Secular Liberal Democracy Research Articles

LİBERAL İSLAM YAKLAŞIMI: ELEŞTİREL BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

Bu çalışmada, liberal İslam düşüncesinin temel kavram ve argümanları irdelenmiş ve bu iddialar etrafında şekillenen bir siyasal yaklaşımın sınırları, imkânı ve kısıtlamaları değerlendirilmiştir. Çalışmanın ilk bölümünde, farklı liberal İslam kavramsallaştırmaları ele alınmış ve bu kavramsallaştırmalara içkin sorunlar ortaya koyulduktan sonra yeni bir kavramsallaştırma önerilmiştir. İkinci bölümde ise liberal İslam yaklaşımı kapsamında, Endonezya’dan Liberal İslam Ağı (Jaringan İslam Liberal/Liberal İslam Network) düşünürleri ve Sudanlı düşünür Abdullahi An-Naim’in düşünceleri ele alınmıştır. Bu düşünürlerin, İslam ve liberalizm ilişkisinde seküler liberal demokrasi anlayışını temellendirirken hangi argümanlara ve önermelere başvurdukları serimlenerek çeşitli başlıklar altında incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın son bölümünde de bu düşünürlerin siyasal liberalizm kapsamında ortaya koymuş oldukları liberal anlayış değerlendirilirken, bu anlayış çerçevesinde inşa edilen liberalizmin nasıl kapsamlı liberalizme dönüştüğü ve bu dönüşümün yol açtığı sorunlar tartışılmıştır. Bunlara ek olarak, bu çalışmada düşünürlerin siyasal olan etrafında şekillenen bakış açılarına yönelik eleştirilere de yer verilmiştir. Bu eleştiriler çerçevesinde, siyasal olanın kurucu rolüne yapılan vurgu, her zaman alternatif bir siyasal düşünüşe imkân sağlamaktadır.

TEORI ABDUL KARIM SOROUSH: ANALISIS TEORI AGAMA DAN MASYARAKAT BERAGAMA

Soroush is a Muslim and comes from a society where political discourse and political debate are still struggling to resolve religious relations with politics and therefore the types of arguments and concerns he gives to secular liberal democracy mainly come from that background. Moreover, the implication of Soroush's political theory is that God was ruled out, not because of social evolution and the ability of human beings to manage their lives based on his own knowledge and collective rational consensus, but by deliberate political decisions to expel him from sociopolitical life.

Exploring opposition to ritual female genital cutting since the first U.S. federal prosecution: the 2017 Detroit case.

In the U.S., the 1996 federal law banning medically unnecessary female genital cutting (FGC) of minors was rendered unconstitutional in 2018 in the Nagarwala case. This paper highlights legal developments at the federal and state levels in the U.S. since this trial. It looks at anti-FGC frameworks in other Western countries such as Australia, the UK, France, and Switzerland for comparison. The Australia High Court ruled in favor of a broader interpretation of the words "mutilate" (as in "female genital mutilation" or FGM) and "clitoris" in 2019. In the UK in 2019, a mother of a three-year-old became the first person convicted of "FGM". In the U.S., 2020 federal legislation strengthened opposition to FGC of minors. Twenty-one U.S. states have developed legislation since 2017 that was enacted to oppose such FGC. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affords equal protection under the law without regard to sex or gender, prompting increased inclusion of neonatal male circumcision and normalizing surgery for children with intersex traits in the FGC legislation debate. More widely, the principle of equal application of the law raises questions about the legality of adult female genital cosmeticsurgery where adult "FGM" is banned. Tensions between state law and religious law introduce complexities to allowing religious and cultural communities to practice their preferred way of life when this conflicts with human and civil rights afforded to individuals within secular liberal democracies. For consistency, the anti-FGC framework in the U.S. may need to shift towards calls to protect all children, regardless of sex characteristics (i.e., including male and intersex children) from medically unnecessary, non-consensual genital cutting.

Separating Politics from Institutional Religion

Nowadays, more than three centuries after John Locke’s affirmation of the separation between state and church, confessional systems of government are still widespread and, even in secular liberal democracies, politics and religion often intermingle. As a result, some ecclesiastical institutions play a significant role in political affairs, while minority groups and individuals having alternative worldviews, values, and lifestyles are frequently discriminated against. Locke’s theory of religious toleration undeniably has some shortcomings, such as the exclusion of Roman Catholics and atheists from toleration and an emphasis on organized religion in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). However, Locke’s theory of toleration, which presents a Christian’s defense of the civil rights of those who have different religious opinions, still provides powerful arguments for the oft-neglected separation of politics from institutional religion, thereby urging us to leave theological dogmas and ecclesiastical authorities out of political life.

