Alfred Stepan

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JB: You recently co-edited a volume, Rethinking Religion and World Affairs, that emerged from an SSRC working group you chaired. You have an essay that appears in the volume, “Religion, Democracy, and the ‘Twin Tolerations,’” that’s an updated version of an article you published in the Journal of Democracy in 2000. The article was clearly prescient; it’s still relevant for republication today. What got you thinking about democracy, secularism, and religion in the late 90s?

AS: I had recently finished co-authoring with Juan J. Linz our book, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, and was thinking about the status of democracy in the rest of the world. Many analysts were saying that without Western secularism, along the lines of French läcitė, democracy would not take root elsewhere, especially in the Islamic world. I was not then a specialist on comparative religion but I had traveled frequently to India, and I was absolutely certain that you don’t need secularism in the classic social science sense of declining religious belief and complete emptying out of religion from public space, in order to have democracy. Indeed, the only place in the world where the French type of 1905, aggressive, religiously unfriendly secularism co-exists easily with modern democracy is in academic texts. In fact, 1905 French secularism doesn’t now exist in any democracy in the world, including France. In 1958, de Gaulle came back and in essence said “the old argument was that all French citizens would go to our public schools and learn everything about French Citizenship and history—they don’t. About 25% of all our school children are in Catholic schools, so let’s give some money to the Catholic schools so long as they include a lot in their curriculum on French history.”

The word “secularism” carries a lot of negative baggage in Arab countries because for many speakers of Arabic the word has a connotation that is anti-religious. So if the argument is “Democracy must be secular,” and if people are parsing that in their heads in an Arabic speaking country, they may be understandably putting some version of the following question to themselves: “If secularism means being anti-religious, and if to be a democracy you must be secular, then as a good Muslim should I support democracy?”

JB: So you saw problems with secularization theory and the prevailing theories of democratization.

AS: What I was increasingly convinced about was that the relationship between democracy and religion as theorized in the classic studies of secularism was not the norm in many countries that were actually democracies. Classical secularist arguments often entailed an empirical prediction that the role of religion would inevitably decline with modernity, and a normative prescription that it should. In the contemporary world neither the prediction, nor the prescription, seemed defensible to me. What is imperative for democracy, however, is some degree of “differentiation” between religion and the state. But I was convinced that there are many ways to arrive at sufficient differentiation, despite this not having been adequately thought about or documented. I was also aware that among the “first generation” of democratization theorists, such as Adam Przeworkski, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Laurence Whitehead, or even Juan Linz, none of us was then writing on religion and democratization; but this had to be done. I was personally aware of the possibility for theological and political change within religions because Vatican II and Catholicism’s “aggiornamento“ of the 1960s had a significant positive impact on three democratic transitions I had written a lot about: Brazil, Chile, and Spain.

JB: Was there a catalyst in the 90s that got you thinking about religion when not a lot of other people were?

It is hard to say there was one catalyst. But I do remember a conversation with Ernest Gellner in the mid-90s in Budapest that encouraged my pursuit of the possibility for arrangements like the twin tolerations. I was the first president and rector of Central European University and Gellner was the director of our Center of the Study of Nationalism. Gellner was one of the most famous theorists of nationalism and one of his many specialties was Islam. We disagreed on many issues but had numerous friendly exchanges. Gellner had a theory that Muslims were “secular resistant,” and if you’re going to have democracy in a Muslim-majority country you needed a version of secularism rather along the lines of French läicité. For this to endure, the military had to be the “reserve power” and the meta-constitutional force upholding secularism. So, if democracy is to exist in a Muslim country it’s got to be like Turkey. Turkey had a series of military coups d’état, many of them to control Islam, in 1960, 1971, and 1980. I felt uncomfortable with Gellner’s conclusion because I had often been exposed to such essentialist arguments about Catholicism being “secular resistant.” I had also written a number of books on transcending military-controlled regimes and disliked any idea of the permanent indispensability of the military.

My current research leads me to many anti-Gellernian findings. I show how Indonesia has had a “twin tolerations”-friendly approach to religion, the state, and democracy since 2000 and, unlike Turkey, no coups. Senegal’s version of “twin tolerations,” involving democracy and mutual “rituals of respect” between secular state officials and Sufi religious leaders, is also unlike Turkey; again, no coups. Turkey itself, in some important ways, has become less Gellnerian. In the 80s and much of the 90s, the Turkish army was pro-Western Europe and most Islamists were anti-Europe. However, once the moderate Islamist AKP became the ruling party in Turkey, in 2002 via elections, many of their leaders realized that they had a chance to rule Turkey democratically. They also saw that the norm among European Union members was that religious people have some legitimate role to play in civil society and even in political society. Also, the book by Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe, and my writing on “twin tolerations” reinforced this view. More and more, AKP leaders realized that European countries had a religiously-friendly form of democracy, but that Turkey, since Attatürk, had a form of authoritarian secularism imposed from above with military help; and they came to believe that joining the European Union would be better for religious freedom in Turkey. For the same reasons, the military became less pro-Western Europe.

JB: What does a healthy relationship between democracy and religion look like?

AS: My reflections on the ten-year book project I recently published with my co-authors Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State Nations: India and other Multinational Democracies, increasingly guided me toward thinking about the “multiple secularisms” implicit in the concept of the “twin tolerations.” The book is principally a “primal scream” against the French idea of a nation-state with one hegemonic language and one hegemonic culture for countries that are in fact multinational. Some of the findings in the book, from one of the largest census-based surveys in the world (27,000 individuals in India, 10,000 in Pakistan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, and 10,000 in Bangladesh) are illuminating. Again and again we document that “multiple and complementary identities” are often the norm. Concerning religion, we created an index of the intensity of religious practice, with three dimensions to the index, and we also created another index of intensity of support for democracy, again with three dimensions taken into account. We did this to test an increasingly accepted hypothesis in India that the more intense the practice of Islam, the less the support for democracy. Many analysts were also worried this was happening among the Hindus, given the Hindu nationalist BJP. We found that in India, among each of the four major religions, the greater the intensity of religious practice, the more the support for democracy. How solid is this finding? It is a Pearson Chi-squared three-star finding, which means that there’s one chance in a thousand that this pattern happens by chance. It’s been replicated in Indonesia; Indonesia is the same.

Elsewhere I have looked at compulsory paid religious holidays in “separatist” pattern countries (France and the United States), in countries with “established church” patterns (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), and in countries with what I call a “positive accommodation” pattern (Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland). In these eight democratic countries there are sixty-one compulsory paid religious holidays for the majority religion, which is Christianity. They have zero for any minority religion—Judaism, Islam, etc. In Indonesia, the majority religion is Muslim, but they have six such Muslim holidays and seven for other religions. In Senegal, it’s seven holidays for Muslims, but six for Catholics, who represent less than ten percent of the population. Senegal also pays for some Catholics to take a pilgrimage to Rome. In India, where the majority religion is Hindu, there are five Hindu holidays and twice as many for minority religions. The Indian government also grants some subsidies for Muslims to make the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. This is because religion is accepted as a normal part of people’s lives. The state thus deliberately goes out of its way to show respect for the different religions in the country.

JB: In April 2012, you published an article, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations,” in the Journal of Democracy. The article does a great job contextualizing the current transition to democracy, in view of Tunisia’s political history, and of producing information that was not, until your article, in the public domain. Indeed there is an element of almost “breaking news” journalism about the piece.

AS: I am honored at the thought that a comparativist can occasionally give “breaking news “to the world. In fact I started my career as a special foreign correspondent for The Economist in West Africa and South America. That was a long time ago, but I still approach research with the tenacity of a journalist and with the aim of discovering new material. I don’t think some political scientists are aggressive enough. I am too often told that “nothing exists on the subject” when what is correct is that nothing is on the net about this. Much of my most interesting new contacts and materials emerged out of interviews with leaders. Two of the most important Islamic political theologians and party leaders, Rachid Ghannouchi, the head of Ennahda in Tunisia, and Adurrahman Wahid, the head of the 40-million member NU in Indonesia, spoke to me several times, which of course was interesting in itself, but since my time with The Economist, such interviews also lead to talks with their rivals. Some scholars are surprised that so many key political activists are willing to talk at length. I work on the assumption that if I can get in the door, and if I seem an informed listener, no one is bored by the story of his or her life. They talk, and if they want to demonstrate a point, they may search in their papers and give me a copy of what turns out to be a little known historical document.

JB: Did anything like this happen while you were working in Tunisia?

AS: The most original and important insight I gained into why secularists and Islamists were able to make a democratic coalition in Tunisia, unlike their counter-parts in Egypt, emerged precisely like this. Ghannouchi had told me a number of times that he, and other major Ennahda leaders, had talked to major secular leaders about overcoming the obstacles so as to enable them to jointly resist the dictatorship of Ben Ali and possibly pave the way to a democratic transition. But no documents were forthcoming in my first visit in March 2011, or my second visit in June 2003, but on my third visit, after the successful elections that produced a Constituent Assembly, four of the five largest parties in the Constituent Assembly—moderate Islamist Ennahda and three secular parties—gave me documents, often signed and with their Party leadership position. I have written about this in my Journal of Democracy article and in a previous contribution to The Immanent Frame. Here I only want to stress that these parties had met regularly and often secretly since their first meeting in Aix-en-Provence in France in June 2003 and hammered out “twin toleration” types of agreements on the formation of a sovereign space for democratically elected officials and a space in civil and political society for democratic Islamic activists.

The process was surprisingly like the one in Chile in the eight years before the defeat of Pinochet. In Chile, the socialists deeply distrusted the Christian Democratic party, which had supported the coup by General Pinochet in 1973. For their part, the Christian Democrats felt that the Socialists had contributed to what they saw as growing violence under Salvador Allende. But in the early 1980s both the Christian Democratic and the Socialist parties were in opposition to Pinochet and began meetings similar to those that occurred later in Tunisia. From my conversations with key participants in the Chilean talks and in the Tunisian talks, the continuing dialogues made possible the democratic coalitions that followed free elections in both countries. To date in Egypt, no talks comparable to those that began in Tunisia in 2003 have yet taken place. Given the enduring mutual fears of secularists and Islamists in Egypt, both sides, in lieu of dialogue with each other, have frequently made what I call “Brumairian” compromises with the military.

