Four guided missiles packed with explosive material hurtled into the morning sky. Though the day was brilliant blue and cloudless, no one saw them coming. They were aimed at a nation that did not see itself at war. Moreover, it was a nation convinced that missiles fired in anger no longer posed a serious threat to its security. The weapons were conventional in the strict sense: they did not carry nuclear warheads.

But the weapons and the attackers who launched them were anything but conventional. The 19 hijackers who commandeered four civilian jetliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, were not sent by a state or nation. They were not motivated by any purely secular or political cause. Born of religious zeal, they sought to strike a blow against a power they believed was in thralldom and service to Satan. Motivated by faith, they wanted to strike a blow for Allah.

Religion, which was supposed to have been permanently sidelined by secularization, suddenly appeared to be at the center of world affairs. Seemingly without warning, faith had transgressed the neat boundaries that organized the thinking and planning of our best and brightest policy makers, policy analysts, and scholars. Religious believers were supposed to stay confined to one side of the boundary that sealed private faith off from global public affairs—a boundary that separated the irrational from the rational, the mystical from the purposeful. However, guided by an astonishing combination of zealous faith and coolly calculating rationality, September 11 showed that organized religious believers could act with purpose, power, and public consequence.

And we—not only America, but the whole world of professional policy-making and analysis—were unprepared. As Robert Keohane, a leading international relations scholar, had the humility to admit shortly afterward:

The attacks of September 11 reveal that all mainstream theories of world politics are relentlessly secular with respect to motivation. They ignore the impact of religion, despite the fact that world-shaking political movements have so often been fueled by religious fervor. None of them takes very seriously the human desire to dominate or to hate—both so strong in history and in classical realist thought. [emphasis added]

In his own post-9/11 analysis, however, Keohane also had the honesty to say: “Since I have few insights into religious motivations in world politics, I will leave this subject to those who are more qualified to address it.”

This edited volume picks up where Keohane left off. In the light of religion’s global resurgence, most dramatized by 9/11, it attempts a radical rethinking of the relationship between religion and world affairs, hence the title. It brings together scholars who are eminently qualified to analyze how and why religious motivations, actors, ideas, and organizations matter for contemporary world affairs. It addresses some of the reasons that theories of world politics and world affairs have been slow to address religious factors, how and why religious factors are influencing important global dynamics, and how we need to adapt our theories of world affairs to the realities and implications of this resurgence.

*  *  *

There was once a virtually unbroken consensus in the foundational works of social science about modernization and religion. One part of this consensus was empirical or factual. The other was normative or ethical. The empirical assumption was that with economic modernization or “development,” religion would decline. The ethical assumption was that with political modernization and its attendant “democratization,” religion should be confined to the private sphere. Description and prescription went happily together.

Both parts of this consensus are now in question. The September 11 attacks clearly demonstrated that the consensus was wrong. Well before and apart from September 11, however, the consensus was increasingly difficult to sustain. A multitude of simultaneously developed and vibrantly religious societies—starting with the United States—explodes the empirical assumption. A multitude of simultaneously democratic and luxuriantly faith-saturated societies—including India, Turkey, and Indonesia—explodes the ethical assumption. And ten years after September 11, 2001, religious militancy remains a powerful force—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and numerous other locales—that individual governments and the international community have proven unable to defeat or even contain.

This old consensus is nevertheless stubborn. It still structures much of our study and understanding of the role of religion in world affairs. It does so because many of the concepts and conceptual distinctions on which it was founded remain firmly lodged in the minds of international relations scholars, as Bryan Hehir describes in chapter 1 of this book. The meaning of concepts such as “secularism,” “modernity,” “power,” and “public life” is assumed without hesitation or complication. With equal confidence, a sharp boundary is drawn between these concepts and phenomena assumed to be their polar opposites: “religion,” “tradition,” “theology,” “faith,” and “private worship.”

Much classical thinking and practice in world affairs is thus a form of border patrol. It is concerned with policing and strengthening the fence between two worlds. The first world is the “secular” and “public” world in which international actors—nation-states and the multilateral organizations that bind them together—are presumed to make rational choices in the pursuit of political and economic power. The second world is the “spiritual” and “private” world in which religious actors—everything from church hierarchies to clerical councils to violent organizations such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah—are presumed to make faith-based choices in the pursuit of nonrational or irrational goals. As with the empirical assumption about religion and economic development, the factual assumption about these two worlds is that they are two separate universes, with little to no mutual contact or interaction. As with the ethical or normative assumption about religion and political democratization, the ethical or moral assumption about these two worlds is that they should be kept as far apart as possible.