The Multiplicity of Bioethical Expertise in the Context of Secular Liberal Democracies

While the notion of bioethical expertise might raise a host of questions concerning moral authority it is nevertheless the case that bioethicists continue to advance well thought out, detailed and comprehensive arguments concerning the ethical implications of the biosciences and healthcare. Not to make use of such work or those who produce it when it comes to the work of government and the development of policies would seem misguided at best. Thus, in the light of existing analysis of scientific expertise and its proper contribution to democratic political processes, this essay explores the role expert bioethicists might legitimately play in the production of policy and broader public moral debates. However, given that ethics can shade into politics and, furthermore, does so in a way that is not the case for science and politics, the ethico-political limitations that constrains and constructs the exercise of bioethical expertise is examined. Particular attention is paid to the implications of this view when it comes to bioethical research predicated on religious perspectives in the context of public reason, the validity of which has recently been called into question. We conclude with the suggestion that, if they are to act as experts in political contexts, bioethicists cannot simply make expert contributions to policymaking processes, they should also acknowledge they are responsible for shaping the broader public moral discourses about science and medicine.

New atheism and secularism

The paper attempts to analyze the theoretical conditions of the possible conflict between the New Atheism and modern secular liberal democracies. After short presentation of a few main components of neoatheistic thinking I concentrate on the notion of secularism as proposed by Charles Taylor. I conclude that by identifying the religion as “the root of all evil” the New Atheists are revealing the unjustifiable lack of judgment, as their aggressive antireligious stance generates rather crises and conflicts than social harmony.

MAKING THE CASE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN SECULAR SOCIETIES

This is the text of the opening keynote lecture delivered at the conference, “Is Religious Freedom under Threat?,” Christ Church, Oxford, May 23–25, 2018, convened by Oxford University's McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life and Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion.It is truly an honor to deliver the opening lecture for this McDonald Conference titled “Is Religious Liberty under Threat?” Since it was only four years ago that I had given a talk on that subject for the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion’s Summer Academy, which built in turn upon my Harold Berman Lecture at Emory University two years before, I have had to give some serious thought to how I might avoid repeating myself. Yet when I looked back over what I said on those occasions, I wished that I had dwelt less upon the threats and more on the challenge of how to address them. What I would like to do in this lecture, therefore, is to offer some suggestions in the hope of stimulating discussion about how to make the case for religious freedom as a fundamental human right in today's increasingly secular liberal democracies.

Habermas, Islam, and theorizing the “Other”

Over the last twenty years, Jürgen Habermas has been at the forefront of debates involving religion in the public sphere. In the wake of 9/11 he has responded to the problems of terrorism, “radical Islam,” and the so-called Muslim question in Europe, attempting to align these issue with his broader theories of deliberative democracy and postsecularism. Although Habermas aims for an inclusive model of deliberation in the public sphere, I argue that his reliance on macro theories of secularization and modernization reproduce an ideal of secular liberal democracy as the standard by which to think about various “Others,” including Muslims. As a result, I claim that he ends up reproducing a soft variety of the “clash of civilizations” thesis by failing to account for the complexity of Muslim identities. In conclusion, I look at alternative models that are better able to historicize and contextualize “Islam” in the past and present, and point to significant gaps that must be filled if his proposals are to be taken seriously.

God in the Enlightenment ed. by William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram

God in the Enlightenment. Edited by William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 322. $34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-19-026708-7.)The familiar image of the Enlightenment as an eighteenth-century movement to clear the way for secular liberal democracy by applying the acid of philosophical critique to the political and institutions of the Old Regime is alive and well. But for several decades it has come under increasing critical scrutiny, notably by historians working to delineate alternative, religious Enlightenments that afford religion a positive role in the genealogy of modernity.This collection of essays, drawn from a 2012 conference at Ohio University and introduced by co-editor William J. Bulman, advances that critical project. Lamenting that none of the and other recent scholarly alternatives to the rigidly secularizing, philosophical Enlightenment has proven compelling enough to replace it as a point of reference in the intractable and inappropriate (p. 31) current debate about the role of religion in public life, Bulman proposes defining the Enlightenment so as to encompass all those alternatives while holding a mirror to the debate itself. His Enlightenment denotes those who deliberated about public religion by employing the sacred and secular philological and historiographical practices characteristic of Renaissance humanism. In response to the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they aimed to establish order, stability, peace, and well-being (p. 18), articulating their views from the perspective of elite secularity: a common recognition, enabled by an influx of reports about the world's diversity, that their proposals needed to be acceptable to people of widely varying types and degrees of belief and unbelief' (p. 19). Familiar from Bulman's 2015 monograph Anglican Enlightenment, this Enlightenment is chronologically and ideologically extremely capacious. It begins in the mid-seventeenth century and can sustain a multitude of mutually exclusive epithets: tolerant and intolerant, authoritarian and democratic, liberal and conservative, pious and atheistic.Bulman's model finds mixed support in the volume's twelve other essays. On the one hand, although few contributors explicitly put its key concepts, causal mechanisms, and chronological boundaries to the test, most offer original and provocative investigations of authors who bear its hallmarks: intellectual indebtedness to the Renaissance and Reformation, and philological or historiographical engagement in debate outside the confines of academic philosophy and theology. On the other hand, some contributors characterize Enlightenment itself in ways that implicitly diverge from Bulman's.The least divergent are those who describe it neutrally, in terms of secular, rational, and philologically oriented discursive principles. …

