Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age

Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age

Previous Publications

Linell E. Cady Linell E. Cady and Sheldon W. Simon, eds. Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence, 2007. Linell E. Cady and Delwin Brown, eds. Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain, 2002. Linell E. Cady. Religion, Theology, and American Public Life, 1993.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations, 2008.

Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age

Edited by

Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

COMPARATIVE SECULARISMS IN A GLOBAL AGE

Copyright © Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–62124–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Comparative secularisms in a global age / edited by Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. p. cm. Chiefly proceedings of a series of conferences held 2007–2009. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–62124–4 (alk. paper) 1. Secularism—Comparative studies. 2. Religion and politics— Comparative studies. 3. Secularism—Congresses. 4. Religion and politics—Congresses. I. Cady, Linell Elizabeth, 1952– II. Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, 1970– BL2747.8.C645 2010 211⬘.6—dc22

2009036683

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Part I

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Interpreting Secularisms

Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity: An Introduction Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd 1. Hermeneutics and the Politics of Secularism Andrew Davison 2. Manifestations of the Religious-Secular Divide: Self, State, and the Public Sphere Nilüfer Göle

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Part II History and Global Politics of Secularisms: France, United States, Turkey, and India 3. The Evolution of Secularism in France: Between Two Civil Religions Jean Baubérot Translated from French by Pavitra Puri 4. Secularism and Security: France, Islam, and Europe Yolande Jansen 5. The God-in-the-Constitution Controversy: American Secularisms in Historical Perspective Tisa Wenger 6. Varieties of Legal Secularism Winnifred Fallers Sullivan 7. Public-Private Distinctions, the Alevi Question, and the Headscarf: Turkish Secularism Revisited Markus Dressler

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87 107

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Contents

8. Assertive Secularism in Crisis: Modernity, Democracy, and Islam in Turkey E. Fuat Keyman

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9. The “Secular Ideal” before Secularism: A Preliminary Sketch Rajeev Bhargava

159

10. Indian Secularism: A Religio-Secular Ideal T. N. Madan

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11. Not Quite Secular Political Practice Zoya Hasan

197

Part III

Secularisms Refracted through Religions

12. Islam and Secularism Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im

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13. Secularism and Heterodoxy Gauri Viswanathan

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14. Reading Secularism through a Theological Lens Linell E. Cady

247

Bibliography

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Contributors

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Index

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Preface and Acknowledgments

This volume emerged from a multiyear project on the history and politics of secularism and the public role of religion in France, India, Turkey, and the United States. The aim was to illuminate the distinctive formations and traditions of secularism in their varying relations to religion in these selected countries. The rationale was that exploring these multiple formations in comparative and global perspective would shed light on the dynamics and dangers of the reigning public narratives about the interface of religion and secularism, from the “culture wars” within countries to the purported “clash of civilizations” globally. The motivation was to foster fresh thinking on secularism, and its interface with religion, from new collaborations—across disciplines, across countries, and across traditions. The book grew out of series of international conferences at which most of these chapters were originally presented. The first conference, “Religion, Secularism, and Democracy: Competing Narratives, Alternative Models” was held at Arizona State University in March 2007. The second conference, “The History and Politics of Secularism,” was held in Istanbul in July 2008, and the third conference, “Religious Freedom, Pluralism, and Secularism,” was held near Delhi in January 2009. This broadly comparative project has benefitted from the insights and advice of many individuals. We are especially grateful to the rest of the international advisory team of scholars whose counsel and participation in the conferences greatly enhanced the project. They include Rajeev Bhargava, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi; José Casanova, Georgetown; and Nilüfer Göle, Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Thanks as well to Charles Taylor for being a central participant in the international conferences. As the project director, Linell Cady would like to express appreciation to the many individuals who offered ideas and suggestions in its planning stages. In the United States, these include Hussein Agrama, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Talal Asad, Sam Cherribi, Miriam Elman, Sumit Ganguly, David Jacobson, Gary Laderman, Richard Martin, James Morone, Gyanendra Pandey, Kathleen Sands, Gauri Viswanathan, and Hakan

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Yavuz; and in Istanbul Ayse Kadioglu and Binnaz Toprak and her colleagues in Political Science at Bogazici University. In Paris, Mohammed Arkoun, Sihem Habchi, and Eve Livet generously shared their time and insights. In India, many thanks to Anne Feldhaus and the late Rajendra Vora, to whom this volume is dedicated, for providing a wonderful introduction to life in Pune and the opportunities to discuss this project with a broad range of people. Thanks as well to Neera Chandhoke, Gopal Guru, Niraja Jayal, Shail Mayaram, and Praveen Swami. This project could not have taken place without the support and contributions of Linell’s ASU colleagues, especially John Carlson and Tracy Fessenden who have been involved with this project from its inception. Thanks also to Sally Kitch, Jacqueline Martinez, Angelita Reyes, Shahla Talebi, George Thomas, Margaret Walker, and Carolyn Warner for their insights. Carolyn Forbes and Laurie McKinny of ASU’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict provided essential administrative and organizational support for the project and the international conferences, a daunting responsibility when carried out from another continent. Thanks to Zeynep Kilic, Rajeshwari Balasbramanian, and Sruthi Muraleedharan for providing onsite conference support. Kelly Fitzsimmons, Beverly Lucas, and Ramazan Kilinc provided helpful research assistance at various stages. We are especially grateful to Matt Correa for the research support he provided throughout the project, and for his invaluable help in preparing the manuscript for publication. We would also like to thank Andrew Johnston for his assistance with the cover image. The cover photo shows one of two separate staircases, originally for men and women, in the Trustees’ Office in Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. This is where people from outside the religious community came to conduct business with the Shakers. The project was supported by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation to the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. We are indebted to Connie Buchanan, formerly of the Ford Foundation, for her enthusiastic support of a large international project that would bring together scholars from many disciplines and many countries for these conversations. We are grateful to Sheila Davaney, now at the Ford Foundation, not only for her continued support of this project, but also for her significant participation and intellectual contributions to it. Thanks also to Ganesan Balachander and Bishnu Mohapatra, both formerly of the Ford Foundation’s office in Delhi, for their suggestions and contributions to this project. Most of all, we would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their interest and efforts in advancing this conversation across so many borders.

Part I

Interpreting Secularisms

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Comparative Secularisms and the Politics of Modernity: An Introduction Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Introduction In mid-nineteenth century England, George Holyoake coined the term “secularism” to name an orientation to life designed to attract both theists and atheists under its banner. Impatient with positions defined in opposition to traditional Christian belief, such as atheist, infidel, or dissenter, Holyoake dreamed of a new formation, rallying around the “work of human improvement,” that would not be splintered by these older divisions.1 He needed a positive philosophy, one that was not parasitic on what was being rejected. His 1854 Principles of Secularism aspired to give voice to such an alternate vision. Its signature features were its appeal to reason, nature, and experience and its passionate commitment to the amelioration of human life. Although it clearly differed from forms of traditional Christianity that invoked clerical or scriptural authorities or focused on supernatural means and otherworldly ends, secularism, as Holyoake fashioned it, was not the antithesis of religion or one side of a religion-secularism binary. It was a canopy large enough to house some forms of religion as it excluded others. Its capaciousness was one of its defining virtues. For Holyoake a strategic advantage of his newly coined label was the way it riffed on the term “secular” in the Western Christian imaginary. Within a Christian theological framework the secular identifies the temporal and worldly in distinction from, though in relationship to, the eternal and spiritual. By appropriating a term “found and respected in the dictionaries of opponents” Holyoake hoped to underscore the shared resonances.2 A revealing tension runs through Holyoake’s manifesto for secularism, a tension that, as we shall see, surfaces repeatedly in its subsequent appropriations. There is, on the one hand, his big tent strategy aimed at identifying common ground across diverse constituencies for shared transformative aspirations. He identified principles that were, he argued,

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rooted in nature and evident to reason and so provable and appropriately public. Secularism, he wrote, is the “unity of principle which prevails amid whatever diversity of opinion may subsist in a Secular Society.”3 In this trajectory Holyoake envisioned secularism as a module that potentially coordinated with a variety of philosophies and religious traditions, rather than as an oppositional alternative to them. Hence while he rejected religious traditions as authoritative for belief or practice, he welcomed them as “raw materials” for thought and even “high wisdom for our reverence.”4 There was, however, another far less accommodating strain running through his treatise on secularism. It surfaced, for example, when he endorsed secularism as a “policy of life to those who do not accept theology,” or suggested that secularism replaces theology because it “rejoices in this life” rather than fixates on another.5 In this trajectory secularism is envisioned less as a shared orientation around which a variety of more comprehensive visions might assemble, than a competing intellectual and moral vision, committed to atheism and materialism. Charles Bradlaugh, another principal leader of the secularist movement in nineteenth-century England, spearheaded this alternate strain. A revealing entry on secularism in the 1920 edition of Hasting’s Encyclopedia on Religion called attention to these dual currents, challenging the theoretical coherence of Holyoake’s rendition and championing the greater consistency and social impact of Bradlaugh’s antireligious and triumphalist version.6 We can read Holyoake as negotiating with the tensions of these currents, struggling to fashion a modest, pragmatic, and flexible variant of secularism against countervailing pressures. In the past century and a half, secularism as an ideological formation and set of related legal, cultural, and political practices has emerged as a defining characteristic of modern democratic societies. Throughout most of the twentieth century the conventional understanding has been that modern democracies are secular democracies, with little attention devoted to parsing the competing strains and dissenting elements of various forms of secularism. The feature story has been the clean and principled divide between the secular public and the private religious, which theists and atheists could presumably embrace regardless of their differing assessments of the fate and fortunes of religion. At a minimum the secular public was explicitly focused on the institutions and authority of the state, in distinction from those of religion. But this relatively circumscribed rendition of secularism attending to religion/state formations mingled with other more comprehensive renditions that positioned secularism as a supercessionary alternative to religions. Secularism remained secure, so long as the consensus that religion belongs within the private sphere remained in place.

An Introduction

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This consensus, never as pervasive as many scholarly and public narratives once led us to believe, has now fractured. Secularism has increasingly lost its largely taken for granted status as shared public discourse and space, with its accompanying inflections of neutrality and universality. No longer the unarticulated given, whose invisibility confers much of its power, secularism stands exposed and, in many contexts, opposed. Disputes over the nature and legitimacy of the secular state and society have exploded in recent decades across the globe. Religious actors and movements are challenging, and sometimes violently resisting, the secularist settlements that have come to dominate politics and public policy in a range of democratic states. Today we find ourselves, like Holyoake, stuck in a binary, although now it is secularism, its powers of mediation receding, that increasingly anchors one pole of a religion-secular divide. The dominant map of the religion-secular landscape pictures their clear separation, a visual representation of the Western metanarrative of modernity that charts the progressive differentiation of spheres, including science, the economy, and politics, that emerge from the control of religion. This map faithfully represents the links between modernity and secularization in the Western social imaginary. Although a far more parochial and prescriptive story than its narrators ever imagined, it continues to inform public and scholarly discourses on religion. Perhaps most influential is the manner in which this story works to sustain an oppositional construction of the categories of religion and the secular. In so doing, the insulation and isolation of religion and the secular are foregrounded, rather than their mutually interacting transformations. By functioning as a static snapshot and not a moving picture, the dominant map sustains the presumption that religion and the secular are readily distinguished in modern democratic societies. Some wield this map as a weapon in defense of modernity under siege by regressive religious forces, and others use it as a rallying cry to mobilize against a creeping secularism hostile to religious visions and values. Others reject the map entirely, denouncing it as a tool of colonial or postcolonial power to reshape all territory in its image. Clearly, the map does not provide an adequate picture of the conflicts and conundrums at the religion-secular boundary, nor a compass for moving past the polarizing discourses surrounding it.

Aims and Approach of the Volume This book takes up the challenge of rethinking secularism for our time. We approach secularism as a series of constantly evolving and contested processes of defining and remaking religion in public space, instead of a static “solution” to the challenges posed by religious and political

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difference. Rather than see secularization as resulting from a transfer of authority away from religion, various modes of secularism provide different spaces for religion, with the latter understood to be plural in form and always internally contested.7 Driven by the conviction that we have too long been beguiled by a single picture of secularism, the volume aims to explore variations that our dominant map of the religion/secular landscape fails to illuminate. To rethink secularism in this increasingly globalized era, it is critical to explore its formations, and its contestations, in multiple contexts. In this volume we focus on four country cases, France, India, Turkey, and the United States. Focusing on these cases foregrounds diverse formations of secularism, as each relates to religion, illuminating their specific historical and cultural roots as well as their broader global interactions. The empirical focus of the volume and sustained attention to four country cases is one of its distinctive features. Studying secularism “from the ground up” in concrete historical and contemporary circumstances, as this collection seeks to do, draws attention to the fact that we are not simply engaging disembodied ideas and visions, but ways of life, disciplinary practices, habits and sensibilities associated with various formations and traditions of secularism, many of which have become a heated battleground for religious-secular politics. We chose this particular set of countries for several reasons. Intense public controversies over the nature of the secular state and society, and the public role of religion, have emerged in each of these countries, generating lively, even acrimonious debates around the politics of religion and secularism. In addition, each of these countries embodies a distinctive conflictual history of secularism worthy of comparative study, and allows for intellectually productive points of contrast as well as interesting commonalities. Finally, the interactions between and among these countries are also significant, and go a long way toward illuminating the transnational, even global nature of secularist politics as various formations of the secular circulate, collide, gain and lose cultural and political footholds in diverse contexts. This set of countries also includes four different dominant religious traditions (Hinduism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism) that, as we shall see, pose distinctive challenges and possibilities in relation to secularism. By focusing on these cases, in relation to transnational and global dynamics, the collection provides the reader with multiple lenses with which to interpret the politics surrounding the religion-secular divide and, hopefully, recognize the limits of this binary and the ways in which both politics and religion confuse and confound it. The idea is to read each formation of secularism through the prism of another, and in so doing to gain new insights and perspectives on our own and others’

An Introduction

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practices. It is to develop an ear for their variations, their contingencies, and the particular conditions, both material and otherwise, which enable and constrain them. Through this process it becomes possible to counter the pervasive tendency to privilege a single model of secularism, and use it as the norm against which others are judged as either adequate or deficient. This is a process, as Andrew Davison describes it, of decentering; its aim is not to substitute an alternative model as the norm. It is an expansive interpretive move that helps to “reveal the limits of social theory perpetually steadied within the archetypal models of European experience,” critical in an increasingly globalized age. Indeed one of the interpretive challenges taken up by a number of the chapters concerns the relationship between forms of secularism and the West. It is clear that secularism is not only or essentially Western as the cases of Turkey and India illustrate. The “civilizing mission” of Western colonialism and modernism, as Nilüfer Göle observes, has certainly shaped Indian and Turkish secularisms, but they are not mere replicas of Western secularisms. They are, as the chapters concur, distinctive formations that cannot be reduced to the Western models. In fact as Rajeev Bhargava argues in his chapter, forms of political secularity may have existed in India before secularism. Seeking to excavate the historical and conceptual resources without which modern Indian secularism would not have taken the form it did, Bhargava identifies a series of “cultural spaces” where ideas and practices associated with individual choice, equality, and toleration emerged in multiple Indian traditions. Conversely, dimensions of secularism in the West also reflect influences from non-Western traditions, as Gauri Viswanathan indicates in her exploration of popular spiritual movements such as Theosophy, which drew deeply from Indian traditions. Similarly, Bhargava suggests that while Europeans may have come to embrace the idea of toleration of other Christian sects from their own experience the “conceptual space for the idea of impartiality toward all faiths” emerged first in India and was transmitted to Europe through colonial encounters and the legacies inherited from the polities of colonial subjects. The chapters underscore that norms and forms of secularism are forged and sustained through a range of power relations, including state-society relations, discourses of democratization, gender relations, nationalist projects and politics, religious and theological imperatives, and colonial and postcolonial interactions. Context-specific analyses of secularism reveal its implications in a variety of other forms of politics, including transnational politics, personal identities, nationalist politics, and the politics of securitization, as Yolande Jansen’s chapter underscores in her discussion of the relation between laïcité and the securitization of Muslim minorities in France.

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Although expanding the range of secularisms with which we are familiar is a critical step in decentering Eurocentric visions and versions, our objective goes beyond merely cataloguing the variety of secularisms extant in these four countries. We are interested, that is, in more than expanding our knowledge about multiple forms of secularism, although doing so is critical to our larger normative and constructive concerns. This volume pushes these discussions further by bringing together empirical, analytic, and normative reflection to contribute to fresh thinking about the interface of the religious and the secular within and between these countries. Although we remain sympathetic to particular calls for secularism in certain historical epochs and contemporary situations, we are also faced with the challenge of developing concepts, coining terms and identifying practices that work outside of the limitations that claims to the secular or the religious as oppositional constructs often impose in particular times and places. To address secularism and religion from new perspectives, and to foster new thinking that goes beyond the terms of current debates and received understandings about these categories and the distinctions between them is our larger aim. In taking up this challenge and encouraging this new thinking, this volume brings together a diversity of disciplinary approaches and insights from the social sciences and the humanities. Such a cross-disciplinary conversation is essential if we are to move beyond the constraints of the history and politics of the disciplinary specializations of the modern university, which in many instances reflect the kinds of institutional habits and traditions that our work problematizes. The disciplinary divisions, their assumptions, and methods are all deeply implicated in the religion/ secular discursive formations that we seek to explore. For instance, in Europe the emergence of the social sciences in the latter decades of the nineteenth century reflected the university’s institutional embodiment of the Western narrative of secularization, with its emphasis upon the differentiation of the spheres of the market, society, and politics, separate from the dominance of religion. Economics, sociology, and political science developed as academic disciplines devoted to theorizing these newly secularized domains. These disciplines, as Tomoko Masuzawa explains, took Western societies as the object of inquiry and in many ways as the norm, while anthropology and Orientalism arose to study “the rest.”8 A religion/secular fault line is expressed and reproduced through the disciplinary divide, reflecting European struggles to define what it means to be modern and secular in relation to a complex and multifaceted cultural and religious inheritance. Anthropology and Orientalism “promoted and bolstered the presumption that this thing called ‘religion’ still held sway over all those who were unlike them: non-Europeans, Europeans of the premodern past, and among their own contemporary neighbors, the

An Introduction

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uncivilized and uneducated bucolic population as well as the superstitious urban poor, all of whom were something of ‘savages within.’ ”9 In contrast, political science, sociology, and economics promoted a model of the modern secular self and society in the West, screening out or compartmentalizing what they defined as “religion” from their studies and theories. Secularization theory attained paradigmatic status within the social sciences in the twentieth century, imprinting these disciplines with ideological and prescriptive features that were hidden within purportedly objective categories and explanatory frameworks.10 These disciplines, working with a liberal model of the human, as independent and rational, and aspiring to be a science, privileged law-like generalizations regarding human behavior. Pursuing objective knowledge, premised on the view from nowhere, eclipsed attention to intersubjective meanings, visions, and values that constituted human experience for both individuals and societies. Religion, identified with the parochial and the private, was essentially kept off the radar screen, as was recognition of the manner in which a particular and historically contingent religion/secular classification helped to make this so. Although the study of religion can redress up to a point this lack of attention to secularism’s “other,” it is essential to recognize the extent to which it bears the imprint of the same secularist academic tradition. This is a function of the modern configuration of its organizational principle and focus. “The modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning,” as Masuzawa observes, “a discourse of secularization,” a “discourse of othering.”11 The move to define religion was in large part to demarcate and contain it, separating it from the domains of power, politics, and scientific knowledge. In tracing the emergence of the modern understandings of religion and the secular, Talal Asad calls attention to their mutual construction. The secularizing of the state and scientific study occurs with the “construction of religion as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practiced in one’s spare time. This construction of religion ensures that it is part of what is inessential to our common politics, economy, science, and morality.”12 This trajectory did not preclude participants within the diverse religious traditions, Western and non-Western, from making religious discourse their own, and finding their own motivations for reforming and advancing it. The move to corral and contain religion also makes possible its privileging and defense.13 Despite the Western, and specifically Christian, roots of the term secular (which is derived from the Latin word saeculum meaning “of the age”),14 the globalization of this vernacular, and in some cases of the secular/religious binary itself, has involved, as we shall see, a variety of

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local appropriations, contestations, transformations, and even head-on collisions. This is evident, for example, in the chapters on India which not only show religion to be a “basic sociological and political fact about India today” but also highlight the distinctive features of Indian secularism that refract its local traditions and political challenges. What we seek to illuminate is this interplay and overlap between forms of secularism and projects of remaking religion, a dynamic that includes both religious and secularist impulses and aims. The secularist imprint on the field of religious studies can be glimpsed by considering the manner in which its own academic legitimacy occurred in and through its opposition to theology, an older, once central discipline that self-consciously retained its roots within the Christian tradition.15 By positioning itself as objective and public over and against theology, which was deemed confessional and parochial and bound to a single religious tradition, religious studies secured entry into the modern university—and in the American context theology was relegated to seminaries and divinity schools charged with the training of ministers. One feature of this disciplinary formation, at least until quite recently, has been the tendency to essentialize and decontextualize religious traditions, evident in the configuration of world religion courses that focus on the sacred texts, doctrines, and rituals of religious traditions in abstraction from their appropriation by participants in particular places and times. This methodological angle is an external view from nowhere that flattens and homogenizes the insider’s lived experience. It reflects the modern liberal move to isolate and depoliticize religion. Hence bringing religious studies into the mix of the social sciences does not necessarily counter the limitations and constraints of the modernist disciplinary mold, as this field in some of its tributaries reflects similar distinguishing features. Several of the chapters interrogate this secular modernist disciplinary mold from a theological or a more religiously diverse standpoint, with approaches that counter its proclivity to fix and homogenize religion. In so doing they draw upon resources from religious and spiritual traditions to rethink secularism and its interface with religious discourses and practices. Gauri Viswanathan argues that thinking about the secular through the frame of heterodoxy, and specifically spiritual movements outside mainstream religion, makes it possible to see the limits of the modern secular-religion dichotomy by looking at what is ignored or suppressed by both secular philosophies and religious orthodoxies. “The degree to which religion and secularism coincide in their inability to acknowledge alternative spiritual practices,” she observes, “is matched only by the scholarly complicity in homogenizing religious histories to fit a composite profile of religious belief.” She asks, in conclusion, “How differently would secularism be understood if it was seen through a history omitted

An Introduction

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from its own narrative?” In a parallel effort that focuses on the diversity within Christianity, Linell Cady, drawing upon the work of H. Richard Niebuhr, considers a variety of ways in which the Western Christian tradition has envisioned and enacted its relationship to the broader world. She suggests that exploring these alternatives, and the conflicts and theological conundrums they have generated, offers theoretical and normative insights for moving beyond the static and constricting picture of the religion-secularism dichotomy. Abdullahi An-Na’im explores forms of secularism from an Islamic theological perspective, distinguishing between “assertive” and “weak” versions. He argues that the former, that seeks to privatize religion, is antithetical to Islam, whereas the latter that promotes a neutral state that mediates diversity is fully compatible, if not essential for Islam. In this fashion he rejects the theological coherence of the notion of an Islamic state, as he makes room for the ongoing contributions of Muslims to shaping public and political life. By considering secularism through the imperatives and the constraints of an Islamic theological perspective, An-Na’im moves toward a model that highlights its contextually shifting and mediating features. Attentive to the challenges of developing a global comparative approach, Nilüfer Göle notes the importance of exploring multiple configurations of the secular-religious divide including at the level of the state, the public sphere, and the self. Göle underscores the extent to which secularism in non-Western contexts has been closely bound up with the “civilizing mission” of the West, thereby transmitting “a set of norms that define rationality as well as ethical and aesthetic forms.” In addition to its centrality in the nation-state project, Göle emphasizes that “secularism works as an organizing principle of social life, and penetrates into everyday life practices and underpins the politics of emancipation and sexuality.” She documents the significance of the material dimension of the question of religious difference that often escapes analyses focused exclusively on legal, philosophical, or institutional questions. This materialization of the secular-religious divide is expressed through, for example, dress, architecture, and the organization of physical space in specific contexts. The chapters in this volume point toward the importance of illuminating alternative worldviews that do not fit neatly in either liberal humanist or conventional Christian categories and assumptions. In so doing, the ahistorical reification of conceptual frames that blind us to the lived realities of other ways of being in the world is tempered. Andrew Davison’s chapter is an extended reflection on the methodological and epistemological considerations that are entailed in a global comparative study of secularism, which he identifies under the rubric of hermeneutics. The fundamental characteristic of a hermeneutical approach is the attention

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to meaning as the constitutive feature of all experience, practices, and institutions. Davison’s chapter calls attention to the importance of exploring the “shared, and sometimes contested and changing, understandings of the participants,” countering the tendency of many social scientific approaches and methodologies to rely exclusively upon external analyses of behavior. Responsive to these concerns, this collection seeks to bridge the impressively broad and deep divides between social scientific, humanistic, and theological approaches to the religion/secular boundary. Since the scholar can never fully escape from his or her own interpretive horizon, a hermeneutical approach leads ineluctably to the recognition of a dialogical model of the scholarly endeavor. This transformative insight is critical to academic work in a global era. It pushes us toward “conversing with and within multiple worlds and outlooks, multiple traditions and subtraditions, multiple subjectivities and intersubjectivities.” This volume draws upon a range of disciplinary approaches and voices that collectively contribute to an informative and transformative engagement with the secular-religion divide and alternatives lodged within and beyond it.

Comparative Secularisms: France, United States, Turkey, and India We seek to highlight the multiple threads that are woven into the discursive fabric of different varieties of secularism. As the chapters make clear, secularism is a far more “comprehensive and diffuse package of ideas, ideals, politics, and strategies than its representation solely as religion’s Other would lead us to expect.”16 Moreover, the contours of the package shift across time and place, underscoring the impossibility of any monolithic or static definition. As Nietzsche reminds us, only “something that has no history can be defined.”17 To adapt Paul Rabinow’s observation about modernity to the present study, it is impossible to define secularism; rather one must track the diverse ways the insistent claims to being secular are made.18 In doing so the contributions to this volume illuminate the multiple shapes and patterns that secularism has assumed in the four countries under study. Although it is impossible to offer a simple definition of secularism, as mentioned earlier a common thread runs through the variations that we have found helpful in organizing our thinking about these issues. In some fashion each reflects a processual and often-conflicted attempt to remake, reform, or refashion religion. This process is not captured in the standard portrait of secularism that envisions a wall of separation

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from religion. In suggesting two separate domains, the wall metaphor obscures the interactions and integrations that mark their formations and reformations. Indeed secularism has drawn much of its power from its ability to cloak this process. Different forms and traditions of secularism accomplish this remaking of religion differently, with strikingly varied objectives and outcomes. But they share the sense that religion needs to be remade, relocated, and related to differently in the modern world. Focusing on this common trait, rather than on the misleading presumption that secularism means simply the separation of religion from state and/or politics, provides a much-needed corrective. France represents in many ways the paradigmatic model of secularism as remaking religion, at least in its own self-representation. As Jean Baubérot writes, secularism constitutes at one and the same time a “founding myth of modernity” and an origin myth for France as a modern nation-state. Forged in a revolutionary and violent context, Baubérot observes that French secularism, known as laïcité, bears the marks of its oppositional formation over against the Roman Catholic Church, the only officially recognized religion of the time. In its dominant representation it took on features of an exclusive civil religion of the Republic. Seeking to fashion undivided loyalty to the state and counter the power of the church, French secularism was driven by the desire to protect citizens from religion and not, as in the American case, to also protect religion from the state. The pursuit of liberty in France stood in opposition to religious freedom, not in collusion with it. Champions of this aggressive and absolutist rendition of secularism secured its position through a series of binaries that positioned it as the public, rational, emancipatory alternative to the private, superstitious, authoritarian option that is religion, all of which worked to sustain the overriding contrast between modernity and tradition. This is a rigidly separationist approach to remaking religion, reflecting, in Baubérot’s words, “kingly power over beliefs” and legitimizing the expulsion of religion and religious symbolism from the public realm. The broad public acceptance of the 2004 law banning the headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols from French public schools taps into and reinforces this narration of secularism. However, although this narrative may represent the dominant, even iconic, picture of French secularism, it fails to capture the more complicated interface of religion and secularism in France, past or present. France’s roots, Baubérot contends, are essentially double, and both clerical and anticlerical tendencies coexist and compete. Throughout much of the twentieth century and into the present, on the ground relations between church and state have been more fluid than the oppositional model would suggest, particularly in relation to legal and financial matters. According to his account, a more accommodationist tradition is evident, with

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touchstones in an older origination myth of the fifth-century Christian baptism of the French leader Clovis. The history of French secularism is essentially an ongoing contestation between the dominant narrative of a republican civil religion of secularism and a minor thread that reflects a more accommodationist relationship to religion, in this case Roman Catholicism. What is of interest is why and when the different competing traditions surge and ebb. The powerful resurgence beginning in 1989 of a forceful state secularism in response to the headscarf affair is not simply evidence of a monolithic French model under attack, but the remobilization of a discursive strategy, with deep and conflicted roots in French history and politics. It appears as the anxious response to what is perceived (among other challenges such as European integration, economic globalization, and the process of coming to terms with French colonial and collaborationist projects), as the menacing threat of a growing Muslim immigrant population to French national identity and the republican model of public space.19 Yolande Jansen explores these complex dynamics in her contribution, arguing that though claiming to de-ethnicize and depoliticize religion, the French interpretation of secularism as religious interiorization leads to securitizing attitudes and practices toward Muslims in France. She shows how the politics of secularism, understood as the interiorization of religion, have become embedded in and intertwined with a particular kind of nationalist political discourse and project in contemporary France. Secular French identity, although self-presenting as neutral and inclusive, appears more inflected with religious and ethnic specificity through the prism of the headscarf controversy. Consider the telling words of the French prime minister who remarked at the height of the conflict: “do we want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of secularism.”20 Just as French secularism exhibits a recurring dominant chord in complex interaction and tension with a minor chord, secularism in the United States is similarly complex. This is an important point to keep in mind when comparing country cases, as the tendency is to speak in shorthand about the French version or the American version. Doing so does serve the legitimate end of highlighting key differences and tendencies, but always at the expense of effacing the tensive multiplicity within each. So while we can speak of different models of secularism within the four countries, in so doing we run the risk of ignoring voices that give shape in some instances to counter traditions. The set of chapters focusing on the American case call attention to its multiple traditions of secularism, underscoring why summing it up through the pervasive metaphorical shorthand of a “wall of separation” is so misleading. Tisa Wenger explores the conflictual history of secularism

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in the United States through the prism of a nineteenth-century controversy over a proposed amendment to identify America as a Christian nation. This case study allows her to illuminate two major traditions of secularism as they jostled and competed in their late nineteenth-century quests to construct a narrative of American identity. Advocates of the amendment defended it as a strategy to protect laws and practices that safeguarded liberty and the moral life of the nation, from school prayer, to Sunday closing laws, to military chaplains. Since no particular Christian denomination was privileged, they denied that the amendment ran afoul of the constitutional principle against an establishment of religion. To champions of the amendment political liberty was grounded in religious liberty, refracted through a nondenominational Protestantism. The opposition, on the other hand, insisted the amendment violated the constitutional principles concerning establishment of religion and religious freedom; it constituted the establishment of a generic Protestantism, and in so doing constrained the liberty of religious minorities and the nonreligious. In this controversy, as Wenger notes, the “shared value was not secularism but the all-American principle of liberty” over which conflicting narratives emerged. So it was not secularism as such but protecting and advancing liberty, however differently defined, which was the driving motor. A coalition of self-identified atheists, secularists, and religious liberals pushed for a strong separationist model and reread the founding leaders and texts through the prism of the newly coined category of “secularism.” As Wenger writes, “a history of secularism as an ideological project must view the formation of the United States not as the success of a pre-existing ‘secularism’ but as a contentious and contingent process that helped shape the conditions” in which it later emerged. These two traditions of interpreting the role of religion in American public life continue to shape the discursive landscape, variously working to fuse, counter, or—through a type of shell game—obscure the links between Christianity and national identity and secular law and practices. In this respect the American case is quite different from the French, where the associations between national identity and an antireligious secular identity date from the very birth of the French nation-state. In the American context this separationist tradition, with its antireligious sensibilities, although increasingly influential in more elite circles by the early twentieth century, has never been the dominant chord. There is a reason why no American president has self-identified as a secularist, even when invoking the separationist tradition, as John Kennedy did in 1960. Both of these traditions work to remake religion, although it may be easier to see in relation to the separationist trajectory. By insisting that religion belongs within the private sphere, and reading the constitutional principles as endorsing not just the institutional separation of church and

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state, but the separation of religion and politics more broadly, secularists seek to compartmentalize, marginalize, and tame religion. But the accommodationists, for whom religious liberty and political liberty are seamlessly linked, are also in the game of reforming religion as they advance interpretations of, in this case Christianity, that align with national identity and democratic values. Noting that the “secular law needs a pliant religion,” Winni Sullivan explores these two major traditions of secularism as models for managing religion. Separationist approaches have sought to eliminate religion from the public sphere, while accommodationist ones have pursued the project of constructing a more universalist version of Christianity that is envisioned as blending seamlessly into secular forms and discourses. Consider, for example, the way in which American law has sanctioned a particular form of Christian marriage, but all the while insisting that it is “not religious.” These two interpretive traditions of legal secularism in American life have sought to manage religion by seeking its “homogeneity or absence.” Sullivan suggests that in addition to these two classical traditions, there is evidence of a third type in recent legal decisions, though cautioning that all three may be present “most of the time in much of the modern Christian west.” This third type reflects the recognition of a more diverse religious landscape, and a sense of religious life as more “eclectic, adaptive, and acculturating,” mixing it up not only with other religious traditions but also with practices from the broader culture. Religion lived and interpreted in this fashion, Sullivan concludes, “seems to neither need particular accommodation nor careful separation.” As in the American case, developments in Turkey over the last century also do not fall easily into the basic categories readily available to most observers, such as separation versus accommodation, or secular versus religious. As illustrated in each of the chapters on Turkey, Turkish secularism is a complex set of political arrangements, practices, and sensibilities that involves defining, regulating, and remaking religion, and we fail to understand it if we frame the contestation as “secular moderns” versus “religious anti-moderns.” Rather than representing a backlash against modernization or a revival of premodern Islamic tradition, contestants to the Kemalist model represent a series of distinct challenges to a particular instantiation of secularism authorized and regulated by state authorities since Atatürk’s founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923. 21 Secularism in Turkey, that is variously named Kemalism or laiklik in Turkish, has been a largely top-down political project of remaking religion coinciding with the formation of the nation-state that has sought, with varying degrees of success, to impose a separationist model of a secular state in tandem with an official and heavily regulated version of state (Sunni) Islam. In his chapter on the grammar of Turkish laicism

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and its reification of “religion,” which he explores through the prism of the Alevis, a minority Muslim sect, Markus Dressler describes Kemalism as the attempt “to secularize public life and the political sphere, and to put public religious practice under state surveillance.” He insists that laicism is not antireligious per se, but rather like nationalism should be understood as charged with distinguishing between religious practices conducive and harmful to national unity. The result is a rather authoritarian form of secularism that has incited a range of responses, including most recently a debate similar to that in France concerning whether women wearing a particular form of headscarf should be allowed to enter universities. Kemalism has been neither uniform nor gone uncontested. In his chapter on the crisis of legitimacy of Turkish secularism E. Fuat Keyman observes that “the unfolding of Turkish modernity has resulted not in the demise of religion, but, on the contrary, the increasing presence and power of religion in the symbolic construction of identity, as well as in social life.” Keyman charts the rise of the Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (MUSIAD), a key institutional actor in the rise of what he describes as “economic Islam,” which explicitly links globalized free market economics with Islamic principles. He situates both this organization and the rise of the Justice and Democratic Party (AKP) as challengers to the “assertive mode” of Turkish secularism and claimants to an alternative modernity in which Islam has a significant role to play. As Dressler points out by way of introduction to his analysis of the “Alevi question” and the headscarf issue as they unfold within and against the discourse of Turkish laicism, there are also important characteristics of laiklik that resonate with the other country cases. For example, he points to the degree to which laicism and nationalism are intertwined in the Kemalist worldview, highlights the extent to which laicist discourse concerns itself with the management and production of religion, and underscores the degree to which laicist discourse is organized by and through a public-private distinction correlated with ideas about legitimate and illegitimate religion. Dressler also accesses the theological dimensions of Kemalist discourse through a careful analysis of the Turkish state’s treatment of the Alevis, citing the ways in which jurists evaluate Alevism in relation to implicit concepts of Sunni Islam, as well as through an analysis of the headscarf debate, which is dominated by discussions about traditional versus political headscarf styles and public debates over whether certain forms of covering are required by religion. Each of these contributions helps to reframe accounts that depict the challenge to Kemalism in Turkey as a side effect of economic or political woes, a stage in the rocky transition to Western modernity, or evidence of an intractable clash of civilizations. Challenges to Kemalism are neither

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a backlash against secularization nor evidence of a clash of civilizations spawned by commitments to premodern Islamic practices. Instead they represent a series of efforts to refashion and rework controversial elements of a powerful yet historically contingent Turkish secularist settlement. 22 In India secularism is a central term in political life, as is also the case in France and Turkey. Its meaning here, as elsewhere, has become increasingly contested in recent decades. Exploring the historical trajectories that have produced Indian secularism, T. N. Madan observes that it was neither a term that was widely used before India’s independence in 1947, nor referenced in the constitution, though it was inserted to the Preamble in 1976 and is deemed an “unalterable feature of the constitution” by the Indian Supreme Court. Indian secularism, Madan argues, is distinctive, shaped by the religious and cultural roots of India’s past and the political challenges of the present. It is most aptly understood, he suggests, as “religious pluralism as a positive value combined with the affirmation of national unity within a democratic framework.” According to Madan, Indian secularism is not driven by a separationist impulse to keep the state and religion apart, as in the United States, or religious expression outside the public sphere, as in Turkey and France. Similar to the tradition of religious secularism in the United States that Wenger and Sullivan highlight, Madan argues that secularism in India is not an independent worldview but a “religio-secular ideology.” It draws deeply upon the values of religious pluralism and tolerance that are rooted in Hindu traditions. Although affirming the centrality of secularism to national identity and Indian political life, Zoya Hasan offers a different take on its meaning as she explores its erosion in recent decades. It must be understood, she argues, within a broader constellation of concepts that include democracy, equality, and justice. Forging links that bind these terms within a shared conceptual space is the “outstanding achievement of India’s freedom struggle” and the heart of its political project. Secularism from this angle is not captured through the idea of disestablishment or separation. To the contrary the state is charged with reforming religion in the interests of social justice and equality, including securing the rights of religious minorities. This has led to laws that abolish such practices as untouchability and child marriage and that make room for the continuation of personal family law for the minority Muslim community. It is, as Hasan observes, a “balancing act” as the state seeks to foster a secular democracy that advances national unity, justice, equality, and the rights of minorities. Reading the chapters on Indian secularism allows us to see the differing interpretive angles that help to constitute it. Hasan offers a reading that positions secularism as a political ideology that stands apart and above the religious traditions and communities that it regulates. Madan, on the other

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hand, envisions secularism as a religio-political vision, one that is more integrated with the religious history and culture of the majority tradition and necessarily so, he suggests, if it is to secure the legitimacy and roots it needs to flourish. Wary of this blend in light of the religious politics of the Hindu right in recent decades, Hasan underlines the vulnerabilities and dangers of any seamless integration between secularism and the dominant religious tradition. Together, these chapters represent the different forms of religious secularism and irreligious secularism that we have encountered in the other three country cases. As we have seen, both forms function to reconfigure religion. In the Indian context where disestablishment is not a defining principle, irreligious secularism manages religion more through explicit regulation than through its banishment from public spaces. The religious secularism variant in India, with its heavy accent on pluralism and tolerance, is the product of a series of constructive interpretive efforts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectuals to reconfigure Hinduism so as to provide a unifying philosophy focused on social transformation that would serve the interests of the nation.23 It is noteworthy, if not surprising, that religious minorities offer revealing angles into the conflictual history and power politics of secularism in each country. In India, as in the United States, religious minorities have been important voices in advancing an irreligious form of secularism, both countries with significant traditions of religious secularism. As Wenger notes regarding the American context, Jews and other religious minorities have played a leading role in countering the Protestant-secular fusions that have worked to marginalize or disadvantage minority groups. Similarly, in India Muslim voices have been among the most vocal in criticizing forms of government accommodation of Hindu majoritarianism. The situation is interestingly different in France and Turkey where separationist/laicist forms of secularism have dominated. In these contexts religious minorities, whether the Alevis in Turkey or Muslims in France, have illuminated the exclusionary features of official or de facto forms of religious establishment that exist in tandem with the secular state and are actively managed or sustained by it. These comparative observations highlight the way in which secularism functions as a political strategy of nation-states, as Göle argues. A secularism that strays too far from the majority view may become unstable and lose legitimacy, and one that aligns too closely may fail to make room for diversity. Rather than alternatives that prompt any once and for all choice, it may be more helpful to envision them as coimplicated points on a spectrum of politics in dynamic tension. From this angle the ambiguity of secularism is not so much a conceptual weakness, as a pragmatic flexibility and a political cover that can be mobilized variously, depending upon the political and religious exigencies of the moment.

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Global Interactions The global dimensions and implications of the politics of secularism are inescapable and should not be sidelined in favor of a methodological and epistemological nationalism that prioritizes the domestic politics of individual states. Particular Christian and post-Christian categories (secular, religion) have become globalized, hybridized, and transformed through interactions with and within other societies. According to José Casanova, “the very fact that the same category of religion is being used globally across cultures and civilizations testifies to the global expansion of the modern secular-religious system of classification of reality which first emerged in the modern Christian West.”24 At the same time, and to challenge the other side of the methodological nationalist coin with Jean Baubérot, different forms and tendencies of secularism also coexist within single states. Just as secularist traditions and templates travel across national boundaries, it is also the case that no single form of secularism can be mapped cleanly onto a single nation-state. Rather, multiple traditions collide and cohabitate with varying degrees of tension both within and between states. This suggests that claims to the secular in Europe, India, the United States, or elsewhere cannot be fully understood without reference to both European and global history. Secularisms are created though actions and beliefs and cannot be abstracted from the global historical contexts and circumstances in which they have emerged, and in which in recent centuries Europe has played a formative role. For example, while on the one hand French laïcité emerged out of and remains indebted to both the Enlightenment critique of religion and Christian reform, on the other hand it also has been constituted through and influenced by global relationships, including colonial and postcolonial relations with religious minorities both in France and abroad. 25 Forms of secularism contribute to the consolidation of inclusionary and exclusionary group identities at global, national, and transnational levels. Another “lesson learned” from the study of the global and comparative dimensions of secularism is that useful parallels may be found in studies of nationalism and feminism from a global and comparative angle. As several of the chapters illustrate, these discursive formations are often intimately interwoven with each other. As a result there is potential for rich and nuanced cross-disciplinary studies of the intersections between secularism, nationalism, and feminism. Secularist settlements, nationalist settlements, and gender roles often link up. It is often the case that they become naturalized and normalized together in unpredictable and often-contested constellations. At other times, they operate largely below the threshold of public debate.

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In addition, if as we suggest, claims to the secular are about remaking religion, then a significant feature of such claims is that they not only rely upon but also help to produce definitions of religion, religious resurgence, reasonable religion, normal politics, and so forth. As an illustration of the power of secularism to define and remake these terms, consider the outside limits of a term like “religious resurgence” as conventionally defined. Kemalists and French laicists no longer monopolize public debate over what it means to be a secular state; yet not all challengers to Kemalism in Turkey or to laïcité in France can be described as “religious” resurgents. Debates over whether the United States is Christian, post-Christian, Judeo-Christian, or something else entirely are common, as are whether India is a Hindu, multireligious, or post-Hindu state. Yet not everyone who challenges American or Indian secularist settlements is “religious” as it is conventionally understood. This suggests that religious resurgence is not simply or at least not always a rise or return of “religion” taken in some predefined way, but instead represents an acceleration of challenges to dominant forms of secularism and the laws, habits, and institutions that underpin and reproduce them. 26

Toward a New Conceptual Vocabulary At a conference in Istanbul in 2008 that brought together many of the contributors to this volume, Charles Taylor observed that “We need to take a deep breath and jump into a completely different mindset.” We agree. Secular and religious convictions are interwoven with political authority in ever-evolving formations of staggering variety at different levels of politics from local to national to global. These formations fail to align neatly with either state boundaries or conventional secularist assumptions of any variety, whether European, Turkish, Indian, or American. A new conceptual vocabulary is needed that is better equipped to reflect the growing array of practices that escape, circumvent, and confound both Enlightenment epistemology and the constraints of traditional religious authority. Such a vocabulary would allow us to analytically frame emergent alternatives to rigid secular-religious dichotomies. It would encourage us to think more self-consciously about the influence of received categories that stand in the way of coming to terms conceptually and in daily life with varieties of theocratic and nontheocratic political practice both inside and outside the West. The explosion in the use of the category of “spirituality,” for example, captures a growing impatience with the analytic limitations of too rigid a religion-secularism divide and the personal and political sensibilities and practices it sustains. Those claiming to be “spiritual but not religious” invoke a modernist caricature of

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religion as authoritarian, dogmatic, and static that they reject in favor of a more personalized, eclectic, and journey-like approach to life. So envisioned, spirituality is not isolated from secular domains, but the rubric for a mode of being within them. Several of the chapters call attention to this form of religiosity/spirituality as an indication of the shifting religionsecular landscape and perhaps a resource for rethinking its constraints. Responding to the analytic challenges of the religion-secular classification, as well as to the empirical complexities and dilemmas represented in each of the chapters that follow, it is our intention to nudge scholars toward such new vocabularies for grappling on a global scale with what Davison describes as the relation between “political power and matters of tradition, culture, and conscience.” We are certainly not the first to do so.27 Afsaneh Najmabadi for instance has gestured toward the potential of a politics that resists rigid secular-religious classifications and the exclusionary politics that follow in their wake. She cites examples of these promising alternative forms of politics in contemporary Iran.28 Like Najmabadi, the contributors to this volume agree upon the necessity of breaking the hold of a rigid secularist worldview and the necessity of opening spaces for new dynamics and practices, while acknowledging the need to create and maintain a series of secularizing public spaces, institutions, laws, and traditions to facilitate speaking across boundaries of religious-secular difference. We also agree upon the necessity of recognizing mixed legacies, accomplishments and failings, strengths and drawbacks of particular variations of secularist politics. To adapt Deniz Kandiyoti’s observation about feminisms, while we should be careful not to “jump to celebrate” the emergence of alternative forms of secularism if they are antipluralistic or intolerant, at the same time we also should not fail to interrogate the secularist discourses of modernity to which they are often counterposed.29 Although we do not offer a roadmap—which would be unpersuasive and unworkable in any case given the diversity of secularisms and religions encountered in this volume and in the world—we do seek to maximize conditions for future discussions, arguments, and forms of persuasion to take place. The idea is to create spaces for new thinking and practice to meet the challenges of a pluralizing and increasingly interactive global environment. At the same time, the historical contexts and comparative insights placed in conversation in this volume may suggest tools for transcending the terms now deployed in the “culture wars” taking place in each of the four countries under study. Without attempting to offer a blueprint or “one-size-fits-all” prescriptive framework, we seek to encourage greater self-consciousness about the multiple meanings and uses of secularism within selected national, and global, contexts. Project participants also disagreed at times. It is by way of acknowledging one such productive disagreement—and the need for further

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conversation and debate that it signals—that we conclude this introduction. The point of contention involves the extent to which broadening and opening various forms of secularism to new perspectives and practices is sufficient, as contrasted with the view that a more profound set of transformations and a more critical standpoint is called for vis-à-vis the assumptions and practices associated with political modernity in general and forms of secularism in particular. In other words, is a “better,” more diverse, and more expansive secularism the goal, or is there a need to go beyond the conceptual and practical vocabulary provided by the languages of secularism and religion toward a completely new set of linguistic, philosophical, and phenomenological practices for negotiating across and within foundational commitments in late modern comparative and international politics? This productive point of disagreement, exposing an unresolved critical dilemma in the study of secularism and religion specifically, and the politics of modernity more generally, animates many of the chapters that follow.

Notes 1. George Jacob Holyoake, Principles of Secularism Illustrated, rev. 3rd ed. (London: Austin, 1871), 9. The book is available online at http://books. google.com / books?id=w6v5glczzmEC&printsec=titlepage&source= gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 2. Ibid., 10. 3. Ibid., 17. 4. Ibid., 14. 5. Ibid., 27, 11. 6. Eric S. Waterhouse, “Secularism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), 349. 7. This is a point that Winnifred Sullivan, drawing upon the work of Clark Gilpin, makes in her chapter. 8. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 9. Masuzawa, 19. 10. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17. 11. Masuzawa, 20. 12. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 207. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Casanova, 12–17. 15. For a collection of essays exploring the history and disciplinary politics of theology and religious studies in the modern university, see Linell E. Cady and Delwin Brown, eds., Religious Studies, Theology, and the

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Introduction,” in The Crisis of Secularism in India, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53. Paul Rabinow, French Modern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 9; cited in Lila Abu-Lughod, “Introduction: Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7. See Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). “Raffarin Sees ‘River of Islam’ Threaten Turkey EU Membership,” Expatica. Com, September 23, 2004, http://www.expatica.com/fr/news/local_news/ raffarin-sees-river-of-islam-threatbrin-turkey-eu-membership-12162.html (accessed July 30, 2009). Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Contested Secularisms in Turkey and Iran,” chapter four of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 65–83. Hurd, “Contested Secularisms in Turkey and Iran.” See, for example, Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (London, New York: Routledge, 1999), 128–142. José Casanova, “Rethinking Public Religions,” in Handbook on Religion and World Affairs, ed. Alfred Stepan, Monica Toft, and Timothy Shah (New York: Columbia University Press and the Social Science Research Council, forthcoming). This argument is developed in chapter three, “Secularism and Islam,” in Hurd’s The Politics of Secularism in International Relations. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Theorizing Religious Resurgence,” International Politics 44, no. 6 (November 2007): 647–665. For other efforts, see, for example, Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Secularisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). Afsaneh Najmabadi, “(Un)veiling Feminism,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 39–57. Deniz Kandiyoti, “Review of Women and Gender in Islam,” Contemporary Sociology 2, no. 5 (1993): 688–689; cited in Abu-Lughod, 25.

Chapter 1 Hermeneutics and the Politics of Secularism Andrew Davison An interesting exchange occurred during a recent seminar on modernity in Turkey.1 During a set of presentations that critically engaged several standard assumptions about the meaning of a “secular” state, one colleague described ways in which state and religion are structurally integrated in matters of governance in the contemporary practices of several secular states in Europe. Her presentation successfully challenged the assumption that “secular” practices in the West conformed to the ideal-typical model of a strict separation between political and religious spheres. 2 The examples of an intermingling between state and religion in Europe led some of us to think that such practices were not radically different in principle from the highly integrated relationship between state and Islam in Turkey (assuming for the moment that Turkey is not “in” “Europe”). This observation, in turn, sparked many questions. One concerned the possibility of abandoning the Anglo-European ideal type of “the separation of the political and religious spheres” as the starting point for the comparative study of secularist politics in favor of the model of secularism found in Turkey. In Turkey’s laicist politics, the ideal has always been significant integration, not separation. Would it be possible to theorize secularism beginning from Turkey, rather than Europe? The implications of these reflections struck some of us as profound: could the observation of significant intermingling between state and religion in European practices lead us to decenter Europe and center Turkey in the study of secularism and secularity? In my use of “Europe” I do not mean the specific practices of European Union member states. I mean the ideal typical understanding, generated primarily out of European thought and history, that secularism entails “separating politics and religion.” This understanding has profoundly governed the study of politics associated with secularism, so much so that inquirers have often registered differences from it—like those found in the laicist institutional relationships in Turkey—not simply as differences but as lacks or incompletenesses in relation to the standard. 3 The deeply provocative question that emerged in our workshop thus

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was: Given that some European state practices include forms of integration between religion and politics, could laicism in Turkey now be considered as even more than a difference: could it become the new exemplar for engaging in the study of secularisms? This chapter addresses this question from a self-consciously hermeneutical perspective—one that seeks to produce theoretical languages in the study of secular politics in which the multiple constitutive possibilities in the politics of secularism may be identified and compared, and out of which further theorizations of secularism and secularity may emerge. Such a view necessarily decenters Europe, but, I shall suggest, it does so not to center another model as much as to open the study of secularism to all possible ways of constituting the relation between state and religion or between political power and matters of tradition, culture, and conscience more generally. In hermeneutics, there is no special class of interpreters or “interpreted” who are positioned to give ultimate, final meaning to political experience. Everyone is an interpreter and every practice within the politics of secularism is meaningful. In this context, a hermeneutical study of laicism in Turkey does indeed serve as a highly illustrative site— not, however, for the promotion of the Turkish laiklik as a new model, but rather to reveal the limits of social theory perpetually steadied within the archetypal models of European experience, to illuminate alternative possibilities within the politics of secularism, and, therefore, to demonstrate the indispensability of hermeneutics in the study of secularisms in a global age. Drawing on the work of contemporary philosophers of hermeneutics, I outline and illustrate the basic presuppositions of hermeneutics in the study of practices associated with secularism.

Hermeneutics Hermeneutics is a field of social inquiry within which there are many approaches. What unites most of them is the idea that explaining social practices requires understanding the meanings constitutive of them. Humans are seen as self- and other-interpreting beings who endow their actions, practices, and relational and institutional endeavors with meanings (understandings, ideas, purposes, hopes, etc.) that make those forms of experience what they are, such that without those meanings, or with other meanings, the experiences would, in terms of their very identity, be different. For social inquirers to say anything compelling about human experience, they must undertake some sort of engagement with those meanings. The relationship between meanings and social practices is thus understood in hermeneutics as constitutive: the meanings make the practice “what it is” in the sense of marking the identity of the practice,

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distinguishing it from other practices, such that were the meanings different, the very identity of the practice would be different as well. Underlying this view is the idea that language is not simply something human beings use for a variety of instrumental purposes (strategic positioning, mobilization, etc.). It is, rather, the medium for the expression of constitutive meanings. The hermeneutical approach does not rule out instrumentality, for strategic purposes may indeed constitute a practice, but it emphasizes a constitutive and meaningful reading of the relationship between language and practice. Meanings expressed in and through languages give practices particular identities. Viewing language as simply instrumental, or not engaging in the analysis of constitutive meanings, perhaps by relying for explanatory purposes solely on the observation of overt behavior, reported speech, or survey responses—all analytically distinct from constitutive meanings—risks never saying anything sufficiently compelling about the practice under consideration. From a hermeneutical perspective, nonhermeneutical accounts tend to frustrate and increase rather than address and engage the most basic analytical question: What is the practice about which we are speaking? Within hermeneutics there are debates over how to characterize “meaning,” where to place the emphasis between different kinds of meanings, and how to come to an understanding of these different kinds of meanings. Some forms of inquiry highlight subjective meanings—the understandings, purposes, motivations, intentions, and so forth with which individuals constitute their actions. Others posit the category of intersubjective meanings for the study of social practices. The elaboration of this category is, to my mind, one of the major breakthroughs of hermeneutical inquiry in the study of politics. Charles Taylor famously noted that intersubjective meanings tend to “fall through the net” of the dominant methodological individualism of social science.4 They also fall outside popular dichotomous thinking that the only alternative to the largely debunked idea of objectivity is subjectivity (hence, “everything is subjective”). From the analytical vantage point of intersubjective meanings, interpreting social practices requires coming to understand something distinct from subjectivity. In the context of interpreting politics, theorists have drawn upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of language games to elaborate the category of intersubjective meaning. A language game may be seen as a metaphor for understanding the constitutive relationship between intersubjective meanings and social practices. The idea is that intersubjective meanings constitutive of practices are analogous to rules constitutive of ordinary games. Rules of a game may be seen as shared understandings among the participants—the rules describe the characteristics and aims of the game, the positions and purposes of each player, and the possible relationships

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between the players. They define what constitutes a proper move, what constitutes an improper one, and how the components and terms of the game are to be understood. The rules are not simply subjectively understood—they are shared or intersubjective, such that while the participants may be playing for different subjective reasons, their participations in the game are constituted by what they share—the intersubjective meanings. Of course, the participants may—and often do—innovate the rules of a game. They may contest the rules as well. Out of such innovations and contestations, changes in the rules of the game occur. Note that when the rules—what is commonly understood intersubjectively— change, the constitutive identity of the game changes as well. It is now a different game than it was. From the viewpoint of intersubjective hermeneutical inquiry, what is true of games is true of all social practices: they are constituted by the shared, and sometimes contested and changing, understandings of the participants. These understandings constitute the practice—make it what it is, such that were the understandings different, the practice would be different as well. To be sure, the meanings constitutive of social practices differ from formal, codified rules of games, though what is written in a game’s instruction manual is not always what is constitutive of the game. Innovation and various contextual renderings (“customs”) of the rules often occur to make the game something other than what “the rules” say it should be. Such is the case, too, with social practices: where there are formal rules (e.g., laws), the practice is not always constituted by those rules. A hermeneutical engagement is less interested in what is codified than what is commonly understood— the participant’s know-how, the meanings in the usage of the constitutive concepts of the shared understandings, and the contestations within what is shared. The idea of language games is relatively simple, but it has many important implications for social inquiry, a few of which I address here by way of a brief illustration drawn from the practice in which the contributors to this volume, its editors, its publishers, and you, its readers, are participating. Differently situated participants in the practice of publishing commonly understand—and may contest—that contributors to an edited volume will provide readers with pages that contain text-based ideas and information. This basic, but still fundamental, shared understanding is one of the many understandings constitutive of the practice of publishing in that it marks the identity of the practice and distinguishes it from other practices such that, were the rule different, the participants would be engaged in a different practice. If I were to hit the return button for a few minutes and then send several blank pages to the editors, they might respond, “that’s not what we’re doing!” (It would be like a soccer player intentionally kicking the ball to the opponents’ goalie during

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full play.) “That’s not a contribution to a book!” Or they might articulate an understanding that they may have believed we shared about how books like this are arenas for the stimulation of reflection on a common curiosity from different vantage points that must be written down. Or they might talk about the particular significance of producing new perspectives on the topic of secularism in the global age—part of the intersubjective significance deeply constitutive of this particular volume as a practice. Participants in common endeavors share an understanding of both the rules and the concepts within the intersubjective constellation (e.g., “a contribution”). We may contest the rules; we may have different subjective reasons for participating; and we may have varying understandings of the concepts within the rules. But our participation in the practice—the common endeavor in which we understand ourselves to be participating—is constituted by what we share. Without that, this practice would not be what it is. Hermeneutics maintains that what is true of practices is true of structures and institutions more broadly. Each dimension of social reality is constituted by meanings. Large structures—perhaps like cost structures that might constrain a publisher from agreeing to produce blank pages, or the very structure of the book that generates all this thinking, writing, and reading—tend to be viewed in causal terms outside the framework of constitutive meaning. From a hermeneutical perspective, however, those structures are also constituted by the subjective and/or intersubjective understandings, purposes, aims, and so on of their participants. The meanings constitutive of structures may be very complicated. Participants within them constitute them at different points of time and from varying positions of power, but these complexities do not make structures or their hierarchies nonconstituted. Hermeneutically speaking, intersubjective meanings make structures what they are, such that with different meanings the structure would be different—as evidenced by the existence of great variety in political, social, and economic structures and institutions across and within societies. The issue of structures raises the important question concerning how hermeneutics accounts for the production of meaning. Strictly speaking, the hermeneutical thesis focuses attention away from causality to constitutive meaning. This implies that, other than underscoring the human production of meaning itself, hermeneutics need not speak to the question of causality, within which social explanation is often framed. Nonetheless, hermeneutically informed modes of scientific realism and discourse analysis address this lingering explanatory curiosity. The former posits the workings of relatively enduring generative structures while discourse analysis seeks to provide genealogical accounts of the production of meaning through the joint operation of discursive regimes and

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their accompanying disciplinary mechanisms. A thoroughgoing hermeneutical effort would require that such structures, regimes, and mechanisms be conceptualized as constituted by meanings. The category of intersubjective meanings presents a significant challenge to the status of subjectivity. Insofar as the former exist between participants as something shared, a simply subjective meaning seems elusive. Whatever is in an individual’s understanding seems to indicate that person’s participation in the broader languages of the social spheres he or she inhabits. Moreover, the fact that subjective differences can be understood among participants suggests that those differences are not simply subjective. A common language seems to exist to make those differences possible and understandable as differences. Furthermore, what may look like individual “action”—such as driving one’s truck or giving a political speech—may not be best characterized as “individual.” They may be endeavors undertaken as part of broader practices such as “driving” or “campaigning” and fruitfully studied as practices constituted by understandings among their participants.

Dialogical Inquiry Constitutive meanings appear private from the perspective of the participants in practices, but hermeneutics maintains that they are accessible through various forms of reflection and communication with participants in the practice. The forms can be actual or “metaphorical” in the context of studying practices whose participants are not directly accessible. There is significant diversity within hermeneutical inquiry on these issues as well as on the theoretical character of the resultant model. I shall offer an account heavily shaped by the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, one that underscores the nonobjectivist understanding that social scientific analysis involves a give and take between the ideas, prejudgments, or fore-meanings that inquirers have about their subject matter and their analysis of that subject matter as guided by those ideas.5 In other words, the prejudgments, concepts, concerns, paradigmatic principles, and sense of meaningfulness of the subject matter that inquirers bring to their analyses—both very personal, subjective meanings and the intersubjective meanings within the political, theoretical, or research traditions the inquirer inhabits—constitute the basis from which inquiry proceeds. From this perspective any form of analysis that implies the possibility of putting aside or removing the inquirer’s language from the process of inquiry is seen as problematic. For example, Weberian verstehen analysis offers an attractive element of empathetic understanding but also conveys the image of analysts getting out of their

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own heads and inside those of others, implying the possibility of removing the analyst’s understanding from the process of inquiry. The same seems true in anthropological notions of ethnomethodological indifference that seek to adopt, without judgment, the languages constitutive of practices as the languages of explanation. Both modes offer versions of the objectivist presupposition that it is possible for social theorists to abandon their own language in the process of understanding and adopt another. In the case of positivist social science, this means generating an operationalized set of culturally neutral scientific terms for the purposes of generalization. Positivist social science “goes general,” while the others “go native,” but all express the view that it is possible for social inquirers to do the humanly impossible—to put aside their language in the process of social explanation. Indeed, observations in each are made in and through the intersubjective fore-meanings of objectivity, verstehen, and indifference, respectively. Gadamer’s hermeneutics proves fruitful here, because it conceptualizes the analytical movement as a dialogical one wherein the interpreter acknowledges the ongoing role of prejudgments and fore-meanings in the process of understanding and seeks to place them into play in a dialogical effort—actual or metaphorical—to understand constitutive meanings. The goal of inquiry shaped by this insight is, through dialogue, to bring the constitutive meanings of the lives and practices we seek to understand into the language(s) of the interpreter, so as to be able to express those meanings within the languages of social theorization. The outcome neither reproduces the predialogical language of the interpreter nor simply expresses the language of the participants in a practice. It is what Taylor calls a language of perspicuous contrast in which the meanings in both may be seen, compared, and contemplated for purposes of theoretical reflection. The wider the scope of our inquiries, the more the contrasts, and the more fruitful the theoretical contemplation is. In Gadamerian hermeneutics, the essential aim is for participants in the hermeneutical project to understand differently, that is, to arrive through dialogue at understandings different from those with which we began. Dialogue is the context for understanding, and thus understanding differently occurs within the variety of constitutive constraints and possibilities of dialogue as a practice: historical or linguistic distance, effect history possibilities and impossibilities of translation, and the elusiveness of any final and full, complete understanding. Given the depth and scope of the intersubjectivity of constitutive meanings, a hermeneutical account of even very specific aspects of a practice—such as book publishing or the state or religion—requires enormous dedication and effort. Hermeneutics seeks to understand what may be understood about the meanings of carefully identified practices, and this includes

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understanding what may be difficult to understand, what resists both understanding and this framework of understanding, and even understanding differently what understanding may mean. Whatever the constraints of dialogue, hermeneutics sees accounts of meanings, including those of constitutively opaque areas of meaning, impossible translations, and permanently perplexing differences as better than nonhermeneutical accounts because we have endeavored to make sense of the meanings that make practices what they are. For the purposes of political inquiry, therefore, the idea of language games and the dialogical model of inquiry prove remarkably fruitful in adapting the constitutive understanding of meanings to the study of social practices.