However, it is true that what could be called classical secularization theory recognized the reality and legitimacy of some traffic between these two universes. Classical secularization theory assumed the descriptive and prescriptive forms noted at the beginning: it expected the automatic decline of religion in the face of development and required the hermetic isolation of religion in the face of democracy. On one hand, the forces of development and progress would so impinge on the world of religion that religion would have little to do and less space in which to do it. Modern progress would make the security and comfort offered by religion increasingly unnecessary. Modernization, in other words, would infiltrate, occupy, and diminish the world of the spirit, fostering the “disenchantment” that Max Weber made central to his understanding of modernity. On the other hand, secularization theory held that the forces of democracy should reform and regulate religion to make it compatible with freedom—to inculcate habits of autonomy and rational reflection and encourage individuals to forge new identities as democratic citizens. On closer inspection, in other words, classical secularization theory imagined that the religious and political worlds would and should interrelate to a significant extent.

The crucial point, however, is that the secularization theorists who assigned themselves the task of managing the points of contact between the public “secular” world and the private “spiritual” world allowed—and expected—traffic to flow in only one direction.

The result of this stringent and one-way boundary maintenance has been the long-standing exclusion of religion and religious actors from the systematic study of world politics in general and international relations in particular. This has created a paradoxical situation: religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one of the least examined factors in the professional study and practice of world affairs.

For example, the lead journal for political science in the United States is the American Political Science Review (APSR). In its 100th anniversary issue, an article concluded that “prior to 1960 only a single APSR article sought to use religion as a variable to explain empirical phenomena” and that in APSR “from 1980 on, just one article in American Government put religious factors at the center of analysis; and just two in Comparative Politics.” A similar neglect marked the international relations literature. Daniel Philpott, a contributor to this book, judged that in his survey of leading journals of international relations from 1980 to 1999, “only six or so out of a total of about sixteen hundred featured religion as an important influence.” This neglect of religion in research is echoed in teaching. One of the coeditors of this volume, Alfred Stepan, teaches at one of America’s largest and oldest schools dedicated to training graduate students for international careers in government, political analysis, international organizations, the media, human rights, the private sector, and academia: the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is currently teaching the first general course on the role of religion in world affairs in the school’s fifty-year history.

*  *  *

Rethinking Religion and World Affairs represents a collective effort to rethink religion and world affairs by questioning the sharp empirical and ethical boundaries that have separated the two. A working group of leading scholars and policy practitioners concerned with religion in the contemporary world was convened by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, to devise strategies to transcend this state of affairs. It soon became apparent that thousands of professors never trained in religion and world affairs would be asked to design and teach new courses, media newsrooms to report on religion in greater depth, and legislators, foreign policy makers, humanitarian organizations, development agencies, and feminist and human rights groups to devise new and more appropriate approaches to religion.

Bangladesh is often lauded as the poster child of third-world development: the birthplace of microcredit, the harbinger of religious tolerance, and exemplar of a transition from turbulent politics to persistent democracy in the developing world. Different from its neighbors on the basis of varying post-colonial experiences and development trajectories, the religion question came to be written on the nation through a particular “secular” construction, referred to in the vernacular as dhormoniropekkhota, or “religiously neutral.” This construction initially argued for an absence of religious political parties and for equal treatment of religions by the state so that all citizens may enjoy “equal” opportunity. While the ban on religious political parties has subsequently been lifted, and greater allowances made to Islam in the constitution, these are widely considered by liberal-secular defenders of the original constitution as intrusions that have defiled the sanctity of secularism. Restoring the original secular constitution, with all its constitutive elements is, as many argue, essential for socio-economic development, successful indicators of which, such as decreased maternal and infant mortality, increased literacy amongst the poor, and innovative ideas such as credit for the poor, have garnered Bangladesh a certain degree of global visibility. These advances, many argue, have been made possible only because the language of development has steered clear of religion in an attempt to construct the ideal secular nation. In other words, pro-secular development advocates argue that development successes have occurred in spite of, rather than (in collusion) with religion and religious beliefs, practices, and sensibilities.

Parallel to the achievement of the state, donors, and NGOs in the field of socio-economic development, much of which has furthered the status women, are legal triumphs through which, unlike in the Pakistani case, the Islamist call to declare Ahmediyas apostates has not been vindicated. Thus, the state’s secular mandate NOT to define the content of Islamic belief and practice is seemingly preserved. However, this “secular” prerogative does not find equal resonance when it comes to minority populations, for whom struggles over property and other rights seldom even make it to the courts. The “triumph” of secularism thus manifests itself in keeping alive a “liberal” notion of life for the majority population. An example of this is the recent victory in which the High Court directed the Ministry of Education to take immediate steps to implement the Guidelines on Sexual Harassment and to ensure that no woman working in any educational institution, public or private, is forced to wear a veil or cover her head, and may exercise her personal choice whether or not to do so.