Shepherding Public Discourse Practices: Homiletic Form Aligned to the Logic Operative in Racial Rhetoric and Public Theological Discourse for Secular Liberal Democracies

Shepherding Public Discourse Practices: Homiletic Form Aligned to the Logic Operative in Racial Rhetoric and Public Theological Discourse for Secular Liberal Democracies

‘Sound Health Starts from Education’: the social construction of obesity in Iranian public health discourse

This paper presents the results of a study exploring official public health discourse surrounding obesity in Iran. Data were obtained from the Iranian Government agency website responsible for public health. Our study contributes to the knowledge about the social construction of public health issues in general, and obesity in particular, in a developing country that subscribes to sociocultural norms and a political economy regime proclaimed to be very different from those in secular liberal democracies. Our analysis reveals noteworthy differences and parallels between obesity discourses emanating from public health officials in the neoliberal West and those currently taking shape in the Iranian context. While a notable lack of emphasis on consumption as a tool of lifestyle change as well as distinctive anxieties regarding modernization and technology characterize obesity discourse in Iran was noted, so was the promotion of individual behaviour change. We discuss the implications of these findings and make recommendations for further research on the public health strategies currently being undertaken to address obesity in Iran and other non-Western contexts.

Islam and Liberal Citizenship

In Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus,Andrew March asks if Muslims can draw on Islamic doctrinal resources tosupport living as a minority in secular liberal democracies? His answer is athoroughly researched and argued “Yes.” This work of political philosophyprovides a cogent rebuttal to the Islamophobic narrative common in certaincircles that Muslims are a fifth column – cuckoo hatchlings waiting for demographicdominance before Islamizing their host nations.The author’s detailed and critical analysis is long overdue, particularlygiven the debates about Muslims in western countries that have polarizedopinions on such issues as France’s “burqa-bans” or the United States’ “waron terror.” There is also a wider context: addressing how religious doctrinescan be subordinated to secular authority, which is asked by others with sacredlaw-based religions, among them Orthodox Jews, Catholics, and Baha’is. Further,for those interested in strengthening commitment to civil society, Marchpresents belief-sourced reasons for supporting the argument that liberaldemocracy can shore up support among the religious faithful who are not necessarilyswayed by secular arguments ...

Negotiating Absence and Presence: Rural Muslims and ‘Subterranean’ Sacred Spaces

. Rural Muslims' lives have received less attention than those of their urban counterparts in secular liberal democracies. Muslims' experiences of rural regions are characterised by a visible absence on the one hand, but a physical presence on the other. In this paper, the concept of the subterranean is invoked to understand the negotiation between superficial absences and physical presence. Conscious of the clandestine associations of the subterranean, it is argued that this illustrates a tactical making-do with limited resources rather than self-segregation. It is concluded that absences and presence in rural multiculturalism are complex, contingent and have a temporal nature.

Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East

The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies, one that guarantees the peaceful coexistence of religiously diverse populations. Enshrined in national constitutions and international laws and treaties, the right to religious liberty promises to ensure two stable goods: (1) the ability to choose one's religion freely without coercion by the state, church, or other institutions; and (2) the creation of a polity in which one's economic, civil, legal, or political status is unaffected by one's religious beliefs. While all members of a polity are supposed to be protected by this right, modern wisdom has it that religious minorities are its greatest beneficiaries and their ability to practice their traditions without fear of discrimination is a critical marker of a tolerant and civilized polity. The right to religious freedom marks an important distinction between liberal secularism and the kind practiced in authoritarian states (such as China, Syria, or the former Soviet Union): while the latter abide by the separation of religion and state (a central principle of political secularism), they also regularly abrogate religious freedoms of their minority and majority populations. Despite claims to religious neutrality, liberal secular states frequently regulate religious affairs but they do so in accord with a strong concern for protecting the individual's right to practice his or her religion freely, without coercion or state intervention.