Comparison and Theorization With its analytical imperative to account for the matrices of meanings constitutive of practices, hermeneutics has been said to prevent commonly understood requirements of explanation, especially comparison, general theorization, and criticism. As there are many different approaches to political inquiry, however, there are many different senses of what comparison, generalization, and criticism may mean. Hermeneutics offers a specific understanding of each. Comparison means to identify the contrasts, similarities, and differences between constitutive meanings. Such comparisons may be used to theorize specific constitutive forms as well as broader possible patterns and relationships among them. Generalization is not necessary, but it is not impossible either. An excellent example is the subject matter of the present study. As it illustrates, general terms in the study of the politics of secularism appear available. Hermeneutically speaking, it is crucial that these terms be described in relation to the constitutive meaning content of the practices. A variety of practices described as secular cannot be said to be the same if their constitutive languages differ, but it seems possible to articulate those differences through the shared terms that are understood to have different meanings in different contexts. Hermeneutical criticism has several dimensions. Criticism is a necessary component of any dialogical engagement. The idea that criticism should be withheld from conversation resonates with the objectivist premise that prejudgments and fore-meanings contaminate inquiry. In contrast, hermeneutics suggests that a dialogue can only occur if those are put into play. The idea is not communion but dialogue, not agreement but understanding constitutive meanings. Withholding strong judgments seems to shield the interpreter’s language of inquiry and risks closing off the possibility of understanding differently. Criticism of a range of kinds

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thus seems necessary. The common worry is that “criticism” will disrupt or end a conversation, but it is difficult to know in advance the impact that any utterance within a conversation will have on the conversation. Criticism may sharpen the focus of an exchange; indeed, purposeful reluctance to foreground one’s strongest judgments may shut it down. If criticism ends an exchange, then understanding differently may include understanding limits of the existing languages of interpretation. It may reinforce the inherent difficulties of illuminating contrasts between existing languages of interpretation—including “criticism”—and meanings constitutive of practices constituted by other languages. Or, the seeming end in the exchange may only be a temporary suspension in dialogue. Understanding differently is the aim, and that may happen in a variety of ways. Most fundamentally, this interpretive standard requires interpreters to be open to dialogically receiving the meanings constitutive of the practices of others, suggesting a second critical dimension to the project. The outcome of hermeneutical engagements—languages of perspicuous contrast in which constitutive meanings are given expression—entails a range of possible changes in the languages of inquiry. These may be subtle shifts brought about by dialogue with constitutive meanings relatively familiar to those of the inquirer, or they may be radical changes requiring major alterations in the organization and meanings in the prior understanding. Enduring theoretical propositions may be rendered relevant in different ways or even made irrelevant. It is difficult to stipulate the character of the different understanding before the engagement, but some kind of alteration occurs through dialogue. The inquirer ceases to view the practices under consideration simply through the initial horizons of interpretation. Hermeneutics thus offers a form of criticism that continually implies the permanent provinciality and ongoing potential transformation of existing fore-meanings in relation to the multiple and diverse meanings constitutive of human social practices.6 Hermeneutics opens theoretical understandings to being displaced, to being taken to another place in terms of understanding—within and across societies, even inside one’s own locales. This is why hermeneutics is relevant to opening the study of secularisms in a global age beyond the contours of European ideal types. What Europe had rendered as a lack in relation to its standard is taken by hermeneutics as a difference with the potential to transform our very understanding of the standard. Hermeneutics is relevant to the study of secularism in a global age not because it allows us to extend existing knowledges around the world. It is relevant because it is open to conversing with and within multiple worlds and outlooks, multiple traditions and subtraditions, multiple subjectivities and intersubjectivities. In this regard, it is

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anti-imperialist, and its constitutive purposes significantly contrast with the colonial accumulation of cultural knowledge. The constitutive meanings of life-worlds outside the hermeneutically open languages of inquiry inform and transform those languages. When hermeneutics crosses borders, it crosses with its provisionality and provinciality intact, knowing there are other vocabularies and additional transformative possibilities for theorizing to receive. Hermeneutics views participants in practices as coeval interlocutors—as the makers of the meanings constitutive of life—not, emphatically, as objects of conquest, control, conversion, or the affirmation of the preexisting identities of the interpreter. Of course, this does not ensure that hermeneutical understanding will not be understood as colonial. Its constitutive terms—including understanding differently—may differ from the intersubjective participant’s know-how of practices it is open to understanding. Constituted as it is as a practice of social inquiry seeking understanding (in contrast to other alternatives), however, hermeneutics underscores the importance of this constitutive possibility—that there are practices constituted on terms fundamentally different from its own. Indeed, this is the recurring starting point for its form of dialogical inquiry. In hermeneutics, what get continually displaced are the preunderstandings of inquiry itself. Hermeneutics thus “goes global” to understand multiple meanings constitutive of practices associated with secularism hoping to produce altered understandings and theorizations of the ways human beings meaningfully endow the relationship between politics and religion, or between power and matters of tradition, culture, and conscience more generally—to use terms open to being understood differently as well. With this brief account of hermeneutical study in mind, let us return to the question of secularism in Turkey.

Laiklik Placing the European prejudgment that secularism entails a “separation of state and religious spheres” into a metaphorically dialogical relationship with the constitutive understandings of the founding and ongoing relationship between state and Islam in Turkey produces an understanding that what are seen as separate spheres within the European prejudgment are understood to be separate in some ways and integrated, supervised, overseen, and controlled in other ways within the institutional and interpretive relationships of power between state and Islam in Turkey. In Turkish, this relationship is characterized as laiklik, a concept often translated into English as secularism. A more direct translation would be laicism. When secularism is used, it is important to inform our

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usage with the meanings constitutive of the practices, especially because the intersubjective understandings of “secularism” within the European fore-meaning envision the “separation of realms” as an alternative to their integration. This is not the intersubjective understanding constitutive of the practices associated with laiklik. In Turkey’s laicist relations, the founding and ongoing understanding is to separate state and religion and to maintain their separation in particular state spheres within a set of institutional relationships that ensure their integration and supervision as well. In their founding conception, separation meant the goal of disentangling and lessening the role of Islamic theory and practice from their previous interrelation within Ottoman governance in certain constitutional, political, and cultural spheres so that the ruling party’s version of the Turkish national future would be implemented by the state and its most powerful executive offices, including the military. Within that vision, state affairs in law, education, and political practice were conceptualized separate from Islam as commitments to national values, Western corporatist modernity, civilization, economic prosperity, positive science, and worldly affairs more generally. But this did not mean that the state, its nationalist vision, and religion were entirely separated, since the ruling party created institutions for the promotion of its version of Islam as well, especially through its General Directorate of Religious Affairs. This office has grown significantly over time and is a key component of the laicist structures. Through it, the state provides extensive services to Turkish citizens domestically and abroad on matters of belief and worship. To this end, the state contains established relations of what are constituted as oversight, interpretation, service, and supervision for the teaching, training, and employment of all religious personnel and, through the offices of the mosques and publishing houses of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, the promotion and publication of a State Islam. The state also provides forms of religious instruction within its national educational system (under the education ministry) and in the military, for cadets and officers. These combined relationships of separation and integration have historical roots within Ottoman practices and, since the earliest days of the republic, have been implicated in the ongoing political battle within Turkey between forces supportive of more assertive or more elastic forms of separation, oversight, integration, monitoring, and control.7 More detailed inquiry into the specific constitutive meanings of these concepts is hermeneutically important, but already we are well-positioned to elaborate perspicuous contrasts between European ideal-typical foremeanings concerning secularism and the constitutive meanings of laicism in Turkey. What appear as alternatives in one (separation or integration) are not in the other. In Turkey’s laicist relations, relations understood

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as separation exist within a set of relations understood as integration, supervision, and control, and the latter relations are understood as part of the larger practice of maintaining the separation of religion from state affairs. One constitutive purpose of the Directorate of Religious Affairs is to ensure that the state’s religion does not interfere in other state affairs. Now, these intersubjective understandings are sometimes contested by participants in the practice, and those participants may participate for a variety of subjective reasons, but their participations and the practice are constituted by what they share—their intersubjective meanings. These meanings constitute the complex of intermingled relations between state and religion in Turkey’s laicist practices in the sense of making those practices what they are, such that, with different meanings, the practices would be different. A hermeneutical study of the power relations associated with secularism in Turkey clearly leads to an altered understanding of constitutive meanings in the politics of secularism.

A New Ideal Type? To return to the question posed at the beginning of the chapter, given that forms of integrated relations exist between state and religion in European practices as well, should the study of secularism in a global age begin not with the European ideal of “separated realms,” but with the social theoretical ideal of established separated and integrated realms constitutive of Turkey’s laicist practices? My answer may be divided into two parts, one stressing the comparative relevance of the study of secularism in Turkey and the other underscoring the importance of hermeneutics to theorizing the politics of secularism globally. The constitutive social theoretical ideal of an institutionally and interpretively integrated set of relations between state and Islam in Turkey, when conceptualized as an ideal-typical fore-meaning from which to begin analysis, indeed enables us to see more complicated relationships within global practices associated with secularism. To take the example of secular politics in the United States: this fore-meaning immediately brings into view various forms of intermingled formal political practices between state and religion. Participants in secular politics in the United States commonly understand and may contest that political power should maintain a strict separation between state and religion in matters of law, education, and politics to keep them free from the influence of the other and to ensure the robust life of religion in society, but additional intersubjectivities constitute integrated relations between the two spheres as well. Practices such as “faith-based” policies are constituted by the shared understanding that state and religious organizations may cooperate in pursuing shared social goals, where those

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goals and the institutional connections are supervised by the state. Here we see, as in Turkey, institutionally integrated controls, oversights, and supervisions within a structure that maintains certain separations. Practices constituted with the purpose of maintaining the life of religion within the halls of power also exist in the United States (e.g., congressional prayer breakfasts, presidential Iftaar dinners, military chaplains), and, while the U.S. political structure heavily emphasizes, as in Turkey, public policy constituted on terms of positivist science, participants commonly understand and contest that it does not systematically prevent political activity constituted primarily on the basis of religious understandings. Obvious examples include heavily pietistic political campaigning and pronouncements of the truths of religion during official ceremonies and in the conduct of formal state practices, such as legislative deliberations and war. Office holders across the political spectrum engage in these practices, with different emphases, and often in ways that go unnoticed because of the dominant tendency to see U.S. politics through the fore-meanings of “separation.” Opposition, for example, to embryonic stem cell research is obviously constituted by religious views, but so too is support. President Barack Obama cited his “belief” that human beings are “called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering” in his executive order of March 2009 renewing federal funding, an order that he constituted as well by positivist respect for the “facts” of science. The president’s belief appears subjective, but it is also widely shared within these practices and is now constitutive of the practices of government-funded stem cell research. This highly abbreviated illustration offers important contrasts between secularism in Turkey and the United States. In the United States, public officials commonly understand and may contest that their speech and practice may be articulated as answering the call to God, usually as long as that call is not the sole stated basis of public policy; whereas in Turkey, politicians commonly understand and contest that, while such political speech may be desirable for some, it is legally forbidden for most, though not all, public officials. (The constitutive meanings of the practice are related but not equivalent to codified restrictions.) In both Turkey and the United States, it is commonly understood that some state officials—for example, the Director of Religious Affairs and the U.S. President—may properly engage in promoting or pronouncing on religion within a broader institutional framework that ensures its separation in other ways. These constitutive understandings make these practices what they are: institutional and interpretive state religiosity in both cases, though with different emphases and within different sites. The hermeneutical approach also allows us to understand competitive politics within both as partly a battle between those who support different degrees of integration, not only different degrees of separation, between power and religious institutions and ideas.

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Starting from the analytical perspective of laicism in Turkey thus enables contextual, comparative, and theoretically provocative insight into the constitutive character of other secular practices. It makes possible not simply a postcolonial release of difference into Europe. More fundamentally, it makes possible a broader sense of the possibilities within the politics of secularization in the global age, one that decenters and—as analysis proceeds—potentially dispenses with Europe as the focal point of analysis. These implications follow, however, not because we have initiated our inquiry within social thought in Turkey but because we have done so on hermeneutical terms.

Proceeding Hermeneutics envisions placing the languages constitutive of social inquiry into a dialogically transformative relationship with the languages constitutive of social practices. In the study of secularism, this initially entailed questioning the European tendency to treat differences from the separation ideal as lacks and treating them as differences to understand, compare, and theorize alternative ways of constituting power within the politics of secularism. The focus on alternatives is central. As demonstrably fruitful as the terms of laiklik may be for illuminating additional forms of state-religion intermingling, the priority is the ongoing possibility of altering the languages of social theoretical understanding through dialogical engagement with the multiple and diverse meanings constitutive of the politics of secularism globally. Hermeneutical inquiry resists elevating any single social theoretical outlook to the position of a fixed ideal, and this includes, paradoxically but necessarily, the constitutive terms (understanding, meaning, dialogue) of its own standards. As such, it seems uniquely constituted to see even more constitutive variety—more or less interminglings between power and religion along with relations that are constituted on entirely different terms. In sum, to understand secularism in a global age—and to quote one philosopher on these matters—“you need hermeneutics.”8

Notes I wish to thank Elizabeth Shakman Hurd for encouraging this effort, Bill Lynn and Paul Soper for ongoing conversation, and James Farr for his teaching. 1. “Turkish Modernity and the Social Sciences: A Crisis in Knowledge?” Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, March 20, 2009.

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2. See, Mirjam Künkler and Michael Meyer-Resende, “Discussion Paper No.1,” in A Missing Link: Why Europe Should Talk about Religion When Promoting Democracy Abroad (Democracy Reporting International, June 2009). 3. For further elaboration, see Andrew Davison, “Laiklik and Turkey’s ‘Cultural’ Modernity: Releasing Turkey into Conceptual Space Occupied by ‘Europe,’ ” in E. Fuat Keyman, ed., Remaking Turkey (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007), 35–46. 4. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 40. 5. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), 265–307 and discussion in Andrew Davison, Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) 13–15, 51–86. 6. On “provincial,” see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3. 7. For further elaboration, see Taha Parla and Andrew Davison, Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist Turkey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 8. Hans-Georg Gadamer said this in an exchange I had with him and Joel Weinsheimer on hermeneutics and the study of secularism in Turkey (July 5, 1997, University of Heidelberg). For the record, Gadamer also observed that “the military is important there as well.”

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Chapter 2 Manifestations of the Religious-Secular Divide: Self, State, and the Public Sphere Nilüfer Göle My aim in this chapter is to present a succinct mental mapping of the changes, shifts, and displacements that are currently taking place in our ways of approaching the secular-religious divide. I propose an analysis and selective reassessment of the changes that have occurred during the last three decades in our approaches to secularism. Due to our ongoing conversations across cultures and disciplines, there is an increasing awareness in the social sciences that there is not one ideal-model of secularism, whether it is defined by the Anglo-Saxon liberal model or by French political “laïcité.” Rather there exists a plurality of secularisms in different national, cultural, and religious contexts, including non-Western secularisms, as, for example, in India and Turkey. The point of departure of this book is the necessity of decoupling secularism and Western experience and acknowledging the plurality of secularisms. It aims to foster a comparative gaze between different genealogies, historical trajectories, cultural habitations, and political formations of the secular. Not only the plurality of secularisms that supposes distinct national formations but also the cultural crossings and the interconnected histories of secularism need to be highlighted to understand today’s religious-secular formations and their confrontations. It is therefore not sufficient to open our readings of secularism to its multiple configurations in distinct national formations as if they were independent from each other. The formations of the secular follow different historical trajectories and have different religious genealogies in different places, yet they are closely interconnected with hegemonic impositions of Western modernity and colonialism. The revival of religious movements, conservative values, various fundamentalisms, and in particular Islamist movements challenges the authoritarian modes of secularism that exclude religion from public life and from definitions of the modern self. New modes of confrontation are taking place between

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the secular and the religious not only within national formations, but also across cultures and civilizations. Coupling the incomparable, namely the French and Turkish examples, despite their differences, can help us understand the intercivilizational encounter of the secular. The two different historical experiences, European and non-European, with two different religious genealogies, Christian and Muslim, following two different trajectories of nationstate building, democratic and authoritarian, are historically connected to each other by the principle of “laicite.” Both countries cherish Republican secularism and idealize a public life exempt from religious signs, yet both have witnessed in the last thirty years the rise of Islamic visibility in public life and a destabilization of the established boundaries between the secular and the religious, leading to a process of confrontation, rivalry, and mimicry between the two. If Turkish secularism, “laiklik,” is derived from French “laïcité” and from dialogical encounter with Western civilization, today debates on French secularism are engaged in relation to Islamic presence in Europe. The Islamic headscarf issue crystallizes, both in France and in Turkey, the debates on the presence of religious visibility in public life, the civilizational aspect of the confrontation, and the enforcement of Republican secularism by legal rulings or the support of the army. The first point that needs to be emphasized is that the Western master narrative of secularism undergoes a radical change as it shifts from an “indigenous” debate that is shaped by exchanges with Christian religion to that of confrontation with Islam. The second shift concerns the acknowledgment of the plurality of secularisms and a growing interest in depicting and understanding nonWestern forms of secularity. The master narrative of Western secularity has imposed a sociological gaze that has evaluated non-European experiences with an established set of criteria and measured the inconsistencies or deficiencies in respect to a model that is supposed to be universal. However studies of the secular have introduced the idea that secularity is a longue-duree history of reforms that initially had their loci within religion itself and have deconstructed religious-free approaches to secularism. Marcel Gauchet, whose work elucidates the particular role that Christianity played in the process of secularity (Christianity as “the religion of the end of religion”), is a pioneer in rearticulating the secular with the religious.1 In his recent work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor critiques the narrative of secularism that dismisses the changes that have occurred in the religious and spiritual realm and argues against what he calls “subtraction theories” that define secularity as simply the elimination of religion, telling the story of a secular age as it develops within and out of Latin Christianity.2

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Such approaches shift attention to the religious context in which secularism evolves and thereby lead to an unpacking of secularity as a religious-free, neutral, and universal development of European modernity. Revealing the particularity of secularism and its intrinsic relation to Christianity goes hand in hand with a critique of the universalist claims of the Western model of secular modernity. These criticisms have an impact on the way we decenter the European gaze of secularism and open our readings to the multiplicity of secularisms. They can lead to two different attitudes in studying secularism in non-Western contexts. Either we postulate that secularism is the product of Western history, intrinsic to Latin Christendom and consequently an alien ideology for the nonWestern civilizations (as Bernard Lewis argues for Islamic civilization). Or, on the contrary, we can decouple the secular and the Western and study the multiple formations and manifestations of the secular in different historical and religious contexts. However both of these positions are problematic insofar as they ignore the influence of Western secular modernity. They ignore the way in which it travels to different contexts, through different political forms of interaction, such as colonialism or modernism, evident for example in Indian and Turkish secularism. The latter illustrate the manifold manifestations of secularism in relation to two different nation-building processes—the former shaped by postcolonial and the latter by post-Empire context— and in relation to Hindu and Muslim religious genealogies. These multiple forms of secularism are shaped, on the one hand, by the formations of the national and, on the other, by the dialogical relations with the religious and the modern. In our readings of multiple secularisms in nonWestern contexts, we cannot ignore the way secularity is transmitted as a vector of Western ways of life, as a way of self and public governance. Although one cannot dismiss the imprint of colonialism and modernism in shaping these formations of the secular, neither can one reduce them to mere copies of Western secularism. To depict and translate the particularity of Muslim (or Hindu) habitations of the secular, we need to give up “deficiency theory” that presupposes that non-Western experiences are lagging behind, incomplete and noncontemporaneous with the West. Secularism in non-Western contexts is often conceptualized as a second-rank imitation of the Western original. Turkish secularism is often studied as an authoritarian derivative of French “laïcité,” measured in terms of its gaps, inconsistencies, and deficiencies regarding the French ideal-model. However each time a notion travels, and is repeated, it is never exactly the same because in the process of repeating a term or a concept, we never simply produce a replica of the original usage; every reiteration transforms the original meaning, adding new meanings to it. 3 The French notion “laïcité” is readopted to

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Turkish language as “laiklik” and thereby becomes part of daily political usage and the collective imaginary. The use of the same notion with a slight change of the accent points to a process of iteration in which the workings of secular power go beyond being a mere second-rank copy, with new meanings, discourses, images, and practices. Instead of reading secularity in the mirror of an ideal-Western model and measuring its gaps and deficiencies, we need to depict the ways secularism is semantically adopted, politically reinvented, collectively imagined, and legally institutionalized. Overall, we are witnessing the weakening of the hegemony of the secular not only as a master narrative in the social sciences and as an ideology of Western modernity, but also as a collective imaginary that regulates the daily social lives of individuals. The decline of the power of the secular signifies that the old hierarchical boundaries with the religious are unsettled and have become more porous. Rather than capturing the relation between the two in consecutive terms, as religion alternating with the secular, and pointing to a “post” secular era, we need to understand the ways religion becomes contemporaneous of the secular modern.4 We can hitherto speak of the recompositions of the religious-secular divide as well as new confrontations, rivalry, and mimicry between the two. The religious-secular divide manifests and competes, as I argue in this chapter, at three levels, namely the state, public sphere, and self. The battleground between the religious and the secular concerns foremost the formation of the state, the governance of the public sphere, and the ethics of the self.

Monopoly of the State over Religious-Secular Distinctions We speak of distinct models of secularism in national contexts, such as French, American, Indian, and Turkish secularisms. The story of secularism can hardly be told independent of the history of nation-state building. Secularism understood as a principle of separation between state and religion underpins the nation-state building process, manmade law making, and popular sovereignty. Two widespread tacit beliefs are however increasingly being questioned. The first is that secularism and democracy are thought to be concomitant with each other. The second is that secularism is understood as the impartiality of the state and therefore as the guarantee of religious and confessional pluralism and atheism. Both presuppositions run counter to particular historical experiences. Secularism can foster liberal pluralism or authoritarian nationalism; it depends on the trajectories of the nation-building process.

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In the Turkish case, although the debates and processes of secularization of norms, laws, and institutions started during the second half of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, secularism reached its apogee with the Turkish state-building process after 1923 and became the founding ideology of Republican nationalism. 5 It created its own national elite by means of compulsory nation-wide secular education and adoption of the Latin script. Hence, Turkish secularism works within the frame of the politics of uniformization and homogenization of a national culture against the legacy of a multiethnic and multireligious Ottoman Empire.6 The eradication of non-Muslim minorities, by population exchanges and massacres in the last days of the empire and during the Republic, led to a social terrain in which Sunnite Islam became the religion of the majority. Secularism underpinned the ideal of a national community “free of religion,” yet simultaneously it implicitly defined this community in terms of a Muslim and Sunnite majority, in counter distinction with non-Muslim minorities of the cosmopolitan empire as well as the Alevites and Kurds. In the process of Turkish nation-state building, secularism became a vector for the homogenization of a national culture, whereas in the case of India, secularism was enacted as a guarantee of religious pluralism.7 In both cases, secularism plays an important role as a state ideology, and the state is defined as a secular state in both the Indian and the Turkish constitutions. However the particular and quite distinct contexts of state-building become decisive in the meanings and practices that become associated with these two secularisms. In India anticolonial resistance privileged cultural and religious differences, whereas in Turkey the dismantlement of a multireligious and multiethnic empire led to the making of a national community. Secularism as a guarantee for religious pluralism in India and for modern nationalism in Turkey played different roles. If today Hindu nationalism challenges national diversity and the legacy of religious pluralism in India, in Turkey political Islam challenges the authoritarian and exclusionary politics of secular nationalism. Islamic movements have cultivated an ambivalent relation with nationalism. Islamic critical thought and political radicalism first developed against the supremacy of the national, defending the community of believers (“oumma”) as a main reference for the collective identity of Muslims. However Islam has also become a form of nationalism.8 The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran can be interpreted as a way of not only completing the nation-state building process, ending the monarchy, centralizing religious education, and homogenizing the national culture by religion but also providing a forceful symbolic and political example of Islam as an organized state power. The Turkish and Iranian examples can be compared as cases of reverse mirroring. Turkish Republican

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secularism and the figure of Ataturk have been taken as an exemplary model and a source of inspiration in many Muslim countries, including Iran. Hence social science literature compares Turkey and Iran in their respective engagements with secularization understood as synonymous with Westernization. However the comparison between the two countries can also be made in relation to their formations of the national. Turkey ended Ottoman monarchy and realized the transition to a nationstate within the ideological framework of secularism in 1923, whereas Iran ended the power of the monarchy with an Islamic revolution of 1979. Both countries are Republican states; but the secular-religious divide is reversed, the former completed the formation of the national by means of political secularism (“laiklik”), the latter by means of political Islamism. Organized state power is framed by national secularism in Turkey and by national Islamism in Iran. In both countries pluralization and democratization hinge upon the distancing and growing autonomy of the state from the political ideologies of secularism and Islamism, respectively. What is at stake in both cases is the decline of the hegemony of the state over the definitions of the secular and the religious. These developments cannot be captured in terms of linear, consecutive, and alternating replacements between the secular and the religious. Rather than either-or arguments, Islamization versus democratization, one has to frame the changes in terms of recompositions and mutual borrowings between the secular and the religious. The process of democratization in Turkey shows that despite the political polarization between the religious and the secular, the wall of separation between the two becomes more and more porous as mutual borrowings and cross-fertilizations blur the rigid distinctions. Hitherto it is difficult to speak of clear-cut distinctions between the secular and the Islamic. The Islam-rooted AK Party (Party of Justice and Development) government takes on the project of joining the European Union (EU) and enhances a series of reforms in support of the recognition of ethnic and religious pluralism while the political parties of secular legacy turn toward more authoritarian nationalism and anti-European politics. It would be too simplistic to interpret Islamic politics in Turkey as “the failure of secularism,” as it would be too simplistic to interpret the opposition movements in Iran as “the end of Islam.”9 The democratic resistance and protest movements in Iran during the general elections in June 2009 criticized the theocratic authorities for abandoning the original ideals of the revolution and called for the end of state monopoly over the definitions of Islam.10 Despite differing levels of pluralism and democracy, in both cases the political distinctions of the religious-secular divide are unsettled. And in both cases nationalism inhibits or challenges the state’s claims to monopolize definitions of either the secular or the religious.

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Configurations between the secular and the religious are shaped not only by nation-states but also by transnational dynamics and global migratory flows. European nation-states have increasingly become migrant, multireligious, and culturally heterogeneous states. The established division between pious America and secular Europe does not hold any longer. Muslim migrants in Europe or Polish citizens of Europe make claims on behalf of freedom of religion. The EU remembers its spiritual roots and Christian heritage to define its Constitution, cultural unity, and geographic frontiers. Is Europe secular or Christian? What about Muslims and Jews living in Christian Europe? Do the three monotheistic religions define equally the European heritage, or is Judeo-Christian Europe distinguished from the Islamic other? Do the debates over the legitimacy of Turkish membership in the EU reveal a religious difference or a “civilizational” one? Turkish membership that brings forth both Muslim and secular affiliations unsettles the established boundaries of European identity, whether defined in cultural or religious terms. On the other hand, Muslim migrants claim their Islamic visibility in the European public sphere as they distance themselves from the national origins of their religion. The way Islamic religion is learned, interpreted, and practiced in Europe is a novel experience to the extent that it is not in direct continuity with “parents’ religion” and affiliated with a given nation. Islam becomes part of “disembedded,” imagined forms of horizontal solidarity. Charles Taylor describes social disembeddedness as a condition for a different kind of social imaginary; that is “horizontal forms of social imaginary in which people grasp themselves and great number of others as existing and acting simultaneously.”11 To the extent that European Islam is disembedded from national cultures, it becomes a “religious experience” in both individual and collective terms, leading to new hybrid forms between secular Europe and Muslim religion. Once again we witness the unsettlement of the distinctions between Islam and Europe, between religious and secular. New recompositions, tensions, co-penetrations between the two give rise to new definitions of self and everyday life practices. The story of secularism is not confined to a given nation-state but follows transnational dynamics in which the encounters and confrontations among different cultures and civilizations become paramount in shaping debates, unsettling distinctions, and accelerating borrowings between the secular and the religious.

Secular and Pious Self Secularism is a mode of state governance as well as a set of moral values for self-governance. Secularism works as an organizing principle of social

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life, penetrates into everyday life practices, and underpins the politics of emancipation and sexuality. In non-Western contexts, secularism is closely interrelated with the project of the “civilizing mission” of the West and transmits a set of norms that define rationality as well as ethical and aesthetic forms. Colonial or modernist elites embody such norms by means of their access to Western ways of rational thinking and life practices. The norms of “Western civilization” are transmitted and adopted at the level of everyday life practices, definitions of self, and habitus. The creation of a “secular habitus” in a Muslim culture means a series of changes in traditional and religious culture that bring women to the forefront as markers of new forms of life. Practices and reforms such as abandoning the veil, compulsory coeducation for girls and boys, social mixing of men and women, free-love, equal rights for men and women, women’s performance in public, all denote the erosion of traditional-religious norms of women’s covering, the ban on women’s performance and visibility on the public scene, the segregation of men and women in social life, and arranged marriages and polygamy. The secular self means a set of bodily practices to be learned, rehearsed, and performed, ranging from ways of dressing (and undressing), talking and socializing with men to acting in public. The habitations of the secular are not transmitted “naturally” and implicitly, but on the contrary become part of a project of modernity and politics of self that require assimilation and “acculturation” to a Western culture. The changes in dress codes are particularly charged with political symbolism. Kemal Ataturk and Mahatma Gandhi, two figures that incarnated Turkish and Indian independence, and both known as the “father” of their respective nations, communicated in their public lives and style of dress their commitments to local and Western cultures, traditional and modern, spiritual and secular distinctions. Both in different ways embodied the governance of self and governance of public. Both leaders performed their clothing preferences publicly and symbolically. Ataturk opted for Western style clothes (his wardrobe is exhibited in his mausoleum in Ankara) whereas Gandhi wore the traditional Indian “dhoti” (fabric made from local traditional raw cotton) and shawl.12 Gandhi ate simple vegetarian food and practiced fasting as a means of self-purification. Ataturk avoided any spiritual activity in public, serving as a role-model to be followed by Turkish secular politicians who abstained from the use of any religious idiom and practice, including fasting during the month of Ramadan. One marked “religious disobedience” and expressed the desire to belong to the home of “civilized (read westernized) nations,” while the other signified “civil disobedience” and resistance to Western colonial powers. While Gandhi ended untouchability in India, Ataturk advocated

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women’s participation in public life and replaced Sharia law with family code to ensure gender equality. The abolishment of the Caliphate (the Ottoman emperor as Caliph was the supreme religious and political leader of all Sunni Muslims across the world) in 1924 by the proWestern nationalist movement of Ataturk connected the histories of the two countries in an unprecedented way. The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the Caliphate system evoked sympathy not only among Indian Muslims, but also among the members of the Indian independence movement, leading to political and social mobilization on behalf of the Ottoman Caliphate, known as the “Khilafat movement” in India. There is a relation between the end of the Caliphate and the renewal of Islamic movements. The abolishment of the Caliphate engendered a vacuum of religious authority and unity in the Muslim world, and it has led since the end of 1970s to a plethora of Islamic movements competing with each other over the interpretations of religious norms and political authority.13 The revolution in Iran and the establishment of Islam as an organized state power provide a model of political reference and aspiration for many contemporary Islamist movements. However the stateoriented political agenda of these movements should not overshadow the cultural-religious repertoire. Contemporary actors of Islam are engaged critically with the cultural program of secular modernity and Western colonialism. Specifically, Islamic movements challenge the established equation between definitions of the Western self and the civilized self and elaborate an alternative performative politics of the pious self and habitus in modern contexts.14 Religion becomes part of the interpretation and improvisation for self-definitions of Muslims who seek to restore piety in modern life. Individuation (or more precisely personalization) of religion goes hand in hand with the establishment of collective bonds among Muslims who recognize each other by means of a shared repertoire of performative piety. In the revival of religious movements, there is an element of Islamic “self-fashioning” that follows the dynamics of modern individuation.15 As Stephen Greenblatt argues, modern individuation is not boundless, and the fashioning of the self is the outcome of the mechanisms of discipline, restraint, and a partial suppression of the personality. Similarly, Islam provides an alternative repertoire for self-fashioning and self-restraint by means of disciplinary practices, which range from supervision of the imperatives of faith to the control of sexuality, in both mind and body, which are called “nefs” in Islam. The Islamic headscarf expresses the self-fashioning of Muslim girls with disciplinary categories of Islam but for whom the category of faith is not a prearranged category and enters into the domain of improvisation,

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adaptation, and invention. It is a sign of self-restraint (hijab means modest behavior and dress) and self-fashioning, including literally the production of Islamic aesthetics and fashion. Islamic self-fashioning and self-governance confronts contemporary secular feminism. A nonverbal but embodied communication in the veil conveys a sense of disobedience to secular notions of self-formation and sexual freedom. If the Islamic veil, by means of covering a woman’s body, is a reminder of sacred intimacy in public, secular feminism claims equality and transparency in bringing the personal and the intimate into public. If covered women call to mind the limits of sexuality and the indispensability of Muslim women in public, uncovered women project an interpretation of emancipation as the free display of desire and the body in public. The Islamic veil, when it is not enforced on women by state power or communitarian pressure, and expressing the personal trajectories of women and their self-fashioning piety, presents a critique to secular interpretations of women’s emancipation. Islamic feminism unsettles the religious-secular divide to the extent that Muslim women are both pious and public, blurring the distinctions between religion and gender erasure. There is a reverse mirroring between pious and secular self-fashioning, although in each case the boundaries between personal and public, self and sexuality, religious and secular become fuzzy as they are intertwined with each other.

Secular Public Spaces and Religious Visibilities The claims of religious visibility in public and the controversies they provoke reveal the unspoken secular rules and norms of the public sphere in European countries. There are different levels of state control of religious presence in public life, ranging from active and aggressive to more pluralistic conceptions of secularism depending on the national politics of secularism.16 However the question of religion in the public sphere cannot be reduced to choices of liberal versus authoritarian politics of secularism. French and Turkish policies that ban the Islamic headscarf in the public schools (France) and in the universities (Turkey) can be considered exclusionary and active, if not an authoritarian interpretation of “laicite.” However the two countries are not “exceptional” in debating and attempting to restrain Islamic presence in the public sphere. In Germany and Italy, where the presence of religion is not as unwanted as in France, the polarizing debates on the construction of mosques, the height of the minarets, and the shape of the domes, reveal the disturbing irruption of Islamic visibility in the public landscape.17 The question of religious difference cannot be framed solely in terms of abstract principles

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of toleration and recognition of the plurality of faiths. It appears in a materialized form and in a given physical space. The incursion of religious signs, symbols, and behavior (headscarf, minarets, segregation of sexes) disturbs the European public eye and collective consciousness to the extent that these are considered not to be in conformity with unspoken secular norms of public life. The spaces in which Muslims make their religious difference visible are subject to public controversy: schools, cities, swimming pools, hospitals, cemeteries all become public spaces in which the religious-secular divide becomes problematic and subject to recomposition. With migratory dynamics and global technologies of communication, the public sphere escapes the grip of nation-states and becomes a site of transnational flows of communication, bringing into close interaction different cultures and civilizations. The public sphere that was conceptualized in relation to the European historical development of the nationstate, as a mononational and monolinguistic entity, becomes a site of migration, religious pluralism, and civilizational encounter. How can we rethink the public sphere without reducing the public to a mononational community and its legislative confinement to the nation-state? The weakening of the hegemony of the national-secular calls for a new conceptualization of commonness without the vertical hierarchy of the nation-state as a prerequisite of the public sphere. The notion of space needs to be at the forefront of our analyses depicting the recompositions between the secular and the religious. The notion of space does not refer to an empty space but to a space of production of social relations, defining boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, of acceptable and forbidden. A space is always regulated by certain norms, whether religious or secular. These norms are not only dictated by state law, but also shared values by those who inhabit and utilize those spaces. These unspoken norms are revealed once they are challenged by the intrusion of newcomers, foreigners, and by all of those who are not supposed to be present in those spaces. The Islamic intrusion, in failing to conform to European norms of publicness, provokes controversy and confrontation by means of which the “secular” and “civilizational” norms of public life are disclosed. However, these confrontations also create a new public; they bring together, in unintended and unpredictable ways, dissonant, competing persons, cultures, foreigners in proximity, in assembly. They create a new space, an interstice that affects the meanings of the religious and secular modern. The wall of separation between the two becomes porous and religious-secular distinctions become fuzzy in the course of common and confrontational public experience. At the level of everyday life practices, individuals appropriate new ways of combining secular and religious norms as they choose among

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spiritual experiences and convert to other religions or compose different religiosities, thereby producing new forms of syncretism. Buddhist Catholics and Yogi Muslims are among such nascent examples. The spatial proximity among cultures and religions not only creates anxiety, confusion of boundaries, and sporadic violence. It also opens up possibilities for new ways of connecting between cultures and religions once the hegemony of particular definitions of religious and secular distinctions, and civilized and uncivilized taxonomies, decline. Nationalism, the public sphere, and definitions of the self have been conceptualized principally within the secular paradigm. I have argued that the revival of religion reflects the loss of hegemony of the secular at these three levels of social organization: state, public, and self-governance. Consequently the secular-religious divide is unsettled, leading to mirroring and rivalry between the two for the orientation of the norms of disciplinary practices of the self, the state, and public life. Rather than sequential replacement of one with another, of the secular with the religious, and the assertion of some kind of categorical identity, we need to think in terms of confrontations as well as recompositions between the two. Only such a paradigmatic shift can open the possibility of addressing normative questions of modernity from an intercultural perspective in which the notions of secular and religious distinctions are not derived exclusively from Western experience.

Notes 1. Marcel Gauchet, La religion dans la démocratie, Parcours de la laïcité (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See especially pages 22 and 530–535. 3. Seyla Benhabib, “Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National, and the Global,” in Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations, ed. Robert Post (London: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. For the ways Islam becomes contemporaneous of Europe, see Nilüfer Göle, Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe (Paris: Galaade Editions, 2004). 5. However one should not think that the historical genealogy of the secular in Turkey starts with Atatürk Republicanism; some aspects of the secular are part of the Ottoman State tradition and Islamic historical legacy. To locate the origins of Turkish Republican ideology in the Ottoman past and for the correction of dualistic representations of the secular and the religious, see S¸ükrü Haniog˘lu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 6. Nilüfer Göle, “La question de la femme, la républicanisme et la laïcité: Regards croisés entre la Turquie et la France,” in Islam de France, islams d’Europe,

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7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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ed. Alain Gresh (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 101–110; and Nilüfer Göle, “Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The Making of Elites and Counterelites,” The Middle East Journal 51, no. 1 (1997): 46–58. For secularism in India as fostering religious pluralism, see Rajeev Bhargava in this volume. Ernest Gellner, “Religion and the Profane,” Eurozine Articles, 2000, http:// www.eurozine.com/articles/2000–08-28-gellner-en.html (accessed July 28, 2009). For an insightful analysis of the protest movements in Iran during the general elections in 2009, see Slavoj Zizek, “Téhéran en crise, ou le retour aux sources de la révolution de 1979,” Le Monde, June 27, 2009. For an analysis of democratization in Iran, see Farhad Khosrokhavar, “The Public Sphere in Iran,” in Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran, and Europe, ed. Nilüfer Göle and L. Ammann (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2006), 257–280. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 83. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For the relation between the end of Caliphate and the revival of Islamist movements, see Bobby S. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (New York: Zed Books, 1997). Nilüfer Göle, “Islam, European Public Space, and Civility,” Eurozine Articles, March 5, 2007, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007–05-03gole-en.html (accessed July 28, 2009). Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jürgen Pieters, Moments of Negotiation: The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001). Ahmet Kuru, Secularism and State Policies toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the public debate on the construction of a new mosque in Cologne, Germany, see Patrick Haenni and Stéphane Lathion, eds., Les minarets de la discorde. Éclairages sur un débat suisse et européen (Fribourg: Religioscope, 2009); and these two articles, “Cologne affronte samedi un ‘congrès anti-islamisation,’ ” September 18, 2008, http://www.7sur7.be/7s7/fr/1731/Islam/ article/detail/420197/2008/09/18/Cologne-affronte-samedi-un-congresanti-islamisation.dhtml (accessed August 15, 2009); and “Le génocide des Arméniens évoqué lors de la construction de la mosquée de Cologne,” August 20, 2007, http://www.armenews.com/article.php3?id_article=34011 (accessed August 15, 2009).

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Part II

History and Global Politics of Secularisms: France, United States, Turkey, and India

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Chapter 3 The Evolution of Secularism in France: Between Two Civil Religions Jean Baubérot Translated from French by Pavitra Puri In 2005, an International Declaration of 250 academics from 30 countries affirmed that the reality encompassed by the term secularism does not belong to “any culture, nation or continent.” Moreover, they declared that secularism can “exist in situations where the term has not been traditionally used.” The authors of the declaration define secularism as the outcome of three parameters: first, the freedom of conscience and the collective practice of this freedom; second, the nondomination of religion over state and society, the separation of religion and politics; and finally the principle of equality and nondiscrimination for religious reasons. Nowhere does such a secularism that would correspond completely to these parameters exist. On the other hand, in certain countries we find some concrete and relative forms of secularism that differ according to historical and social contexts and give more importance to one or the other of these three aspects. The distinction between the word and the social reality that it encompasses remains important. In France, as for that matter in Turkey in another context, even the word “secularism” constitutes a founding myth of modernity and an extremely important political and social claim. Alexandro Ferrari distinguishes, with good reason, “narrative secularism” and “legal secularism.”1 In France, depending upon the circumstances, the two can be found in close interaction or can be quite strongly disconnected. As in other countries, France is marked by the memory of its mythical foundation. The first founding reference concerns the Christian baptism of the “pagan” French chief Clovis (around 496 AD) that came to signify the future France refusing Aryan “heresy” in favor of the “Catholic, Apostolic and Roman” Christian faith. Clovis’s baptism would “metaphorically” be France’s baptism.

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The second founding reference concerns the birth of modern France, of Republican France, owing to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. This second foundation—political modernity and the construction of the nation-state of France—occurs in a head-on conflict with Roman Catholicism, the only authorized religion at the time. Fundamental acts of secularism (secular civil status, civil marriage, first attempt at the separation of church and state) are thus carried out in a context of confrontation that evokes vivid memories of this confrontation. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present, these two often-conflicting founding mythical accounts are at the base of both narrative secularism and its connections with legal secularism. But these connections have been expressed slightly differently at different times. Schematically, three periods can be distinguished. The first period (1789–1905) extends from the revolution itself (which quickly acquired the status of the foundation story) up until the separation of church and state. This is the period of “the conflict between two Frances” (according to the accepted expression), 2 of conflict between “clericalism” and “anticlericalism”: France, which refers to Clovis’s baptism, and France, which refers to the “values of 1789,” clash, and attempts in vain, at times, to reconcile the two. The legal connections between church and state are made up of a complex mix of semiofficial relations between the church and the state and the supervision of religions by the state (Concordat with the Holy See for the Catholic Church, system of “recognized cults” for Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism). The law of the state is secular (Civil Code of the French), and religions are in the public service and constitute the foundation of public morality. This is what I call “the first threshold of secularization (laicization).”3 The “conflict between two Frances” first and foremost concerns national identity. In a century during which France experienced seven different political regimes, this conflict was equally a conflict of regimes between the monarchy and the republic. The establishment of the Third Republic in 1870 brought about a certain anticlericalism of the state: the consolidation of the republic implied, for its partisans, a strong reduction in the political and social influence of the Catholic Church, considered the closest ally of the monarchists. The rallying to the republic, a call to French Catholics by Pope Leon XIII in 1892, brought about more conciliatory politics for a few years. But it did not put an end to this head-on collision for two reasons. First, the republic that was being rallied had, in the Pope’s vision, to have a Catholic identity, which was rejected by the partisans of “the values of 1789.”4 Then, at the very end of the nineteenth century, the dishonest compromises made by Catholics in the Dreyfus Affair (Jewish officer

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falsely accused of treason) induced a return and a radicalization of the anticlericalism of the state, with “complete secularism” as the watchword. This culminated in the law forbidding members of religious congregations from teaching (1904).5 The second period (1905–1989), or second threshold of secularization (laicization), is the one that I call a “secular pact,” which refers to a progressive reconciliation of the two Frances, with various highs and lows, and with the conflict centered in the field of education. The contemporary social use of the term secularism tends to focus on these areas of conflict and to ignore the pacification of relations between Catholicism and state. The 1905 law of separation of church and state marks the victory of the secular camp: the church loses all official character, and the Concordat and the system of “recognized cults” are abolished (article 2). But this victory also creates the possibility of an implicit pact, as conciliatory elements prevailed over other more radical ones.6 The law puts an official end to supervisory measures concerning common law and the politics of anticlericalism of the state (“the Republic assures freedom of conscience and guarantees the free exercise of cult,” article 1). Moreover, the autonomy of the internal organization of each religion is assured (article 4).7 Despite the Pope’s refusal (due to his fear of a “contagion” in the denunciation of the Concordats8) to accept this law, the separation functions, owing to three complementary laws, from 1908 onward. The main stages of this progressive reconciliation of the “two Frances” include the following: the “Sacred Union” of French people of diverse beliefs during the war of 1914–1918; an agreement in 1923–1924 between France and the Holy See on the status of Catholicism in the separation regime; the Vatican’s condemnation of Action française’s political and identity-based Catholicism in 1926; and the inscription of secularism in the constitution immediately after World War II in 1946 (even though the president of the council belonged to a Christian Democratic party). The “painful” aspect of the separation for practicing Catholics was less the state’s secularism, already acquired beforehand for the most part, than the nation’s religious neutrality, and the end of all official religious dimensions of French identity. This is why Catholics took awhile to adapt to this and to understand that this separation allowed their church greater freedom. However, the situation remained conflicted regarding schools, which is hardly surprising because schools impart not only knowledge but also a certain representation of the nation. “Two youths” were taught two different visions of France at secular schools and at denominational Catholic schools. After many developments, which are outside the scope of this discussion, the years 1982–1984 witnessed the failure of an attempt at unifying secularism (flexible) with the educational institution.9 Private Catholic

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schools, greatly subsidized by the state since 1959, were for the most part kept in place. In fact, after Vatican II the majority of public opinion considered that the “Catholic school” was not teaching a “France” that was different from the public secular school version. Many parents wanted to be able to take advantage of the competition between the two schools. New conflicting aspects emerge from 1989 onward, the year of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and also, in France, of the so-called affair of “Islamic headscarves.” We then arrive at a third period, a third threshold marked by the significant presence of a Muslim cultural and religious minority (around 8 percent of the French population), often socially demeaned and economically marginalized in metropolitan France. This period is also characterized by the decline of the legitimacy of institutions,10 the end of the East-West “Cold War,” fear of a terrorist threat connected to Islam, and fear of globalization allegedly under Anglo-Saxon hegemony. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, hostility toward the “Islamic headscarf” intensifies and, after the report of a commission also known as the “Stasi Commission” appointed by the President of the Republic Jacques Chirac, this hostility results in the law of March 15, 2004 (significantly called “the secularity law”) that forbids students from wearing any symbols that “ostensibly manifest a religious appearance” in the public schools. The use of the term secularism at this point tends to take on aspects of civil republican religion. However, at the same time there are the beginnings of a collective realization of the multicultural character of French society, and in 2007 the election of a new president of the republic, Nicholas Sarkozy, changes the situation yet again. It is this third period, and current representations of French secularism torn between two civil religions, that I now attempt to analyze. To accomplish this it is necessary to briefly define the notion of civil religion. We know that the term comes from the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considers religion necessary for society to function well, to be beneficial to public morality, to engender civil peace. For Rousseau, “it is important to the State that each citizen has a religion that makes him love his duties,” and he specifies, “the duties that [each one] is obliged to fulfill towards another.” Cold rationality is not enough to assure the social pact. Republican politics should include an affective, emotional dimension. It must make use of something that resembles religious mysticism. The philosopher thus recommends the transfer of a church transcendence to a state transcendence: the professed “faith” becomes “civil.” If one appears heretical in relation to “social maxims that each one would be obliged to admit” to “dogmas” of civil religion, he or she is rejected as a “fanatic” and an “insurgent.”

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Although the “declaration of civil faith” is therefore obligatory, historical and explicit religions are optional. Unlike John Locke, they did not become socially optional in the sense of a separation of politics and religion, but rather of integration to a new implicit, state controlled and civil religion. Locke’s “limited government” is replaced by a kingly power over beliefs. One of the “dogmas” of civil religion is the refusal of intolerance. The intolerant must be chased out of the state. Therefore, for Rousseau, there is no difference between theological intolerance (“outside the church, no salvation”) and civil intolerance: “it is impossible to live in peace with people whom we believe are damned.”11 During the Revolution and the Third Republic, attempts at republican civil religion were recurrent,12 notably the one that might be described as “integral secularism,” but they could not assure a social pact because in fighting the sociopolitical influence of Catholicism they found themselves too closely connected to one of the two Frances in conflict. In short, they constituted the marker of a leftist “progressive” identity faced with a “conservative” right-wing identity. This is why the 1905 law of separation, meant to be a “law of appeasement” (according to Aristide Briand, its principal author), is characterized by a logic that is much more Lockean that Rousseauist.13 It dissociates civil tolerance and theological tolerance and demands only respect for the former from religions. Admittedly, it prohibits putting religions on a salary or funding them (signs of their semiofficial character), but at the same time it allows two exceptions to facilitate the “freedom of cults” guaranteed by law. The first exception concerns chaplaincy services, and the second concerns the use of public cultural buildings free of cost (churches, temples, synagogues). Other subsequent measures move in the same direction. At present, the sum of indirect subsidies accorded each year to religions, primarily to Catholicism, is estimated to be several billion euros. It can be seen therein that the symbolic aspect of “nonofficiality” is more important than the financial aspect. If the 1905 law is of Lockean inspiration, the state of mind of certain secular militants continues, in the twentieth century, to be imbued with a republican civil religion perspective, and this is marked, notably, by their will to fight denominational Catholic schools and to consider the “republican school” as the only legitimate one. In 1984, their fight could definitely be seen as lost. Yet it rebounded five years later in another context. In fall 1989 the refusal of three students in a public school in a large Parisian suburb (Creil) to remove the headscarf that hid their hair in the classroom would allow the recycling of certain arguments in favor of a “republican school,” considered to be an “institution devolved to the universal,” but now no longer against

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Catholicism, but against “fundamentalism,” and more particularly, against “Muslim fundamentalism.” The impact on public opinion would be very strong. In France, in the long run, problems of a religious nature quickly take on a political dimension. Moreover, this “affair” takes place a few months after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, condemning the writer Salman Rushdie to death. In France wearing the headscarf is associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran and is considered by many as more political than religious. Media iconography associates “scarf” and “fundamentalism.” Wearing the headscarf is equally contested as signifying a position of inferiority for women. The bicentenary of the 1789 Revolution also re-elevates what we call “republican abstract universalism” to a place of honor. In this discourse, the proper French citizen must be “abstract,” meaning without distinctive identity characteristics and can only live his or her diverse adherences in the “private sphere.” However the legal decision taken at that time did not go in the direction of “republican (civil religion) secularism.” The state council declares that wearing religious symbols in public school is compatible with secularism, provided it does not take place in an “ostentatious” manner. This solution will last about 15 years during which a dissensus will be noted between established legal secularism and dominant narrative secularism, for which secularism and wearing the headscarf are antagonistic. However in 1995 an inquiry carried out by two sociologists, François Gaspar (supporting the ban in 1989) and Farhad Khosrokhavar, concludes that a wide-ranging diversity of meanings accompanies wearing the headscarf: it can constitute, for young Muslims, a way of entering modernity.14 But the result of this inquiry carries less weight in the face of the pictures broadcast by television during that time, showing women with their throats slit for having refused to wear the headscarf in Algeria, then in the grips of a cruel civil war. And professors and principals find themselves in a difficult position, as young girls initially expelled from their schools for the “ostentatious” wearing of the headscarf” win before the administrative tribunal and triumphantly return to school. Though the legal mechanism of French secularism as a whole remains of Lockean inspiration, themes that draw the representation of secularism toward a republican civil religion enjoyed great success during this period. The expression “secularism: the French exception” emerges. It is often opposed to that of “Anglo-Saxon communitarianism” and combines fear of a globalization of Anglo-Saxon supremacy with fear of a certain kind of Islam. It is asked that Islam be “republican,” “moderate,” “soluble in the Republic” all representing and drawing upon a Rousseauist perspective of civil religion. Even “Republic” and “democracy” are opposed,

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playing on two different meanings of the term “republic,” the ancient res publica and the French Republic. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Right fights the Left more and more on the theme of “threatened secularism.” A representation of secularism that takes on the characteristics of republican civil religion then becomes possible without dividing the traditional “two Frances.” On the contrary, it can, virtually constitute the common good of those of “French origin” to which the “French stemming from immigration” would have to swear allegiance. The law of March 15, 2004, on religious symbols considered “ostentatious” in public school, seems to mark the triumph of this “republican secularism.” The President of the Republic Jacques Chirac appeared to join such a trend. Significantly, he speaks of school as a “sanctuary” and uses the expression “republican temple.” The invocation of the “values of the Republic” takes on an incantatory tone, and denunciation of “communitarianism” becomes ritualized. Moreover, since the mid-1990s the fear of an influence of movements qualifying as a “sect” leads to a hardening in the administrative application of the 1905 law regarding religious minorities.15 However, from this time onward it seemed to me that this triumph was clearly short-lived.16 Indeed, the March 2004 law could constitute a beginning (a similar law concerning hospitals was envisaged) or prove to be a sort of firework display closing down the celebration of a representation of secularism as a “French exception,” and (by its reassuring side) accelerate the realization that “republican abstract universalism” was no longer a functioning instrument to resolve France’s problems in the twenty-first century. The manner in which political power channeled, or rather smothered, the centenary celebration of the 1905 law on the separation of church and state, refusing to examine the “tidying up” propositions of the 1905 law, illustrates that “republican secularism” found itself on the defensive. The only political initiative of some importance was taken by the Minister of the Interior, Nicholas Sarkozy, creating a commission known as the “Machelon Commission” that examined these questions mainly from a legal angle. This commission submitted its report in September 2006 and noted that Islam and Evangelical Protestantism, “two recent growing denominations” on French territory, would encounter certain difficulties in the construction of buildings for their respective religious groups.17 Even before voting for the 2004 law, in 1999–2000, the so-called republican movement had faced defeat with a modification of the constitution allowing a law favoring male-female parity in political assemblies. This movement had cried out in vain at “communitarianism” to no avail.

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The citizen, becoming sexed, ceased to be “abstract.”18 However, the Left, then in power, had refused at the same moment the installation of a High Authority to Fight Discrimination and to Promote Equality (Haute Autorité de Lutte) against discriminations. The latter is created by Jacques Chirac in April 2005. After the November 2005 riots in the suburbs, it fell into place progressively and will notably stop an expansive interpretation of the 2004 law. At the same time, the term “diversity” starts being used increasingly to name, in a more inclusive manner, those who have been qualified as “immigrants” or as people “stemming from immigration.” Notably in the media and in elections the necessity of having candidates “stemming from diversity” is discussed. This euphemism helps avoid using the terms “ethnicity,” “visible minorities,” or “multiculturalism,” all of which carry bad associations in France. However it constitutes a new sign that we are moving away from a representation favoring the notion of “abstract citizen.” The new President of the Republic, Nicholas Sarkozy, has always appeared cautious in the face of the “republican” tendency. Minister of the Interior in charge of “cults,” he succeeded, unlike his predecessors, in giving impetus to the creation of a French Council of the Muslim Faith (Conseil National du Culte Musulman). He included in this process the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (Union des Organisations Islamiques en France/UOIF), considered to be of a rather fundamentalist tendency, and he refused to favor a so-called moderate Islam. In doing so, he took a different approach to the application of French secularism to Islam, an approach that could be distinguished from the republican civil religion that represented the dominant perspective of the time. At the same time, certain passages from a book of interviews, published in 2004,19 and in addition two speeches given in December 2007 and January 200820 show his attraction to an American-style civil religion. American-style civil religion is related to Rousseauist civil religion in its concern to ground social connection on a nondenominational religious reference. It stands apart due to the fact that it does not impose a “theological tolerance” on historical religions and maintains a noncontroversial relation with them. 21 Rousseau, of Protestant origin, clashed with a Catholicism, which, owing to the repression of the monarchic state, asserted itself in France as the only legitimate religion. At the same time, British America, transforming itself into the United States, was already a religiously pluralist country. The invocation of a nondenominational God, and the author of the rights of man according to the Declaration of Independence (1776), goes hand in hand with the separation of church and state carried out by the First Amendment of the Constitution (1791). In the United States, this implies the coexistence of civil religion and a

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secular republicanism. The country’s history makes such a coexistence possible: the foundation of the United States as a modern nation, in fact, can be found as a consequence of the foundation of British America. The two founding myths do not have a divergent meaning, as is the case in France. Contrary to French republican civil religion, in the American context one may regard the republic as sacred and invoke God explicitly, a God at once Protestant and syncretist. American civil religion has had its progressive exalters (Lincoln, Martin Luther King) and conservative ones (Eisenhower, G. W. Bush). It has strengthened the social connection in a country built through immigration. It legitimizes, in the eyes of some Americans, American imperialism, and, more or less following the times, gives secularism a religious undertone in this country. Importing an American-style civil religion to France, according to Nicholas Sarkozy, is without a doubt linked with the idea that it is necessary for France to embrace, from now onward, its multicultural character without weakening its social connection, hence this “politics of diversity” that he advocates. In any case, the necessity of completing the republican regime through recourse to “transcendence” is a recurring theme of the president and constituted the backbone of a speech he gave in Rome in December 2007 that attracted a great deal of attention. This speech provoked strong reactions. In fact, it carries out a critique of secular morals. According to the president, “it [secularism] always risks exhausting itself or transforming itself into fanaticism when it is not built against a hope that fulfils the aspiration for the infinite.” Furthermore, he adds, “morals devoid of connections with transcendence are more exposed to historical contingencies and finally to ease.” We herein recognize themes dear to Jean-Paul II and Benedict XVI. The speech extols the “increased prestige” of France’s “essentially Christian roots,” and comprises a sort of “declaration of repentance” as secularism would have tried to “cut France from its Christian roots.” This diagnosis can be considered accurate for the 1793 revolutionary drift, but certainly not for the 1905 law where the members of Parliament refused all the amendments that went in this direction. A sentence, whose consequences should be watched, ends the speech: “Everywhere you (= Catholics) take action, in the suburbs, in institutions, towards youth, in the interreligious dialogue, in universities, I will support you.” In Rome the presidential speech naturally favored Catholicism, but the following month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, it is a syncretic God that finds Himself at the front, “the God of the Bible, of Evangelists, of the Koran,” a “transcendent God who is in the mind and heart of every man.” This deconfessionalized God greatly resembles the God of American civil religion.

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In fact, in the two speeches the same logic of U.S. civil religion is at work: the supplement of the soul given by the belief in transcendence is necessary to the social connection. Undoubtedly, it is necessary to articulate two things: if France has become culturally diverse, its past is “essentially” Catholic, and Sarkozy intends to play on both pictures. Such a point of view however does not consider the fact that as I have suggested France’s mythical “roots” are essentially double:22 and thus any enterprise that appears to be neoclerical runs the risk of awakening an anticlericalism that remains latent and cuts France in two. Thus, according to a poll conducted by the Catholic daily La Croix, if 49 percent of the French consider that the president was right to “underline France’s Christian roots in his speech,” exactly the same percentage believes that he was wrong.23 It is perhaps not surprising that these speeches accompany, in Sarkozy’s mindset, an insistence on social success where failure, for people possessing moral qualities, can only be a temporary test to be overcome by their will and courage. The call to a religious transcendence is tied to a liberal point of view on the social level. 24 Will these speeches embody a politics of “rupture” with regard to secularism (according to a term that the president is fond of)? It is too early to say. For the moment, a working group, answerable to the Minister of the Interior, is studying the possibility of updating certain aspects of the 1905 law, which seems logical enough, since we are in 2009, but the proposed modifications may challenge the equilibrium established by the law between liberty and nonofficiality. 25 Certain jurists, notably those from Alsace, 26 would like to see the prohibition against direct subsidies for religion eliminated. 27 Reorientations are therefore to be anticipated, without yet knowing if they will amount to an American-style civil religion, which hardly corresponds to France’s history, or if they will merely soften certain aspects of republican civil religion advanced by French secularism over the past few years. The international context, the evolution of Islam in France, in Europe, in the world, the dissensus between the evolution of opinion as regards customs and religious authorities, notably Catholic authorities constitute as many parameters as will have an influence in the evolution of the situation, and will influence public opinion as well. Different studies show that a large majority of French public opinion is attached to secularism, of which most have a liberal conception that includes freedom of conscience, equality between religions, and the separation of religion and politics.28 At what point, at what threshold, will the public consider that this separation finds itself in “danger”? The poll by La Croix gives us some indications. On the one hand, 79 percent of those polled consider that “secularism must continue to respect all beliefs and

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must not consider religions as a danger but as an asset to society,” while on the other hand 87 percent consider that “religions can create tensions within society.” Moreover, 79 percent of those polled also consider that “religions can contribute to passing on positive reference points and values to youth: respect for others, tolerance, generosity,” while on the other hand 77 percent consider that “religion is the concern of private life and religious authorities should not publicly take a stand on society’s great stakes.” I would conclude by insisting on the power exercised by French narrative secularism. Following the dominant point of view, this can have, with temporal gaps, consequences on legal secularism. After a period (1989–2004) where a conception of secularism relating to a republican civil religion was dominant, two different evolutions are noted. The first development, that of civil society, becomes aware of the “diversity” of French society, while maintaining certain mistrust toward religion’s possible political dimension. The second development, that of the new President of the Republic, brings together French secularism with American-style civil religion. Will these two evolutions reconcile themselves or confront each other? To answer this question would be premature.

Notes 1. Alexandro Ferrari, “Du politique à la technique: laïcité narrative et laïcité du droit. Pour une comparaison France/Italie,” in Brigitte Basdevant Gaudemet and Francois Jankowiak, eds., Le Droit Ecclesiastique en Europe et à Ses marges, XVIII-XX siècles (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), 333–345. 2. This can be dated back to Portalis, Napoleon Bonaparte’s advisor and the prime minister of cults; he was talking about “Catholic France” and “free France” as two Frances to be reconciled. 3. On the different thresholds of secularization (laicization), see Jean Baubérot, Laïcité 1905–2005, entre passion et raison (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004) and Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité en France, 4th ed. (Paris: PUF, 2007). 4. See, notably, Emile Poulat, Eglise contre bourgeoisie (Tournay: Casterman, 1977). 5. See Maurice Larkin, Religion, Politics and Preferment in France Since 1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9–58. 6. See Jean Baubérot, “La loi de 1905 est plus qu’une loi,” in Martine Cohen and Yves-Charles Zarka, eds., Faut-il réviser la loi de 1905? (Paris: PUF, 2005), 105–131, and Baubérot, Histoire, 71–88. 7. I emphasized these aspects in my book Jean Baubérot, L’intégrisme républicain contre la laïcité (La Tour d’Aigue: L’Aube, 2006), 143–194. 8. This aspect, unrecognized for a long time, was brought to light by Maurice Larkin, L’Eglise et l’Etat en France, 1905: la crise de la séparation, édition française (Toulouse: Privat, 2004). 9. Jean Battut, Christian Join-Lambert, and Edmond Vandermeersch, 1984, la guerre scolaire a bien eu lieu (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995).

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10. See François Dubet, Le déclin de l’institution (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002). 11. I develop this comparison on Locke and Rousseau in my work Les laïcités dans le monde (Paris: PUF, 2007), 22–31. 12. See Oliver Ihl, La fête républicaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 13. See Isabelle Agier-Cabanne, “La laïcité, exception libérale dans le modèle français,” Cosmopolitiques 16 (2007): 133–144. 14. Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le foulard et la République (Paris: Le Découverte, 1995). 15. And the adoption of a law in June 2001 targeting the so-called sects. 16. See Jean Baubérot, “Les mutations actuelles de la laïcité en France au miroir de la Commission Stasi,” in La Laïcité au Québec et en France, Bulletin d’Histoire politique 13, no. 3 (printemps 2005): 77, and Baubérot, L’intégrisme républicain, 127, where I wrote that if a pessimistic interpretation of the 2004 law makes it “the revealer of French tensions,” an optimistic interpretation makes it “a sort of republican orgasm” that “favors a relaxation and permits to engage in a policy that is more favorable to cultural diversity.” 17. Jean-Pierre Machelon, ed., Les relations des cultes avec les pouvoirs publics (Paris: La documentation française, 2006). 18. See Olivia Bui-Xuan, Le droit public français entre universalisme et différencialisme (Paris: Economica, 2004), 250–271. 19. Nicolas Sarkozy, La République, les religions, l’espérance, entretiens avec Thibaud Collin et Philippe Verdi (Paris: Cerf, 2004). 20. Analyzed in my work Jean Baubérot, La laïcité expliquée à M. Sarkozy et à ceux qui écrivent ses discours (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), and in Jean Baubérot, “The Honorary Canon President at the Lateran,” Les Cahiers rationalistes (March–April, 2008): 20–28. 21. See Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21; and Robert Bellah and Philip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980). 22. As indicated at the beginning of this contribution. 23. The IFOP Poll had a sample of 959 people and was performed March 6–7, 2008. Results were published in La Croix, March 22–24, 2008. 24. See Oliver Mongin and Georges Vigarello, Sarkozy, corps et âme d’un président (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 90, 101. 25. I analyze the diverse possibilities from the Machelon Commission onwards in Baubérot, La laïcité expliquée, 191–215. 26. For so-called historic reasons, the 1905 separation law does not apply in Alsace or Moselle. 27. The majority of the Machelon Commission seems to follow them on this point. See Machelon, 24. 28. See Jean Baubérot, “Current Issues in France,” in Alec G. Hargreaves, John Kelsay, and Sumner B. Twiss, eds., Politics and Religion in France and the United States (New York; Toronto: Lexington Books, 2007), 157–169.

Chapter 4 Secularism and Security: France, Islam, and Europe Yolande Jansen In brief, this world is “secular” not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the “real” has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainly, without fixed moorings even for the believer.1 —Talal Asad

Introduction French secularism is usually presented as an exceptional variety of more moderate and acceptable versions of secularism in Europe, particularly after France’s adoption of the controversial law of 2004 prohibiting the wearing of headscarves in public schools and while performing public functions. However, in one important regard it presents an exaggerated version of other European secularisms, rather than an exception to them, and so we can learn from the French case to understand secularism in a broader European context. As I argue, a crucial motive that French secularism shares with a more general European strand of interpreting the secular is the idea that it implies the “interiorization of religion.” This chapter starts with a reflection on this motive in European thought and in contemporary critiques of it by Talal Asad and William Connolly. In a second step, I explore the thesis that the interpretation of secularism in terms of religious interiorization plays a paradoxical role in

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the increasingly securitizing attitude toward Muslims in France—and in Europe more largely. While this interpretation claims to de-ethnicize and depoliticize religion, it instead politicizes religion. To substantiate this claim, I show that what ultimately motivated the French law prohibiting the headscarves was the perception of Muslim presence as a potential security issue, a fear of what was “behind the scarf.” The logic of this fear is intimately connected to secularist assumptions surrounding religious interiorization. In this context, I take up some issues with Asad’s reading of the headscarf law and of French secularism. For although his reading of the headscarf law is incisive, he appears to connect it to an understanding of French secularism that underestimates the internal complexities of the concept and the practices connected to it. I propose that a productive tension between two historically central interpretations of “secularity,” in terms of religious liberty and privacy on the one hand, and religious interiority on the other, could be brought out more strongly than is the case in many interpretations of secularity, and that this tension can be used to criticize the interpretation of secularity in terms of religious interiorization and the securitizing policies connected to it.

