study. First, I shall examine the arguments put up by these preachers against secularism and in support of post-secular society. Next, I will study the rhetorical strategies used in these two sermons. Finally, I will discuss the relevance of these two sermons to the contemporary debates in the West on contesting secularism and multiple secularisms. It is argued here that traditionalist Muslim preachers see secularism as an encroaching power that poses a danger to the figures of authority and norms that control gender, knowledge, and education within Muslim communities and societies.

Historicizing Secular Subjectivities: Conceptual Erasures and Subjective Multi-Hybridizations

The “multiple secularities” framework may be regarded as a recent ambitious contribution to the comparative analysis of secularisms across Western and non-Western societies. While I argue in this article for the “historicization” of secularities as proposed by the framework, I also point out the latter’s lack of empirical attention to the subjective dimension of historical secularities. More specifically, the article attempts to show the theoretical relevance of analyzing historical secularities in post-colonial societies from the perspective of the subjects and their complex selves. Through a genealogical analysis of the subjectivities of three influential positivist intellectuals in 19th-century Mexico, I argue that the analytical axes of the multiple secularities framework may be refined and broadened. I discuss how the framework’s search for local forms of “conceptual distinctions” should be complemented by the search for conceptual erasures and how the analysis of “semantic hybridity” should be broadened and include the analysis of experiential and emotional forms of hybridizations. I also argue that the analyses of historical secularities should account for “sacred-secular” hybrids, as well as more specific hybridizations, such as ecclesiological–secular and theological–secular transpositions.

‘The True and Scientific Religion’

Abstract A scientific worldview is taken to be a dominant factor of European secularity but peculiarly absent in Africa. Taking cues from the multiple secularities and global religious history approaches, the article uses global entanglements as a critical analytical tool to investigate the formation of our present, shared conditions, without essentializing cultural European/African differences. The core question is: Why, how and under which circumstances do people adapt global regimes of secularity, in this case particularly: global debates on religion and science? The article analyzes three lecture-transcripts, delivered by the West African intellectual John Augustus Abayomi Cole and printed in the West African newspaper Lagos Standard. In the context of Christian intellectuals in late nineteenth century West Africa, these lectures discussed African religion as congruent with science. This argument was possible through Abayomi Cole’s adaptation of esotericism, specifically its claim to true religion and science. Thereby, Abayomi Cole tried to negotiate independence from European missionary oversight.

Multiple Secularities in Africa – An Introduction

Abstract Raising timely and urgent questions about the forms, scope and boundaries of religious authority and practice, this article offers novel ways for the study of secularities and secularisms in contemporary African societies. In recent scholarly debates on secularity, Africa has been marginal. Part of the reason, it was suggested was that African ways of being in, and knowing, the world lay outside the religious-secular divide. We contest such positions. Secularism was clearly part of modernists colonial ideologies that called for the eradication of African beliefs described as backward and irrational. We find that the colonial encounter had a powerful historical impact, essentializing and othering African societies as marked by holistic indigenous cultures rather than differentiated religions. We suggest that the complex interplay of different African and European cultures has simultaneously shaped the social construction and historical development of multiple secularities. We propose that the concept of multiple secularities provides creative avenues to rethink religion, political authority and belonging. We consider secularities as contested arrangements of religious and other spheres whose dynamics include processes of de-differentiation and de-secularization.

Cекулярность и религия: реальность или концепт?