How odd, since that is exactly what happened in India in the 1950s and 1960s. In those decades, Article 26 was brandished all over India in response to reformist legislation passed in most states in order to give effect to Article 17. These “Temple Entry” laws opened Hindu temples to Dalits—people considered untouchable by caste Hindus. However, unlike American jurists and judges, the makers of the Indian Constitution had foreseen constitutional conflict, hence the freedom of religion clauses (Articles 25 and 26) came qualified ab initio with declarations of the ability of the Indian state to regulate the non-religious aspects of religion and to undertake social reform. Thus, when Gouda Saraswath Brahman trustees attempted to keep the temple of Sri Venkataramanah, in Mulki, South Karnataka, free of pollution from untouchables by claiming that it was a denominational temple and hence entitled to limit its benefits to members of the denomination or those admitted at their discretion, the Supreme Court stated that the constitutional clauses enabling the state to open Hindu temples to all Hindus (i.e. including Dalits) overrode other considerations. And when the Gujarati Swaminarayan Sampradaya, or Satsangis, claimed exception, in Sastri Yagnapurushdasji v. Muldas Bhundardas,  on the basis that they were not Hindus at all, an activist judiciary, led by then Chief Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar, committed all those epistemic sins that writers in this series have discussed: he reduced Hinduism to certain basics, and then told Satsangi escapists that they jolly well were Hindus and had better behave like good, modern, but also authentic Hindus. In pursuit of a century-long effort to make Hinduism ethical and democratic, an act was passed by the state of Madras in 1951 reinforcing the power of a government department called the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Commission to inspect and supervise Hindu temples and maths (monasteries) and audit their accounts. In response, several Article 26 cases were lodged, which led to certain sections of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act (1951) being deemed unconstitutional. But in one case, the judges of the Madras High Court also explained why the freedom of religion clauses did not offer a secure escape route from the reformist agenda of the Indian state. Charmingly, they said it was because India was not America—in India there was no rigid and complete wall of separation between the Church and State.

All this is old hat, and eminent American scholars have commented extensively on the Indian judiciary’s predilection for unseemly meddling in religious matters. Striking a somewhat lone note, Marc Galanter did suggest five decades ago that the Indian case was neither unique nor necessarily distinct from the American one—and anticipating Talal Asad, he observed: “No secular state is or can be merely neutral or impartial among religions, for the State defines the boundaries within which neutrality must operate.”

But however universal these legal conundrums are revealed to be, to the outside observer (in this case, me) it does appear that Americans have rather abruptly woken up to a problem that was surely always there—since both the constitutional provisions and the religious denominations have been around for much longer. Not being acquainted with American case law nor with the American religious landscape, I wonder whether the question is really “Why now?” Were all religious folk behaving just right until that moment, or had they taken legal restrictions lying down, not noticing until twenty years ago that such restrictions threatened the freedoms supposedly intended by the founding fathers of the nation? If, as Haefeli suggests, toleration is inevitably a partisan phenomenon (and I totally agree with him there), what element of the partisan equilibrium was shaken in the U.S.A. twenty years ago, around Smith? In India, there was a very specific socio-political context in which Article 26 was deployed in the 1950s and 60s, which I have cursorily outlined above. That context, incidentally, has changed. Dalit activism has long since moved on from temples and found greater value and justice in accessing the material means of social advancement—educational facilities, government jobs, and political representation. Since the 1980s, Article 26 has again been frequently deployed, but this time by institutions that have since been clubbed together under the bureaucratic appellation of Minority Educational Institutions. Seeking autonomy, in most cases from the supervisory authority of universities that they are affiliated with, or exemption from general rules of admission of students or appointment of staff, including (note the irony) rules based on affirmative action (i.e. Dalit empowerment) policies, these institutions seem to be behaving in very similar ways to the post-Smith religious alliances in the U.S.A. India, it appears, has become more similar to America in the past half century.

I will dare more, and wonder aloud about the status of “belief” in this tortuous history of religious freedom, or claims thereof, in these two countries. It appears to me that in spite of the demonstrably greater frequency of appeals to it, “belief” threads in and out rather than providing a stable central pattern at the core of a peculiarly modern re-inscription of religion. In India at least, religious reformism, which has afflicted Parsis, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus since the early nineteenth century, was not even rhetorically about identifying and defending true “belief” alone. If it had been only a matter of untrammeled possession of beliefs, the freedom of religion clauses in the Indian Constitution could have permitted the Saraswat Brahmans and the Dalits in Mulki, to each maintain their own beliefs and carry on with their unequal daily lives as usual. The new “belief-centrism”—of which P.B. Gajendragadkar et al were guilty—was essentially about ethically validated belief. In that he may be considered an intellectual descendant of the “father of  modern India,” Rammohan Roy (d. 1833), who believed for a while that he had found such socially responsible belief in The Precepts of Jesus—until missionary dogmatism convinced him that a new and truly monotheistic and un-superstitious religion was needed in order to create an amicable society with women’s rights and so on. About the same time, a man with a very different social vision fulminated against Protestant missionaries going on about caste disabilities. The upper caste Tamil Christian poet, Vedanayagam Pillai, told mission authorities in London that a new generation of missionaries was getting it all wrong by insisting on caste de-segregation in church. Belief is what ought to matter, he said, whereas: “…who should preach on the faith of the Son of God [but] preach now all the day long …  upon the subject of eating with the Pallar and Parayer promiscuously.” The missionary authorities disagreed—and Pillai was excommunicated in 1829. I wonder, in the light of these counter-intuitive examples—the “reformist” foregrounding social ethics and the “orthodox” asserting faith—whether the novelty of “belief” is less its adoption as a normative description of religion per se, or rather, its increased use as a rhetorical device especially in contexts where specialist religious authority is challenged.

These are strong claims with powerful appeal. In India too, national narratives would trace today’s secular democracy to the foundational moment when religious freedom—taken in a broad sense, at least—was established as a political ideal. Many regard Indian secularism to be deeply rooted in an ideal of equal respect for all religions. The annual reports issued by the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom over the past several years credit the Indian achievement by noting that the constitution protects religious freedom. But they also observe that laws at the state level have restricted this freedom. The 2010 Report cites legislation restricting religious proselytizing, which it describes as “‘anticonversion’ laws,” but which are properly known as Freedom of Religion acts.

The Report’s choice of nomenclature glosses over an important debate about the meaning of religious freedom in India. Many critical observers of Indian debates over conversion argue that to interpret religious freedom to include a right to proselytize, as is normative in American foreign policy and human rights law, is to impose “a Western conception of religion and religious freedom on the rest of the world.” They argue that religious freedom so construed favors “proselytizing religions,” like Christianity, over “non-proselytizing religion,” which is more typical to India.

I will not dwell on this line of argument here except to note that it has a long and respectable pedigree. Far from confined to the Hindu Right, it is integral to a prominent tradition of Indian secularist thought: the Gandhian tradition, first articulated during the 1920s. This explains the fact, also glossed over in the Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, that many “progressive” Indians support restrictions on proselytizing. In an important sense, the Indian secularist imagination took shape as an intervention in the politics of religious freedom.

What is the politics of religious freedom? As others in this series have remarked, the question hinges on what we take religion to be. Critical reflection has called into question whether it is possible to produce a sufficiently neutral definition of religion to allow religious freedom to be administered to all persons equally. But this is more than a question of majority bias—important as this question is, more is at stake than whether religious freedom is interpreted in such a way as to privilege Christians over Hindus, or Hindus over Christian and Muslim minorities. We must ask what is foregrounded when we speak of religion and what forms of politics our talk of religion might exclude. This is particularly true when we consider the politics of religious freedom outside Europe and North America.

The International Religious Freedom Reports on India only hint at this larger story. Untouchability is illegal in India, but members of the Scheduled Castes or Dalits—castes formerly referred to as “untouchable”—continue to face discrimination and violence regardless of their religious affiliations as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist. Their struggles for equality make their appearance in the State Department reports only briefly, when they involve religious conversion: “some Dalits who sought to convert out of a desire to escape discrimination and violence encountered hostility and backlash from upper castes.” But Dalits are subject to discrimination, even by their co-religionists, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim. A mere change of religious affiliation does not bring escape from caste-based discrimination. So just what kinds of practice are we talking about, using this imprecise language of “religious conversion”? What forms of political practice does our attention to religious freedom conceal?

I want to draw attention to the different forms of political struggle that have come to be sheltered under the language of religious freedom in India, but that are also obscured by it. By considering the Indian case from the vantage point of caste, I also hope to provoke a rethinking of the truism that religious freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. Critical reflections have taught us that the category religion is neither natural nor universal, but derives from a modern, European history. The history of religious freedom in India is therefore a history of (partial, incomplete) translations. I cannot do justice to this complex history in this brief post (see more in my contribution to this volume). Instead my aim is to highlight the problem of translation.

From the eighteenth century through the twentieth, the category of religion organized the colonial policy of the British government in India. It informed the colonial policy of religious toleration, and it informed the practice of extending political representation to Indians as members of communities. Indian political elites learned to speak this language of religion, and to invoke their right to religious freedom against the intrusions of the colonial state.

But in India the English-language discourse of religion was specific to the civic arena of colonial politics. Scholars have often remarked upon the divided or “bilingual” quality to colonial politics: the civic arena, which was organized by a quasi-liberal political idiom, was confined to a relatively small circle of social actors—the English-educated elites—particularly when they addressed their British rulers. Outside this narrow arena, political effort in colonial India was organized by vernacular idioms that reached deeper into Indian society and drew upon a longer history on the subcontinent. Scholars often resort to using a religious vocabulary to describe the vernacular idioms of politics outside the civic arena. But to do so obscures the labor of translation that was required when Indian actors represented their political struggles before the state.

Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, those judged to belong to low or “untouchable” castes took part in what I refer to as “ritual-political” struggles for dignity, respectability, and equality of treatment with (Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu) upper castes. Ritual-politics targeted the “meticulous rituals of power” that constituted certain caste groups as subordinate. Low castes were prevented from adopting the dress or ceremonial of superior castes, were required to show prescribed forms of deference in their postures and their forms of greeting, and were often excluded from equal access to common spaces. In the ritual-political initiatives of the low castes, these distinctions were loci of resistance, together with restriction from use of common wells and vessels, exclusion from common schools or education, debarment from owning land, forced obligations to perform demeaning tasks, and unpaid labor.