The Interiorization of Religion as an Interpretation of Secularism in European Discourses I would like to reflect on a recent provocative passage by the American political theorist William Connolly, who has been critical of secularist biases in philosophy and politics: Indeed, the best definition of Europe itself—as presented by those constituencies assuming themselves to be qualified to define its core authoritatively—is the idea that to be European is to express religious beliefs in the private realm and to participate as abstract citizens in the public realm. This innocent and tolerant-sounding definition promotes Christian secularism into the center of Europe and reduces Islamic peoples into a minority unlike other minorities; they are distinctive because they alone are unwilling or unable to abide by the modern agenda. . . . You might even say that the inner connection between Christianity and Europe today . . . resides in the demand, growing out of the Christian Enlightenment, to disconnect the expression of religious belief from participation in embodied practices, so that it becomes possible to imagine a world in which everyone is a citizen because religious belief is relegated to the private realm and the interior of the self. 2

We could read this as a dramatic account of the relationship between Europe and Islam, and actually, between Europe and any non-Christian

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religion. According to Connolly’s account, Europe, as defined by the most powerful constituencies within, is an exclusionary Europe incapable of critically scrutinizing its own parochial secularism and Christian Enlightenment-based narcissism. It would be easy to criticize Connolly’s account by unpacking and diversifying the characteristics of “Europe” as he constructs it. To mention but a few obvious objections that even intransigent majorities would consider: can we speak of a Christian Enlightenment when Christianity has been greatly divided in Europe first among its own protagonists, and second in relation to the Enlightenment? And hasn’t there been a radical strand in the Enlightenment that it would be difficult to qualify as Christian, even if we acknowledge the importance of the emergence of Protestantism and Christianity more generally for the development of Enlightenment thought—and of secularism? Another consideration is that neither at the level of legal practice nor at the level of social expectations is there question any longer of a strict privatization of religion. This is the case in all regimes of “secularism” in Europe. All of them deal publicly with the governance of religious diversity, however diverse these modes of governance may be. 3 Perhaps this is the case in France (and Turkey) even more so than in other countries, because the focus on the religious neutrality of the public sphere goes along with a long time policy tradition of “support-and-control” of religion.4 However, I do think Connolly alludes to a discourse of “secularism” that has become quite powerful in Europe since September 11, 2001, but that has been emerging since the late 1980s, and that has become an important strand in public debates since the Rushdie Affair and the French headscarf affairs. The secularism defended here does present a specifically European mélange of Christian and Enlightenment theological, philosophical, and political motives. In this context, French debates about laïcité have been scrutinized in Europe with more attention than the distant irony that was displayed at the adoption of the 2004 law. Particularly insofar as the Enlightenment has recently been presented as a specifically European legacy that needs to be “protected” in the confrontation with its contestations, with rising fundamentalisms, and with Islamism in particular, has the French framing of questions surrounding Islam and the position of Muslims in Europe in terms of secularism attracted serious attention elsewhere, and even been emulated.4 The transformation of debates about the place of migrants with an Islamic background in Europe in terms of multiculturalism, social inclusion, and migration into debates about the status of religion in the public sphere might in itself be interpreted as European debates showing their “French side” and vice versa.

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Now this motive emerging in recent European discourses about “the Enlightenment” to be defended against fundamentalisms conflates precisely two aspects of secularism that Connolly mentions but does not distinguish: religion’s interiorization (the relegation of religious belief to the interior of the self) and its privatization. As I argue, religious privacy does not necessarily imply the rejection of religious practice or an interpretation of religion in terms of interiority, and this is a productive distinction in the contemporary European context for several reasons. My intention is to suggest that we need to understand how the tensions within secularism make room for interpretations accommodating to increasing religious diversity, instead of assuming that secularism (or Enlightenment) imply a full package either to take or to leave. I will now briefly address what I understand by the “interiorization” of religion. The thesis that modernity implies a progressive interiorization of religion has long informed European philosophy and sociology as an important strand in the secularization thesis. Modernity seemed to imply the increasing “subjectivation” or individualization of religion into “religious experience” or “spirituality.” Many people expected this to result in the decline of religion in general or of any form of religious organization. This interpretation of secularization does historically overlap with most current interpretations of the “privatization” of religion, but this is not necessarily so: privacy is a spatial and political-legal term whereas interiorization is a psychological or metaphysical one. Interiorization means a gradual rejection of outward religious practices in general and a concentration on the inner self, or at least the attempt to separate out a mental “belief” from religious practices. According to the latter interpretation, religious practices are inessential to what “religion” really is. They only symbolize or represent it, rather than forming a constitutive part of it. Privatization, in contrast, does not imply a specific interpretation of the relation between religious practice and the inner self, but religion’s giving up (voluntarily or involuntarily) any direct political roles, and the simultaneous creation of a limited space for the free exercise of religion. This space can be interpreted in terms of “conscience” or “opinion,” as was the case in early modernity and most Enlightenment thought. Then privacy stays close to interiority and “space” should be interpreted metaphorically. But “opinion” has always had its bodies, practices and organizations, and associational freedoms have gradually—and usually grudgingly—been recognized in all Europeans countries—relatively late in France in the law of 1905. This means that public-private distinctions have come to be understood as spatial, flexible, and contestable, and both religious practice and religious organization have returned as issues to be negotiated locally.6

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The idea of “religion” as essentially independent from specific religious practices, and hence, from particular religious traditions (or “churches”) emerged in early modernity, in the context of the search for a common denominator helping to end the religious wars. Summarizing this tradition, Immanuel Kant distinguishes religion from the diverse confessions: Religious differences—an odd expression! As if we were to speak of different moralities. There may certainly be different historical confessions, although these have nothing to do with religion itself but only with changes in the means used to further religion, and religious books (the Zend-Avesta, the Vedas, the Koran, etc.). But there can only be one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus the different confessions can scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion: these are fortuitous, and may vary with differences in time or place.7

Kant interprets religious difference as an effect of history in which confessions were connected with power hierarchies, the Catholic one in the first place. A “future” religion of reason, actually the only real “religion,” is independent from organizational hierarchies, from “cultic,” practical aspects. As said, this concept of a pure religion emerged in the search for a solution to the intra-European religious wars, but it did produce its own differences, struggles, and hierarchies. Protestantism was often considered as a prestage of an even more desirable freestanding, “secular” morality guided by reason. Both Catholicism and Judaism were connected to a medieval world in which political and religious hierarchies were thoroughly entangled. For example, John Locke excluded Catholics from toleration because he considered their obedience to the Catholic Church a sign of political loyalty to Rome. Kant as well criticizes Catholic worldly power, clerical hypocrisy, and the policing of people’s minds, although he does not exempt Protestantism from critique. He argues that we encounter the links between religion and power in Catholicism and Judaism systematically, because these religions conceptualize God as requiring obedience, not moral conviction (and reasoning) from individual believers.8 He denies Judaism the status of religion and calls it a “cult,” a “statutory” confession.9 In a comment on Moses Mendelssohn, he suggests that the latter wanted the Jews to submit themselves to a “yoke of exterior observances,” because he wanted to retain Judaism in a practical sense in modernity.10 Kant does not treat Islam systematically, but he says some sparse things about it in his anthropology, actually, in the part on mental diseases: “Fanaticism [Schwärmerei], the most dangerous human deceptive screen [Blendwerk],” leads to extremities such as “putting Muhammad on the throne.”11 So at a time when all confessions were deeply entangled

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in political processes of nation-state and minority formation, the idea emerged that Protestantism was a prestage of an Enlightened, rational religion, converging with a pure, independent, interior—or, in our terminology, “secular”—morality, while other religions were essentially political (and potentially fanatical) because of their theological content. Returning to contemporary debates, the thesis of the progressive interiorization of religion in modernity—and its desired transformation into moral reason—has been contested from many sides as a central element in the contestation of the secularization thesis in general.12 Asad’s Genealogies of Religion shows the pervasive legacies of the Enlightenment concept of religion, specifically the Kantian version, in today’s understandings of religion in which it is considered a system of meanings to be symbolized by certain practices instead of being constituted by their performance. Part of Asad’s point about this legacy is that an abstract, essentialized concept of religion can be used as a measure to compare “higher” and “lower” religions, a popular option in the humanities since the Enlightenment and a contributor to imperial projects in the name of “civilization.”13 Moreover, “religion” in the purified sense is a modern Western concept, intimately connected to modernist, mentalist theories of the subject. Apart from being problematic philosophically, it is not a neutral concept useful for understanding the “religions” of other peoples (or of earlier periods in European history). Indeed, the interiorized concept of religion can only grasp religious traditions (or rather, traditions more generally) on its own terms and will always reduce practice to something exterior, servile and inessential to what religion really is.14 Problematizing the interpretation of religion in terms of an “interiority” that can be separated from practice also has consequences for how we conceive of liberty of conscience. The production of “religion” in and through practice implies the entanglement of the supposedly free, spontaneous heart (or a Kantian independent reason) with discipline, society, and hence, with power. Questioning interiority thus also has consequences for the liberal idea that religion (or, for that matter, moral reasoning) could be insulated from power once it is privatized. Religion’s free (private) exercise in a secular state does not imply the absence of power, and religion is inescapably connected with politics as well and not as free as liberal philosophies might have hoped.15 Yet how exactly is the interiorization of religion as an underlying presupposition of secularism instantiated in the contemporary European intellectual and political landscape? And how is it connected to securitization, as I suggested in my introduction? Connolly and Asad present this strand of secularity as essential for European secularism and European power structures more generally. By contrast, I will argue that in the European intellectual and political landscape interpretations of

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religious liberty and privacy play a role that are in critical tension with interiorization, instead of being dependent on it, and can be used to critique tendencies toward securitization. Let us now turn to France.

Laïcité and Security The 2004 French law was interpreted by many Europeans as resulting from an exaggerated, unnecessarily strict interpretation of secularism, and a deviation of French laïcité from other, acceptable modes of secularism. On the one hand, laïcité has been criticized for being too ideologically liberal, in the sense of expecting a privatization of religion that is blind to its practical limits and overly distrustful of religion’s necessarily public aspects. This abstract understanding of private-public relations becomes manifest, for example, in the many recent appeals to the law of 1905 instituting the strict separation of church and state. In practice, there are abundant examples that show the complex interrelations between church and state, and religion and state more generally.16 On the other hand, French practices of religious governance have been criticized for not being liberal enough: they are the legacies of a-liberal or preliberal policy traditions and intellectual motives: for example, Rousseauian civil religion,17 the policy tradition of gallicanisme (support-and-control of religion18), a combined “ideological obsession with the religious” and “a fascination for the monarchy.”19 The basic problem for all of these critics seems to be the (neo-) Republican focus on civic unity and a deficiency in liberal pluralism. However, laïcité is an essentially contested concept in France as much as secularism is elsewhere, and its interpretation varies across politicalhistorical contexts. In particular John Bowen has meticulously reconstructed the many interpretive spaces between laïcité as a concept and its “application” in the law concerning religious signs. He contests the assumption that the law follows a typically French institutional “model” of laïcité and stresses the many diverging governmental practices that actors defend as in compliance with laïcité. 20 Also, there was much less consensus in France about the law on the headscarves than the large parliamentary majority that voted in favor of the law might suggest: many countervoices argued against the law in the name of a different, nonexclusive, liberal laïcité, and others were more generally critical of the appeal to the principle.21 Some critical voices addressed underlying problems of racism and a tradition of securitizing approaches toward Islam as a colonial legacy. 22 However, notwithstanding the fact that there is no “national institutional model” of laïcité that could explain (or legitimize) the law,

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the influence of a cultural laicism on interpretations of religious practices, and of Islamic ones in particular, should not be underestimated. To explore its role, however, the “secular” needs to be addressed not as an institutional model but as “a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.”23 In this context, expectations surrounding the interiorization of religion are crucial, but we have to locate them in the right place. French cultural laicism has often been analyzed in terms of what could be called, in Rawlsian terminology, a comprehensive doctrine: a modernist, neo-Kantian doctrine of moral autonomy for all which tends to encourage interpretations of the headscarf as a sign of women’s submission—for example, in the work of Cathérine Kintzler, Henri Pena-Ruiz, the program of ni putes ni soumises. 24 The historical antecedents of comprehensive laicism have been traced: laicization in the early Third Republic already not only implied a protestantization of French political structures, but also went together with a neo-Kantian moral pedagogy. 25 However, comprehensive laicism is contested within France, and it is questionable whether it served as a sufficient basis for the headscarf law or determines French attitudes toward Muslims generally. As an alternative interpretation, I would like to scrutinize cultural laicism’s role in the perception of Muslim presence as a security issue, which is less contested and harder to pinpoint than the more obvious “comprehensive laicism.” One of the most important documents produced during the headscarf debates was the report written by the Stasi Commission in December 2003. This commission, appointed by President Chirac and headed by the Christian-democratic politician Bernard Stasi, wrote a highly publicized report in which it redefined laïcité and advised prohibiting the wearing of “conspicuous religious signs” in public schools. 26 All the members of the commission except one, Jean Baubérot, voted in favor of the proposal for a law. From the report, it becomes clear that comprehensive laicism was a motive of some of the committee members, but not the crucial motive that constituted the ultimate consensus among them about the necessity of legislation. Instead, their near unanimous decision was motivated by the committee’s perception that it was dealing with a security issue that was trumping concern for liberty of religious expression: In the secular framework, spiritual or religious choices form part of individual freedom; however this does not mean that these things should be confined to the intimacy of conscience, “privatized”, and that all social dimensions or public ways of expressing them should be denied to them. Laïcité distinguishes free spiritual or religious expression in public space, which is legitimate and even essential to

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democratic debate, from the attempt to appropriate it, which is illegitimate [de l’emprise sur celui-ci]. 27

The commission distances itself from “comprehensive laicism,” while arguing that some public manifestations of belief should be interpreted as an illegitimate attempt to damage or appropriate democratic debate. The report continues, Freedom of conscience does indeed form the rule and police measure should be the exception, but public powers always do have the possibility of taking measures that limit the manifestation of the freedom of conscience in order to prevent risks of troubles to public order. . . . The commission thinks that today it is no longer the freedom of conscience which is at stake, but public order. 28

It is because of a presumed assault on public order that the commission deems it necessary for public forces to give “strong signs” to the “Islamist groups,” with the prohibition of the scarf at school as the most important sign. 29 So the recommendation represents an exceptional “police” measure, a proposal for an intrusion into a domain of society usually and preferably left to the citizens themselves. The commission’s securitizing approach becomes even more evident in a letter written to it by one of its members, Alain Touraine, during the last weeks of the hearings and published in 2004 by Jean Baubérot: We have to separate clearly the defense of personal rights from the struggle against communitarianist attacks against institutions. . . . I add, more concretely, that it would be manifestly absurd to prohibit the veil in the name of feminism and the dignity of women, because such a decision would imply that women are considered manipulatable, incapable of taking decisions themselves and consequently, to consider them “minors”. In the same manner, in the present circumstances it is impossible that an entirely negative or even repressive orientation could be considered as anything else than an act of hostile closure of a West that feels itself being attacked–and justifiably so–by the Islamist offensives. 30

Note that Touraine explicitly rejects comprehensive laicism as a reason to propose legislation. Astonishingly, when Touraine wrote this letter, not long before the Stasi Commission recommended the law, he still opposed the law as an act of closure. But Touraine at this time already framed the measure in terms of a struggle between “the West” and “the Islamist offensives.” This suggests that it is not the relative severity of laïcité, but

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the perception of an exceptional threat to French security by Islamist groups, and the idea that legislation against the scarf could function as a semiotic weapon, that contributed to the surprising consensus among members of the commission. The commission’s nearly univocal perception of this threat can be interpreted in terms of expectations surrounding religious interiority. The first consideration worth noting is that it is not the scarves themselves that cause fear, but rather the conflict seeking groups putatively “behind” them. This is corroborated by the many references in the French context to “what is behind the scarf”—see the abundance of formulations like “derrière le voile/le voile, que cache-t-il?” In this sense, the scarves derive their public relevance not from their visibility, not even from their allegedly proselytizing significations, but from their potentially underlying dangerous, inimical politics. And if these claims are hidden behind the scarf, then its public relevance, ironically, is a symbol of something “private,” not in the sense of “apolitical,” but in the sense of “secret,” or “interior.” We have already seen that the legacy of religious interiority can be traced to the idea that religious practices can be separated from their meanings. On that interpretation, practices can also mean something else than what the practitioners themselves tell or say about them or their official meanings. The separation of practice and meaning thus also makes it possible that people outwardly adapt but inwardly revolt. The secular in terms of religious interiority produces this fundamental “insecurity” and “invisibility” systematically, precisely by locating religion in conscience, and by interpreting religious practice as accidental, and potentially nothing but a mask. This modern insecurity has been thematized from the secular’s emergence in early modernity, when for example Bacon started to reflect on the uses of dissimulation and “secrecy” in politics. 31 Insecurity may lead to the use of sophisticated semiotics to detect “real” meanings. Talal Asad has interpreted the Stasi Commission’s interpretation of the scarf as a “religious sign” in such a light: by taking it as a sign instead of as a religious duty constitutive of a “way of being,” as many wearers do, the committee gives a secular interpretation of the practice. By then also claiming that the scarf is a religious sign, the committee does what the sovereign secular state has always done: defining what religion is and what it is not. Asad questions the idea put forward in French discourses that to “display” a (visible) religious sign can be interpreted as “the will to (make) appear an Islamist identity.”32 With this intrusion into conscience, one claims privileged access to the wearer’s intentions. In so doing, Asad contends, the French state transgresses its own guarantees of privacy and is “in the business of uncovering dangerous hidden meanings,” which it will always find, just as the Spanish Inquisitors always found hidden beliefs.33

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I agree with most of Asad’s interpretation, but I am not sure that the fascination and fear surrounding the headscarves are produced by the presumed “will to make appear an Islamist identity” of the wearers.34 Many French citizens feel they do not know what the scarf means, nor what it might mean in the future, precisely because for them it is a “sign” and because they do not fully trust those wearing scarves. 35 This feeling is related to the typically modern simultaneous production of interiority and insecurity. But this tendency is not always as strong, and it is triggered by experiences that cause fear. In France, 9/11 caused fear, also because it revived the memory of the metro terror attacks in Paris (1995) by members of the Algerian GIA—causing the death of eight and two hundred injuries. And there was great awareness in France of the Algerian terror of the 1990s, especially among immigrants, who were partly refugees from Algeria. The extremely violent struggles between the Algerian state and various groups of Islamists caused between 150,000 and 200,000 deaths (the numbers are contested), and they have been perceived by many as struggles between those actors wanting to unify the social body entirely (whether it be the nationalist state or the Islamists) and those struggling for “a space of life and laicized thinking in which freedom is no longer the privilege of the monarch or the state.”36 Ironically, in the French-Algerian context, the scarf has been an exemplary icon of typical secular, modern politics long before the events of the last decades, and before the terms in which we understood political conflict became those of political religion and secularism. For example, in Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous movie about the Algerian War of Independence, The Battle of Algiers (1966), Algerian women hide their inimical intentions toward the French behind their scarves just as pragmatically as behind their modern dresses. Starting by hiding the guns of the Algerian underground under their haïks (long white scarves covering the whole body) while playing out their piety against French soldiers, when this becomes appropriate, they take off their scarves, cut off their hair, and dress very “French” to carry bombs into the French Algerian quarters of Algiers. The curious thing is that the scarf, obviously an icon of a refusal of secularity, is actually also, in French cultural memory, an icon of the deeply modern and secular motive of violent political resistance potentially hidden “behind” the religious sign. This ambiguity is an important reason for the mix of fascination and fear that the scarf produces.37 But there are several options for a state to react to (potential) insecurity. France is famous for the Jacobin tendency toward further control, toward the creation of a state “where one’s innermost thoughts are themselves criminal,” and whose ideal is “perfect social and psychological visibility.”38 Legislation targeting the wearers of headscarves to “send

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off signs” to the potentially violent “Islamist” groups “behind” them could be interpreted as a first step in this progression. And it will not be enough when Muslims take off their scarves: on the contrary, the fear of what might be “hidden” can only be enhanced when Muslims become more “invisible,” which only makes the meanings of their actual practices more instable.39 After all, some of them might still sympathize with radicalism without wearing scarves, especially when they have been blackmailed or forced to remove them. The suggestion that prohibiting the scarf is a sign to Islamist groups posing a threat to public order can only enhance the xenophobic perception of Muslims as citizens “with potentially something to hide.” A more liberal reaction would have taken Muslims at their word until they would have individually proven to pose a threat to public order, instead of suspecting them collectively. It would have taken seriously the words and deeds of those who say they do not sympathize with radicalism while wearing a scarf and who argue that there are legitimate reasons for wearing a scarf that do not overlap in any way whatsoever with adherence to a violent Islamism. For example by claiming orthodoxy or piety, but also by giving other more pragmatic, historical or even outright political reasons; after all, sympathy for radicalism and its causes is not the same as carrying out acts of terror.40

Sovereignty, Interiority, and Privacy I return now to my initial proposal to build on the productive tensions within different interpretations of secularism by taking up an issue with Talal Asad. In his essay on the headscarf law, which he sees as a “window into laïcité,” Asad starts by noting that contemporary political cultures, as modern nation-states, are fixated upon ideas of integration, which has sometimes had the most disastrous, even genocidal consequences.41 He traces this fundamental problem of the modern nation-state to the emergence of the state itself in late mediaeval Spain, when “religious difference” started to be interpreted in secular terms of “nationality” and minority formation.42 Asad interprets contemporary French secularism against the background of the early modern emergence of the secular and particularly stresses the relevance of the cuius regio, eius religio principle that emerged at the end of the European religious wars. For him this entailed the installation of a single absolute power, the (Hobbesian) sovereign state, which Durkheim interpreted in terms of integration.43 Its principal attitude toward religion is not neutrality but a political concern with identifying and controlling religion, and with homogenizing populations.

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Analogously, he suggests, the French debates about the headscarves were “not so much about tolerance . . . not even about the strict separation between state and church.”44 What was at stake “is sovereignty, which defines and justifies exceptions.”45 This power to decide on exceptions “confirms Republican sovereignty in the Schmittian sense.”46 Whereas the laïc Third Republic homogenized the many Catholic standpoints into a Catholic Christianity, Republican “political theology” is now vital again in “the struggle with another enemy—a homogenized ‘fundamentalist Islam.’ ”47 While I do think that the headscarf law may be interpreted in terms of Republican political theology, I hesitate to interpret it as a window into laïcité, and then take laïcité itself as a principle characterizing the French state—or French political culture—incapable of practicing religious tolerance or any real separation between church and state, private and public toward contemporary Muslims. I would argue that the debates in France were about tolerance and separation, and that French political culture made a remarkable shift toward a securitizing discourse to justify the headscarf law.48 Asad interprets modern French secularism in relation to sovereignty and the ethnoreligiously homogenizing cuius regio eius religio principle. We can argue that sovereignty and homogenization are two sides of the same coin when religious difference is confined to interiority, and stress the totalitarian character of the Leviathan. We may also agree that processes of national homogenization were indeed the basis of actual practices of governance and that the religious impartiality of the early modern state is a myth—although toleration did exist, but rather at local levels, and in terms of tolerant practices.49 However, there is also tension between the state’s theoretical impartiality and its homogenizing practices, and this has from the beginning opened up a space for a liberal motive in terms of the tolerance of religious minorities and later, of freethinkers. Even Carl Schmitt, on whose concept of sovereignty Asad leans, in his very fear and hatred of liberalism, acknowledges that there is an “interior,” “secret” moment within the protoliberal, Hobbesian state that it can never fully control: Everything pertaining to religion derives its legitimacy, vim juris, only through the dictate of state power. State power however only determines the outward cult. The separation of interior and exterior is already available in Hobbes, but in a germ-like state. . . . But the Jewish philosopher (Spinoza, YJ) drives this germ to its ultimate unfolding, up until the point where the opposite has been reached and the Leviathan has been robbed of its soul from within.50

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Schmitt locates an inevitable threat to sovereignty in its own creation of privacy, however minimally (purely interior) conceived. This is systematically connected to his anti-Semitism, which is based on the fear that a potentially inimical ethnoreligious minority might abuse of privacy and organize itself invisibly.51 The securitizing reasoning about the potential violence behind the scarves follows a similar logic. A liberal answer to (potential) insecurity goes in the opposite direction. German historian Reinhart Koselleck, not coincidentally a student of Schmitt but also a liberal democrat, shows how Hobbesian “interiority” is the noeud from which an “Innenraum,” a private space emerges, which becomes more public in the course of modernity. While in Hobbes, morality is still “tacit and secret,” in Locke it is no longer a matter of the individual but receives its own generality from the “secret and tacit consent” among citizens organized in secret “societies.”52 Privacy is gradually extended into private organizations in civil society and goes far beyond being the political-legal mirror of interiority. This process does not occur because relatively homogeneous majorities may always come to like, respect, or even trust the “different,” but because of the insight that full control is impossible and that the price for the attempt to realize it might be real insecurity for minorities in the first place, but ultimately for everyone. Giving weight to the countervoices in France that have argued against the neo-Republican (or rather neo-Jacobin) interpretation of laïcité might help to counter the idea that modern states act “naturally” when they react in deeply integrationist, nationalist, and xenophobic ways to the presence of Muslims today. After all, resorting to discourses and practices of “exception” is a specific act that stands in a tense relation with liberal principles. Liberality requires the acceptance of the risk of being too late, of not controlling people’s intentions, nor their expressions, nor even their associations until they prove that they threaten public order. Therefore it exercises a minimum degree of principled naïveté and is reluctant about allowing semiotics into politics. Suggesting, as Asad does, that integrationist sovereignty is not only deeply entangled with liberalism (or secularism) but that there is even no tension between them, might lead us to overlook valuable sources of critique within contemporary liberal democracies. Instead, it is important to stress laïcité’s (or more generally, secularism’s) complexity and internal instability as a concept immanently linked to interiority, liberty, and privacy in its genealogy. 53 In conclusion, in the French debates it has become quite clear that even in France, with its many vociferous advocates of comprehensive laicism, securitizing arguments had to be added before a law prohibiting the headscarves could become acceptable. It remains to be seen to what extent other European countries will adopt the French arguments

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and legislation, but they may do so, especially when real threats to public order exist. This may lead to an increase in racism, perhaps especially in those countries where the egalitarianism also inherent in French Republicanism has weaker traditions. Such a process of ethnoreligious securitization may have long-term consequences: once religious difference has been interpreted as a sign of potential danger that states should act upon (in the name of protecting majorities), fear and scrutiny of “intentions” may only intensify when Muslims become less “visibly” different but still remain “potentially” so. We have only to hope that Muslims do not end up paying a still higher price for their assimilation, if not in France, then elsewhere in Europe.

Notes All translations from French and German are mine. I would like to thank Veit Bader, Beth Hurd, Irena Rosenthal, and Michiel Leezenberg for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 64–65. 2. William Connolly, “Europe, a Minor Tradition,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 78. 3. See for example Veit Bader, Secularism or Democracy? Associational Governance of Religious Diversity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). 4. Elizabeth Hurd even nicely defines laicism as the combined focus on the absence of religious signs from the public sphere with a focus on the control of religion by the state, and hence overcomes the unjust suggestion that France has a (liberal democratic) regime of separation, while Turkey has a statist, “security” regime of control. See Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and John Bowen, “A View from France on the Internal Complexity of National Models,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 6 (2007): 1003–1016. 5. For example, a debate among Pascal Bruckner, Timothy Garton Ash, and Ian Buruma about European history, Enlightenment, and its relationship to secularism has been held on an important European Web site called Sign and Sight (the European/anglophone version of the German Perlentaucher). 6. For the diverse meanings attached to religious subjectivation, individualization, and privatization see Bader, 43–49. 7. Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1795]), 114. 8. Part IV of Immanuel Kant, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003 [1793]). 9. Kant, Die Religion, 125.

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10. Ibid., 185. 11. Immanuel Kant, Sämtliche Werke, ed. F. Rosenkranz and F. W. Schubert (Leipzig: Voss, 1838 [1764]), 25. 12. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Connolly and Bader. 13. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 42. 14. Asad, Genealogies of Religion; see also Connolly. 15. Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Connolly. 16. See Jean Baubérot’s chapter in this volume, Bader 2007, and John Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, The State and Public Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 17. See Baubérot in this volume; Cécile Laborde, “On Republican Toleration,” Constellations 9, no. 2 (2002): 167–183; and Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism; The hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 18. Bowen, “A View from France.” 19. Olivier Roy, La laïcité face à l’islam (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2005), 63. 20. See Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves, and Bowen, “A View from France.” 21. See Jean Baubérot’s chapter in this volume. 22. Among the many French critics (of the law, but of the larger politics of laïcité as well) were Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Saïd Bouamama, Pierre Bourdieu, Nilüfer Göle, Cécile Laborde, Bruno Latour, Gérard Noiriel & Stéphane Béaud, Charlotte Nordmann, Paul Ricoeur & Monique Canto-Sperber, Émile Poulat, Pierre Tevanian, and many others; see Charlotte Nordmann, ed., Le foulard islamique en questions (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2004). Secularism’s links with security in the colonial context, particularly the Algerian one, have been analyzed in Anna Bozzo, “Islam et République; une longue histoire de méfiance,” in La Fracture Coloniale: La société française au prisme de l’héritage colonial, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Sandrine Lemaire (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2006), 75–82; and Vincent Geisser and Aziz Zemouri, Marianne et Allah; Les Politiques français face à la ‘question musulmane’ (Paris: La découverte, 2007). 23. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 25. 24. See Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 493–526; Yolande Jansen, “Laïcité or the Politics of Republican Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-secular World, 475–493; and Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 25. See Laborde, “On Republican Toleration,” and Jansen. Nineteenth-century French rejections of Catholic politics were all formulated in terms of the need for citizens capable of critical (rational) judgment and not submitting

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27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

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to “a priesterly and absolutist” religion. See Laborde, “On Republican Toleration,” 172. Bernard Stasi, “Rapport au Président de la République,” Commission de réflexion sur l’application du principe de laïcité dans la République (2003), http://lesrapports.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/BRP/034000725/0000.pdf (December 11, 2009). Section 1.2.1 in Stasi, 13. Section 2.2.2 in Stasi, 23–27, and Section 4.2.1 in Stasi, 55–56. Section 4.2.1 in Stasi, 55–56. My emphasis. Touraine quoted in Jean Baubérot, “Proposition faite par Jean Baubérot à la Commission Stasi,” in Le voile, que cache-t-il?, ed. Alain Houziaux (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2004), 114. See also Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 65–68. Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” 502. Ibid., 524. Ibid., 502. This distrust might help to explain why only two women wearing headscarves were interviewed by the Stasi committee. In a personal conversation in summer 2008, Touraine told me that even hearing these two was something he had had to fight for with other committee members. This rather curious disinterestedness has also been explained in terms of the idea that women wearing scarves were regarded as “oppressed” and without agency. So either they are considered without political agency, or with too much, and inimical, political agency. For the complicated interaction of gender and securitization motives surrounding the scarf, see Nilüfer Göle, Interpénétrations, L’Islam et l’Europe (Paris: Galaade éditions, 2005); Nacira Guénif-Souillamas and Eric Macé, Les féministes et le garçon arabe (Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 2004); and Valérie Amiraux, “Representing différence,” Open Democracy, November 15, 2005, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ democracy-resolution_1325/difference_3026.jsp (accessed May 1, 2009). My italics. Reda Bensmaïa, “The Vanished Mediators: On the Nature of Violence in Algeria,” Parallax 4, no. 2 (1998): 3–16. For a detailed account of the politics related to the scarf in French Algeria and during the war of independence, see Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2006). Mona Ozouf, L’école de la France. Essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 83. For an interpretation of how a similar fascination for the “signs” of hidden allegiances affected the French Jews during the Dreyfus Affair, see Yolande Jansen, “French Secularism in the Light of the History of the politics of Assimilation,” Constellations: An International Journal for Critical and Democratic Theory 16, no. 4 (December 2009): 593–603; and Yolande Jansen, Secularism and Assimilation: Reading Marcel Proust in a Post-Secular Age (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2010).

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40. See Farhad Khosrokhavar, L’Islam des jeunes (Paris: Flammarion-Pere Castor, 1997) and Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves. 41. Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” 514. 42. Ibid., 494–496. 43. Ibid., 499. 44. Ibid., 500. 45. Ibid., 507. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Here it would be useful to explore strategies of “desecuritization” as a reply to “securitization.” See Ole Waever, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in On Security, ed. R. Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 46–86. Writing in the same tradition of critical security studies, Jef Huysmans lucidly discusses the role of Carl Schmitt in contemporary security discourses and critical security studies. See Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 49. Carl Schmitt, Der Leviathan in der Staatslehre des Thomas Hobbes: Sinn und Fehlschlag eines politischen Symbols (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003 [1938]), 87. 50. Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 51. On the relation between Carl Schmitt’s political theory and his anti-Semitism, see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 52. Reinhart Koselleck, Kritik und Krise (Freiburg/München: Karl Alber Verlag, 1959), 43. 53. See also the distinction made between a Lockean, liberal interpretation of laïcité and a Jacobin, Republican one in Baubérot’s chapter in this volume. Baubérot also argues that the early Third Republican laïcists knew “how to deflate conflict” and that their laicism was motivated by their “long term intelligence,” an intelligence lacking in today’s neo-Republicans claiming the legacy of laïcité. Jean Baubérot, “Voile, école, femmes, laïcité,” in Le voile, que cache-t-il?, ed. Alain Houziaux (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2004), 70.

Chapter 5 The God-in-the-Constitution Controversy: American Secularisms in Historical Perspective Tisa Wenger In February 1873, approximately five hundred people attended a national convention held by the National Reform Association (NRA) in New York City to call for a constitutional amendment that would “recognize God as the source of all power, Jesus Christ as the chief ruler, and the Bible as the supreme ruler of all national conduct.”1 The NRA, created a decade earlier by a coalition of Protestant leaders, pointed out that America had already been identified as a Christian nation in various state and federal court decisions and by prominent national figures such as Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who had famously written that it was “the especial duty of government to foster and encourage [Christianity] among all the citizens and subjects.”2 NRA organizers believed that an amendment clarifying the nation’s Christian foundation would provide necessary constitutional protection for prayers and Bible reading in the public schools, Sunday closing laws, antiblasphemy laws, prison and military chaplains hired by the government, and other laws and traditions that they believed essential to the nation’s moral foundations. They denied that the proposed amendment would create an unconstitutional establishment of religion on the grounds that no particular denomination would receive special privileges and insisted that such a change would actually preserve rather than violate America’s liberties. In the words of an earlier NRA statement, “The proposed religious amendment to our national Constitution, so far from infringing any individual’s rights of conscience, or tending in the least degree to a union of Church and State, will afford the fullest security against a corrupt and corrupting Church establishment, and form the strongest safeguard of both the civil and religious liberties of all citizens.”3 Not surprisingly this argument did not convince the self-proclaimed freethinkers and religious liberals of the day, who condemned the proposed amendment as a violation of the First Amendment and of America’s

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fundamentally secular character. The National Liberal League (NLL), which laid claim to America’s founding ideals by holding its organizing convention at the nation’s centennial in 1876, excoriated the proposed amendment as an attempt to create a full-blown religious establishment. Instead the NLL offered its own amendment, an expanded version of the First Amendment that would have spelled out its vision for the strict separation of church and state and clarified the unconstitutional nature of the very laws and practices that the NRA wanted to protect. Many of the NLL’s leaders identified themselves as atheists or even secularists and ridiculed all religion as an outmoded and perhaps dangerous superstition. Although they insisted that they honored every individual’s freedom of conscience, they wanted to ensure that such notions could have no further influence in the public sphere. Not all of the NLL’s supporters shared these views: several members of the board were Reform Jews, Unitarians, and liberal Protestants who found positive value in religion but believed that—in the best interests of religion as well as the state—it should be kept strictly separate from government. Whatever their differences, they agreed that America had been founded as a secular state and that its freedoms depended on maintaining that secular identity. The God-in-the-Constitution controversy therefore hinged in many ways on the question of whether America’s foundational identity was Christian or secular. In response to the NLL, the NRA set itself explicitly against secularism, which its members and supporters understood as an antireligious philosophy that would cause moral decay and so lead to the nation’s downfall. It is therefore ironic that the NRA can itself be seen as advocating a form of secularism, which many scholars define not as an intrinsically antireligious stance but as the political assertion that government should in some way be independent from religion. Even as the NRA called for a constitutional recognition of America’s Christian identity, its concern with maintaining a boundary between church and state, or at least with preventing any particular denomination from holding the reins of government, positioned them just inside the boundary of secularism in this sense. In a quest for greater analytical clarity around the varieties of secularism, political scientist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has identified “Judeo-Christian secularism” and “laicism” as secularism’s two major forms in European and American political culture. Using Hurd’s categories the NRA represented a strong form of Judeo-Christian secularism, which views religious freedom and the disestablishment of religion as historically and philosophically grounded in Christianity (more recent versions often include Judaism) and therefore dependent on a broadly Christian (or Judeo-Christian) culture. In contrast its freethinking opponents would exemplify Hurd’s laicism, a term drawn from the French

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laïcitè, which in its strong form views all religion as a threat to freedom and so seeks to eliminate its influence in the public sphere.4 This chapter identifies their dispute as an important episode in the contentious history of secularism in America, an episode whose themes continue to resonate today. I am not interested in delineating my own boundaries around who counts as a secularist, but in contributing to a sort of cultural history of the multiple formations of secularism as Americans have understood it. The disjuncture between my identification of the NRA’s agenda as a variety of secularism from a political science perspective, and that organization’s own explicit repudiation of secularism, hints at an ongoing disconnect between academic and popular understandings of this category. Although academics typically see only some forms of secularism as hostile to religion—Hurd’s Judeo-Christian secularism explicitly affirms a broadly Christian framework for the secular state— most Americans in the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first have understood all secularism as intrinsically antireligious. For that reason virtually no American politicians past or present have claimed an overtly secularist identity. This is in stark contrast to the situation in India, for example, where secularism was introduced as a way for the state to neutrally arbitrate conflicts between religious groups, and—although intellectuals debate its merits and future—most political parties continue to champion secularism as the only way to ameliorate religious tensions and even accuse one another of being insufficiently secular. Especially given that historians and social scientists understand the United States as the first model of a secular state, the American public’s general anathema toward secularism must be examined as a key to the co-constituted histories of religion and the secular in American life.5 The God-in-the-Constitution controversy is crucial to such a history of American secularism because it helped introduce the concept of secularism, a term coined in the 1840s by British atheist George Holyoake, into American public discourse. As I have already mentioned, the NLL’s most vocal leaders were self-identified secularists who, despite their assurances that they respected religious believers, typically ridiculed or attacked religion as a delusional and dangerous force. They reinterpreted America’s revolutionary leaders as secularists, framed the U.S. Constitution as a secularist document, and presented secularism as the only safeguard against fanaticism, theocracy, and ruin. Strictly speaking, their insistence on secularism as the nation’s founding legacy was anachronistic, since neither “secularist” as an identity nor “secularism” as a political ideology existed in the revolutionary period. A history of secularism as an ideological project must view the formation of the United States not as the success of a preexisting “secularism” but as a contentious and contingent process that helped shape the conditions in which the ideology

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of secularism later emerged. America’s identification as a secular state seems self-evident to many of us today not because the founders were secularists as such, but because the U.S. Constitution helped shape the very notion of a secular state and became a model for the creation of secular constitutions around the world. It was nineteenth-century secularists, the NLL’s leaders prominent among them, who first defined secularism in the American context and laid claim to the founders in these terms. Just as important, their tendency to ridicule religion and the NRA’s antisecularist response helped set the pattern for the negative perceptions of secularists and secularism among most Americans.6

Christian Freedoms: The God-in-the-Constitution Movement The U.S. Constitution includes no reference to God and mentions religion only twice. Article 6, section 3, forbids any religious test for public office, and the First Amendment bars Congress from establishing any religion or interfering with the “free exercise of religion.” Advocating for these principles in the revolutionary era were two otherwise disparate groups on the American scene: deists like Thomas Jefferson, motivated by Enlightenment values of individual liberty and conscience; and Protestant dissenters—some of whom emphasized the freedom of conscience as a theological imperative—who sought to end the colonial religious establishments that subordinated them. Neither deists nor dissenters wanted to disadvantage religion as such; both groups were convinced that the freedom of conscience would benefit true religion even though they held very different conceptions of what that meant. But these principles were far from a consensus among the framers, and many Americans feared that the lack of an established church would lead to anarchy and chaos. They finally won out only because neither the established Congregational churches of New England, the Anglican churches of the southern colonies, nor any other church had sufficient presence across the colonies to become a national establishment. The First Amendment originally applied only to the federal government (Congress shall not . . .) and did not immediately affect the establishments then existing in many of the states, although one by one the latter followed the federal precedent and ended their lingering vestiges of formal establishment, a process completed in 1833 when Massachusetts finally eliminated its tax support for churches.7 The nation may not have been officially Protestant, or even Christian, but it is easy to find evidence of an unofficial Protestant establishment in place by the mid-nineteenth century. The numbers and influence of

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Protestants in America grew dramatically during the waves of religious revivals often called the Second Great Awakening that swept the nation in the early decades of the century. The vast majority of Americans with prominent positions in education, government, law, and other spheres were members of the leading Protestant denominations, and they understood Protestant religion as the foundation of American civilization. Although bitterly divided along denominational and sectional lines, these Protestants forged a broad consensus in their hopes for the progress of a Christian civilization. As they saw it, true religion could be identified by its fruits of civilization and morality, and only Protestant Christianity fully qualified.8 When the nation found itself torn apart in Civil War, many argued that the union could only be saved through a formal recognition of God as the common authority. After the battle of Bull Run in 1861, the prominent Connecticut Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell preached an influential sermon condemning the “godless theorizing” that had left God out of the constitution and proposed that restoring national unity would require a shared recognition of God’s authority, perhaps in a new amendment to the constitution. Appeals for such an amendment became more and more common over the following few years, and in 1863 advocates created the NRA to advance the cause.9 America’s unofficial Protestant establishment found justification in a historiographical narrative that celebrated American religious liberty as the fulfillment of Christianity’s true message. The first major history of American religion, published in 1843 by the Presbyterian clergyman Robert Baird, valorized the colonial Puritans and other religious dissenters as the first to understand the basic Christian principle of liberty because they had suffered such bitter religious persecution in the Old World. Although unable to implement this principle perfectly by themselves, they created the conditions for religious liberty in the new nation.10 The idea of Christianity as the foundation of America’s liberties was central to the work of Philip Schaff, influential professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. In his Church and State in the United States: The American Idea of Religious Liberty and Its Practical Effects (1888), Schaff insisted that “the First Amendment could not have originated in any pagan or Mohammedan country, but presupposes Christian civilization and culture . . . Christianity alone has taught men to respect the sacredness of the human personality as made in the image of God and redeemed by Christ, and to protect its rights and privileges, including the freedom of worship, against the encroachments of the temporal power and the absolutism of the state.”11 Even historians generally considered “secular” made similar claims. As George Bancroft puts it in History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United

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States of America (1884), “Vindicating the right of individuality even in religion, and in religion above all, the new nation dared to set the example of accepting in its relations to God the principle first divinely ordained in Judea.” This view of liberty as an essentially Christian principle undergirded the NRA’s repeated assertions that American liberties could only be preserved by putting God in the constitution.12 This historiographical tradition took great pains to distance America’s founding ideals from any associations with irreligion. Schaff, answering European critics who feared that a nation without a church would deteriorate into atheism and chaos, firmly differentiated America’s system from “the infidel and red-republican theory” of liberty manifested in the French Revolution: “The American separation of church and state rests on respect for the church; the infidel separation, on indifference and hatred of the church and of religion itself . . . [The French Revolution] began with toleration, and ended with the abolition of Christianity, and with the reign of terror, which in turn prepared the way for military despotism as the only means of saving society from anarchy and ruin. Our infidels and anarchists would re-enact this tragedy if they get the power.” The specter of the French Revolution led Protestant historians to obscure the importance of Enlightenment ideals in America’s founding, intensifying their view of liberty as a Christian legacy. For example, Baird gave the “arch-infidel” Thomas Jefferson a negligible role in Virginia’s pioneering act of separation, crediting instead the Baptists and Presbyterians who had petitioned the legislature to end the Church of England’s established status soon after the Declaration of Independence.13 Writing to advance America’s identity as a Christian nation, they had little interest in giving credit to the skeptical Enlightenment tradition or to the “secularism” that would be lauded by the NLL.14 The dominant narrative presented liberty as not only Christian but specifically Protestant, and nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism found its rationale in the image of Catholicism as opposed to freedom and therefore dangerous to American liberties. Protestant leaders since the Reformation had attacked the Roman Catholic Church for refusing its members the right to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves, and denounced the church’s mediating role for violating their ideal of the individual’s direct accountability to God. Nineteenth-century Protestants, adding critiques of newer doctrines such as papal infallibility, portrayed Catholicism as absolutely irreconcilable with civil and religious liberty. For example, Schaff’s History of the Christian Church (1870) presented Catholicism as the major impediment to the progress of liberty past and present, which for Schaff was the basic plotline of church history. While the Roman Catholic Church “degenerated into an insufferable tyranny over conscience, and thus exposed itself to destruction,”

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the Protestant Reformation was based on “the universal priesthood [and] the self-government of the Christian people.” Schaff presented the Reformation as the recovery of true Christian liberty, realized most fully in the American system of religious freedom, the ultimate telos of church history. Constantly repeated, such refrains help explain how so many Protestants could advocate the marginalization or exclusion of Catholics in the name of religious freedom.15 Protestant nativism was fueled in the mid-nineteenth century by the growth in Catholic immigration and by Catholic challenges to the Protestant norms and biases of the public schools. Starting in the 1840s in New York, many Catholic leaders argued that Catholics could not in good conscience send their children to schools that denigrated Catholicism and required participation in Protestant-style devotions and Bible readings. Catholics did not initially seek to get such religious practices banned from the schools, but sought a portion of the public funds to support parochial schools as an alternative for Catholic children. If the “public” schools were for all intents and purposes Protestant, they argued, then public funds should also support Catholic schools.16 Faced with these demands, and fearful that Catholics ultimately sought to control the government, Protestants who had very little else in common agreed that public funding for Catholic schools would violate the suddenly urgent principle of a “wall of separation” between church and state. The eventual compromise that emerged piecemeal around the country refused such funding but also—at least in principle—ended most school-sponsored Bible reading and prayers, which freethinkers and liberal Protestants along with Catholics and Jews now condemned as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. In other words, as Philip Hamburger has argued, the secularist vision for the separation of church and state grew in nineteenthcentury America in part through an anti-Catholic imperative to ensure that Catholic schools could not receive public funding.17 At the same time, a more conservative Protestant reaction against this compromise would help inspire the NRA and its push to put God in the Constitution. Many Protestants discerned in the school disputes a nefarious Catholic design to block the free access to the Scriptures and indeed to destroy the free nature of American institutions. “It is the priests of Romanism who would break up our common school system for sectarian purposes, and shut out the light and influence of the Word of God,” wrote the Presbyterian Minister George Cheever in his Right of the Bible in Our Public Schools (1854). “What a burlesque upon the name of freedom, where the Bible is carefully shut out, where the very Lord’s Prayer is branded as intolerance and sectarianism, where the books and the principles which alone can lay the foundation or teach the nature of civil and religious freedom, are interdicted.”18 Cheever blamed Catholics

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even more than skeptics for removing religion from the public schools and believed that these events threatened America’s liberties and its very moral foundations. The God-in-the-Constitution movement grew on these Protestant resentments, and proponents made school prayers and Bible-reading a prominent part of their platform.19 American Catholic leaders, who certainly did not want to be defined as anti-liberty, presented an alternative historical and theological narrative identifying Roman Catholicism as the real foundation for freedom. Archbishop John Hughes of New York, who also led the Catholic battle over religion in that city’s schools, argued that the Protestant conception of liberty fomented a dangerous extremism. In the Protestant system taken to its logical extremes, he told an 1850 audience, “[i]nstead of recognising any general standard on any question of a moral character, every one was supposed to be able to form a standard for himself.” This created a sort of moral vacuum, “a feeling of great individual self-complacency, when you told every man that he was himself the very best judge to determine upon all religious, moral, social, or political questions,” which in turn opened the door to despotism: “If you will watch the progress of events, you will perceive that kings began to feel that they could now become despotic, because they formed their own royal standard, and there was no ecclesiastical counterpoise to the arrogant pretensions of the throne.”20 The French Catholic theologian Abbe Martinet, whose works were translated and introduced to an American audience by Hughes, ridiculed the doctrines of sola scriptura and individual conscience that left Protestants “tossed from system to system at the sport of influential ministers or absurd visionaries, submitting alternately or simultaneously to the direction of innumerable popes, all more powerful than the Roman Pontiff, since in religion they play the part of inventors.” Hughes and Martinet rejected the freedom of the individual conscience but not liberty itself, a principle that was central to national identity in both France and America. As Martinet explained, the church rested on a foundation of history and tradition that even the Pope could not change, giving the Catholic “the assurance that he is listening to Jesus Christ” and so providing the basis for “true independence of thought and conscience.” Thus the true church prevented the slide into anarchy and despotism by ensuring that rulers were accountable to God, offering the only sure foundation for human freedom. 21 Given the NRA’s deep-seated anti-Catholicism, it is ironic that its leaders advanced a deeply corporate notion of liberty that was similar in many respects to that of Hughes and Martinet. James McIlvaine, a Presbyterian minister and an unofficial theorist of the movement, feared that Americans were taking their laudable tradition of individual liberty to anarchic extremes that threatened to “subvert all creeds and

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confessions of faith.” Because Christianity provided the foundation of liberty, he argued, individual liberties had to be curtailed wherever they interfered with the nation’s Christian character. In A Nation’s Right to Worship God (1859), McIlvaine argued against any notion of religious freedom that would reject school prayers and Sunday laws and defined the nation as a corporate body with its own obligations to the divine: “Many seem to think that the separation of church and state means that the state has no duties to God, and no religious character.” On the contrary, he insisted that “nations, as such, have a moral character, and are clothed with a moral responsibility of their own . . . Consequently, it is an inalienable right of nations to acknowledge the being and government of God, to worship, honor, and obey him, in their national and government acts.” Individual liberties had to be balanced by the liberty of the nation as a corporate body to worship God and declare its identity as a Christian nation. At an organizational meeting in 1870, the NRA appointed McIlvaine a vice president and repeated his phrasing in its resolutions, insisting “that it is the right of nations as such, no less of individuals composing them, to worship God according to the Christian religion in Christ Jesus.”22 Needless to say this idea that the rights and liberties of the nation as a whole must sometimes supersede the individual liberties of religious minorities was very much in tension with the NLL’s exclusive emphasis on the individual subject and the rights of the individual conscience. Perhaps the most interesting question is not whether the NRA was advocating some variety of secularism, however we might define it, but how the various sides of this controversy attempted to negotiate the meaning of the secular in political terms. John Lardas Modern has recently identified what he calls an “evangelical secularism” in nineteenth-century America, making the case that “evangelical media practices” (here Modern emphasizes the pervasive and influential communications of Bible, tract, missionary, and other religious societies) did not only regulate those domains defined as religion, but also actively shaped American notions of the secular—and of the relationship between the two—by presenting an all-encompassing view of the world in which the principles of true Christianity and those of “secular” reason, morality, and politics were perfectly consistent and mutually reinforcing. 23 Along these lines, the NRA did not so much try to obliterate the secular state, or to demand the institutional subordination of the secular to the religious as in a fullfledged theocracy, but insisted that the separation of church and state was a divine principle that depended on the nation’s Christian character and that the state along with the church must honor God. “All the powers of government, its authority and very essence, are from God alone,” wrote McIlvaine. “The family, the church, and the state, these are all

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co-ordinate institutions, severally independent of each other, yet all alike having one and the same Head, which they are equally bound in solemn form to acknowledge, worship, and obey.”24 From this perspective, only if the nation paid due homage to God could the proper independence of secular and religious spheres be preserved—an argument that simultaneously constructed the secular as at least ideologically subordinate to an overarching religious allegiance.

The National Liberal League and the Origins of American Secularism When freethinkers and atheists began to organize to oppose the NRA in the 1870s, they too based their appeal on the all-American principle of religious liberty. At the Centennial Congress of Liberals, convened in 1876 to claim the legacy of the nation’s founders, President Francis Abbott of the newly created NLL condemned the “ruthless encroachments . . . made upon religious liberty throughout our entire land.” Abbott specifically condemned the movement’s effort to put God in the Constitution and deplored its success in closing the Philadelphia World’s Fair on Sundays: “During the present week, delegated representatives of large organizations from many of the different States have convened in this city for the avowed purpose of securing a national recognition of the Christian religion in the organic law of this government. Tomorrow, the Christian Sunday, our International Exposition will be closed in violation of the rights of Jews, non-Sabbatarians and Free-thinkers, while today, the Jewish Sabbath, the Jewish exhibitor is obliged to prepare his exhibits for the public.” Religious liberty for Abbott could not privilege the majority religion of Christianity over the rights of religious minorities and the nonreligious. 25 Abbott, a former Unitarian minister, had established his freethinking credentials as the editor of The Index, a weekly paper in Toledo, Ohio, that had long been calling for various reforms in the name of “free religion.” As articulated in The Index, the “Nine Demands of Liberalism” opposed point-by-point the aims of the God-in-the-Constitution movement. Abbott advocated ending tax exemption for churches, stopping any prayers and Bible-reading that remained in public schools around the country, repealing all laws requiring any observance of the Sabbath or of “Christian” morality, banning any special recognition of Christianity in state constitutions or by any level of government, and in general ensuring “that our entire political system shall be founded and administered on a purely secular basis.” The NLL, which claimed eight hundred members by the time of the 1876 convention, adopted these demands and

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effectively made them the central program of the secularist movement. 26 It then proposed its own constitutional amendment as an effort to clarify and expand on the existing First Amendment: Neither Congress nor any state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or favoring any particular form of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or permitting in any degree a union of Church and State, or granting any special privilege, immunity, or advantage to any sect or religious body, or to any number of sects or religious bodies; or taxing the people of any State, either directly or indirectly, for the support of any sect or religious body, or of any number of sects or religious bodies; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. 27

This proposal would have eliminated many of the First Amendment’s ambiguities by explicitly forbidding any sort of government involvement in religion, a far stricter standard of separation than had ever existed in America. While they ardently defended the principle of religious freedom and the rights of religious minorities, many in the NLL expressed an undisguised contempt for religion. “We would scrupulously respect the private religious belief of every man,” wrote Abbott, “even while we think it superstitious.” Abbott and likeminded freethinkers were convinced that religion, and Christianity in particular, was downright dangerous to America’s liberties. As the renowned abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison put it, “I believe that Christianity, being founded on the absolute ‘Divine Authority’ of Jesus Christ, is by its very nature hostile to individual and national liberty, and to equal individual rights.”28 A key member of the NLL’s executive committee was Robert Ingersoll, the Civil War colonel and famed orator known as the “Great Agnostic.” Ingersoll ridiculed the notion of putting God in the constitution by asking which God should be so honored: “Is it the God of the Old Testament, who was a believer in slavery and who justified polygamy?” Ingersoll predicted all sorts of nefarious consequences from such a change: “All the kings of the earth acknowledge the existence of God, and God is their ally; and this belief in God is used as a means to enslave and rob, to govern and degrade the people whom they call their subjects . . . The church in all ages and among all peoples has been the consistent enemy of the human race. Everywhere and at all times it has opposed the liberty of thought and expression.” From this perspective, the primary goal of disestablishment was not to facilitate the growth of religion, as Baird and Schaff had argued, but to protect the state from religion and its threat to individual liberties.29

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The NLL developed an alternative historical narrative that located the origins of liberty not in Protestant Christianity but in an Enlightenment revolt against religious authority, and anticipated the decline of religion as an expansion of liberty. They shared their opponents’ celebration of America as the beacon of liberty to the world, but rather than crediting Protestant Christianity they believed that the nation’s lingering Protestant establishment must be destroyed to fulfill the nation’s promise. “The Old World is clogged and embarrassed by the universal junction of Church and State,” as Garrison put it, while “the New World presents the spectacle of a mighty republic founded on the principle of their total disjunction, and destined, if this principle is only adhered to and more thoroughly applied, to attain a pinnacle of political eminence overtopping the most colossal empires of antiquity.”30 Ingersoll interpreted the nation’s founding as an experiment in religious liberty that involved not only equality among all religions but also the total subordination of religion to the state: “Our fathers said: ‘We will form a secular government, and under the flag with which we are going to enrich the air, we will allow every man to worship God as he thinks best.’ They said: ‘Religion is an individual thing between each man and his creator, and he can worship as he pleases and as he desires.’ And why did they do this? The history of the world warned them that the liberty of man was not safe in the clutch and grasp of any church.” Where his opponents decried the framers’ failure to acknowledge the Christian foundations of freedom, Ingersoll praised them for rejecting religious privilege and authority and so creating the first secular state.31 This demand to explicitly name America as a secular state can be seen as one dimension of a broader secularist effort to undermine religious authority in various arenas of American life. 32 Of course it was not only atheists and freethinkers who opposed putting God in the constitution. A few religious leaders joined the NLL, and far more denounced any effort to legislate religious observance. Not surprisingly American Jews took a leading role in this fight, and indeed many Jewish leaders and organizations had opposed efforts to put God in the constitution since the formation of the NRA in 1863. “Let us hold firmly to the entire separation of church and state,” preached the prominent Reform rabbi Max Lilienthal in 1870, “and our beloved country will not only prosper and succeed as heretofore, but will always lead the van of human liberty and civilization.” During this period, largely because of this controversy, leaders of Reform Judaism became increasingly vocal advocates of strict separation and the secular state. The newly formed Union of American Hebrew Congregations applauded the 1876 “Congress of Liberals” for its efforts “to secularize the State completely and to protest against” anything that would “endanger the bulwarks of perfect freedom and justice.”33 Several Reform rabbis were not only

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League members but also officers, including Isaac Mayer Wise who served as one of the League’s several vice presidents. Jewish organizations sent a series of petitions to Congress through the following decades against the NRA’s periodic proposals for a constitutional amendment.34 Thus it was largely in response to the NRA’s efforts and in coalition with the NLL that many American Jews, especially within Reform Judaism, began to explicitly advocate for a “secular state” as the best way to protect the interests of Jews and other religious minorities in America, and in so doing helped develop American concepts of secularism and the secular. 35 As the trauma of the Civil War receded, many Protestants—especially those from denominations that traditionally emphasized the freedom of conscience—also expressed their disagreement with the NRA’s agenda. Baptists in particular typically spoke out against a Christian amendment on the grounds that religion benefited from a separation between church and state. They opposed the proliferating “blue laws” that required businesses to close on Sundays, another key element of the “Christian America” agenda, on similar grounds. As a Los Angeles Baptist minister preached in 1897: “The Jew has as good a right to worship on the seventh day Sabbath as the Christian has to worship on the first day, the Christian Sabbath, and any civil statute which imposes any disability upon the Jew or upon any Sabbatarian is obviously wrong.”36 The state was rightly responsible for “secular” affairs and should have no power over religion, which by definition was a matter of individual conscience. Protestants like these would never have joined the NLL because they disliked its generally antireligious brand of secularism. Rather than seeking to protect the state from religion, they sought to protect the free religious conscience from the state, and it was on those grounds that they opposed blue laws along with the NRA’s proposed amendment. In many ways they continued the dissenting Protestant tradition that had helped frame the U.S. constitution’s provisions on religion in the first place, representing what Linell Cady has described as a third strand of American secularism, somewhere between those who wanted America constitutionally declared a Christian nation on one side and the antireligious (or laicist) secularists on the other.37 Others well outside the Protestant mainstream opposed both a Christian amendment and the blue laws on religious grounds, and increasingly grounded their cause in the all-American principle of religious liberty. Among the most vocal opponents of the blue laws were Seventh-day Adventists, who ridiculed the idea that Sunday was the “Lord’s Day” on the grounds that Genesis specified the seventh day (Saturday) as the day of rest, a biblical requirement nowhere contradicted in the New Testament. If some Christians wanted to worship on Sunday, they had no right to impose that latter-day corruption on those who observed the

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true seventh-day Sabbath. Although Seventh-day Adventists emphasized these issues of biblical interpretation, they also increasingly appealed to the constitutional principle of religious liberty and became ardent advocates of the separation of church and state. Their sensitivity to their own marginalization, combined with their free-church emphasis on the freedom of conscience, led them to become key champions of that separation as a central value of both Christianity and American identity.38 After its peak in the 1870s the membership and visibility of the NRA gradually declined. The conservative Presbyterians who dominated the organization continued to agitate for a constitutional amendment, but their regular petitions to Congress were repeatedly “referred to committee” and essentially ignored. As a Los Angeles Times piece on the daily life of a congressman put it, “There are always people who want to insert the word ‘God’ in the Constitution, as is done in some of the State Constitutions, and people who make it their business to see that this is not done. They watch each other like hawks, and all they accomplish is to create such a warfare that Congress will not consider it seriously, although it is now in committee, where it has been many times before.”39 Although the NRA formally ceased to exist in 1945, its signature cause would remain alive in strands of the twentieth-century evangelical movement. The National Association of Evangelicals, founded in 1942, also called for a constitutional amendment in which “this nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”40 But this proposal never became a defining issue for the twentieth-century evangelical movement. While many evangelicals continued to advance the vision of America as a Christian nation with its values grounded in Christianity, only a small minority would actively advocate for a Christian amendment. The NLL, renamed the American Secular Union in 1885, suffered from a series of internal conflicts and barely lasted into the twentieth century. The new name came after a series of controversies over the appropriate breadth of the organization’s mission. While some wanted to remain narrowly focused on church-state issues, others hoped to address a broader social agenda and even to create a national political party. The latter was a difficult proposition for many reasons, among them that members held such a wide range of opinions on social and political questions. NLL President Thaddeus Wakeman, an attorney and movement stalwart, largely ended this debate in 1884 when he convinced delegates that the organization did not have the resources to create a political party and should therefore remain focused on the “Nine Demands of Liberalism.” The new name “American Secular Union” reflected this clarification of the group’s primary focus on promoting secularism in government and society and suggests just how central the concept of secularism had

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become to the movement. By 1885 the Union counted two hundred and fifty auxiliary chapters around the nation, and although only a handful of these were consistently active their very existence reveals a fairly wide dissemination of freethought and secularist opinion in the period. But tensions simmered over whether the movement should simply emphasize the separation of church and state and remain positive toward religion, or whether secularism necessarily involved an attack on religion—a position that obviously alienated religious folks who might otherwise be allies. Attendance at the Union’s annual conventions varied considerably, with only twenty-five at the Chicago Annual Convention in 1893, a year when the group had joined Jews and Seventh-day Adventists in an unsuccessful battle against the closure of the Chicago World’s Fair on Sundays. In 1900 the Union boasted forty to fifty thousand members, at least on paper, but notice of its activities gradually faded from even the most supportive periodicals, and by the end of the decade it had disappeared entirely.41

Conclusion The National Liberal League and the American Secular Union represented a minority movement with even less social influence than the militant atheists so visible in the American scene today—a strand of secularism that has never managed to implement its vision for an American public sphere entirely free from the influence of religion.42 Much to the chagrin of conservative evangelicals then and now, the campaign against public school prayers and Sunday laws did for the most part succeed—a result that cannot be credited simply to secularist activists but to the corresponding efforts of Catholics, Jews, Seventhday Adventists, and other religious minorities. More broadly, advocates of secularization (not all of whom are antireligious, but who by definition advocate a somewhat limited sphere for religion) have had some success in displacing the formerly prominent influence of Christianity in particular arenas of American intellectual culture, most prominently in the universities, the courts, and the mainstream media.43 Nevertheless, U.S. presidents continue to hold prayer breakfasts and to regularly invoke Christian values; public funds continue to support chaplains in the military, hospitals, and prisons; religious organizations remain exempt from taxation (a privilege challenged by many secularists as an unconstitutional establishment of religion); issues of religion in the public schools remain hotly contested; and in recent years the government has with great fanfare created a “faith-based initiatives” office that dramatically expands federal support for social service programs operated by religious organizations.

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Over the course of this history, attacks on religion by prominent intellectuals in the name of secularism have created the popular perception of secularism as inherently opposed to religion, and so contributed to a certain polarization of American culture. In the God-in-the-Constitution debate, the shared value was not secularism but the all-American principle of liberty, interpreted by each side to support its own cause. While the secularists of the NLL understood liberty strictly as a matter of individual conscience and rejected any link between religion and government as a violation of that freedom, their opponents in the NRA insisted that the nation must honor its Christian heritage as the foundation of all of its values, including religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Ever since, a strong contingent of Americans have wanted the United States to claim a Christian identity, not a secular one, and have argued that Christianity, or at least some kind of religious faith, is an essential foundation for American values and freedoms. Thus, while academics might consider America one model of a secular state, most Americans consider “secularism” a bad word even as they celebrate religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Notes 1. “Amending the Constitution,” New York Times, February 27, 1873. 2. Cited in Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States, or the American Idea of Religious Liberty and Its Practical Effects (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888), 128. 3. “The Pittsburg Convention,” New York Times, March 7, 1870. 4. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 5. This chapter responds to José Casanova’s proposal for “the study of modern secularism, as an ideology, as a generalized worldview, and as a social movement, and as a catalyst for counter-secularization responses” as an important area for research. He suggests that the secularization of Western Europe is best understood not as an inevitable byproduct of modernity but “in terms of the triumph of the knowledge regime of secularism,” making the history of secularism essential to our understanding of why Europe has become so secular while the United States and most other parts of the world have not. See José Casanova, “Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocuters, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 17. 6. See Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2005), especially 111–134, for a related argument. 7. From 1780 to 1833 Massachusetts required every citizen to belong to a church and pay taxes to support that church, a system that in practice favored the

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

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majority Congregationalists. The courts did not actually require the states to grant religious freedom rights until the 1940s. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) required the states to honor all rights granted to citizens by the federal government, part of the Reconstruction efforts to ensure equal rights for African Americans. Extensive legal debates over what this meant in practice followed, and the Supreme Court did not formally apply this principle to religious freedom until the 1940 case Cantwell v. Connecticut. See Michael S. Ariens and Robert A. Destro, Religious Liberty in a Pluralistic Society (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1996), 49–51, 204–205. Robert T. Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, 2nd rev. and enl. ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 82–100. Morton Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 58–63. Quote is from Bushnell, Reverses Needed: A Discourse Delivered on the Sunday after the Disaster of Bull Run (Hartford, 1861), 21, 23, 25–26, cited in Borden, 61. Despite this sermon Bushnell never joined the NRA or endorsed its program (Ibid., 68). Robert Baird, Religion in America, or, An account of the origin, progress, relation to the state, and present condition of the evangelical churches in the United States: with notices of the unevangelical denominations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845), 63–69. Schaff, 40. Bancroft, 326, cited in Schaff, 137. Where nineteenth-century historians celebrated the Protestant origins of religious liberty, recent scholars have either attacked this connection as the source of an intrinsic Protestant, or more broadly Western, bias; or else have minimized it in an effort to cast religious liberty as, at least potentially, a universally applicable value. One example of the latter is Martha Craven Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Schaff, 15; Baird, 215–225. Not until Sidney Mead’s The Lively Experiment in 1963—long after the secularization of the academy had in many ways reshaped the field of American religious history—would historians of religion rediscover the significance of the Enlightenment in shaping America’s tradition of religious liberty. Sidney Mead, The Lively Experiment (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). On the secularization of the academy as a deliberate effort by secularist intellectuals, see Christian Smith, “Secularizing American Higher Education,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Christian Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 101–141. Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1870), 138, 40. For an excellent discussion of Catholic positions in these debates, see John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York; London: W.W. Norton, 2003). John Hughes, Complete Works of the Most Rev. John Hughes, D.D., Archbishop of New York, vol. 1 (New York: Lawrence Kehoe, 1865),

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

Tisa Wenger includes many pertinent speeches and letters by Archbishop Hughes, the leading Catholic figure in the controversy in New York. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Rev. George B. Cheever, Right of the Bible in Our Public Schools (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1854), 109, x–xi. “Amending the Constitution,” New York Times, February 27, 1873. John Hughes, The Church and the World (New York: Edward Dunigan & Brother, 1850), 17–18. Abbe Martinet, Religion in Society, or the solution of great problems, placed within the reach of every mind, Translated from the French ed., vol. II (New York: D. & J. Sadler, 1850), 116, 21, 23, 29. See also Donald Louis Kinzer, An Episode in Anti-Catholicism: The American Protective Association (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964) and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom. Rev. J. H. McIlvaine, “A nation’s right to worship God”: An address before the American Whig and Cliosophic societies of the College of New Jersey (Trenton, NJ: Murphy & Bechtel, printers, 1859), 16, 17, 31–33, 38–41; “The Pittsburg Convention,” New York Times, March 7, 1870. John Lardas Modern, “Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan,” Church History 77, no. 4 (December 2008), 824. McIlvaine, 32, 27, a position repeated at the Pittsburgh convention; see “The Pittsburg Convention,” New York Times, March 7, 1870. Centennial Congress of Liberals, Equal Rights in Religion (Boston: National Liberal League, 1875), 36. Sidney Warren, American Freethought, 1860–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 35–36, 162. Centennial Congress of Liberals, Equal Rights in Religion (Boston: National Liberal League, 1875), 36, 7, 5. Ibid., 10, 72. Robert G. Ingersoll, What Is Religion? And Other Essays (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1890?), “God in the Constitution,” 8, 12. Centennial Congress of Liberals, 70. See “The Declaration of Independence,” in Ingersoll, What Is Religion?, 12. Smith, The Secular Revolution. Jonathan Sarna and David G. Dalin, eds., Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 167–174. Quotes are on 169–170 and 173. One example is “Hebrews to Petition Congress,” New York Times, March 16, 1896. See also Borden, Jews, Turks, and Infidels. Sarna and Dalin, 167–174. See also David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-twentieth-century American Intellectual History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), on the role of Jews in secularizing higher education. “At the Churches Yesterday,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1897. On the debates over Sunday laws as an indicator of changing views of work, rest,

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37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

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and recreation, see Alexis McCrossen, Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). See Linell Cady’s chapter in this volume. W. H. Littlejohn, The Constitutional Amendment: Or, The Sunday, The Sabbath, the Change, and Restitution (Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press 1873); William A. Blakely, American State Papers on Freedom in Religion, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1943). The documents in Blakely’s volume are an impressive collection of primary sources on religious freedom issues from the colonial period up to the publication date, with an emphasis on Sunday laws, and framed in patriotic fashion with images of the Statue of Liberty and America’s “founding fathers” interspersed throughout. For the ongoing Seventh-day Adventist work on religious freedom, see the North American Religious Liberty Association, “Proclaiming Liberty,” http://churchstate.org/article.php?id=9 (accessed April 17, 2009). “Correspondence of the Times,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1896. Borden, 74. Sidney Warren, American Freethought, 1860–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 164–175. See, for example, Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Smith, The Secular Revolution.

