Secular Movements Research Articles

Religious origins of nationalist movements: The experience of India and the Sudan

AbstractNationalism in Asia and Africa is generally understood as a modern secular movement for independence. However, this idea is contestable. Analysing nationalism in India and the Sudan, this paper argues that nationalist movements there actually had their origins in Islamic religious resistance against the British colonial rule preceding the development of secular nationalism. Depending on political development following the colonial advancement, the secular elite‐led nationalism also largely fostered religious communal nationalism in India and the Sudan. This substantiates the argument that religion never ceased to play the most central role in the nationalist movements in India and the Sudan. Following an inter‐continental approach to study nationalism, this article explores exclusively the connection between religion and the first ever generic nationalist movements in the context of colonialism in India and the Sudan.

A Hermeneutic Approach to the Formation of a Secular Culture in Modern Israel

ABSTRACT The creation of the state of Israel was the outcome of the Zionist movement, which originated in Europe and was itself inspired by fundamental European ideas—Enlightenment, national self-determination, democracy and socialism. From its earliest days Zionism was primarily a secular movement that rejected the religious establishment and religious way of life of the Jews in the Diaspora. In many respects, however, the founders of the state and the principles on which they founded its institutions—the political, judicial, economic, social, and educational—were rooted in the ethical values and cultural practices of the Jewish tradition which they had apparently rejected. To explain this complex process of secularization of a very ancient religious and cultural tradition—which many see as an unresolved or unresolvable conflict between two opposing systems of thought—I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer and especially on his Truth and Method (1960). Culture, according to Gadamer, is a continuous flow of tradition within what he called “the horizon.” People, he argued, create and live within a given cultural tradition, but they are at the same time its interpreters, enlarging it by adopting elements from various cultures and ideologies, or “horizons.” From this hermeneutic perspective, the founders of modern Israel and their successors were the active interpreters of the Jewish tradition within the larger historical context of the European Enlightenment. I illustrate this process of cultural interpretation by focusing on the secularization of the Jewish holidays, specifically on the way the Kibbutz movement, a leading symbol of the new Israel, re-interpretated Jewish holidays like Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Yom Kippur, and gave these religious festivals a secular-Israeli content. However, this dynamic pioneering stage of secularization may be said to have ended by the 1980s. From then on, the secular identity of Israeli society has been undergoing a variety of radical changes.

The religiosity of the secular: the case of self-help

ABSTRACT Religious decline is an oft-repeated fact proposed by secularization-based studies. It stems from the preconceived notion that religion and the secular are against each other. A major problem with this binary is that the secular is considered to be devoid of any religiosity. This paper highlights the opposite avenue of research trodden by a few scholars who have disregarded the said binary and navigated the religiosity of the secular to which far too little attention has been paid. Particularly, this article focuses on the religiosity of self-help which is mostly considered as a secular movement. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is only one study which has empirically examined this topic while it occupies a special place in our understanding of religion. The space in this paper does not allow for a full discussion of the issue. Therefore, it generally highlights the new path to understanding religion and potential points of departure for exploring self-help’s religiosity. Finally, the paper briefly discuses why this topic deserves serious attention.

Contemporary Crustal Movement at the Southern Edge of Central Sikhote-Alin Fault According to GNSS-Observations

The Central Sikhote-Alin Fault (CSAF) is one of the largest tectonic structures in the continental part of the south of the Russian Far East. Its modern geodynamic activity is still very poorly understood, especially by remote sensing methods. The available geological estimates of movements along the CSAR reach several mm/year, however, the available scattered modern geodetic data allow us to state that no displacements exceeding a few mm/year have been detected in the central part of the fault.
 In the present work, based on the data of GNSS observations carried out in the first two decades of the 21st century, the first quantitative estimates of the secular (plate) movements of the Earth's crust in the vicinity of the village of Kievka (Primorsky Krai), located at the southern end of the CSAR, are obtained. Also, in the study area, numerical modeling of the effect of geoenvironment disturbances (co- and postseismic displacements) initiated by the catastrophic Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011, Mw 9.1, was evaluated and performed. The results obtained are in good agreement with the available models of the earthquake source and models of postseismic viscoelastic relaxation of the geoenvironment.