Some of these ritual-political initiatives—I have in mind the shuddhi activities associated with the Hindu reform organization, the Arya Samaj—came to be identified as “religious conversion” and, during the 1920s, became the focus of national debates over religious freedom. For the members of “untouchable” castes who actively pursued shuddhi into the first half of this decade, shuddhi was important not because of any nominal change of religious identity it brought about, but because of the way it could be made to serve the ritual-political struggle against caste oppression. But in the 1920s, Indian elites translated this politics of shuddhi into the language of religious freedom: they debated whether religious freedom should protect shuddhi “proselytizing,” or whether “proselytizing” posed an intolerable threat to peaceable relations between (in this case, Hindu and Muslim) religious communities in India. As elites translated shuddhi into the language of religion and religious freedom, the struggle against caste inequality dropped out of sight.

A great deal has changed in the politics of caste and in the politics of “conversion” between the 1920s and today. As this brief history of religious freedom in India suggests, we must ask not only what kinds of politics the active promotion of religious freedom in India might facilitate, but also what forms of politics and modes of collective action it might foreclose.

Let me begin with the historical relationship between the several civilizations of “the axial age,” Karl Jasper’s term for a period (sometime between 600 and 400 BCE) when similar important ideas—literacy, rationality, criticism—appeared in Israel, Greece, China, India, and Iran (though Professor Bellah does not say much about Iran). It is a time of breakthroughs, or breakdowns, in all of them. But the problem with the idea of a breakthrough is that evolution goes too slowly to be pinpointed in a single age—that change is gradual. In the case of India, for instance, Professor Bellah rightly notes that there were continuities with older inquiries, that there was, already in the Rig Veda, in c. 1500 BCE, the questioning, the uncertainty that we find in the Upanishadic debates of around the 6^th century BCE. The axial spirit of inquiry, of challenge, is therefore not a breakthrough in the Upanishads or Buddhism.

But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that in each of these ancient cultures (India, Greece, China, Israel) there was, simultaneously, a breakthrough, then we must ask, where did these changes come from? What was the historical relationship between these cultures? Did the axial idea grow up in one, to be transmitted to the others?  Did it arise in all of them at the same time because of some shared social or economic development? Was there a sudden simultaneous appearance in all of them of some vibrating pillar like the one in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, A Space Odyssey”? The tension between independent origin, borrowing, or diffusion from a common source is an age-old question in the discipline of comparative religions, and Professor Bellah wisely does not attempt to resolve it.

But the apparent conflict between these explanations might be resolved by a modified version of the argument that Claude Lévi-Strauss made (in “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America”) about cross-cultural parallels:

The simplest hypothesis is that of historical contact or independent development from a common civilization. But even if this hypothesis is refuted by facts, or if, as seems more likely, it should lack adequate evidence, attempts at interpretation are not necessarily doomed to failure. [...] Even if the most ambitious reconstructions of the diffusionist school were to be confirmed, we should still be faced with an essential problem which has nothing to do with history. Why should a cultural trait that has been borrowed or diffused through a long historical period remain intact?

Lévi-Strauss further argues (in The Story of Lynx) that borrowing is never haphazard, that what is borrowed is not just fitted into a preexisting structure: the borrowing takes place because of the similarity in structure between concepts in the culture that “lends” them and concepts in the culture that “borrows” them. In the case of the axial age, Professor Bellah suggests a similarity not in mental structures but in social and economic events. But then, what explains the confluence of such events in several cultures at once?

There is no clear, single reason why, for instance, ideas of reincarnation and renunciation arose in India in both Hinduism and Buddhism at this time (let alone in Greece, as well). Professor Bellah, true to his discipline, notes the general changes in the economic and social background, but these changes also took place, sooner or later, in many other parts of the world, often in places where no such ideas arose. To explain the Indian instance, at least, we might use a modified version of the intriguing hypothesis that Walter A. Fairservis laid out in his book, The Roots of Ancient India. Fairservis suggests that the theory of reincarnation may reflect an anxiety of overcrowding, the claustrophobia of a culture fenced in, a kind of urban Angst (a word ultimately derived from what the Rig Veda calls amhas, the terror of being confined in a small space).

The terror of overcrowding was also a precipitating factor in the ancient Babylonian epic, the Enuma Elish. Actual overcrowding, as Professor Bellah notes, in a most moving passage near the end of the book, precipitated several crises in the history of the planet earth, including the one that seems to be beginning now. The terror of overcrowding, however, arose not when the earth as a whole was crowded, which could not have been a problem in the ancient world, but when there were clusters of overcrowding in certain places: the first cities.

The Upanishadic discussion of the doctrine of transmigration begins when a teacher asks his pupil, “Do you know why the world beyond is not filled up, even when more and more people continuously go there?” and it ends with the statement, “As a result, that world up there is not filled up.” (Chandogya Upanishad 5.10.8; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.1.1 and 6.2.2). The idea of an overcrowded earth is a part of the Hindu myth of the declining Four Ages (people live too long in the first Age and become too numerous) and recurs in the Mahabharata as a justification for the genocidal war (when the overburdened earth begins to sink beneath the cosmic waters). Is this fear of crowds related to the shock of the new experience of city life in the Ganges Valley?  Were there already slums in ancient Kashi/Varanasi (as there may already have been in Harappa , in the Indus Valley Civilization, before 2000 BCE? )?   Did a fear of this sort inspire the theory of reincarnation, a recycling not of tin cans but of souls?

The spread of paddy rice cultivation into the Ganges valley, producing a surplus that could support cities, created an unprecedented proximity of people. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous nation on earth (History, 5.3). Population densities had significantly increased as a result of a combination of the incorporation of indigenous peoples, a soaring birthrate, and the creation of agricultural surpluses. This led to a burgeoning of all the things that people who (like the ancient Vedic Indians) like to sleep on their saddlebags at night don’t like about sleeping indoors, things that are for them a cultural nightmare. The movements to renounce the fleshpots of the Ganges Valley may have been inspired in part by a longing to return to the good old days preserved (or imagined) in the Vedic texts, when life was both simpler and freer. Such a longing is reflected in the village settings of so much of the Upanishads, and in the forest imagery that abounds in the writings of the early sects, both inside and outside of Hinduism. Within the cities, the Buddha sat in an isolated spot under a tree to obtain enlightenment, and he first preached in a deer park. The Upanishads seem to have been composed by people who left the settled towns for rustic settings where master and student could sit under some tree somewhere, the ancient Indian equivalent of the bucolic liberal arts college; the renunciants are said to live in the wilderness, in contrast with the conventional Vedic sacrificers who live in villages.

Perhaps in reaction to this fear of the crowd, the whole Indian tradition at this time was becoming not just renunciant but individualistic; we begin to see a transition from group to individual, a perceived need for personal rituals of transformation, forming a certain sort of person, not just a member of the tribe.

As Professor Bellah rightly notes, it seldom if ever occurred to anyone in India, then or at any time before the 19^th century, to attempt to change the world; but many people made judgments against the world, particularly the social hierarchy of their world, and opted out, or tried to solve the problem of suffering within the individual. The new religious movements of the axial age located the problem of the human condition, of human suffering, within the individual heart and mind (where Freud, too, located it), rather than in a hierarchical society (where Marx located it). In this way, at least, these movements were individualistic—“Look to your own house” (or, in the Buddha’s metaphor, “Get out of your burning house”)—rather than socially oriented, as non-renunciant Hinduism was—“Your identity is meaningful only as one member of a diverse social body—that is, the hierarchy of caste.”  This in itself was a tremendous innovation.

I don’t think that these ideas can be explained in terms of social factors alone. Someone, someone, thought of the particular Hindu variant of the idea of reincarnation that became the theory of karma. And someone else thought of the Buddhist variant. Of course, these individuals did not produce their ideas in a vacuum, and Professor Bellah gives full credit, throughout his book, to the impact of great individuals such as Plato and the Buddha. The idea of karma, first laid out in detail in one of the earliest Upanishads (the Brhadaranyaka), was foreshadowed in many ways in early Vedic texts and perhaps developed among kings rather than priests (a possibility that Professor Bellah discusses well). There may well have also been contributions from the great Indian catch-all of “local beliefs and customs,” village Hinduism, or from that ever-ready source of the unknown, the Adivasis or aboriginals. And there is also always the possibility of an infusion of ideas from the descendents of the Indus Valley Culture, an unknowable pool of what might be radically different ideas. All great ideas are in a sense created by committees, like Hollywood film scripts and camels (in the old joke).

But rather than postulating, for the source of these ideas about individual salvation, an axial pool whose existence can’t be proved, it might be simpler to admit that some individual, some brilliant, original theologian whose name is lost to us, composed some of the Upanishads. We can line up the usual suspects: a natural development from Vedic ideas (no genius required); some brilliant person in the Vedic camp (genius required); kings rather than priests; the IVC and its descendents; Adivasis; etc. But this lineup is often nothing more than a confession: “I can’t find it in the Veda.”  And perhaps something roughly like this is what happened in axial Greece, and China, and Israel—that is to say, to use Monty Python’s phrase, something entirely different. Our failure to identify the individuals in many of these essential cases, to name a Plato or a Buddha, should not, however, drive us back upon the unfalsifiable hypothesis of an axial Zeitgeist.

Among the several factors that Professor Bellah regards as characteristic of the axial age is the dawn of a universal ethics; in India, he sees this as happening particularly in Buddhism. I would argue that various forms of, and alternatives to, universal ethics, existed before the axial age in India.

The first problem with using universal ethics as a defining breakthrough is the assumption that this particular brand of ethics is all that defines religion, and therefore that when ethics improve, religion evolves. But many other aspects of religion also underwent dramatic evolution during this period—mysticism, theology, the use of narrative in argument, changes in ritual, the beginnings of sectarian worship, and so much more. Moreover, although certain forms of ethics did in fact evolve at this time, other ethics were already there long before. Generosity in particular was basic not only to the ethics of Vedic religion but to the broader Indo-European world that preceded the Vedas.

My colleague Jim Gustafson, in Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, working from assumptions he derived from Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, made a useful distinction between, on the one hand, an ethics of obligation, a universal, Kantian agenda of following the rules, doing your duty to society; and, on the other hand, an ethics of appreciation, generosity, and art. An ethics of obligation may well have thrived or even developed in the axial age; but an ethics of appreciation was in place before it, and continued to thrive after it. Moreover, even if we grant that the ethics of obligation evolved or improved at this time, we must also grant that other aspects of social ethics got worse: women, for instance, had enjoyed many privileges, and a degree of freedom, in the pre-axial Vedic age that they lost in subsequent eras of Hinduism. (And in Buddhism, though many women thrived in Buddhism in ways that were not yet available to them in Hinduism.) I don’t want to veer into promiscuous relativism here, nor to rank the different sorts of ethics, but merely to point out that something that I would call ethics was already in place throughout the Indo-European world long before the axial age.