The privileging of a liberal notion of Islam was the raison d’etre of the secular construct whose original clause that no political party can operate in the name of religion was borne directly out of the independence struggle. The Pakistani state had asserted its hegemony on the pretext that Bengali cultural markers, on the basis of their similitude with (Hindu) West Bengal, were inadequate expressions of the “Islamic nation” that Pakistan felt it had to project itself as. The birth of Bangladesh was seen, by the ruling elite of the time, as an opportunity to construct a new national character where a monolithic notion of Islam that required purging Bengalis of their linguistic and cultural affinities would not prevail. The state, although certainly not neutral vis-à-vis Islam, thus created particular Muslim citizen-subjects, who, in order to be nationalistic, had to refrain from a public/political position on Islam. However, in the course of development and modernization, the citizen’s engagement with Islam could not be contained to rituals that linked one’s inner self to the supernatural world via pirs, mystics, sufi saints that serve as spiritual leaders in praying for and guiding one’s worldly problems, and the darga sharif, or shrine of a dead pir where prayers are believed to be better heard. Given the tensions around public expressions of religion and their presumed anti-Bengali, “anti-nationalist” affinities, how would a more “modern” engagement with Islam express itself in Bangladesh? The Islamist platform brings with it all the pent-up negativity of aggression and anti-nationalism. Other more “neutral” platforms such as the Tabligh Jama’at are just too “neutral”—almost ineffective if Islam is to deliver us from bad governance, corruption, and personal, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy.

Other “creative” and evolving ways are on the horizon. I encountered some of these modalities while conducting fieldwork in women’s taleem, or Quranic discussion circles, in Dhaka. While such circles are not entirely new to the cultural, religious, and political landscape of Bangladesh, the ones in which I participated, along with many others in the city, are somewhat different in their pursuit of “modern religious” engagements that refrain from affiliating with existing religious groups and political parties. While the women are conservative vis-à-vis gender and sexuality issues, they appear more open in their thoughts about the political import of their public actions.

The first explanation offered by secular liberals of this modality of mobilizing—which calls itself “a-political” in its refusal to stand on an Islamist platform while at the same time distancing itself from a Tablighi kind of personal piety—is that it is strategic, aimed at keeping at bay the anti-nationalist stigma attached to the Jama’at-e-Islami. Framing the women’s religious engagement as strategic is consonant with the secularized normative religious subject for whom religion and the public sphere do not and must not mix. Thus, it is convenient to see the desire to mix the two as an aberration, as the intransigence of secularism’s defiling elements, and therefore to predict that this must result in the women ultimately embracing Islamism. This argument, which retains for the liberal advocates of secularism their position of authority as creators and drivers of secular modernity, stems from a misunderstood notion that the secular and the religious represent distinct domains of national life, leading to distinct subjectivities. This view has been complicated through the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Wendy Brown, as well as in recent collective publications such as Rethinking Secularism.

What are the women’s perspectives? The women believe that they are engaging in da’wa, or proselytizing, and use the same term to refer to their modus operandi. Their methods of shaping and changing the self as well as taking those selves to the public space rests in reading and following other, often competing interpretations of the Quran and Hadith along with other exegetical material and constantly bringing the ensuing understandings to bear upon current-day realities and requirements. Through such methods, the women seek to inculcate in themselves and their families deeper faith and practice, such as wearing the hijab and being meticulous in the daily prayers, as well as to create “responsible and productive” citizens. They refer to many of their outreach initiatives as “secular operations with religious undertones” and argue that the ultimate objective of living in the world is not only piety “which has its ebbs and flows,” but responsibility and accountability in creating a productive society. This phrasing reflects the attempt to make a religious agenda appear secondary to others—an effective way to draw in many (young) people towards productive community work and to disarm potential critics.

In making Islam relevant to the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the country, the women must contend with what is out there—the achievements of the development sector, the failures of twenty years of democracy, a political system that has seemingly placed religion on the backburner, and a displacement of the enchanted from “God to Bollywood.” The women, and many of their male peers, are knee-deep in thinking through how to put religion back on the table. What would be the best possible routes to achieve this task? In “effectively and productively” putting Islam back on the table, how does one stay true to God, self, and society? Thus, while the “secular-liberal” suspicion that these newly religious men and women have an agenda is not completely unfounded, their plan also consists of positing religion as a choice, albeit a very desirable and beneficial one. Such desirability of religious engagement may not keep religion in the private sphere, but it also does not approach the formal political space of the public sphere. These engagements thus not only strive to create new intersections of the religious and the secular, but also redefine and alter religious belief and rituals through dialogues, debates, and adjustments to perceived requirements of the day.