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Chapter 6 Varieties of Legal Secularism Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Introduction The desirability of global extension of the rule of law is currently being promoted by political actors across the ideological spectrum. At times, rhetorical evocation of the rule of law takes on a transcendent utopian glow—as of an entire philosophy and practice sufficient for the peaceful coexistence of humankind. Universal law as the successor, one might say, to universal religion. This is a somewhat startling image for those of us who are lawyers—or who study law—and find it as violent, as historically messy, and as genealogically compromised, as any other human institution. Yet, the rule of law as the very essence of the secular, the a-cultural, the a-political, continues to operate in many places as a stand-in for the last best hope for mankind. There is tremendous ambiguity in this small phrase. What do its promoters hope from it? The rule of law has stronger and weaker forms. In its strongest form, the rule of law has a strong substantive quality making it akin to the foundational claims of the natural law tradition. In this version, law is singular, uniquely rational, self-evident, and autonomous, embodying universal norms. With the achievement of the rule of law, it is implied, the lion will lie down with the lamb. Other rule of law projects seem more modest. The rule of law in these scenarios is closer to the ground, more local. It means regularity, lack of corruption, transparency, equality before the law of all including the sovereign, no secret or ex post facto laws, among other things. The rule of law in this more modest form is about legislative reform and the training of judges and lawyers. It is understood to provide some of the minimal conditions of a democratic society and to make market capitalism possible, but not of itself to produce justice or to end the need for cultural and political negotiation about the terms of life together on this earth. In both the strong and weak versions of the rule of law, however, law is almost always understood to constitute in some sense the very

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essence of the secular. Law—the law of the modern nation-state and its international extensions—has been carefully differentiated from other areas of public life. It has been carefully and thoroughly disenchanted. Indeed, “law” is taken to begin, to be invented, when it becomes secular. Its predecessor religious legal systems are not understood to be law.1 This strong claim to secularity persists even in the face of recent leakage into law from the excesses of civic piety, from a new religious activism, as well as academic flirtations with political theological rereadings of contemporary politics. It is law’s secularity that allows it to transcend the messiness of politics. In most discussions about the necessary link, or not, between law and morality, morality, too, is understood to be secular. While there is much talk about the sacred today and about political theology, those who would insist on explicitly religious foundations of law are marginal to mainstream legal theory. Law, modern secular law, seeks the control and privatization of religion. Modern religion is understood to be that which happens in places permitted by modern law. Coexistent with calls for the global enactment of the rule of law, the “return of religion” is attested to across the globe. This “return of religion” takes variant forms as well. Universalist varieties include the broadest rhetorical and institutional reach of both old and new international religious ideologies from across the traditions, from the Roman Catholic Church to Sunni Islam and some modernist forms of Buddhism. But the persistence of popular and transactional religion is also newly visible. Particularist religious ways of being in the world include the apparent resurgence of antimodern or premodern religious forms as well as postmodern eclectic syncretisms (Pentecostals, neopagans, practitioners of voodoo and Santeria, Falun Gong, local Islams, etc.). Many of these practices began as highly localized forms but with the increase in global migration are themselves present in many parts of the world today. Religion today constitutes a complex and fissiparous field, one in which a stubborn fact seems to be that authority is located more and more in the individual, rather than in institutions. Both universalist and more particular forms of religion challenge the supremacy of law. Law, positivist modern law, in all its guises, based, as it is, in an erasure or suppression of religion and idolatry, seems to have few resources to cope with the return of religion in any form. Secular law needs a pliant religion, but the actual interaction of the two suggests more parity. Any actual instantiation of the modern rule of law, however self-consciously secular, implicates a theory and practice with respect to religion as well. That is, in Talal Asad’s words, together they help to constitute a formation of the secular. 2 In the United States, the reigning alternative legal secularisms, or church-state positions, have historically been expressed in the tension

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between two interpretive communities with respect to the religion clauses of the First Amendment: the “accommodationists,” those who favor what they understand to be nondiscriminatory government support for religion, as well as exemptions from application of the law for the religiously motivated; and the “separationists,” those who favor a thorough privatization of religion, a “wall of separation” between church and state, and a uniform neutral application of law to all, without distinctions on the basis of religious identity. Taking examples from a couple of recent U.S. lawsuits to illustrate these positions, I explore the possibility that a third legal secularism is emerging in the United States, one that is neither accommodationist nor separationist in the traditional sense. I briefly sketch out these three current legal models for the management of religion in state institutions in the United States, the two classics and the emergent third, correlating the understanding of religion in each model with a “church-state” model and a variety of secularism. I borrow for this purpose three “types” of secularism suggestively explored in a recent essay by American religious historian Clark Gilpin—“religious secularism,” “irreligious secularism,” and “areligious secularism.”3 (I use Gilpin’s terms, a trio inspired, he says, by Charles Taylor and Talal Asad, but do not wish to burden him with, or make him responsible for, my extensions of his suggestions into the realm of law.) Understanding secularism to be, in some sense, the defining mood of modernity, however varied in its appearances, Gilpin proposes three moments in the history of American secularism—religious secularism, irreligious secularism, and areligious secularism—moments he defines as spatial in nature. Rather than seeing secularization as resulting from a transfer of authority away from religion, he sees various modes of secularism providing different spaces for religion, religion always understood to be plural in form. As with all models, these three are not found in pure form and do not follow one another chronologically in neat order. Indeed, I think they may be necessarily codependent and so all are present most of the time in much of the modern Christian west. They do provide one suggestive framework for analyzing religion in the United States today. They also are, not surprisingly to any student of American religious history, in some sense, enactments of Protestantism and find interesting parallels in U.S. constitutional interpretation and in models of the rule of law. Gilpin uses religious secularism to denominate the new public space that resulted from urbanization, an urbanization that began at the end of the nineteenth century and was paradigmatically described by Protestant theologian Harvey Cox in The Secular City in 1965.4 The city space Cox described was a place of liberation, a place made in part by the social

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gospel, by a “pragmatic, this-worldly philosophy of social transformation.” That space was at once a continuation of the de facto nineteenth century “establishment” of protestant evangelical Christianity and a new frank de-mythologization of Christianity. Irreligious secularism, for Gilpin, is quintessentially represented by the public school, a place in which critical thinking supplanted explicitly religious spaces and which is largely inhospitable to both historic religions and religious secularism. Irreligious secularism, although a product of American protestant culture, supplies the ideological basis for the politico-legal dogma of the “separation of church and state.”5 Areligious secularism, for Gilpin, denominates a still emerging post-Christian space that honors religion as a human universal and in which religious pluralism can be creatively renegotiated in the many contemporary sites of cultural exchange; a disestablishment that implies multiplicity and hybridity rather than homogeneity or absence.

Religious Secularism The most powerful form of religious secularism today in the United States, I would argue, is that presented by certain projects undertaken by conservative evangelical Christians.6 Those projects are being enabled by the now well-institutionalized partnership between religious organizations and governments known as the faith-based initiative to support what are termed faith-based social services. Those programs put into practice once again a particular legal secularism that understands law and politics as properly the expression of a form of Christian universalism. This strain of contemporary evangelical thought and practice has much in common with its predecessors—parachurch movements to promote sobriety and hard work that were also vehicles for a de facto protestant Christian establishment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like its forerunners, it is also this-worldly and pragmatic. (While dominated by evangelical Christians, broadly understood, this form is significantly present in both other Christian and non-Christian versions.)7 One such project is the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), an in-prison rehabilitation program designed and administered by Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), which was founded by Charles Colson after his conversion and release from prison in 1975. Presently extant in five states, IFI is an 18 month biblically based residential program of prisoner reform.8 The IFI prisoner wakes at 5:30 a.m. for devotions, and then attends Bible classes, work assignments, counseling sessions, and religious services, for the rest of the day. Personal televisions and profane language are forbidden. The prisoner is immersed in a world

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of Bible verses and Bible stories. He is required to read evangelical selfhelp literature such as The Man God Uses and The Bondage Breaker. Every Friday evening he is required to attend a revival meeting and every Sunday, church services. The IFI prisoner is trained to interpret his own experience of the world and to change his behavior through the memorization of Bible verses and through studying lessons drawn from Bible stories. IFI includes an aftercare mentorship during which ex-prisoners are required to attend church. In his 2006 opinion finding the Iowa version of the program unconstitutional, federal district court Judge Pratt called IFI a form of protestant monasticism, a union of religious and state power that resulted in a project of forced conversion.9 Yet IFI says that its purpose is not religious proselytization, but rather civilization, the reduction of recidivism through a program that attempts to “civilize” the prisoners through the teaching of “universal,” rather than religious, values. Although it has always insisted in this double identity, both Christian and secular, its mission has in the last few years become more explicitly “universal” and more “secular,” apparently in response to legal challenges, while still claiming to be a Christian ministry. Prison Fellowship’s Web site now reads, two years after Judge Pratt’s decision: “The InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) is a proven, voluntary and holistic values-based Reentry Program. It seeks the development of the whole person—spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and physically. The spiritual formation aspect of the program is based on the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.”10 But the intimate fusion of secular and Christian purposes was always present, and not just for constitutionally strategic reasons. As was evident at the trial, IFI staff sees a virtually complete and unproblematic overlap between the rule of law and biblical values. They were indignant at the suggestion that the Constitution might outlaw these efforts. The rhetorical integration of the religious and the secular was made dramatic at the Iowa trial by one of the devices IFI’s lawyers used on cross-examination. The IFI Iowa program was described as being built on six values: integrity, restoration, responsibility, fellowship, affirmation, and productivity. Each of the complaining prisoners was asked about these values by one of the IFI lawyers: Q. These values are taught [by IFI] from a Christian perspective; true? A. True. Q. Using lessons and references from the Bible; right? A. Right. Q. Okay. You’d agree, wouldn’t you, that these values, these six values, are not uniquely Christian, are they?

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A. No, they’re not. Q. They’re common to a civilized society, aren’t they . . . These values, integrity, restoration, responsibility, fellowship, affirmation, productivity, apply to everyday life, don’t they? A. That’s true. .... Q. In IFI, the lessons that illustrate these six values are drawn from the Bible, though; right? A. Correct. Q. But these basic values, which are so universal, can be illustrated from other aspects of life; don’t you agree? A. Such as? Q. Well, do you recall the story about Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat? A. Yup. Q. That’s the story of responsibility, right, the cat and the children clean up the mess they made while their mother was away? A. Right. Q. Okay. And Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is a story of fellowship, right? The town of Whoville coming together despite the Grinch’s efforts to steal Christmas; right? A. Correct. Q. So these six basic values taught by the IFI program can be found almost anywhere. Isn’t that so? A. Yes. .... Q. You’d not be surprised if lessons illustrating the value of responsibility, for example, could be found in the Koran, would you? A. True. Q. Likewise, someone could probably find lessons illustrating fellowship in the Book of Mormon, don’t you think? A. Yes.11

Virtually every prisoner answered in this way. What did IFI mean by implying that universal values—the values of civilization—can equally well be taught through the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, or Dr. Seuss? Surely these high-profile evangelicals who boast on their Web sites and in their publications that IFI increases the number of Christians (“souls won for the Kingdom of God”) cannot agree with John Rawls that “For the purposes of public life, Saul of Tarsus and Paul the Apostle are the same person.” And Jesus and the Grinch and Moroni and Mohammed and The Cat in the Hat? I think they do. All are understood by IFI to be “biblical” to the extent that they teach integrity, restoration, responsibility, fellowship, affirmation, and productivity. All are understood to be secular and legal to the extent that they are teaching

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civilization, not religion. IFI says that they seek personal transformation on the part of prisoners, rather than conversion. (Conversion is understood by PFM and IFI, in the evangelical idiom, to be about seeking to bring persons to a saving affirmation of Jesus as Lord.) The Iowa prison program, and many other faith-based social service programs, inhabit a place that is at once secular and Christian, not unlike the settlement houses of a century ago, a would-be homogeneous place that resembles what Gilpin calls religious secularism. The universal values promoted by IFI, when carefully regarded, look less like the Bible and more like what multinational corporations look for in their employees, that is, people who will get up every morning and go to work and support family values. They look more like the Protestant ethic, rather than the Bible. Indeed, the new promotion of “civilization” looks a lot like the nineteenth-century version that supported reform projects of various kinds, including the original invention of the penitentiary and the wholesale remaking of Indian culture. It is what used to be called a de facto protestant establishment, an establishment stained, as it was, and is, for all its noble purposes, by bigotry, racism, and colonialism. The power of this form of secularism, religious and legal, is in part in its denial of its religiousness. It is an accommodation of religion and yet it rejects the name. Relying on the state to provide the institutional bones of its project, this form of Christian universalism sees a seamless and unproblematic overlap between biblical law and the rule of law.12 But one could argue that IFI’s Christian secularism is giving way to equality and neutrality, even a religious inclusivism, that smacks of the very secular relativism they deride. And looking more broadly across the variety of faith-based social service providers and programs, that erosion is even more apparent. The pattern repeats a pattern shown by Mark deWolfe Howe in his book on the First Amendment.13 Antebellum legal enabling of congregational polities gave way after the Civil War first to nationalist and then to internationalist constitutional readings of religion. Or, in Gilpin’s terms, earlier religious secularisms were transformed as a result of an expansion first of federal over state, and then of international over national legal power.

Irreligious Secularism For Gilpin, the space created by irreligious secularism is quite different from the secularized Protestantism of religious secularism. Its most iconic instantiation is in the American public school, a space in which explicit religion was mostly banished, first after the Bible Wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and then by the school prayer

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decisions of the mid-twentieth.14 The story goes that, fearful Protestants chose irreligious secularism over the earlier de facto protestant establishment, because they did not wish to share religious secularism with Catholics. Catholic morality was not biblical. The First Amendment doctrine that emerged from this history is based in the revival and national enshrining of Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, “the wall of separation,” as the privileged metaphor of American church/state relations.15 In the space of irreligious secularism, religion is understood to be entirely private, a matter of personal choice. While the public school is the paradigmatic example of such a space, this version of secularism has also flourished in other state institutions, including the armed services and in the prison—where, before the advent of the new evangelicalism, religion was managed and contained through traditional prison chaplaincies designed to serve soldiers and prisoners as individuals in their private capacities by facilitating their individual practice of religion, leaving the professional work of each institution to be defined by secular theories of the human. In the appeal from the decision in the Iowa case declaring Iowa’s contract with IFI to be unconstitutional, a joint supporting Amicus brief was filed by the American Correctional Chaplains Association, The American Catholic Correctional Chaplains Association, and Jewish Prisoner Services International. Arguing for the affirming of the district court’s decision and opposing faith-based programs, the brief filed by the various correctional chaplains associations offers an impassioned and proudly enlightenment defense of traditional chaplaincy programs, and the professional and ethical standards to which those programs are subject. “The primary purpose of chaplaincy programs is to address the religious needs of incarcerated inmates,” the brief states, adding in a footnote that the purpose is “not to change a prisoner’s behavior.”16 The brief also states, While chaplaincy programs may seek to address the specific faith needs of a particular inmate, they may not indoctrinate or compel attendance at any religious service or program . . . Consequently, standards of practice requiring inclusion, neutrality and nondiscrimination—and prohibiting indoctrination or compulsion—are at the core of every prison chaplaincy program.17

Distinguishing themselves from PFM and IFI, the prison chaplains associations understand themselves to have a very different role, one that they understand within what they explicitly call “republican and enlightenment” ideas about punishment. “[Prison] reformers,” they say, “sought to mold a criminal justice and reformatory system around addressing

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social ills. These reformers sought to establish a rational system of crime and punishment, based on the belief that crime would decrease when ‘the mind of man is once more accessible to the mild influence of reason and humanity.’ ”18 Explicitly comparing prison history to that of the schools, the prison chaplains argue that their role is no longer that of the nineteenth century when proselytization was a part of both education and prisoner rehabilitation. Reason, they say, has replaced faith in government programs of transformation. For irreligious secularism, the rule of law, in the guise of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, acts as gatekeeper to the public space, the irreligiously secular public space, the place of rationality. But one of the reasons IFI exists is that this model is in danger of losing its plausibility and its constituency.

Areligious Secularism Areligious secularism is frankly emergent in Gilpin’s description. He offers as an example of what he calls areligious secularism the space revealed by the research of Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams into what he terms the “generative self,” an American way of being that is characterized by the narration of redemptive stories. As Gilpin tells it, McAdams’ informants “tell secular stories of their lives that incorporate elements derived from religious traditions into narratives that neither favor nor disfavor a religious reading of the self; theirs is an areligious secularism.” This research effort emphasizes the universality of “spiritual” practices for Americans. Although there are affinities in such a reading of contemporary religious universalism with other older readings of a religion of America, from the transcendentalists to Walt Whitman and beyond,19 I believe Gilpin sees this form of secularism as new, as a more open, pluralistic and negotiable space than that celebrated in the literature of Americanness. A similar moment might be found in the facts underlying a surprising recent decision by a federal court in Wisconsin, facts that reveal another legal space for religion, one that is neither a comprehensive and integrating translation of Christianity like IFI, nor a simple privatization like the prison chaplaincies. Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Nicholson 20 concerned the constitutionality of a program of the National Chaplains Center of the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). (In 2005, more than 5.3 million people received health care in VA facilities.) According to the district court, the VA chaplaincy has evolved since its founding in 1883 from a focus that was primarily “sacramental”—meaning apparently the provision of religious service to patients not unlike that described by the prison chaplains associations—to a focus that is now primarily “clinical.”

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Thus, “to effectively implement its clinical chaplaincy program, the VA Chaplain Service was recently reorganized under the Medicine and Surgery Strategic Healthcare Group. The purpose of this reorganization was to recognize VA’s chaplaincy as a clinical, direct patient care discipline.”21 VA chaplains have an explicit duty to provide clinical pastoral care, protect the patient’s constitutional religious free exercise rights, and protect the patient “from having religion imposed on them.” “Spirituality,” the court insists, for the VA, “is not necessarily religious because it concerns the meaning of life on a more general level.”22 As a part of its self-described “holistic health care model” and in response to national accrediting standards that require that all patients receive an initial spiritual assessment, the VA chaplaincy has recently developed various spiritual assessment tools, tools that evaluate a patient’s spiritual health by quantifying a patient’s responses to a series of questions about their religious identity, beliefs, and practices. Spirituality is integrated into the treatment of a variety of ills, including posttraumatic stress disorder and various types of substance addiction and chemical dependency. The separationist plaintiff in the Nicholson case, the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), complained that as a result of the reorganization of the VA chaplaincy, “VA chaplains have crossed the constitutional line by incorporating religion into the delivery of VA health care services.”23 Rejecting FFRF’s argument, the district court granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of the VA, concluding that no constitutional violation occurred because all religious activity was entirely voluntary on the part of the patient. Although there are real, classic, “establishment” type problems with the VA program, particularly in the fact that the training and licensing of chaplains is controlled by mainstream religious organizations, and the likelihood that there is real potential for abuse in a one-on-one situation such that it could be administered in a way that is not voluntary and is discriminatory, the court’s opinion is replete with generalized approval of a broad effort to accommodate what is viewed as universal, that is the spiritual. What has been created in hospitals today, and this incorporation of the spiritual is not limited to the VA, is what, in Gilpin’s terms might be viewed as an areligious space for religion, one that acknowledges the eclectic and adaptive nature of contemporary religion. In legal terms, it is a way for law to deal with a religion that is no longer banished to private spaces but that is also no longer about the Bible. It is a natural aspect of human life.

Conclusion A satisfying political and legal acknowledgment of the persistent reality of religion seems long overdue, but, as in most things, the devil is in the

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details. All three forms of legal and religious secularism remain potent possibilities for legally accommodating religious difference. Each offers important insights and sets of practices. Religious secularism and its legal twin, accommodationism, as exemplified by both right and left wing antiliberalism, insists that there is something fundamentally sterile and inhuman about liberalism and the rule of law, without religion. But the alternatives that both present deny the centrality of diversity and doubt. Irreligious secularism and its legal twin, separationism, insists on the precious achievements of the Enlightenment and the irreducible personality and integrity of different cultural communities but concedes little to the public role of religion and a sense of common humanity increasingly pressed on us by globalization. Areligious secularism fits with the new bureaucratic bottom-up regulatory governance and affirms the universality of religion but can seem a thin and lonely place in which to live. To my mind, one finds the cultural imagining of a place that combines the best of these possibilities less in philosophy or theology or law—and more in ethnography. It is there that one sees contemporary religious persons as eclectic, adaptive, and acculturating, actively borrowing practices not only from other religions but also from business, politics, communication media, and popular culture. This space recognizes the predicament of the modern self described by Charles Taylor and others not as one of nihilism and despair, but as one of activity and hope. I conclude by briefly mentioning two ethnographies that begin to capture the possibilities of the space of areligious secularism. Saba Mahmood and David Engel, ethnographers who work in modern urban settings—those quintessentially secular places as Cox noted— offer portraits of men and women reinventing their religious traditions to suit their contemporary needs. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood, in Politics and Piety, 24 describes the Egyptian women in Cairo that she came to know during her research in the late 1990s. These women, as Mahmood describes them, have invented new religious fora to serve their need for religious guidance. In mosques all over Cairo there have sprung up female religious experts, without formal clerical credentials, who offer weekly teaching sessions to women on how to live a Muslim life. Contrary to Western feminism’s picture of Muslim women as passive creations of men’s religion, Mahmood sees these women, both the self-appointed interpreters of the Shari’a and their followers, as active agents creatively exploring and affirming their traditions to serve them in new times. Legal sociologist David Engel, in an article summarizing his recent research in Thailand, “Globalization and the Decline of Legal Consciousness: Torts, Ghosts, and Karma in Thailand,”25 describes what he sees as a shift away from the use of the courts to a reliance on religious

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explanations and rituals as a way of dealing with injuries sustained in car accidents. Engel has had the good fortune to have returned to the site of earlier research, giving him the benefit of a twenty-five years perspective. He shows us, based on his extensive interviews with Thai Buddhists, their new ways of understanding and coping with their role as victims of road accidents. Whereas twenty-five years earlier his research had shown a population availing themselves of a combination of local village compensation systems and the modern legal institutions of tort law, today he sees an increasingly urbanized Thai population employing the teaching of transnational Buddhist doctrine and ritual in place of modern law. Using ideas of karma, compassion and nonduality, as well as local spirit traditions, the modern Thais he talks to seek complex causal explanations for their predicaments and, in some sense, seek to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than finding wholeness through the rule of law.26 Both the women Mahmood describes in Cairo and the Thai accident victims Engel interviewed seem to be taking charge of their own lives through re-appropriations of the traditional in ways that appear to reject both enlightenment epistemologies and the dogmatic constraint of religious authorities. The challenge for those who would press on us the rule of law is to be flexible enough—through the fostering of legal pluralism—to allow such practices to occur. A small step in addressing the scandal and brutality of massive incarceration in the United States might begin by listening to the prisoners, rather than processing their complaints through the tired dualism of First Amendment jurisprudence. I do not think it is too far a stretch to see the accident victims in Thailand and the women of Cairo as their fellows. The Iowa prisoners who brought the suit said that what initially attracted them to IFI was the possibility of finding the resources to remake their lives. They wanted to learn about other religions as well as their own. They wanted the support of a community and mentors along the way. They certainly did not want to be told that they were all the same and that sameness added up to the fact that crime=sin. All three groups are arguably operating in the new space of areligious secularism. Whether the rule of law can fairly regulate this space remains to be seen. In the United States, the ongoing transformations of the faith-based initiative, and evolving legal responses to it, will be one place in which this project will take place. This third way is neither accommodationist nor separationist in a traditional sense. With religion naturalized it seems to neither need particular accommodation nor careful separation.

Notes Parts of this chapter elaborate on Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “The New Disestablishment,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation

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18, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 21–26; and the concluding chapter of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 1. See, for example, Andrew Huxley, Religion, Law and Tradition: Comparative Studies in Religious Law (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 6; Robert A. Yelle, “Bentham’s Fictions: Canon and Idolatry in the Genealogy of Law,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 17 (2005): 151–179. 2. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 3. W. Clark Gilpin, “Secularism: Religious, Irreligious, and Areligious,” The Religion and Culture Web Forum, http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/ publications/webforum/032007/commentary.shtml (accessed May 18, 2009). 4. Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Collier Books, 1965). For Cox’s later reflections on his book and its impact, see his “The Secular City 25 Years Later,” The Christian Century (November 7, 1990): 1025–1029. For a collection of essays on the diversity of twentieth-century U.S. urban religion, see Robert Orsi, ed., Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 5. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. I do mean here with the expression “evangelical Christian” to gesture quite broadly to the wide range of mostly protestant Christian churches and religious practices that characterize the conservative core of protestant Christianity in the United States today, without any desire to limit the entire freedom of individual Americans to denominate themselves in any way they wish. For a discussion of the political and legal hazards of signifying the religious identity of other Americans, see Prison Religion, supra n.1. 7. For a comprehensive review of this movement, see Robert Wuthnow, Saving America? Faith-based Services and the Future of Civil Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 8. The Iowa iteration of IFI was declared unconstitutional in 2006 in a suit brought on behalf of complaining prisoners by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Americans United v. Prison Fellowship Ministries. 432 F. Supp. 2d 862 (2006). The ruling was affirmed on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in 2007. Americans United v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, 509 F.3d 406 (2007). I served as an expert witness in the case for the plaintiffs and subsequently wrote a book about the case. See note 1. 9. 423 F. Supp. 2d at 909. 10. www.pfm.org (accessed May 18, 2009). 11. Americans United v. Prison Fellowship Ministries, Transcript, 103–106. 12. See Mary Anne Case, “Marriage Licenses,” Minnesota Law Review 89 (2005): 1758–1797, who argues that American Protestants are dependent on the state for institutional enforcement of their norms, especially with respect to marriage. See also, Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism

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13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Mark deWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness: Religion and Government in American Constitutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Although there has been, and continues to be, significant regional variation in the secularism of U.S. public schools, public schools and other public institutions in the South have long been more hospitable to the explicit presence of religion. For a complicating renarrating of the history of separationism in the United States, see Hamburger, Separation of Church and State. Brief Amicus Curiae of the American Correctional Chaplains Association, 9. Ibid., 14–16. Ibid., 26–27. See, for example, readings of American religion by Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Michael Warner, Introduction to The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); and Courtney Bender, Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006). Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Nicholson, 469 F. Supp. 2d 609 (W.D. Wisc. 2007). 469 F. Supp. 2d at 612. 469 F. Supp. 2d at 613. Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Nicholson, Brief of Appellants, p. 16. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). David Engel, “Globalization and the Decline of Legal Consciousness: Torts, Ghosts, and Karma in Thailand,” Law and Social Inquiry 30 (Summer 2005): 469–514. Also, David Engel and Jaruwan Engel, Tort, Custom, and Karma: Globalization and Legal Consciousness in Thailand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Something like what legal anthropologist John Bowen celebrates in his Islam, Law, and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Chapter 7 Public-Private Distinctions, the Alevi Question, and the Headscarf: Turkish Secularism Revisited Markus Dressler

Introduction From the beginning of the Turkish Republic, its political elites promoted a secular nationalism as the social bond intended to overwrite religious and ethnic divisions and create a sense of coherence and unity. Ever since it became a guiding principle for politics in the late Ottoman period, Turkish nationalism aimed at creating national homogeneity and identity qua a rhetorical inclusivism (around categories of Turkishness and Islam) and practical exclusivism (as for everything that did not fit said categories), which was sometimes more and sometimes less forceful and violent. In the Turkish republic, united under the banner of Kemalism, Turkish nationalism and Turkish secularism—or better laicism (laiklik)—determine the parameters for the negotiation of the legitimacy of particularist group identities and practices in public. Indeed, it is in cases of dissent to the significations and internal logic of the homogenizing nationalistlaicist discourse that its grammar becomes most palpable. As Nilüfer Göle has argued, modernity in the form of the nation-state manifests itself in “assimilating strategies and homogenizing practices,” whereas resistance toward it articulates itself in “search for difference and authenticity.”1 While the Kemalist discourse asserts its superiority as signifier of Turkish modernity not the least qua disciplining practices aimed at the homogenization of communal identities, dissenting voices against this discourse have nevertheless been frequent. Reaching back to the first years of the republic, more than twenty political parties have been closed down due to either alleged antilaicist activities or ethnic separatism. Turkey also has an infamous record of media censorship, ideologically motivated supervision of public education, continuing discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities, as well as curtailment of freedom of speech, felt in particular by public voices (especially

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journalists, intellectuals, and publishers) who address taboo topics or criticize sacred national symbols. 2 The state institutions most strongly invested in this homogenization project of Kemalism, most prominently the judiciary and the military, justify interventions against groups or individuals regarded as threatening the hegemony of Kemalism with reference to the sanctity of the Kemalist principles. Since the Turkish state tradition is committed to defining the contours and content of public discourse from above, segments of society that struggle to emancipate themselves from the hegemonic discourse have to counter the prejudice that their criticism is directed against the authority of the state itself. In the state-centered, authoritarian logic of Turkish modernity such criticism is quickly perceived as separatist in its core—a view that then justifies the state to use force for the protection of its hegemony. Since the 1990s, however, Turkey has experienced a gradual liberalization of the public sphere and voices that challenge the centralist doctrines of the Kemalist state ideology have become more pronounced and self-confident. This process has led to increasingly open and sophisticated contestations of the Kemalist legacy, which is scrutinized both by the Islamic movement, as well as by liberal voices in the public sphere. Alternative interpretations of secularism and nationalism have become visible in the manifold discussions on issues perceived as threatening to Kemalist sensibilities. As for nationalism, the question of cultural and political rights for the Kurds, concessions of national sovereignty in the negotiation process for membership in the European Union, and in recent years the debates on the source and nature of the violence surrounding the expulsion of the Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire reflect a reluctant opening of the public sphere to new voices and positions. In 2008, this relaxation of the public sphere seemed for the first time to have a tangible effect on the tolerance of the state against parties drawing on Islam and Kurdish nationalism. 3 In December of 2009, however, the Constitutional Court shut down the Democratic Society Party, accusing it of close connections with the Kurdish PKK guerilla, which is considered a terrorist organization. As for laicism, the most contested issues are the headscarf debate, and the legitimacy of political parties drawing on Islamic rhetoric and symbolism. Although hardly recognized in Turkish public debate,4 the question of Alevi recognition as a socioreligious community different from Sunnism is also related to the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. 5 The Alevis of Turkey comprise an estimated 10 to 15 percent of Turkey’s population.6 As a nonrecognized minority regarded by most from within and outside as part of the Islamic tradition and due to Alevism’s complex ethnic composition, the question of Alevi identity and recognition

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constitutes a serious problem for both Turkish laicism, which strives for Sunni-Muslim homogeny, and for Turkish nationalism, which still sticks to a rhetoric of ethnic unity—especially when it comes to Turkey’s Muslim citizens.7 To the extent that Turkish laicism espouses a notion of legitimate religion strongly influenced by Sunni Islam, Alevis are compelled to articulate their difference within the parameters of an explicitly laicist, and implicitly Islamic, framework if they want to advance their cause.8 The empirical focus of this chapter is on debates about the “Alevi question” and the headscarf issue as they unfold against and within the discourse of Turkish laicism. Theoretically, the chapter inquires into how Turkish laicism reifies religion drawing on both political and theological semantics. In the discussion of this dynamic I emphasize the role of the public/private distinction as organizing principle for legitimate religious practices within the confines of a public sphere that is in a constant struggle to increase its radius against an authoritarian state tradition.

The Discourse of Turkish Laicism The aim of Turkish laicism, as established in the first one and a half decades of the Turkish Republic, is to secularize public life and the political sphere, and to put public religious practice under state surveillance. Throughout the history of the republic, this authoritarian secularism has been challenged by conservative segments of society, who complain about what they perceive as laicist exaggerations, as, for example, the laws and regulations that restrict the wearing of religiously significant clothing, such as the veil, in public spaces. Against those challengers of Kemalist laicism such as the reigning Muslim-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the broader Islamic movement they represent, advocates of laicism fiercely defend the status quo. A recent example of this confrontation unfolded in 2008. In February of that year, Abdullah Gül, the current president of the republic (and the first president of Turkey with an Islamist background) signed an amendment to the constitution that allowed women wearing a particular form of “traditional” headscarf (as opposed to the still banned tesettür style of headscarf that is characterized as a modern, politically motivated, invention of the Islamist movement) to enter the universities. It did not take long for the Republican People’s Party, which understands itself as the one and only legitimate political representative of Kemalism, to bring the amendment in front of the constitutional court. In June of 2008 the court declared the amendment void and its application illegal.9 In contrast to President Gül, whose wife wears the tesettür style headscarf characteristic of the Islamic movement, the former President Ahmet

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Sezer (2000–2007) had been an old-school Kemalist and ardent opponent of any relaxation of laws and regulations prohibiting the headscarf. In a speech in commemoration of the 67th anniversary of the insertion of the principle of laicism into the Turkish constitution, he gave the following ideal typical Kemalist account of laicism: National sovereignty is grounded in the foundation of laicism. In the laicist system, sovereignty belongs to the nation; worldly affairs are organized by worldly principles; the affairs of religion and state are totally separated from each other; religion is sheltered in the sacred and private place of individuals’ consciousness; and none of the political, social, legal, economic spheres of the state can be regulated by religious rules.10

In its description of Turkish laicism qua notions of differentiation and privatization, the quote is emblematic of the classical secularization paradigm.11 Closer inspection, however, reveals a great deal about the particulars of Turkish laicism. First, it shows how laicism and nationalism are intertwined in the Kemalist worldview. Second, it reflects the obsession with religion characteristic of laicist discourse: the private is explicitly defined as a “sacred” place, and the proper sphere of the religious. Implicitly, however, it is the public that is sacralized in the sense of the tabooization of its intrusion by religious symbols, which are banned to the private sphere. This shows how the laicist discourse is organized by private-public distinctions correlated with ideas about legitimate and illegitimate religion. While Sezer locates “individual consciousness” in the sphere of the private, he relates the public to the realm of the state, which he further divides into “political, social, legal, economic spheres.” This way he essentially equates the domains of the public with that of the state. One has to ask whether there is in such a conception any room for a public sphere outside of the control of the state. At the very least the quote reflects the authoritarian state’s resentment toward liberal conceptions of a public sphere.12 Last but not least, Sezer’s assertion that separation of religion and state would be characteristic of the laicist system—an assertion that belongs to the self-image of Turkish laicism and is rather wide-spread—is noteworthy. It can hardly be assumed that Sezer would be unaware of the fact that Turkish state institutions are administering and regulating all forms of licit religion in Turkey. An explanation could be that the notion of state in this context must refer to something that transcends the concrete state institutions. My understanding is that it refers to a kind of metastate, asacred ideal of the Turkish state that ought to be protected from publicly assertive religion, which in the grammar of Kemalism is cast as the

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rival and very other of laicism. Therefore the assertion that state and religion are separate in the laicist system does not refer to the relationship of concrete institutions, but to questions of hegemony. As long as it is the state that controls religion, and not the other way around, the state can be regarded as untainted by, and in that sense “separated from,” religion. As a matter of fact it can be argued that the Kemalist state tries very hard to control, and to that extent limit, the domain of the public sphere, which is in a continuous effort to liberate itself from state control. As stated earlier, the discourse of Turkish laicism is dominated by the principles of separation of religion and politics, and control and administration of religion by the state. While the former justifies repression of religious activism in the political arena, the latter secures the superiority of the state over religious institutions. In the case of Islam it is the Directorate for Religious Affairs (DRA) that fulfills the function of securing the secularity of religion, that is to say—in the Turkish reading—subordinating it to the national interest. In line with the laicist discourse, which correlates private-public distinctions with ideas about legitimate and illegitimate religion, it is the role of the DRA to define, represent, organize, and regulate public forms of Islam. The DRA thus embodies the normalizing, executive side of Turkish laicism.13 Religious activities outside of the oversight of the state are still perceived as a threat by the Kemalist establishment14 and formally illegal. This is also true for those Alevi spaces and activities that are perceived as “religious.” Alevis accuse the DRA of trying to assimilate them into mainstream Sunnism. They claim that they are discriminated against by the DRA since the type of Islam the latter sponsors would one-sidedly be based on the Sunni tradition; that DRA employees are almost exclusively Sunni, and in its activities, such as its publications and sponsored events, the organization of religious education, the interpretation of Islamic law, policies regarding places of worship, and the organization of religious holidays follow the Sunni and disregard the Alevi tradition.15

The “Alevi Question” Why has an official status as a legitimate religious-cultural group so far been denied to the Alevis of Turkey? The answer has to do with the way the term minority (azınlık) is conceptualized in Turkey. Alevis and Kurds were not granted a minority status in the Turkish Republic; rather, the goal was to assimilate them, making them good Muslims and Turks.16 Following this logic, the dominant state approach toward the Alevis has from the beginning of the republic been to encourage their assimilation into the Sunni mainstream. Tacit toleration of their practices was the best they could hope for.

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The Kemalist ideal of ethnic and religious unity, which has been institutionalized in the formative years of the republic, presents the Turkish nation as overwhelmingly Turkish and Muslim. Claims of difference from the unitarian model based on ethnicity, language, or religion are perceived as threatening and remain suppressed. In this worldview, minorities are citizens with certain privileges, but not members of the, implicitly Sunni-Muslim and ethnically Turkish, nation. Within this scenario, the problem of awarding the Alevis a special status based on religious difference is apparent. A minority status, as connoted in Turkish discourse, would question their loyalty to the Turkish nation. In other words, nonrecognition of their difference has been the price they had to pay for being accepted as a legitimate part of the nation. Since the late 1980s the “Alevi question” has become an issue of public debate in Turkey periodically flaring up around contested issues. Alevis since embarked on a revitalization of their traditions and a public coming-out that puzzled many observers, who had regarded Alevism as essentially assimilated into mainstream culture.17 Alevis established new organizations and networks and began to demand official recognition as a community legitimately different from Sunni Islam, thus challenging the Kemalist discourse of religio-national unity. Consequently, certain aspects of the “Alevi question,” such as issues of naming, religious practice, and state support, regularly ended up in the courts.18 A recurring matter of confusion and dispute has been the relationship between Alevism and Islam. This confusion is stirred both by mainstream Islamic currents, for whom the otherness of the Alevis is a religious affront, as well as by the laicist state, which in its endeavor to regulate Islam depends on unambiguous categories. Sorting out these categories, secular jurists sometimes take on quasi-theological functions and conflate laicist language with concepts from the Islamic legal tradition. This conflation makes visible the dialectical relationship between laicism and what it others as “religious,” in this context Alevism. For example, State Attorney Fuat Samancı reasoned in a case against a newly founded Alevi umbrella organization, the Cultural Association of the Union of Alevi and Bektashi Organizations (CAAB), in 2002, that “[t]he word Alevi is a religious term. The foundation of an association that focuses on Alevism under this term would destroy the indivisible unity of the state’s nation and country.”19 The court followed his argument and banned the organization based on laws that criminalize activities in the name of a distinct religion (din), or a religious subgroup (mezhep) as separatism. Ironically, in their reliance on terminology from the Islamic legal tradition such as din and mezhep, the respective laws reveal a distinctively Islamic concept of religion. Concomitantly, banning the CAAB on grounds of its alleged

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religious character strengthened a particular position within Alevism, namely the understanding of Alevism as a religious formation. The irony of this fact was made explicit in the CAAB’s appeal, in which it rejected the religious category imposed on it by the court and declared that Alevism would be neither a religion nor a religious subgroup. The case went back and forth with several appeals until the CAAB was finally declared legal. In one of the appeals against the organization, Attorney General Fahri Kasırga argued, in line with the DRA’s standard position, that the state had to retain equal distance toward all Islamic subgroups and thus organizations in the name of the Sunni or the Alevi mezhep could not be tolerated. He further declared that “[w]hat has to be prevented is not individuals expressing themselves using categories such as religion (din), religious subgroup (mezhep), culture and so forth, but rather that these expressions develop into organizations which could lead ‘to minorities based on difference of religious persuasion (mezhep) in violation of public order.’ ”20 Kasırga here employs a particular private-public distinction to delegitimize certain forms of religion. While “individual” religiosity (the realm of the private) is not objectionable, the organization of groups (in other words, the entry into the realm of the public) along sectarian religious lines is regarded as a threat to national unity and therefore needs to be criminalized. This is the classical approach of Turkish laicism toward religion: religion per se is not the problem, and not sectarian religion, but rather sectarian religion in the public outside of state control. 21 However, the court did not follow Kasırga’s argument, and instead affirmed the right of the Alevis to open organizations in their own name. Circumventing the contested issue of the religious character of Alevism, the court referred to Alevism as “cultural variation,” and declared that the CAAB should not be forbidden as long as it would not actually endanger public order, thus again putting emphasis on action as opposed to assumed intent. 22 The juristic debate on the legality of the CAAB exemplifies the laicist state elites’ suspicion and fear of religion entering the public sphere outside the state’s direct supervision: not even the Alevis, although overwhelmingly self-identifying as staunch laicists, are permitted religious freedom, and are thus paradoxically discriminated against by the very ideology of which they claim to be the most faithful guardians. However, the politics of laicism are not static, but evolve through subtle processes of negotiation, and there certainly is more openness toward Alevi demands of legitimate difference and equal rights today as compared to the situation thirty or even twenty years ago. Those Alevis who see Alevism through the prism of Islam tend to demand equal treatment with Sunni Muslims. For example, the Turkish nationalist (Alevi) CEM Foundation embarked on a lawsuit against the

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state demanding that Alevi cemevis be recognized as places of worship, that Alevis receive financial support from the DRA, that a certain number of DRA staff positions be reserved for Alevis, and that Alevism be integrated into mandatory religious education at public schools. 23 In a public court hearing on this case in 2007, Saim Yeprem, a member of the DRA’s high council, provided an expert opinion in which he reiterated the state’s position that the Islamic place of worship would be the mosque and that the cemevi could only be considered a “private place of worship” (özel ibadethane). He explained this by pointing out that Islam would be a primary identity (üstkimlik), of which Alevism would constitute a secondary identity (altkimlik). This is consistent with the DRA’s standard argumentation that due to its commitment to national unity it cannot support any secondary identities of Islam, and therefore can not integrate the Alevis as Alevis. Alevis across the political spectrum reacted to Saim Yeprem’s remarks with outrage, demanding the right to define Alevism and its relation to Islam, as well as the signification of the cemevi by themselves instead of having Sunni state representatives define it for them. 24 The conflict over the status of the Alevi cemevi is another example of how the state-centered laicist discourse connects notions of private and public with concepts of legitimate and illegitimate religion. Again, private religion is never a problem. As soon as it enters the public, however, it needs to subscribe to the hegemony of the state. The dispute over Alevism further shows how the laicist state institutions signify meanings of Islam—in this example by positioning Alevism toward the mainstream. It opens a window into what one might call the theologico-political dynamic of Turkish laicist discourse, namely the way in which the political argument (which establishes the private-public distinction and affirms the strong position of the state) is linked to the theological argument (describing Alevism as secondary Muslim identity and affirming a discourse of Islamic unity). I argue that the theological argument is located at the core of Turkish laicism. In its positioning of Alevism, Turkish laicism employs religious semantics and forces the Alevis to position themselves theologically within an Islamic system of reference: is Alevism a mezhep, that is a legitimate Islamic subgroup or legal tradition?; is it a tarikat, that is a Sufi brotherhood, or a Sufi formation in more general terms; or is it rather a din (“religion”) in its own right? It is not that these terms would be alien to the Alevi tradition, but in the Turkish public sphere their particular meanings are coined by mainstream Islamic understandings, while the primary right to interpret them is in the hands of the (laicist) state institutions, whose power is based on their control of religion. In short, these technical terms are not negotiated in a neutral space; rather,

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the mode of their negotiation reflects specific relations of power, more precisely the hegemony of a particular knowledge regime of laicism in the public sphere. 25

Who Defines the Private? The Headscarf Debate As the Alevi case shows, the Kemalist state struggles to prevent intrusions of the private (the place of individual religion) into the realm of the public (the sphere controlled by the laicist state and official religion). Thus, DRA official Yeprem rejected the Alevi attempt to receive state recognition for the cemevi, since the latter could only be considered a “private place of worship”—underlining that the only legitimate, that is public, place of worship is the mosque. The Alevi case is, however, only a secondary arena of this struggle. The major side of the battle for the public-private distinction is the female body and the regulation of women’s appearance in public. In Muslim majority countries, the organization of gender in the public sphere has been a central issue in the negotiation of modernization and modernity. As Göle points out, “in a Muslim context, secularism denotes a modern way of life, calling for the ‘emancipation’ of women from religion, the removal of the veil, and the end of the spatial separation of the sexes. Women are symbols of the social whole: home and outside, interior and exterior, private and public. They stand in for the making of the modern individual, for the modern ways of being private and public.”26 In Turkey, the public unveiling of the female body has been of crucial symbolic significance for the establishment of the power of the state to define the parameters of a “modern” public sphere. Alev Çınar describes how “[i]n the 1920s, the Islamic veil took a central place in official discourse, where it was used as the symbol of backwardness, ‘barbarism,’ and the oppression of women by the Ottoman state.” In the logic of Kemalism, “the unveiling of the female body came to be the ultimate sign of the emancipation of women and the liberation of the nation” and was lauded as an important step toward modernization. 27 Consequently, traditional Islamic practices such as veiling are perceived as a challenge to the project of laicist modernity, and the authority of the state to monopolize the definition of the private and the public. 28 A paradigmatic example illustrating this dynamic was the debate that followed after Merve Kavakçı, elected MP for the religious-conservative Welfare Party, appeared on May 2, 1999, wearing a veil in parliament to take her oath on the constitution. In the course of the ensuing tumultuous scenes, then Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit took to the lectern and declared: “In Turkey, nobody interferes in the clothing and the headscarf

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of women in private life. However, this is not a domain of private life. Those who serve here, have to suit the tradition and the rules of the state. This is not the place to challenge the state.”29 Implicitly Ecevit here equates the private with the domestic. Against such localized and spatial notions of privacy, Muslim women who enter the public with the veil, drawing on the principle of religious freedom, make claims to an individualized, nonspatial notion of privacy. With their subjective sense of privacy, they challenge the patriarchal state and Kemalist discourse, and present an alternative vision of a modern public. 30 Apparently, from within the logic of state-centered Kemalism, the public sphere is not primarily a space for free debate, but rather a space where the state has to exert its authority to define the parameters of public discourse in such a way that they are supportive of the Kemalist project. But, as both the Alevi case and the headscarf debate show, the public sphere has become too diverse and open to be totally controlled by the state or the Kemalist establishment. Against the state’s disciplining powers, nonstate actors such as Alevis and advocates of a liberalization of the headscarf laws draw on discourses that question and transgress the limits of the state’s hegemony. To challenge the knowledge regime of Turkish laicism, and thus the authority of the Turkish state—in a move to further push the boundaries of the public sphere—they employ international human rights language, or more liberal, less state-centered, discourses of secularism. 31

Competing Leitmotifs and Structural Forces The classical leitmotif of Kemalist laicism is separation of religion and politics, reflected in the secular legitimation of political rule, and a system of control of religion by the state that secures the state’s hegemony in defining public-private distinctions. This authoritarian laicism champions collective rights over individual rights. It is in this sense of laicism that the contours of the collective, in its purest form identified with the ideal of a Turkish (Sunni) Muslim nation, are defined by Kemalist discourse as secular. The state has to ensure that potentially divisive religious symbols and practices are kept outside of the public sphere. Any intrusion of illicit religious signs into the domain of the secular collective carries the smell of separatism. In other words, freedom of religious expression (both for individuals and for groups) is subordinated to the freedom of the secular nation from uncontrolled religion. A speech from the fall of 2007 by General I˙lker Bas¸bug˘, since August 2008 commander in chief of the Turkish military forces, may serve as an illustration of this worldview. It

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was delivered in the midst of public debates around a government sponsored proposal for a new Turkish constitution, which among other things intended a cautious opening of Turkish laicism through a liberalization of restrictive laws on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in sensitive public spaces. Addressing new students of a military school on their first day of classes, the General argued that “the anti-laicist movements and the ethnic nationalists32 have a common target: the . . . nation-state.”33 However, as he assured the cadets, “the [principles of the] nation-state, the unitary state, and the laicist state are central elements of the foundational philosophy of the Republic. The Turkish Military forces have always been and always will be protecting [them].”34 The Turkish army understands itself as radically modernist, and as a guardian of the Turkish civilizational project defined as laicist, nationalist, and state-centered. Accordingly, the General cautioned against the spread of liberal ideas, for which he blamed “post-modernity and globalization.”35 The restrictive laicism of the Kemalist elite, anchored in a corporatist, authoritarian modernism that is legitimized qua dogmatization of a particular memory of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and early years of the Republic, 36 is increasingly challenged by a second leitmotif, which has gained momentum in recent years, namely the idea of religious freedom, from which some even derive the principle of protection of religion by the state. 37 This leitmotif aims at increasing the weight of individual rights at the expense of the rights of the abstract national collective. The tension between authoritarian and liberal leitmotifs of Turkish secularism, which could also be framed as a tension between ideas of negative and positive freedom regarding religious practice, is obvious, and public debate displays increased awareness in this regard. Considering changes in the balances of power within Turkish politics following the establishment of political Islam as a strong sociopolitical force and international pressures, the long-term trend seems to be toward a gradual modification of Turkish laicism in the direction of a more liberal secularism. The conflict between authoritarian laicism on the one hand, and a more liberal secularism on the other, is complex and entangled in divergent experiences and visions of modernization and modernity, as well as questions of political, economic, and cultural hegemony. Underlying this conflict are, on one level, rival conceptualizations of the privatepublic distinction. For supporters of the Kemalist leitmotif of separation and control, the public and the private are defined from above along functionalist lines and aim at safeguarding the integrity of the supposedly secular nation. They imagine the idealized Kemalist metastate as a masculine, fatherly figure that is evoked against various others, and embodied in the state institutions that are seen as still able to guard the

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implicitly female—in other words, vulnerable and in need of protection— nation against perceived Islamist and liberal intrusions, respectively.38 Against this restrictive secularism, both Alevis, who struggle for official recognition and autonomy in the signification of Alevism, and Muslim women, who demand the right to wear the headscarf in public places under the domain of the state, such as universities, draw on a notion of secularism in terms of freedom of religious practice and thus challenge the hegemonic distinctions between public and private, as well as the state’s exclusive authority to define it. The political obsession with religion, as displayed by laicism, tends to distract from social and economic problems by turning them into a debate about ideas. 39 As I have argued elsewhere, the theologico-political debates around laicism cannot be isolated from the socioeconomic realities in which they are situated.40 Four major factors need to be considered: (1) A new Islamic bourgeoisie with roots in Anatolian culture (the “Anatolian Tigers”) has become economically very influential and claims its share in the distribution of social and political capital. It has found a political ally in the AKP, and it is clear that this symbiosis is seen by the Kemalist establishment as threatening its privileged position.41 (2) The “headscarf student” and the “Islamist party” are urban phenomena that reflect the search for new models of development/modernization in line with traditional values. A product of the immense socioeconomic transformation and especially urbanization of Turkish society in the last fifty years, they demand a voice in the public sphere and proportional access to political institutions and state services. The emergence of new types of actors in the public sphere naturally means shifts in the distribution of access to political and cultural resources and is bound to provoke resistance by those who resent such redistribution. (3) Since the 1980s, Turkey has rapidly transformed into a society strongly influenced by consumer capitalism. Those who benefited from economic liberalization and have material stakes in corporate capitalism will naturally not like language that frames societal conflicts in terms of class and access to particular consumerist lifestyles. It can be assumed that debates on laicism/religion are much less unsettling to the capitalist sector than debates that focus on the material fault lines that divide Turkish society and shed critical light on the increasing cleavages between socioeconomic classes.42 In this context, it is important to note that the mainstream Turkish media is to an enormous extent monopolized in the hand of a small number of media holdings. (4) Finally the Turkish military, which justifies its place above politics with its role as guardian of national unity and the laicist order, naturally feels threatened by a liberalization of Turkish laicism. If Turkish laicism were to be redefined in a more liberal direction, then the military would be deprived of a major legitimation of its supra-democratic status.

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Therefore, one should assume that the military has an existential interest in safeguarding the current knowledge regime of Turkish laicism. In fact, the military plays an important role in public campaigns against alleged enemies of laicism.

Laicism Contested: Dissolution and Reaffirmation Viewed from the outside, Turkish laicism appears caught in a self-created tragic circle. By criminalizing religious practices and languages it holds as dangerous for the project of Kemalist modernity, it renders contestations of religious identities a matter of daily debate and thus reinforces them. In the Alevi case, laicism is enacted against a part of the population deeply committed to secular society. Criminalizing the very name “Alevi” by associating religious separatism with it, and connecting the question of state recognition of Alevism with theological debates about its origins and essence, encourages the framing of Alevism in religious terms. In their defense against patronizing forces, Alevis are within the religio-political discourse of Turkey encouraged to stay within the terminological framework of Islam when articulating their difference from majority practice. The comparison with Germany, which hosts a considerable Alevi minority (roughly half a million people), is revealing in this regard. There, Alevis can take advantage of a more liberal religion discourse and enunciations of Alevi identity therefore meander beyond the semantics and language conventions of Islam and Turkish nationalism.43 The headscarf debate is another example of the tragedy of Turkish laicism. Since the late 1980s, Kemalist notions of modernity that associate the headscarf with notions of passivity, rurality, ignorance, and traditionalism have been challenged by veiled female students who forcefully came out in urban public places to demand their right to education without discrimination based on their religious practice. As Çınar argued, the veiled students’ activism—drawing on liberal values and international human rights discourse—subverted not only the dualistic worldview of Kemalism, but also “undermined the authority of secularism over the public sphere.”44 New practices of piety such as veiling and gender etiquette in the public challenge the knowledge regime of secularism, while the concomitant commitment to Islamic authenticity also reflects an internalization of modernity. As Göle suggests, women wearing Islamic dress in the public embody difference “and their public visibility (for example, in schools, in Parliament) [creates] disturbances in modern social imaginaries.” The “ambiguity of signs” that is created by women such as Kavakçı, who embody both Islamic norms of piety, and a habitus perceived as utterly Western and modern, “disturbs both the

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traditional Muslim and the secular modernist social groups.”45 The headscarf debate thus makes visible “tensions emanating from two different cultural programs in the making of the self and the public.”46 The classical binaries on which the Turkish modernization project has been based have become blurry as practices such as veiling, previously othered as a sign of traditionalism and ignorance, now demand access to the sacred spheres of the Kemalist public, namely schools and universities, as well as places for social entertainment, high-politics, and state administration. No wonder that the Kemalist establishment, whose authority depends on its state secured privileges, and relies on its exclusive right to present its story as the master narrative of Turkish modernization, clings to its possessions and mobilizes all of its remaining forces to maintain its hegemonic position in the public sphere. Despite the fact that the forces of the laicist system still have the upper hand when it comes to the regulation of public space in Turkey, the public sphere has become more diverse and receptive to alternative visions of modernity. Thus, some universities relax or ignore the headscarf ban, and President Gül’s wife fulfills her duties as first lady in line with Islamic dress code and etiquette—despite the contempt this evokes in many laicists. In other words, there are breaks in the laicist system, and with further democratization one should expect that the rigid laicist unveiling-politics will soften, and the Alevis will be able to advance their struggle for official recognition as a non-Sunni Muslim community. Both Alevi and Sunni Muslim activists can be understood in the framework drawn out by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, who theorized religious resurgence “as a political contestation of the fundamental contours and content of the secular and the sacred, a contest that signals the disruption of pre-existing standards of what ‘religion’ is and how it relates to politics.”47 It is surprising to note, however, that in the Turkish debates on laicism there is little acknowledgment of the similarities between Alevi organizations and pious Sunni Muslim groups in regard of their opposition to the laicist regime, as well as in their demands for recognition of their practices, and neither is there much public awareness of the structural similarities in the way the state curtails and undermines both groups’ demands.48 This clearly has to do with the way in which the knowledge regime of laicism juxtaposes notions of modern (çag˘das¸) and reactionary (irticai) religion as opposite poles in a two-dimensional space leaving little leeway for more complex and creative imaginations. Since the Alevis are in the public imaginary recognized as exemplary laicists, the notion of Alevis as victims of laicism appears rather paradoxical, even subversive, and therefore unacceptable to many.49 The widespread perception that signs of crisis of the political system in Turkey in recent years are induced by a polarization between Islamists and

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secularists is too simplistic. First, since laicism as a disciplining discourse is invoked not only against Islamists—or those perceived as such—but also against fellow laicists such as the Alevis. In addition, changes in the power balances of the public sphere intertwined with structural and economic transformations of Turkish society as discussed earlier also have to be considered. Fear of Islamization is therefore only one of the motives that fuel laicist vigor; other, more structural motives involve questions of hegemony over the rules of the public sphere, and political power more generally. Seen from that perspective the more general function of Turkish laicism, beyond the quest for a particular secularist definition of state-religion-politics relations, is not only to ensure the superiority of the state in defining public discourse when it comes to religion, that is to say, creating national unity through establishing religious hegemony; Turkish laicism is also, due to its intrinsic connection with Kemalist ideology, a practice and signpost in defense of the political hegemony of those institutions and currents of Turkish society that self-identity as Kemalist.

Conclusion Although theorists of religion have in recent years embarked on a postsecular turn in the study of religion and the secular, the concept of religion dominant in most national publics has been remarkably unaffected by this. The language dominating the public sphere of Turkey has remained utterly modernist. It is based on monolinear, evolutionist readings of history dominated by the Kemalist master narrative and conceives of the religious and the secular as opposite poles on a horizontal level. This dichotomist view renders the articulation of alternative perspectives on modernity, history, religion, and politics, as well as alternative visions for the contours of the public sphere, extremely difficult—particularly since emerging new readings of these concepts are perceived not only as an ideological challenge, but also as a threat to the current distribution of sociopolitical and economic power in Turkish society. Turkish laicists are at tremendous unease with the idea of a public sphere that allows for a socially and politically active role for religion. In the laicist discourse, the notion of the private is often reduced to the “domestic,” as the speeches by former president Sezer and former prime minister Ecevit discussed earlier exemplify, wherein the headscarf was associated with ideas of “individual consciousness” and “private life,” respectively. Conceptualized as such, the domesticated private is juxtaposed to a public that is by definition a sphere under surveillance of the state—a constellation that makes it difficult for a more liberal public sphere beyond the immediate control of the state to prosper. Nevertheless,

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as both the headscarf debates and the Alevi case show, Kemalist laicism is gradually losing its monopoly to define public-private distinctions. Laicism as a regulating principle of the public sphere with implicit theological jurisdiction is very explicit in the kind of religious language and practices it supports. The two major forces that challenge the laicist system today are political Islam and the Alevis. At first sight it might seem paradoxical that laicism appears rather differently in both contexts: against the Alevis, laicism enforces theological interpretations coined by Sunni Islam, thereby undermining the religious autonomy of the Alevis. In the name of national and religious unity, the Directorate of Religious Affairs aims to draw Alevis closer to the Sunni mainstream. In this context, laicism asserts the hegemony of Sunni Muslim concepts and practices. On the other hand, Kemalists use laicist rhetoric against political Islam and the tesettür-style veiling, which is seen as symbol of an Islamist orientation; in this context, laicism is invoked against particular forms of Muslim discourse and practice. This means that laicism is not antireligious per se, rather it is—similar to Turkish nationalism—charged with distinguishing between religious practices conducive and harmful to the goal of national unity. However, it perceives as problematic only the public roles of religion. As I tried to show, Turkish laicism correlates its distinction between private and public spaces with ideas about legitimate and illegitimate religion. Insofar as it systematically links political and theological arguments, Turkish laicism is a theologico-political discourse. 50 The political argument, which is very explicit, affirms the strong position of the state as primary agent of secularism and regulates the private/public distinction. The theological argument, though never explicitly stated as such, comes through in the state’s patronizing treatment of the Alevis, when, for example, jurists evaluate Alevism in relation to implicit concepts of mainstream Sunni Islam. In the headscarf debate the theological dimension of the laicist discourse is even more subtle. However, it reveals itself in discussions about traditional versus political headscarf styles, and in public debates about whether certain forms of covering are required by the religion. More profoundly, it is the aspiration of the political discourse to regulate and subordinate the religious that blurs the boundaries between the theological and the political. In other words, within the laicist framework the theological is political, and the political is theological, at least insofar as the political is absolutist in its demand to discipline and administer the religious. The result is a situation in which the theological and the political are, despite strong rhetoric to the contrary, in fact extremely difficult to disentangle. Setting out as an iconoclast with the mission to rigidly separate the political from the religious, laicism is systematically confusing the two, and to that extent has become a priestess of the nation-state.

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Notes 1. Nilüfer Göle, “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002), 187. 2. For a comprehensive overview of minority issues in Turkey see the 2007 report by Minority Rights Group International, “A Quest for Equality: Minorities in Turkey,” Minority Rights Group International (2007); See also Baskın Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar. Kavramlar, Teori, Lozan, I˙ ç Mevzuat, I˙çtihat, Uygulama (Istanbul: I˙letis¸im, 2004). For the development of human rights issues in general see the Amnesty International Report 2009 on Turkey, http:// thereport.amnesty.org/en/regions/europe-central-asia/turkey; see also the annual reports by the EU Commission on Turkey’s progress toward accession released by the Commission of the European Communities (Brussels). For the most recent report see http://www.ihb.gov.tr/english/turkey_progress_ report_2009.pdf (both reports accessed January 29, 2010). 3. In 2008, the Constitutional Court rejected the attempt to close down first the—rather marginal—pro-Kurdish Justice and Freedom Party (Hakpar), which was accused of engaging in nationalist separatism (in January), and then, in a move of much greater immediate political significance, also rejected—if only by one vote—the attempt to ban the reigning Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had been accused of undermining the laicist order (in July). As pointed out by Baskın Oran, a specialist on minority issues and human rights, modifications of laws and regulations in the context of the Turkish adjustment to EU legal standards contributed to this apparent relaxation of the Constitutional Court. Baskın Oran, “Rejim Kurtuldu, Sıra Devlet’te,” Radikal I˙ki, August 10, 2008. 4. For a rare example of a Turkish voice that understands the Alevis as a victim of Turkish laicism, and from that angle urges for a liberalization of the latter, see Murat Aksoy, “Bas¸bakan Yarın Madımak’a Gitmeli,” Taraf, July 1, 2008. 5. The term “knowledge regime of secularism” was coined by José Casanova, who uses it to point to the persistent force of established secularist worldviews. He argues that “the secularization of Western European societies can be explained better in terms of the triumph of the knowledge regime of secularism, than in terms of structural processes of socio-economic development such as urbanization, education, rationalization, etc.” José Casanova, “Immigration and the New Religious Pluralism: A EU/US Comparison,” paper presented at the conference “New Religious Pluralism and Democracy,” Georgetown University (April 21–22, 2005), http://www.ipri.pt/eventos/pdf/ Paper_Casanova.pdf, 7 (accessed April 23, 2009). 6. Roughly two-thirds of them speak Turkish, and the rest either the Kurdish Kurmanci dialect, or Zazaki (a northwestern Iranian language as is Kurdish). Alevis insist on their difference from Sunni-Islam, manifested historically in their social and political marginalization within Ottoman and Turkish societies, their ritual and social practices, and a worldview strongly shaped by Twelver-Shiite mythology, Islamic mysticism, as well as various non-Islamic traditions. For a concise overview of the history,

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

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Markus Dressler practices and beliefs, and modern transformations of Alevi identity see Markus Dressler, “Alevı¯ s,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2008–1), 93–121. In the rhetoric of Turkish nationalism, non-Muslim minorities are perceived as outside of the boundaries of the Turkish nation. See Markus Dressler, “Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (2008): 280–311. It was no accident that on the same day on which the court issued its decision the then chief of the Turkish military staff, General Yas¸ar Büyükanıt, gave a public speech in which he made clear that neither the Turkish judicial system nor the army would allow modifications of the laicist system— when it comes to the protection of laicism, the judiciary and the military tend to walk closely together. Tolga Akıner, “Büyükanıt ‘Ilımlı I˙slam’a Sert Çıktı,” Radikal, June 6, 2008. “Laiklik Özgürlük Demek,” Radikal, February 6, 2004, http://www.radikal. com.tr/haber.php?haberno=105245&tarih=06/02/2004 (accessed March 6, 2008). See José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 17–39. This suspicion extends to democratic principles in general. As the journalist Bülent Kenes¸ has argued in the context of revelations about the secretive Ergenekon organization, which is charged with being involved in terrorist activities and planning to organize a coup d’état—the roundup of which has been a shocking experience for many Turks who could not believe the entanglement of staunch Kemalists and patriots in terrorist actions and plans for a coup d’état—, in the ultra-laicist mindset “democracy is nothing because the majority of the nation is unable to make a correct decision for themselves and for the country.” Kenes¸ asserts that this elitist approach and the firm belief in the superiority of one’s own convictions as well as the duty to realize them for the greater good “is quite widespread among the ranks of the bureaucracy and the military, and it affects the entire administrative body like a cancer.” Bülent Kenes¸, “Ergenekon’s Turkey and Fake Patriots,” Today’s Zaman, July 30, 2008, http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/yazarDetay. do?haberno=148805 (accessed December 6, 2009). A massive state bureaucracy, the budget of which is larger than that of many government ministries, the DRA is responsible, among other things, for Islamic education, mosque construction and maintenance, provision of legal opinions (fatwas), and the pilgrimage to Mecca. See I˙s¸tar Gözaydın, “A Religious Administration to Secure Secularism: The Presidency of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Turkey,” Marburg Journal of Religion 11, no. 1 (2006). By “Kemalist establishment” I refer to those self-defined Kemalists who hold positions of power in the state institutions (such as the educational system, the judiciary, and the army), as well as those who have, due to their economic position, been able to lead comfortable secular lives, which they see as under threat by growing conservative segments of society.

