On more substantial issues, his instinct is exactly right (and mine) when he says that Taylor wants a neutralism that is not necessarily secular. I wrote a fair number of words in my essay to try and make that instinct into a sound bit of criticism in political theory. I am sure that I have not persuaded Taylor, but it is gratifying to see that During and I share an understanding of Taylor. If he and I are right, Taylor’s honorable and interesting effort to redefine secularism as his form of “neutralism” fails. Or at any rate—if one takes the view that definitions, being stipulative and conventional, cannot exactly fail—it is not theoretically well motivated. During doesn’t mention his grounds for thinking Taylor to be wrong, but does gesture at broad agreement with the grounds I had presented.

Where he seems to find my dialectic is missing something is at the point when I mention that the implementation of secularism (in those contexts where its implementation is called for) in the face of resistance to it, should appeal to a historicized conception of the subjects who resist it. He suggests that I should have given a thicker sense of the actual historical development that might be needed to bring such subjects around to secular polities and proceeds to guide me to a path by which this might be done by providing a genealogy of how it was in fact achieved in Europe. These genealogical and historical remarks are valuable, but I want to shepherd their relevance to a different part of my dialectic from where he places them.

The entire last two sections of my paper aim to address the philosophical issues that arise when secularism is called for but is resisted by religious identitarian groups, and they argue for a historically constituted conception of political subjectivity with dynamic possibilities for the presentation of internal reasons by secularism to those who resist it. Of these efforts on my part, During says this:

This is an ingenious philosophical prophecy. But the obvious problem with it is that history has not so far worked this way, and Bilgrami offers no good reasons for us to think that it will in the future either. I can’t address the issues that Bilgrami’s turn to history raises in any depth, so I’ll content myself with three broad points, the first two of which displace philosophic discussion of state secularization by connecting it to capitalism [and science’s role in society], and thus implicitly to contemporary history’s actual motor. The third places the debate between Taylor and Bilgrami in a different historical trajectory than the one that Bilgrami himself offers, by offering a distant genealogy of Church/State relations.

In response, let me repeat first what I had said in response to Colin Jager: I come bearing no prophecy. I have no predictive aims. What has perhaps misled During (which is why I say that his historical remarks are relevant at another stage of my dialectic than where he offers them) is that I was possibly not clear enough that at this stage of the paper, I am discussing a philosophical problem and invoking the relevance of history in a very philosophical mode.

When I had asked what secularists might do in contexts in which secularism is necessary but in which it faces religious identitarian resistance, I was really asking two questions that were narrowly philosophical. First, is it right for secularists to impose its policies from on high via the force that states possess or should it come to secularist policies inclusively by negotiation with those who resist it; second, should one justify this or that secularist policy to those who resist it by pronouncing some universal, “externalist” claim for its truth or should one seek “internal” reasons in the conceptual vernacular of the very groups which resist the policy. (These two questions are obviously related since the notion of negotiation in the second disjunct of the first question is of a piece with the ideal mentioned in the second disjunct of the second question, the ideal of seeking internal reasons in a conceptual vernacular of those who oppose one.) It is in the context of these specific questions that I introduced the appeal to history. The appeal was: If internal reasons are not available in these efforts at negotiation at any given time, one should not grant anything to relativism (relativism being the view that both parties to the negotiation have a right on their side, a relative right!), but rather one should (as a normative stance) see the party with which one was negotiating as consisting of historically constituted subjects whose moral-psychological economies might, as a result of changing historical circumstances, go on to develop internal conflicts that make them more susceptible in the future to revision of their views via internal reasons.

I had left things relatively schematic here and said nothing very specific about what sorts of historical changes might make for internal conflicts in the thinking of those who resist secularism. I did give one example of how a change in even many conservative women’s thinking in America in favor of pro-choice policies was partly shaped by historical changes in the nature of the economy owing to a proportional increase in employment opportunities in the service sector over the heavy goods manufacturing sector, as well as owing to the general shift away from industrial capital to finance capital. Such changes opened up greater possibilities for women’s work outside the home and that introduced new aspirations in women and that, in turn, introduced conflict in their thinking which may well have led to a deliberation towards pro choice. But, other than that example, I had not said much about specific historical developments that might bring about changes of mind towards secularism. During is disappointed in my silence on this score and thinks that I might have looked to actual history to fill the void in what I mean history to be doing in this stage of my paper. The instruction he is offering me might, thus, be formulated as follows: “Don’t leave things so schematic. Look at the past and notice how much the rise and then the flourishing of capitalism as well as the centrality of science in society did to shape secularist polities and then seek or hope to make (or to predict and prophesize less schematically than you have) historical changes of that kind in those societies in which there is resistance to secularism.”