By drawing attention to the similarities in the presupposed subject of the newly religious and the secular Bangladeshis’ worldviews, I do not intend to blur distinctions and subject these women’s initiatives to either pseudo-Islamist or secular readings. What I would like to draw the reader to is the particular ways in which worlds are created through exchange and sharing and the particular language and attachments that allow them to arrive at their goals. To think about religious engagement in light of embodied practices through different modes of engagement within and outside the religious repertoire is an important exercise not only for an understanding of how religion advances in the world, but also for insights into whether, to what extent, and how all that is apparently secular delivers upon its promises.

The stakes of this conversation, especially for the field of development, in contexts such as Bangladesh and other parts of the developing world are high. The development paradigm promoted by state, donor, and NGO partnerships, which has presupposed a universal citizen subject has long kept the question of religious identity at bay. Advocates of liberal development models stand vindicated when Bangladesh does not come up on the World Economic Forum’s list of the top-ten countries ranked by the Global Gender Gap (GGG) index. Since the development process had ensured that women in Bangladesh fare better than those in India, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt, amongst others, to bring to the surface how the religion question has been subsumed under and shaped by development initiatives, thus, seems not only unnecessary, but even dangerous. “Why spoil a good thing?” secular, pro-development advocates ask. But would such an insight necessarily be spoiling a good thing? Instead of preserving certain existing notions, would not a critical examination of the development process and its handling of and negotiations around religious identities open possibilities for a deeper understanding of how transformations actually occur? After all, religious identities, especially in the context of South Asia, have long been a part of one’s political and everyday existence. Religion, as far as I am concerned, has always been on the table.

I understand that if such an exercise reveals that the shaping and mediating mechanisms of the development process have stifled religious life, then secular advocates will fear sharp critiques by religious quarters, as experienced in 2003-2004 through Islamist attacks on BRAC schools. Since these events took place, several development organizations have kept as far away as possible from dealing with issues around religion. This distancing has neither silenced radical, Islamist voices, nor has it enabled a greater understanding of the dynamics of the development process or the growing appeal of faith-based development organizations. What is “Islamic” about Islamic microfinance and why is it on the rise? As a development model, does it operate on similar principles and presuppose the same normative subject as secular microfinance? These are important questions—not only because they allow us to better understand new trends, but also because they may lead to greater clarity on the effects of institutional arrangements that work upon religious ideas and practices to produce certain tangible outcomes. Exploring these questions will take away the monopoly of those who think that their (religious or secular) approaches offer the only solution. Coming at the issue without presumed distinctions between the religious and the secular, and the animosity often bred by that distinction, can lead to a better understanding of the development process, and to qualify how and why, for example, Bangladesh has managed to stay out of the list of the ten worst countries to live in for Muslim women. This research is crucial to lifting blinders that have historically been placed on groups that advocate both religion and secularism in dire opposition to one another. The gains of such an exercise would be invaluable to thinking about secularism, its limits and dispensations, and about religion as an ever-changing component of a secularizing, modern world.

Azza Karam

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the SSRC project on Religion and International Affairs. Karam here speaks only for herself, not for any institution, organization, or board.—ed.

*  *  *

NS: Before we get to your work at the United Nations, let’s start with recent events in Egypt, your home country. How, in your view, is the Egyptian revolution of a few months ago proceeding? Has it been betrayed yet?

AK: It sounds as though you’re waiting for it to be “betrayed”!

NS: No, not at all. I’m wondering what exactly it would mean for the revolution to be betrayed. It seems to be assumed that, somewhere along the way, all revolutions are.

AK: The revolution is proceeding with the hiccups associated with any comprehensive transformation entailing the political, social, economic, and legal overhaul of an entire country. Is the revolution over? On the contrary, we have but begun. Are there disappointments en route? Definitely. But is there a sense that no change is taking place? Not at all. Are we going backwards? Impossible, given the enormity of what has transpired in the consciousness, not only of Egyptians, but of all Arab people. This revolution is, first and foremost, about crossing the Rubicon of fear, about reclaiming dignity, and about the youth being engines of political and social transformation on an unprecedented scale. None of these dynamics are reversible. We are living through the enactment of a new collective consciousness.

NS: Maybe in that sense it can’t be betrayed. But the enactment won’t be easy.

AK: Well, there are the grimy realities of entrenched, interest-based politics; an economy struggling to recover from being on hold while the revolution was taking place, in a global financial environment that is itself struggling to stand on its feet; and a legal system that needs to be overhauled—all while maintaining security and stability in a region being christened, by fire, into freedom.

NS: What was going through your head during the uprising? Were you afraid of what might happen?

AK: I was afraid for the safety of the youth demonstrating so courageously, creatively, and with so much passion. I was afraid for the millions left in the clutches of a government that deliberately instigated instability for the first four days of demonstrations.

NS: And then?