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15. I discuss the DRA concept of religion and the organization’s treatment of the Alevi question in more detail in my forthcoming “Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of the Turkish Alevis,” in The Politics of Religion-Making, ed. Markus Dressler and Arvind P. Mandair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 16. Oran, Türkiye’de Azınlıklar. 17. See Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, “Die ‘Wiederfindung’ des Alevitums in der Türkei. Geschichtsmythos und kollektive Identität,” Orient 34 (1993): 267– 282; Karin Vorhoff, “ ‘Let’s Reclaim Our History and Culture!’—Imagining Alevi Community in Contemporary Turkey,” Welt des Islams 38 (1998): 220–252; Markus Dressler, Die alevitische Religion. Traditionslinien und Neubestimmungen (Würzburg: Ergon, 2002). 18. For a more detailed discussion of the legal debates involving Alevi claims see Dressler, “Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse.” 19. Hatice Yas¸ar, “Meg˘er Aleviler de yokmus¸,” Radikal, February 15, 2002, http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=29341 (accessed December 6, 2009). 20. Adnan Keskin, “Alevi I˙smi Sakıncalı,” Radikal, May 7, 2003, http://www. radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=74420 (accessed February 22, 2007). 21. This is a continuation of the dominant approach of the Ottomans to nonSunni minorities, which was one of toleration and noninterference as long as the Empire did not see its own authority in question. See I˙lber Ortaylı, “Les groupes heterodoxes et l’administration ottomane,” in Syncretistic Religious Communities in the Middle East, ed. Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi and others (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 205–212. 22. Adnan Keskin, “Alevi-Bektas¸i Derneg˘i’ne Onay” Radikal, May 25, 2003, http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=76229 (accessed September 14, 2007). It has to be noted that the ruling was influenced by a liberalization of the Legal Code for Associations in the context of adopting EU standards, to which the judges made explicit references. 23. Erdal S¸afak, “Alevi Talepleri,” Sabah, June 22, 2005, http://arsiv.sabah. com.tr/2005/06/22/yaz08–40-120.html (accessed March 7, 2008). 24. CEM Vakfı, Haberler, June 29, 2007, http://www.cemvakfi.org/haber_ detay.asp?ID=208 (accessed September 10, 2007). 25. See Dressler, “Religio-Secular Metamorphoses.” 26. Göle, 185. 27. Alev Çınar, Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places, and Time (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 62; See also Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 28. Göle, “Islam in Public,” 189. 29. “Erbakan, is¸te Eserin,” Hürriyet, May 3, 1999, http://webarsiv.hurriyet. com.tr/1999/05/03/113592.asp (accessed March 7, 2008). 30. For a thorough criticism of the analytical aptitude of spatial conceptualizations of the private and public, see Baudouin Dupret and Jean-Noël Ferrié, who argue convincingly that “ ‘public’ and ‘private’ are contingent categorizations, always particular, contextualized, and not generalizable from one interaction

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

Markus Dressler to another.” Baudouin Dupret and Jean Noël Ferrié, “Constructing the Private/ Public Distinction in Muslim Majority Societies: A Praxiological Approach,” in Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies, ed. Armando Salvatore and Mark LeVine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 135. The European Court of Human Rights has in recent years emerged as an important stage from where the hegemony of the Turkish state in regard to the rules and limits of public discourse has regularly been questioned. Together with the space for debate opened up by Turkey-EU negotiations about Turkish EU-membership, they form powerful (counter-)publics and constitute a constant challenge to the endeavors of the Turkish state to restrict the public sphere. Read: Kurdish nationalists, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and groups in its vicinity. Tolga Akiner, “Askerden Sivil Anayasaya Eles¸tiri,” Radikal, September 25, 2007. “Anayasa Tartıs¸masına Asker de Girdi,” Radikal, September 25, 2007. As General Bas¸bug˘, who is known for his interest in contemporary philosophy, explains, it is one of the crucial characteristics of modernity to take necessary preventive measures for its defense if needed, and “[t]hese preventive measures as well as reason have to remain alert against contingencies—those contingencies which have an important place in post-modernist thoughts.” Quoted in Murat Yetkin, “Bas¸bug˘: Atatürk Devriminin Koruyucuları Hazırlıklı Olmalı,” Radikal, September 25, 2007. For a study that problematizes the recent Kemalist nostalgia, which is expressed in a privatization of Kemalist symbols and a glorification of the golden age of the republic’s early years, and which argues that it has its main roots in a shift of political and class hegemony, as well as in the neoliberal consumerism that emerged gradually in the last two decades, see Esra Özyürek, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For a discussion of these different dimensions of laicism as negotiated in Turkish discourse see Dressler, Die alevitische Religion, 146–154. For a discussion of the way the Turkish state is gendered as masculine and the nation as female both in Islamist and in Kemalist discourses see Çınar, 60. Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 32. Markus Dressler, “On Turkish Laicism,” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, July 30, 2008, http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/ immanent_frame/2008/07/30/on-turkish-laicism/ (accessed December 6, 2009). See the chapter by Keyman in this volume. See Özyürek, 17. Attempts to seriously question the neoliberal politics that took hold of Turkish society after the coup of 1980 have been launched by both the Kemalist left and other leftist critics, but they never were able to set the terms of public debate and were—especially within the Kemalist camps—sidelined by ideological debates such as those on laicism.

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43. Although there is no public pressure on the Alevis in Germany to declare themselves Muslim, there are other incentives that make a “religious” qualification of Alevi identity appealing. As a result, among Alevis in Germany the idea of defining Alevism as a religion in its own right in explicit contrast to Sunni Islam finds much more support than in Turkey. Anti-Muslim prejudice in Germany compels most Alevi activists to present themselves, as long as they chose to stay within an Islamic framework, as “the other Islam,”—secular, tolerant, in short “modern”—while it encourages a minority to embark on conceptualizations of Alevism outside of the fold of Islam altogether. See Dressler, “Religio-Secular Metamorphoses”; Markus Dressler, “The Modern Dede: Changing Parameters for Religious Authorities in Contemporary Turkish Alevism,” in Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, ed. Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 269–294; and Martin Sökefeld, “Difficult Identifications: The Debate on Alevism and Islam in Germany,” in Islam and Muslims in Germany, ed. Ala Al-Hamarneh and Jörn Thielmann (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 267–297. 44. Çınar, 84. 45. Göle, “Islam in Public,” 181; see also Göle, The Forbidden Modern. 46. Göle, “Islam in Public,” 177. For insightful discussions of the Turkish headscarf debate and the question of secularism, see the section dedicated to this topic on the SSRC blog The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, available at http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ category/the-headscarf-controversy/ (accessed December 6, 2009). 47. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Theorizing Religious Resurgence,” International Politics 44 (2007): 649. 48. Among the few exceptions are the journalistic writings by Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı. In a recent piece he even argued that the fate of those discriminated against due to their headscarf and those discriminated against for being Alevi would be the same, and it would be “due to the same state mentality that those of our people who carry these two identities are not recognized as compatriots.” Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı, “Madımak’ı Devletin Diliyle Anmayalım!,” Taraf, June 28, 2008. 49. For a discussion of the complex historical and ideological relations between the Alevi movement and Kemalism, see Dressler, Die alevitische Religion, and Markus Dressler, “Turkish Alevi Poetry in the Twentieth Century: The Fusion of Political and Religious Identities,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 23 (2003): 109–154. 50. See Hent De Vries, “Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a PostSecular World, ed. Hent De Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1–88.

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Chapter 8 Assertive Secularism in Crisis: Modernity, Democracy, and Islam in Turkey E. Fuat Keyman Since its state-centric inception in 1923, Turkish secularism has operated in a multiplex fashion, and in doing so has always faced serious legitimacy, representation, and governing problems. Moreover, since the 1980s, and especially the 1990s, it has been subject to challenges and criticisms demanding democratic restructuring through institutional and discursive reform. As Turkish secularism has operated both as constitutive of modernity and as a political project to control the identity claims and demands of religious communities for the recognition of their cultural rights, it has been criticized and challenged as functioning as a restrictive and biased foundation lacking the capacity to develop a common public and religious morality. More precisely, the more the state has become involved in the institutional regulation, funding and administration of existing religious identities and their political, economic, and cultural presence in Turkish modernity, the more it has been confronted by serious challenges and criticisms demanding institutional and discursive reform. As a matter of fact, as José Casanova has correctly pointed out, the project of constructing a strong and state-centric mode of secularism is likely to be vulnerable to criticism and challenge, “because it is too secular for the Islamists, too Sunni for the Alevis, (too Muslim for the non-Muslim minorities) and too Turkish for the Kurds,”1 and moreover “a Turkish state in which the collective identities and interests of these groups cannot find public representation cannot be a truly representative democratic state, even if it is founded on modern secular constitutional principles.”2 In this chapter, relying on Casanova’s brief but accurate account of Turkish secularism, I suggest that today Turkish secularism is in a profound crisis and in need of reconstruction in such a way that it can act as a democratic and multicultural foundation on which to develop a common public morality and a civic coexistence within and between

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diverse religious and nonreligious groups. In substantiating this suggestion, I rely on Charles Taylor’s work on “Modes of Secularism” where he makes a distinction between “passive secularism” and “assertive secularism,” and suggest that Turkish secularism from its inception in early republican modernity (1923–1950) has operated as an assertive mode of secularism in which “the state excludes religion from the public sphere and plays an ‘assertive’ role as the agent of a social engineering project that confines religion to the private domain.”3 I provide a history of Turkish secularism and its recent crisis, which constitutes a background for the case studies that I focus on in this chapter: the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and what has come to be known as “economic Islam” and its main actor, the Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (MUSIAD). In each of these cases, we see a challenge to Turkish secularism, and more importantly, these challenges have been playing an important role in transforming Turkey into a “postsecular society” in the making.4 It should be pointed out that these challenges have been directed mainly at the assertive role of secularism, and in doing so challenged what I would call “the subjective dimension of secularism” which indicates that as modernity disseminates throughout society, more and more people “look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations” in particular. 5 These cases, accepting the institutional separation between state and religion, but challenging the subjective dimension of secularism, have demonstrated that the unfolding of Turkish modernity has resulted not in the demise of religion, but, on the contrary, the increasing presence and power of religion in the symbolic construction of identity, as well as in social life. For this reason, the chapter makes a call for the need for a democratic reconstruction of Turkish secularism in a way that makes it possible to strengthen the institutional and normative foundation of Turkish secular modernity by accommodating religious identity claims through the ethos of cross-cultural dialogue and democratic deliberation. A democratic secular modernity is a redefinition of secularism that maintains that the secular state needs to be accepted and protected. In other words, what I call the “objective secularization,” that is, the institutional separation of the domains of religion and politics constitutes the basis for Turkish democracy and its consolidation. Yet, as a political project, Turkish secularism needs to be reformed in such a way that its assertive state-centric mode of governing can be transformed into a democratic politics of secularism. What is needed then is a “democratic secular imaginary” as a more dialogical, tolerant, and accommodating strategy of living with difference, enabling us to understand religious claims to difference in their own right and approaching them emphatically and critically.

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Turkish Modernity and Assertive Secularism A quick glance at the contemporary history of Turkey indicates that “Turkey did not rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It was ‘made’ in the image of the Kemalist elite which won the national struggle against foreign invaders and the old regime.”6 The process of “making” still continues today, even if it involves different actors, discourses, and strategies of modernity. Atatürk and the Kemalist elite set into motion the process of making modern Turkey by attempting to establish necessary political and cultural institutions both to break with the Ottoman past and to reach the contemporary level of (Western) civilization. It is here that the significance of secularism lie in terms of both its institutional (objective) function, that is, the separation of the state and political affairs from religious institutions and symbols, and its subjective function, that is, the demise of the symbolic and cultural role of religion, as Turkish society and people become more advanced, more modernized, and more civilized.7 Thus, on November 1, 1922, the Sultanate was abolished, on October 29, 1923, the Turkish Republic was proclaimed, and starting March 3, 1924, a number of crucial laws leading to a series of institutional changes were passed: education was left to the monopoly of the state, the Caliphate was abolished, and the religious schools (the medrese) were outlawed. In addition, it was decided that religious affairs and the administration of pious foundations were thereafter to be supervised by directorates attached to the office of the prime minister. To do so, the Directorate of Religious Affairs was established not as an autonomous institution but as a state institution responsible for the regulation of religious activities and practices. The abolition of religious courts in April, 1924, the outlawing of mystic orders and sects (tarikats) in 1925, the adaptation of the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, the removal of religious law (the S¸eriat) from the criminal law, and in 1928, the abrogation of the constitutional provision that regarded Islam as the religion of the state, as well as the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928, were all realized with the aim of establishing the institutional basis of objective secularization, thereby removing religious beliefs and symbols from the process of modern state-building and its consolidation.8 It should be pointed out, however, that the separation between state and religion was so strict in the Turkish case that it involved not only the total removal of Islam from state affairs, but also, and more importantly, the absolute institutional and constitutional control of religious activities by the state.9 Moreover, this control included both the public realm and the private realm. In this sense, secularism took the form of “laicism,” a concept that has indicated the “assertive character” of

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Turkish secularisms and has meant not only the “official disestablishment of religion” from the state, but also the “constitutional control of religious affairs” by the state. Thus, as introduced into the Constitution by the Republican People’s Party (CHP) in 1937, laicism operated both as a constitutive principle of the party and as a constitutional basis for the regulation of religious activities. The Kemalist elite believed that it was through a constitutionally founded and supported principle of laicism that both a modern mode of social cohesion for Turkish society could be established and a necessary level of social consciousness for civilization raised.10 Laicism for the Kemalist elite was the main way of establishing a linkage between the objective and the subjective processes of secularization; a linkage operating from above, from the state to society, with the assumption that the strict separation between state and religion and the constitutionally based control of religious activities would eventually give rise to the acceptance and dissemination of the laicist identity-formation in Turkish society, and thus to the successful realization of the process of subjective secularization.

The Resurgence of Islam and the Crisis of Secularism However, such strict and assertive secularism did not prevent Islam from remaining a significant agent in the formation of social and political life in modern Turkey. While being excluded as the other of the national identity, Islam has nonetheless been a significant “symbolic system” providing meaning to individual and community identity. In fact, the symbolic role of Islam and the existence of religious worldviews have remained strong in the course of Turkish modernity. It can be suggested in this context that the history of laicism in Turkey has demonstrated that rather than declining, religion has remained omnipresent in Turkish society. It has always been the main point of reference by which almost all political parties relate themselves to Turkish voters since the transition to the multi party-based parliamentary democracy in 1945. By relying on religion and its role in the constitution of preferences, life styles and the social identity-formation of Turkish people, the center-right parties have always acted as the dominant and powerful political actors of the multi party-based parliamentary democracy in Turkey. These political parties included the Democrat Party (DP), which after World War II gave rise to the first powerful liberal challenge to the state-centric Turkish modernity, the Mother Land Party (ANAP) that dictated the economic liberalization era in Turkish politics after the 1980 military coup, and the AKP that in 2002 formed a single majority government and played a

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significant role in the initiation of the necessary democratic reforms for the full accession of Turkey into the European Union (EU). All of these parties and their strength in Turkish politics cannot be explained without reference to the continuing power of Islam in Turkish life.11 This role and the power of Islam have immensely increased since the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, becoming an effective and strong political, economic, and cultural force that has dictated the changing nature of Turkish modernity. In the process of the resurgence of Islam, not only has religion been politicized by political parties carrying out Islamic identity and discourse, it has also been articulated into economic actors, civil society organizations and cultural identity claims. Today, just as it is not possible to analyze Turkish politics without reference to Islam, it is equally impossible to understand the Turkish political economy without considering Islamic capital and its institutional structure, or the cultural sphere without recognizing the symbolic and sociological power of Islam.12 In fact, the resurgence of Islam has been one of the defining and constitutive elements of the changing nature and formation of Turkish modernity since the 1980s, and has had a significant effect on Turkish secularism by causing its recent crisis.13 It has become clear that while successful in establishing and maintaining objective secularization both institutionally and constitutionally, Turkish secularism has been weak in creating a secular social ethos strong enough to achieve subjective secularization. Assertive Turkish secularism, and the laicist national identity it has attempted to create, now face a serious legitimacy crisis, stemming from an inability to respond effectively to the various Islamic identity claims to recognition and cultural-group rights. Thus, instead of secularization, Turkish society has recently been witnessing the processes of the “deprivatization of religion” in which the presence of Islam is felt strongly in different spheres of societal relations.14 The processes of deprivatization are operating effectively in such a way that (1) despite the constitutional banning of Islamic parties, political Islam carried out by these parties is still representing a plurality of Turkish voters, (2) even without state support, economic Islam is functioning effectively as an articulating principle between the free market and local communities by providing medium- and small-size enterprises with a powerful network based on trust relations, and (3) contrary to the orientalist belief that Islam is antimodern, cultural Islam is still acting as a powerful symbolic and moral force for identity-formation, but now it is coexisting with postmodern, highly globalized and consumptionist cultural patterns, as in the case of the headscarf affair and the problem of religious sects.15 What factors have contributed to the deprivatization of religion? And in what way do they operate as a critique of Turkish secularism? In answering these questions, it is necessary to point out two problems that

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have confronted Turkish secularism in its historical development and eventually caused its legitimacy crisis. The first problem is that contrary to the expectations of Turkish secularism, that is, as Turkey becomes more civilized and modern, it would also become more secular, Islam has always remained an effective symbolic force and a strong cultural reference for the formation of Turkish identity.16 Despite the constitutional regulations and institutional reforms by which the state employed a strict form of secularism in its attempt to create a laicist social ethos, Islam has been a significant symbolic system both giving meaning to human existence and thereby forming an effective cultural basis of individual and communal identity in Turkey. It can be argued, in this sense, that from the beginning of the making of modern Turkey to the present, Turkish secularism has presented a paradox of a Muslim country “being, at least constitutionally, more secularist than the European ones it wants to emulate, with the possible exception of France,” and at the same time, confronted by a societal (group) will to traditional community and cultural identity based on Islam.17 Thus, the making of modern Turkey presents historically a paradox embedded in the complex relationship between objective secularization (successful in its positioning toward societal modernity) and subjective secularization (weak in terms of the failure of the secular state to create a laicist social ethos). The second problem that has contributed to the deprivatization of religion in Turkey is related to the way in which the project of nation state-making has approached secularism as a way of governing society. As noted earlier, in putting secularism into discourse and practice the Turkish state did not aim to act “impartially” to different Muslim and non-Muslim religious communities. Instead its main aim was to control and regulate religious activities through constitutional and institutional means, to establish a strict separation between the state and religion. In doing so, the state hoped to prevent the politicization of religion and to keep it in the position of a purely individualist faith. The creation of the Directorate of Religious Affairs and the constitutionally recognized status of laicism were precisely intended to achieve the aim of controlling and privatizing religious activities. Thus laicism has defined the modus vivendi of Turkish secularism not only as a defining element of Turkish modernity but also as a vital political project for the governing of society. In recent years, however, Turkish secularism has been subject to serious criticisms with respect to its (strictly) control-based operation and therefore its failure to adopt the principles of “impartiality and neutrality.” As in the cases of “the Turban affair,” the constitutional banning of Islamic parties such as the Welfare Party and the Virtue Party, and the problem of religious sects, secularism has been criticized as being too

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secular and too strict, so that it works against representative democracy and pluralism. However, in these cases, while the state-based structure of the Directorate of Religious Affairs was being challenged, its purely Sunni-based interpretation of Islam and therefore its total exclusion of different Islams in its operations had never been voiced. It is in this context that for Alevis, Turkish secularism is not only too secular, but also too Sunni that it is neither impartial nor neutral. It is also in this context that for non-Muslim communities, secularism in Turkey appears to be too Muslim, thereby lacking the ability to put into practice the principles of universality and impartiality. As Markus Dressler points out correctly in his chapter, in the case of Alevis, in its attempt to control religious activities, the secular state paradoxically reinforces the dominance of the Sunni-based interpretation of Islam. It does so, both ideologically by giving primacy to Sunni Islam and institutionally by financing the activities of the Directorate of Religious Affairs while not contributing to the activities of other Muslim and non-Muslim religious organizations.

Challenges to Assertive Secularism These problems (the symbolic power of Islam in the construction of Turkish identity and the failure of Turkish secularism to adopt the principles of impartiality and neutrality) have led simultaneously to the recent legitimacy crisis of Turkish secularism and the emergence of the deprivatization of religion. However, recent research on Turkish modernity has indicated clearly that the critique of Turkish secularism is not directed to the process of objective secularization in which, as noted earlier, it was understood as a separation between the state and religion in the structural differentiation of society. On the contrary, the critique of secularism, voiced by political, economic, and cultural Islamic actors, has been, and still is, related mainly and primarily to the other functions of secularism concerning the process of subjective secularization. In what follows, I focus on the AKP experience and economic Islam (MUSIAD) as illustrative case studies of the critique of assertive secularism.

AKP and the Conservative-Liberal Synthesis As pointed out by many commentators on Turkish politics, both the November 3, 2002, and the July 22, 2007, national elections have constituted a political earthquake.18 Not only have these elections enabled the AKP to form a strong single majority government, but they also widened and deepened its societal support. Since the time of the transition to multiparty democracy in the 1950s, it is only the AKP that has gained almost 47 percent of the popular vote. Despite the fact that

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the March 29, 2009, local elections resulted in a sudden drop in AKP’s electoral support (38.8 percent), the party still continues to be the most powerful political actor vis-à-vis the opposition parties. For our purposes, I limit myself to the analysis of these two general elections in terms of the question of secularism. I have explored the sources of the electoral success of the AKP elsewhere.19 Four sources are worth emphasizing here. First, in these elections, the AKP presented itself to society not as an ideology-based Islamic party but as a conservative party of the center, concerned with the problems of the society at large. Second, the AKP appeared to be much more serious in its concern compared with its main rival, the CHP, in dealing with the pervasive corruption that was an endemic feature of the Turkish economy during the successive phases of the neoliberal era. The AKP put forward a convincing case for creating a new impetus for economic change by claiming that it aims to eliminate cronyism and corruption that have negatively affected Turkey’s banking and financial system for decades. Third, the AKP seemed to put much greater weight in its program on the issue of social justice compared to the CHP. Thus, as opposed to the CHP’s economic program, the AKP presented itself as a party that placed the deep problem of “social and distributive justice” at the center of its immediate priorities even if this meant the possibility of conflict with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At the same time, the party’s approach was different from traditional style populism in so far as there was a pragmatic acceptance of the need to operate within the boundaries of the IMF program. Fourth, in establishing its organic links with society at large, the AKP insistently and repeatedly argued that it is a conservative democratic party willing to work for the protection of individual rights and freedoms, as well as for Turkey’s integration to the EU as a full-member. Indeed, the AKP has tried to project itself as a conservative democratic party with obvious parallels to the Christian democratic tradition in Europe. Not surprisingly, the party has tried to develop close and organic links with the Christian Democrats in Europe after assuming power in 2002. These four elements collectively have helped the AKP to construct a winning electoral coalition and to capture the very “center” of Turkish politics in the process. The AKP’s three-dimensional electoral strategy enabled it to present its identity to society not as an Islamic but as a broad-based conservative party whose primary aim is both to overcome the economic crisis and to work for the further democratization of state-society relations in Turkey. The AKP differentiated itself from its Islamic predecessors, the Welfare and the Virtue Parties (the RP and the FP, respectively) and its current Islamist alternative, the Happiness Party (SP) by arguing that in governing society the AKP

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will be democratic and in doing so it will represent a moderate Islamic discourse that respects the secular foundation of the Turkish Republic and conceives religious affairs within the context of pluralism and the language of rights. The AKP has also successfully differentiated itself from the main coalition partners of the 1999–2002 era by claiming that as opposed to the state-centric nature of these parties, it will work for society and, hence, be far more responsive to the demands of societal actors such as civil society organizations. Finally, the AKP effectively distinguished itself from its main competitor, the CHP, by projecting an image that not only would its economic program pay more attention to the problem of social and distributive justice, but also it would support the small- and medium-scale industrialists to vitalize the production side of the Turkish economy in an equitable manner. Moreover, the AKP, in the political realm, appeared to be much more proactive and reformist in its orientation and its promotion of Turkish membership in the EU. It is through these differentiations that the AKP found widespread social support for itself, especially from the medium- and small-scale industrialists whose numbers and economic activities have been growing throughout society, also from the established class alliances with the poor and disadvantaged groups, and mobilized civil society organizations voicing the needs of the religious segments of the society in terms of recognition. By constructing a broad cross-class coalition, the AKP effectively captured the ground that a social democratic party such as the CHP could occupy if it were in a position to develop an appropriate and convincing electoral strategy. The superior mobilization skills as well as the superior performance of the Islamist parties at the level of local administration over the past decade have also helped to boost the electoral fortunes of the AKP highlighting one of the striking deficiencies of traditional social democratic parties in the Turkish context. 20 In retrospect, the AKP’s economic program was based on what could be described as a “conservative-liberal synthesis” that operates on the basis of three basic principles: (1) an effective and postdevelopmental state, (2) a properly regulated market economy, and (3) social justice. “An effective and post-developmental state,” in this context, means a state that is democratic, transparent, and accountable in its interactions with society, but at the same time “caring” and assuming a supervisory role in relation to the economy.21 The AKP’s claim here is that it will transform the existing state structure that is detached from society and, therefore functions as a closed, ineffective, and undemocratic system of rule. “A properly regulated market” is by definition a kind of market economy that is not destructive and corrupt, but enriching, contributes

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to economic development, and is compatible with social justice. The AKP is clearly market-friendly in its vision provided that the appropriate regulatory framework is put in place. “Social justice,” in turn, is to be established both in terms of the distribution of wealth and welfare services within the limits of a market-oriented economy but also with respect to the domain of recognition in which social segments will not be discriminated against on the basis of their different cultural beliefs, an aspect that was lacking in the CHP program. In short, the AKP argued that a strong, stable, and trust-based economy could not be established without solving the question of social justice in the realms of distribution and recognition. The question of the extent to which the AKP is against the secular state remains to be answered and has generated a serious debate in Turkey, leading to the closure case against the AKP. The above-analysis suggests that the AKP is a conservative party contributing to strengthening and widening the visibility of religious worldviews and convictions. The AKP has generated a challenge to the assertive mode of operation of Turkish secularism, but this challenge has stemmed to a large extent from the critique of, and is directed against, the subjective dimension of secularism, and, while accepting objective secularism, has made a significant contribution to the deprivatization of religious and conservative values in social life. In doing so, the AKP experience in Turkish politics shares a resemblance with the economic claims of MUSIAD to conservative modernity in Turkish economy.

Economic Islam and Conservative Modernity As noted earlier, one of the defining features of the recent AKP experience in Turkey has been its strong support for free-market values and economic globalization. To understand the AKP’s linkage with economic liberalism, which constitutes also a significant difference between the party and its ideological and political roots, such as the RP and the FP, it would be necessary to analyze briefly the role of economic Islam in the process of Islamic resurgence in Turkey. I have provided a detailed account of economic Islam elsewhere. 21 Here I focus on economic Islam and its main institutional actor, MUSIAD, only in terms of its critique of Turkish secularism. MUSIAD became widespread throughout Turkey in the 1990s by successfully linking medium and small business activities on the basis of Islamic principles of trust and solidarity. In doing so, it aimed not only to provide an economic foundation for the process of Islamic resurgence, but also to challenge Turkish secularism in terms of its failure to adopt the principles of impartiality and neutrality in economic life. In its attempt to integrate the free market with Islamic

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principles, MUSIAD has accepted the separation of state and religion, but criticized secularism when put into practice by the state as an act of control of Islamic self and as an exclusive (rational) source of progress and emancipation. Economic Islam, voiced and practiced by MUSIAD, has argued that as the success stories of the Japanese and the South Asian models of capitalist development have indicated, it is possible, even desirable, to employ a more communitarian approach in thinking about progress, to link a free market economy with religious and traditional values and to create a morally loaded economic development. Since the 1990s, economic Islam, embedded in small- and medium-level economic enterprises, has employed export-led economic strategies, created economic development and modernization in certain Anatolian cities, such as Kayseri, Konya, Gaziantep, Denizli, and Corum, located itself in global-regional-local interactions, and more importantly, proved that Islam can create economic progress and coexist (rather than clash) with secular modernity. 23 This general account of economic Islam can be substantiated on the basis of the following points extrapolated from my research of MUSIAD24: 1. MUSIAD views globalization as a process whereby exchange activities go beyond the borders of the nation-state and operate within a global market. For them, globalization creates interconnectedness among societies, economies, and cultures, and sets “the rules of the game” that requires rational thinking, long-term strategies, and organizational capacities. 25 This interconnectedness operates both internationally and regionally. MUSIAD attributes a positive quality to globalization because it is as a result of the globalization of market relations that a suitable ground was created for the rise and the success of economic Islam, and advocates Turkey’s EU membership, as it will provide new trade partners for them. 2. MUSIAD argues that Islamic discourse is far more compatible with globalized market relations than the existing state-supported bourgeois class in Turkey, insofar as it creates the relation of trust and solidarity among economic actors. The reason for the compatibility of Islam and the free market is given by MUSIAD with reference to the “East Asian model of development,” in which, it is believed, the success comes from “the ‘strategic fit’ between the traditional institutions that regulate social relations and the requirements of global markets.”26 3. In this context, MUSIAD argues that its discourses, strategies, and actors create what is called the “proper Islamic discourse” that is neither backward, nor mystical, nor solely traditional, but, on the contrary, is progressive, open to economic and technological innovation,

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compatible with free trade and capitalism, and able to create the sources of wealth. This means that MUSIAD promotes technology and quality maintenance. Economic Islam promotes capitalism as economic globalization but situates it in Islamic discourse as its cultural basis. As the representative of economic Islam, MUSIAD articulates Islamic religion with economic globalization, but at the same time creates a societal vision based on the primacy of cultural/communitarian identity over individualistic morality. 4. However, MUSIAD’s societal vision, while promoting economic liberalism, does not involve political liberalism, insofar as it accords primacy to community over the individual. In fact, for MUSIAD, community, based on Islamic values, comes before individual preferences and morality, so that the references to democracy, freedom, and morality, and in this sense pluralism and multiculturalism, are situated in and framed by the communitarian ideology rather than political liberalism.

On the basis of these characteristics, I argue that as an effective economic actor and a powerful pressure group that links Islam with Western economic rationality, MUSIAD also constitutes a strong alternative to Turkish assertive secular modernity, historically framed by the strong-state tradition. In doing so, it produces the coexistence between Islamic identity and free market ideology, supports the exposure of Turkish economy and society to the globalized world, and acts as a pressure group that sees the possibility of creating a democratic and economically advanced Turkey in the process of European integration. In this sense, MUSIAD and its Islamic self identity is not antimodern or antisecular nor a critique of and an opposition to capital: instead, it constitutes an “alternative claim to modernity,” or what can be called a “conservative model of modernity” as a morally and culturally loaded economic modernization. MUSIAD’s Islamic claim to modernity advocates community and the language of the societal good. This claim provides a communitarian societal vision in which Islam functions as the main articulating principle between capital and labor by making both not the competing self-interested actors but the service-producing and solidaristic members of an economic organization. Hence, MUSIAD’s Islamic model of modernity, while arguing for the need to restructure the state/society relations in Turkey on the basis of the principles of democracy, pluralism, and freedom, attempts to establish and disseminate a communitarian modern self who is economically driven and rationally acting, but at the same time morally loaded and ethically just, thereby successfully articulating the global with the traditional.

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Conclusion: Toward a Democratic Secular Imaginary In this chapter, I have provided an historical/sociological analysis of Turkish secularism and its crisis, as well as two empirical case studies to show that this crisis has mainly to do with the assertive model that has characterized the modus vivendi and modus operandi of Turkish secularism. Moreover, the two case studies have demonstrated that it is not the objective but the subjective dimension of Turkish secularism that has constituted the main focus for its critiques. In concluding, I would like to make five analytical and diagnostic points about the present nature of secularism in Turkey, which I think should be taken into account in any attempt to create a democratic secular imaginary. These points are as follows: 1. Turkey can be described as a postsecular society. Of course, postsecular society refers not to an ontological totality, but to an “emerging reality” in the process of being made. This means that both empirically and normatively, Turkey remains a secularized social order but in which religious worldviews and convictions continue to increase their power and influence in shaping and reshaping religious identity claims to recognition. This also means that the debate about secularism necessarily involves the question of how to accommodate religious values and claims. 2. Today Turkish secularism is in profound crisis. It should be pointed out, however, that there is a need to make a distinction between passive and assertive secularisms and suggest that this crisis is the crisis of the assertive mode of secularism that defines the modus vivendi and operandi of Turkish secularism. 3. The recent challenges to assertive secularism have emerged from within what Casanova calls the process of the deprivatization of religion. They are challenges to make religious identities and values visible in the public sphere, and to demand recognition. They accept the secular state, that is, the institutional separation of politics and religion, but reject the reduction of religious worldviews or convictions to the private realm. 4. In this sense, the crisis of secularism can be overcome through a democratic secular imaginary, that is, by democratizing the secular state in such a way that while religious worldviews and convictions accept and promote the secular state as a sufficient and indispensable condition for the public visibility of their values and cultural identities, the secular state not only becomes neutral and impartial to each and every religious identity, but also attempts to take seriously and accommodate religious

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claims and demands by allowing cross-cultural dialogue and democratic deliberation in the public sphere. 27 As Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im suggests in his influential book, Islam and the Secular State, “in order to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim, I need a secular state. By a secular state I mean one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine.”28 I argue that An-Na’im’s suggestion should be shared by all identities, religious or otherwise. In fact, despite our differences, we need a secular state to sustain pluralism in our societies and solve our problems through dialogue and deliberation. But to accept that the state should be secular should not mean the exclusion of religious values and convictions from politics or public deliberation. On the contrary, the secular state, promoting a democratic secular imaginary rather than an assertive mode of secularism, should act not as a comprehensive doctrine; on the contrary, it should function in a minimalist fashion, so that it would be possible to accommodate in public deliberation religious values and convictions. 5. The process of democratizing the secular state in Turkey also requires an institutional reform, that is, the reform of the Directorate of Religious Affairs in such a way that it acts as universal and impartial to all religious identities and provides a true financial and representative inclusiveness. Thus, rather than making each and every cultural identity unhappy, it operates as a regulatory institution accommodating and ensuring religious worldviews and their cultural rights and freedoms.

In The Puppet and the Dwarf, Slavoj Zizek differentiates two roles of religion in modern society as “therapeutic or critical. It either helps individuals to function better in the existing order, or it tries to assert itself as a critical agency articulating what is wrong with this order as such, a space for the voices of discontent.”29 Whether therapeutic or critical, this role should be played by religion to promote a democratic secular imaginary, in order to make our postsecular society not a society where the clash of fundamentalisms frames and determines the terms of political discourse, but a society where difference is negotiated through democratic deliberation and public dialogue. The debate about secularism in Turkey continues to provide important and illustrative insights by which to understand our postsecular society and its future.

Notes Many thanks to Elizabeth Shakman Hurd for her valuable suggestions and excellent editorial help. 1. To Casanova’s short but explanatory suggestion, we can add that “it is also too Muslim for non-Muslim religious communities,” non-Muslim communities involving the Armenian, Jewish, and Greek religious identities.

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2. The emphasis is mine. See José Casanova, “Civil Society and Religion,” Social Research 68, no. 4 (2001): 1064–1065. 3. In Ahmet Kuru, “Passive and Assertive Secularisms,” World Politics 59 (2007): 571. 4. The term “post-secular society,” developed by Jurgen Habermas, has both an empirical and a normative quality. Empirically, it refers to a social order in which even though processes of secularization have been experienced over the course of modern times, religious worldviews and convictions have remained, and continue to remain, strong in the formation of cultural identities and their demands for recognition. Normatively, the persistence of religious convictions in secularized social orders requires a model of law and politics that accommodates rather than excludes these claims into the process of cross-cultural dialogue and democratic deliberation. For more detail, see Jurgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 1–25. 5. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 107. 6. Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1997), 3. 7. In fact, in the minds of the Kemalist elite, the objective secularization and the subjective secularization were directly linked to political (societal) modernity and cultural modernity. Thus, secularism was considered one of the “defining elements of political modernity” in the process of modern nation-state building whose mode of governing was impersonal, rational, and removed from religious and traditional ties. At the same time, secularism was “a vital project” for the Kemalist elite, in order to create a modern and laicist national identity as a rationally thinking and acting self whose relations to itself and its milieu were not dictated by religious beliefs and symbols. 8. Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: Hurst & Company, 1998). 9. I˙s¸ tar B. Tarhanli, Müslüman Toplum, Laik Devlet (Istanbul: Alfa, 1993), 18–19. 10. Serif Mardin, “Religion and Secularism in Turkey,” in Ataturk, Founder of a Modern State, ed. Ali Kazancigil and Ergun Özbudun (London: Hurst & Company, 1981), 211. 11. E. Fuat Keyman and Ahmet Icduygu, eds., Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions, Turkish Experiences (London: Routledge, 2005). 12. E. Fuat Keyman and Berrin Koyuncu, “Globalization, Alternative Modernities and the Political Economy of Turkey,” Review of International Political Economy 12, no. 1 (2005): 105–128. 13. E. Fuat Keyman, “On the Relationship between Global Modernity and Nationalism,” New Perspectives on Turkey 13 (1995): 93–120; Andrew Davison, Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 14. See Casanova. 15. Keyman and Koyuncu, “Globalization.” 16. Nilüfer Göle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

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17. Casanova, 1064. 18. E. Fuat Keyman and Ziya Önis¸, Turkish Politics in a Changing World (Istanbul: Bilgi University Publications, 2007). 19. Ibid. 20. Ali Çarkog˘lu, “Turkey’s November 2002 Elections: A New Beginning,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 6, no. 4 (2002): 30–41. 21. Ziya Önis¸ and E. Fuat Keyman, “A New Path Emerges,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 2 (2003): 80–95; and Keyman and Önis¸, Turkish Politics. 22. See Keyman and Koyuncu, “Globalization,” and Keyman and Önis¸, Turkish Politics. 23. These cities, examples of economic Islam put into practice both discursively and institutionally and through the establishment of the city- or regionalbased trade and industry centers, as well as the subunits of MUSI˙AD, have been called the “Anatolian tigers” that have brought about progress and dynamism in Anatolia. 24. See Keyman and Koyuncu, “Globalization,” and Keyman and Önis¸, Turkish Politics. 25. Ergun Özbudun and E. Fuat Keyman, “Globalization and Turkey: Actors, Strategies, Discourses,” in Many Globalizations, ed. Peter Berger and Samuel Huntington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 26. Keyman and Önis¸, Turkish Politics. 27. I borrow the term “democratic secular imaginary” from William Connolly. See William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 28. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1. 29. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 3.

Chapter 9 The “Secular Ideal” before Secularism: A Preliminary Sketch Rajeev Bhargava Till a decade ago, there was a virtual consensus in India, a view shared by both its opponents and defenders, that secularism was alien to Indian culture and civilization. This view was to be found in the writings of T. N. Madan who claimed that secularism was a gift of Christianity, a product of the dialectic between Protestantism and the Enlightenment.1 Another example is K. M. Panikkar, who claimed that a modern, democratic, egalitarian, and secular Indian state was built on modern European traditions, not the foundations of ancient Indian thought.2 For Madan this alienness was the principal cause of the troubles of secularism in India. In his view, the distance between secularism and an Indian cultural ethos was so great that it had little hope of taking root and bringing peace between warring religious communities. Contrary to this view, Panikkar drew the opposite conclusion that the alienness of secularism from ancient traditions and Hindu thought meant not the redundancy of secularism but rather the estrangement of ancient traditions and Hindu thought from contemporary social reality. With the birth of new socioeconomic relations and their rupture with older orders, concepts developed in a different earlier context had to give way to new concepts. Thus, there was nothing surprising about the alleged alien character of secularism to ancient Indian culture or thought. Both these views shared at least one other assumption, namely, that there exists a tight fit between concepts and their background. Madan interpreted this in largely culturalist terms and also assumed at least some general longterm continuity. Once he had made culture primary, continuous, and existing in the longue duree, he had to find modern secularism, as he understood it, both alien and unworkable in India. For Panikkar, the background was socioeconomic and marked with discontinuities. It followed that a radical change in it would necessitate an equally radical change in the repertoire of our conceptual vocabulary. Secularism was a functional requirement of

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newly emergent conditions and the whole issue of its compatibility or not with ancient Indian culture was a non issue. It was tied very closely to the newly emergent conditions and made necessary by them. There was a consensus that secularism was alien to or radically new in the Indian cultural context. This proposal needs a qualification. There are some who believed that in Mughal India, particularly in Akbar’s time and because of his initiative, there was a conscious attempt to formulate the conception of a secular state in India with the implication that this attempt would not have been possible without at least some elements of something akin to a secular state in the Indian tradition. 3 This view has been vigorously challenged in India, particularly for its inexcusable anachronism. It reads too much of the present into the past. Obviously at issue here is not the term “secular.” Even if such a claim is ridiculously anachronistic, it is not so because of the extrapolation of a currently used term to an entity or a process in the past. The crux of the matter is the availability of a conceptual resource. The claim made by people like Humayun Kabir is that a full-fledged attempt, regardless of its success then or in the future, was made by Akbar to formulate a conception of what we now call the secular state.4 A few years ago I would have ridiculed this claim. However, now I am cautiously critical because I see that scholars such as Kabir were trying to articulate something important even though they were making some obvious mistakes in doing so. I hope to explore the link between the modern conception of Indian secularism and its background conditions. I reject the culturalist view but not the idea that culture forms an important part of this background condition. I do not take the view that there is something continuous in every strand of, what we now come to understand as, Indian culture. But nor do I take the entirely opposite view that there is an absolute rupture between the cultures of two distinct periods of the history of this region. I reject the idea of a very tight or close connection between concepts and their background conditions. This undermines the idea of the open- endedness of concepts, to the possibility of their novel and plural interpretations and does not take cognizance of the idea of conceptual space. In my view at certain crucial junctures in Indian history, certain conceptual spaces were opened up that could contribute, under certain conditions, to the growth of modern secularism. I have used the word conceptual space in the plural form. I mean here that some spaces must be opened up simultaneously or over regular intervals of time that enable multiple historical agents over a period to imagine new concepts, provided they have the motivation to do so. A conceptual space may be opened up and may remain wholly unutilized for long periods of time, sometimes so long that it may even recede out of our background, totally forgotten. A reasonably articulated concept

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draws elements from these multiple conceptual spaces, provided they have the motive to do so. This usually happens over long periods of time. This conceptual work is never fully finished and frequently never fully related to one another. So, over different periods of time, one may find different concepts generated that belong retrospectively to one family or which could resemble one another. Seen teleologically, they may even be seen as present at different stages of articulacy, some more clearly formed and some only half formed, but there could be crucial junctures in the history of a society when all these elements drawn from different periods of history, and therefore from different conceptual spaces, are forged together to form a broad conception. Such a conception may even crystallize around a single word. Often the same word is used as the foci of the crystallization of many related conceptions. One can trace their different trajectories and offer a narrative of the different sources of a concept and a term associated with it (or many concepts and a term associated with it or one concept with many terms associated with it). So, what I wish to eventually write is a nonteleological conceptual history of what we today call secularism.5 I begin to take the first faltering steps toward an initial survey of the field—first the relationship of political power and religion in ancient India, then in the pre-Mughal era, and finally in the Mughal period.6 I hope to show that the Panikkar-Madan view is mistaken and that distinct conceptual spaces are available in multiple Indian traditions where elements were formed, opposed, and reinvented out of which modern Indian secularism developed.7

What Is Modern Indian Secularism? In several papers I have claimed that Modern Indian constitutional secularism (MICS) is different from, and provides an alternative to, both the idealized American and the French conceptions of secularism. Both these conceptions separate the state from religion for the sake of individualistically conceived moral and ethical values. The idealized American model interprets separation to mean mutual exclusion (wall of separation). The state has neither a positive relationship with religion, for example, there is no policy of granting aid to religious institutions, nor a negative relationship with it; it is not within the scope of state activity to interfere in religious matters even when the values professed by the state are violated within the religious domain. This noninterference is justified on the ground that religion is a private matter, and if something is amiss within the private domain, it can be mended only by those who have a right to do so within that sphere. This, according to proponents of this view, is what religious freedom means. Mutual exclusion is justified on grounds

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of negative liberty and is identical with the privatization of religion. In my view, this model of secularism encourages a passive respect for religion and is sensitive only to some aspects of inter- and intrareligious domination. In contrast, the idealized French model interprets disconnection to mean one-sided exclusion. Here the state may interfere in the affairs of religion but religion must not interfere in the affairs of the state. Such states exclude religion to control or regulate them and sometimes even to destroy them. They encourage an active disrespect for religion and are concerned solely with the prevention of the religious order dominating the secular. They are indifferent to aspects of inter- and intrareligious dominations. The secular state in Turkey, and even more strongly, the Communist states of Soviet Union and China, also follow this model. A number of features characterize MICS that distinguish it from say the dominant American or French model. Like the idealized American and French models, MICS rejects both theocracy—a state where a priestly order directly administers the state by reference to what it believes are divine laws and established religions—and states that endorse institutional and personnel differentiation between religious and political institutions but which continue to have formal and legal links with one or multiple religions. Similar to them, MICS is value-based and rejects amoral secular states—states that separate religion from themselves not for any value but to maximize power, wealth, or both (Machiavellian states). The key difference is that MICS interprets separation of state and religion to mean not mutual exclusion, one-sided exclusion, strict neutrality or opportunistic distance, but rather what I call “principled distance”—a sophisticated policy in which states may connect or disconnect with religion depending entirely upon whether the values to which they are committed are promoted or undermined by one or the other way of relating to religion. Second, MICS developed in response not only to the threat of the domination by the religious of the nonreligious and various forms of intrareligious domination, but also to the domination of the religious by the nonreligious and to interreligious domination. One implication of this is that MICS is a multivalue doctrine that does not easily allow one value to be overridden by others but always seeks to balance and reconcile values, such as individual-oriented and community-oriented values. This makes it far more amenable to contextual and comparative forms of ethical reasoning. Finally, MICS favors neither active disrespect nor passive respect toward religions but instead an attitude of critical respect. Its objective is neither to accept religion as it is nor to eventually annihilate it. All these features once again are to be contrasted to the normative ideals embedded in other models of secularism that developed largely in single religion societies, prioritized one or the other value, and were insensitive to communitarian orientations and so on.

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The idealized American or the French model—what I call mainstream Western conceptions—could not have developed without certain cultural background conditions. These included significant events such as intrareligious warfare or interconfessional conflict that led to the development of the idea of toleration, the invention of the idea of individual rights, and the presence of a religious tradition that allowed for strict institutional separation between church and state. The question that I wish to ask is, given that MICS is different from mainstream Western conceptions of secularism, and given the assumption that part of the distinctiveness of MICS flows from a difference in background social and cultural conditions, what might these conditions be? The conceptual world of MICS is different from the conceptual world embedded in the background conditions that made it possible. If so, what might this other conceptual world be that made it possible for us to develop MICS? For some, this question is not worth asking because modern secularism is a universal doctrine and marks a rupture with all nonmodern or ancient cultural traditions. My chapter assumes that this view is at least partly incorrect. The relationship between modern Indian secularism and its past is not marked by a total break. If that were so, I would not even be asking the principal question of this chapter—that is, what are the background conditions for the development of MICS? This question presupposes some relationship between the conceptual world of MICS and a different conceptual world that nonetheless made it possible, a world that has receded into the background, but without which MICS would not exist or not have the form in which it does exist. For the purposes of this chapter, I will not be looking at the trajectory of MICS since the advent of colonial modernity. Here I wish to ask what conceptual resources might be present in the ancient, the “medieval,” and the early modern world without which MICS would not have taken the form it did. So, my question is what were the forms of political secularity before secularism? Can we speak of a secular ideal before Modern Secularism?

Ancient India In the period between 1500 and 500 BCE, when the Vedic corpus was composed, preserved, and transmitted by and for a section of the Brahmanas, the form of political power vested in the raja was tied up not only with the ultimate goals of existence but also with the promotion of Vedic dharma.8 However, the functions of the priest were sharply distinguished from those of the king. Vedic Brahmanism was “the religion of rituals” and required ritual specialists, the Brahmin. Only he embodied spiritual authority to perform sacred rites and sacrifices. However,

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this authority did not give him access to direct political/governmental authority. He was the king’s guru, but he could rarely become king himself. However, the king could himself claim divinity. For Manu Smriti (dharma text composed between 200 BCE and 200 CE), the king was divinity in human form. This is how the many kings of Ramayana and Mahabharata are still viewed and remembered.9 Though the ritual priests never directly ruled the political order, it is mistaken to conclude that this period witnessed the establishment of Vedic dharma. This is so because institutional separation of the religious and political institutional characteristics of states with established religion was virtually nonexistent. In the absence of a tight unity of purpose of all organization with the Brahmanical order, an institutional separation was impossible because no clearly demarcated institutions emerged in this context. The entire polity can be viewed as partly theocratic and in part as having an established “religion.”10 Generally, Hindu kings made Vedic dharma an object of social policy. To promote dharma, temples had to be built, dharmic endowments had to be given, and dharmic affairs had to be supervised, thus ensuring that dharma flourishes through financial help and administrative-legal supervision. Could the state tolerate different interpretations of dharma, different creeds, and sects? Did it provide assistance and endowment to all in an impartial manner? Historical evidence is mixed here. On the one hand there is evidence from King Ashoka’s edicts where he appears to articulate a policy that amounts to something more than toleration and somewhat less than equal respect for all religions. Many of these edicts acknowledge the presence of different religions as natural. All religions are seen to be worthy recipients of respect and support. Non-Buddhist faiths are seen not as errors but as a “constructive part of reality in a morally productive society.”11 The praja is advised to “avoid extolling one’s own faith and disparaging the faith of others improperly or, when the occasion is appropriate, immoderately.”12 All religions are expected to share a space within which they can respect and dialogue with one another. Yet acknowledging and respecting other religions is not the same thing as according them equal respect. Respect is compatible with hierarchy, which is why the use of the term “toleration” in the context of Ashokan edicts is partly appropriate. Furthermore, there was some degree of mutual interpenetration between Vedic Brahmanism (with its cults such as Vaishnavism and Saivism) and Buddhism, Jainism, and popular, mystic cults such as Tantrism and Shaktism (worship of the Devi [Goddess]). This considerably modified some forms of Vedic Brahmanism. Alongside this lies another set of evidence that emphasizes fierce debate and competition among different faiths: “There were limits to accommodation and syncretism and relations between religious communities were not always harmonious . . . not only over doctrinal issues but also over patronage.”13

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For our purpose, the key point to note is the presence of a great multiplicity of worldviews and the difficulty of one totally dominating or annihilating the other.14 This gave rise to a conceptual space that enabled the development of traditions of religious freedom. As Max Weber puts it, “religious and philosophical thinkers in India were able to enjoy nearly absolute freedom for long periods. Freedom of thought in ancient India has no parallel in the West before the recent age.”15 From the second century BCE onward, Buddhism exercised considerable influence on popular religious movements.16 Crucially, by reinterpreting dharma as a social ethic, Buddhism disconnected the ends of the state from the ends of Vedic Brahmanism. In a recent essay, Romila Thapar has made this point quite eloquently.17 For the Buddha, a belief in deity was far less important than human relations and right conduct toward the family and wider community. For him, dharma was the larger ethic propelled by ahimsa. Furthermore, since the function of the state is to prevent the disintegration of the society and caste structure induces fragmentation, it was the duty of the king to oppose it. This made Buddhism one of the earliest originators of the idea of social equality and a catalyst in the opening of a conceptual space that would be used very widely by the lower castes and the outcastes in later periods.18 Further, Buddhism and Jainism were among the first big faiths to acknowledge the freedom of choice for women to become renouncers.19 Although limited, this opened up another conceptual space later occupied by groups. I have spoken of two traditions in ancient and early medieval India: one that supports something akin to establishment of multiple sects and faiths, and another that opens up a conceptual space for the disconnection of state from “religious” ends, beyond this worldly well-being of the family and the community. There is however a third tradition exemplified best by the Arthashastra (the science of statecraft written in fourth century BCE) that opens up a conceptual space for something akin to amoral states that profess no faith in any cosmology. The writers of the Arthashastra were solely concerned with principles of statecraft and in which the Brahmin too became a political animal. The Arthashastra is replete with instances of opportunistic distance from, and one-sided exclusion of, religion. Though political rulers could interfere in the affairs of religion, no faith-based order could interfere in state craft. Temples could be patronized or regulated as and when it suited the interests of the state. Religious endowment became another area of interest-based state administration. Endowments by now had a double purpose—as gifts from the ruler they were grateful thanks for legitimating what the Brahmana gave, sometimes in literally fabricating the right kind of genealogy.

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The Bhakti Movements A major contribution in the development of new conceptual spaces was the Bhakti movements that arose in the sixth and seventh centuries in southern India (led by the Nayanars and the Alvars—devotees of Shiva and Vishnu, respectively—in Tamil Nadu; the Alvars can also be credited with the emergence of the Rama cult), spread to western India in the thirteenth century, and reached the northern and eastern parts of the country between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. 20 During much of this period, the focus of attention shifted from elite Vedic polytheism to popular worship of Krishna and Rama. Passionate Bhakti replaced sacrificial rites and ecstatic mysticism replaced Vedic philosophy. Group singing (kirtan) of devotional songs emerged as the popular religio-cultural form and pushed Sanskrit aside from the public space. This movement shaped many modern Indian vernacular literatures that were essentially for the masses. Brahamanical socioritualistic order lost much of its spiritual authority that passed to sants- gurus-pirs. This new devotional religion, within the existing social framework, introduced alternative space for the ideas of brotherhood, equality, and individual Bhakti saints. 21 Second, Vedic Brahmanism was “transformed into a new sort of syntheses” as politicocultural traditions were contested within spaces that were opened up as Muslim power and pre-Muslim practices confronted one another. 22 Normative and textual Islam arrived in India and found itself in a dialogue with changing sociopolitical institutions, individuals, and ideas leading to a new narrative. 23 “Bhakti”—a generic term—meaning a sentiment of loving devotion or attachment, had distinct and sometimes contradictory features highlighting both the intrareligious and interreligious eclecticism of the period. 24 It had two broad strands. First, Nirguna bhaktas like Kabir and Nanak rejected caste distinctions, religious differentiation, and contributed toward political rapprochement as Muslims began their political dominance in India. Second, Saguna bhaktas like Tulsidas and Ramanuja upheld caste sanctity, had a predominant Hindu appeal, and served to galvanize religious fervor. In fact, Tulsi was particularly successful in marginalizing the revolutionary impulses of the Nirguna movement through appropriation.25 Later, in the seventeenth century, Kabir was vaishnavized as well. Notably, Bhakti did not necessarily bring together different religious groups; sometimes they led to their proliferation, such as the rise of Sikhism from the nonsectarian teachings of Nanak.26 It is true that the critical edge of dissenting forms of bhakti was blunted with their assimilation into mainstream upper-caste worship. But

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“even if it did not substantially break the boundaries of high traditions, it redefined these in content, modality and address . . . the language remained evocative precisely because its experiential base had altered but not disappeared.”27 Thus, one can safely say that much of bhakti was ultimately aimed at the liberation from rebirth and the miseries of thisworldly existence, and some of its strands opened up a conceptual space for a novel and radical normative imagery that would influence the later development of secular ideals. One particular Bhakti movement, the Virasaivite movement, led by the Karnataka saint Basavanna and popularized by the vachana writers in the twelfth century, was the most radical.28 Although a Brahmin, Basavanna revolted against Brahmanical orthodoxy, ritualism, and discrimination on the basis of caste, creed, and gender. His movement gave special place to women and became the predominant factor in overturning Brahmanical superiority, and to some extent, patriarchal values. The female with her powers of creation and nurturing became more important than the male, and the lower castes devoid of the trappings of wealth and power were considered nearer to the God than Brahmins. 29 Worshiping Shiva, the movement rejected Vedic authority, even the rite of cremation, favoring burial instead. It propagated widow remarriage, condemned child marriage and arranged marriage, and did not class women as polluted during menstruation. 30 Although the initial radicalism and the anti-sanskritization of the Virasaivite movement did not last beyond the twelfth century and inherent socioeconomic inequality (between very poor Madigas and Holeyas and very rich Okkaligas) retrenched caste hierarchies, patriarchy, and gender inequality, 31 three things stand out in the early phases of this movement: first, a defense of social equality and a rejection of both caste hierarchies and gender inequality leading toward a new religious community; second, an emphasis on individual choice and responsibility in religious matters, including liberation unmediated by social authority or institution thus developing the conceptual repertoire for socioreligious freedom for individuals; and, finally this freedom was not only a challenge to established authority but also a platform for radical dissent. Likewise, another exponent of bhakti, Mira Bai (1498–1550), gave voice to the subordinated classes (in particular, the weaving communities in the sixteenth century) of Saurashtra and Rajasthan (western India) against feudal privilege and caste norms, stood for a cultural resistance to socially imposed marital relationship, and gave refuge to those bereft of caste. 32 Both Basavanna and Mira undermined the idea of closely bounded communities and rendered religious boundaries flexible.

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The Sufis Although the radicalism of bhakti can be traced back to late Buddhist siddhas and the Nath school of “jogis,”33 the coming of Islam also had a profound impact on the development of what Romila Thapar calls the guru-pir tradition. 34 Indeed the popular monotheistic movements of neither Kabir nor Nanak can be understood without the disavowal of esoteric ritualism and an egalitarianism reinforced by popular Islam. 35 Furthermore, this “syncretism” deviated from both “Hinduism” and Islam and “can not be . . . explained away as the off-spring of a marriage between Hinduism and Islam.”36 There were innovations (the Sufi tradition of tadhkira) as well as continuities, which must be recognized. 37 Nirguna bhakti, in particular, “distanced itself from distinctive Hindu and Muslim symbols and encouraged a selfless love for God.”38 Similar to Bhakti, Sufism asserted the freedom of the individual to experiment with Islamic religious truth, even if it entailed a questioning of the Sharia. The rejection of the caste by radical bhakti paralleled the Islamic propagation of social and religious equality. Both popular Islam and Hinduism showed remarkable proclivity toward individual religious idiosyncrasy, rejection of social institutions and their power. The teachings of Ramananda exemplify this. He not only taught egalitarianism (following in the Ramanuja tradition), but also accepted disciples regardless of their castes. Kabir, one of his pupils, even more radically argued that each devotee should seek God directly. His views envisioning an egalitarian order were endorsed by broad sections of society, including peasants, artisans, and untouchables. His poetry saw no difference between Ram and Rahim, Hari and Hazrat, and Muhammad and Mahadeva. Similar to the Bhakti emphasis on individual choice, devotion, and guru/sant (e.g., the acharya tradition of Nathmuni [824–924]), the Sufis too gave prominence to Pirs and Fakirs. Over time the fluid teachings of the Bhakti saints and the Sufi Pirs loosened the formal boundaries of socioreligious distinctions. As different regions came under the spell of Sufis, Sufism too got indigenized through the use of regional languages and traditions.39 The religious needs of the lower levels of society were fulfilled by the so-called guru-pir tradition that emphasized individual choice and dissent, social equality and welfare; sustained the fluidity of elite religious boundaries; taught “toleration” and a form of limited but sincere universal social ethic, and emerged as a popular “religious attempt at social reconciliation and integration.”40 Modern Indian secularism is believed to draw its conceptual resources from this tradition.41 Sufis are often portrayed as a vital link between Hindus and Muslims, mitigating, to some extent, the harshness of the Turko-Muslim and Afghan-Muslim military

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conquest of the subcontinent.42 They are also identified as important agents in the conversion to Islam.43 In the ultimate analysis, the quintessence of Sufi Mystic teachings, namely, “unity of Godhead,” “brotherhood of men,” “moral equilibrium against slavery, black-marketing, profiteering, venery brought in the wake of the urban revolution of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” “social service,” “rejection of worldly goods and glory,” and “pacifism and nonviolence” facilitated the evolution of a common exchange of ideas.44 “While political strife and social conflict brought forth . . . uncompromising reactions, the periods of political stability . . . and social harmony tended to strengthen the moderate opinion.”45

Courtly Islam The “guru-pir” tradition countered the Islam of elites and the courts. Do we draw the implication that the latter sought to establish the monopoly of Islam and encouraged hostility toward other religions? This does not appear to be entirely true. It is true that when the Sultanate was established in the thirteenth century, the Sultans were expected to follow the Shariat. Indeed one might have expected the rule of the Caliphate of Baghdad in all areas under the control of Muslims, but the Caliphate of Baghdad soon came to a violent end at the hands of Mongol invaders. Moreover, the Shariat could not be fully enforced even in Muslim-dominated societies. To expect that societies with an overwhelming non-Muslim population would follow Shariat was foolhardy. Politics and military considerations dictated that in societies with older pre-Islamic traditions, the Shariat be followed only by a tiny religious elite. It could be imposed only with very heavy, almost unbearable, political costs. It was best then to follow the Quranic injunction that in matters of faith there should be no compulsion and that Muslims should live together in peace with non-Muslims. The history of religion in Medieval India was marked by the partial Islamization of the subcontinent as well as the indigenization of Islam in India. Although the old systems of religious beliefs and practice continued to flourish, new indigenous movements arose considering the presence of Islam. From the eighth century onward, Islam’s interaction with the local religio-cultural traditions had prepared the ground for religious syncretism and cultural synthesis. Between 1200 and 1800, the Medieval State was crucial in bringing together major communities not merely by administrative intervention but by a conscious constitution of ideology. Political Islam adjusted itself to India and along with forms of governance, it also developed a new vocabulary.46 Though religious identities tended to get exclusive and standardized under political compulsions,

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mutual borrowings continued unabated. A wide and varied spectrum of religious phenomena, thus, marked the medieval period of Indian History—revealing both continuity and change.47 When I say that the requirements of politics prevented rulers from imposing Sharia on the entire population of their kingdom, I do not mean to suggest that policies of political expediency had widespread legitimacy. Both orthodox religious and legal opinion were critical of such policies. Sometimes rulers succumbed to pressure from religious orthodoxy. At other times, rulers tried to bypass it and abstain, and other times bent backward to comply with it. Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) exemplified this orthodoxy. Barani was opposed to what he saw were carriers of a false creed. It was the duty of every Sultan to promote din (religion) and Sharia and to suppress infidels. Since the primary function of the king was to protect Islam and Muslims, any act intended to promote the interest of Muslims is praiseworthy, however injurious it may be for others. For Barani, a royal action taken in the cause of Islam cannot be despotic. Conversely, a decision that ignores, overlooks, or offends the demands of Sunni Islam is nothing but tyrannical. The Muslim ruler had to be just, but justice is established only when the king follows the commands of religion.48 For Ali Hamdani (fourteenth century), the subjects of the rulers must be divided into Muslims and Kafirs. Both enjoy divine compassion but must be treated differently by Muslim rulers. Though Muslim rulers should protect the life and property of Kafirs, this should be done only if they do not build public places of worship. Even their private religious buildings must remain open to Muslim travelers. There should be no public demonstration of their rituals and customs. They should not mourn the dead in public nor carry their dead bodies through Muslim graveyards. They should be segregated. Kafirs should look different from Muslims in their dress and if a Muslim visits a place where a non-Muslim occupies a seat, the latter must vacate it for the Muslim. During the period of Delhi sultanate, heretical Shia sects were persecuted as well by orthodox Sunnis highlighting both intra- as well as interreligious tension. Many were forcibly converted to Islam. The sentences of criminals were remitted and individuals were granted daily allowances on embracing Islam. If Muslims converted to Hinduism, this was the crime of apostasy and punished by death. The jizya, a special tax imposed on non-Muslims, was a heavy financial burden and a badge of inferiority. It stimulated conversions to Islam. Hindus were to be reminded of their inferior status in an Islamic state. Hitherto I have contrasted the Sufi or the “Guru-pir” tradition with elite-driven religious orthodoxy among Muslims. I have claimed that while popular Islam built conceptual resources that provide the cultural preconditions for the development of modern secularism in India, the views of elite-driven religious orthodoxy militated against the growth of

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these conceptual resources. Though there is much truth in what is mentioned earlier, it ignores the conceptual innovations within elite Muslim discourse and in the culture of Mughal courts. It overlooks the manner in which Sharia was reinterpreted and how justice rather than religious law was made an important value undergirding the state. Moreover, it neglects the phenomenal contribution of Akbar in developing a new kind of state that has few parallels in Indian or European history. Let me briefly turn to each of these. First, in a context where the religious views of rulers failed to coincide with the religion of the subject, dissenters within Sunni Islam continued to invoke the Sharia but altered its meaning to legitimize an ideal city as one that is composed of diverse religious and social practices and an ideal ruler to be one who ensured not the well-being of Muslims alone but of the entire people consisting of diverse religious groups. For these dissenters, Sharia was not to be interpreted in narrow juridical terms but in broader philosophical terms.49 It became a more flexible concept of practical political philosophy rather than a rigid concept of law. In the narrow juridical interpretation found, for instance, in the works of Barani and Sirhindi (sixteenth century), the rule of the Sharia meant not only the total dominance by Muslims but also, if not the elimination of infidelity, at the very least the humiliation of infidels. To those who interpreted Sharia more philosophically, for example Abul Fazl, the Sharia came to be synonymous with the Namus (divine law), the most important task of which was to ensure a balance of conflicting interests, of harmony between groups and communities, and of noninterference in their personal belief. Second, dissenters within Sunni Islam developed a conception of a state based on justice that if not entirely independent of Sharia was at least not incompatible with it. This view is also found in the Nasirian tradition, in Akhlaq-i-Nasiri. In Akhlaq texts the focus turns on man, his living, and the world. According to these texts, though the perfection of man cannot be achieved without the adulation of divinity, it is equally impossible to attain it without peaceful social organization and cooperation. Social cooperation, in turn, depends on justice. If justice (adl) disappears, each man will merely pursue his own particular, selfrelated desires. This negates social cooperation. To facilitate it, a balancing agency is required. The Sharia serves this purpose but it cannot work without being administered by a just king whose principal duty is to keep people in control through affection and favors. Cooperation can be achieved in two ways: (1) through mutual love (mohabbat). However in the absence of natural love, it can be achieved only by (2) an artifice (justice). If love among the people were available, justice (insaaf) would not be needed. So, social cooperation is to be achieved through justice administered in accordance with law, protected and promoted by the

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king whose principal instrument of control is affection, favors, and justice rather than simple command and obedience. In the Akhlaq literature, justice in the ideal state is social harmony and balance of the conflicting claims of diverse interest/religious groups. Divergence from justice causes clashes and destruction. In a treatise of the seventeenth century compiled in the Deccan, it is argued that the objective of the state, the Sultanate is to fulfill worldly human needs but since human beings follow diverse religions, conflict might ensue. The role of the perfect God-sent person, Namus or Sharia is to avoid such conditions of conflict. 50 Justice further requires that no one should get either less or more than he deserves as a member of his class. Excess and shortfall both dislocate the nature of the union and social relations of companionship. Throughout, this emphasis on the desirability of justice is argued from the point of view of a secular ethic. Justice is for all and is against discrimination against one. A primary advice to a king is to consider his subjects as “sons and friends” irrespective of their faith. So justice serves a real public interest. A non-Muslim but just ruler will serve society better than an unjust Muslim Sultan.51 The ancient Sassanid kings remained in power for 5,000 years even though they were all fire worshippers and infidels. Akhlaq and Mutazilite theories of justice had a lot in common except that the former was dependent on the will of God and the latter on human reason. In the Sunni tradition, the former prevailed but aspects of the second, whose ethics were close to that of the first, also crept into the tradition.