The modern expression of Hongdao Yuan 's aesthetic thought in Art

Since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, a romantic trend of thought has been aroused in the field of literature and art, baptized by Yangming Wang's mind study, the self-centered aesthetic trend advocated by scholars and officials, affirmed the natural emotions of individuals, publicized the individuality, and constructed the artistic creation principles and evaluation system with self-centered. This aesthetic ideological trend develops a secular movement based on the affirmation of the natural needs of people, which can be summarized as "transforming elegance into vulgarity", advocates sexual spirit, attaches importance to individual and freedom, and has the atmosphere of ideological liberation. Hongdao Yuan's one of the representatives of this ideological movement. This paper explores Hongdao Yuan's modernity in art through the study of his aesthetic thoughts.

Radical Secularism and Worldview Dilemmas in Countering Sectarianism in Lebanon

Through an analysis of Lebanon, this article investigates the secularism dilemma, namely, that secularism often leads to the politicization of religion and a high risk of conflict. Although this is the case in Lebanon, Lebanese political activists and youth movements advocate for secularism as the only alternative to the present consociational political system. The article introduces the worldview theory of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers and deconstructs the concept of secularism by focusing on philosophical and anthropological academic debates on the topic. The goal is to discover why Lebanese support of secular movements and parties is remarkably limited despite the massive support of civil society for a radical critique of the present political system. The article ends with a discussion of two concepts: “radical secularism,” coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor; and “asecular power,” introduced by the anthropologist Hussein al Agrama. It concludes that the Lebanese case teaches us that the relation been worldviews and secularism must be reformulated in new ways to solve the secularism dilemma.

دعاوى تحرير المرأة

هدفت الدراسة إلى بيان دعاوى تحرير المرأة وتناولت أيضًا مفهومها ونشأتها والتحدث عن أبرز دعاتها وبيان حرية المرأة والأفكار والمعتقدات التي دعا إليها دعاة التحرر والشبه المثارة حولها. ومن أبرز ما توصلت إليه الدراسة أن مفهوم تحرير المرأة إنما هو حركة علمانية ظهرت في بداية القرن التاسع عشر في بلاد مصر العربية، ويعتبر ميزان التحرر عند دعاة التحرير هو أن تتحرر المرأة من أمر ربها وتعصي الله سبحانه وتعالى.

The Impact of Foreign Salafi -Jihadists on Islamic Developments in Chechnya and Dagestan

This article intends to revisit the role of foreign fi ghters in the Chechen war and its aftermath, looking particularly at their impact on Islamic developments in Chechnya and Dagestan during the 1990s–2010s. The article challenges the argument, which is predominant in the literature, that foreign jihadists were primarily responsible for transforming the Chechen insurgency from a secular movement into a religious one. Instead, it argues that Islamist tendencies and Salafi circles were present in the North Caucasus before the outbreak of the First Chechen war. Secondly, this article contends that local Salafi jamaats, in conjunction with foreign jihadist fi ghters, provided the mobilization structures and the ideological framing for the radicalization of the Chechen/ North Caucasus rebel movement. By examining the Salafi -jihadist discourse of both foreign and local Salafi s operating in Chechnya and Dagestan in the 1990s and 2000s, the article shows how foreign Salafi s infl uenced and helped shape the ideological framing of local Salafi politicians and rebel jihadist groups. Yet, this article also shows that many of these Salafi -jihadist projects failed to gain broader societal support. They did not resonate with the local populations in Chechnya and Dagestan in the 1990s–2000s. A fi nal section of this article looks at events in the past decade, particularly at developments since the emergence of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In this context, the article explains why many young Muslims in Dagestan became themselves foreign fi ghters and travelled to Syria/Iraq to fi ght for and live in the Islamic State. It concludes that Salafi projects, although not indigenous to the region, prospered as a result of the interaction between local Salafi s and foreign jihadist fi ghters and recruiters.

Secular feminism in Tunisia: a political generations approach

ABSTRACT We argue that the ‘youth movements’ of the Arab uprisings are better understood through a political generations framework that shifts the analytical lens away from a transitional stage towards a collective identity forged as the result of a major event. We identify a pre-revolutionary generation of feminists, a political generation of the revolution – those who, as a result of the revolution identified themselves as feminist for the first time and, consequently, founded or joined a feminist organization – and an incipient generation of feminists, that emerged from the recent protests marking the 10th anniversary of the revolution. We demonstrate how the revolution created a new political generation of secular feminists that can be distinguished from pre-revolutionary feminism along four important lines: state feminism; decolonization; intersectionality; and their perspective on and use of the term gender. We conclude with a discussion of the fragmentation of the secular feminist movement.