AK: My fear was gradually replaced by several other emotions, starting on January 29, when a series of events began to take place: I allowed myself the first thin line in the crescent of hope when I heard the rumblings of discontent within the Egyptian army itself—rumblings that were articulate and deliberate, and that echoed the people’s demands for both dignity and systemic change. I began to allow myself to smile—and then to grin—when, at the very same time, an Egyptian sense of humor asserted itself in the various venues where demonstrations were taking place—in slogans, attire, and much more. I shook my head in utter disbelief at the camels and horses that were brought in—and felt sorry for them, because of the five-hour journey from the pyramids to Tahrir Square that they had had to endure under whips and ill-treatment. But I wept like an orphan for the people who were dying. I clenched my fists and invoked hell upon those who were deliberately causing the loss of life. I stayed awake night after night, with Egypt’s time defining that of my own life, calling friends and family in Egypt and everywhere else in the world, exchanging information about events, analyzing, hoping, and arguing. Above all, and throughout, I—and every single Egyptian I know, Muslim and Christian—prayed and prayed and prayed. On February 10, when we all expected Mubarak to announce he was stepping down, I literally cursed him—and threw my shoe at his image on my computer screen—as did most Egyptians listening to him across Egypt.

NS: What was it like for you when he finally stepped down?

AK: On February 11, 2011, I was born again as a proud Masriyya—Egyptian—deeply humbled by those ten or twenty years younger than I, but a thousand years more courageous. I kissed my computer screen—the very same one that had just suffered the indignity of having a shoe hurled at it—when Al Jazeera aired the announcement and displayed the unadulterated joy of Egyptians at Mubarak’s resignation. I was amazed, beyond words, at the images of people cleaning up in Tahrir Square. There and then, I prostrated myself in thanks to the Almighty for the beauty of the spirits of the people whom He had enabled. And on the streets of New York City, I held my head up and greeted the Egyptian coffee vendors, hot dog vendors, and commuters loudly, in Arabic, and joked and laughed and shook their hands—for the first and only time in the ten years that I have lived here.

NS: Have you been to Egypt since then?

AK: No, but the enormity of the transformation does not require one’s physical presence within the national boundaries to be appreciated. The Arab awakening in the neighboring countries is itself an indication that the change that has taken place is very much ongoing, and that it is reshaping the identity of the entire region.

NS: Some observers heralded the apparently secular quality of the Egyptian revolution. Do you think that religion will be less on the lips of leaders in the Arab world now than it has been in recent decades?

AK: Secularism comes in many shades and varieties, but it has never manifested—not even here in the United States—in the manner of a total repudiation of religion. A famous Egyptian nationalist leader in the early twentieth century, describing his nationalist aspirations and the struggle against British colonialism, once said: “I am a Copt by religion, a Muslim by culture, and an Egyptian by both and much else.” This multitude of identities, which includes different religious-cum-cultural contexts, has and shall always characterize Egyptians and, indeed, all Arabs. Are we likely to hear less religious talk in Egypt today? I doubt it. After all, why should religion not continue to feature in a country that believes itself to have invented religion in the time of the pharaohs?

NS: How is religion being talked about and thought about at the United Nations? Are there ways in which it is, perhaps conspicuously, not being talked and thought about?

AK: Religion, as an ingredient of culture, has always been part of the business of human development. In the last decade or so, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent reconfiguration of geopolitical dynamics, discussions about religion have begun to occupy a more prominent role in the discourse within and among the various UN agencies. The last two Secretaries-General have referred specifically to the role of faith in several of their speeches, in terms of both culture and faith-based service organizations. More and more UN agencies, beginning with UNFPA, have started to identify faith-based partners in social development, on issues of health, education, child care, nutrition, and the environment. The United Nations system today is more aware of the fact that religious communities, and their affiliated organizational entities, are some of the oldest, most deeply rooted, and furthest reaching social welfare networks and providers known to humanity. They are increasingly recognized as part of the partnerships for development at the United Nations.

NS: How do you help others at the UN to become better attuned to the importance of religion in development work?

AK: What I do is provide technical support to my colleagues at UNFPA, so that they are able to discern the appropriate faith-based partners for our reproductive health, gender equality, and population and development work. My job, then, is to facilitate strategic engagement with the world of religion, as part of the broader culture, in order to further the realization of our human rights mandate. In 2008, many of UNFPA’s faith-based partners were convened to launch the Interfaith Network for Population and Development, a unique human rights-oriented initiative within the United Nations. Several of our UN colleagues joined the deliberations and attended the launch, which took place in Istanbul. Today, there are over 500 member organizations, with a legacy of partnering not only with UNFPA but also with several of its UN sister agencies on a range of development issues. The UNFPA also currently chairs an Inter-Agency Task Force on partnerships with faith-based organizations around the Millennium Development Goals. We come together to share information, coordinate activities, and share experiences and lessons learned.