Akbar Though formally unlettered, Akbar had diverse spiritual interests. His tutor introduced him to Rumi (d. 1273) and Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1317), and under ideological influences traceable to Ibn al-Arabi and Abd al-Karim al-Jili, Akbar showed his lack of dogma as soon as he began ruling independently in 1560. This liberal outlook can also be understood as a part of a process to which the predecessors of Mughals (the Afghans, in particular) had made significant contributions. 52 In August 1562, he remitted the tax on Hindu pilgrimage centers. In March 1564, Akbar abolished jizya. Why did he do this? On one view “these were steps dictated principally by the exigencies of state . . . rather than . . . religious tolerance.”53 This is supported by evidence from 1564 to 1575 during which Akbar made efforts to strengthen his state broadly within the framework of Sunni orthodoxy. The massacre at Chittor between February 23, and March 9, 1568, and the reimposition of jizya in 1575 confirm this point.

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However, his devotion to Chishti saints tempered the acceptance of traditional orthodoxy.54 The mahzar debacle of 1579–1580 and the revolt of 1580–1581 were the turning points in the unfolding of his philosophy of Sulh-I-Kul (absolute/universal peace) by composite socioreligious tolerance.55 An eclectic man, Akbar’s Sulh-I-Kul was to be his basis for the fraternity of faiths. Once the mahzar of 1579 failed to appease the Muslim orthodoxy, the subsequent years from 1581 to 1605 saw the emergence of Din-i-Ilahi—independent of either orthodox Islam or Hinduism and questioning both with a neutral terminology for both intra- and interreligious controversies—heavily influenced by pantheism: “God creates visible differences whereas the Reality is the same.” Pursuit of Empire and the spirit of syncretism saw the steady evolution of mutually consistent religious ideas from a multiplicity of sources. 56 Akbar’s liberal religious outlook is also considered to be the motive force of his Rajput policy. His close relationship with the Rajputs was, initially, essentially political, based on an elite commonality of interests. Subsequently, it symbolized a broad liberal social tolerance.57 This alliance strengthened cultural rapprochement and opened space for the Sufi concept of Wahdat-al-Wujud (monism as a reality/unity of being) as well as the Nirguna Bhakti emphasis on religious unity and social equality. Akbar’s contact with Shaykh Taj-al-din Ajodhani in 1578 moved him to a realm of his own.58 He forbade forcible conversions to Islam, removed restrictions on the building of temples, and appointed Hindus in high places. He organized religious discourses, initially only for the Ulama, open to the Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Christians after 1578. In February– March 1575, he gave orders for the erection of Ibadatkhana (House of Worship) for religious discussions. Between 1579 and 1605, Akbar hosted three Jesuit missions but his profound faith in Wahdat al-Wujud remained deeply rooted. In his search for the transcendent truth, Jainism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, as well as Iranian dualism made a contribution. In making Sulh-I-Kul as state policy, Ibn al-Arabi’s acceptance of idol worship, in so far as the object of man’s worship is God himself, and the theory of perfect man contributed significantly. Since the Sultanate was the de facto Caliph in India, every Muslim ruler was dependent on the religious guidance of Ulama. The Sadar-usSadur was the chief theologian of the state—responsible for the interpretation and application of the Shariat. In 1579, Akbar reduced the powers of this office (for both Shaikh Abdun Nabi and Makhdumul Mulk). He claimed a just ruler was not bound by any particular interpretation of Sharia and if any disagreement arouse on a point of law, he had absolute authority to prescribe a legally binding interpretation in conformity with the injunctions of the Quran.

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Between 1579 and 1582, Akbar passed through the most critical years of his spiritual experiences that led to profound changes. Matrimonial alliances across religions were pursued and the Mahabharata and the Upanishad were translated into Persian. Jizya was abolished again in 1580. Various Hindu festivals were celebrated in Akbar’s court. Following Hindu Yogis, Akbar abstained from eating meat and had the center of his head shaved. He named his own household servants chelas (disciples of Yogis were known as Chelas). He appointed a Brahman to translate Khirad Afza and showed interest in the worship of fire and the sun. He had always permitted his Hindu wives to worship their idols within the palace and now he showed some interest in the idea of reincarnation. He also venerated Virgin Mary and gave permission to construct churches. This was in sharp contrast to other parts of the world where religious bigotry and intolerance were virtues. One can hardly forget that the “Age of Akbar” coincided with the period of bloody religious wars in France and elsewhere in Europe of which the St. Bartholomew’s massacre (1572) was only one small episode. Closer to home, the Ottoman emperor claimed that the enforcement of Sharia was an important part of state policy. Of course, Akbar’s policies of laying down rules of governance without reference to Sharia were resented by orthodox Muslims, most notably by Badauni and Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (for a very brief time in the 1590s Akbar appears to have adopted a hostile attitude regarding orthodox Islamic practices and institutions).59 Even Raja Mansingh (his trusted Hindu Rajput ally) cautioned him when he learnt of Akbar’s increasing interest in Christianity. But by any yardstick, Sulh-I-Kul compares favorably with other such contemporaneous attempts, such as Erasmus’s pamphlet “The Lamentations of Peace, Banished from everywhere and ruined,” which accepted war against non-Christians while crying for peace among them.60 Akbar developed and implemented Sulh-I-Kul to liberate himself from the traditional religion. The debates on whether Akbar was a Muslim (or an apostate from Islam), about what his eclecticism amounted to (liberal Islam), or whether he was a believer, each seem to assume that denominational classification and religious boundaries were stable and impermeable to historical change—these debates ignore the pressure for alternate spaces that had come into being.61 This tradition of equal respect and impartiality developed in Akbar’s time toward all religions was continued in large measure even by the British. In medieval India, a broad theme of “religious eclecticism” can be detected that embraced Akbar’s imperial and aristocratic innovations as well as numerous popular monotheism(s) and mysticism(s).62 It is not farfetched to conclude that while the Europeans learnt the idea of toleration of other sects from their own experience, the conceptual space for the idea of impartiality toward all faiths was created in the subcontinent and

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learnt by Europe, if at all, from colonial encounters and the legacy they inherited from the polities of their colonial subjects.

Problems in This Account I have presented a preliminary sketch of how multiple traditions of popular “Hinduism,” Buddhism, Jainism, and popular and Courtly Islam opened up conceptual spaces that enabled later generations to forge a distinctive conception of modern Indian secularism. Elements of resources for principled distance between state and religion can be found in deep religious diversity that goes back at least to the fifth century BCE and was reinforced by developments in the Sultanate and the Mughal periods. Ideas of minimal material well-being and decent, this-worldly social relations were developed by Buddhism. The persistent account of the denial of religious freedom is paralleled by an even more powerful account of religious toleration and religious freedom throughout Indian history. Likewise, the idea of human equality is available in some form in Buddhism, Bhakti, and Sufi movements, popular Islam, and occasionally in Akbar’s eclectic religiosity. Yet, the account provided here is not only sketchy but also ridden with internal problems. For a start, it might appear too triumphalist.63 I have laid more emphasis on conditions conducive to the development of secular ideals than on those that undermine them. Second, any chronological account carries with it the danger of a teleological bias. Although, I do not wish it to be teleologically significant, I am not confident that I have escaped an indefensible progressivism. Third, I recognize that on occasions my account resembles anything that captures the social reform movements in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. If so, I am guilty of anachronism. Take the claims made on behalf of the Virsaivite movement. What were the reasons why they propagated widow remarriage? Why did they attack arranged marriage? Why were women believed to be unpolluted during menstruation? Unless we get proper answers to these questions we really do not know what the differences were between how lives were lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and how they are lived in the twentieth century. Even if we were to make the not altogether implausible claim that something interesting was stirring in parts of southern India in the twelfth century that was what we call modern and well before the advent of Western modernity, we still do not get a sense of the background conditions and the social, cultural, and political imaginary of that period. We do not really get a sense of how past actors understood and articulated their actions and intentions. There is too much anachronism and too little sensitivity to the radical differences between the world then and the world now.

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One great difficulty has to do with the meaning of crucial terms and their translation. When something is translated as equality, what exactly are we to mean by that? How do we understand the claim that religious reformers such as Kabir sought to end the caste system? How do we understand notions of individual choice and responsibility? In short, we have the following issue before us: we certainly need to oppose ridiculous ideas such as that notions of individuality, freedom, and equality were invented in the modern West and nowhere else. But equally we have to guard against the worst kind of ethnocentrism and anachronism. We cannot read into the past of India, modern Western notions of freedom, equality and the individual. A whole new language and vocabulary has to be retrieved, the entire buried treasure has to be brought back to the surface so that we can reconsider not only non-Western past and present, but also rewrite the story of Western past and present. For instance, the idioms of power that existed in Mughal times emerged from a complex reflective process involving politics and religion. They were neither always ideal nor always liberal. They could not have been so given the diverse and evolving polity paradigm within which they operated. “Yet a comparative reflection with other polities and societies of that period shows that the idioms in which political ideas and ideals were expressed had much that was original about them.”64 The greatest difficulty in my account is that I operate with concepts that have developed within Western Christendom and modernity. Do terms such as “theocracy,” “establishment,” and “secular” capture the structure and process of religion and politics in non-Western societies? A deeper, conceptually sensitive historical reading of sources might throw up altogether different concepts, or a new categorical framework that questions fundamentally the terms with which I have operated throughout this chapter. Such questions must await further study.

Notes I thank Professor Romila Thapar for helpful suggestions on the “Ancient India” section and Rakesh Ankit for research assistance in the final stages of writing this chapter. 1. See T. N. Madan, ed., Religion in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); and T. N. Madan, Modern Myths Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 2. Panikkar quoted in Donald Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 57. 3. See Irfan Habib, ed., Akbar and His India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Mughal State,

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

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1526–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Iqtidar Alam Khan, ed., Akbar and His Age (Delhi: ICHR, 1999). See Humayun Kabir, Minorities in a Democracy (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1968). This is my first very tentative attempt, an outline of a sketch of work that I wish to do in the next ten years or so. I have two excuses for taking up this ridiculously large canvas. First, this is an outline of a possible ten-year project. Second, I need to do this to shape my first questions and the anxieties and difficulties surrounding it. I believe the next step can be taken not only by reading more in greater depth but also by answering the questions and problems such a research inquiry raises. I end my chapter with listing some of my initial anxieties and difficulties. In an imaginary 10-year project, I would deal with each of these in separate chapters and add another chapter on British colonialism, one on postindependent constitutional secularism and finally on the period of the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in postindependent India. The only recent work that makes a similar attempt is Romila Thapar’s “Is Secularism Alien to Indian Civilization?” in The Future of Secularism, e.d., T.N. Srinivasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83–108. Readers will observe both my dependence on this essay and the subtle methodological and substantive difference with it. Overall, I am very sympathetic to this enterprise and hope to carry it forward in this and other essays. Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008), 184. Here, we need to keep in mind that divinity in ancient India was “cheaply available.” So that if indeed the king was God on earth, he was only one God among many. Second, these “divine kings” themselves kept apart these functions and gave Brahmins (Rishis, Munis, and Acharyas) a very special place. See A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (London: Picador, 2004 [1954]). In other words, it is neither theocratic nor a power that establishes religion. Since, I do not have a proper term for it, I continue to use these terms. Kristin Scheible, “Towards a Buddhist Policy of Tolerance: The Case of King Ashoka,” in Religious Tolerance in World Religions, ed., Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), 321. Ibid., 323. Singh, 509–510. Though this was not impossible, as Romila Thapar reminded me in a private conversation, the Ajivikas and Carvakas died out gradually. Smith, 61–62. Jasjit Singh Grewal, ed., Religious Movements and Institutions in Medieval India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. See Thapar’s “Is Secularism Alien to Indian Civilization?” For a discussion of Buddhist notions of human equality, see Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian,

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

Rajeev Bhargava Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 182–185. Ibid., 97. Major Bhakti Saints by region include the following: Vaishnava mysticism (South India): Ramanuja (d. 1137), Madhva (1197–1276), Nimbarka (thirteenth century), and Vallabhacharya (1479–1531); West India: Jnanesvara (1271–1296), Namdev (1270–1350), Eknath (1533–1599), Tukaram (1598– 1650), and Ramdas (1608–1681); East India: Jayadeva (twelfth century), Chaitanya (1485–1533), Chandidas (fourteenth century), and Vidyapati (fourteenth/fifteenth century); North India: Ramananda (1400–1470), Kabir (1440–1518), Tulsidas (1532–1623), and Surdas (1483–1563). J. T. F. Jordens, “Medieval Hindu Devotionalism,” in A Cultural History of India, ed. A. L. Basham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 266. Singh, 509. See Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India c. 1200– 1800 (Delhi: Hurst & Company, 2004). Krishna Sharma, “Towards a New Perspective,” in Religious Movement in South Asia 600–1800, ed. David Lorenzen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 291–327. Grewal, 9. Sharma. Grewal, 16. Ekantada Ramayya and the Aradhyas shaped the creed before Basavanna— the Prime Minister of King Bijjala of the Kalachuri Kingdom of Kalyana in present day Bidar, Karnataka—took over. Vijaya Ramaswamy, Divinity and Deviance: Women in Viraisaivism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 147. Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 11. Ramaswamy, 192. See Parita Mukta, Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1994); and Kumkum Sangari, “Mira Bai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti,” Economic & Political Weekly 25, no. 27 (July 7, 1990): 1464–1475, 1537–1552. W. H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 159. Thapar, 92. Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1974), 94. As “Sufi preachings had already spread . . . in Kabir’s and Nanak’s time” they must have influenced them. Irfan Habib, “The Historical Background of the Popular Monotheistic Movement of the 15th—17th Centuries,” Seminar on Ideas: Medieval India, Delhi University, November 1965. Bruce B. Lawrence, “The Sant Movement and North Indian Sufis,” in The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, ed. Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), 372. Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12.

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39. Grewal, 27. 40. R. S. Sharma, ed., Indian Society: Historical Probings (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1974), 189; also see D. N. Jha, ed., Feudal Social Formation in Early India (Delhi: Chanakya, 1987), 388. 41. Key Sufi thinkers: Attar, Rumi and Jami, Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240) and Abdul Karim al-Jili (1365–1428); influential Sufi orders: Chishtiya (thirteenth–eighteenth centuries), Suhrawardiya (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), Firdausiya (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), Kubrawiya (thirteenth–fourteenth centuries), Qadiriya (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries), Shattariya (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries), and Naqshbandiya (fifteenth– seventeenth centuries). 42. Some examples include H. K. Sherwani, “Cultural Synthesis in Medieval India,” Journal of Indian History 41, no. 1 (April 1963); Tara Chand, Society and State in the Mughal Period (Delhi: Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, 1965), 96–100; Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (Allahabad: Indian Press, 1963); Yusuf Hussain Khan, “Sufism in India,” Islamic Culture, no. 30 (July 1956), 252; and Mohammad Yasin, A Social History of Islamic India (1605–1748) (Lucknow: Upper India Publication House, 1958), 51. 43. Some examples include W. Thomas Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith , 2nd ed. (London: Constable, 1913), 270–271; Aziz Ahmad, Studies in the Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 83–84; A. B. M. Habibullah, The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India: A History of the Establishment and Progress of the Turkish Sultanate of Delhi; 1206–1290 A.D., rev. ed. (Allahabad: Central Book Depot, 1961), 305–306; Mohammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), 22; Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Studies in Medieval Indian History and Culture (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1966), 92; A. Rashid, Society and Culture in Medieval India (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay,1969), 192–193; Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Medieval Indian Culture (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1964), 78; Murray T. Titus, Islam in India and Pakistan (Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1959), 48–49. 44. See Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, “Muslim Mystic Ideology and Contribution to Indian Culture,” in Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India During the Thirteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Aligarh: AMU, Dept. of History, 1978 [1965]), 230–264; and Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Studies in Medieval Indian History (Aligarh: Cosmopolitan Publishers, 1956). 45. Grewal, 21. 46. Alam, Languages of Political Islam, ix. 47. Grewal, 1; and Raziuddin Aquil, Sufism, Culture, and Politics: Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 235. 48. For a discussion of the Sultanate and Mughal period, see Alam, Languages of Political Islam. 49. See Alam, Languages of Political Islam. 50. This introduced a degree of ambiguity in Sharia; a point mentioned earlier. 51. Alam, Languages of Political Islam, 59.

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52. See Aquil, 232. 53. See Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Nobility under Akbar and the Development of His Religious Policy, 1560–80,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 1/2 (April 1968): 29–36. 54. See chapter six, “Akbar: Heretic or Apostate,” in Ahmad, 167–181. 55. S. A. A. Rizvi, “Dimensions of Sulh-I Kul (Universal Peace) in Akbar’s Reign and the Sufi theory of Perfect Man,” in Akbar and His Age, ed. Iqtidar Alam Khan (New Delhi: ICHR, 1999), 3–21; Irfan Habib, “The Mughal Empire,” in State and Society in Medieval India, ed. Jasjit Singh Grewal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79. 56. See M. Athar Ali, Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society, and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 57. See Satish Chandra’s “Mughal Relations with the Rajput State of Rajasthan: The Foundations” in Essays on Medieval Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 357–406; and also Satish Chandra “Akbar’s Rajput Policy and Its Evolution: Some Considerations,” in Akbar and His Age, ed. Iqtidar Alam Khan (New Delhi: ICHR, 1999), 61–69. 58. Ahmad, 167–181. 59. Rizvi, “Dimensions of Sulh-I Kul.” 60. See chapter two, “Meeting of the Oceans,” in Eugenia Vanina, Ideas and Society: India between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–85. 61. Kumkum Sangari, “Akbar: The Name of a Conjuncture?” in State and Society in Medieval India, ed. Jasjit Singh Grewal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 488. 62. K. M. Shrimali, “Religions in Complex Societies: Myth of the ‘Dark Age’ ” in Religion in Indian History, ed. Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007), 29. 63. For example, see Vanina, 82; and chapter 8, “Historical Background to the Rise of the Bhakti Movement in Northern India,” in Satish Chandra’s Historiography, Religion and State in Medieval India (New Delhi: HarAnand Publications, 1996), 110–131. 64. Alam, Languages of Political Islam, 195.

Chapter 10 Indian Secularism: A Religio-Secular Ideal T. N. Madan Vision is ideological almost by definition . . . the way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them. —Joseph Schumpeter

Is Indian secularism the Indian version of a universal conceptual category—secularism in India—with its own defining characteristics in addition to some essential general features that it shares with secularism elsewhere? Or, is it significantly distinctive for us to be wary of its being treated as just a variant without, however, asserting its uniqueness? Rajeev Bhargava has argued forcefully for Indian secularism being “a distinctively Indian and differently modern variant of secularism.”1 Although broadly in agreement with his formulations, particularly his emphasis on the multivocality of secularism in the West, I develop my argument somewhat differently, focusing for heuristic purposes more on the specificity of Indian secularism than its generality. Let me recall Max Weber’s insightful observation that whatever is “historical” is so because it is “significant in its individuality.”2 Moreover, it seems to me, the method of civilizational comparison through “typification,” with a view to revealing the universal by focusing on difference, is appropriate for this endeavor.3

The History of Indian Secularism The specificity of Indian secularism, I would like to argue, lies in a combination of historical and contemporary circumstances. The limitation of space permits only a brief outline.

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Whether Indians have for very long considered religion a determinant of group and individual identities, or only from the nineteenth century onward after the colonial intrusion, such identification is today universal among the more than one billion inhabitants of India. At the last census (2001), only a fraction of one-half percent of respondents refused to answer the question about religious affiliation. It will not do to dismiss such responses, as is often done, as thoughtless gut reactions to enumerators’ insistent questions. The pervasiveness of religion as personal faith or as political ideology, or as both simultaneously, is a basic sociological and political fact about India today. What makes this demographic datum potentially dangerous to the civil society and the polity is the very uneven distribution of religious identities: approximately 82 percent Hindus, 13 percent Muslims, and 2 percent each Christians and Sikhs. The remaining 1 percent accounts for dozens of communities, including Buddhists, Jains, Jews, and Zoroastrians. The overwhelming majority of Hindus and the by no means small population of Muslims call for a fine tuning of governmental policies; errors of judgment in what is appropriate and what can be implemented can be costly. I will not go into the internal heterogeneity of Hindus and Muslims beyond mentioning that a considerable number of politically mobilized, traditionally oppressed, lower caste communities do not consider themselves Hindus any more, nor is it right to regard all tribal religions as Hindu in some sense. Now, the religious traditions of Hindus and Muslims, and Sikhs too, who together account for 95 percent of the population, do not recognize the autonomy of the domains of economics and politics, but consider them as governed by moral or religious values. In the classic Brahmanical formulation of the goals and value orientations of life, dharma, or morality, encompasses artha, that is, the rational pursuit of economic and political goals, and provides its legitimizing principle.4 The Islamic tradition is absolutely unequivocal in its rejection of Western formulations of the sacred-secular dichotomy.5 The religious traditions notwithstanding, secularization (in the sense of an increasing range of activities, such as agriculture, education, healthcare, and governance, being “released” from the control of traditional knowledge and specialists and conducted in accordance with modern science, technology, and bureaucratic procedures) is proceeding apace everywhere, but secularism as a worldview does not therefore automatically become acceptable. Indians like other peoples elsewhere are quite comfortable living with contradictions. They do not seem to think that religious beliefs and practices have to be strictly separated from secular (so-called) activities or, in some sense, privatized. My contention that religiousness in India is publicly acknowledged and pursued, and that its privatization is an alien

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idea, and therefore secularism as a worldview, providing an ideological backdrop for the secular state, would not find easy acceptance, attracted much criticism from secularist intellectuals in India.6 My conclusion, clearly stated, that for the success of the secular state we need to take both religion (as worldview) and secularism (as political ideology/practice) seriously, was generally ignored.7 Secularism as political ideology and practice obviously does not stand for the separation of religion/church and the state in India, but rather for a nondiscriminatory state, which is constrained to treat its citizens in certain contexts (where religious beliefs and/or identities are at stake) differentially rather than uniformly. At this point, I must briefly mention the long history of interreligious conflict (Indianists call it communalism), which in modern, colonial India overrode the sociocultural reality of peaceful coexistence. The term that is generally used for the latter is “composite” culture, but I find it ambiguous and am therefore skeptical about its usage. My fieldwork experience in the Kashmir Valley has convinced me that Hindus and Muslims may situationally recognize cultural differences (no common worship, intermarriage, or commensalism) and yet construct nonconflictual, even harmonious, social arrangements on its basis.8 The national movement for freedom from colonial rule split early in the twentieth century and followed two tracks. On the one side were the pluralists or multireligious nationalists, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and including Muslim nationalists, who constructed their political agenda in terms of common interests. The term secular was hardly ever used to characterize such interests. On the other side were the monoreligious nationalists, called communalists by their opponents, more prominent among Muslims than among Hindus, who regarded religious communities as nations and stressed the incompatibility of both their interests and their values. Resentful of the loss of political power in the subcontinent, which they had enjoyed for eight hundred years, and apprehensive of Hindu dominance in a one person-one vote democratic polity, Muslim separatists, inspired by a pathbreaking ideological statement by the poet-philosopher Mohammad Iqbal,9 and led by M. A. Jinnah, ironically a secularist in the Western sense of the term,10 eventually forced the partition of the country in 1947. Independence from British colonial rule thus coincided with the emergence of two sovereign nation states, India and Pakistan, in the subcontinent. Expectedly, although contrary to the wishes of its founder (who died in September 1948), Pakistan was proclaimed and remains until today an Islamic but nontheocratic state. And, again quite expectedly, the leaders of the new Indian state set out to fashion a polity in consonance with the ideals of the freedom movement, notably democracy and religious pluralism.

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Legislatures elected under restricted franchise in the last year of colonial rule (1946) assumed the responsibility of constitution making in both countries. Pakistanis ran into many and protracted difficulties after the initial proclamation of the Islamic state; Indians after two years of diligent deliberations gave themselves the world’s most liberal constitution. Proclaiming India a democratic republic, “freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion” (article 25) was granted to the citizens as a fundamental right. In addition, another fundamental right (article 15) forbade discrimination by the state against any citizen on the basis of religious identity. There is no specific prohibition of the establishment of a state religion, but such a limitation is entailed by other relevant provisions. Indeed, the spirit of the constitution is against it. Like it had seldom been used in the pluralist rhetoric of the freedom movement, the word secularism found no place in the constitution either, and this despite the repeated pleas of a member (K. T. Shah) to mention it. The pleas of another vocal member (H. V. Kamath) to open the constitution with a reference to god were also rejected. It is clear that secularism even in its limited sense of nonreligiousness, not to mention its connotation of opposition to religion, was not an idea that would find acceptance among the constitution makers who were drawn from all the religious communities of India. Even agnostics and rationalists like Nehru had to concede that Indians were by and large religious. This is how he put it in 1948 a few months after independence: “India will be a land of many faiths, equally honored and respected, but of one national outlook.”11 Here, then we have the definition of Indian secularism: religious pluralism as a positive value combined with the affirmation of national unity within a democratic framework. So defined, secularism was subsequently declared by the Indian Supreme Court to be a basic, and therefore unalterable, feature of the constitution. The qualifying term secular in describing the Republic was added to the Preamble by an amendment in 1976 to identify India as “a Sovereign Socialist Democratic Republic.” The Hindi version of the constitution pinpoints the connotation of the term secular (laukik; cp. Greek laikos) by using the phrase pantha nirpeksha, which translated back into English would read as denominationally neutral, using the word “denomination” in a general rather than its specific Christian connotation. Today, the public display of symbols of religious identity has become a major contentious issue in many countries. In France the Muslim headscarf and the Sikh turban are not allowed in public schools, and in Turkey the headscarf has failed to make it to the university campus (see the chapters on these two countries in this volume). In Denmark the government is contemplating a ban on the wearing of Christian crosses, Jewish skull caps, veils, and turbans by judges in its law courts, and in Quebec

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(Canada), according to media reports, the Gérard Bouchard-Charles Taylor commission recently recommended removal of the crucifix atop the speaker’s chair in the Quebec provincial parliament to protect the state’s secular image. In sharp contrast, the Indian parliament—a macrocosm of the Indian nation—affords the viewer an eye-catching spectacle. Christian crosses, Jain robes, Hindu forehead marks, Muslim and Sikh beards, varieties of headgear, including veils and turbans, and even swords, proclaim the religious identity of every such honorable member as wishes to display it. What is true of the parliament is also true of other public spaces, including schools, banks, and government offices. Religious symbols do indeed thickly populate the public square in India. How was the ideal of national unity binding religious communities together into a nation with a common outlook, which could not be achieved through the years of the freedom movement, to be attained in the wake of independence? The appeal to economic interests consistently repeated over many years had failed to overcome communal differences and prevent partition. Ten years after independence, in 1958, Nehru did have to confess to André Malraux that “creating a secular state in a religious society” was no easy task.12 Whether Nehru used the phrase secular state in the Western or the Indian sense of the term, to connote a separation of the domains of religion and politics/governance or to convey equal respect for all religions, he made it clear that the ideal was not easily achievable. And who would know better? Secular considerations were not to be abandoned, but could perhaps be reinforced by drawing upon the resources of religious traditions and also of early and medieval Indian history.13 Indian secularism was to be a religio-secular ideology. It is noteworthy that Nehru himself felt constrained to invest economic and political developments with the aura of the sacred. He famously called the big dams and other development works “temples of the new age”14 and described “secular democracy” as a “sacred cause.”15 He personally chose the Buddhist wheel of righteousness (dharma chakra) as the centerpiece of the national flag, and the Sarnath pillar of the third century BCE, depicting three religious images including the dharma wheel, as the national emblem. Here, we have that “intimate union of the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty,” which Alexis de Tocqueville found in North America and missed in his own country.16 In this formulation, needless to emphasize, primordial identity and democracy are not antagonistic categories. The most outstanding and influential spokesman of the traditional Hindu point of view during the formative years of the Republic was the philosopher Radhakrishnan (who was chosen by Nehru to be the second president). And he thought that it would be “strange that our

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government should be a secular one while our culture is rooted in spiritual values.”17 Secularism, Radhakrishnan maintained, had to be given a culturally appropriate definition in India to emphasize that “the universality of spiritual values may be attained in a variety of ways.”18 This was a throwback to the Rig Veda (c. 1500 BCE): ekam sad viprah bahudha¯ vadanti, the Truth or Absolute is one but has been variously described by the wise. This is the doctrine of religious pluralism that modern Hindu intellectuals have invoked over the centuries in promotion of religious pluralism and tolerance. In the late nineteenth century, a charismatic Hindu religious reformer, Vivekananda, who sought to recast Vedantic (late Vedic) Hinduism as a global religion, cited the aforementioned Vedic aphorism, and much else from traditional sources, to stress its tolerant, even accommodative character. And in the twentieth century, Gandhi presented it thus: “All religions are divinely inspired, but they are imperfect because they are products of the human mind and taught by human beings.”19 Many Muslim traditionalists, who totally reject Western secularism as a worldview, do support Indian secularism as state policy, for it is expedient to do so. For example, the Jama `at-i-Islami of India considers Indian secularism a “blessing” and a “guarantee for a safe future of Islam” in modern India. 20 Obviously, this is a tactical compromise, offset by an explicit commitment to the ideal of a universal Muslim community of faith (ummah). In contrast, their counterparts in Pakistan and Bangladesh campaign for an Islamic state. Moreover, many traditionalists selectively cite the Qur`an itself to derive from it the doctrine of religious pluralism and tolerance. 21 Scripture is not, however, what the orthodox secularists would fall back upon. Indeed, some Indian Marxist intellectuals have denounced Indian secularism in no uncertain terms: “It is in fact no secularism at all—it is far more a celebration of all kinds of religion and religiosity, ignorance, obscurantism and social oppression.”22 Others have observed that the notion of samabha¯va or equal treatment does not necessarily imply respect or goodwill (sadbha¯va), but that it could more reasonably stand for the eventual rejection of all religions as error and falsehood. The liberals appeal to secular history, and trace a tradition of interfaith dialogues and religious tolerance back to the policy of the emperor Ashoka (c. 268–233 BCE), who, although born a Hindu himself embraced Buddhism, but did not make it the state religion. Instead, he commended “religious concord” to his subjects so that they may “hear one another’s principles”; by honoring another’s sect “one increases the influence of one’s own sect.”23 He declared “all men are my children (savve munisse paja¯ mama¯),” thus presenting himself as a parent rather than a prophet. 24 His policy of “dhamma,” although

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undoubtedly inspired by his understanding of the Buddha’s teaching, was largely his own formulation. Thapar calls it “a secular teaching,” and “an attempt . . . to suggest a way of life,” which was “practical” as well as “highly moral.”25 Nearly two millennia later, the Muslim emperor Akbar (1543–1605 CE), breaking with the established policy of treating non-Muslims in India as protected but morally and politically inferior subjects, pursued a policy of religious tolerance and even syncretism, and peace toward all (sulh-i-kul). 26 He decreed that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”27 Akbar’s exemplary policies suffered fairly rapid erosion after his death. Needless to add, orthodox Muslim opinion was severely critical of him, even accusing him of apostasy.28 Amartya Sen, among others, finds “echoes” of Ashoka’s and Akbar’s (particularly the latter’s) promotion of interreligious harmony “in the later history of India.”29 He maintains that Akbar “laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state,” a kind of “secular state which was yet to be born in India or for that matter anywhere in the world.”30 Attention has also been drawn to the emergence of a syncretistic religious culture in North India in the medieval period, at the local level, which had Hindu gurus and Muslim pirs as its charismatic preceptors. They preached “a message not only of tolerance but also of social equality and a concern for the human condition.”31 It is argued that this tradition provides a credible historical basis for contemporary Indian secularism. But this too is problematic, mainly because of the other-worldly character of these sects.32 I think one has to be cautious, and not project, even inadvertently, conceptual similarity as historical continuity. It is fine to see in Ashoka’s or Akbar’s ideas, or in medieval folk religions, alternative, non-Western conceptions of secularism as religious pluralism, and build a comparative typology of secular (or religious) ideologies and states, but only just that. 33 The immediate antecedents of the Indian secular state lie elsewhere. 34

The Sources of Contemporary Indian Secularism A religiously neutral, nondiscriminatory state made its appearance only in the mid-nineteenth century, when the British crown assumed full responsibility of the governance of those areas of the subcontinent that had been seized by the East India Company. A royal proclamation in London in 1858, inspired largely by the perception that the soldiers’ mutiny and the subsequent mass uprising of the previous year had been triggered by official disregard of the religious sensibilities of Indians generally, committed

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the government to abstention from any interference in the religious beliefs and practices of the empire’s Indian subjects: “We declare it to be our royal pleasure that none be in any wise favored, nor molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy equal and impartial protection of the law.”35 The proclamation did not, however, grant to Indian religions moral equality with Christianity as true faiths, and evangelical activities, allowed by an act of the British parliament in 1813, continued as before. Not everyone, however, considered the proclamation sincere or gracious. The wife of the deposed king of Oudh, issued a counter proclamation later in the year (1858), totally rejecting its genuineness.36 Even so, the British statement of policy did indeed influence the thinking of a nascent national leadership. A society characterized by religious pluralism and governed by a nondiscriminatory state is what Indian secularism has come to mean under the constitution of free India adopted in 1949. Nondiscrimination does not mean, however, that there shall be no intervention in the religious practices of the people to secure justice for all. Bhargava calls this the policy of “principled distance,” and argues cogently in favor of it, but does not consider the difficulties in implementing such a policy.37 The government has on many occasions ended up tying itself in knots, trapped in uncomfortable proximity instead of maintaining reasonable distance. The real problem is the absence of a general consensus on how to define principled distance in a pluralist setting. Thus, the constitution outlawed the immemorial Hindu practice of untouchability (article 17), under which some of the lower castes were denied access to upper caste places of worship, wells, village commons, and so on, and physically avoided because they were considered ritually polluting. Besides, after the promulgation of the constitution, and in furtherance of social justice, the Indian parliament enacted a series of laws that overturned centuries-old Hindu customs in respect of the inferior or nonexistent rights of Hindu women regarding marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance of property, and so on. British rulers had refrained from interfering with such customs and, in fact, froze them by codifying them as Hindu personal law. The policy of noninterference was uniformly applied to all communities. Although the constitution required under the directive principles of state policy that the state “endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code” (article 44), successive governments have generally refrained from intervening in the personal laws of the minority communities. Such restraint is not an expression of principled distance, but political caution that its critics call, not entirely without justification, political opportunism, or “vote bank” politics. Differential treatment of the majority and minority communities, defined primarily in terms of religious identity, has thus

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emerged as a defining feature of Indian secularism. Articles 29 and 30 grant the minorities the fundamental, inalienable right to establish and administer educational institutions, which are exempt from taxation and other liabilities, subject to certain limitations. In this regard, it has been argued by some political scientists that the state should compensate the religious minorities for the conditions of economic and political deprivation that cannot reasonably be said to be their own creation. It should also enable them to preserve their cultural and religious heritage through the creation of “supportive structures.”38 This is highly problematic. I will not go into that here beyond pointing out that such a policy could lead to a vastly enlarged and proactive role for the state generally, to the detriment of individual liberty and civil society initiatives. Moreover, it would hinder the growth of a national identity. 39 A major conclusion that the foregoing, necessarily brief, discussion of the evolution of Indian secularism yields is that its institutional expression, namely the secular state, is meaningful only in the presence of a continuing plurality of religious communities. This is, of course, broadly true of the United States also (see the relevant chapters in this volume), but in India, in the absence of the kind of cultural homogeneity that prevails in North America, the state is expected to honor all religions, and not construct a wall of separation between them and itself. The secular state exists here not because the society at large has turned its back on religion as a public phenomenon, but because religion is generally important and not as personal faith alone. The state is not emancipated from religion: this was the constitutional choice and is the governmental practice. It should be added, however, that the general processes of secularization proceed in India independently of the political ideology of secularism. To trust an agronomist rather than an astrologer, a doctor rather than a faith healer, or a banker rather than a traditional money lender has nothing to do with secular politics. The majority-minority conundrum that divided the national movement in the first half of the twentieth century, and led to partition, is the specter that haunts India today at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The last twenty-five years have been witness to the rearticulation of Hindu revivalism as cultural nationalism under the auspices of a family (so-called) of organizations, among which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps), founded in 1925, is the parent body, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party), founded in 1980, the political front.40 Claiming to be the representative body of Hindus, although including a sprinkling of non-Hindus, it has not so far been able to win at the national level the support of more than approximately one-fifth of the total electorate. In terms of its presence in the parliament, however, it made great strides in just fourteen years,

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from 1984, when it had two members, to 1998, when it emerged as the single largest party ahead of the Congress, the self-proclaimed torch bearer of Indian secularism. It may be added that, throughout its career, BJP has made extensive use of religious symbolism in political mobilization, drawing upon both mythology, old beliefs and current practice. BJP has characterized the concern of other political parties, including notably the Congress and the Left parties, for the minorities as the policy of appeasement. The emergence of Muslim terrorism in various parts of the country since the late 1980s has provided grist to its mill. BJP headed a coalition government at the center (federal level) from 1998 to 2004, which soft pedalled its agenda of Hindu hegemony presented as Indian cultural nationalism, and rather focused on economic and foreign policy issues. BJP’s national leadership failed to take action against the government of the state of Gujarat run by the party for its failure to prevent mass murder, rape, and looting in early 2002, following an incident of arson on a train carrying Hindu political workers, and suspected to have been engineered by Muslim terrorists. The carnage left more than a thousand Muslims dead.41 The most authoritative leader of the BJP, L. K. Advani, recently summed up the party’s stand on secularism thus: “Unfortunately, for decades now, in the name of secularism, politicians have been wanting the nation to disown its essential personality. For the left inclined, secularism has been a euphemism to cloak their intense allergy to religion and more particularly to Hinduism. It is this attitude which BJP characterizes as pseudo-secularism. This attitude is wrong and unscientific [sic].”42 Needless to emphasize, the “essential personality” of Advani’s conception is rooted in pre-Islamic indigenous cultural values. Now, Partha Chatterjee pointed out in 1994 that “The majoritarianism of the Hindu right is perfectly at peace with the institutional procedures of the ‘western’ or ‘modern state.’ ”43 The question that therefore arises is whether “the defence of secularism [is] an appropriate ground for meeting the challenge of the Hindu right?” Or, whether the emphasis should be on “the duty of the democratic state to ensure policies of religious toleration”?44 He argued for tolerance “premised on autonomy and respect for persons,” so that the minorities can “resist homogenization from outside and push for democratization from inside.”45

Gandhi and Indian Secularism At this point we must return to Gandhi. Gandhi is generally considered the patron saint, as it were, of Indian secularism; this is an oversimplification.

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And often, he is bracketed with Nehru as a secularist; this is quite misleading. Gandhi’s conception of religion could be called secular since he demystified it and bracketed it with reason, but not otherwise. Nehru was, as I have already said, an agnostic, and Gandhi was an intensely religious person. “For me,” he affirmed quite early in his life, “every, the tiniest, activity is governed by what I consider my religion.”46 In 1940, as on numerous other occasions during his life, he reiterated his position: “I cannot conceive politics as divorced from religion. Indeed religion should pervade every one of our actions.”47 The state was another thing, however, much narrower than politics. A few months before his assassination, Gandhi said that “the state should undoubtedly be secular. Everyone . . . should be entitled to profess his religion without let or hindrance, so long as the citizen obeys the laws of the land.”48 In Gandhi’s judgment, the moral individual was the cornerstone of the good society, provided that he/she was an other-regarding rather than self-oriented individual—a satya¯grahı¯ ( “a truth agent”) and not a sannya¯sı¯ (renouncer) —and in such a society the state’s functions obviously would be limited. Two clarifications are in order here. First, what was Gandhi’s conception of religion? His answer was “religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe . . . This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality.”49 Second, and in view of the foregoing statement, what was the rationale for religious plurality? For this Gandhi appealed to, among other ideas, the combined Jain doctrine of “many sidedness” (anekantava¯d) and “qualified certainty” (sya¯dava¯d), according to which no absolute or unqualified statements can be made about existential reality because of its multidimensional and complex nature. Various kinds of specification are necessary. It is this doctrine, he affirmed, which had taught him “to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his.” And it was sya¯dava¯d that had taught him “the unity of all religions.”50 Gandhi also argued that a truly religious person would always be open to what religions other than the one he or she is born into had to teach. What may be missing or latent in one tradition could be present or manifest in another. One’s tradition does not say it all or always get right what it says. Put otherwise, no religion is complete without the others. This led Gandhi not toward some kind of religious syncretism, but to recognition of the value of religious plurality—which is what Indian secularism primarily is all about. In holding such a view, he was radically different from religious thinkers like the Hindu Vivekananda51 or the Muslim Maulana Azad,52 who regarded their respective religions as the most perfect, but granted the right of other true religions to exist. Indeed,

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Vivekananda maintained that Vedantic Hinduism included in itself all that was true in every other religion. Gandhi’s pluralism was marked by humility rather than condescension. He found the notions of tolerance and respect for all religions inadequate: the former seemed to him to “imply a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one’s own,” and the latter was, he said, “patronizing.” What satisfied him (to quote his own words again) was the resolve “to entertain the same respect for religious faiths of others as we accord to our own, thus admitting the imperfections of the latter.”53 Gandhi’s concept of the minimalist secular state (small government) makes sense only in the presence of his participatory pluralism within a moral universe. His secularism is a religious idea, a moral value, implying reference to a transcendental principle. It is not a matter of political necessity or prudence. It must be added that religious ideas in Gandhi’s reckoning were not self-certified, nor was the sanction of scripture sufficient; they were essentially open to the scrutiny of moral reason and, in his own case, conscience. And unlike many other religious reformers such as Dayananda Sarasvati, the founder of the revivalist Arya Samaj, 54 Gandhi’s inner voice was not silent on politics and economics. His vision of the good society was holistic.

Conclusion What about the future of Indian secularism as a religio-secular ideal? Its most serious challenges could ironically come from the secular state’s concern for the religious sensibilities of the people, particularly of the minorities, and from its democratic character. I can do no more than very briefly mention some possibilities. Currently (in 200855), the Indian Supreme Court is seized of the problem of whether to allow the cutting through of a submarine rock formation between the southern tip of India and the northern tip of Sri Lanka to allow the passage of large cargo and passenger ships. This will very considerably shorten the sea route from the west coast of India to the east coast, which at present requires going round Sri Lanka, and contribute to economic development and in other ways too. The Hindu right, including the BJP, opposes the move on the ground that the orthodox among the Hindus believe that this geological formation, popularly called Ramar Sethu (Rama’s Bridge), was constructed by the god Rama. To cut through it will, they maintain, amount to its desecration and hurt the religious feelings of the majority community, which should be no less sacrosanct than similar feelings of the minorities. The Hindu case was argued in the Supreme Court by some of the country’s most eminent constitutional lawyers, including a former

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Attorney General, Soli Sorabji, himself a Parsee. To reject their argument would amount to allowing secular considerations to violate freedom of religion, they suggested, because Hindus offer worship at Ramar Sethu, and would no longer be able to do so if it is desecrated. To accept it would mean the subordination of secular concerns, including developmental activities, to the dictates of the purveyors of religious traditions, without regard for the historical authenticity of such traditions and contemporary national interest. For the time being the court has chosen evasion; it gave an interim order asking the government to examine alternatives to the proposed sea passage, and report back to it. This has not yet happened (October 2008). Should the court eventually give the green signal to the project, an angered and mobilized Hindu right could place BJP in a much stronger position politically, and parliamentary elections are due early in 2009. It is, of course not certain that this will happen; many Rama Bridges would be needed to provide passage to the Hindu right to its promised land. But, already, in May this year, the party, generally considered only a North Indian force, defeated two secular parties in an election in South India, and formed the government in the state of Karnataka. One cannot entirely rule out the possibility that India may gradually slide into a situation comparable in some respects to the present imbroglio in Turkey, where the guardians of the nearly hundred-year-old secular legacy of Kemal Ataturk, namely the army and the judiciary, are at loggerheads with a legally elected popular government, run by the Justice and Democratic Party (AKP) and its top leadership, led by Prime Minister Erdogan. Historical and ideological differences between BJP and AKP should not be minimized. At a deeper level, however, the current Indian and Turkish political scenarios represent what Elizabeth Shakman Hurd calls “a renegotiation of the public terms of the relationship between religion and politics” within a democratic framework.56 This renegotiation questions “secularist normative assumptions” about the significance of religious resurgence. The character and cross cultural relevance of Indian secularism are not, I think, fully settled issues. The conceptual snarls are many and the policy snares numerous. There is no easy predicting its future course as a religio-secular ideal.

Notes 1. Rajeev Bhargava, “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,” in The Future of Secularism, ed. T. N. Srinivasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 20–21. 2. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 78.

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3. See Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and chapter 12 of T. N. Madan, Images of the World: Essays on Religion, Secularism, and Culture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. See T. N. Madan, ed., Way of Life: King, Householder, Renouncer. Essays in Honour of Louis Dumont (New Delhi: Vikas; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1982), particularly the essays by Charles Malamoud and K. J. Shah. 5. See chapter five of T. N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 6. T. N. Madan, “Secularism in Its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (1987): 747–759. 7. See Rajeev Bhargava’s chapter in this volume. 8. T. N. Madan, “The Social Construction of Religious Identities in Rural Kashmir,” in Muslim Communities of South Asia, ed. T. N. Madan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 229–268. 9. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ed., Great Speeches of Modern India (New Delhi: Random House, 2007), 119–142. 10. See Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11. Madan, Modern Myths, 233. 12. André Malraux, Antimemories (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), 145. 13. See Rajeev Bhargava’s chapter in this volume. 14. Mukherjee, 222, 225. 15. Shaikh Mohammad Abdullah, Flames of the Chinar: An Autobiography (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), 122. 16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004 [1835]), 31. 17. S. Radhakrishnan, foreword to The National Culture of India, by Abid Husain (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007 [1956]), ix. 18. Madan, Modern Myths, 245. 19. Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi Vol. 1. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 543. 20. Mumtaz Ahmad, “Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia: The Jamaat-i-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat,” in Fundamentalisms Observed, ed. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 457–530. 21. See chapter five of Madan, Modern Myths, for a discussion of the views of Maulana Azad. 22. Randhir Singh, Five Lectures in the Marxist Mode (New Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1993), 49. 23. Romila Thapar, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 255. 24. Ibid., 147. 25. Ibid., 163, 149. 26. The medieval period of Indian history is marked by persistent admonitions by religious leaders (ulama), advocating that the kings establish a theocratic

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31.

32. 33. 34.

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state. The kings generally were, however, more concerned about secular gains (territory, stability, revenues, etc.) than religious merit through the propagation of Islam and the elimination of infidels. Persecution in various forms of those not yet converted was common, however. See Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 275–298. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 18. See Sri Ram Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962). Sen, 16. Ibid., 18, 287. It may be noted here that the innovations of Ashoka and Akbar were not inherent in their respective religious traditions, as Ashis Nandy rather brusquely suggests, but were the outcome of their situational predicaments and spiritual struggles. See Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: The Insistent Politics of Silent and Evasive Pasts (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 8; Thapar, Ashoka; and Shirin Moosvi, “The Road to sulh-I kul: Akbar’s Alienation from Theological Islam,” in Religion in Indian History, ed. Irfan Habib (New Delhi: Tulika, 2007), 167–176. Romila Thapar, “Is Secularism Alien to Indian Civilization?” in The Future of Secularism, ed. T. N. Srinivasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100. See Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod, eds., The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987). See Rajeev Bhargava’s chapter in this volume. Judging by Iyer’s carefully assembled anthology of Gandhi’s moral and political writings and Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1961), Ashoka and Akbar were, of course, significant presences in the thinking of these two founding fathers of Indian secularism, but much more so in Nehru’s than in Gandhi’s case. Both of them noted Ashoka’s efforts to spread Buddhism. Akbar received more attention in the context of inter-religious harmony. Interestingly, Gandhi attributed Akbar’s tolerance to the influence of Hinduism on him (Iyer, 47). Nehru mentions Akbar’s attempts to “start a new synthetic faith to suit everybody” and to promote a composite Hindu-Muslim culture (Iyer, 273), and “to interpret religion in a rational spirit” (Iyer, 278). Both leaders viewed Ashoka and Akbar as important historical personalities, but also noted that their innovations were short lived. See Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961). Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 72. Surendranath Sen, Eighteen Fifty-Seven (New Delhi: Publications Division: Government of India, 1957), 382–384. Bhargava, 39–41. Neera Chandhoke, Beyond Secularism: The Rights of Religious Minorities (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). See Madan, Images of the World, 113–146. See Christoph Jafferlot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (New Delhi: Viking, 1996).

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41. See Siddharth Vardarajan, ed., Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002). 42. L. K. Advani, My Country, My Life (New Delhi: Rupa, 2008), 371. 43. Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1994]), 346. 44. Ibid., 348. 45. Ibid., 375, 378. 46. Iyer, 391. 47. Madan, Modern Myths, 235. 48. Ibid., 237. 49. Ibid., 235–236. 50. J. T. F. Jordens, Gandhi’s Religion (London: Macmillan, 1998), 151–152. 51. Shamita Basu, Religious Revivalism and Nationalist Discourse (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 52. See chapters five and six of Madan, Modern Myths. 53. Jordens, 154 (emphasis added). Many contemporary scholars have arrived at similar but differently argued positions. Thus, Adam Seligman in an insightful discussion recommends “[h]umility . . . in all directions—of both faith and reason,” and a willingness to “question the very ‘givenness’ of each’s certitudes.” He calls this attitude “a skeptical toleration—an epistemological modesty whose very uncertainty would prevent intolerance of the other.” See Adam Seligman, Modernity’s Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 128. 54. See J. T. F. Jordens, Dayanand Sarasvati: His Life and Teachings (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). 55. As of December 2009, the legal battle about the status of the Rama Bridge has yet not reached the verdict stage at the Supreme Court. Actually, it has lost much of its relevance in the context of electoral politics. Elections to the national parliament and some state legislatures earlier this year resulted in a setback to the BJP. It did not come to power at the Centre and was voted out in one of the states (Rajasthan). The party is currently faced with a sharp internal division between moderates, who favor a liberal political stance, and hardliners, who advocate a return to strident Hindutva, equating Hindu culture with the “national ethos.” The latter, of course, stands for Hindu political dominance. A major terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008, executed by a Pakistani Islamist group, resulted in considerable loss of life and property and attracted worldwide condemnation. Fortunately, it did not generate a Hindu backlash, nor did it help the BJP at the hustlings. The prospect for Indian secularism remains very hopeful, but the guard cannot be lowered. 56. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Theorizing Religious Resurgence,” International Politics 44, no. 6 (November 2007): 650.

Chapter 11 Not Quite Secular Political Practice Zoya Hasan There is a widely held view that the rise of the Hindu right, particularly the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), challenged the Nehruvian consensus on political secularism with its emphasis on democracy, religious neutrality (or equal standing for all citizens, regardless of religion), and social justice. Even though the BJP may not demand a role for religious institutions or state support for religious rituals, its political vision and practices are the antithesis of secularism. It not only challenges the secular basis of the state but also seeks a communal reconstruction of national identity. It regards secularism as basically a code for anti-Hindu politics and derides the principle of minority rights, a key feature of Indian secularism, as an unwarranted privilege.1 Much of what has been termed the “secularism debates” revolves around the conceptual and normative structure of secularism, which from viewpoints such as the BJP’s and communitarian scholars, is deeply flawed. 2 Very few scholars have looked at the political practices of major political parties and how they impact secularism. In 1998, in the twelfth general election, a coalition of sixteen parties led by the BJP won a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha (The House of the People) and formed a government in New Delhi. This marked a crucial turning point in modern Indian politics: for the first time, the BJP, India’s main right-wing political party and the front party of a family of militant Hindu organizations (known as the Sangh Parivar), formed a government at the Center, ending decades of erstwhile political isolation.3 Although the BJP set aside the most contentious aspects of its agenda, such as the adoption of a uniform civil code (which is opposed by the dominant section of minorities), to forge an electoral coalition, its growing influence, nevertheless, posed a threat to secular democracy and constitutional safeguards for minority rights. This party was founded on the Hindutva ideology that upholds and espouses Hinduness. It proceeds from a conception of India as divided among majority and minority religions and equates India with a Hindu nation. Many of its party’s leaders belong to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and/or the Vishva

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Hindu Parishad (VHP), and both groups support recognizing India as a Hindu nation. The ideology of Hindutva and the communalization of the polity under BJP rule convinced secularists that far from adhering to secularism, the BJP advocated an ideology that endangered India’s pluralism and unity. Hence, the electoral victory of a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the 2004 parliamentary elections defeating the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was seen as a respite for secular politics. But the defeat of the BJP did not spell the end of the Hindu right or for that matter the role of religion in politics and society. Rather this phenomenon has had a strong influence on the functioning of the state, civil society, and minority rights. Be it the communalization of the polity, the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, communalizing national security, educational policy, or gender issues, the BJP’s legacy is disquieting, to say the least. Two major issues confront the secular project. The first major issue is the direct political challenge that comes from the Sangh Parivar and the BJP, stressing the centrality of a homogenizing version of Hindu culture as the defining element of both religion and nation. The BJP is not prepared to recognize in word or deed the importance of minority rights and the need to guarantee the security and rights due to them as equal citizens in a democratic and nondenominational state. Its anti-Muslim stance has turned the question of minorities into a matter of bitter conflict and controversy in India, especially when “secularism has meant providing for substantive equality for religious minorities.”4 The second major issue confronting the secular project in India relates to the distortions in the political practices of secular parties that have clearly done harm to political secularism. These issues arising out of the political practice of secular parties more specifically form the focus of this chapter. The crisis of the secularist model has been interpreted by many as a manifestation of the inadequacy of the Indian model itself. Political secularism is questioned not only by right-wing politicians, civil society groups, and religious leaders, but also by academics. In fact, Indian academics were among the first to voice their disagreement with secularism. 5 For T. N. Madan, Ashis Nandy, and Partha Chatterjee, the threat to secularism comes from the conceptual structure of secularism that, they argue, is terribly flawed.6 In different ways, each argues that secularism is “linked to a flawed modernization, to a mistaken view of rationality, to an impractical demand that religion be eliminated from public life, to an insufficient appreciation of the importance of communities in the life of people and a wholly exaggerated sense of the positive character of the modern state.”7 By criticizing secularism, none of these critics mean to privilege communal ideology or the politics of either the majority or minority

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communities.8 But in denouncing secularism they share the view that it is the secular model that promotes communalism or religious intolerance. In fact, they blame the doctrine of secularism for the resurgence of communal politics in India. For them, the secularity of the state is not a bulwark against the Hindu right.9 They see Indian secularism as promoting a false idea that “a secular state should be one which enjoins and prescribes the showing of equal respect for all religions (sarva dharm sambhavam) rather than maintaining a basic separation of state apparatuses from religious influence and institutions.”10 Furthermore, they see no incompatibility between the political agenda of the Hindu right and the preservation of a secular state. Supposedly, the evidence of this is that the Hindu right does not attack secularism as such, but rather attacks pseudo-secularism and the pseudo-secular state. But from this one cannot draw the conclusion that the BJP is not opposed to secularism. Even though the BJP does not oppose democracy it claims that it is the force representing the majority of Hindus. The BJP does not oppose the principle of the democratic state, but it seeks to redefine democracy as majoritarian and secularism as tolerance.11 In place of Nehruvian secularism, the communitarians advocate religious tolerance as being authentically Indian, therefore, more effectively secular. Tolerance, they hold, is deeply rooted in Indian tradition and therefore more “natural” to Indian culture, especially Hinduism. Yet, the problem of identifying an essentialized Indianness or the essential tolerance of Hinduism is obvious, as claims of tolerance do not square with tolerance of hierarchies, inequalities, and communal violence.12 Even today there is so much intolerance and intercommunity violence over what are partly religiously driven divisions. Also, there is no evidence that secularism has sought to ride roughshod over religious sensibilities; in fact, evidence of the past two decades suggests that the state has at times gone out of its way to accommodate religious sensibilities. It is not clear why secularism is inappropriate for India, particularly when secularism has not contributed to the eradication or lessening of religious faith. The BJP was engaged in discrediting political secularism much before the communitarian critique of secularism began to dominate academic debates on secularism. It attacked the practice of secularism, particularly the Congress party’s practices, as pseudo-secularism, and attempted to link secularism to a Hindu conception of tolerance via the purportedly inherent tolerance of Hinduism. This strategy is rooted in the claim that Hinduism is the most tolerant of all religions and consequently most conducive to secularism. In other words, it is not constitutional principles and laws of a secular state but the natural tolerance of Hinduism and Hindus that can make secularism safe in India. Beyond this, for

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the BJP, secularism means nothing more than the strategy and practices of a nontheocratic state through which it is possible to maintain peace between communities and protect the religious liberty of individuals.13 The BJP often cites the infrequency of violence under its rule as further evidence of its toleration and nonpartisanship. The Hindu right’s unrelenting attacks on minority rights—which are redescribed as Muslim appeasement—are an attempt to snap the links between secularism and minority rights, notwithstanding the fact that India has one of the oldest and most extensive regimes of minority rights.14 This contravenes the very idea of equality—of equal respect for religions and equality of citizenship in a democracy.15 Secularism and democracy are decoupled and then presented as if they are mutually exclusive concepts, but the interconnections between them in the Indian context are obvious.16 This can be confirmed through a quick look at the specific provisions pertaining to secularism and fundamental rights and the debates in the Constituent Assembly on the rights of religious freedom in the context of communal riots and the Partition of India on religious lines in 1947.17 These debates underline the intrinsic link between democracy and secularism based on the recognition that India could build national unity and survive only on the basis of secularism. Any attempt therefore to distance secularism from democracy in India could change the specific meanings of these terms. In today’s circumstances it is perhaps even more important to emphasize the constellation of concepts—secularism, democracy, equality, and justice—as their interconnection is an outstanding achievement of India’s freedom struggle and has defined the political agenda of independent India. This chapter focuses on political secularism, one of the chief pillars of the liberal democratic state in India. It examines political processes that have led to an erosion of political secularism, a process that has been aggravated by the rising influence of the Hindu right. The political context framing these developments has been the electoral successes of the Hindu right in the 1990s, on the one hand, and the expanding influence of community-based political groupings, which includes caste groups and religious minorities, in Indian politics during this period, on the other.18 It examines two episodes in the recent history of political secularism to understand the growth of majoritarianism and how that might affect secularism. Much of the public debate on the distortions of Indian secularism has drawn attention to state policy toward religious minorities and the accommodation of minority sentiment, especially regarding their identity concerns. Through a brief examination of the Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project (cutting a deep channel for ships through the shallow waters of the Palk Straits and the Gulf of Mannar), and the controversies surrounding India’s most famous painter M. F. Husain and his

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work, this chapter explores some of the distortions of secular practice that are associated with the politics of majoritarianism. This chapter’s principal contention is that secularism has been weakened by external forces inimical to it and aggravated by the blemished record of political parties, and not by internal flaws in the conception of secularism. It is not the concept of political secularism per se that is responsible for the problems of secularism in India. Over the years there has been a gradual erosion of secularism and liberal democratic discourse. Opportunism and repeated attempts by political parties to play the communal card has weakened secularism. Although committed to the ideal of secularism, there have been several instances when political parties succumbed to the easy political gains to be reaped from communalism. Secular parties have found the idea of scoring quick electoral gains by tampering with secular principles and institutions too tempting to turn down. Political leaders are eager to curry favor with religious leaders to use them to marshal political support.19 Parties seeking to stake out a position as pro-Hindu, or simultaneously pro-Hindu and a protector of the minorities, have given a fillip to the emergence of antisecular politics. In India, secularism is not an option; it is an absolute necessity in the context of India’s extraordinary diversity and pluralism. Secularism alone can create equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or culture. A contemporary notion of secularism is best derived from the egalitarian and universalist ideas embodied in the constitution and closely linked to the ideals of the freedom struggle. Nehruvian secularism, for all its flaws, was an integral part of an effort to build a plural conception of nationhood in extremely difficult political circumstances. A critique of political secularism is an inappropriate ground for mounting a challenge to communalism, which is one of the most serious and dangerous problems facing India today. It is not the failure of political secularism that creates these problems, rather, it is the failure of political parties to live up to the ideals of political secularism.

Political Secularism Secularism in India, as elsewhere, means a separation of organized religion from organized political power. The basic constituents of this separation, however, are not exactly the same as in Western secularism. 20 The term secularism did not enter the constitution until 1976. But despite this and serious differences of interpretation, secularism has been a central feature of the Indian project of modernity and democracy. The constitution does not mandate a strict separation of religion and state—religion

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has not been disestablished. Departing from the disestablishment model, the state has chosen to interpret secularism as the responsibility to ensure the protection and equality of all religions and provide for regulation and reform, rather than the strict separation of religion and state. 21 Article 30(1) recognizes the rights of religious minorities and, unlike other articles applicable to citizens qua individuals, it is a community-based right. Second, article 30(2) commits the state to give aid to educational institutions established and administered by religious minorities. These are significant departures from the “wall of separation” view of the secular state. Even more significant are articles 17 and 25(2) that permit the state to intervene in religious affairs, regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political, or other secular activity that may be associated with religious practice. The third feature is the emphasis on social welfare and reform. In pursuit of this agenda, the state abolished untouchability and threw open Hindu temples to all sections of the community. 22 Unlike the American view of disestablishment that is often thought to be based on a strict “wall of separation” between the religion and the state, the Indian state is empowered to legislate against the “non-egalitarian” and “caste-ridden” prejudices legitimated by Hindu society, including temple entry to former untouchables, abolition of child marriage, and abolition of untouchability.

Secular Consensus The features of the Indian Constitution discussed earlier depart fundamentally from the Western model. Unlike the strict separation view that renders the state powerless in religious matters, they enjoin the state to interfere in religion. Yet, there is no mistaking the overall secular design articulated in these salient principles. It was precisely because political secularism was seen as having tremendous weight and relevance as a crucial component of the democratic project that the constitutional dispensation of secularism has remained intact. Even in the face of pressures from the Hindu right, Nehru never countenanced a political role for religion, as that would endanger national integrity. The historical triumph of the Indian National Congress is that every political party now claims to be secular. 23 Historically, the Congress sought to balance contending interests by attempting to make room within itself for both the Hindu right and orthodox clerics at the same time as it championed the cause of modern secularism. 24 This balancing act was a part of Congress’s conception of its identity “as a self-consciously representative assembly of Indians from different parts of India,”25 with secularism as the instrument through which it sought to dissolve particularistic identities.

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Overall secularism was adapted to suit Indian conditions in ways that enabled it to combine with and respond to the demands of statecraft, while incorporating the religious ideals of Gandhi, on the one hand, and the modernist outlook of Nehru, on the other. Despite its many weaknesses, this strategy worked for many decades. 26 The secular consensus held dominant sway over public life well beyond the Nehru era, meeting serious challenge only in the late 1980s. Two features of politics in the later period marked by the escalation in communal violence have contributed to a more generalized growth of communal prejudice. One was the routine participation of large numbers of police and paramilitary personnel in communal violence, invariably on the side of the majority community across the country, resulting in a recurring distrust of security forces by the minority communities. The second feature of politics was the propensity of the Congress to play “the communal card”—pragmatic accommodations of the backward elements of both the majority and minority communities. The Congress leadership, as demonstrated by several events mentioned below, faltered at crucial moments and they failed to live up to the standard set by Nehru.