From the post-industrial prophecy to the de-industrial nightmare: Stagnation, the manufacturing fetish and the limits of capitalist wealth

The post-2008 era saw a return of the manufacturing fetish, the idea that manufacturing constitutes the flywheel of growth without which no nation can thrive. Across the Global North and South, voices are calling to reverse deindustrialization and revive manufacturing. While today deindustrialization is met with anxiety, in the 1930s economists predicted deindustrialization but interpreted it as a liberating process leading to a post-industrial age based on material abundance and widespread economic security. Far from delivering this vision, deindustrialization actually produces a precarious economic order driven by labour precarity, economic stagnation and lost development opportunities for the Global South. What can be termed the Baumolian and Kaldorian frameworks, attribute this precarious reality to services’ inability to replace manufacturing as a growth engine given their technologically stagnant nature. However, this article argues that, by focusing on the technical aspects of service economies, such views overlook the social limits of the capitalist economy and its historically specific conception of wealth, value. As capitalism matures, productivity becomes an increasingly inadequate form of augmenting social wealth as it results in great increases in physical output but counterintuitively undermines the expansion of value. Capitalism is underpinned by a secular movement towards declining dynamism, as it increasingly struggles to maintain its former economic vigour. Stagnation and heightened labour precarity are not merely the product of tertiarization but symptoms of capitalism’s declining trajectory.

5Religion and Representation

AbstractIn recent years, the relationship between religion and representation has been examined with particular intensity in the field of modernist studies, to which all books reviewed in this chapter have contributed. It is telling that three of them are devoted to Virginia Woolf, whose firm rejection of patriarchal Christianity and the established church has for years been considered a prime example of modernism’s hostility to religion. New scholarship on Woolf, religion, and spirituality offers a much more nuanced view of her engagement with Christian culture and illustrates the wealth of new methodological developments in the field of modernist studies. The review opens with a discussion of the recent religious turn in modernist studies, situating it within the expansion of the field connected to the emergence of the new modernist studies. Subsequently, it examines four new books that contribute to scholarship on modernism and religion. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. The New Modernist Studies and Religion; 2. Jane de Gay, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture; 3. Stephanie Paulsell, Religion Around Virginia Woolf; 4. Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf, edited by Kristina K. Groover; 5. Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism. The books reviewed illustrate the scope and depth of new research into modernism and religion, offering a fresh critical perspective that challenges the widely accepted view of modernism as a purely secular movement.

Desecularising the postcolonial resistance: the role of Islamic spirituality in the framing of Moroccan anticolonial thought

ABSTRACT It is worth noting that Marxist and secular forms of resistance have been given much priority in postcolonial discourse. We find that almost all prominent postcolonial works produced in the 1980s and 1990s celebrated the secular and Marxist nature of anticolonial liberation struggles. This emanates from the fact that the concept of resistance within postcolonialism has been defined in secular terms. Postcolonial historians and critics marginalised the role of religious anticolonial movements in favour of secular, nationalist and Marxist liberation movements. It is ‘odd’ that postcolonialism did not devote some space for Islam and anticolonial Islamic liberation movements. However, the post-9/11 global resurgence of religion has prompted postcolonial studies to re-open the question of the sacred. Because 9/11 has provoked an upsurge of spirituality and religion worldwide, postcolonialism has entered the ‘God debate’ and postcolonial writers have started to investigate the multiple roles religion played in the imperial project. In this sense, this article sheds light on the role Islam played in shaping Moroccan anticolonial consciousness. It presents Islam – Salafism and Sufism - as a mobilising ideology for the anticolonial liberation movement in Morocco. In other words, being aware of the fact that the future of postcolonialism is the return to the past as well as of the growing interest in religion within postcolonialism, in this essay I am going to desecularise the postcolonial resistance by highlighting the theological origins of Moroccan nationalist movement and attempting to incorporate North African anticolonial spirituality into the realm of postcolonial studies.