The article examines radical rethinking of the correlation between secularity and religion in so-called post-secular period, which has led to the emergence of a variety of concepts based on very different grounds. The article is aimed at searching an answer to the following question: are the common, taken for granted theoretical concepts of secularity and religion can be adequate to the reality they seek to describe, and, if so, how this could be proved? The article examines the concept of “secularity” in the modernity as meta-narrative according to which secularity and religion are seen as opposites where strengthening of one necessarily entails the weakening of the other; the disintegration of this meta-narrative in postcolonial critique and the theory of “multiple secularities”, which has raised doubts about the adequacy of the historical interpretation of secularity as a homogeneous project within the framework of modernization as a global process is studied. The history of the concept “religion” in relation to secularity is reviewed; it is proved that today, due to the infinite variety of empirical manifestations of religiosity (doctrines, symbols, rituals, institutions, etc.), their analytical description is complicated due to the lack of a common conceptual ground. The contradiction between institutional and individual religion, and various theories of new types of religiosity, are considered. The article analyzes the concept of pluralism as one of the research strategies in studying the correlation of secularity and religion; pluralism is seen as the situation when none of the competing worldviews can pose itself as the final arbiter of the available systems of ultimate meanings, which gives individuals and communities the right to freely construct their religious identity. The author pays special attention to Ch. Taylor and R. Bellah’s concepts of secularity and religion. It is concluded that in the crisis of the previous research strategy in the study of secularity and religion, the most adequate is meta-position as an attempt to assess the relationship between the reality being described and theoretical methods of describing it. In addition, meta-position presupposes a fundamental shift of the research focus from the subject as an object to the subject as a researcher and to the specifics of the research process.

Comparative or Multiple Secularisms? Evidence from a Comparison of France and Turkey

Comparative or Multiple Secularisms? Evidence from a Comparison of France and Turkey

La « sécularisation » des discours et des pratiques en contexte islamique : le cas du Parti pour la justice et le développement au Maroc

By putting in the Moroccan context the concept of ‘multiple secularities’, this paper digs the process of conceptualization of ‘secularization’ at the initiative of the Islamist leader, Saadeddine al-Othmani. The latter supported the acceptability of a secular principle adequate to religion, its symbols and their presence in the political and public space. Through the analysis of his writings as well as of other leaders’ discourses, this article follows the compromises between religious and secular revendications during the process of conceptualization inside the PJD-MUR. Using the theories of ‘secularization’ and ‘de-théologisation’, this study highlights the strategy of ‘rejection’ and ‘adaptation’ developed by the PJD. Rejecting the hypothesis of a linear secularization of Islamist ideology, it also examines the ongoing or incomplete structural mutations resulted from the ‘distinction’ ( tamiyyîz) between the party and the movement, as well as between the socio-political spheres.

Indonesian Blasphemy Law as Legal Forum for Renegotiating Indonesian Secularity

If secularism is described merely as the decline of religious roles in public spheres or religious privatization, then there would be difficulties to put the secular term on Indonesian history. The principle of divinity “Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa” as adopted on the “Pancasila” as state ideology has become basis for religionization and rejecting any utterance of secularism at law, State institution, or other public domain. On the other hand, Indonesia as a democratic State as well as the most populous Muslim country in the world has never put the notion of Islamic state or theocracy as its State model. Its modernity is developed under the Western idea of law supremacy or the rule of law to which a democratic political system is laid down. This situation seems to be paradoxical in the view of both religionist or modernist due to its inconsistency to their strict concept especially on Islamic state and secularism. Or, is Indonesia another example of how religion and modernity has its multiplicity based its own historical reflexivity without making clash between religion and secularism? This article is intended to seek kind of distinction on Indonesian secularity based on how its blasphemy law developed and functioned under the framework of open-ended negotiation. The first epoch assumed as the place of negotiation on Indonesian secularity was taken place on initial stage of State’s formation around transition era of independence in 1945. Then, there have been several renegotiations afterward through multiple and overlapping instruments of development such as politics, economy, law, and culture. The blasphemy law as one of such instruments will be used to read how the relevant actors of Indonesian history has constructed their own concept of state and religion included its interrelationship characters as the basis for social and structural differentiation or distinction. The expected outcome of the reading and its analysis is to reveal any evidence of Indonesian particularity on secularization which may be related to the concept of multiple secularities.