Secular Practice and the Erosion of Secularism For more than four decades after Independence the Congress occupied a pivotal position in Indian politics. Congress’s political supremacy began to decline from the late 1960s and with it India’s secular framework began to weaken. 27 Before this period, the political influence of religion was limited and communal parties won few seats. Although Indira Gandhi retained a strong commitment to India as a secular state, her definition of secularism was premised on the equality of all religions and not the rejection of religion or complete separation of religion and politics. 28 The clear separation between politics and religion required to maintain the secularist polity became blurred. The readiness to overstep the bounds of constitutional propriety on matters of religion and secularism created the space for the rapid rise of an antisecular alternative. A series of events, some unintended, others calculated, helped anti-secular forces to gain a foothold in the political system. The unraveling of the secularist fabric began with demands for regional autonomy in Punjab and the manner in which the state responded to those demands. The Congress decided to play “the Hindu card” to undercut the popularity of its regional rival, the Akali Dal in Punjab. Indira Gandhi refused to take stern action against Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (Sikh preacher turned extremist), thereby allowing him to run amuck and turn his wrath against Hindus. 29 Congress expected the Hindu reaction in northern India to consolidate behind the party and also help it regain political

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support in the rest of the country. But the attacks against Hindus orchestrated from the Golden temple in Amritsar spun out of control and could only be contained after Mrs. Gandhi ordered the army to march into the temple to remove the militants who had taken control. This decision inflamed Sikhs leading to the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards. Another such event was the decision of the Congress government, led by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, to revoke the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case by passing the 1986 Muslim Women’s Act (MWA), denying Muslim women access to civil law in matters of marriage and divorce. The Supreme Court, in a 1985 landmark judgment, granted a small maintenance allowance to Shah Bano, a seventy-three-year-old Muslim divorcee, to be paid by her husband under the Criminal Code. 30 The apex court was asked to pronounce on the relationship between these sections of the Criminal Procedure Code of 1973 and religious personal law. The court ruled that Section 125, as part of the criminal rather than civil law, overrides all personal law and is uniformly applicable to all women, including Muslim women. This was the final decision in a long series of suits and appeals in which her ex-husband argued that he had discharged his duty according to Muslim law. The decision to overturn the Shah Bano verdict breathed life into the ideology of the Hindu nationalists who condemned the Congress for its appeasement of Muslims though this legislation. The third and most far reaching in this series of events that damaged and destabilized secularism was the mishandling of the Ayodhya dispute. During this period the BJP and its affiliates started a nationwide campaign to construct a Ram temple in place of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Hindu activists had been claiming that the mosque stood at the spot believed to be the exact birthplace of Lord Ram. Several decisions of the Congress party, which included unlocking the disputed site, launching the party’s 1991 electoral campaign from Faizabad (a town near Ayodhya), and allowing the foundation stones of the proposed temple to be laid near the mosque, were aimed at arousing Hindu sentiment, but they ended up compromising the secular principle of the separation of religion and politics and encouraging the BJP to intensify its campaign for a Ram temple. 31 Overall, the decision to turn a dispute between two religions over a piece of holy ground into a national issue was intended to appease the majority community that was unhappy with the government’s decision to overturn the Shah Bano court verdict. 32 Both these decisions, calculated to please, respectively, communally minded Hindus and Muslims, ended up giving a massive boost to the forces of the Hindu right, reflected in the BJP’s rise from a mere two

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to eighty-nine Lok Sabha seats. Giving one concession to a particular community and then offsetting it by granting concessions to other communities was a process that left both Hindu and Muslim communities feeling they had lost something. Not only does the constitution contain no warrant for such patronizing “secularism,” but it is also a dangerous approach that provokes a backlash from both sides of the communal divide. Despite, or some would say because of, the concessions to religious group demands, the polity has been torn apart by competitive communalism and sectarian conflict. The social and political space that the Hindu right seized was created partly by the retreat of secularism during six years of BJP-led NDA rule and partly by the ambivalence and contradictions in secular political practice. In this context, the election of the Congress-led UPA at the Center defeating the NDA was read by many as “a decisive vote against communalism” and as the people’s “reaffirmation of a commitment to pluralism and secularism.”33 Two major decisions of the UPA government went some way in restoring secular faith. The first was the decision to undo the creeping Hinduization of curricula in the educational system. Under Murli Manohar Joshi, a BJP politician with close links to the RSS/VHP, the Human Resources Development Ministry of the NDA government launched a campaign to “saffronize” (Hinduize) all levels of education by revising textbooks, instituting regulatory changes, and appointing sympathetic officials to key positions. The new textbooks published in 2002 and 2003 immediately became the subject of criticism for their innumerable distortions of history and, above all, the Hindutva perspective embedded in the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2000 for primary and secondary education that was also the basis of the new school textbooks.34 Both the NCF and the textbooks were subsequently withdrawn by the UPA government. The second decision was the landmark Sachar Committee report that highlighted the development deficit and deprivation of the Muslim community and its neglect at the hands of successive governments, thus exposing the hollowness of the propaganda that Muslims are being appeased.35 Despite this promising start, however, the UPA government failed to provide relief or bring justice to the victims of the 2002 Gujarat violence, barring the one inquiry into the Godhra incident instituted by the Ministry of Railways. Earlier Gujarat even failed to find a mention in Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh’s first address to the nation. Overall, the politics and strategy of the UPA government (2004–2009) could not overcome the weakness of secular practice arising from its lack of political will and inability to stand up to religious politics. The task is by no means easy as can be seen from a brief discussion of two recent episodes that underline the difficulties in the attempt to disentangle politics from religion.

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Two Recent Episodes The government’s stand on the Sethusamudram project controversy is a case in point. First proposed in 1841, this project envisages dredging a coral walkway between India and Sri Lanka to reduce sailing time for ships. Currently, ships have to navigate around the Sri Lankan coast to reach destinations in the east of India. Once completed, this project is expected to boost maritime trade by providing considerable economic activity in the region and saving crucial time and money for movement from the East and West coasts of India. All parties in Tamil Nadu, except one, have actively supported it and the major objections based primarily on environmental impact have fallen by the wayside. There were no objections to the project on grounds of religious sentiment until recent faith-based opposition by certain Hindu groups. 36 In September 2007, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court regarding the Sethusamudram project to continue dredging on the grounds that Ram Sethu, also known as Adam’s Bridge, was not an “essential” and “integral part of Hindu religion,” which alone would warrant protection by the constitution. This affidavit raised doubts about Ramayana, an epic Hindu poem, and the link between Lord Ram and Ram Sethu. “We are not destroying any bridge. There is no bridge. It was not a man-made structure. It may be superman made structure, but the same superman destroyed it. That is why for centuries nobody mentioned anything about it. It (Ram Sethu) has become an object of worship only recently.”37 These statements provoked a public outcry that led to the withdrawal of the affidavit. 38 The government accepted a court’s recommendation to strike a balance between “faith and logic” by exploring alternative routes for the shipping channel to spare any damage to the Ram Sethu, considered holy by many Hindus. The Sethusamudram issue quickly moved from the margins to center stage of national debate after the Hindu organizations protested against the project and demanded that Ram Sethu be declared an ancient monument. The BJP accused the UPA government of attempting to abuse and hurt Hindu sentiments when the government suggested there was no proof of Ram Sethu as a place of worship. The party asked whether the government would have made “such derogatory comments about the symbols and beliefs of other faiths.”39 According to the BJP, the UPA government, by denying the historicity of Ram, was endorsing an irreligious brand of secularism that is more anti-Hindu than antireligion. In the words of the opposition BJP leader, L. K. Advani, “the government has sought to negate all that the Hindus consider sacred . . . and wounded the very idea of India.” The contention was that real secularism,

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as opposed to pseudo-secularism (practiced by the Congress), cannot be irreligious, or hostile to Hinduism because India is quintessentially Hindu. The ASI’s affidavit had limited itself to rejecting the claim that scriptures or mythological texts such as the Ramayana constitute historical proof that Ram Sethu is a manmade structure and not to belittling the importance of Ram in Indian culture.40 The affidavit was on strong ground when it stated that it was not a manmade structure but “a natural formation made up of shoals and sandbars.” However, statements that questioned the veracity of Ramayana or the occurrence of events in the text went beyond the requirements of the case. It is these overreaching statements that sparked an outcry of protest. Even if the ASI had been more diplomatic in its wording of the affidavit, it is highly unlikely that it would have restrained the strident protests of the Hindu right. Clearly, the BJP leadership chose to take offence not only because they have little respect for the complexity and diversity of the Hindu tradition, but because they believe that Hindu sensibilities, concerns, and sentiment must be accorded special respect and primacy in India because Hindus form a majority of its population.41 Congress, fearing a possible backlash, did an about face over the project, despite its earlier claim that opposition to this project on lines of faith was “misconceived and unsubstantiated.”42 It took measures to withdraw the objectionable paragraph (affirming the bridge was a geological, not manmade, formation) that it had submitted before the Supreme Court.43 In so doing the Center said, “it has total respect for all religions, and Hinduism in particular, in the context of the present case. The Central government is alive and conscious of the religious sensibilities, including the unique, ancient and holy text of Ramayana.”44 The Union Law Minister went a step further to say, “Lord Ram is an integral part of Indian culture and ethos and cannot be subject matter of litigation in court . . . We have equal faith in Ram or Shiva.”45 In effect, he was making a case that the viability of the project should be judged not on economic or environmental grounds, but should consider mythological concerns as well. An editorial in a leading newspaper observed that “the secular credentials of the Indian state have just taken another knock . . . Respecting one’s right to religious belief is not the same as allowing the right to override the secular character of the Indian state. Indian secularism is not irreligious. But it is also not about equating mythology and geology.”46 None of the constituents of the UPA, with the exception of one party in alliance with the ruling Congress party, spoke up to defend the ASI

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affidavit or to question the BJP, under whose government at the Center the Sethusamudram project was originally approved. In fact, most of them questioned the government’s wisdom of gratuitously interfering in matters of faith. This controversy reflects the difficult balance that the Congress has had to strike between protecting secular values and at the same time trying not to hurt or offend majority sentiment or vocal segments of it. The Congress party’s statement claimed that the prompt withdrawal of the affidavit reflected the party’s sensitivity to matters of personal belief and faith unmindful of the fact that this proposition violated the constitutional imperative of secularism, which requires that we attempt a basic separation of religion from politics, and more narrowly, that we do not favor or privilege any religion. This is a reflection of the fragility of the secular ethos of parties such as the Congress when it finds itself under attack from the BJP that seeks to use issues that appeal to religious sentiment. Appeals to majoritarian sentiment tend to benefit the BJP, and not the Congress. Yet, Congress was unable to either confront the Hindu right or its claims of tolerance in this regard.47 A similar pattern can be observed in the M. F. Husain controversy. The same balancing act was evident in dealing with the attacks by right-wing Hindu organizations on Maqbool Fida Husain, one of India’s most distinguished and celebrated painters whose work represents an intense engagement with modernism and popular culture. Although the issue was a relatively minor one, it has important implications for the political practice of secularism, which was increasingly torn by imperatives to sustain secular principles of cultural freedom and the compulsions of political pragmatism. The Hindutva campaign against Husain started in September 1996, when an RSS controlled Hindi magazine, Vichar Mimansa, published sections of Husain’s paintings with provocative titles given to them by the magazine. In response, activists of the Hindu right barged into the Herwitz gallery in Ahmedabad to destroy his paintings for allegedly offending religious sensibilities and insulting Bharat Mata (Mother India) and Hindu gods and goddesses. An earlier untitled painting by Husain, which passed into a private collection before entering the public domain in 2006, under the title of Bharat Mata, was ostensibly the source of offence. Husain apologized, saying that it was not his intention to hurt religious feelings, even as his lawyers clarified that he had not, in fact, christened the painting, and that the name Bharat Mata had been given by the gallery without his knowledge.48 The artist was threatened, his Mumbai residence was ransacked, and his exhibitions were vandalized. Gallery owners were eventually forced to withdraw it from the bidding process. In 2004 Bajrang Dal and VHP activists

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attacked an art gallery in Surat to vandalize his art works. In addition, dozens of criminal cases were filed resulting in many non-bailable warrants. The anti-Husain campaign made deft use of social intimidation tactics to harass Husain, and he was eventually compelled to seek refuge in a distant country rather than risk the possibility of arrest and prolonged detention.49 The turning point came in May 2007 after the Home Ministry advised the police chiefs of Delhi and Mumbai to take appropriate action against the artist. This was in response to a letter from L. K. Advani accusing the UPA government of double standards in that they sought to pacify Muslims protesting against the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, yet they refused to pay heed to the hurt sentiments of Hindu groups offended by Husain’s paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses. The Home Ministry issued an advisory that all complaints against him in any part of the country would be investigated and ensured its wide publicity by having it prominently published in the Hindustan Times newspaper. This advisory has made it impossible for Husain to return to the country. It is significant that the Home Ministry took no cognizance of the protests by liberal and secular forces against the demonization of the artist, but took immediate notice of the BJP leader’s protest to issue an advisory. Ironically, all this was happening when the Congress was in power and Husain was always close to the party. 50 Even worse, the UPA government chose not to rally for the inclusion of Husain’s works at an Art Summit in Delhi in August 2008 when the organizers decided to leave out his works for fear of a backlash and vandalism. On the other hand, in 2008, Hindu extremists smashed prints and photographs on display at an exhibition organized by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), a platform for concerned artists and academics, to protest against his exclusion from the Art Summit, supported by the Union Ministry of Culture. This fiasco, as indeed the entire approach to Husain’s self-imposed exile, underlines the tensions within secularism and the deeper fissures in the polity regarding the ideals enshrined in the constitution and politics of accommodation. It is worth noting that the controversy was not created by Husain himself as he had been painting gods and goddesses for a long time. Rather, at some point the Hindu right decided to target him to dramatize their opposition to secular cultural hegemony. He was a prime target because he is a Muslim who had dared to produce a body of work suffused with the iconography of the Hindu pantheon. 51 But the attack on him had nothing to with his iconography or the protection of Hinduism. The protestors were using Husain’s name and fame to politicize and mobilize Hindu cadres. However, the more important point

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is that the government, instead of providing protection, seemed to be giving in to the extremists out of fear of being branded anti-Hindu and thus seen to be appeasing Muslims. Consequently, Husain was left to the mercy of courts and police investigators while the government was not prepared to defend the rule of law. This once again underlines the government’s ambivalent stand on freedom of speech and expression and the reticence of the Congress to take a principled stand to protect the basic tenets of the constitution. As ever, the party wants to be all things to all people, but given the opposition it faces from the BJP it frequently tilts toward making an adjustment with majority sentiment to offset the BJP’s charge of minority appeasement. An analysis of the Sethusamudram and Husain controversies not only highlights the ambivalence of the Congress but it also underlines important differences between Congress and BJP perspectives on secularism, pluralism, and nationalism. Although Congress is often tentative in its defense of secular principles, the party is not inherently communal or majoritarian. Congress leaders could plausibly argue that such instances of compromise and vacillation were momentary aberrations. By contrast, the BJP’s brand of majoritarian nationalism organizes politics around emotionally charged religious issues and actively promotes an idea of India that conflates religious identity with national identity. The party’s identity is crucially dependent on the presence of Muslims as the “other” and a Hinduism forever beleaguered by Islam. By contrast, the Congress party has nothing in common with the homogenizing nationalism of the Sangh Parivar. Historically, the uniqueness of the Congress position lay in its near complete freedom from any mystical notions of national essence that are the stock in trade of narrower nationalisms that succeeded in aligning their states with faith as in the case of Sri Lanka or Serbia. 52 To mobilize large masses of people under the nationalist banner, the Congress, whether by design or by default, replaced cultural notions with colonial exploitation and subjugation during the anticolonial movement. To say all this is not to deny that Congress has often failed to differentiate its position from that of the BJP for fear of offending Hindu sentiments. Secular parties lack the political courage to tackle communal elements head-on. This includes communal elements in the minority communities as well. Conservative and reactionary figures among Muslims are accorded importance on the baseless assumption that they are the true representatives of the followers of their faith. Instead of reinforcing its own tradition of defending secularism and deriving strength from the support that secularism enjoys in the large mass of Indian society, a sizeable section of the Congress party has either tried to appropriate the communal discourse or migrated to the communal camp.

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Conclusion At a deeper level both episodes show that separation of religion and politics requires an ideological countervailing force that the Congress party—as the principal secular political force—sometimes is unable to provide. If the flip-flop strategy of the Congress offers any lesson, it is that ideas and challenges emanating from majoritarian politics cannot be countered by compromise or conciliation. Congress cannot effectively counter the Hindu right as long as it remains unconvinced that secularism is not only the right moral response but also the politically winning one. In this regard, Mani Shankar Aiyar rightly remarked when the BJP won the parliamentary elections in 1998–1999 that the “real danger before the country is not a BJP electoral victory. The real danger lies in the rest of us seeking to thwart the rise in electoral support of the BJP by becoming pale imitations of the original.”53 But this again is a long-term problem: so long as there are sufficient votes in such divisive politics, political parties are not going to abstain from using them. Much depends on the Congress party being able to mobilize the political will to take a firm stand against the practitioners and purveyors of polarization and violence without fearing that it will alienate the majority community from the party. Since the emergence of the BJP as a formidable political force, the Congress has sometimes found it difficult to draw the line especially as it tries to appropriate the positions of the BJP. In both episodes the UPA government dithered between secular principles, on the one hand, and not hurting majority sentiments, on the other, and erred on the side of the latter. Both the Husain and Sethusamudram controversies exemplify the failure to act decisively against communal elements that has weakened the capacity to uphold the original commitment to provide secular and democratic governance. That said, it would be grossly misleading to suggest that these two episodes constitute a retreat from secularism or that they are predictable responses arising from the conceptual structure of Indian secularism. On the face of it, political secularism has not performed its principal function to limit the role of religion in politics and in conflicts between communities. But nonetheless, it is important to remember that a secular state has survived in a deeply religious society and in a context in which ethnic nationalism remains a powerful force in the world and especially in India’s neighborhood. The stunning verdict in favor of secular parties and government in two successive parliamentary elections (2004 and 2009) indicates the strong support for secularism in India. Overall, Nehruvian secularism is a resilient force and still offers the most credible and viable way of building a secular democracy in an extraordinarily diverse society such as India.

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Notes 1. See, for instance, Gyan Prakash, “Secular Nationalism, Hindutva and the Minority,” in The Crisis of Secularism in India, ed. Anuradha Digwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), 177–188. 2. See articles in Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998) and also in Anuradha Digwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds., The Crisis of Secularism in India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007). 3. The RSS (National Volunteers Organization) was founded in Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Also known as the Sangh, it is a Hindu revivalist organization associated with Hindu militant movements. The RSS is a conservative and reactionary organization that represents a form of militant Hindu nationalism. It suffered a severe setback in 1948–1949 because of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by one of its members (Nathuram Godse). Jawaharlal Nehru banned the RSS in 1948. 4. Needham and Rajan, 21. 5. For a lucid account of political secularism see Rajeev Bhargava, “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,” in The Future of Secularism, ed. T. N. Srinivasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6. The writings of these authors are included in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics. 7. Bhargava, “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism,” 20. 8. For a critique of the positions of Nandy, Madan, and Chatterjee, see chapter four of Achin Vanaik’s Communalism Contested: Religion, Modernity and Secularization (Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997). 9. Ibid., 188. 10. Ibid., 153. 11. Ibid. 12. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Women between Community and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates in India,” Social Text 18, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 55–82. 13. Rajeev Bhargava, “Liberal, Secular Democracy and Explanations of Hindu Nationalism,” Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 3 (2002): 92. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 93. 16. For a discussion of this interconnection see Sumit Sarkar, “Indian Democracy: The Historical Inheritance,” in The Success of India Democracy, ed. Atul Kohli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23–46. 17. Ibid., 39. 18. K. N. Panikkar, “Secularism in Practice,” The Hindu, March 15, 2005. 19. Bhargava, “Liberal, Secular Democracy.” 20. For an elaboration of the Indian model of secularism and its universality see Bhargava, “The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism.” 21. Ibid., 35–36.

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22. The Indian courts have outlined areas in which the freedom of religion is not absolute. Article 17 abolishes untouchability and makes it an offense punishable by law. Practice of untouchability cannot be protected under article 25. Land can be acquired under article 31, despite the fact that it might be part of religious endowment. Article 25’s limitation on religious freedom exemplifies the constitutional need to accommodate the state’s provision for social welfare and reform. 23. Mukul Kesavan, “Naming the Enemy,” The Hindu, September 16, 2001. 24. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Congress, Secularism and Freedom,” Seminar 526 (June 2003): 26–30. 25. Mukul Kesavan, Secular Common Sense (Delhi: Penguin India, 1998), 3. 26. Ibid. 27. Mani Shankar Aiyar, “Can the Congress Find a Future,” Seminar 526 (June 2003): 14–22. 28. Francine Frankel, India’s Political Economy, The Gradual Revolution, 1947– 2004, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 664–665. 29. Sumit Ganguly, “The Crisis of Indian Secularism,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 4 (2003): 11–25. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 16–20. 32. Ibid. 33. Arundhati Roy, “Let Us Hope the Darkness Has Passed,” Guardian, May 14, 2004. 34. See Mushirul Hasan, “The BJP’s Intellectual Agenda,” in Will Secular India Survive, ed. Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: ImprintOne, 2004), 157–176. 35. Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh constituted a High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India. The committee chaired by Rajender Sachar, and charged with investigating the socioeconomic status of Muslims, submitted its report to the prime minister in November 2006. The Sachar Committee Report (SCR) found stark underrepresentation of Muslims and systematic evidence to show that they are an underclass on par with the lowest Hindu caste groups. It showed that in the twenty-odd years since the submission of the report of a High Power Panel on Minorities, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Weaker Sections (1983) appointed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the central government and those of the states have done very little to rectify the backwardness and underrepresentation of Muslims. 36. The Hindu, September 15, 2007. 37. Ibid. 38. The Economic Times, October 15, 2008. 39. Ibid. 40. Praful Bidwai, “The Question of Faith,” Frontline 24, no. 18 (September 22–October 25, 2007). 41. Ibid. 42. The Indian Express, July 23, 2008. 43. The Indian Express, September 15, 2007. 44. Associated News of India (ANI), February 22, 2008.

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45. The Times of India, September 14, 2007. 46. Editorial, “Myth or Reality,” The Times of India, September 15, 2007. 47. Mahesh Rangarajan, “A Bridge Too Far,” The Telegraph, September 18, 2007. 48. Rajeev Dhavan, Harassing Husain: Uses and Abuses of the Law of Hate Speech (Delhi: Sahmat, 2007). 49. Ibid. 50. Husain’s painting of Indira Gandhi as Goddess Durga earned him the title of “court painter” during the Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977. 51. Ram Rahman, “MF Hussain: Why Is He in Exile?” Indian Express, September 15, 2007. 52. Kesavan, “Naming the Enemy.” 53. Mani Shankar Aiyar, Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist (Delhi: Penguin, 2006).

Part III

Secularisms Refracted through Religions

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Chapter 12 Islam and Secularism Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im

Introduction The premise of this chapter is that Islam is consistent with the secular state, defined as neutral regarding all religious doctrine, because the neutrality of the state is more likely to facilitate the authenticity of the religious experience of believers by conviction and free choice. In my view, the notion of an Islamic state is conceptually incoherent, historically unprecedented, and practically unviable. I am not suggesting that Muslim ruling elites never claimed that their state was or is Islamic, or that the general Muslim public has always been clear on the true nature of the state. If this was the case there would be no need for me to make this argument. What I am suggesting is that claims that the state is or can be Islamic are false, and that upon reflection Muslims in general would accept the point I am making. Instead of trying to summarize in this brief chapter the whole theory, as presented elsewhere,1 my purpose here is to argue that the sort of secular state that is compatible with Islam and therefore more likely to be accepted by Muslims is one that is characterized by what I call “weak” secularism. This version of secularism is more characteristic of India and the United States than of France and Turkey. Its defining feature is a willingness to acknowledge and mediate a positive role for religion in public life, instead of attempting to suppress or control religion. This is not easy to do in practice, but should at least be the objective. However, as states are deeply historical and contextual, with each being specific to its own society, I am not calling for the Indian or American models to be copied by other countries. The quality of being secular is often defined or described in contrast to being religious. 2 Since it is impossible to define what is religious in universal terms, the definition of the two terms becomes circular, whereby each is the opposite of the other. Beyond such difficulties, it is unwise in my view to contrast the religious and secular. Regarding the state in particular, it cannot be religious because it is a political institution that is

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incapable of religious belief or practice. It is incoherent to define the state in contradistinction to what it cannot be anyway. More broadly, it is misleading to contrast the religious and secular in such binary terms because they are in fact mutually interdependent. For Muslims in particular, such a binary distinction tends to confirm their worst apprehensions about the secular state as “anti-religious.” In this light, the question is how can the secular state be understood apart from being the opposite of the religious? What are the characteristic features of a secular state, and how is it distinguishable from other types of states? The response I propose to argue for from an Islamic perspective can be stated as follows. To perform its necessary functions, the state must be neutral regarding religious doctrine, while recognizing and regulating the equally necessary connection between religion and politics. This can best be done, I believe, by a deeply contextual, normatively minimalist secularism of the state as a necessary though insufficient condition for securing the space for the robust and civil debates of pluralism. Conversely, a broader, normatively assertive, and ideologically prescriptive secularism of the Turkish and French variety is in fact counterproductive for inclusive pluralism as a framework for self-determination. The argument for the sort of secular state I am calling for can be made at several levels and for a variety of reasons. First at a personal level, I need a secular state to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, while respecting the right of others to subscribe to whatever religious or other belief they wish. More fundamentally, the secular state is a necessary means to facilitate the full potential and flourishing of human life, which is a matter of free and sustained self-determination. Second, at a social and political level, the secular state is necessary for achieving sustained pluralism as distinguished from merely factual demographic diversity. To enable political community in the reality of religious and moral diversity, the state should make minimal moral claims as necessary for keeping the peace and providing essential services. The minimal secularism of the state I am calling for to ensure and facilitate a public role for religion is necessary because society needs the moral depth of religion as a resource for public policy, and as a basis for individual as well as collective self-determination for citizens who happen to be believers. Moreover, since the legitimacy of the secular state among believers depends on its ability to mediate the public role of religion, rather than relegate religion to the so-called private domain, it is misleading and counterproductive to define the secular state by the negative quality of being the opposite of religious. It is equally important to emphasize that the dynamic and multiple role of religion for believers should never be at the expense of unbelievers. It is as wrong to deny unbelievers their commitment to whatever beliefs they choose to adopt as it is to impose those beliefs on believers.

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However difficult it may be to achieve and maintain this balance in practice, there is simply no viable alternative. As Charles Taylor argues, The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?3

It is especially important to avoid the collapse of religion and the state because of the inherently nonnegotiable nature of religious claims, in contrast to other philosophies and ideologies. Moreover, I would emphasize that even the religious convictions of citizens, when reflected in state law and policy should not be framed as religious. Attributing the quality of religion itself to state laws and policy is not only alienating for nonbelievers, but it also makes it harder for Muslims to accept change or amendment of those laws and policies through the regular democratic process. It is therefore wiser to refrain from identifying laws and policies in religious terms, though different groups of citizens may ground their political views and choices in terms of their own religion or philosophy. In short, I am proposing that weak secularism of the state is necessary for a principled and consistent commitment to pluralism as a political and legal framework for enabling individual and collective self-determination, including freedom of religion. Weak secularism makes the least normative claims that are necessary for sustaining pluralism without violating the neutrality of the state regarding religious doctrine. This is not to suggest that the state can or should be neutral in all matters, because the performance of its legitimate functions, like keeping the peace and providing essential services, requires it to make choices among competing views (which are, of course, subject to the safeguards of constitutionalism, human rights, and equal citizenship for all). The secular state must be historical and deeply contextual if it is to secure self-determination for each particular population, which is inherently undermined by any prescriptive or preconceived blueprint of a secular state. It is of course possible to engage in comparative analysis of similarities and differences among various experiences with the secular state, but that is different from using any one historical embodiment of the secular state as normative or representative of the secular state for all others.

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An Analytical Model of Weak Secularism The objective of my proposed theory of the relationship among Islam, state, and society is to ensure the institutional separation of Islam and the state, despite the organic and unavoidable connection between Islam and politics. The first part of this proposition sounds like secularism as commonly understood today, but the second part indicates the opposite. This relationship is always the product of a constant and deeply contextual negotiation, rather than the subject of a fixed formula of either total separation or complete fusion of religion and the state. The paradox of the separation of religion and the state and the connection of religion and politics can only be mediated through practice over time, rather than completely resolved by theoretical analysis or stipulation. The question is how to create the most conducive conditions for this mediation to continue in a constructive fashion, rather than hope to resolve the paradox once and for all. The two poles of this necessary mediation in the case of Islam can be clarified as follows. First, the modern territorial state should neither seek to enforce Shari’a as positive law and public policy, nor claim to interpret its doctrine and general principles for Muslim citizens. Second, Shari’a principles can and should be a source of public policy and legislation, subject to the fundamental constitutional and human rights of all citizens, men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims equally and without discrimination. In other words, Shari’a principles are neither privileged by being enforced as such by the state nor necessarily excluded as a possible source of state law and policy. The belief of even the vast majority of citizens that these principles are binding as a matter of Islamic religious obligation is not sufficient reason for their enforcement by the state as such, though Shari’a continues to be the basis of individual and collective observance among believers. The rationale of all public policy and legislation should always be based on what might be called “civic reason.”4 Muslims and other believers should be able to propose policy and legislative initiatives emanating from their religious beliefs, provided they can support their proposals in public, free and open debate by reasons that are accessible and convincing to the generality of citizens, regardless of their religion or other beliefs. But since all decisions about policy and legislation are in practice made by majority vote in accordance with democratic principles, all state action must also conform to basic constitutional and human rights safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. In this way, claims that particular policy or legislation is supported by civic reason cannot override objections that it violates the fundamental requirements of equality and nondiscrimination. It is not possible, nor desirable in my view, for the people of any society to keep their religious beliefs, commitments, concerns, and doubts

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out of their political choices and decisions. It is healthier and more practical to recognize and regulate the role of religion as a legitimate source for informing political decisions than to force religious reasoning into the domain of secretive politics, and thereby constrain or distort the political participation of believers. It is also necessary to challenge the superiority of an abstract notion of a purely secular reasoning over a religious reasoning, as if the former is rational and scientific, while the latter is irrational and superstitious. The categories of understanding people employ in their everyday lives cannot neatly be compartmentalized into mutually exclusive secular and religious realms.5 It is equally important to emphasize that the model of secularism I am proposing does not accord less value to secular modes of being and thinking in the world than to religious modes. The object is to respect both types of approaches to life, and to bring people who hold them into mutually respectful interaction, rather than to privilege one over the other. This is why I distinguish between Islam and the state, on the one hand, and Islam and politics, on the other, to ensure institutional separation in the first relationship and to regulate continued connectedness in the second. Securing institutional separation of Islam and the state is necessary for affirming and regulating the relationship between Islam and politics to ensure that the religious convictions of the majority of the population are not imposed on the minority except by their own free and voluntary acceptance through civic reason. Majority rule is always subject to the human rights of every single citizen, even if those rights are not asserted in practice. The proposed framework seeks to establish a sustainable and legitimate conceptual and institutional structure for an ongoing process, where perception of Shari’a and its interaction with principles of secularism, constitutionalism, and democratic governance can be negotiated and debated among different interlocutors in each society. In all societies, Western and non-Western, the interaction of these principles is a highly contextual formation, contingent on sociological and historical conditions, and entrenched through specific norms of cultural legitimacy. In this gradual and tentative process of consensus-building through civic reason, various combinations of persons and groups of different religious or philosophical persuasion may agree on one issue but disagree on another. Alliances among different constituencies may succeed or fail in achieving the adoption of some policy or legislation by the state, but none of that will be permanent and conclusive. Whatever happens to be the substantive outcome of political strategies regarding any issue, it is made by and can change through a process of civic reason that is equally accessible to all citizens. Shari’a principles should not be presented for enactment into law only because Muslims believe them to be binding because that claim cannot be the subject of civic reason, whereby all citizens can freely debate the issues

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and negotiate the outcomes. It is true that people will always disagree about reasons and their rationale, but for the purposes of public policy and legislation that is binding on all citizens reasoning should always be open to debate and contestation among all citizens. This is not possible when the reasons and their rationale for the position of one side are simply assertions of their religious conviction or ideological imperative. For the success of the proposed framework, it is necessary that the state does not itself join as a partisan in the negotiation of the role of Islam and Shari’a in the community. Since the state and its institutions are not human agents who can act, any action taken in the name of the state is in fact that of the officials who control and operate the relevant organs of the state. This reality only emphasizes the imperative of neutrality of all state institutions and actors on matters of religious doctrine and practice in the community. The state should also not intervene in civic reason on the basis of nonreligious or secular rationale, except to uphold the constitutional and other safeguards of free and fair debate and contestation. In other words, the role of state institutions as such should be limited to protecting civic reason and adjudicating dispute according to established constitutional and judicial criteria and process. This does not mean that the state will actually be completely neutral in these matters because that is not possible for the human beings who act in the name of the state. Rather, my point is that state neutrality should be the objective that all actors and institutional safeguards should strive to achieve. The neutrality of the state must be pursued through a variety of safeguards and processes of political and legal accountability for any degree of neutrality to materialize. The critical and delicate role of the state is the reason why the distinction between state and politics is both necessary and difficult to maintain. In fact, the necessity and difficulty of achieving and sustaining this balance are related because the state itself is a political institution. The distinction between state and politics in any society will not be a permanently settled boundary and will vary depending on the government in power at any time. These considerations remind us of the critical role of institutional and normative safeguards such as constitutionalism, human rights, and citizenship as the essential framework for civic reason. That said, it is unrealistic to expect people to fully comply with the requirements of civic reason, because such choices are made within the realm of inner motivation and intentions. It is difficult to tell why people vote in a particular way or justify their political agenda to themselves or to their close associates. The requirement of civic reason and reasoning processes does not assume that people who control the state can be neutral. On the contrary, this requirement must be the objective of the operation of the state precisely because people are likely to continue to act on personal beliefs or justifications. The requirement to publicly and openly present justifications

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that are based on reasons that the generality of the population can freely accept or reject will over time encourage and develop a broader consensus among the population at large, beyond the narrow religious or other beliefs of various individuals and groups. It is also relevant to note here that the ability to present public reasons and debate them publicly is already present in most societies, and what I am calling for is its further development consciously and incrementally, over time, rather than suggesting that it is totally absent now or expecting it to be fully realized immediately.

Further Reflections: Secularism as Mediation Muslims tend to be apprehensive about the term “secularism,” which they associate with hostility to religion. Yet, many Islamic societies, from Senegal to Turkey to Central, South and Southeastern Asia, have apparently accepted the term “secularism” in their own domestic constitutional and political discourse. Although the meaning and implications of such usage must be understood and assessed in relation to each particular case, the general currency of the term makes it useful for comparative reflection. It should also be noted that the term carries a wide variety of meanings, including decline of religion, conformity to the present world, disengagement or differentiation of society from religion, shifts from the source of divine power to phenomena of human capability and creation, and “desacralization” or “sacralization” of rationality. The cluster of meanings associated with the term varies by society at different moments, and by different groups within each society. Hence for our purposes here, the point is that any conception of secularism is so contested within and among different societies that there is simply no uniform systematic model that fits the wide variety of meanings and experiences of different societies. I am therefore presenting a model of secularism as a framework for mediating permanent tensions in the relationship between religion and the state on the one hand, and the connectedness of religion and politics, on the other. Any conception of secularism will necessarily be multidimensional, reflecting elements of the historical, political, social, and economic landscape of each country. Accordingly, secularism for various Islamic societies must account for the religious dimension of the lives of local communities, instead of being seen as an effort to impose preconceived notions of categorical relegation of religion to the private domain. The notion of secularism as mediation confronts a permanent paradox: on the one hand, the various organs and institutions of the state are conceived and operated everywhere by persons whose religious or philosophical beliefs will necessarily be reflected in their thinking and behavior. Yet, ruling elites will probably attempt to impose their religious views on others, perhaps in the

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name of majority rule or divine command, but to the severe detriment of political stability, fundamental human rights, and social justice in the country. In my view, the tension between such competing claims should be acknowledged and mediated, instead of insisting on the illusion of either complete separation or total fusion of religion and state. Allowing religious principles to play a positive role in public life without permitting them to be implemented as such through law and policy is a delicate balance that each society must strive to maintain for itself over time. For example, such matters as dress style and religious education will normally remain in the realm of free choice, but can also be the subject of public debate, even constitutional litigation, to balance competing claims. This can happen, for instance, regarding dress requirements for safety in the work place or the need for comparative and critical religious education in state schools to enhance religious tolerance and secularism. I am not suggesting that the context and conditions of free choice of dress or religious education will not be controversial. In fact, such matters are likely to be very complex at a personal and societal level. Rather, my concern is with ensuring, as far as humanly possible, fair, open, and inclusive conditions for the negotiation of public policy in such matters. These conditions, for instance, are to be secured through the entrenchment of such fundamental rights of persons and communities as the right to education and freedom of religion and expression, on the one hand, and due consideration for legitimate public interests or concerns, on the other. There is no simple or categorical formula to be prescribed for automatic application in every case, though general principles and broader frameworks for the mediation of such issues will emerge and continue to evolve within each society. Another aspect of the notion of mediation is that the ability of secularism to politically unite people of divergent religious and philosophical commitments depends on its making minimal moral claims on the community and its members. It is true that secularism should not be completely morally neutral, as it must encourage a certain civic ethos to achieve its own objective of safeguarding inclusive pluralism. It is also possible for minimal moral neutrality to evolve into stronger consensus on some public policy and legislative choices. In practice, however, the ability of secularism to politically unite diverse communities diminishes to the degree that it is taken to require specific outcomes of some morally divisive issues. In fact, the more morally charged an issue, the greater its threat to the credibility of a view of secularism that seeks to prescribe the answer. The point can perhaps be illustrated with reference to controversies over abortion or euthanasia. On the one hand, the imperative of separation of religion and the state would preclude the implementation of a policy outcome that is based on purely religious doctrine. On the other hand, denying those believers the right to express their views on such matters in religious terms would undermine their commitment to

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the principle of secularism. The challenge is how to permit religious discourse among those who wish to engage in it, while ensuring that public policy and legislation in all matters are based on civic reason, especially if they are highly morally charged. It is also important to challenge the fallacy of a binary distinction between the religious and secular, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, because the meaning and relevance of religion to believers is in their every day “secular” lives. It is unrealistic to view these two dimensions of human experience in strict separation since religious considerations often provide the moral foundations of public policy, even in so-called secularized societies. Questions of public policy, such as how to determine fair and equitable grounds for legal dissolution of marriage, division of matrimonial property, or how to adjudicate custody of children after divorce, necessarily draw on moral and ethical underpinnings that are strongly influenced, if not definitively shaped, by religion in any society. Secularism, as simply the separation of religion and the state, is not only incapable of meeting the collective requirements of public policy, but it also fails to provide sufficient guidance for individual citizens in making important personal choices in their private lives or public political participation. I am not of course suggesting that religion is the sole basis of morality for all people, but it is certainly of paramount importance in the moral reflection of believers, who remain the majority in most societies today. A perception of secularism as simply the separation of religion and the state is not sufficient for addressing any objections or reservations believers may have about specific constitutional norms and human rights standards. For example, since discrimination against women is often justified on religious grounds in Islamic societies, this source of systematic and gross violation of human rights cannot be eliminated without addressing the commonly perceived religious rationale. This must also be done without violating freedom of religion or belief for Muslims, which is also a fundamental human right. Although a secular discourse in terms of separation of religion and the state can be respectful of religious sensibilities, it is unlikely to succeed in rebutting religious justifications of discrimination without invoking a religious argument against discrimination. In contrast, including a public role for religion can encourage and facilitate internal debate and dissent within religious traditions that can overcome such religiously based objections. Requiring the state to be neutral regarding religion precludes use of the coercive power of the state to suppress debate and dissent, but that safe space still needs to be actively used by citizens to promote religious views that support equality for women and other human rights. Moreover, religious discourse is needed for promoting the legitimacy of the doctrine of separation of religion and the state itself, as well as other general principles of constitutionalism and human rights.

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Concluding Remarks: Comparative Reflection There is a dialectic relationship between local deeply contextual experience of various societies and universal norms or principles that can be extrapolated from those experiences. For instance, there is no universally shared “blueprint” of what concepts such as secularism, constitutionalism, citizenship, and civic reason mean. Whatever generalizations we can make about these and related ideas are based on comparative reflection upon actual experiences, after the fact and over long periods of time. No society or region of the world has the power or authority to define these concepts for others, but all societies can and do learn from each other’s experiences, even when that is not realized or acknowledged. The balance of power and differential in resources, which is currently still in favor of Western over non-Western societies, may make it harder to appreciate these realities of autonomy and interdependence of human societies. The point I am trying to make may be clearer when we consider the longer range of human history, but it can also be observed in our daily experiences of resisting coercive imposition, while accepting friendly and respectful efforts to influence our views or behavior. In this light, any relevant idea and argument in the debate about a secular state, constitutionalism, democracy, and so forth, in Islamic settings should not be reduced to misleading and untenable dichotomies of “Western” and “non-Western” concepts and institutions. These debates in any part of the world are about the achievement of shared visions of human dignity and social justice under similar conditions in the present local and global context. There is also a long history of exchange of ideas and experiences among a wide variety of religious and cultural communities, regardless of perceptions of internal or external origins or pedigree of those influences. While elites or ideologues may assert fundamental difference between “them” and “us,” there has always been profound dialogue and exchange across ancient and medieval civilizations, into the colonial and postcolonial era. There are and will be in the future some Muslims and non-Muslims who will insist on the “them and us” dichotomy, indeed, those holding confrontational and competitive attitudes tend to seek out and promote their counterpart on each side of this imagined divide. To reiterate, the model I am proposing is closer to the forms of secularism located in India and the United States than to those of Turkey and France. However, the deeply contextual and historical nature of secularism everywhere not only precludes imposing the experience of one society on another, as emphasized earlier, but also indicates that the experience of the same country can change over time.6 The distinction between weak and strong secularism I am employing is sometimes expressed in terms of

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passive and assertive secularism: Passive secularism, which requires that the secular state play a “passive” role in avoiding the establishment of any religions, allows for the public visibility of religion. Assertive secularism, by contrast, means that the state excludes religion from the public sphere and plays an “assertive” role as the agent of a social engineering project that confines religion to the private domain. Thus, passive secularism is a pragmatic political principle that tries to maintain state neutrality toward various religions, whereas assertive secularism is a “comprehensive doctrine” that aims to eliminate religion from the public sphere.7

The concept of weak secularism I have outlined in this chapter can also be called passive secularism, provided the objective of promoting pluralism is emphasized. As I emphasized at the beginning, the problem with assertive/strong secularism is that it fails to take seriously the challenge of pluralism to facilitate constant negotiation and contestation among different views in society, including religious perspectives. Assertive secularism diminishes possibilities of inclusive pluralistic discourse and favors a monolithic secular discourse, thereby undermining the individual and collective right to self-determination of religious believers. In proposing state neutrality regarding religion in the interest of pluralism, I would also note that neutrality and pluralism are not contextually independent concepts—their meaning and practice are outcomes of constant negotiations and contestations among social and political actors operating and interacting in local contexts. To take the call for a historically contextual secularism seriously is to focus on how locally defined notions of neutrality and pluralism interact in practice to enable people to negotiate difficult moral issues like abortion, or urgent practical questions like religious education, matters of dress and lifestyle. Moreover, since no community remains static, and communities can change significantly and rapidly in the present globalized context, one should expect the locally determined meaning of secularism to shift and change over time. In other words, local understandings and practices of neutrality and pluralism and processes of their interaction and outcome are all constantly contested and changing everywhere, and not only in countries of the global south. In the final analysis, the model of weak secularism I am proposing should be both robust and flexible. It must be robust in the sense of being effective in refereeing the negotiation of policy and legislative matters in a pluralistic society, while ensuring the neutrality of the state toward religion. The model of weak secularism should also be flexible to accommodate and adapt to mounting and increasingly complex realities of diversity. In accordance

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with this combination of efficacy and flexibility, I have attempted to present a sufficiently specific understanding of weak secularism, while trying to avoid preempting how and why issues and controversies are bound to arise, or prescribing uniform solutions for all societies. By mediating competing religious perspectives of the public good, while remaining responsive to local concerns, this model facilitates genuine personal commitment to Islam precisely because it secures freedom of religion for all citizens. To be the Muslim I choose to be by choice and conviction, I need the state to remain neutral regarding all religions and beliefs, while enabling the interplay of various dimensions of personal and social life, whether perceived as secular or religious. All such dimensions are integral to being human.

Notes 1. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2. For instance, Edward Bailey suggests that “Secular is really quite easy to define! Its meaning keeps changing yet remains consistent. It always means, simply, the opposite of ‘religious’—whatever that means.” Quoted in William H. Swatos, Jr., “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 213. 3. See Charles Taylor’s post “Secularism and Critique,” The Immanent Frame, http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/24/secularism-andcritique/ (accessed April 24, 2008). 4. I use this term to distinguish my conception from John Rawls’ notion of “public reason,” which I find to be too prescriptive and U.S.-specific. See An- Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 97–101. As I understand it, Rawls’ conception of public reason is too prescriptive for participants and the sort of reasoning they should deploy. For instance, he distinguishes between the scope of public reason and what he calls the “background culture” of civil society, which includes such associations as churches, universities, and the like. He also excludes the media from the realm of public reason. See, John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 443, 444. 5. Ashis Nandy, Talking India: Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 103–104. 6. On the contested meaning of American secularism, for instance, see, John Witte Jr., Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do about It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); and Bruce T. Murray, Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 7. Ahmet T. Kuru, “Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies toward Religion,” World Politics 59 (July 2007): 571.

Chapter 13 Secularism and Heterodoxy Gauri Viswanathan This chapter is an attempt to think about secularization through the heterodox strains in religion, in such a way as to push back the history of secularism to a point before the consolidation of mainstream world religions. I contend that a focus on heterodoxies in religion complicates a straightforward binary opposition between secularism and religion and promotes a long view of history in which the heterogeneous fragments comprising religious formations are illuminated, leading to questions that challenge a chronology of secularism based on a narrative that reads the diminishing place of religion in public life as the catalyst for a secular outlook. Furthermore, as a vehicle of heterodoxy’s dissemination, literature offers a corrective to accounts of secularism from a purely social science perspective. Literature’s history is so much a part of the momentum leading to a secularist worldview that it appears to have a unique standing among disciplines, in that it chronicles the transition from a religious culture to a secular culture rather than developing methodologies for studying the emergence of secularism. Yet in no way does the scholarly work in other disciplines on secularism have only tangential methodological relevance to literary studies, as is evident in the ways that literary periods are demarcated. If the debates on secularism bear significantly on literary studies, it is often in terms of the dissociation of belief from imagination deemed to be a legacy of the Enlightenment. The periodization inherent in narrativizing the decline of religious culture in these terms, with the Enlightenment as a pivotal transition point, assumes a divide in literary studies between early modern literature, in which a unity of spiritual and temporal powers prevails, and post-Enlightenment literature, in which the influence of the religious sphere on daily life is eclipsed by understandings of the world shaped by reason and imagination rather than by doctrinal belief. This divide appears to affirm the pattern of secularization outlined by the sociological literature, which explains the rise of secularism in terms of ruptures between two worldviews, one religious and the other, rational

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and modern.1 However, there is no basis for assuming that the divide in literary history results from the opposition of religion and reason or that religion disappears altogether. As the sociologist Philip Gorski notes, characterizations of secularism in terms of religious decline are misleading. 2 He prefers instead to use the term “religious change” to signify religiosity’s unstable meanings. Thus, describing public culture as more religious or less religious is not particularly useful, given that doctrinal ideas remained in tension with residual beliefs in magic, reincarnation, and astrology, among other beliefs. These ongoing practices pointed to other religious systems not conventionally brought under the rubric of mainstream religions such as Christianity or Judaism. In other words, there is no spiritual vacuum one can point to as evidence of religion’s total decline. Gorski juxtaposes two conflicting paradigms—one proposing that religion disappears and the other that religion is actually strengthened in the post-Reformation world—to argue that medieval Europe confounded both theories by holding Christianity and the paganism it supposedly vanquished in a steady balance, in which superstition coexisted with institutionalized Christian practices. Before the sixteenth century, the line between magic and religion was not all that clear-cut, and mainstream religion grew by drawing boundaries around itself and relegating magic to superstition and heresy.3 Consequently, the Reformation was less a popular revolt against clerical authority than a radical step toward detaching pagan attributes from religion and creating an autonomous space for religious belief to flourish, uncontaminated by eclectic forms of popular worship. This divide is structured more evidently by the dichotomy of elite versus popular than rational versus irrational. In many respects, the internal history of Christianity, played out against the fault lines of class, is driven by the motor of secularizing tendencies in the manner that radical doctrinal shifts succeeded one another. Each new theological shift streamlines belief, reducing its more variegated popular expressions and banishing the residues of the fantastic, the wondrous, and the superstitious to a pre-Christian, pagan past, while consolidating selective doctrinal tenets that mark off authentic Christianity from its heterodox versions. At the same time I do not want to be misread as suggesting that heterodoxy implicitly remains outside the structures of power or institutional authority. As S. N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane, and David Shulman’s volume on orthodoxy and heterodoxy in India argues, heterodox groups are vitally important in shaping the institutional dynamics of civilizations.4 Important to an understanding of a civilization’s momentum for change, heterodoxy is one mode by which civilizations responded to the effect of modernization and shaped the directions in which they ultimately developed, leading to the emergence of new cultural orders. “Former dissenters became rulers” is Michael Heyd’s shorthand description of

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transformations in early modern Europe. 5 When religious dissent entered into the central traditions of English society, it reintroduced ideas of “individual experience, experimentation, and a magical attitude toward nature,” which had been marginalized by traditional authority.6 As spheres of influence in the cultural and political order gradually shifted to dissenting attitudes, these in turn penetrated the cultural and political center and contributed to something akin to a regime of tolerance, in which modern science grew in influence and cut into the authority of the church. A comparative perspective, however, reintroduces older binaries, as is apparent in Eisenstadt’s differentiation between the course of heterodoxy in monotheistic societies, which he sees as having become a part of the political history of these societies, and that of Hindu and Buddhist societies, in which, far from penetrating the world, heterodoxy moves in an otherworldly direction in an effort to reshape perceptions of quotidian reality and hence construct new types of civilization.7 A major corrective of sorts is Amartya Sen’s reading of heterodoxy in The Argumentative Indian, which eschews such civilizational readings and makes much more explicit connections between heterodoxy—and the argumentative traditions that comprise it—and Indian democracy, even going so far as to say that “heterodoxy [is] the natural state of affairs in India. . . . It deeply influences Indian politics, and is particularly relevant, I would argue, to the development of democracy in India and the emergence of its secular priorities.”8 Heterodoxy becomes, for Sen, a key site of argumentation, debate, and discussion, as well as resistance to canonical ideas and the authority of dominant groups. In Indian history he finds numerous examples of heterodox thought in the rulership and statecraft envisioned by Ashoka and Akbar, both of whom Sen identifies as important figures in promoting forms of democratic reasoning that owe very little to Western thought but have their provenance in Indian heterodoxy, as preserved in literary texts.

Belief and Imagination The presence of different kinds of demarcations in the evolution of the religious sphere, which cannot all be characterized as reason’s triumph over religion, raises broader questions about whether the study of literature might help scholars in other disciplines understand the oblique processes of secularization. If, as is the case even in other fields, it is no longer acceptable to describe religion as giving way to science and technology in a straightforward narrative, how might studying the development of literary forms yield alternative descriptions that will help clarify the dynamics of transition from a religious to a secular order? How might

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renewed interrogation of the Arnoldian proposition that literature succeeds religion, beginning with historicization of the term religion itself, help us rethink religion’s nature in more than the homogeneous terms assumed by modern secularism? A closer study of literary history provides insights into the flawed nature of the secularization thesis. Examining the evolution of the literary field, we note that the primary ruptures are not between reason and religion but, rather, between belief and imagination, pointing to a development in which religious belief is contested by the alternative (even heterodox) knowledge systems it had suppressed or marginalized. Alex Owen’s study of modern British occultism, The Place of Enchantment, is an important place to begin rethinking literature’s secular trajectory, howsoever oblique the route is.9 As Owen notes, the transition from belief to imagination was jagged not smooth, mediated by occult movements that, in their exploration of forms of higher consciousness detached from religious meaning, created what she calls a fictionalizing process.10 She concludes that “it is the crucial alignment of the rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.’ ”11 The idea of a mythopoeic unconscious is one of the most important concepts to emerge from such theorizations. Among the notable figures seeking to give scientific validity to occult phenomena was Frederick Myers, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, who conducted extensive psychic investigations into what he called “the subliminal mind,” or willed imagination, which, as Owen observes, he conceived of as a powerful instrument for “spinning complex webs of creation with interpretive, explanatory, and even ethical significance,” completely outside the agency or knowledge of the conscious mind.12 Myers described the “subliminal uprush” as a psychic phenomenon resembling creative genius or mystical insight, with an integrative function that brought the unconscious mind into concert with the movements of the higher self.13 Myers’s use of the spiritual language of soul, higher self, and world-soul put him at odds with psychologists and scientists and contributed to his marginalization from scientific circles. Yet at the same time he could never be effectively banished to the outer fringes of arcane occultism, as his theories of the subliminal mind kept returning to the central role of the imagination in communicating information unavailable to experience or memory. Myers’s pivotal assertion, that the unconscious mind generates fictional propositions (“scraps of thought and feeling”) in its search for knowledge of the occult real, brought imagination into open conflict with preexisting belief.14 To be sure, occultist practices aiming at an experience of the world of supersensory phenomena drew on psychic models that might, on one

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level, have borne comparison with protocols of religious belief. The key difference, however, is that for occultists the conscious mind directed the “complex web of creation” induced by the subliminal mind (identified with the “higher self” in Myers’s thinking). Occultists saw this web of creation as having been generated by the higher self’s experiences of a virtual realm, beyond imagination or mysticism. Most important, as the higher self moves into this realm, the actions of a conscious mental agency give narrative form to the fictional propositions generated in the process. However, the resulting narrative cannot be described as entirely fictional since it is based on experiencing, rather than imagining, supersensible phenomena. The signal contribution of Myers’s psychic research, as well as of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which put his findings into practice, was an epistemology of the occult real based on “fictions,” an alternative term for psychic experiences of hidden realities. The distinctions between occult knowledge and religious belief emerge in the ways that the occult real is illuminated. Rather than produced by texts of revelation, as is the case with religious belief, occult knowledge is built on storytelling, which occult practices treat as a form of revelatory experience. The title of one of Owen’s chapters, “Occult Reality and the Fictionalizing Mind,” captures the shift in register from belief to imagination as the initiator of secularizing processes in modern culture.

Oppositional Religious Discourses I have more to say about occultism’s place in the history of secularization, but here I want briefly to draw attention to religion as a broad construct that includes both orthodox and heterodox elements. Although it is convenient to see empirical reason as constituting a principal challenge to religious doctrine, the mistake is to homogenize religion and understate the degree to which it comprises competing beliefs, some of which were historically marginalized, others obliterated, and still others assimilated into a dominant religious system. To conceptualize religion in opposition to reason, therefore, misses the role of oppositional, so-called heretical discourses such as Gnosticism, Manichaeanism, and Hermeticism in defining what Karen King calls “the boundaries of normative Christianity.”15 That Gnostic beliefs were rendered equivalent to oriental heresies furthered the aims of colonialism in propagating Christianity as the only authentic religion. The standard argument about the Enlightenment as a vehicle for secularization, in which conceptions of divinely inspired history are replaced by the idea of history as a product of human agency, pays little heed to religious heterodoxies in the secularizing process. These oppositional knowledge systems challenged

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canonical tenets and initiated skepticism and resistance to official, statesponsored doctrines. Furthermore, at least one of these knowledge systems—Gnosticism—called for a return to inaugural moments in the rise of religion when the mysteries of life, while being an object of religious thought, at the same time provoked an “existential experience of human alienation.”16 The attempt to turn such experience into theodicy, to offer systematized explanations for suffering that eventually put doctrinal religions in place, was a prime target of heterodox thought. It is interesting that Max Weber, notoriously credited with having institutionalized the notion of the “disenchantment of the world” as a secular outcome of religion’s decline, has received far less attention for several arresting passages in his work tracing the genealogy of the intellectual to theodicy. According to Weber, the modern intellectual—the ultimate product of a secularized world—has been paradoxically consumed by the need to understand the causes of pain and suffering in the world. Weber offers what to all intents and purposes is a theory about the religious origins of the modern intellectual. From ethical guilt and unjust suffering, the intellectual develops a compensatory ethics that ultimately seeks not to reject religion but to rationalize it. The compulsion to explain seemingly random and meaningless suffering is accompanied by the conviction that there must be just recompense for unjust suffering. Such compensation is found in ethical meaning. Suffering, for Weber, is the key starting point for rationalization of the world. His deliberately oblique argumentation links compensatory meaning with human alienation and loss of mystery. Weber argues, for example, that the more one seeks to find meaningfulness, the more the world is devalued. Conversely, the more the world is devalued, the more its value is sought . . . but in what exactly? That object remains elusive for Weber. Writing on disenchantment, Marcel Gauchet draws attention to Gnostic thought as refusing any kind of rationalization: “At one extreme lay gnosticism’s great rejection, the irrevocable devaluation of this world in favor of the unimaginably other to which the soul aspires.”17 At the other end are proto-secularist efforts to “reintegrate the order here-below with its source in the beyond, the theocratic attempt to put worldly life on the same footing as life directed toward the beyond.”18 If Gnosticism represents one extreme, radical in its rejection of rationalization, we find Weber struggling to break out of a bind that kept the intellectual in the grip of religious rationalization, despite the apparent worldliness produced by such intellectual moves: “For the more intensely rational thought has seized upon the problem of a just and retributive compensation, the less an entirely inner-worldly solution could seem possible, and the less an other-worldly solution could appear probable or even meaningful.”19

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Reading Weber, I am reminded of Simon During’s suggestive analysis of literary history, which finds that the more literature is devalued, the more it breaks off from its institutional affiliations and enters the fantasy spaces of wonder. 20 Unlike tradition or orthodoxy, wonder has no institutional home, no anchoring mechanism that channels its expression in determinate ways. It does not require a structure of reference and intertextuality for its meaning to be construed—indeed, it thwarts all identification with systematized forms of knowledge. It would seem Weber makes an uncannily similar move by opening up the possibility that the “existential experience of human alienation,” to use King’s phrase, initiates a search for value in an as-yet-indeterminate space. 21 The fact that this search results in rationalization, which in turn perpetuates the repetitive cycle of devaluation and revaluation of the world, does not take away from Weber’s characterization of the intellectual enterprise as shot through with motivations akin to those driving theodicy. Furthermore, Weber’s understanding of rationalization follows a peculiarly dialectical progression: The less magic or merely contemplative mysticism and the more “doctrine” a religion contains, the greater is its need of rational apologetics . . . The more religion became book-religion and doctrine, the more literary it became and the more efficacious it was in provoking rational lay-thinking, freed of priestly control. From the thinking laymen, however, emerged the prophets, who were hostile to priests; as well as the mystics, who searched salvation independently of priests and sectarians; and finally the skeptics and philosophers, who were hostile to faith. 22

Strikingly, Weber’s account of acts of intellection brings the anticlerical, antinomian intellectual closer to Gnostic ways of knowing than to Enlightenment rationalism as we understand it. To quote Weber again: “Every religion in its psychological and intellectual sub-structure . . . has taken a different stand toward intellectualism, without allowing the ultimate inward tension to disappear. For the tension rests on the unavoidable disparity among ultimate forms of images of the world.”23 This is clearly not a triumphalist narrative of reason’s ascendancy over belief but a subtle reading of oppositionality as internal to religion. Such oppositionality embraces different dissenting traditions and even includes conversion, which at times employs rational apologetics in an effort to reshape the religion to which an individual has converted. 24 Most important, Weber recognized the bonds that kept the intellectual tied to rationalizing processes in religion: “Redemptory religion will see nothing but the intellect’s desire to escape its own lawful autonomy.

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Above all, religion sees all this as a specific product of the very rationalism that intellectualism, by these endeavors, would very much like to escape.”25 Weber sees rationalization as a trap that the intellectual can escape only by, paradoxically, taking recourse in what During, describing literary subjectivity, characterizes as the fantasy space of wonder. If this is the inevitable but startling trajectory of rationalization, then its outcome in spurring resistance to rationalism points to the oblique routes through which we would need to trace the pathways of not only intellectual activity but secularism itself. For if rationalization in explaining irrational experiences such as suffering and pain ironically produces equally irrational concepts such as original sin (the example Weber gives), then true acts of intellection must go in opposite directions, short-circuiting the compulsions to rationalization. So perhaps more than he intended, Weber brings the skeptic and the intellectual closer to the dissenting knowledge systems that posed heterodox challenges to mainstream doctrine by questioning the very premises of religious rationalization. For this reason, heterogeneous spiritual movements outside mainstream religion deserve serious study, no matter how eccentric and idiosyncratic they might seem to modern readers (as well as to their own contemporary public perhaps). The primary interest in studying movements like Theosophy, for instance (which Jung called “Gnosticism in Hindu dress”26), is that the writings by its best-known practitioners— Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Alfred Sinnett, among others—track the moment when religious mysteries were buried or relegated to superstition, a development that Gorski, citing the work of scholars on secularization, identifies as occurring at the time of the Protestant Reformation. 27 Indeed, Wouter Hanegraaff, who has written compellingly on occultism as a movement shaped by the emergence of secular thought, argues that esotericism’s transformation into modern occultism produced an eclectic form in which elements of correspondences and causality were uncertainly intermingled, with ambiguous results. Noting that the development from an internally consistent worldview of correspondences to an uneven, contradictory worldview is symptomatic of the unstable relation between religion and secularism, Hanegraaff suggests that the original coherence of esoteric thought, rooted in arcane symbols and encryptions, was disrupted by the intrusion of new elements of historicity and causality, producing an “unstable mixture of logically incompatible elements” that was as much alienated from scientific rationalism as from traditional esotericism.28 His perspective is at odds with an earlier literature on occultism, which treated the occult as an assemblage of survivals, evoking ghosts of superseded, forgotten creeds and regressing to a primitive stage of cultural and religious development. Such interpretations, Hanegraaff

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notes, come from a discredited nineteenth-century evolutionism that treated magical worldviews as prehistorical.29 Hanegraaff, on the other hand, views modern occultism as a distinct outgrowth of secular materialism in its deployment of technologies that probe the composition of matter to explain transmaterial phenomena. Indeed, secular culture provides a vital impetus to alternative knowledge systems that contest received doctrine without necessarily endorsing scientific materialism.

The Religious Origins of Secular Knowledge Secularism’s unstable relation to religion, exemplified by the persistence of aspects of religious ideas in the secularization process, dogs the work of even the most skeptical and rational intellectuals like Friedrich Nietzsche, Weber, and Jürgen Habermas. One need only turn to the recent writing of Gauchet to note the extent to which contemporary scholarship on disenchantment and secularism accepts the powerful hold of Christianity on the thinking of modern intellectuals in far greater ways than generally acknowledged. Gauchet even argues that Christianity is a precursor to modern secularism because it introduced ideas of rational and moral progress fundamental to conceptualizing modernity. Following Gauchet’s argument to some extent, Vincent Pecora maintains that the Western intellectual can never escape reverting to the deep relation between secularized Judeo-Christian tradition and Enlightenment notions of truth and progress.30 However, Pecora’s aim is not so much to affirm that Christianity is a precursor to secularism as to question gaps that persist in contemporary criticism’s memory and historical knowledge of secularism, particularly of secularism’s religious origins. Pecora brings secularism within the frame of Christianity’s ethical imperatives and establishes as a point of contention in cultural criticism secularism’s derivation of messianic trajectories of progress and redemption from Christian tenets. Recognizing the effects of such a bind, Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg adopted the most radical and uncompromising approach: in seeking to dismantle secularism’s Christian edifice, they distanced themselves from secularism’s putative moral trajectory, arguing instead that history is contingent, cyclic, mechanical, and purposeless. Their effort to disentangle secularism from Christianity led them to conceive of human action as mechanistic and random, without anchoring principle or redemptive promise. No doubt, the conception of secularism as a materialistic, mechanical philosophy puts in question the commitment to principles of distributive justice and equality that postreligious societies strive for, in place of the hierarchies preserved by priestly authority. The cold logic that underwrites the mechanistic reinscription of

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secularism brushes aside the ethical implications of such a position, insisting that secularism must be extricated from its religious antecedents if it is to have consequence. Notwithstanding a move to disavow secular culture’s evolution from religious origins, taken to its limit in Löwith and Blumenberg, we would do well to ask how and why religion lingered even in the work of atheistic intellectuals, who were haunted by the challenge of explaining where a concept of the good comes from if religious belief no longer supplies codes of behavior. Is religion so tied to modern secularism that the latter cannot be conceived without its predecessor? There is a strain of thought in Western philosophy and social science that cannot altogether dispense with the legacies of Christianity, as is clear in Habermas’s conflicted theories of modernity, which Pecora examines brilliantly to locate the points at which secularism has been rendered most vulnerable when unmoored from its religious foundations. Secularism’s relation to religion is most unsettled when new contexts emerge that change the form and function of art. For example, art objects that have ritualistic religious significance, blending the sacred and the secular in their iconic status as instruments of worship and aesthetic appreciation, become problematic when placed in museums, where the preexisting balance between secular and sacred elements is disrupted, contributing to an instability in the identity of secular culture. Is this a sign that modernity’s project is incomplete as Habermas claimed? If so, the reasons may well lie with secular philosophy’s inadequacy in translating “all the politically significant religious and presumably still Judeo-Christian concepts into a viable public and universal discourse.”31 Pecora’s inclusion of the words “politically significant” to characterize the ongoing relevance of religious precepts raises the stakes for the creation of a pluralistic society. Is political significance measured in terms of a common denominator across all religions? Is there indeed a unifying point of reference in religions that yields a public and universal discourse? Or are cultural and religious differences so great that there is no common ground for a shared discourse, making room for the state to step into a vacuum created by conflicting discourses and assume the position of arbiter?