I repeat: I am not prophesying or predicting any secularist triumph (something I have also stressed anxiously in my response to Jager). I am only normatively advancing (and to use Jager’s term “hoping” for) the triumph of secularism where it seems necessary to do so, i.e., in scenarios that mimic the European setting in which it had in fact been called up as necessary. What During’s instruction ignores is an earlier part of my dialectic in which I myself had given this sort of thick genealogy for how the need for secularism arose in European nations. In doing so, I was, for reasons rather similar to Mahatma Gandhi’s, rather explicitly skeptical of the virtues of the historical transformations in which secularist polities were seen as necessary. It seemed to me that there was no particular reason for countries outside the orbit of European influence and power to seek these transformations. I, again following Gandhi, took colonized countries to be in the orbit only peripherally and unwillingly, and found it quite understandable that they should resist aping these forms of capitalism and centralized state formation which had facilitated the rise of corporate domination in the colonizing nations, using science and technology primarily for corporate gain as well as for highly advanced militaries and armaments. And in my own genealogy, I had fastened on a particular modern form of exploitation of religion in European nation-building, which had grown in tandem with the things that During mentions (capitalism and the use of science in its development as an economic formation), a nationalism that was based on mobilizing majoritarian religious sentiments.  The point then is this: Capital, the deployment of science in the pursuit of profit, large scale technological militarization, centralized states tied in hyphenated conjunction with nations, nationalistic mobilization of religious majorities against religious minorities, all emerged gradually in European “modernity” in a familiar trajectory, and secularism as a political doctrine grew in this web of transformations with a very particular good to offer. It would repair the damage wrought by majoritarian religious prejudice and power often exercised with a sustained form of violence backed by the state and minoritarian religious backlash against it with its own form of prejudice and a more episodic form of violence of resistance. And I had said that once this sort of society with these features had been constructed, it is quite possible that nothing less and nothing other than secularism could be conceived and devised to control the damage, given its cumulative depth and pervasiveness.

So, it is precisely because I had in mind just what During presents in his genealogy that I had said, following Gandhi’s lead, that unless one had some vision whereby all of the world should end up as Europe and the West has, countries outside the orbit of such a European (or more generally, Western) construction, should resist pursuing and adopting these lamentable conditions that made it seem that secularism was a necessary solution. Thus, far from being prophetic, I was actually resisting the tendency to Whiggish declarations of secular outcomes in the future for the rest of the world. In this, I believe, I share something deep with Taylor. But, unlike him, I don’t find any need to redefine secularism, domesticating it to another meaning that better fits the urge we both share.

So, in this earlier part of my dialectic, I had myself denied that secularism could really be understood independently of this entire genealogically traced background of European modernity and nationalism, something that During himself nicely underscores in detail (more detail than I presented) in his comments. But he offers the genealogy to me as something I could introduce at a later stage of my dialectic when I am looking at contexts where secularism seems to be a good thing to advance, in the face of resistance to it. However, these contexts, I claimed, are contexts where, despite such resistance to secularism from religious identitarian groups, the conditions of European modernity described in my paper (and in greater detail in other work) had already been replicated in countries outside the main orbit of European or Western society. (I had in particular considered India in the period of the late 1980s and after when this form of religious nationalism and minoritarian backlash against it had emerged in full force –as contrasted with the period when Gandhi was writing, where there was no such replication.) But –and this is the punch line—if these conditions have already been replicated for the relevance of secularism to be acknowledged and advanced, then During’s suggestion that I accommodate those conditions in my appeal to history at the later stage of my argument, seems redundant. I would not have in the first place been advocating secularism for these societies in which there was resistance to it, unless these historical conditions of European modernity had been replicated in them. This is not to say that I don’t find his genealogical remarks valuable. I do and I am in full accord with them as bearing a relevance to the concept of secularism, as I’ve explained above. It’s just that I would place their value and relevance in a different place in my argument from where he proposes them on my behalf.

I couldn’t end this response without saying that I appreciate and find instructive During’s further suggestion that where secularism is necessary and one seeks to convince others of it, there is no reason to think that the state is the only agency whereby this is done. The sorts of more informal associations that he proposes where there might be such dissemination are certainly worth exploring and emphasizing. I don’t believe that the pursuit of these other sites in civil society where negotiation of a broad kind may be sought should make us think that the state should become abstemious and aloof from such negotiation. The field of force in which (to use my, rather than During’s, concept) internal reasons are sought to persuade others of the importance and need for secularism is capacious enough to include both the state and the more loosely constituted institutions of a wider civil society. (See my essay, “Secular Liberalism and the Moral Psychology of Identity” for some historical examples of how the state can effectively be part of this field of force.)