A Theo-Politics of the (Im)proper: Jacques Derrida vis-à-vis Graham Ward

Scholars from a variety of disciplines have questioned the adequacy of secular liberal democracy as a model for the socio-political, leading to a number of responses. This article examines and critiques the socio-political proposal of the theologian Graham Ward, who argues that theological communities provide the only means of exceeding the play of commodified surfaces in the cultural context of advanced capitalism. The difficulty is that, due to the metaphysical structure around which Ward constructs his theo-political edifice, his proposal leads to a dangerous form of identity politics. The critique of Ward's position is drawn from the thought of Jacques Derrida, who also questions the adequacy of secular liberal democracy. Derrida's religious formulation of the "tout autre" (wholly other) disrupts the metaphysical closure postulated by Ward and leads to an alternative socio-political vision. In contrast to Ward, Derrida's model of the theo-political is defined by the disruption of identity politics.

Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media

Depiction of Muslims in Selected Australian Media

'I am Christiaan Jordan, a White Man': Liberal Anxieties and the Politics of Transition in Sheila Fugard's The Castaways

AbstractThis article assesses the contribution that Sheila Fugard's short novel, The Castaways, makes towards an understanding of the dilemmas of white identity in South Africa during the apogee of white hegemony in the mid 1970s. The novel's protagonist, Christiaan Jordan, is emblematic of a white liberal individual, who acknowledges his/her complicity in the historical violence that has been inflicted on the defeated and colonised indigenous subjects of white rule. Such individuals sought a transition to a more just future, but dreaded the violence that might attend such a transformation. We examine Jordan's embrace of Buddhism as an attempt to evade the logic of violent confrontation, demonstrating the profound difficulties involved in the translation of Buddhist philosophy into political practice. We conclude with an affirmation of the value of secular liberal democracy for the minimization of violent political conflict, despite the imperfections and compromises that this perspective implies.

The choosy reaper

Our increased understanding of the biology of ageing has revived prospects for radical anti‐ageing medicine. Ethicists have often tried to argue against these endeavours, but with little success. Their arguments, which appeal to the natural order, are either circular or self‐defeating. Invoking the invariance of the human condition cuts no ice as rational argument and often turns into an avowedly irrational appeal to the ‘yuk reaction’ that exotic technologies evoke. Does that mean that anti‐mortality technologies are ethically innocuous? Not if we consider the reality of unequal death in today's world, in which differences in longevity highlight the gap between the haves and the have‐nots. Even in affluent societies, in which the basics of food, shelter and medicine are widely available, the grim reaper is very much class conscious. Without returning to the concern for equality that was once the hallmark of the Enlightenment, radical life extension may well add to these existing inequalities, and create more resentment and strife in the future. Many aspects of current biomedical research, especially in the more avant‐garde areas of neuroscience and stem‐cell research, are united under the alluring label ‘regenerative medicine’. These developments fuel legitimate hopes for new treatments of degenerative diseases, which, in an age of increasing longevity, represent the main focal point for prevailing anxieties about ill health and the frailties of old age. But regenerative medicine is often taken more literally to mean rejuvenation—a genuine turning back of the clock—which leads to more florid speculations about massive increases in human lifespan. These futuristic views are often criticized by scientists as daydreams that owe more to science fiction than to a sober appraisal of predictable advances. But they are taken more seriously by a different category of opponents, namely those who condemn these prospects on ethical grounds. For many conservative critics, …

The Interwar Polish Catholic Press on the Jewish Question

Until the very eve of the Holocaust, the Catholic church was engaged in a struggle against what it termed “liberalism,” namely, modern secular democracy and the separation of church and state. This struggle was framed by Catholic leaders as one of Catholic civilization against a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy to de-Christianize Europe. The charge of a Masonic-Jewish conspiracy was a staple of the Catholic press in interwar Poland. The church's efforts to create a Catholic Poland by overturning so-called liberal or Masonic democracy had patent implications for Jews, who were seen as the primary agents and beneficiaries of secularity. This article provides an overview of what the Catholic press wrote about so-called Jewish-Masonic efforts to create a secular Poland and places those writings within the context of the Vatican's crusade against modern secular liberal democracy, a crusade not officially repudiated until the Second Vatican Council—thirty years too late for Poland's Jews.