Worldview complexity: The challenge of intersecting diversities for conceptualising diversity

Social science analysis of diversity, and religious diversity in particular, has long struggled to move beyond simple binaries of religious-secular, religious-spiritual, traditional-modern, global north-global south, and so on. Twenty-first century realities test existing terms and find them wanting. While concepts such as the postsecular, multiple modernities, multiple secularities, and non-religion point to new lines of analysis, each still refers to binary and thereby limiting terms. This article reviews research on religious diversity, delineating some of the major challenges posed. Building on useful frameworks of superdiversity, multiple pluralities, and religious complexity, we argue that the more widely encompassing concept of worldview complexity might represent a better way forward. It has the advantage of acknowledging the intersecting diversity of diversities in multiple, differing contexts, and abiding similarities in what is occurring ‘beneath religion’.

Respect, freedom, citizenship: Muslim women’s secularities and perspectives on wellbeing

ABSTRACT The religiosity of people migrating into secular European countries has posed many questions for policymakers and scholars alike, particularly where it concerns Islam. Rather than opposing migrants’ religious identities with secular values, this article examines shifts and tensions between the ‘multiple secularities’ of Muslim women and integration policy alike, through an ethnography of wellbeing. Set in the Netherlands, it demonstrates that Muslim women of Pakistani background embrace a secularity characterised by respect and religious liberty but that despite a ‘modernisation’ of values, their religion remains the source of their secularity. Dutch integration policy, however, has shifted from a secularity accommodating religious diversity to one characterised by individual liberty (placed in opposition to religion), and, increasingly, towards the progress of a culturally homogeneous nation. By thus failing to recognise religious sources and alternative social dimensions of human wellbeing, Dutch policy risks undermining secular values generally and alienating Dutch Muslims specifically.

Comparative Secularities: Tracing Social and Epistemic Structures beyond the Modern West

Abstract In view of the questionability of the concept “religion” as an analytical category for the investigation of pre-modern, non-Western cultures, how can one still pursue the history of religion or historical sociology of religion? Roughly speaking, scholars of religion can be placed between two poles with regard to this question: (1) those who reject the cross-cultural use of “religion” as a comparative concept and (2) those who believe they cannot do without it. We propose an approach that acknowledges the cultural dependence and historicity of concepts such as “religion” and the “secular,” while still conducting historical research on pre-colonial non-Western societies relevant to the study of both. Our approach aims to investigate the emergence of social and epistemic structures in various cultures—forms of differentiation and distinction—that have enabled the reorganisation of socio-cultural formations into religions and thus facilitated the formation of “multiple secularities” in global modernity.

Distinctions and Differentiations between Medicine and Religion

Abstract This special section of Asian Medicine brings together three scholars of the history of healing practices and medicine in premodern Asian societies to explore whether and how emic boundaries between religion and medicine were drawn in different historical contexts. In this introduction, we use the example of ancient Japan in an attempt to show how first steps towards a separation of religion and medicine can be identified, even when they have not yet been clearly differentiated institutionally or distinguished conceptually as distinct fields of action. By doing so, we operationalize the macro-sociological question central to the ‘multiple secularities’ approach, namely how ‘secular’ fields of action—here, curing disease—emancipate themselves from ‘religion’ in premodern ‘non-Western’ societies. We propose to look for differences in the framing and interpretation of healing activities, for the ascription of either (professional) competence or (religious) charisma to the healers, to ask whether the activities are to be interpreted as a social function or service, and to identify the sources of authority and legitimacy. This is followed by a brief summary and discussion of the contributions by Selby, Czaja, and Triplett.