And this takes me to my final point: Rationality is one of the defining breakthroughs of the axial age; scholars tend to turn Indian enlightenment (spiritual awakening) into European Enlightenment (an 18^th century philosophical development), mistaking the Buddha for Voltaire. But near the very end of the book, Professor Bellah begins to talk about the importance of play, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and all that, which seems to me to be part of the irrational or non-rational aspect of religion, and a very important one. The ethics of obligation is generally not playful—too much is at stake, the great challenge of human suffering. But there’s a lot of playfulness in the Upanishads and in early Buddhism. Play, the love of nature and generosity are intrinsic to the ethics of appreciation, which is also an ethics of aesthetics. Overemphasizing the ethics of obligation short-changes other religious changes and concerns that evolved at this time in the ethics of appreciation, changes in narrative, in art, in the performance of religion, the singing of religion. These seem to me to cry out to be given more prominence in any broad survey of the history of religion, especially in one so deeply humane and compassionate as Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution.

This essay is a slightly revised version of remarks delivered last month in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.—ed.

Such a debate can certainly help to confront our taken-for-granted assumptions with other per­spectives: European religious liberties look different when compared with a multi-religious society like India (even if not explicitly mentioned in Bhargava’s paper) and its practices of accommodation and vice versa. And the participants in the debate obviously agree upon a common definition of the “problem” that Europe faces: namely to socially, legally, and politically integrate its ethnic and religious minorities, especially its Muslims.

But here the consensus comes to an end. I would say it necessarily comes to an end, because no ultimate proofs are available for value judgments. As value judgments they themselves are inherently “flawed.” What can help us to understand the conditions and to assess the consequences of certain forms of “secularism,” of state regulations on religion and related social institutions and societal practices, is com­parative empirical research rather than the exchange of normative positions (or the substitution of normative concepts). Such research would have to be a common endeavor of scholars from different parts of the world. And it would imply that they take note of the research that is already available in a variety of languages, but has not been translated into English and therefore does not exist in the global discourse.

The problem of normative approaches is visible in the ongoing debate on the “crisis of secularism in Western Europe” as well. One of the problems is that the reality of the so-called “moderate” secularism(s) of Europe on the one side is compared to an abstract principle, called “principled distance,” on the other. Veit Bader has rightly pointed out—and Rajeev Bhargava would probably agree—that the practice of Indian secularism, which this principle relates to, is no less ambivalent than in the different cases of European secularisms, even if the problems are not the same everywhere. But then we would have to compare practices with practices rather than practices with principles. On top of that, more than one or two types of European secularism exist. Different traditions of secularism, secularity, and religion-state relations exist in Western Europe (not to mention in Eastern Europe), with different consequences in practice. Saying this does not neglect common concerns, the integration of migrants being one of the most eminent.

Another problem of value judgments is that concrete examples are usually given in order to support a claim instead of exploring the conditions and effects of a certain phenomenon. In a world where English has to serve as a substitute for the languages which we ourselves don’t speak (may they be Hindi, French, Arabic, Russian, German or any other language), we have to rely on volumes and articles in English that give us overviews on world-wide developments. However, the examples presented there do not always paint an accurate picture of the reality in different countries and regions. Sometimes this is due to a lack of information, sometimes it is because the primary interest in practices of discrimination does not always allow for differentiated perspectives and ambivalent results.

Even if Rajeev Bhargava is correct in his general statement that European countries (and their “secularisms”) have fundamental problems with including Muslims, he is not so in regard to some of his examples. I just refer to the German examples that he gives: Muslim private schools are indeed rare in Germany, but if they are acknowledged by the state, they do get state funding. For example, this is the case with a Muslim elementary school in Berlin. However, private schools in Germany are not as important as they are in other countries. As far as religion in school is concerned, it may be much more important to see how the integration of Islamic education in public schools develops. This process is moving along slowly; however it is ongoing. Some federal states have started to offer Islamic education in the universities, an important step toward the inclusion of Islamic theology faculties alongside the Christian theology faculties that have always been part of German academia.

Bhargava highlights prohibitions against ritual slaughter as another example of discrimination. Here again, reality is more complicated. In Germany, slaughtering an animal without prior anesthesia is generally prohibited for reasons of animal protection. However, exceptions to this rule are granted for reasons of religious freedom. This has been confirmed in Supreme Court rulings of 1985 and 2002 that dealt with the case of a Muslim butcher, and was reaffirmed in a government statement in 2010. It is true that prior to 1985, exceptions were given to Jewish butchers rather than to Muslim ones. And still, there are insecurities when the administrative courts have to decide over such exceptions and over the number of animals to be ritually slaughtered. To speak of discrimination in general, however, does not match the reality. The inclusion of animal protection—like environmental protection—as a constitutional norm was only possible after the Constitutional Court had decided positively over the Muslim butcher’s case in 1985. Here again, the societal debate is highly controversial. Not only animal protection groups, but also right wing groups interpret these rulings as signs of political correctness. Nevertheless, they exist and are practiced.

The third example that Bhargava gives involves the construction of mosques. As far as the law is concerned, such construction is subject to the same zoning and land regulations that govern the construction of other houses of prayer. There certainly is no legal discrimination, and applications to build mosques are usually approved if the formal requirements are fulfilled. However, this does not mean that no problems exist. The announcement that a mosque is planned to be built often leads to protests among the population; and often this protest is fuelled by right-wing groups. In some cases of conflict, the initiators ultimately withdraw their construction plans. In other cases however, the conflict has been given an institutionalized form (for example through public hearings), where both sides were able to express their concerns. As Jörg Hüttermann has shown in his study “the Minaret,” the outcome of these hearings may very well be positive: the conflicting groups begin to acknowledge each other and to envisage concrete persons instead of vague dangers. This institutionalization could be interpreted as an example of direct “state intervention” into majority/minority-affairs (see Bhargava’s essay), but it is rather the moderation of a community process.

I do not list these examples in order to neglect the difficulties that migrants, especially Muslims, are facing today in Germany as well as in other European countries. Discrimination is a serious problem in many of them. However, the examples indicate that things are not as clear-cut as they seem, and that the outcome of current conflicts depends on a variety of factors. Tariq Modood certainly could list further examples from Britain, with its stronger multiculturalist practice, for example the growing inclusion of Muslim chaplains in correctional facilities.

Even France, which has repeatedly been the object of “bashing” due to its “affaire des foulards” and its ban on the public wearing of the burqa, in a not too distant past was widely looked upon as a positive example because of its integrative model of citizenship. The principle of “jus soli” and the practice of integration attached to it were then considered to be much better able to integrate newcomers than, for example, the German principle of “jus sanguinis.” And for quite some time the French model seemed to fulfill this function rather well. Let us not forget that the “affaire des foulards” in the beginning was not simply a majority vs. minority conflict. The headmaster of the school in Creil who prohibited Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in the classrooms was himself a migrant from the Antilles. One could say that he sought to uphold a principle under which he himself was able to succeed. And the school, up to then, had been quite successful in integrating minorities. Even here, the minority/majority relation seems much more complicated than the language of discrimination indicates.

This does not imply that I consider the ban on headscarves in schools or the burqa verdict reasonable. However, the story of Creil and its results remind us that it might be useful to take the cultural memory of a society into account in order to better understand the dynamics underlying struggles over religion and secularity. Due to such cultural memory, these struggles themselves have a normative imprint that is perceptible in the way people respond to certain phenomena—in what they defend and what they attack. Normativity here comes into play as part of the reality itself, as something that we need to understand in order to grasp the social dynamics of the reality under investigation. Max Weber has called this “Verstehen” and saw it as a prerequisite for attempts at explanation. This does not mean that we need to like what we get to see. But my impression is that approaching the reality already from a normative perspective limits what we get to see, because we put things into ready-made boxes of discrimination and non-discrimination.

I do not question the value of normative theory for legal and constitutional concerns, and for political theory, even if this is not my field of expertise. For empirically grounded comprehension and explanation of societal and political processes, institutions, and practices, however, it seems to me that its use is limited. In this respect I do not see how the substitution of meta-languages, which Veit Bader suggests, would make much of a difference.

My colleagues and I, in a research group at the University of Leipzig, suggest an approach to the variety of relations between the secular and the religious through the lens of “multiple modernities” and their respective “multiple secularities.” This approach attends to the diversity of cultural conditions and prerequisites of institutionalized secularity as well as to the impact that the encounter with certain “Western” types of modernity has had. Further, it considers the diversity of cultural embeddings of secularity and the guiding ideas that are connected to them. As a first step, we distinguished four types of secularity: secularity for the sake of individual liberty; secularity for the sake of balancing religious diversity; secularity for the sake of societal integration and national development; and secularity for the sake of the independent development of societal sub-spheres. These are ideal-typical distinctions, in reality they may overlap and conflict with each other. However, as ideal types (not normative ideals) they may help us better understand some of the driving forces of the conflicts that we face. Secularity—in this perspective—is value-laden in reality, because it is “about something,” and this explains its blind spots as well as the fierceness of some present conflicts. If the differentiation between the religious and the secular is motivated by the guiding idea of individual liberties, other motives (like group interests or national integration) may remain in the background or even be neglected. If, on the other hand, secularity is guided by the idea of accommodating group diversity, individual rights or the independence of societal spheres may in turn be neglected. These assertions could be illustrated by a variety of different constellations in countries or regions. One could also identify “critical junctures” (Kuru), in which dominant patterns and motives undergo change: The Netherlands seems to be a good example of a shift from a focus on group balance accompanied by an early debate on tolerance and by practices of non-interference, toward a focus on individual liberties, accompanied by a strong process of secularization in the population, and finally a shift toward issues of national integration and progress with an accompanying secularist ideology. This example shows that secularity can change its meaning under certain conditions.

This, however, is an empirical enterprise, and these concepts have to prove their usefulness in research and theorizing. The Indian case—in its empirical reality and with its normative underpinnings—is definitely one of the most interesting cases of secularity (in our terminology) for the sake of balancing religious diversity. But this does not make it a normative model for Western European societies. They will follow their own paths, whether we like it or not.