NS: What lessons has this process taught you?

AK: One thing I’ve learned over time is that these FBOs (faith-based organizations) and “religion” are not one and the same thing. The world of religion is vast and difficult for us to quantify and categorize into neatly distinct entities. Religion and faith do not lend themselves to the usual normative frameworks of development praxis, which means that engagement with religious communities has to be sustainable, built upon common goals, and mainstreamed into broader civil society and government partnerships. This is critical to establishing and maintaining the trust that is required for any such engagement, and for facilitating the co-ownership of national development processes among all the different partners involved.

NS: How do you choose those partners?

AK: The United Nations cannot afford to—nor should it—work with only one faith tradition, or with only one FBO, or with the same religious leaders on all issues. We are obliged to work with varied representatives of different religious organizations and communities on addressing a multiplicity of human development needs. And we have to maintain the same respect and appreciation for the respective strengths and modus operandi of each partner, as long as there is agreement on the basic goals of human development, that is, human rights, peace, and security for all. But we have also learned that the responsibility for cultivating and maintaining these partnerships lies on all sides. Just as we hold ourselves accountable to our intergovernmental boards, mandates, and civil society partners, we expect our FBO partners to do the same with each other, and with us.

NS: Religion seems especially relevant—as a source of controversy, I mean—to the issues of gender, reproductive health, and population that the UNFPA deals with. Do you find the organization’s work to be constrained by religious concerns?

AK: It is not really possible to speak of religious constraints as such. Religious concerns, positions, and services vary significantly according to the religion itself, as well as per country, region, and situation. Issues of reproductive health vary enormously, too. What I can say, almost unequivocally, is that it is virtually impossible to embark on any issue relating to sexuality, women’s rights, and gender relations without coming across particular cultural dynamics. But it would be wrong to assume that particular cultures are unchanging obstacles. If there is one lesson we keep learning from history, and that has been highlighted of late by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is that people change their own cultures from within all the time.

NS: Do you think the revolution represents a sea change in the role of women in Egyptian society?

AK: In my opinion, and contrary to popular (and largely ethnocentric) beliefs, the revolution could happen only because women’s roles in Egyptian society—and Arab societies as a whole—have already been undergoing a sea change. Anyone who has studied Arab societies in the last thirty years will attest to how socially active, politically informed, and economically engaged women have been. The magnitude, scope, and diversity of their participation in the revolution is itself a testament to how intrinsic to the social, economic, legal, and political fabric they already are—and have been. What is now transpiring with women’s rights in Egypt—and elsewhere in the Arab region—is a continuation of the struggle for gender equality within the emerging political framework, which is part and parcel of the larger effort to safeguard all human rights in the new polity that is now being collectively fashioned.

NS: What can people in the West do to help advance the cause of women in the Middle East? Or would it be better to butt out?

AK: Arab women have made it clear they are perfectly capable of activism and of articulating their own needs and aspirations. If and when these women need the assistance of “people in the West,” they will let that be known in no uncertain terms. After listening, the “people in the West” can then decide whether and how best to respond. And it would be wise to do so in consultation with the same women who made the request.

NS: Many have expressed concern that conservative groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, will gain power in Egypt—one assumption being that that would be deleterious to the cause of women’s rights. Is there a chance, then, that things could become worse for women?

AK: It is seriously myopic to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood is “anti-women.” I first started studying the Brotherhood, as part of a range of Islamist formations around the world, back in the late 1980s. Even within the organization itself, there are diverse perspectives on women’s rights: there are extremely active, very well-educated, cultured, and articulate women members of the Brotherhood, just as there are some members who are deeply conservative when it comes to women’s roles in public. Bear in mind that revolutions are happening within almost every group, party, and institution in Egypt today: the army, political parties, universities, professional associations, media, NGOs—you name it. So, even within the Muslim Brotherhood, a revolution continues to unfold among its diverse members—young and old, men and women, and so forth. The journey of these different revolutions is, for everyone concerned, a process of acquiring wisdom, and I believe strongly that we have little to lose and a great deal to gain.

NS: What do you think is the cause of all this upheaval? Why now?

AK: We are living in the context of a generation of youth—which is over 60% of our populations—that has grown up as part of a global youth culture equipped with mass communication technologies and amid huge challenges to established powers. I mean, who would have thought the Soviet Union would collapse; or that religion would re-emerge so strongly after decades of attempts to keep it out of politics; or that a woman and former guerilla fighter would be elected president of the largest Latin American country, and a black man would be elected as president of a country that once went to war with itself over racism? This generation is growing up at a time when even what it is to be a man or a woman is being radically redefined.