The State against Religion The historian Christopher Bayly, in his anti-Foucauldian book The Birth of the Modern World, comes up against a stumbling block when, in promoting the idea of decentralized state power and the penetration of the state by local communities, he finds a new threat arising in the form of spheres

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of religious influence. For Bayly the state alone can ensure secularism, and this conviction traps him in a web of contradictions symptomatic of studies that purport to delimit the reach of state power, while conceding its efficacy in guaranteeing a secular ethos standing above the compulsions of religious communities. Indeed, if state agency interests Bayly at all, it is primarily as an engine of demystification. Through the state, reason replaces magic, ritual, and superstition in the organization of a society’s functioning. This transformation, Bayly acknowledges, is the most positive impact of the modern state, which assumes the role of torchbearer of modern thinking and practices. But he cautions that even in the post-Enlightenment era, magic and superstition persisted in a vast majority of communities, concluding that if this was an era of demystification, as Weber described it, it was so only in a very specialized and limited sense. Bayly argues, “It may be that some forms of magic, magicians, shamans, and fetish objects lost power, that ghosts retreated into the world of romance, and that everyday things lost their power to convey malevolence or benevolence. But this was true only among the small international middle class. Elsewhere such rationalizations had not proceeded very far.”32 The implications of this statement are dismaying, to say the least. Must we accept that those outside the pale of an international middle-class culture are outside modernity itself, susceptible to nonrational, magical modes of thinking? Obviously the binarism of the sentence appears to suggest so. To be fair, this passage appears in the context of a discussion on religion and the nation, in which Bayly argues that the increasing authority of religious belief among certain faiths (Islam, Roman Catholicism, and the Russian Orthodox Church are the only examples he gives) pitted religion against the nation-state. One outcome of the contest was that the nation-state found itself shaped more and more by religious solidarities, especially with the widespread dissemination of mass-produced religious texts that reached deep into many layers of society. Bayly sweepingly characterizes the leadership of national movements as secular and liberal, whereas “the people” imbue the nation with religious meaning and, in time, even affect the way nationalist movements begin to conceive of the state in messianic terms. Bayly’s implicit conclusion is that the takeover of the nation by religious interests slowed down the demystification that Weber described as a post-Enlightenment tendency and marginalized the secular tendencies of the nation’s would-be leadership. The instances of religious nationalism he cites—in Russia, Poland, Bosnia, Ireland—all serve to showcase the fervent mobilization of the populace around religious identity, both to resist the colonizing aims of outsiders and to claim the nation for a religious mission. It would be too obvious to say that Bayly’s divide between a secular, rational leadership and a largely religious population perpetuates

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the notion that those under the sway of religious ideas are gripped by false consciousness. Far more interesting is what the secular/religious divide reveals about the difficulties in conceptualizing the various sectors of civil society as having the capacity to replicate the state’s power. If Bayly’s trajectory is to counter the Foucauldian approach of seeing the state as all-controlling and omniscient and encourage closer attention to the social processes by which local communities penetrate and appropriate the state, thereby diffusing its absolute power, religious nationalism poses an intriguing challenge to such a project. In privileging the state as a source of enlightened reason, Bayly is caught in a bind to explain the gap between secular state and communities of belief. What indeed would prevent populist millenarianism from appropriating the state’s rationality if there is such a diffusion of state power, as he has been insisting? In fact, I would argue that the most suggestive aspect of Bayly’s argument is precisely that the diffusionist idea of state power has the capacity to transcend the binaries between reason and superstition, secularism and religion, modernity and premodernity, assuming of course that the ultimate goal is to create a nonhierarchical order of society not wholly and absolutely dominated by the state’s prerogatives—one in which local communities are equally centers of initiatives affecting global interests and outcomes. The binaries are loosened to an extent if one considers the keen popular interest in alternative spiritualities (some of which were self-described as “rational religions”) by the late nineteenth century. Localism and cosmopolitanism intersected at the cusp of the “birth of the modern world” in the rise of alternative (or “fringe”) belief-systems like Theosophy, spiritualism, and anthroposophy. Bayly’s description of the international middle class as hostile to magic and supernaturalism flies in the face of the avid occult pursuits of the same class in Britain and other European nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Occultism attracted some of the leading intellectuals, artists, and professionals in fin-de-siècle Britain, who were dissatisfied with their disenchanted world and looked to other pursuits that crossed the boundaries between finite and infinite planes of meaning and imagination. For urban cosmopolitans in particular, occultism afforded a mobility between different personae and worldviews increasingly denied or at least circumscribed by the mainstream morality of their times (a theme presciently probed by Rudyard Kipling in his fiction). Britons’ search for comprehension of the complexities, ambiguities, and contingencies of the fractured modern psyche brought many to occult study of clairvoyance, telepathy, mesmerism, ventriloquism, and astral travel, as was the case also with the professional middle-class culture outside Britain (especially in colonial India). The phenomenal, worldwide growth of the Theosophical Society under

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the tutelage of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott, with its international headquarters at Madras, India, attests to the widespread interest in esoteric thought among Europeans and non-Europeans alike. A flawed reading of the history of world religions and sects leads Bayly to believe there is an insurmountable gap between secular state and belief communities. The history of the Theosophical Society offers an illustrative counterpoint to Bayly’s analysis of the consolidation of world religions. He speculates that as religions became more standardized and known as “world religions,” localized expressions were appended to the wider world of abstract religious norms. Yet by his admission he is challenged to account for the fact that there are certain faith practices that cannot be incorporated into the world religions. To understand their character, he first identifies the distinguishing features of world religions as based on preaching, congregation, and conformity, and then maintains that “esoteric” cults like the Hindu devotional worship of Shakti are different in that secrecy and individual experience are the hallmarks of their practices rather than public worship. 33 Even more importantly, he adds, cults like these define themselves primarily against the world religions, evolving, diverging, and even dying out, but always doing so invariably in response to the world religions. Obviously, Bayly’s characterization assumes that cults are divergent offshoots of mainstream religions. To the contrary, histories of alternative religious movements offer insights into cults as residual aspects of older heterogeneous beliefs that refused to be absorbed into the evolving world religions, and as such remained marginalized, obscured, even suppressed. In offering Shakti as an example of a closed sect, Bayly conveys the impression that the persistence of cults is a non-European phenomenon, an almost tribalistic character being ascribed to the cult of secrecy and exclusion practiced by Shakti.34 However, another picture emerges when the history of religions is written inclusively with an account of its countercultural expressions, both in the West and in the East. A global spiritual movement, Theosophy was motivated by a search for the hidden, and apparently suppressed, esoteric mysteries of early Christianity, as well as other religions of antiquity. No less marked by secrecy and individual experience than Hindu cults like Shakti, Theosophy illustrates how an alternative religious movement, emerging as a response to a need for philosophical answers outside regulated systems of belief, repudiated the doctrinal, congregational aspects of mainstream religion. If not totally anti-Christian as sometimes portrayed in the literature, Theosophy and other spiritualist movements submitted orthodox, institutional Christianity to intense questioning, recovering aspects of its mystical expression seemingly lost to history that connected Christianity with ancient “pagan”

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religions. Such alternative movements were simultaneously an effort to reenchant a world disenchanted by science and materialism and disinvest institutionalized religion of its dogmatic authority. However eccentric and incoherent Blavatsky’s esoteric writings might appear, an important subtext was the insistence that secularization, by seeing itself as outside the reach of religion, contributed to repressing the historical memory of eclectic, heterogeneous beliefs in much the same way that institutional religions did. The recovery of the past is reconstituted in her writings as a moment of new secular transformation, requiring a long view of history. Ironically, it is precisely a long historical view that Bayly’s work, in its own way, aspires to provide. The question is how far back is he willing to go to trace the birth of the modern world? The rise of the modern state as the guarantor of rights to religious conscience has led to one of the most sustained critiques of secularism as dependent on a strong state to ensure that private belief does not become public policy. However, conceptions of the state as a source of enlightened reason create a gap between modern secularism and belief communities that leaves no room for a long view of history in which heterodox sects, because they remained at odds with mainstream religious orthodoxies, were either absorbed into or marginalized by the formation of world religions. In relegating belief to the private domain, the secularist worldview inadvertently closes off historical consciousness of these complex processes. Secularism, in defining itself against religion, has contributed to homogenizing religion’s variegated history, which nonetheless continues to exert influence in subtle, oblique ways that escape the secular understanding. As Tomoko Masuzawa observes, “[O]wing to the complex, highly charged prehistory, moreover, once above ground, the discourse of world religions continued to be sustained and ruled by an occult network of significance not immediately transparent.”35 Following Masuzawa, one might even describe mainstream religions as haunted by their repressed prehistory, a haunting dispelled to some extent by secularism’s flattening out of heterogeneous religious histories, which gestures only toward “world religion” expressions. Conceived as an engine of demystification, the secular state cannot produce an understanding of the spiritualities outside mainstream religions, and so it eventually represses the memory of eclectic, heterogeneous beliefs. If recovered, these beliefs would show a split between elite and popular expressions within religion that is as wide as the divide between religion and secularism. In marginalizing the historical memory of beliefs that fall outside mainstream religions, the logic of secularism creates a gap between dominant and popular narratives that broadens to include the state, alongside religious orthodoxies, in the idea of the dominant. In minimizing the role belief plays in the conditions of modern

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life, secularism has no language to account for other orders of belief that do not easily fit the familiar nomenclature of religion. In the absence of such language, residual folk practices—like maypole dancing or summer solstice worship—are given pagan attributes, labeled “superstition,” and relegated to the sphere of popular culture by religious orthodoxies and secular societies alike. The degree to which religion and secularism coincide in their inability to acknowledge alternative spiritual practices is matched only by the scholarly complicity in homogenizing religious histories to fit a composite profile of religious belief. That popular culture preserves religious debates and issues, albeit as pagan residues, will seem an anomaly, but that is exactly what Victoria Nelson proposes when she suggests, through readings of science fiction, films, pulp fiction, and visual art, that the supernatural encodes aspects of spirituality no longer able to find expression in forms of public belief. 36 Such alternative spiritualities or heterodoxies are equally ignored by secular philosophies and religious orthodoxies, both of which have contributed to marginalizing the popular as the site of alternative beliefs. Note, for instance, the immediate rejection by the Catholic Church of the lost gospel “discovered” in March of 2006: the church’s instinctive response to the discovery was to deny that the official narrative of Christianity was in any way obliged to undergo revision or rethinking. The more benevolent reactions still insisted that the lost gospel was yet another instance of a host of narratives and that the proliferation of counternarratives merely diluted their heterodox potential, leaving Christianity basically intact and invulnerable to questioning. If the church sets itself up as the legitimate expression of Christianity, secularism concurs by seeking to place religion outside the public sphere, thus confining religious authority to the private domain. Having made this move, the secular narrative cannot account for challenges to that authority coming from within heterodox branches of Christianity. Although I do not at all suggest that heterodoxy is another name for the secular, I am proposing, however, that thinking the secular through the frame of heterodoxy can evoke the dissonant strains in religious history that secularism has collectively grouped under the rubric of belief. My effort in this chapter has been to probe heterodoxy in world religions as crucial to an understanding of secularism. How differently would secularism be understood if it was seen through a history omitted from its own narrative? What new terms of definition would arise from this occluded history? Is heterodoxy so resistant to stable cultures of belief that it offers a model for a more expansive idea of secularism? I hope that these questions may begin to chart pathways for understanding secularism as more than the result of ruptures between faith and reason.

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Notes 1. Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (London: Watts, 1966). 2. See Philip Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300–1700,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 138–167. 3. See Gorski as well as Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971) and Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. See S. N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane, and David Shulman, eds., Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Dissent in India (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1984). 5. Michael Heyd, “Calvinism, Religious Dissent and the Establishment of a New Cultural Order in Early Modern Europe,” in Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Dissent in India, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane, and David Shulman (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1984), 170. 6. Heyd, 171. 7. Eisenstadt, 7. 8. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History, and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005), 12. 9. Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 10. Ibid., 148–185. 11. Ibid., 81. 12. Ibid., 182. 13. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Vol. 1. (London: Longmans, 1903), 20. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 49. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 353. 20. Simon During, “Literary Subjectivity,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 31, no. 1–2 (2000): 45. 21. King, 11. 22. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 351. 23. Ibid., 352. 24. See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). In support of the view that oppositionality is internal to religion and does not necessarily derive from science or materialism, David Shulman sees Buddhism as an

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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elaborate allegory of the Hindu explanation of the origins of heresy. Indeed, heresy itself is understood in the form of an allegorical narrative, as is evident in Shulman’s retelling of the story of Vishnu as the Hindu god who corrupts demons by Buddhist heretical doctrines. And having corrupted the demons, Vishnu then kills them, but the heresy survives their slaughter by spilling over into earth, “thus explaining the presence in India of living heretics.” David Shulman, “The Enemy Within: Idealism and Dissent in South Indian Hinduism,” in Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Dissent in India, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane, and David Shulman (Berlin and New York: Mouton, 1984), 28. Weber, 353. Emphasis in the original. Quoted in Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 188. Gorski, 139. Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 409. Ibid., 407. Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 23. Ibid., 53. My emphasis. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 362. Ibid., 333. For example: “In large areas of forest, desert, and mountain in Asia, local shamans and forms of spirit cult persisted more or less untouched by Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam.” Bayly, 364. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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Chapter 14 Reading Secularism through a Theological Lens Linell E. Cady How might we view secularism differently if we read it through the eyes of its religious “other?” This chapter is a venture in answering this question. Although secularism is more aptly viewed as secularisms, distinctive formations that refract the history and politics of particular places, this collection tracks similar patterns across the country cases that reflect the global diffusion of the religion/secular classification and similar challenges stemming from its oppositional construction. As there is no single religious lens, of course, no reading can stand in for them all, though any one might generate insights that travel. In this chapter I read secularism through the lens of the Western theological tradition, with attention to its embodiment within the American context. Secularism, envisioned as one pole of a religion/secularism binary, is commonly rooted in the standard secularization narrative that links its triumphalist advance to the erosion or privatization of religion. Although scholars have become far more attentive to this story’s empirical limitations and normative aspirations, its continuing power, as the chapters in this volume attest, remains deeply embedded within the discourses and institutions of modern life. This dominant version of secularism, primarily defined as not-religion, is nestled and sustained—if now more tenuously—within a much larger “network of binary oppositions established by its central terms,” such as reason and faith, objective fact and subjective value, and most fundamentally, modernity and tradition.1 Through this alignment secularism stakes its claim to represent neutral or shared discourses and spaces, and so a standing that is appropriately public, perhaps even universal. It draws deeply from the narrative of modern progress that celebrates secularism as the necessary vehicle for the growth of knowledge, freedom, and peace. The villain in this story is invariably religion whose avowedly superstitious, authoritarian, and exclusivist ways block human progress. Although this story continues to resonate in many circles, it no longer enjoys its formerly taken for granted status. Far from a simple account of the emergence of modern life, it

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has been exposed as itself a normative project that seeks to recreate the world in its image. 2 It functions, at least in part, to advance the interests of the secular nation-state to fashion a unified identity and to legitimate its authority and use of violence by containing, privatizing, and taming religion.3 Perhaps most importantly its signature credential to solve the conflictual politics of religion from an outside or neutral standpoint has dimmed. Although this version of secularism “purports to stand outside the contested territory of religion and politics,” as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd notes, “it does not and cannot. It is located on the spectrum of theological politics.”4 It is deeply implicated in configuring the domains that it purports to simply keep apart. This version of secularism, although never the dominant chord in American political life as in France and Turkey, gained considerable traction in twentieth-century America, particularly within the academy, the legal arena, and policy circles. But it has long jostled, competed, and mixed with an alternate version that, far from fortifying its borders with religion, envisions their seamless interface. Variously dubbed common ground secularism, Protestant secularism, or simply religious secularism, this alternate tradition of secularism (a label its champions sometimes disavow) interprets Christianity as the historical ground and civilizational context within which the distinction between religion and the secular is made, most especially the institutional separation of church and state. From this perspective Christianity constitutes the wellspring from which secular democratic institutions, liberties, and values draw sustenance. Within this interpretive horizon, American national identity, laws, and mission refract their religious roots, rather than standing over against them, as in the separationist model. In the United States the Protestant secular continuum, even fusion, has sustained the hegemony of Protestant practices and values in part by reinscribing them within secular and national idioms that efface their religious roots and resonances. In this fashion it has traded on the legitimating power of separationist secularism to transcend the conflictual politics of religion. In recent decades these two variants of secularism have taken center stage in the so-called culture wars, continuing a struggle that, as Tisa Wenger’s chapter shows, has roots that extend back more than a century in the United States. This public spectacle—that most Americans watch rather than enact—has pitted aggressive secularists against the active mobilizing efforts of the religious right, and through the oppositional rhetoric of both sides, contributed to a deeply misleading picture of the religion and secular landscape. Their dysfunctional dance has also worked to eclipse other ways of thinking and negotiating the religion/secular divide. Neither offers an adequate template for envisioning the interface of religion and the secular or for navigating the unstable boundary between them.

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Building upon Hurd’s insight on the intersections of secularism and theological politics, I propose to read secularism through a theological lens taking into consideration a broader spectrum of alternatives within the Western Christian tradition. This range is not readily visible to those standing squarely within secularism, especially in its antireligious mode, as the variety of religious alternatives is too easily collapsed into the homogenizing category of religion. The secularist lens tends to flatten the alternatives, presenting itself or its religious other, a category into which all sorts of religious orientations can be lumped, irrespective of their distinguishing and conflictual features. As Gauri Viswanathan notes in chapter thirteen, “Secularism, in defining itself against religion has contributed to homogenizing religion’s variegated history.”5 To open up a more expansive take on this history, she focuses on heterodoxies, especially popular alternative spiritualities, that flow outside “mainstream” or “orthodox” religions and disrupt these more stable formations. In a similar fashion this chapter proposes to read secularism through a broader religious spectrum, although I focus on the diversity within the Christian tradition. Entertaining other forms of theological politics opens up space and imaginative possibilities for breaking out of the epistemological, political, and moral constraints of the religion-secular binary that haunts our public and personal lives. To get a quick handle on a broader spectrum of theological politics within the Western theological tradition, I draw upon H. Richard Niebuhr and his classic work Christ and Culture. A major twentiethcentury American Christian theologian, Niebuhr tackles what he calls the “enduring problem” of the relationship of Christianity to the world, an older theological formulation of our topic. His vantage point, which considers the religion-secular alignment from the side of political theologies, casts our topic in a different light. It not only illuminates a far broader range of alternatives, but it captures the internal theological debates of which they have been a part. In so doing it allows us to see the theological imperatives that advanced a separationist model of religion and secular politics, as well as those that pushed toward their integration. Considering these alternatives on the spectrum of theological politics not only helps to guard against imagining that any one constitutes the Christian solution, but it also captures in a theological register the conflicts and conundrums they generate. Furthermore, it offers some tantalizing clues, theoretical and normative, for envisioning and negotiating the religion and secular boundary more generally. Returning to the American context, I draw upon this broader theological framework to illuminate the conflictual politics over the religion/ secular divide in the past half-century and call attention to some currents that signal a promising shift in its negotiation.

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The Spectrum of Theological Politics For two millennia Christians have lived and argued the riddle of Christianity’s appropriate relationship to its broader world, advancing a variety of alternatives but never reaching consensus on any one of them. To bring some analytic clarity to this perennial debate that Niebuhr notes is “as confused as it is many-sided,” in Christ and Culture he develops a typology that captures major Christian alternatives. My interest in drawing Niebuhr into this conversation goes beyond the descriptive contributions his work might offer. As a theologian, he seeks not simply to faithfully render the historical trajectories but also to engage a “centuries long argument” over the appropriate interface of Christianity and its surrounding world. His insights into the relative strengths and distortions, and mutual corrections, of the competing types reflect his theological voice. Given the secularist paradigm of the modern university, such a voice has lost its visibility and influence, particularly in the past half century since he wrote. But it offers an interestingly different angle on the controversies and confusions surrounding the religion-secular divide of our time—at least in the American context and for those who continue to inhabit, however loosely, this religio-cultural horizon. His work traces back some version of the problem to the earliest years of Christianity, illuminating what is at stake theologically in making the distinction, and in the various efforts to bridge it. I am not suggesting that he finally offers an adequate template for envisioning or negotiating the religion/ secular divide in a religiously plural democracy such as the United States, or indeed more globally. But the parallels between the debates internal to Christianity and the debates over the religion/secular alignment more generally are instructive and, I will suggest, offer some insights and resources for moving beyond our current stalemate. Niebuhr’s exploration of the recurring patterns and motifs that characterize the ways in which Christians have envisioned the relationship of their religious faith to the broader world is analogous to charting the varying relations of religion, in this case Christianity, to the secular world, but it is not fully captured in that formulation. That it is often identified in such fashion is itself an indication of the extent to which the modern religion/secular classification has infiltrated theological thinking on this issue. Reflecting on this puzzle, Niebuhr warns that “it is especially arbitrary and confusing to define culture as though it excluded religion, and the latter as though it included Christ, since the problems with which we are concerned are often most difficult in the realm of religion.”6 This is an elusive point, made even more so by his reliance on the symbol of Christ to express it. Without getting into his extended reflections on Christology, let me just say that, for Niebuhr, Christ functions as the Christian symbol

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of transcendence toward which faith is properly directed. It is not to an historical figure, but through one, toward the “transcendent power.” Put somewhat differently, Niebuhr is calling attention to God as the absolute and critical principle or, somewhat differently still, to the ever receding horizon of the creative process. This theological orientation is seriously distorted when forced into the binary between Christianity and the secular world, as it functions to freeze and to sacralize Christian religiocultural formations. Hence he writes, “it is not essentially the problem of Christianity and civilization; for Christianity, whether defined as church, creed, ethics, or movement of thought, itself moves between the poles of Christ and culture. The relation of these two authorities constitutes its problem.”7 Those standing outside the Christian tradition will no doubt find this distinction illusory or too fine to countenance, but it serves an important critical function internally, even though, perhaps especially though, it readily escapes those who stand within this tradition.8 In making this claim Niebuhr is underscoring the analytic limitations of any religion/secular dichotomy that is too rigidly drawn or stable; only by introducing a dimension of transcendence into the mix, he suggests, can the dynamics of faith be captured and the interface between Christianity and the broader world adequately rendered and negotiated. Niebuhr identifies three major types of responses to this problem of the relationship of Christianity to culture in the Western tradition, although cautioning that such analytic purity does not begin to capture the various blends evident on the ground or in the considered writings of the tradition’s most sophisticated exponents. Generally speaking, they include options that advance separation, integration, or mediating alternatives that seek to sustain both the separation and the relation between Christianity and the broader political, social world.9 The separationist response builds upon a model of opposition between Christian life and culture. It is a static picture that accentuates their radical difference, and it does not foster strategies of engagement with the broader “fallen” world. On the contrary, the Christian faith is primarily envisioned in terms of the abandonment or withdrawal from the world. This type, classically located within the monastic tradition, has had decreasing salience in the modern world, attributable, as Charles Taylor has shown, to the rise of a powerful reforming impulse in medieval Western Christianity that sought to remake the laity and the broader society to conform more fully to Christian principles.10 Falling on the other end of the spectrum of theological politics is what Niebuhr calls the Christianity of culture response. This position represents the view that Christian faith and (the best of) culture can and should be fully integrated. It finds expression in celebratory affirmations of the fusion of Christianity and Western civilization, or America as the

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new covenant, or the presumption that Christian life and democratic life are coterminous. As he says, “the terms differ, but the logic is always the same: Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy.”11 Motivated to harmonize Christianity and culture, champions of this approach contribute to their mutual transformations. In the American context they have produced an array of reform movements, both liberal and conservative, seeking to Christianize society, from abolitionism to temperance, civil rights, and the anti-abortion movement. This approach has also given rise to readings of Christianity that accentuate features that blend with the individualism, democratic sensibilities, and capitalistic ethos of American life—some progressive, some not. Attentive to the moral ambiguities and ironies of the spectrum of approaches, Niebuhr notes the significance of this interpretive resolution to the problem. But he is even more concerned to expose its limitations, which are bound up with its failure to sustain the tensive critical relationship with the transcendent. This approach far too readily collapses Christ and Christianity or, put in other terms, it absolutizes Christianity and by extension sacralizes the religio-cultural formations that it establishes. Its ingredients mix to produce forms of Christendom—through variants of religious nationalism and Christian civilizational identity—that easily cohabitate with secularized idioms. Falling between these options that anchor the ends of the theological spectrum are mediating forms that seek to sustain the principled distinction between Christian faith and culture and bring them into a relationship. Among the most common is a dualist model in which the individual is envisioned as essentially a citizen of two worlds, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, and both demand loyalty and obedience. In the hands of a thinker such as Martin Luther, the result is a vision that sharply distinguishes the spiritual from the temporal, the gospel from the law, faith from reason, but also paradoxically unites these dual orientations in a life “lived precariously and sinfully in the hope of a justification which lies beyond history.”12 More commonly, the paradox collapses into a static and conservative dualism that renders faith an inward orientation and grants autonomy and legitimacy to the affairs of state and society. In this debased form, the dualist approach closely resembles the separationist model with which it has family resemblances. Dualist and separationist Christian motifs have been deeply influential in the American setting, contributing religious voices and rationales to Enlightenment liberal ones in working out the interface of religion and the secular. Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century religious dissenter, is the iconic figure for this religious current that played a critical role in the formation and first amendment articulation of the American model of church/state separation. Williams sought to wall off the spiritual “garden”

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from the “wilderness” of the broader world, preserving the purity of the spiritual life from the corruptions and perversities of worldly affairs. He was not driven by the desire to keep politics and state affairs safe from the power and influence of religion, as was later the case in France, but rather by a deep concern to keep religion from being compromised and corrupted by politics. When the wall is breached it extinguishes the “candlestick,” Williams’s symbol for the “light of divine truth illuminating individual conscience in the wilderness of this world.”13 His was a radically individualistic vision of religion and freedom of conscience that not only rejects alliances between church and state, but also harbors a profound suspicion of all religious collectives. This legacy has helped to make religious freedom and over time—if fitfully and incompletely—its more pluralist embodiment a key part of the equation in the struggles to draw and redraw the religion-secular boundary in American life. It helps to account for the fact that a French version of republican civil religion did not take root, whereas a form of religious nationalism did. Recognizing the theological trajectory that Roger Williams embodied calls attention to the way in which the religion/secular divide, far from being only a secularist imposition on religion, is also a product of a spiritual quest to purify religion. Once again we bump up against the fact that it is not a neutral solution that transcends the conflicts over the relationship of faith to politics, but one among a range of theological resolutions to the issue. A second mediating type that Niebuhr identifies is a conversionist approach that both distinguishes Christianity and culture, but places greater emphasis upon the transformation of the temporal world. In this response their opposition does not lead to separation from the world, or to their paradoxical endurance in expectation of a nontemporal solution after death, but to a conversion of the human spirit that is culturally transformative. This conversion is envisioned as a possibility in the present through divine encounter, an existential relationship that reconfigures time. As Niebuhr puts it, “We are not dealing with human progress in culture, but with the divine conversion of the spirit of man from which all culture rises.”14 The abstract homogeneous time of the modern imaginary has made this type especially opaque. We find it hard to escape from the idea of time as a flat timeline extending from the past into the future. This linear model makes no room for an existential relationship to the transcendent within the present that is transformative but not cumulative in any simple way. This is an orientation or a posture toward experience that honors and fosters its open, transformative possibilities. It is a way of living toward a more expansive horizon that we participatorily create. Only by recognizing some measure of (relative) transcendence within linear time that disrupts the homogeneous, geometric model of time/space can this conversionist approach even be imagined. Not surprisingly, it is all too

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readily fused with the idea of the progressive Christianization of society, a model of historical linear time that eclipses the multidimensional or verticality of this orientation, and in so doing loses the critical principle and prophetic lure that stands over against all finite centers of value.15

Toward a Dialectical Reading So what might we begin to see more readily from this all too brief review of the spectrum of theological politics in the Western Christian tradition? I want to take up this question first as part of a debate internal to this tradition, and then consider what might be broader implications for rethinking the religion-secular interface more generally. First, considering the range of positions reveals the controversy and conflict surrounding this issue. It has never been settled. At stake are divergent views on the nature of God, creation, history, time, truth, and so on. So the debate is not simply a matter of what role Christianity should play in the broader society, but what in fact Christianity is. The spectrum of theological politics does underscore how deeply embedded some form of the distinction between religion and culture/society is within the Western Christian tradition. But just as importantly, it illuminates the motives and rationales that are at work not just to sustain but to bridge the separation, leading to forms of Christendom—whether in medieval Europe or versions of Christian America—as well as dissenting movements seeking their transformation. Recognizing these different currents within the Christian tradition points to the fact that the separation of religion and politics, even within this tradition, is one form of theological politics rather than its permanent solution—as secularism proclaims. This is critical to see, not just to undercut secularism’s claim to transcend the conflictual space of religion and politics, but to expose the recurring religio-cultural-political blends that operate under the secular rubric. In tracking the patterns in the Western Christian tradition, Niebuhr highlights the persistence of the theological imperative to sustain the principle of separation between Christianity and the broader world, and the equally if not more strongly felt imperative to transform it in light of Christian faith.16 Both impulses, he suggests, capture critical dimensions of the dynamic of Christian faith and life. He refuses to single out any one type as “the” Christian answer, although his sympathies clearly lie with the conversionist approach. Understanding why, and why he does not make an even stronger and more exclusive endorsement of this type, is revealing. The conversionist model is distinguished by a refusal to opt for only one horn of the dilemma concerning the relationship of Christianity and the broader world—separation or fusion. It handles the

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conundrum by reconfiguring what is a simple contradiction as framed through the binary into a dialectical process that is motored by an existential posture oriented to the transcendent. From this angle the other types tend to overly privilege one element of the dialectic, and though they are not without their virtues, they do not outweigh their excesses, limitations, and dangers. Given this judgment, why is Niebuhr so cautious in his rejection of these deficient types? His reticence stems in part from his recognition of the limits of his relative vantage point, and a sense that the range of positions, and their conflicts, may in various times and places be needed correctives, responsive to context in ways that no single standpoint can discern. But over time, he suggests, only the paradoxical distinction and alignment of the spiritual and worldly capture the transformative power of faith. But for Niebuhr there is also something about the dynamic itself, and God’s role in relationship to it, that warrants the caution.17 The conversionist model captures an existential challenge for each individual in the present moment, but it is not something that can be tracked or packaged. It is akin to a theological compass providing orientation in light of this dialectic vision, but not in any sense a solution to ensure it. This, and Niebuhr’s interpretation of God’s providential power, prompt him to wonder if perhaps God “employs their partial insights and their necessary conflicts.”18 For those standing within this interpretive tradition, the analytic limitations of a static picture of the interface of religion and the secular become quite clear. It is the emphasis on the transcendent horizon that makes any essentialized or static picture of their interface so problematic. The theological point of reference works, normatively, to sustain a dialectic vision, although clearly the historical record is testimony to its devolution into a binary or religio-cultural fusion. Through this lens a motionless picture gives way to what we might envision as a kaleidoscope reflecting dynamism and recombinatory interactions. Again, it is not as if this metaphor solves the existential problem of how to navigate the boundary at any one moment. But it does provide some analytic tools—a picture to think with—that addresses the conundrum of needing to sustain the principle of separation, and yet also account for their ongoing interactions, alignments, and fusions. It provides a normative vantage point that yields cautionary insights concerning some of the recurring patterns, problems, and pitfalls inherent in the balancing act that this tensive vision elicits. There is wisdom in recognizing the tension, even if it does not absolve the individual in choosing how to sustain its “dynamic counterpoises” moving forward. Thinking with and through the spectrum of theological politics in the Western Christian tradition provides its inhabitants with a calculus for assessing the costs of varying strategies. It makes clear that versions of secularism that insist on a clear and fixed divide from religion too easily

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neutralize Christianity’s critical transformative impulse. But so also does too tight a link between Christianity and political power and extant cultural formations. A Niebuhrian read of the Western theological tradition generates insights that resonate with Abdullahi An-Na’im’s reflections on secularism from an Islamic theological perspective.19 Both challenge a version of secularism that privatizes religion through a fixed boundary, and both recognize a role for a more dynamic and mediating version that may actually help to foster a more authentic religious life—one that preserves the values of freedom, pluralism, and social transformation. Although Niebuhr’s reflections on the patterns of theological politics, and their respective ambiguities, offer resources for rethinking the religion-secular divide, the limitations of his analysis also merit attention. They are especially visible to those standing outside this tradition, particularly those who are religious minorities within dominant Christian societies or those who have been on the receiving end of its colonial and postcolonial exploits. Niebuhr is far too sanguine about the possible value of the contesting forms of theological politics, far too willing to entertain the possibility that they may play a role in a providential plan. His trust and confidence in the power of God, combined with his recognition of the always relative and fragmentary knowledge of individuals, account for his caution. Its deeply problematic implications are evident in his suggestion that the spectrum of theological politics may “represent phases of the strategy of the militant church in the world.”20 Indeed it is precisely this suspicion that leads postcolonial writers such as S. N. Balagangadhara to charge that the religion-secular distinction is a stealth strategy in and through which Christianity can take over the world through its secular clone.21 In Niebuhr’s reflections on the forms of theological politics, he is insufficiently attentive to power dynamics, and to a deeper form of pluralism. His writing is addressed to a Christian audience, and he engages the “enduring problem” through the lens of the Christian tradition in interaction with society. In this respect his work, indicative of the time in which he wrote, fails to address broader and urgent questions about the adequacy of the religion/secular framework more generally. That said, had Niebuhr drawn the radical implications of his own analysis, his reflections would be less saturated with their own Constantinian flavor. But in the more global age into which we have moved, we can and must. As we have seen, Niebuhr insists that the problem is not simply a dyadic relationship between Christianity and culture, as the modern religion/secular framework would suggest. There is a more dynamic interface that reflects a transcendent dimension—that he captures through the symbol of Christ. He makes a compelling case for the theological imperative to distinguish between Christ and Christianity to direct trust and loyalty to the principle of being rather than to finite, limited, and ultimately inadequate centers of value. The ready tendency on the part

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of many adherents to sacralize Christianity is part of the fall out from operating with the overly simple religion/secular binary. And yet despite making the case for distinguishing between Christ and Christianity, the link remains far too tight in his analysis. This reflects the relatively more homogeneous and bounded religious world that he inhabited. There is no effort to reimagine the theological vision within a far more pluralistic context—to articulate the critical principle, or transcendent lure, or more holistic horizon, in ways that do not necessarily go through or only through Christian symbolism, rhetoric, and community. His own constructive vision, and some of the analytic distinctions he makes, pushes toward this more pluralistic perspective that remains only embryonic in his own work.

American Secularisms One of the burdens of this volume is to move toward a more expansive picture of secularism, one that recognizes the various shapes it has taken in diverse places and times. The chapters have explored Kemalist secularism, French laicist secularism, and Indian secularism, calling attention to dominant formations as well as national counter traditions that both inform and challenge them. The chapters on the United States call attention to two major traditions of secularism in American life, a separationist model and a version of religious secularism that envisions more of a continuum between Christianity and national identity, laws, and mission. These two traditions of secularism have constituted the antipodes of the culture wars of recent decades, each side positioning itself as the guardian of America’s founding principles and historical trajectory. 22 These two traditions of secularism, with their distinctive roots, champions, and implications for the public role of religion, have jostled in complicated ways in American life. Consider that in the mid-twentieth century when John Kennedy was successfully appealing to an absolute wall of separation between religion and secular public life and politics, Congress was inserting “under God” in the pledge of allegiance. But it is also important to note that in this same decade, the prophetically inspired civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was profoundly transforming the American landscape. From the perspective of a secularism standing behind an absolute wall of separation, these religiously inflected politics are all too readily collapsed. From a Niebuhrian lens illuminating a broader range of theological politics, their differences loom large. The version of public secularism and private faith that Kennedy espoused still has purchase in the American context, but it has increasingly come to compete with a version of religious secularism shaped by the rise of the religious right and its influence in Republican electoral

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politics in the past few decades. This movement has worked to reinvigorate the links between Christianity and American identity, through legal challenges, revisionist historical narratives, and campaign politics. In so doing it sustains a long tradition of religious secularism that has envisioned continuity between Christian and national identity and values. Former President George Bush invoked this tradition in his campaigning, and in his presidential speeches, and increasingly so post-9/11. Consider, for example, his soaring rhetoric in his 2003 State of the Union Address: “the liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.”23 In this interpretive tradition, secular politics and religious faith are not antithetical but partners in a common enterprise that has forged an American identity and mission that blends secular and religious motifs, enabling them to operate on two different registers simultaneously. On one level the United States is a secular nation-state located within the international system of nation-states, and on another level it is a nation with a sacred mission to advance the divine cause of liberty. The very public battle between these two visions of the religion-secular alignment in recent decades has dominated Americans’ imaginative repertoires, concealing other ways of negotiating their relationship. The 2008 presidential election offers an illuminating window on these crosscurrents, as it signals a promising shift in the politics of religion. It has been revealing to watch Barack Obama position himself in relationship to both of the dominant pictures, as he pursues a different trajectory that he articulates in light of and in relationship to them. It is not that he is a trailblazer, without precedents in American history. But he draws on and extends religious and cultural currents that have been largely eclipsed by the polarization of the culture wars in recent decades—currents that Niebuhr’s more expansive horizon more easily illuminates. That he could be elected—given the way in which politicians inevitably orchestrate their positions to the voters—signals a changing public landscape. Seeking to move past the contentious divide between a “religious America and a secular America,” Obama criticizes each side’s way of envisioning and negotiating the religion-secular boundary. The secular liberal camp erects a high wall of separation, either dismissing religion or pursuing “strategies of avoidance” that over time fail for a variety of reasons. Such an approach, Obama contends, forfeits the “imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice” and contributes to a presumption that social problems are simply technical challenges, solvable apart from deeper—moral, religious, or spiritual—sources of transformation. The liberal embrace of a fully privatized religion—a “solution” whose costs Obama claims to have slowly come to see—has also allowed conservative

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religious voices to define and own religion in public discourse. Rejecting a strong separationist model of the relationship of religion and the secular, Obama is even more disparaging of the conservative alliance’s response to it. The move to ground national identity and moral values in a religious framework, even one extended beyond Protestants to include Catholics and Jews, is fundamentally unable to make room for the diversity of American life. This is a recurring refrain in his writings and campaign speeches. As he remarks in a 1997 address, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation.” In his inaugural address, claiming America’s “patchwork heritage” as a strength, he proclaims, “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus—and nonbelievers.”24 In so doing, he explicitly rejects the powerful current that assumes that religion is the essential source or continued font of democracy, values, and national identity. Significantly, Obama’s emphasis on the diversity of the American religious-cultural landscape does not stop with attention to the multiple traditions of belief and unbelief that inhabit it. Religious traditions themselves are highly diverse, and reflect theological strains that push in very different political and social directions. Even if all Americans were Christian, he pointedly asks, “whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s? . . . Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application?”25 Such attention to the diversity of theological politics is critical as it exposes the distortions that come from any block or wholesale appeal to a religion to ground identity as well as the homogenizing influences of a secularist lens. Rejecting a version of secularism that quarantines religion in the private domain, and one that takes a homogenized Christianity as the privileged source of secular American identity and democratic values, Obama advances an alternative that envisions a more pluralistic interactive border between religions and the secular. This way of imagining the religion-secular divide, tellingly, is driven by both political and theological convictions. In other words it is not simply his commitment to a pluralistic democratic secular politics that underlies this approach, but also a particular take on religion. It should not be surprising then that his criticisms of the dominant alternatives echo some of the same points that Niebuhr leveled at forms of theological politics. Again we bump up against the fact that models for negotiating the relationship of religious and secular domains rely upon working out both sides of the equation. Whether one envisions conflict, fusion, or more pluralistic interactions between religion and the secular depends fundamentally on how one defines not just the secular, but religion as well.

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Two currents particularly worthy of note merge in Obama’s take on religion, contributing to the plural, interactionist model of secularism that he endorses. One is his location within a self-consciously liberal tradition that advances a view of religion as historical and evolving, and the second is the liberationist theology of the black church tradition in the United States. He cites a wide variety of influences of religions, cultures, and regions, in the formation of his spiritual outlook. What he calls his “polyglot” background, bolstered by his mother’s anthropological embrace of religious and cultural diversity, has fostered his appreciation for an eclectic approach to religion, convincing him that “there are many paths to the same place.”26 This theological inclusivism is accompanied by a sense of the importance of fallibilism regarding religion. He is critical of religious dogmas, and exclusivist religious claims to have a “monopoly on the truth.” “Religion at its best,” he flatly proclaims, “comes with a big dose of doubt.” Not an off the cuff remark, this conviction is featured prominently on his own campaign’s official Web site: on the top of his page on faith is a pull quote by political commentator E. J. Dionne, noting “Obama offers the first faith testimony I have heard from any politician that speaks honestly about the uncertainties of belief.” Expounding on this theme in a recent address, he explains that doubt should not replace faith, but it should “humble” us and “compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate.”27 Given the cautionary instincts of politicians, Obama’s willingness to enter into these waters is further indication of a shifting religious terrain. The second notable current shaping Obama’s approach to religion, and by extension his vision of the religion/secular boundary, reflects his participation in the black church tradition. As he explains, his is not some generic Christian affiliation, but an attraction to the “particular attributes of the historically black church” that grow out of its centuries-long struggle against slavery and American racism. Precisely because of this history of oppression, he notes, “the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities.”28 This is not the appeal to religion to ground a shared national identity and values, but the embrace of a prophetic theological tradition that stands in judgment. Obama was drawn to this tradition, he writes, because of its power to “spur social change,” convincing him that faith is not a set of private beliefs or merely compensation for the pain and injustices of life, but “an active, palpable agent in the world.”29 What we see in Obama’s negotiation of the religion-secular divide is a boundary that is both powerfully affirmed, and yet also transgressed. It is affirmed in and through a principled commitment to the constitutional separation of church and state, the decoupling of religion and national identity, and the democratic virtue of translating religious values and

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visions into more universal language that fellow citizens within a diverse society can understand. But the boundary is hardly a high wall that separates and isolates religious faith from secular knowledge or the practices of the political and social world. In his words, “religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic or social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved.”30 This way of envisioning the religion-secular alignment is not a separationist secularism, or a Christian secularism that asserts a static religious ground for national identity and the democratic project. It has the ingredients of a far more dynamic and pluralistic engagement of religious and secular traditions within public space. These include a more fluid boundary between them, as well as a more inclusive, eclectic, and nondogmatic take on religion. Niebuhr’s typology illuminates what is at stake from a Christian theological angle in sustaining a more dynamic and dialectic take on the interaction of religious faith and the world that, although not equivalent, is today imagined through negotiating the religion-secular divide. The critical principle and prophetic aspirations destabilize any static rendering of their interface and provide some tools for their existential negotiation. There are interesting parallels between this dynamic take on their relationship and the interpretive tradition toward which Obama gestures. But crucially, and critically, the latter is what we might call a post-Christian mediating tradition of religiosity that is moving beyond the boundaries of a single religion. This liberal religious tradition of “seeker spirituality,” as Leigh Schmidt puts it, is “an individualized search to imbue this life with spiritual meaning and depth,” an eclectic assortment concerned not so much with salvation, as the “incomplete labor of democratic freedom and cosmopolitan progressivism.”31 The rubric of spirituality is claimed to signal the disavowal of some of the defining features of religion as conventionally understood. Evidence suggests that this form of religion is on the rise. Making a similar point in her chapter in this volume, Winnifred Sullivan suggests that it is now generating a new type of legal secularism, one that differs from the classic separationist and accommodationist approaches. Rather than advancing the “homogeneity or absence” of religion as these traditional approaches have classically done, this third form implies its “multiplicity and hybridity.”

Beyond a Double Helix We have too long been taken in by a single picture of secularism with its self-promoting claims to transcend the conflictual terrain of religion and politics. Reading secularism through the optic of the spectrum of

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Christian theological politics can help us deconstruct and reposition this picture by disclosing a broader vista. A more expansive horizon reveals a greater range of positions on negotiating the religion-secular divide, and so counters the flattening gaze of secularism that too readily assimilates its alternatives to a single formation. Coming at the problem from the religious side of the aisle exposes the argumentative dance within the Western Christian tradition that has marked the contending resolutions to the problem, and continues to do so today. From this angle we can glimpse the competing theological imperatives that make the religion-secular border perennially fraught and unstable. Within the American context, this broader vista also works against the imaginative contraction of the recent culture wars, bringing into view a more progressive and cosmopolitan mediating tradition that has been eclipsed in recent decades. Too static a picture of the religion-secular divide has, in the American context, as in others, contributed to the failure to adequately recognize their cross-fertilizations and resulting blends. Seeking to correct this problem, Hugh Heclo suggests a “twisting helix of reciprocal influences” as a more apt image for the roles and interactions of Christianity and secular democracy in American life.32 Such a picture, like Niebuhr’s typology, captures their more dynamic and integrated relations, and so has the capacity to challenge secularism’s conceit to neutrality, even universality, as the definition of the modern. Failure to recognize the more tangled relations of Christianity and American secularism has blinded many Americans to the Christian inflections of their own secular discourses, laws, practices, and foreign policies. It has provided the ideological cover to presume that secularisms around the world can and should stand insulated and isolated from the religious traditions with which they interface. It has led Americans to embrace a model of secular-liberal-democracy as a global norm, which ironically does not begin to capture the dynamics of American history. Similarly, it has worked to screen out the implicit privileges and democratic exclusions that flow from a Christian inflected secularism in American life. But, as Niebuhr’s typology indicates, there are also theological reasons to challenge such a picture that coordinates with one strand or interpretive resolution to the problem of faith and the broader world. What is lost is a more dialectical vision of their interaction that places greater weight on a more prophetic, critical, and transformative trajectory. A more accurate rendition of the alignments and fusions of religion and the secular is a critical step toward less exclusionary politics, and politically sacralizing theologies. The image of a double helix captures the dynamic interactions and recalibrations of the religious and the secular domains, and opens up analytic space for the mediating traditions and formations that bridge

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them. To the extent that it implies a single religious tradition, as is the case with Niebuhr’s typology, it is limited and inappropriate within a more pluralistic context. A more complicated multistranded helix, perhaps even kaleidoscope, may be a more apt image for envisioning the borrowings and crossings and creativity at the religion-secular divide in a global age. Although such new metaphors offer some resources toward revisioning the religion-secular divide, they also underscore that there is no solution but only temporary resolutions to the ongoing challenges that come from negotiating the competing tensions at its boundary.

Notes 1. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini, “Times Like These,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 6. 2. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 38–39. 3. See, for example, William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 36. 5. Gauri Viswanathan, “Secularism and Heterodoxy” 242. 6. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 32. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Although Niebuhr rightly underscores the theological significance of the distinction between Christ and Christianity, its operation is far slipperier in his analysis of the major types of Christian positions on the relationship between the Christian faith and the broader world. 9. Niebuhr explores five typical answers that Christians have developed to relate Christianity to the broader society, which he labels: Christ against culture; Christ of Culture; Christ above Culture; Christ and Culture in Paradox; and Christ the Transformer of Culture. He characterizes the first two as embracing one of the two poles, and the latter three as mediating types that seek to distinguish and sustain the relationship between the poles. 10. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 423–472. 11. Niebuhr, 103. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49. 14. Niebuhr, 228. 15. Some scholars are now linking this perspective and posture with a new configuration of intellectual life that is captured through “transdisciplinarity” rather than the independent disciplinary formations of the modern university.

264

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Linell E. Cady See, for example, Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, trans. Karen-Claire Voss (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). He further notes that “transdisciplinary is neither religious nor irreligious; it is transreligious,” Nicolescu, 128. The imperatives vary according to place and time, though they do not follow each other in any serial fashion. In the modern world, for example, we find Christian orientations in which the command to Christianize society as a whole is fundamental, as well as ones in which salvation is interpreted as an individual and interior phenomenon. Niebuhr, 234. Ibid., 2. See Abdullahi An-Na’im’s chapter in this volume. Ibid. S. N. Balagangadhara, “The Heathen in His Blindness”: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). This concluding section draws on “Choosing Our Better History: Religion, Secularism, and American Public Life,” a lecture written for the 2009 Macalester College Civic Forum. George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003, http://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext_012803.html (accessed July 21, 2009). Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 16, 2009, http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/inaugural-address/ (accessed May 7, 2009). Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 218. Barack Obama, Interview with Cathleen Falsani, March 27, 2004, http:// blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-interview-with-cathleen.html (accessed February 22, 2009). Barack Obama, Commencement Address at Notre Dame, May 16, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/17/obama-notre-dame-speechfn204387.html (accessed May 17, 2009). Obama, “Call to Renewal” Keynote Address, June 28, 2006, http://blog. beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-historic-call-to-renewa. html. (accessed February 18, 2009). Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 207. Ibid., 208. Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 13; 290. Hugh Heclo, Christianity and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 35.

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Contributors

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University. His publications include African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam (2006) and Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a (2008), which can be downloaded in eight languages free of charge from the Emory Web site (www.law.emory.edu/fs). Jean Baubérot is an emeritus professor, research director and honorary President of the Sorbonne's École Pratique des Hautes Études. He is also statutory member, founder, and honorary director of the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités, a laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. A historian and sociologist by training, Baubérot specializes in the sociology of religion and secularism. The author of more than 20 books, he is also the coauthor of an International Declaration on secularism signed by 250 academics from 30 countries. Rajeev Bhargava is senior fellow and director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. Bhargava is author of Individualism in Social Science (1992), editor of Secularism and Its Critics (1998), and Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (2007) and coeditor of Transforming India (2000) and Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Democracy (1999). Linell E. Cady is professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University and the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. She is the author of Religion, Theology and American Public Life (1993) and coeditor of Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain (2002) and Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence (2007). She is also coeditor of Religion Dispatches, an online magazine devoted to advancing public scholarship and reflection on religion, politics, and society. Andrew Davison is professor of political science at Vassar College. His publications include Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration (1998), Corporatist Ideology in Kemalist

284

Contributors

Turkey: Progress or Order? (2004, coauthored with Taha Parla), Europe and Its Boundaries (2009, coedited with Himadeep Muppidi), and The Philosophic Roots of Modern Ideology: Liberalism, Conservatism, Marxism, Fascism, Islamism (2010, coauthored with David Ingersoll and Richard Matthews). Markus Dressler currently teaches sociology and modern Turkish history at Istanbul Technical University. His research focuses on secularism and religion theory, as well as on religion, politics, and history of modern Turkey. Recent publications include an article on “The Re-Making of Modern Alevism” (Journal of American Academy of Religion 2008), and a coedited volume on Religion-Making (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2010). Nilüfer Göle is professor of sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the author of The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (1996), which is published in several languages. She is also the coeditor of Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe (2006), which explores the emergence of Islam in different public spheres. Zoya Hasan is professor of political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her recent books include Politics of Inclusion: Caste, Minority and Affirmative Action (2009), Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Politics in Uttar Pradesh (1998), and she is a coeditor of Transforming India: Social Dynamics of Democracy (2002). Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. She writes and teaches about the cultural and religious foundations of international relations, with a focus on relations between Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. Her book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations was published by Princeton in 2008. Yolande Jansen is assistant professor of philosophy at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. She is currently involved in a postdoctoral research project called “Laïcité’s Postcolonial Interactions among France and Algeria” sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). In 2010, her book Secularism and Assimilation: Reading Marcel Proust in a Post-Secular Age will appear at Amsterdam University Press (AUP). E. Fuat Keyman is professor of international relations at Koç University in Istanbul. He is also the director of the Koç University Center for Research on Globalization and Democratic Governance. His recent books include Remaking Turkey (2008), Turkish Politics in a Changing World: Global Dynamics, Domestic Transformations (2007, with Ziya Önis), and Symbiotic Antagonisms: Nationalism in Turkey (2009, with Ayse Kadioglu).

Contributors

285

T. N. Madan is emeritus professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi. His numerous publications include Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (1997) and Images of the World: Essays on Religion, Secularism and Culture (2006). Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her recent books include Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (2009) and The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005). Gauri Viswanathan is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998). She is also the editor of Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (Vintage, 2001). She has published widely in education, religion, and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. Tisa Wenger is assistant professor of American religious history at Yale University Divinity School. Her first book, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009), explores the limits of religious freedom as it has impacted the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.

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Index

Abbott, Francis, 96–97 Advani, L. K., 190, 206, 209 agnosticism, 97, 155, 184, 191 Aiyar, Mani Shankar, 211 Akbar, 160, 171–175, 187, 231 AKP, see Justice and Democratic Party (AKP) Alevism, 17, 19, 122–123, 125–130, 132–136, 143, 149 Algeria, 62, 79 American Secular Union, 100–101 see also National Liberal League (NLL) American secularisms, 257–61 see also secularism, history of in the U.S. An-Na’im, Abdullahi, 11, 156, 256 anthropology, 8, 31, 73, 117 Arthashastra, 165 Asad, Talal, 9, 69–70, 74, 78–82, 108–109 Ashoka, 164, 186–187, 231 Atatürk, Kemal, 16, 46, 48–49, 145, 193 atheism, 3–4, 15, 44, 88–89, 92, 96, 98, 101, 238 Azad, Maulana, 191 Baird, Robert, 91–92, 97 Balagangadhara, S. N., 256 Bancroft, George, 91–92 Bangladesh, 186 Bas¸bug˘, lker, 130–131 Battle of Algiers, The (film), 79

Baubérot, Jean, 13, 20, 76–77 Bayly, Christopher, 238–242 Benedict XVI (Pope), 65 Besant, Annie, 236 Bhakti, 166–168, 173, 175 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 189–190, 192–193, 197–200, 204–211 Bhargava, Rajeev, 7, 181, 188 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh, 203 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 236, 241–242 Blumenberg, Hans, 237–238 Bouchard, Gérard, 185 Bowen, John, 75 Bradlaugh, Charles, 4 Briand, Aristide, 61 Buddhism, 52, 108, 118, 164–165, 168, 175, 182, 185–187, 231 Bush, George W., 65, 258 Bushnell, Horace, 91 Cady, Linell, 11, 99 Casanova, José, 20, 143 Catholicism, see Roman Catholic Church Chatterjee, Partha, 190, 198 Cheever, George, 93–94 Chirac, Jacques, 60, 63–64, 76 Christian Democrats, 59, 76, 150 Christianity, 14–16, 20–21, 230, 233 in Europe, 42–43, 47, 59, 65–66, 70–71, 76, 150

288

Index

Christianity—Continued history of American secularism and, 15, 87–102 legal secularism and, 109–115 secularism and, 3, 9–11, 159, 237–238, 241–243, 248–262 Çınar, Alev, 129, 133 civil religion, 13–14, 60–67, 75, 253 Clovis (French chief), 14, 57–58 colonialism, 7, 20, 41–45, 48–49, 113, 175, 182–184, 210, 226, 233, 240, 256 Colson, Charles, 110 communitarianism, 62–63, 77 Connolly, William, 69–74 conservative modernity, 152–154 Constitution by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), 146, 150–152 Cox, Harvey, 109, 117 Cultural Association of the Union of Alevi and Bektashi Organizations (CAAB), 126–127 cultural laicism, 76 Davison, Andrew, 7, 11–12, 22 Declaration of Independence, U.S., 64, 92 deficiency theory, 43–44 democracy, 18, 44, 46, 62–63, 144, 146, 149–150, 154, 183–185, 197–201, 211, 231, 250, 262 democratic secular imaginary, 144, 155–156 dialogical inquiry and engagement, 12, 30–34, 38, 42–43 Dionne, E. J., 260 Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA), 35–36, 125, 127–129, 136, 145, 148–149, 156 diversity, use of the term, 64 Dressler, Markus, 17, 149

Dreyfus Affair, 58–59 During, Simon, 235–236 Durkheim, Emile, 80 East India Company, 187 Ecevit, Bülent, 129–130, 135 economic Islam, 17, 144, 147, 149, 152–154 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 65 Eisenstadt, S. N. 230–231 Engel, David, 117–118 Enlightenment, 20–21, 70–72, 74, 90, 92, 98, 117, 159, 229, 233, 235, 237, 239, 252 European Union (EU), 25, 46–47, 122, 147, 150–151, 153 feminism, 20, 22, 50, 77, 117 Ferrari, Alexandro, 57 First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, 64–65, 87–88, 90–91, 97, 109, 113–114, 118, 252 Foucault, Michel, 238, 240 France Catholicism in, 57–66 civil religion in, 60–67 conflicts of identity in, 57–67 Islamic headscarf in, 14, 17, 42, 50, 60–64, 69–71, 75–76, 78–82, 184 laïcité in, 7, 13, 20–21, 41–43, 50, 71, 75–78, 89 mythical roots of, 13, 57–58, 66 Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), 116 Freedom from Religion Foundation v. Nicholson, 115–116 French Revolution, 58, 65, 92 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 30–31 gallicanisme, 75 Gandhi, Indira, 203–204 Gandhi, Mahatma, 48–49, 183, 186, 190–192

Index Gandhi, Rajiv, 204 Garrison, William Lloyd, 97–98 Gaspar, François, 62 Gauchet, Marcel, 42, 234, 237 Germany, 50, 133 Gilpin, Clark, 109, 110, 113–116 globalization, 6–7, 9, 14, 17, 20, 60, 131, 147, 152–154, 227 Gnosticism, 233–236 God-in-the-Constitution controversy, 88–102 Göle, Nilüfer, 7, 11, 19, 121, 129, 133 Gorksi, Philip, 230, 236 Greenblatt, Stephen, 49 Gül, Abdullah, 123–124, 134 Habermas, Jürgen, 237–238 Hamburger, Philip, 93 Hanegraaff, Wouter, 236–237 Happiness Party (SP), 150–151 Hasan, Zoya, 18–19 Hasting, James, 4 headscarf, Islamic in France, 14, 17, 42, 50, 60–64, 69–71, 75–76, 78–82, 184 tesettür style, 123–124, 136 in Turkey, 121–124, 129–136, 147 Heclo, Hugh, 262 hermeneutics, 11–12, 25–38 Hermeticism, 233 Heyd, Michael, 230–231 Hijab, see headscarf, Islamic Hinduism, 6, 18–19, 21, 43, 45, 159, 163–175, 182–193, 197–211, 231, 236, 241 Hobbes, Thomas, 80–82 Holyoake, George, 3–5, 89 Howe, Mark deWolfe, 113 Hughes, John, 94 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, 88–89, 134, 193, 248–249 Husain, Maqbool Fida, 200–201, 208–211

289

Independent Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association (MUSIAD), 144, 149, 152–154 India ancient, 163–166 Bhakti movements in, 166–167 Constitution of, 188–189, 202 demographics of, 182 erosion of secularism in, 203–205 Gandhi and secularism in, 190–192 history of secularism in, 181–187 Islam in, 169–172 sources of contemporary secularism in, 187–190 Sufis in, 168–169 Vedic Brahmanism in, 163–167, 182 Indian National Congress, 190, 198–200, 202–211 Indian People’s Party, see Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI), 110–115, 118 interiorization of religion, 14, 69–72, 74–76 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 150 Iqbal, Mohammad, 183 Iran, 22, 45–46, 49, 62, 173 Islam Alevism, 17, 19, 122–123, 125–130, 132–136, 143, 149 Courtly, 169–172, 175 economic, 17, 144, 147, 149, 152–154 secularism and, 217–228 Sunni, 16–17, 45, 49, 108, 122–128, 130, 134–137, 143, 149, 170–172 see also headscarf, Islamic Italy, 50 Jainism, 164–165, 173, 175, 182, 185, 191

290

Index

Jansen, Yolande, 7, 14 Jefferson, Thomas, 90, 92, 114 Jinnah, M. A., 183 John Paul II (Pope), 65 Joshi, Murli Manohar, 205 Judaism, 19, 58, 73, 81, 88, 93, 96, 98–99, 101, 173, 230, 259 Jung, Carl, 236 Justice and Democratic Party (AKP), 17, 123, 132, 144, 146, 149–152, 193 Kabir, Humayun, 160, 166, 168, 176 Kahane, Reuven, 230 Kamath, H. V., 184 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 22 Kant, Immanuel, 73–74, 76, 219 Kasırga, Fahri, 127 Kavakçı, Merve, 129, 133–134 Kemalism, 16–17, 21, 25–26, 34–38, 42, 44, 46, 121–136, 145–146, 148, 257 Kennedy, John, 15, 257 Keyman, E. Fuat, 17 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 62 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 62 King, Karen, 233, 235 Kintzler, Cathérine, 76 Kipling, Rudyard, 240 Koselleck, Reinhart, 82 laicism, cultural, 76 laicism, Turkish, 16–17, 26, 34–38, 123–136, 145–148 see also Kemalism laïcité, French, 7, 13, 20–21, 41–43, 50, 71, 75–78, 89 laiklik, 34–38 see also Kemalism language games, 27–28, 32 Leon XIII (Pope), 58–59 Lewis, Bernard, 43 liberalism, economic, 132, 146–147, 152–154

Lilienthal, Max, 98 Lincoln, Abraham, 65 Locke, John, 61–62, 73, 82 Löwith, Karl, 237–238 Machelon Commission, 63 Madan, T. N., 18–19, 159, 161, 198 Mahmood, Saba, 117–118 Malraux, André, 185 Manichaeanism, 233 Mansingh, Raja, 174 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 65, 257 Martinet, Abbe, 94 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 8–9, 242 McAdams, Dan, 115 McIlvaine, James, 94–95 Mendelssohn, Moses, 73 Modern Indian constitutional secularism (MICS), 161–163 Modern, John Lardas, 95 monotheism, 47, 168, 174, 231 see also individual monotheistic religions Mother Land Party (ANAP), 146–147 Muslim Women’s Act (MWA), 204 Myers, Frederick, 232–233 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 22 Nandy, Ashis, 198 National Association of Evangelicals, 100 National Curriculum Framework (NCF), 205 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 198, 205 National Liberal League (NLL), 88–90, 92, 95–102 see also American Secular Union National Reform Association (NRA), 87–102 National Volunteer Corps see Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

Index nationalism authoritarian, 44, 46 in France, 14 globalism and, 20 in India, 45, 183, 189–190, 204, 210–211 Islamic, 4 secularism and, 52, 239–240, 252–253 in Turkey, 17, 45–46, 49, 121–124, 131–133, 136 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 183–186, 191, 197, 199, 201–203, 211 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 11, 249–256, 259 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 237 Obama, Barack, 37, 258–261 Olcott, Henry Steele, 241 Orientalism, 8, 147 Ottoman Empire, 35, 45–46, 49, 121–122, 129, 131, 145, 174 Owen, Alex, 232–233 Pakistan, 183–184, 186 Panikkar, K. N., 159, 161 pantheism, 173 Pena-Ruiz, Henri, 76 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 79 postsecular society, 144, 155–156 Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM), 110, 113–114 private sphere/space, 4, 15–16, 62, 82, 116, 124 privatization of religion, 11, 71–72, 74–76, 108–109, 148, 162, 182–183, 247–248, 256, 258 Protestant Reformation, 92–93, 230, 236 Protestantism, 6, 15, 19, 63–65, 73–76, 87–102, 109–114, 159, 248, 259 public sphere/space, 50–52, 71, 76, 88–89, 101, 122–136, 144, 155–156, 227, 243, 261

291

Rabinow, Paul, 12 Radhakrishnan, 185–186 Ram Sethu (Adam’s Bridge), 206–207 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 189, 197–198, 205, 208 rationalization, 234–236, 239 Rawls, John, 76, 112 religion deprivatization of, 147–149, 152, 155 higher vs. lower, 74 interiorization of, 14, 69–72, 74–76 Kant on, 73–74 privatization of, 11, 71–72, 74–76, 108–109, 148, 162, 182–183, 247–248, 256, 258 use of the term, 73 see also individual religions Roman Catholic Church, 6, 13–14, 52, 57–66, 73, 81, 92–94, 108, 114, 239, 243, 259 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 60–62, 64, 75 rule of law, 107–118 Rushdie, Salman, 62, 71 Sachar Committee report, 205 Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), 209 Samaj, Arya, 192 Samancı, Fuat, 126 Sangh Parivar, 197–198, 210 Sarasvati, Dayananda, 192 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 60, 63–66 Schaff, Philip, 91–93, 97 Schmidt, Leigh, 261 Schmitt, Carl, 81–82 Schumpeter, Joseph, 181 Second Great Awakening, 91 secular self, 9, 48–50 secular, use of the term, 9–10 secularism areligious, 109–110, 115–117 Christianity and, 3

292

Index

secularism—Continued definitions of, 57 dialogical inquiry and, 12, 30–34, 38, 42–43 evangelical, 95 French exception and, 62–63, 69 hermeneutics and, 11–12, 25–38 heterodoxy and, 229–243 history of in the U. S., 88–102 Holyoake and, 3–4 imprint on religious studies, 9–10 irreligious, 19, 109–110, 113–115, 117 Judeo-Christian, 88–89 legal, 16, 57–58, 62, 67, 107–118, 261 as mediation, 223–225 narrative, 57–58, 62, 67 Nehruvian, 199, 201, 211 plurality and, 41–42 political, 7, 46, 163, 197–202, 211 religious, 18–19, 109–113, 117, 248, 257–258 republican, 42, 63 use of the term, 3–4, 57 weak, 217–228 Sen, Amartya, 187, 231 separated realms, ideal of, 36–38 separationism, 13, 15–6, 18–19, 109, 117–118, 248–252, 257–261 September 11, 2001, attacks of, 60, 63, 71, 79, 258 Serbia, 210 Sethusamudram Ship Channel Project, 200, 206–208, 210–211 Seventh-day Adventist Church, 99–101 Sezer, Ahmet, 123–124 Shah Bano case, 204 Shah, K. T., 184 Shaktism, 164, 241 Shari’a, 49, 117, 168–174, 220–222 Shulman, David, 230 Sikhism, 166, 182, 184–185, 203–204

Singh, Manmohan, 205 Sinnett, Alfred, 236 Sorabji, Soli, 193 spirituality, category of, 21–22, 72, 116, 261 Sri Lanka, 192, 206, 210 Stasi, Bernard, 76 Stasi Commission, 60, 76–78 Story, Joseph, 87 Sufism, 128, 168–170, 173, 175 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, 16, 18, 261 Sunni Islam, 16–17, 45, 49, 108, 122–128, 130, 134–137, 143, 149, 170–172 syncretism, 52, 65, 108, 164, 168–169, 173, 187, 191 Tantrism, 164 Taylor, Charles, 21, 27, 31, 42, 47, 109, 117, 144, 185, 219, 251 Thailand, 117–118 Thapar, Romila, 165, 168, 187 theism, 3–4 theological politics, 250–254 Theosophical Society, 240–241 Theosophy, 7, 236, 240–241 Third Republic, French, 58, 61, 76, 81 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 185 Touraine, Alain, 77 Turkey Alevi question in, 17, 19, 122–123, 125–130, 132–136, 143, 149 crisis of secularism in, 146–155 Islamic headscarf in, 121–124, 129–136, 147 laicism in, 16–17, 26, 34–38, 123–136, 145–148 modernity in, 145–146 as postsecular society, 144, 155–156 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 98

Index United Progressive Alliance (UPA), 198, 205–209, 211 United States Constitution, 64–65, 87–102, 109, 111, 113–114, 118, 252 Declaration of Independence, 64, 92 history and origins of secularism in, 88–102 Vedic Brahmanism, 163–167, 182 see also Hinduism veil, Islamic, 48, 50, 77, 123, 129–130, 133–136, 185 Veteran Affairs (VA) Chaplain Service, 115–116 Virtue Party (FP), 148, 150, 152 Vishka Hindu Parishad (VHP), 198, 205, 208

Viswanathan, Gauri, 7, 10, 249 Vivekananda, 186, 191–192 Wakeman, Thaddeus, 100 Weber, Max, 30, 165, 181, 234–237, 239 Welfare Party (RP), 129, 148, 150, 152 Wenger, Tisa, 14–15, 18–19, 248 Whitman, Walt, 115 Williams, Roger, 252–253 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 99 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27 Yeprem, Saim, 128–129 Zizek, Slavoj, 156 Zoroastrianism, 173, 182

293