Beyond Positivism: Building TurkishLaiklikin the Transition from the Empire to the Republic (1908–38)

AbstractThe literature on the development of secularism in Turkey, orlaiklik, often cites the national state builders’ positivist worldviews as a principal explanatory factor. Accordingly, the legal-institutional form Turkish secularism took in the 1920s and 1930s is derived, to a large extent, from the Unionists’ and Republicans’ science-driven, antireligious ideologies. Going beyond solely ideational narratives, this article places the making of secularism in Turkey in the context of the sociopolitical contention for national-capitalist state building. In so doing, the article contributes to the latest “spatiotemporal” turn in the secularization literature, characterized by an increased attention to historical critical junctures, and sensitivity to multiple secularities occurring in Western as well as non-Western geographies. Based on a bridging of the secularization scholarship with that of state formation, and building extensively on Turkish archival material, I argue that the trajectory, fluctuations, and contradictions of secularization can be closely associated with two intertwined master processes: (1) the construction of internal and external sovereign state capacity, and (2) geographically specific trajectories of class formation/dynamics. The Turkish case demonstrates that secular settlements cannot be explained away simply by reference to the guiding ideas of actors. Contentious episodes such as civil-bureaucratic conflict, war and geopolitics, and class struggles/alliances make a significant imprint on the secularizing process.

Practicing Belonging?

Abstract This article suggests a way for scholars of Japanese religion to contribute to the international discussion on “nones” or the “non-religious,” who have been characterized as “believing without belonging,” “belonging without believing,” “believing in belonging,” etc. by integrating three different discursive arenas: one on multiple secularities as a context-conscious reexamination of functional differentiation; one on Japanese modernization centered on the idea of ie (household)-mura (village community); and one on a recent Japanese obsession with tsunagari (relationships, connection) and shōnin (recognition). The article argues that Japanese non-religiousness in the 2010s is an updated, self-conscious version of “religion as human relationships,” which can be paraphrased as “practicing belonging.” Moreover, while the current “religion as human relationships” practiced among young people tends to be confined to the intimate sphere, its traditional version regulated the public sphere as well. It was this public sphere of “religion as human relationships” that came to appear secular, as opposed to World Religions as matters of personal choice, in the process of modernization, which included the adoption of the Western concepts of “religion” and “secular.” The article also suggests that a “relationships turn” has been taking place not only in nonreligious rituals and festivals but also in spiritual culture and institutionalized religion.

Formations of Secularity in Ancient Japan?

Abstract Starting from the premise that the diversity of forms for distinguishing between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ (i.e., multiple secularities) in global modernity is the result of different cultural preconditions in the appropriation of Western normative concepts of secularism, I would like to offer a modest contribution to the understanding of the corresponding cultural preconditions in Japan. I will try to show that the specific—and at first glance, relatively unproblematic—appropriation of secularity as a regulatory principle in modern Japan is to some extent path dependent on relatively stable and durable epistemic and social structures that have emerged in the course of ‘critical junctures’ in history. In this context, I would like to put up for discussion my hypothesis that some decisions taken in the period between the sixth and eighth centuries CE regarding the organisation of the relationship between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ generated path dependencies that were effective well into the nineteenth century.

Challenging Secularities, Challenging Religion: ‘Secularist Ex-Muslim Voices’ in the British Debate on Islam and Freedom of Expression

This article uses the interpretative device of ‘multiple secularities’ to interrogate the presence of ‘secularist ex-Muslim voices’ in the British debate on Islam and freedom of expression. By contrasting Britain with the Netherlands, where these voices are currently relatively absent, it will examine ‘secularist ex-Muslim voices’ as expressed at the International Conference on Freedom of Conscience and Expression in London, July 2017. It argues that these voices have surfaced here due to Britain’s particular history of secularity for the sake of accommodating diversity. They challenge institutionalized levels (state-church relations, multiculturalism, and communitarianism) and social and cultural forms (debate on freedom of expression and Islamophobia). These voices are relatively absent in the Netherlands due to its dominant secularity for the sake of social/national integration. Due to the particular histories of secularity, reference problems that surface in Britain have less bearing on the Dutch situation. These voices have, therefore, been relatively absent.