For the past eight years, I have been studying the emergence of what might be referred to as “post-secular development” in Southeast Asia. I have documented initiatives in contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore that have formulated a mode of Islamic practice conducive to corporate success and transnational competitiveness. In documenting this phenomenon, I have argued that, whereas much of the post-colonial history of what were formerly called “developing nations” was characterized by what the anthropologist James Ferguson has referred to as “faith in development,” recent efforts to merge Islamic practice with scientific and technical knowledge instead represent efforts to develop faith. On the one hand, faith in development refers to the nationalist projects of facilitating economic growth through state-led industrial modernization that occurred in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the postwar period. In this configuration, the nation-state was to bring prosperity to its population through massive investment in industrial technology and production. On the other hand, developing faith refers to concrete initiatives designed to intensify religious practice under the presumption that so doing would bring the work practices of corporate employees into line with global business norms and effect greater productivity and transparency. Developing faith is not a complete break with faith in development, however, because both share the similar conviction that worldly problems can be solved through the proper application of technical and scientific knowledge.

The shift from faith in development to developing faith in contemporary Indonesia was particularly notable at state-owned Krakatau Steel, a massive steelworks in western Java where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2003 and 2005. Historically, Krakatau Steel was absolutely central to the developmentalist ambitions harbored by Indonesia’s former authoritarian president, Suharto. The company was a focal point in the nationalist project of modernization. According to the prevailing developmentalist logic purveyed in blueprints for modernization like Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, Krakatau Steel was part of a complex of institutions that would deliver progress, in the form of industrialization, economic growth, and increased living standards, to Indonesia.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis, the end of the Suharto regime, and the increasing integration of Indonesia into wider global economic circuits have called faith in development into question. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, Krakatau Steel had been the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in state development funds. For years state investment guaranteed the company’s viability, as it was able to keep up to date with advances in steel production technology. However, such investment was brought to an end in 1998, after the near bankruptcy of the Indonesian government. Tariffs on imported steel that had long protected the company from international competition were fully eliminated in April 2004. Finally, and perhaps most ominously for some employees, the Indonesian government has proposed privatizing Krakatau Steel, which could trigger sweeping job losses for members of a workforce that had previously been able to count on lifetime employment.

Given the wide-ranging changes taking place, the company’s existence could no longer be justified according to its status as a symbol of modernization, development, and industrialization. One foreman in the slab steel plant explained to me that, prior to the late-1990s, the “the social was the most important and profit was secondary,” but “now profit is number one and the social mission [misi sosial] is number two.” He said that this “social mission” was premised upon “padat karya,” which literally translates as “dense work” and refers to the practice of hiring more workers than necessary to operate businesses. The tension between the company’s social mission and its business mission was becoming increasingly acute. One general manager told me that a Booz, Allen, and Hamilton management-consulting audit of the company advocated releasing one-quarter of the company’s total workforce, corresponding to at least 1500 (out of roughly 6000) permanent, full-time positions. Some Krakatau Steel employees suspected that privatization would lead to the elimination of a substantial number of jobs. Managers often cited the practice of work spreading as the underlying reason for poor job performance at the company, claiming that employees at the company lacked motivation because they knew that they were superfluous.

To address the problem of employee motivation and prepare for privatization, Krakatau Steel managers sought to (in their words) “develop” the Islamic faith of employees by contracting a Jakarta-based company, the ESQ Leadership Center, to implement Emotional and Spiritual Quotient training at the company. The brainchild of the charismatic businessman Ary Ginanjar, ESQ asserts that a work ethic conducive to business success is present in the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of Muslim faith (iman). He has drawn other ideas for the program from business management and life coaching sessions, like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” that have greatly expanded in North America, Europe, and Asia in recent years. Through the multi-day training sessions that his company offers, Ginanjar stresses that Islamic piety should not only be restricted to religious worship. Rather, Islamic faith should animate all of one’s worldly activity, from interactions with one’s family to everyday work in the world.

At Krakatau Steel, ESQ training sessions were held once or twice per month. They were most often held in the large multipurpose room of the factory’s education and training center. The sessions usually ran from Friday through Sunday. The first two days started at 7:00 a.m. and lasted until just before the maghrib prayers, which usually begin around 6:00 in Indonesia. The third day included the program’s dénouement, which consisted of a simulation of three of the events that take place during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca: tawaf, the circumambulation of the kaaba; the sa’i, a ritual that consists of running seven times back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah in Mecca; and finally the stoning of jamrat al-aqabah, in which pilgrims hurl rocks at three representations of the devil, symbolizing the rebuking of demonic temptation.

The training was structured through a sophisticated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, consisting not only of graphs, charts, tables, and a litany of bullet points, but also with spliced film clips, colorful photographs, and popular music. The information conveyed was culled from a variety of web sites, including that of Harvard Business School. The training was delivered primarily as an interactive lecture in which the main trainer would alternate between engaging with the audience in the familiar style of a television talk show host and proceeding to deliver fiery and profoundly emotive lectures asking for collective redemption from Allah.