The HaZor'im Organization: Religious Pioneers in the Lower Galilee between 1937–1947

The HaZor’im settlement in the Lower Galilee, associated with the HaPo’el HaMizraḥi movement, was founded by religious pioneers from Europe. This article demonstrates that members of the HaZor’im organization were unable to fully realize their dream of combining the study of Torah with working the soil in the Land of Israel – “Torah and Labor” – that they had envisioned when they were on the training farm in Europe. Much has been written about the pioneering settlements of the secular labor movement, but there has been relatively little research about the pioneering religious settlements. This article seeks to address that lacuna by answering questions such as why the HaZor’im group was a dominant one throughout the Land of Israel. How could they realistically expect to create a viable settlement movement in Israel without faith in the righteousness of their choices and lacking social cohesion based on pioneering-religious ideology? The story of HaZor’im illustrates the worldview of religious Zionism during the British Mandate. The members were pioneers of the fifth Aliyah who faced social, economic, and religious difficulties. They collaborated in formulating and writing their ideological views, as well as in shaping a coherent work program for their activities on the land. The group began their venture in the Land of Israel in a labor camp near Rishon LeZion, then settled in the Galilee on land they received from other settlers. This study examines the difficulties they faced and shows how their conceptual world was expressed in practice.

Why Did US Firms Change Since the Early-2000s? The Mass-Multinationalization Implication of Aggregate Fluctuation

Multiple dimensional shifts related to firm-level multinationalization spill over to the aggregate realm as an unusually large mass of US firms multinationalized in the late-1990s. Firms become considerably different in many aspects as they transform into multinational enterprises (MNEs), providing a firm-dynamics foundation for the otherwise secular aggregate fluctuations. The mass-multinationalization hypothesis jointly explains a series of recently raised macro-finance puzzles, including (1) decreasing investment relative to q and profitability, (2) increasing intangible investment, (3) increasing concentration, (4) decreasing labor and capital shares, and (5) market power. The mass-multinationalization looks to be triggered by an increasing incentive of integrating foreign value chains to sell US products and services. The mass-multinationalization hypothesis is a novel, straightforward, and action-based mechanism explaining the joint secular movements, and it does not depend on proposed alternative explanations.

Retirement Without God: Activism and Community Among Secular People Over 60

There are more than 1,400 nonbeliever communities in the United States and well over a dozen organizations that advocate for secular people on the national level. Together, these local and national groups comprise a social movement that includes atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other kinds of nonbelievers. Despite the fact that retired people over 60 dedicate most of the money and energy needed to run these groups, the increasingly vast literature on secular people and secularism has paid them almost no attention. Relying on more than one hundred interviews (including dozens with people over 60), several years of ethnographic research, and a survey of organized nonbelievers, this paper demonstrates the crucial role that people over 60 play in the American secular movement today. It also considers the reasons older adults are so important to these groups, the challenges they face in trying to recruit younger members and combat stereotypes about aging leadership, and generational differences that structure how various types of nonbeliever groups look and feel. This paper reframes scholarly understandings of very secular Americans by focusing on people over 60 and charts a new path in secular studies.

Between Islam and Islamophobia

AbstractWe use data from qualitative interviews with forty atheist activists in two Canadian cities to analyze the politics of critiquing Islam in the contemporary political environment. We show that atheist activists struggle to navigate between their criticisms of Islam, their fears of being labeled “Islamophobic” (taken as a synonym for “racist” or “xenophobic”), and their concerns about contributing to anti-Muslim rhetoric. To manage this struggle, atheists rely on stigma management tactics that allow them to hold or express criticisms of Islam without earning racially charged stigmatizing labels. Using these stigma management techniques speaks to the precarious positions of many atheists today as they try to critique Islam without expressing or contributing to prejudicial views against Muslims. This article will interest scholars of religion and nonreligion, especially those interested in the perceived stigmas associated with atheism and stigma management among members of secular movement organizations.