For a start, when talking about secularism we need, indeed, to make “distinctions”: (i) Does secularism rely on the secularization of societies? Of states? Of cultures? (ii) Do we intend to refer to actual practices and institutions, or to existing norms? If we address only norms, as Bhargava does, we should distinguish between (iii) the “norms embedded in the informal politics of states (and non-state actors),” (iv) the “norms embedded in formal, institutional politics and articulated … in laws enacted by legislatures, executive decisions, judicial pronouncements, and constitutional articles,” and (v) the “normative ideals … expressed in doctrines, ideologies, and political theories.”

Empirically, secularization, in all its different meanings (decline, subjectivization, individualization, privatization of religion), is always a matter of degree, and political theorists should carefully avoid advancing the impression that fully secularized societies and cultures exist; they don’t exist in the “affluent Western countries,” particularly those in Western Europe, nor in “north-western Protestant Europe,” nor in the rest of the world, including the US. Furthermore, a fully secularized state, in the sense of a state in which there is a complete or strict separation of state from organized religion, does not exist—not in the US nor in France, let alone in the rest of the states with liberal-democratic constitutions. If we talk about “secular states” (as Modood and Bhargava do) we should specify what we mean by secularity (e.g. the “two autonomies” of the protection of the state from religions and religions from the state). More importantly, we should try to avoid sweeping generalizations (e.g. the famous comparisons between Europe or Western Europe and the US), and we should carefully avoid conflating the construction of country-specific models of secularism—meaning most often the legally institutionalized relationship between the state and organized religions (churches)—so as to adequately represent the actual muddy state of affairs: states are internally differentiated (trias politica) and, similarly, administrations (different departments) do quite diverse, often contradictory things.

All existing, institutionalized relations between states and (organized) religions are under pressure by increasing religious diversity, particularly by the different varieties of Islam (the old and new “other” of Christianity). In this regard there is broad and important agreement between Modood, Bhargava, and myself:

1. There is no general hostility towards religion in “secular states,” not in the US and, generally, also not in most European states. And there is still no “effective challenge” to “political secularism” from fundamentalist Muslims, from predominant churches, or from “radical secularists.” Yet this is only true when qualified with a degree of reservation: we see increasingly aggressive secularist mobilization, combined with right-wing populism in many European countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark.
2. The claim-making of Muslims in regard to “the place of religious identity in the public sphere”—or, in my language, in regard to the visible and symbolic recognition of (non-Christian) religions—spurred highly dramatized conflicts (politics of symbolic action) and a completely ambivalent reactive re-invention of national Leitkultur that tends to narrow willingness and scope to accommodate religious claims and to “destabilize” or “jolt political secularism” whether one wants to call this “crisis” or not.
3. In combination with dramatized threats of Islamist terrorism, wars against terrorism, increasing securitization, and dramatized stories of “failed integration” (marked by a supposed loss of social cohesion, political unity, and loyalty) the space for accommodation of religious claims (as well as houses of worship, education, care, workschedules, etc.) is shrinking in the predominant political rhetoric in many European states, but happily not so in all of them equally and certainly not so, or at the same pace, in actual practice.

My main disagreements with Modood are:

1. His “moderate secularism” masks important differences in symbolic, institutional, and political accommodation of religious diversity amongst countries characterized by various regimes of selective cooperation between state and church in Europe (also neglected or at least not specified by Bhargava).
2. The link between institutional arrangements of state and religions and multiculturalism is historically and empirically not convincing. It neglects important differences not only amongst countries but also between the various minorities covered by multiculturalism policies. Opening up Christian-biased arrangements to broad and deep religious diversity is different from his project concerning “how to multiculturalize moderate secularism.” In addition, the accommodation of religious diversity is institutionalized in the law and practices of most European countries much more deeply and in greater detail when compared with the fairly recent institutions and policies of multiculturalism. In my view, his proposal is counterproductive in most other European countries, but it may turn out to also be so in the UK.
3. His belief that “moderate secularism” provides the resources and the institutional arrangements for such an opening is naïve: moderate secularism is, as Bhargava suggests, “irretrievably flawed” because it defends varieties of constitutional establishment of one (England, Scotland, Norway, Denmark) or two (Finland) Christian religions or Churches or national religions, inevitably sending the wrong, exclusive symbolic message. In principle and practice, constitutional establishment is in tension with equal religious freedoms and with non-discrimination and equality before the law, even if this tension may not pass the threshold of a serious violation of rights guaranteed in International and European conventions. Criticism spelling out the inherent limitations of establishmentarianism need not involve immediate practical or political claims for pluralizing establishment or for disestablishment—in the same way that criticism of constitutional monarchies need not involve urgent practical claims to replace them with republics—but it is important for two reasons. First, it helps us see why removing the cultural and institutional biases will, as Bhargava notes, “not be easy” and, second, more distance from Oakeshottian pragmatism and institutional tinkering is needed to properly address the issue of more adequate institutional arrangements under conditions of deep religious diversity.

So I agree with the main points of Bhargava’s critique of moderate secularism. It can, of course, be doubted whether Europe lacks the “conceptual resources” to deal with deep diversity, but it is quite clear that none of the existing institutional arrangements, given all their diversity, are adequate or convincing, let alone perfect, and some are not even minimally satisfying. The “selective cooperation” countries suffer from institutional rigidity, from Christian bias, from institutionalized exclusion or serious discrimination of old and new non-majority religions. Examples of the so-called strict separation models, such as France or Turkey, suffer de facto from the same flaws and, in addition, violate individual religious freedoms and meaningful collective or associational autonomy of religions. Is then the “non-establishment” model of the U.S. that is not based on “secularist hostility” the viable alternative? Even if one takes into account that the U.S. does not live up to “strict separation” or the famous “wall of separation,” the model itself also suffers from three significant limitations: (1) the absence of meaningful exit options that are guaranteed by a minimally decent welfare system; (2) interest representation restricted to informal ways of influencing governments (networking and lobbying) that privilege big, old, and politically and culturally established (commonly Protestant) religions because they have access to huge power resources; and (3) the rigid public/private split, well known from the treatment of political parties, which also has counter-productive consequences when it comes to all kinds of welfare, social services, and experiments in education.

Does then the “Indian model of secularism”provide a way out of the pitfalls of the “two mainstream western secularisms” if the inter-communal practices are taken in their “best moments” and if “the country’s constitution” is “appropriately interpreted”? According to Bhargava’s interpretation, the Indian model is “inextricably tied to deep religious diversity”; it has a “commitment to multiple values such as liberty and equality … peace and toleration”; it accepts “community-specific rights”; “it does not erect a wall of separation”; “it is not entirely averse to the public character of religions” (public recognition without establishment); “we do not have to choose between active hostility and passive indifference towards religion” or “disrespectful hostility” and “respectful indifference”; it does not exclusively fix commitments “to individual or community values” and does not mark “rigid boundaries between the public and private.” As a “contextual secularism,” it allows and asks for a balance between “different, ambiguously but equally important values” by democratic politics or by constitutional courts.

Apart from the fact that these characteristics often conflict with each other and may work counter-productively in practice, Indian secularism is, nonetheless, in my view intrinsically linked to rules and practices of militant democracy such as constitutional exclusion and bans on religious political parties and secularist restrictions of political speech that are deeply at odds with important freedoms of political communication, the core of any non-paternalist democracy. I agree with Bhargava that we should not present “Indian secularism” as an idealized model or a “blue print” but we should also stop comparing aggregated, existing, but idealized institutional models. Keeping distance from “moderate secularism” as well as from American or Indian secularism, we may be able to develop new and better institutional arrangements, such as “associational governance,” and learn from practices of reasonable accommodation wherever we find them (“democratic experimentalism”).

When we, eventually, discuss “normative ideals”—rights, first-order principles and second-order principles—we will not be helped but instead deeply troubled by the language of secularism. Yet, recently, the heated debates on secularism in the social sciences, politics, political theory, and political philosophy have also infected legal theory, constitutional law, and comparative constitutionalism (see Bader 2010). Generally speaking it may indeed be “too late to ban the word ‘secular’” or to remove “secularism” from our cultural vocabulary. The argument however that “too many controversies have already been stated in these terms” seems unconvincing to me. For the purposes of normative theory, I have proposed to replace all normative concepts of secularism by “priority for liberal-democracy” because I am convinced that we are better able to economize our moral disagreements or to resolve the substantive constitutional, legal, jurisprudential, and institutional issues and controversies by avoiding to restate them in terms of “secularism” or “alternative secularisms.”

With regard to the constitutional status of secularism, we can discern three distinct positions, all sharing the argument that “secularism … in most liberal democracies … is not explicitly recognized in the constitutional text or jurisprudence” and that it has “no clear standing among constitutional values” either: it is “not clear which established constitutional category secularism fits into or what is the underlying value behind it.”

The first position, defended most outspokenly by András Sajó, tries to overcome the absence of secularism in most liberal-democratic constitutions and to streamline their messiness by developing a “more robust theory of constitutional secularism” to remedy the fact that “most democracies are without a strong normative theory or practice of constitutional secularism,” to present a “clear agenda” and a “coordinated action plan” in order to “defend” vulnerable constitutions against the threats of (“strong”) religions.

The second position—argued by, among many others, Bhargava, Modood, Jacobsohn, Shakman Hurd, An-Na’im, and Willaime—proposes to fully contextualize secularism also in normative theory and constitutional law by developing theories of alternative secularism(s): inclusive, passive, moderate, evolutionary, weak, tolerant, liberal, benevolent, ameliorative or principled distance secularism, laïcité plurielle, positive, de gestion, bien entendue, in opposition to exclusive, assertive, aggressive, strong, intolerant, statist, or malevolent secularism.

The third, rather radical position is to criticize secularism in all its varieties as a viable constitutional principle or, in other words, to drop secularism from our constitutional language and replace it with liberal-democratic constitutionalism (LDC) for the following five reasons.

First, secularism is not only, obviously, a very complex, polysemic, and essentially contested concept but also a fuzzy, chameleonic, highly misleading, or cacophonous concept. If we are able to discuss the substantive issues of state-religion relations with less fuzzy concepts we should do so instead of translating all and everything into the language of secularism. If “secularism” is used in constitutions or by constitutional courts and lawyers, we can discern at least twelve different meanings, some of them clearly incompatible with liberal-democratic constitutionalism. A disaggregated taxonomy allows us to understand what we mean when we disagree in our normative evaluations and judgments and to economize our moral and legal disagreements.

