A Secular Age beyond the West

Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa

Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, Shylashri Shankar

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781108417716
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108287067
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity (Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco), and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007). In all eleven cases, the state - enhanced by post-colonial and post-imperial legacies - highly determines religious experience, by variably regulating religious belief, practice, property, education and/or law. Taylor's core condition of secularity - namely, legal permissibility and social acceptance of open religious unbelief (Secularity III) - is largely absent in these societies. The areas affected by state regulation, however, differ greatly. In India, Israel and most Muslim countries, questions of religious law are central to state regulation. But it is religious education and organization in China, and church property and public practice in Russia that bear the brunt. This book explains these differences using the concept of 'differential burdening'.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Secularity I: Varieties and Dilemmas
• 3 The Origins of Secular Public Space: Religion, Education, and Politics in Modern China
• 4 The Formation of Secularism in Japan
• 5 Law, Legitimacy, and Equality: The Bureaucratization of Religion and Conditions of Belief in Indonesia
• 6 Secularity and Hinduism’s Imaginaries in India
• 7 Secularity without Secularism in Pakistan: The Politics of Islam from Sir Syed to Zia
• 8 Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Secularization from Below in Iran
• 9 The Politics of Jewish Secularization in Israel
• 10 A Kemalist Secular Age? Cultural Politics and Radical Republicanism in Turkey
• 11 Enigmatic Variations: Russia and the ThreeSecularities
• 12 Piety, Politics, and Identity: Configurations of Secularity in Egypt
• 13 The Commander of the Faithful and Moroccan Secularity
• 14 Conclusions: The Continued Prevalence of the “Marker State”
• 15 Afterword and Corrections
• Appendix A Quantitative Take on the Incidence of Taylor’s Three Secularities in the Eleven Country Studies
• Index