The Fluidity of Chechnya’s Conflicts: From Nationalism to Jihad to Supra-Regional Jihad

The study of the Chechen wars that shaped the North Caucasus following the Soviet Union’s demise is much ploughed terrain. While the first Chechen war (1994–1996) received a secular narrative, seeking national self-determination, the second war (1999–2009) propelled a religious narrative. One critical question remains unanswered. Challenging established interpretations, a third wave of Russo-Chechen violence emerged, manifested in increasing numbers of Chechens fighting Russian forces and their allies in the ongoing Syrian conflict. The latest wave begs the question how a secular independence movement evolved in such a way as to develop first regional and subsequently supra-regional religious overtones? Examining the temporal phases of Chechnya’s conflicts as a continuum, rather than piecemeal, identifies an underlying structure that explains the development of the conflicts’ key issues and changes. Fundamentally, within-case process tracing demonstrates that horizontal inequalities () between Russians and Chechens, i.e. unequal access to economic assets as well as political, social and cultural participation explain the violence (). Accounting for the ubiquity of and the conflict’s political environment, I expand the chain of causality that turns into by so-called power ideas (), i.e. ideas about how political power should be organised, such as nationalism or Islamism. Departing from the causal role of , I examine the role of in transforming secular nationalism into regional and supra-regional jihad. The mechanism of transition has thus far confounded strategists and planners. My study will establish a clear historical narrative that illuminates this previously elusive metamorphosis and present a sharper, clearly defined picture of the causes of a conflict transiting multiple stages and just as many interpretations. Ultimately it offers potential to yield schematic findings with conceivably significant implications for other contemporary conflicts.

Solving the Mystery of Crypto’s Bubble

Blockchain is the vehicle on which cryptocurrencies run, and it can’t be regulated by any legal entity during its operation.The huge growth in various cryptocurrency segments in 10 years has created the controversy of an inevitable bubble. A bubble can be generated either by queer herd behaviour or logical secular movement. Traces of evident bubbles have been a certainty and they take the perceived valuation of crypto to figures far away from its true value. This sudden diversion can be lethal due to the illogical, irrational propensity of regular market participants. This study observes ten cryptos under surveillance from September 2014 to August 2019. The selected ten (Monero, Bitcoin, XRP Ripple, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Monacoin, Ethereum, Bytecoin, Digibite, Potcoin) cryptocurrencies were studied for the last five years using Right Tailed ADF Test. Prominent traces of the rational bubble in all the underlying cryptocurrencies were found and have been considered for the study.

Transhumanism and Christianity

Abstract Although supporters of transhumanism present their agenda as a secular movement that specifically challenges the basic ontological and ethical premises of Christian metaphysics, there are also techno-progressive thinkers who claim that Christians should endorse a moderate version of biotechnological human enhancement. The main objective of this essay is to scrutinise this claim by outlining the relationship between transhumanism and Christian anthropology from the perspective of Joseph Ratzinger’s thought. The order of this analysis is constituted by three steps: first, I will critically analyse Benedikt Paul Göcke’s main arguments in favor of a Christian transhumanism; secondly, I will discuss the normative foundation of the techno-progressive agenda with regard to Ratzinger’s/Benedict XVI’s critique of the modern concept of freedom and its anthropological implication – the technological “new man”; finally, I will refer the notion of the posthuman to Ratzinger’s theo-evolutionary image of Jesus Christ as the “man of the future.”

Dynamic Diurnal Changes in Green Algae Biomass in the Southern Yellow Sea Based on GOCI Images

Macroalgae blooms of Ulva prolifera have occurred every summer in the southern Yellow Sea since 2007, inducing severe ecological problems and huge economic losses. Genesis and secular movement of green algae blooms have been well monitored by using remote sensing and other methods. In this study, green algae were detected and traced by using Geostationary Ocean Color Imager (GOCI), and a novel biomass estimation model was developed from the relationship between biomass measurements and previously published satellite-derived biomass indexes. The results show that the green algae biomass can be determined most accurately with the biomass index of green algae for GOCI (BIGAG), which is calculated from the Rsurf data that had been atmospherically corrected by ENVI/QUAC method. For the first time, dynamic changes in green algae biomass were studied over an hourly scale. Short-term biomass changes were highly influenced by Photosynthetically Available Radiation (PAR) and tidal phases, but less by sea surface temperature variations on a daily timescale. A new parameter of biomass changes (PBC), calculated by the ratio of the biomass growth rate to movement velocity, could provide an effective way to assess and forecast green tide in the southern Yellow Sea and similar areas.