Second, constitutions and constitutional jurisprudence provide for such concepts both in terms of rights or first-order principles and in terms of “underlying values” or second-order principles, such as “neutrality” or its reconceptualization as “principled distance” or as “relational neutrality” and “fairness as even-handedness” in cultural matters. The absence of secularism in most liberal-democratic constitutions demonstrates this clearly.

Third, the really important substantive issue is not whether states and politics are “modern” or “secular,” whatever that may mean, but rather whether they are liberal-democratic or, in other words, live up to the demands of minimal, minimal-liberal, and minimal-democratic morality and what this requires in terms of constitutional and institutional arrangements and politics/policies. In the fashionable language of systems theory: from the perspective of constitutionalism the important lead distinction (Leitdifferenz) is not secular versus religious but liberal versus non-liberal and democratic versus non-democratic. This allows analyzing incompatibilities between both “secular” regimes (such as the Nazi regime, the Soviet Union, kleptocratic dictatorships in the Arab world) and “religious” regimes (such as Iran), with liberal and/or democratic ones. In the context of the recent revolutions against secularist dictatorships and the constitution-making in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the use of “secularism” is particularly counter-productive.

Fourth, the principle of constitutional secularism even conceptually eliminates deep and serious tensions between secularism and LDC (e.g. in Turkey and in India).

Fifth, constitutional secularism tends to hide from view structural tensions between liberal constitutionalism (Rechtsstaat, rule of law) and democratic constitutionalism and it undermines reasonable balances amongst the two in general, particularly in cases of militant democracies such as Turkey and India. It also does not help to find reasonable, contextual balances in the many conflicts of rights and hard cases (also acknowledged by Bhargava) that are part and parcel of constitutional jurisprudence in any liberal-democratic state.

In conclusion, replacing “secularism” with LDC should not be misunderstood as a replacement of one ideology (“secularism”) with another equally cacophonous or ambiguous one (“liberalism”). LDC is not a foundational ideology or philosophy but a meta-constitutional and meta-legal theory explaining the constitutional essentials or the core of the various and differing articulations of rights and principles in liberal-democratic international or regional conventions and in state constitutions. It is compatible with many competing theories of the rule of law and of democracy, but does not depend on any of them (including “political liberalism”).

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, commentators trying to analyze Afghan support for Al-Qaeda put a great deal of emphasis on the Taliban’s sectarian orientation as “Deobandi.” Deobandis across South Asia were known for disapproval of what they took to be Sufi or Shia intercessory practices that might compromise monotheism; they also discouraged celebration of ostentatious life-cycle customs. They called for adherence to what they took to be sharia-based individual practices. Deobandis had had a long tradition of influence within Afghanistan. This influence surged with the return of the Taliban leadership, who were, in fact, largely a product of Deobandi schools in Pakistan’s frontier region where they were refugees after the Soviet invasion.

The problem was that commentators took to formulating a simple syllogism: The Taliban were Deobandis. The Taliban had accommodated Al-Qaeda. Deobandis therefore were “fanatical,” “fundamentalist,” “anti-Western,” and “terrorist.”

My goal in the essay I wrote for the SSRC in 2001 was to argue that just as commentators all too often wrongly assumed they could describe Muslim behavior by reference to what were taken as abstract principles of “Islam,” similarly, Deobandis could not be reduced to a single pattern of behavior or political orientation simply by invoking “Deoband.” Deobandi populations varied politically. I particularly wanted to insist that the Deobandis in India, whose leading ulema were widely taken to be spokesmen for Muslim Indians, did not merit these pejorative and dangerous labels. Already subject to widespread discrimination and suspicion in India, Muslim Indians could be harmed by such careless labeling. Instead, I argued, Deobandis in India, as in each of the countries of South Asia, could best be understood as part of the larger political culture in each of their respective national contexts.

Thus, in India, Deobandi teachers, religious leaders, and politicians were actively committed to a secular, democratic polity. Their core leadership had supported the anti-colonial nationalist movement and opposed the creation of Pakistan. In India, there was no national Muslim political party, and although some of the ulema were politically active, it was as part of secular, plural parties with some mix of national, regional, and class objectives. Deobandi activists were in particular committed to preserving “minority cultural rights” in such matters as India’s constitutional guarantee to each religious tradition to follow separate family law. Their primary focus was religious education.

Deobandi ulema in the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam in Pakistan, in contrast, were organized as a distinctive political party, and they participated in the abortive democratic polity of that country. They made expedient, non-ideological alliances in the interest of gaining influence, and some among them were, in fact, regarded as being just as corrupt as any other politician. Many of the Pakistani ulema had been outspoken defenders of jihad in Afghanistan, and Deobandis were particularly supportive of the Taliban, who shared their sectarian orientation. Their goals were not only religious but both nationalist—in giving Pakistan influence in Afghanistan—and national, since commitment to the Afghan jihad could be a model for their own political role. In fact, the ulema had never played a leadership role in the politics of Pakistan, where the military had been in power roughly half the time since independence and were often in control even under ostensibly civilian regimes. The religious parties (with a post-9/11 exception as part of a protest vote against Musharraf in 2002) had never had more than 5 percent of the vote, although their Islamic discourse, especially from the 1980s on, played an ever-larger role in political life.

The Taliban, like the Indian and Pakistani Deobandis, were part of the larger political culture of their country. In the 1990s, they were one of several movements in Afghanistan that utilized an ethnic base to compete for control at the national level in the anarchic conditions following the defeat of the Soviets. They stood out for their insistence on what they took to be legitimate Islamic behavioral practices, but like many other movements, they were prepared to make expedient alliances with those they thought could help them, including Pakistanis looking for “strategic depth,” a link established under the leadership of a woman prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, as well as, for a time, US interests seeking access to oil. They also, fatally, welcomed Al-Qaeda, trading hospitality for material support for their own nationalist goals.

Finally, in my original essay, I commented on the millions who participated in the grassroots Tablighi Jamaat, a program initiated in the 1920s by Deobandis and understood to share their orientation. For them, ideally, there were no politics at all. Across South Asia and everywhere, the goal was one-on-one “invitations,” coupled with periodic mass gatherings, to win nominal Muslims to ritual fidelity, above all to the canonical prayer. The Tablighi Jamaat was not an organization in any formal sense, and its members eschewed any active participation in political life.

Besides emphasizing the distinctive national contexts—apart from Tablighi Jamaat—for these movements, I wanted to underline the multiple motivations for what any of them did apart from the ready assumption that their actions stemmed from opposition to America/“the West”/“Western values.” Instead, I argued for attention to the many elements likely to be in play—Islamic fidelity and hoped-for divine pleasure along with more worldly goals of honor, public support or approval, power, security, companionship, and the like—exactly as would be the case in non-Islamic organizations and movements. What Deobandis do, I wrote, is not always “about ‘us.’”

Hence, ten years later, one might ask whether each Deobandi population continues to define distinctive goals within a national arena and whether, particularly in the face of America-generated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (spilling into Pakistan), any or all of these groups have moved from national or even regional ambitions to the global jihad focus associated with Al-Qaeda. Again, it is particularly important to underline that the situation is radically different for what is now tellingly called the “Af-Pak” region than it is for India. The emergence of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) in particular suggests a commonality of goals with the Afghan Taliban. Moreover, Pakistani militant organizations in the past decade have demonstrably been linked to actions beyond Pakistan/Afghanistan/Kashmir, notably the devastating Mumbai attacks of 2008 (the militant organization in that case was not Deobandi but linked to another sectarian group). Unquestionably, ten years later, militancy and terrorism in Pakistan, including militancy on the part of Deobandis, has escalated. Every survey, moreover, shows anti-Americanism in Pakistan growing ever greater.

Nonetheless, even in regard to the two Taliban groups, even if in principle they are committed to mutual assistance and coordination, organizational structures remain nationally based, and goals similarly continue to be primarily national. Activity across international borders is often intended to bolster reputation and effectiveness at home. Commentators and policymakers tend to exaggerate the international Islamic dimension of political life in this area, and they underestimate the depth of what can be called virulent nationalism that Islamic rhetoric serves. The drone strikes, the presence of foreign troops, the social dislocations engendered not only by violence but by foreign monetary flows together have fueled a public culture in both Pakistan and Afghanistan that is nationalist and profoundly suspicious of the motivations of outsiders.

Pakistan’s military is well known to be ambivalent in relation to its presumed shared commitment with its American allies to undermine the Afghan Taliban, sections of whom have long been regarded as Pakistani “assets” for continued influence. Army opposition to the Pakistani Taliban, whose goal is to challenge the existing state, is clear enough. Deobandis, like all actors in Pakistan, are caught up in a profoundly dysfunctional political system, with a non-functioning state system, an economically exploitative military, rampant corruption, profound socioeconomic inequality, and a public life obsessed with conspiracy theories and intra-Pakistani violence. There is no hint of an “Arab spring.”

The tendency to generalize imputations of militancy and terrorism to Muslims in general and Deobandis in particular has continued. Almost immediately after 9/11, Tablighis in particular fell under suspicion as a terrorist organization or at the least a “cover” being exploited by terrorists. To have had a Tablighi connection of any kind became prima facie an argument for guilt at Guantanamo, an accusation that defense lawyers regularly tried to counter by invoking the long history and actual behavior of Tablighis, whose overriding goal had long been establishing benign relations with governments in order to allow them the visas and permits they periodically sought for their missionary work. That is not to say that there had not been people with claimed or actual Tablighi connections who had participated in militant activities, but the prima facie argument, given the vast reach of the organization, was flawed.

As for Muslims in India, their situation has also been substantially affected, as has been the case of Muslim minorities worldwide in the decade since 9/11 as stereotypes and fears of Muslim terrorism have spread—and, one must add, been exploited. It thus continues to be a matter of some urgency that commentators and others not assume that Deobandi Indians share the political values or strategies of the more militant among the Deobandis located to their northwest.

Madrasas in India, as elsewhere, have particularly been suspected of harboring anti-national sentiments, and of these madrasas, the main Darul Uloom at Deoband is regarded as the most influential and most important. In part to counter any reputation of subversion, in February 2008 the seminary at Deoband hosted a conference of some ten thousand Islamic scholars from across the nation, who denounced all forms of terrorism, proclaiming that it was un-Islamic to kill innocent people. At the same time, however, the conference also denounced unwarranted blame and “profiling” leveled against Muslims. As one commentator put it, they protested “the hounding of Muslim youth and mounting Islamophobic offensives across the world, including India, in the name of countering ‘terror.’” Speakers at the conference singled out “Zionists” and “Western Crusaders” as the cause of such problems, a sign that the anti-Americanism evident above all in Pakistan may have increased traction for many Indian Muslims as well. This conference brought strong denunciations of violence on the part of Americans and others in Iraq and Afghanistan—which speakers labeled the real “terrorism”—as well as implications of covert action in oppressing Muslims in places like India as part of a worldwide campaign against Muslims. This emphasis in the Indian case, arguably, has the particular advantage that it serves to identify distant oppressors instead of one’s fellow countrymen with whom there is an overriding need for peaceful relationships.