A multiplicidade da secularização: a sociologia da religião na era da globalização

A teoria weberiana da secularização é atualmente criticada por reproduzir pressupostos teleológicos oriundos das teorias da modernização. Defrontando-se com essa crítica, este artigo retoma a tese da unidade e variação desenvolvida por Shmuel Eisenstadt e, a partir de tais pressupostos, discute as possibilidades de atualização do conceito de secularização diante do cenário da globalização e da multiplicidade da modernidade. Após demonstrar que em Max Weber o tema já é tratado de forma multidimensional (histórica e estrutural), o artigo busca sistematizar o debate sobre a secularização no campo da sociologia da religião. Em seguida, examinam-se criticamente três modos distintos de apreensão das variedades da secularização: 1) multiplicidade de vias de secularização, 2) múltiplos secularismos e 3) múltiplas secularidades. O artigo advoga pela fecundidade e atualidade da teoria da secularização para determinar não só a natureza e a diversidade do religioso em condições modernas mas também para determinar o moderno na sua relação com o religioso.

Revisitando o secular: secularidades múltiplas e trajetórias para a modernidade

Os debates acadêmicos sobre a secularização e o secularismo atingiram um impasse infecundo. Os teóricos ortodoxos ou neo-ortodoxos da secularização insistem na universalidade epistemológica e na aplicabilidade universal de conceitos mais ou menos uniformes de secularização. Por contraste, as críticas pós-coloniais procuraram provincianizar a noção de secular, enfatizando sua origem ocidental e sua coimplicação com o Estado-nação, a violência e o colonialismo. Neste artigo, ocupamo-nos criticamente dessas abordagens e sugerimos, como perspectiva alternativa, o conceito de “secularidades múltiplas”. Se, por um lado, as abordagens universalista e pós-colonial tendem a dar forma e essência ao secular, nós pretendemos, por outro lado, historicizar e culturalizar a secularidade. Fazemo-lo argumentando que a secularidade se sustenta cultural e simbolicamente em formas de distinção entre as esferas e as práticas sociais religiosas e não religiosas e que as institucionalizações dessas distinções serviram como modo de lidar com diferentes problemas. Não obstante reconheça as historicidades particulares da secularidade, nossa conceptualização liberta-a, de forma significativa, de suas associações singulares ao Ocidente e à modernidade.

Humanist Organizations and Secularization in Germany

Among social scientists, humanist and freethinker organizations are often described as secularizing agents within society with a critical and confrontational relation to religions. This article provides a re-evaluation of this theory with respect to a contemporary example of German freigeistig organizations, the German Humanist Association ( Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands [HVD]). Through being incorporated into German religio- political arrangements, the author argues, the HVD rather imitates religion, thereby unfolding secularization-opposing effects. Drawing on a grounded theory-based analysis of found data as well as interviews and participant observations, and with reference to the comparative frameworks regarding ‘multiple secularities’ (Burchardt/Wohlrab-Sahr) or ‘different modes of nonreligion’ (Quack), the article concludes by distinguishing two different types of freigeistig organizations in contemporary Germany, only one of which can by described as a secularizing agent.

Sobre o secularismo contemporâneo: um estudo de caso português no período democrático (pós-1974)

O nosso artigo visa analisar as diferentes dimensões e os vários contornos do secularismo contemporâneo. Situamos o nosso marco teórico na perspetiva dos múltiplos secularismos de Alfred Stepan e das análises sensíveis aos diferentes contextos políticos, sociais e religiosos de Rajeev Bhargava. Para tal, delimitamos a nossa investigação às relações entre o Estado português e as igrejas e comunidades religiosas no período pós 1974. Ao examinarmos o seu padrão democrático de relação Estado-Igreja, nomeadamente através da observação dos mecanismos de apoio financeiro estabelecidos, procuramos entender em qual dos atuais modelos de secularismo Portugal se enquadra. O fato de este ser um estudo de caso controvertido, onde existe um modelo de separação com cooperação entre Estado e Igreja e, por consequência, um espírito de diálogo, negociação e de permanentes (re)definições do espaço público e simbólico de ambos, com particular destaque para uma religião específica, ajuda-nos a compreender o quão ambíguas e plásticas podem ser as fronteiras do secularismo moderno.