Ary Ginanjar draws evidence for the commensurability of Islam and what might be called the ethics of globalization by instructing participants in these programs that the five pillars contain lessons for business success. Thus, the fourth pillar of Islam, the duty to fast during Ramadan, is reinterpreted as a model for “self-control.” Based on this principle, ESQ seeks to inculcate the duty to constrain this-worldly desires in order to ensure other-worldly salvation. Corruption was a chronic problem at SOEs and was attributed to an uncontrolled desire for material wealth. ESQ sought to represent self-management as a divine injunction to remedy this rampant corruption. The third pillar, the duty to give alms (zakat), was taken as divine sanction for “strategic collaboration” and exercising a “win-win” approach in both business transactions and relations with co-workers. This principle was illustrated with an interactive exercise in which each participant paired up with another, shined his or her shoes, and then reciprocally paid the other for the service. A common critique of employees of state-owned enterprises was their poor customer relations. The exercise was intended to illustrate the importance of serving, rather than being served, for employees of a modern corporation.

In just seven years, ESQ grew spectacularly: by the end of 2010, over one million people had participated in the program. Although Krakatau Steel was one of the first companies to embrace it, the program has now spread across Indonesia to some of the country’s most prominent governmental institutions and state-owned firms, including Pertamina (the national oil company), Telkom (the country’s largest telephone company), and Garuda (the nation’s flag air carrier). Current and former military generals also are avid participants in ESQ, and several sessions have been held at the Army’s officer candidate training school in Bandung (SESKOAD). Recently, ESQ met its goal of becoming a national movement, having established branch offices in 30 out of 33 Indonesian provinces. In late 2005, the ESQ Leadership Center broke ground for a 25-story office tower and convention center in south Jakarta, funded in part through investment shares sold to past participants. When I returned to Indonesia in December 2008, large-scale spiritual training programs were being conducted in the already completed conference center portion of the building. Finally, ESQ has also “gone global”: the first overseas ESQ training was held in April 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, and, in 2007, regularly scheduled ESQ trainings were being delivered in Malaysia on a bimonthly basis. Mahatir Mohamed, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, recently endorsed the program. In addition, ESQ programs have been held in Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Brunei, and in 2008 Ginanjar brought the program to Houston and Washington, DC.

The spiritual training program was extremely popular at Krakatau Steel. According to one human resources manager, Sukrono, efforts to develop faith were the result of an updated reading of the Qur’an. He explained:

When we were a small developing country in the 1970s we thought that worship (ibadah) meant praying, giving alms (zakat), or going on the hajj, but this is not true. Now from studying the Qur’an we know that passages dealing with these things are only about 20 percent of the content, the rest of the Qur’an is about human relations. The crucial thing is that in everyday activity—waking up and going to work, doing family errands, and so forth—one’s intentions (niat) are toward worship.

Here Sukrono illustrates how the faith in development that had guided Indonesian modernization during the New Order had proceeded under the secularist presumption of the separation of religion from work and commerce. In contrast, after the end of the Suharto regime, managers like Sukrono have recast the Qur’an as a human resources management manual and seek to develop faith. In so doing, he echoed how Ary Ginanjar had transformed the five pillars of Islam into recipes for corporate success—for example, by rebranding zakat as “strategic collaboration.”

In response to what was conceived of as a “moral crisis,” spiritual reform reconfigured the relationship between faith and development in Indonesia so that faith itself became development’s object. During the New Order, development was the raison d’être of government policy and practice. However, after Suharto’s spectacular collapse, the logic of enhancement and growth that underlay the project of modernization was applied to the religious practices of industrial employees who were supposed to be the purveyors of development. Islamic practice, previously relegated to the background in Indonesia, was seen both as a means to revive economic growth and as something to be developed and enhanced.

Developing faith did not represent the end of faith in development, but rather a reconfiguration of its rationality, creating what I refer to as post-secular development. The same modernist logic that had guided the project of Indonesian development was still at work. Implicit was the assumption that worldly problems could be addressed through technical intervention and the application of human knowledge. Thus, faith was not viewed as a mystical or irrational practice, but as something that could be instilled through design. Developing faith and, in so doing, creating new patterns of human life, was executed according to the same logic that earlier guided building bridges, toll roads, and factories. Religious practice was something to be enhanced through a series of technical interventions. For many citizens in contemporary Indonesia who had come of age during the heyday of faith in development, Islamic spiritual reform appeared to resolve a number of oppositions that had plagued the project of modernization. ESQ spiritual training offered a recipe for living that was simultaneously Muslim and modern. Thus, post-secular development enabled one to be both an engineer and a devout adherent of Islam.