As is true of some other minority Muslim populations, Muslim Indians serve to crystallize majority nationalism, in the Indian case a role intensified by what may be an implicit conflation of Muslims—typically poor and less educated—with other “polluting” and undesirable lower class/caste groups who increasingly claim rights within the larger society. In the case of Muslims in India, suspicion and disapproval after 9/11 has been further exacerbated by the enduring prejudice that Muslim Indians are “proto-Pakistanis,” their neighborhoods are “little Pakistans,” and so forth. These attitudes have been made worse since 9/11 by alleged and confirmed terrorist attacks, of which the most shocking was the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai.

In this past decade, however, it has been India’s Muslims who have primarily suffered from deliberate violence, above all in a coordinated pogrom in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where perhaps two thousand Muslims were killed and hundreds of thousands more were displaced and their means of livelihood destroyed. To the government’s great credit, a report commissioned in 2006 by the prime minister, popularly known as the Sachar Committee Report, demonstrated unequivocally the poverty and discrimination that have made the widely dispersed and culturally diverse Muslim population among the poorest in India, underrepresented in education and in public employment of all kinds, as well as in professional and other high-level positions.

In this context of suspicion and discrimination, Muslim Indian leaders, including Deobandi leaders, have intensified their stance as committed participants in India’s particular style of a secular, democratic state. Indeed, some have argued that given the strength of both explicit and “soft” Hindu nationalism, or “Hindutva,” it is India’s Muslims who are most ardently keeping alive the ideals of the country’s founding “Nehruvian secularism,” committed to the constitution and to legal processes, as their best hope of flourishing as equal citizens.

In one of the most awaited judicial decisions in India’s history, only in September 2010 was there a verdict adjudicating rights to the site of a sixteenth-century Mughal mosque, illegally torn down in 1992 by highly organized cadres of right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations who claimed that the mosque had usurped the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. This cause had soared in the 1980s, demonstrably fueled by cries of “Hindu unity” as a way to neutralize lower caste/class demands. Ignoring the criminality of the demolition (and the ensuing anti-Muslim violence) and accepting as a legitimate basis for a property decision the “un-secular” criterion of Hindu “belief,” the judges strove for a Solomonic division of the property among three contending parties, two of them organized groups of Hindus and one Muslim. That such a decision seemed reasonable to so many underlines the challenges to keeping secularism alive.

Official Deobandi spokesmen regularly affirm their “full support” in this matter for the country’s judicial process—one that allows, as has happened and is currently pending, further appeal. When a far less important mosque was demolished in Delhi earlier this year, as one commentator noted, even poor Muslims demonstrated their “persistent attachment . . . to the rule of law. The language of rights, and more specifically of tenure, is the meeting ground of Muslims of all persuasions, and the principal terrain of their counteroffensive.” He further argued that they were not asking for any special treatment but simply the fair implementation of existing laws. Muslim Indians also participate actively in the electoral process, joining other Indians in parties that often cultivate specific caste and class interests; the names of several parties with core Muslim support, like the Social Democratic Party of India, the Welfare Party of India, and the All India United Democratic Front, proclaim their inclusiveness and their secularity.

Some political theorists stress a contrast between a “civil society” focused on “the rights-bearing individual” and a “political society” of those who relate to the state in terms of group interests, most notably in the Indian case the right to religiously defined family law for minorities and affirmative action for former “untouchables” and “tribals.” In fact the distinction turns out to be impossible to map sociologically. Deobandi political leaders engage the political strategies of both. In terms of group interests, in the past decade, they have increasingly emphasized not only their religious community interests but class interests as well. Deobandi and other Muslim political figures are looking specifically now to parties that will meet the increasing Muslim demand for “reservations” of public-sector jobs and educational slots, which initially excluded religious minorities. Reservations in India are as controversial as affirmative action is in the United States, but embracing that strategy—as was far less common a decade ago—aligns Muslims with what now is an entrenched dimension of the Indian political system.

If Deobandis and other Muslims are participating in state politics as do other Indians, their small-scale politics also, not surprisingly, share the characteristics of the larger culture. This was encapsulated in the crisis over the leadership of the Darul Uloom school at Deoband that unfolded through the long first half of this current year. In late 2010, the council named Maulana Ghulam Muhammad Vastanvi to be the new “vice chancellor.” At the end of July 2011, that decision was revoked and Vastanvi’s resignation was requested. In many ways this was “an Indian story:” the winning side was of “superior caste,” a family of north Indian, Urdu-speaking, “sayyids,” who thus were part of the north Indian well-born class that has dominated Muslim political leadership. Detractors called the school “a family fiefdom.” Vastanvi, in contrast, was of a rural, trading-caste background from the western state of Gujarat, “a non-forward caste” Muslim, as some described him. The whole episode could be seen as driven by the kind of caste/class and regional competition over institutions that Indians of all religious backgrounds know well. Moreover, sides partly lined up with political party affiliations.

The issue picked up by the media, however, was to make this a story about Muslim “backwardness” characteristic of an always-suspect madrasa. Vastanvi has an MBA and is an alim, an educational entrepreneur who runs schools with high-quality technical training across western India. While favoring the new cause of reservations for Muslims, Vastanvi also stood out for a commitment to technical education and programs to make Muslims more employable generally. He declared himself in favor of the madrasa making fewer public pronouncements through fatwas. What gave fuel to his opponents was a comment he made that Muslims in Gujarat should not dwell on grievances but take advantage of the state’s economic opportunities—for which he gave credit to the chief minister of Gujarat, the infamous Narendra Modi, who is tarred with substantial responsibility for the 2002 killings. To have Vastanvi resign, therefore, became, as one commentator put it, a good occasion for “madrasa bashing.”

If one can get beyond such “bashing,” it is clear that the decade since 9/11, even in the face of violence and other challenges, has seen constructive debates going on among India’s most important ulema. They are experimenting with a range of political strategies—all of which are core to India’s vibrant and distinctive democratic life. Deobandi political behavior a decade ago was primarily shaped by national context, and that pattern remains today.

In all three countries, the patterns of Deobandi activism sketched out a decade ago have, in a broad sense, not only continued but intensified. If in the Indian context, these constitute in many ways a constructive progression, in the case of Pakistan and Afghanistan it is hard to see anything beyond tragedy.

I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.

No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.

In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.

We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.

Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.

The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.

The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.

These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.

What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.

Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.

Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.

Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries.  Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.

Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.

In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.

The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.

Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.

Foremost on the minds of many is what brought on this terrifying attack? To this there are no obvious and firm answers.  Nevertheless it is possible to hazard a few plausible explanations even in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. At the outset, it is possible to dismiss the claim of responsibility of the “Deccan Mujahideen.” Indian intelligence and police sources have made clear that they have no evidence of the existence of any such entity. More to the point, the cell phone transcripts reveal that the callers did not even have a clue about their demands. At best, this call was a deliberate distraction and at worst, a prank. The inability to articulate a set of explicit demands suggests that it was the latter.

Did the attack emanate from within or without India? Again, while the evidence is murky, based upon the available circumstantial evidence there is undoubtedly a Pakistani connection. One of the captured terrorists is of Pakistani origin, he and his fellow marauders came ashore on rubber rafts from the Arabian Sea and the Indian Navy has apprehended a trawler that had sailed from the Pakistani port of Karachi.  Does this corpus of evidence implicate the Pakistani state in this dastardly act of terror?  Perhaps. However, there are levels of culpability and presently it is impossible, with any degree of certainty, to assign a precise degree of involvement or responsibility.

That said it is equally impossible at this stage to easily exculpate Pakistan of any possible responsibility in these attacks. From the 1980s to the present day, various Pakistani regimes have either encouraged or allowed its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate  (ISI-D) to exploit a range of India’s home grown political difficulties. To that end, it is well known that Pakistan trained, supported and provided sanctuaries to Khalistani separatists in the Punjab and continues to do the same for separatists in the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. Indeed in Kashmir, thanks to the ISI-D’s role and involvement, a mostly spontaneous, local uprising against Indian rule has been transformed into a vicious, religiously motivated extortion racket. Despite Indian diplomatic entreaties and military pressures, the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to eschew its support to the jihadis.  Indeed, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization implicated in multiple attacks on India including the most recent, remains comfortably ensconced in the city of Lahore.

Yet the complexity and organization of the attack suggests that it could not have been carried out without domestic support.  If the attackers were indeed Pakistanis, without a doubt, they had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.  No operation of this complexity could have been orchestrated solely from abroad. Why would any members of the Indian Muslim community be a party to this carnage? In recent years, a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims has responded to the siren call of radical Islam. The reasons for their turn to Islamist extremism are complex.  At the time of the partition of India, a significant segment of the Muslim elite departed for Pakistan.  Elements of that elite remained and thrived in post-independence India.  Others who managed to avail themselves of educational opportunities prospered and blended into India’s vast, plural society. On a day-to-day basis, they face little or any discrimination because of their religious identification.

Other less affluent parts of that community, however, are hardly so fortunate. They have long endured routine discrimination in everyday life, in employment and in housing opportunities.  Past generations passively acquiesced in these daily humiliations.  Ironically, because of the relative openness of Indian society, lower middle class Muslims are now much more politically conscious and mobilized and less prone to accept their consigned lot.

Against this social backdrop, two salient incidents can be deemed as the catalysts for their political radicalization. The first was the spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu zealots in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992.  Hundreds of Muslims lost their lives as Hindu mobs went on a rampage, especially in Bombay, with the police acting as passive bystanders. The second episode was the pogrom that occurred in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of a fire on a train with Hindu pilgrims which, some claim, was set alight by Muslim miscreants.  Sadly, few, if any, individuals who were involved in the Bombay riots or the Gujarat pogrom have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, following these two episodes, Muslim radicalism has emerged and flourished.

Despite this growing menace of domestic Muslim extremism, the Congress Party, the principal component of the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been in willful denial about it. Its reasons are straightforward. Muslim constituencies in various parts of the country constitute important swing voters and can thereby determine the outcome of a number of electoral contests. Fearful of alienating these critical voting blocs, Congress has preferred to turn a Nelson’s eye to the problem.

The failure of the national government to forge a set of policies designed to address the social roots of Islamist zealotry are apparent. To worsen matters, many of India’s state-level police forces, when confronted with the challenge of violent Islamist radicalism, have failed to muster the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress it. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, have tainted evidence and have abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. In turn, far from curbing the rise of Islamist violence, their actions have actually provided a boost.

Despite this lugubrious analysis there is no imminent danger of India falling apart along the civilizational fault lines that Robert Kaplan has sketched out.  Even after the spate of bombings that a domestic Islamist terrorist organization, the “Indian Mujahideen,” have carried out this past year, including in the capital city of New Delhi, they have abjectly failed in promoting Hindu-Muslim discord and violence.  Even the crassest of India’s politicians have not tailored their electoral rhetoric along religious lines to exploit the attacks of the “Indian Mujahideen.”  Instead, they have concentrated their fire solely on the Congress-led coalition’s apparent ineptitude to contain the growing scourge of domestic terror.

Also, India’s feisty press has been at pains to underscore that Muslims have frequently been the victims of a number of terror attacks.  Earlier significant segments of the press had also done yeoman reporting on the complicity of the state government of Gujarat in the pogrom that took place in 2002.  These bold attempts of the press to highlight the callousness of the Islamist extremists as well as the culpability of a state government in promoting ethnic strife and violence, in turn, has prompted India’s quasi-official National Human Rights Commission to investigate and report on the malfeasances of various state governments. Such public shaming though hardly a substitute for judicial probes and public prosecutions, nevertheless can act as an important restraint on the fecklessness of politicians keen on exploiting ethnic tensions for electoral gains.

These constraints notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the tragic fact that India faces terrorist threats from within and without. Nevertheless, the imminent fracturing of India’s state and society are, like Mark Twain’s death, greatly exaggerated. The country has been witness to worse times in its 60 odd year independent history. On each occasion it managed to defy the doomsayers. Its societal and institutional resilience, though frayed, is not beyond repair. Tragically, the Bombay attacks may provide the impetus for such an effort.

The book is avowedly didactic, aiming to persuade Muslims in public debate that constitutional rule of law, human rights and democratic citizenship in a secular state represent the only form of political regime consistent with Islam in the modern world. Despite lengthy and repetitious exposition of the notions of democratic constitutionalism, “civic reason,” citizenship and human rights, An-Na`im fails in his explicit purpose of justifying and legitimizing them in Islamic terms, which appear somewhat incidentally and do not carry the primary charge of justification. In this regard, his preaching can only have an effect on those already converted. An-Na`im does, however, have two compelling arguments for his position in terms of Islam, one substantive and the second historical. The substantive argument is that only with such a state can Muslims autonomously and without compulsion follow the law of God as interpreted by themselves. The historical argument is that his “proposal for a secular state is more consistent with Islamic history than is the so-called Islamic state model.” The problem is that few Muslims requiring specifically Islamic legitimization and justification will accept his premises regarding “the inherent nature of Shari`a” and find his substantive argument convincing. An-Na`im’s appeal to history is not intrinsically Islamic either; nor is it easy to sell rhetorically. But it is his more original and stronger argument. Furthermore, as we shall see, the historical argument is even much stronger than he is able to present.

Muslims, An-Na`im argues, need a secular state that is “neutral regarding all religious doctrines” but allows legislation and public policy to “reflect the beliefs and values of citizens, including religious values.” This requires dispelling “the illusion that the Islamic state is supposed to enforce Shari`a,” and “keeping a clear distinction between Islam and the state while regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics;” or again, it requires “the institutional separation of Islam and the state” and “the religious neutrality of the state.” This amounts to a more clear and careful definition than has been provided by the Iranian reformists such as Abdol-Karim Soroush and the former President, Mohammad Khatami, for what they have called “religious democracy.”

Clarity ceases, however, with his call for “regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics.” Returning to the notion of “regulating the political role of Islam,” An-Na`im ends with a reaffirmation that the separation of Islam and the state should be “accompanied by the nurture and regulation of the organic relationship between Islam and politics,” and calls for “an enabling discourse for promoting the role of Islam in public life.” Having convincingly argued against the French and Turkish variants of secularism as exclusions of religion from politics and the public sphere (incidentally, by appealing not to Islam but to democracy and human rights), it is not clear why any regulation of any kind beyond the generic rules of constitutional democracy, civic reason and human rights should be needed. What is the meaning of “regulation” other than the obvious non-exclusion? Does the call for “promoting the role of Islam in public life” point to a hidden agenda lurking behind the innocuous thesis that constitutionalism and human rights need to be justified in terms of Islam rather than Western liberalism to be understood by Muslims? I will come back to this at the end.

The most original aspect of the book is An-Na`im’s historical analysis of law and the state in medieval Islam and the Ottoman empire, as well as the contemporary patterns of the secular state in Turkey and in post-colonial India and Indonesia. Being a lawyer and not a historian, An-Na`im concedes far too much to the proponents of ideology of the Islamic state, whose alleged function is the execution of the Shari`a. He can show that such a state never existed. In fact, the evidence for separation of religion and the state in Islamic history is much stronger. An-Na`im certainly exaggerates the importance of the Shari`a relative to state law (qānun) and customary law in the administration of justice in medieval Egypt and the Ottoman empire, not to mention the Mughal empire and Indonesia. And the myth of the Islamic state he rejects still has enough hold over him to induce a serious, anachronistic misreading of the communal politics of Indian independence in which the Shari`a played no role, either positively or negatively. Nevertheless, the evidence he presents proves his historical argument for the differentiation between the state and religious law and authority more than adequately. This discussion of the separation of religion and the state in Islamic history, and the analysis of the strengths and limitations of the three very different contemporary secular states built on it, constitute the major achievement of this book.

In An-Na`im’s account of imperialism in India, which generalized to the other two cases of empires without substantiation, “colonial reason” is credited with the invention of legal codification. There is no denying the oddity of what developed as the “Anglo-Muhammadan law” under the British Raj, but the colonial motive for codification, beyond the requirements of efficiency in the administration of justice, is not entirely clear. The same claim that codification was the product of colonial reason is not explicitly made in the case of the Dutch empire in Indonesia. Legal codification in the non-colonial Ottoman empire is also seen by An-Na`im as an imperial imposition of a piece with the so called “capitulations”—extraterritorial imperialist rights to consular jurisdiction over their subjects and the compradors declared under their protection. (An-Na`im may be forgiven for passing over the fact that human rights, so dear to him, were introduced side by side with the capitulations and were more strongly pushed by the imperialists in favor of the religious minorities under their protection than codification, in which they had only a tangential interest.) He also conveniently ignores the arguments that legal reform in general and codification in particular may in fact have been a means of resistance to imperialism in Egypt, and the patent fact that codification was part of the autonomous Ottoman will to defensive modernization to withstand the imperialist pressure. An-Na`im shares this dim view of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement for codification of the law, whose proponents saw it as an effort to adopt modern civilization, with Noah Feldman, whose view I have criticized earlier in The Immanent Frame. The vilification of Muslim modern codes stems from the replacement of “democracy” for the “modernization” of the earlier generations of Muslim reformers in An-Na`im’s teleology. This shift exacts a heavy cost in terms of understanding the legal history of the last two centuries. The complex issues of procedural rationalization, separation of law and ethics, reform of the appellate system and systematic use of written documents, and the dilemma of majoritarianism versus judicial activism in protection of human rights—the nitty-gritty of the role of law in a modern constitutional order—are entirely set aside by this hard-nosed lawyer for the glib talk of democracy and civic reason. Here, I must be forgiven for being old-fashioned and thoroughly skeptical.

An-Na`im’s head is in the right place when he insists on Islam’s compatibility with the secular state, but at the very end, when he calls for “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a,” the former loses its control over the latter, revealing a starry-eyed utopia. An-Na`im had briefly alluded to his commitment to Islamic reform as advocated by his Sudanese master, Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, stating that “it also requires the reformulation of usul a-fiqh [principles of jurisprudence].” But why should we expect the new ijtihād and reformulation of the principles of jurisprudence to produce results this time that are different from the Wahhabi ijtihād from the eighteenth century to the present, Salafi ijtihād of the early twentieth century, or the current one of the Islamists? The implicit answer seems to be that Islamic reform would now take place within the framework of constitutional democracy and be subject to human rights. But I see little evidence for An-Na`im’s presumption that the form of Islam to be promoted by his project would legitimize the constitutional democracy and human rights to which it should be subject! In fact, his own evidence of the democratic enforcement of the penal code of the Shari`a in Aceh proves the contrary. He takes cold comfort in “lack of agreement between Achenese leaders about what the application of Shari`a means.” (This is An-Na`im’s variant of the hackneyed assertions one hears often, such as “not everyone agrees what the Shari`a is,” or, “there are different schools of Islamic jurisprudence.”) He thus misses the chance to discuss such judicial devices to protect human rights against democratic majoritarianism as constitutional courts. (Indonesia has an inactive one, but the activist constitutional court of Egypt is not discussed either.

An-Na`im wants to beat the Islamists at their own game by appropriating their rhetorical tools, but this is a very risky strategy. He has made an impressive effort to involve Muslims throughout the world through his website, and used an Indonesian Muslim institute to organize discussion groups. But the Iranian reformists lost badly in their attempt to appropriate the rhetoric of the hardliners despite the fact that they created and controlled, for a few years, the most vigorous press in the Muslim Middle East. The chances of the An-Na`ims and the Feldmans firing single shots from the hip at the same remote target from the far west are much smaller. Attempts at the rhetorical appropriation of Islamism by “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a” (An-Na`im), or the historical romance of the Shari`a as constitutionalism and modern rule of law (Feldman) are bound to fail. Like all religious law, the Shari`a has a restrictive, and never a liberating role, and the Muslims who wish to free themselves from its rigid restrictions historically did so through the liberating flexibility of man-made, secular law (qānun). For Muslims there certainly is a higher realm of freedom corresponding to the religio-mystical sense of the divine path. Yet if history is a guide, the Sufis through the centuries had good reasons for differentiating that realm from the law and for considering Shari`a the inevitably rigid husk to religion’s kernel, which they called Haqiqa (the truth).