*   *   *

Let me now turn to the essay by Justin Neuman. This preening response’s repeatedly announced aim is to raise a question about the extent of religious homogeneity in modern societies. Since, in my essay, I had nothing invested in claiming a widespread factual presence of homogenous religious cultures, this striking of an attitude about plural religions is besides any point that was central to my concerns.

I also said very conspicuously that (S) was far less relevant than is often thought necessary by its advocates and gave very specific contextual conditions in which it has its normative relevance and most urgent need for implementation—when societies were under threat from nationalist forms of religious majoritarianism adopted in countries mimicking the post-Westphalian path of modernity in Europe. This strictly implies an acknowledgement that, as things stand historically, its main normative relevance is to societies with more than one religion. Moreover, the author himself registers that I myself point out that any religious group may find itself developing internal conflicts and undermine its own homogeneity. So it’s hard not to think that he wrote his commentary, half-knowing that he was presenting something that, however keen he may have been to put it in the air, was not deeply relevant to the essay he was setting out to address.

I say in the essay that a definition or characterization of an ideal of secularism has a marginal advantage if it has application to both highly pluralized religious societies and relatively homogenous religious ones. If one understands what the notion of an ideal is, one doesn’t need to be told that an ideal that is supposed to apply to two different sorts of conditions is not any less an ideal if one of those conditions doesn’t, in fact, at some given point, exist. But, evidently, I must do some telling. I was characterizing the secularist ideal. Nothing in it lapses if, in fact, societies are now predominantly plural in their religious convictions and practices. Charles Taylor proposed an ideal of secularism that is restricted to certain conditions. I propose one that is not so restricted. I claimed that it is an advantage to be less restricted in this respect—and anybody reading my essay with a view to comment on it rather than a mind to seize some misperceived opportunity to display his own pluralist credentials, would have taken in that non-restrictiveness was offered as a very minor advantage compared to the other much more substantial advantages claimed. Secularism, I had said, is a stand on religion. If it is true that all societies that exist have more than one religion, the unrestricted ideal is at no disadvantage whatsoever. If it should turn out that there is a society in which there is only one pervasive religion, the unrestricted ideal has application in a way that the restricted one does not. That is the marginal advantage I had claimed and nothing in the clichés presented in this essay about how there is a plurality of religions can undermine this claimed advantage. In a characterization of some ideal (secularism, for instance), words like “should there be…” and “If there are…” which I had used in (S) and have repeated just now are precisely meant to protect oneself from making any commitment to the facts that might restrict the scope of one’s characterization of the ideal. So, huffing on about what the facts are at a given time, makes no odds to an ideal, so characterized.  It is exactly this point that is missed by the proposal in the essay that I should remove the opening clause from my formula (S) which reads “Should there be…”

Various other points are also missed or misinterpreted.  I can’t find a thread of connection in the things they get wrong, so I’ll list them below as a miscellany.

1. There is a quite elementary failure to understand the position being taken, when I said that secularism is a stance about religion and in some broad sense in opposition to religion, in a passage such as this:

…by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion.

Secularism was said by me to have a complex history and I was trying to keep faith with precisely that history in my discussion that tried to make my stipulated characterization non-arbitrary. So I cannot possibly have been setting myself up against either Taylor or Asad on that score, when I say that secularism is a stand in some sense against religion. That secularism should have its own ideologies and disciplines (a point I certainly believe myself) does not rule out the fact that it can be understood as being in opposition to religion, for the utterly obvious reason that it may be some part of those disciplines and ideologies that they run counter to the commitments and disciplines of some religions. And if, as Asad says, secular ideology and disciplines can produce new and modern understandings of religions, I don’t see how that rules out the thought that the new understandings of religion can also be something that secularism stands in opposition to. I would think that if it “polices” them, it can hardly fail, at least implicitly, to do so. My own view, I should repeat here, is that modern understandings of religion emerge out of a range of other developments of modernity (such as nationalism devised on the European model, for instance, in the examples I discussed) and secularism nests in these, often introduced explicitly as getting its point and rationale by combating some of the harmful effects it finds these modern developments around religion to have. But I won’t elaborate on that here because it is really too detailed a thought to actually have any relevance to the essay to which I am responding. As for Taylor’s book in which he presents the secular age of Latin Christendom with its own positive humanist construction in contrast with the secular understood as an ideal of subtraction, I think Taylor himself would say that that topic is not quite the topic he is writing about in his essay on which I was extensively commenting. The concepts of “secularization” and “secular” were partly contrasted by me with the concept of “secularism” because I found myself much more in sympathy with Taylor’s book (which is on the first two of those concepts) than with the essay I was criticizing (which was on the third). And within my classification of these terms, some of Asad’s directions of thought can be read as follows. He makes the perfectly correct claim that modern understandings of religion emerge out of the “secular” and the process of “secularization,” and then secularism is constructed with the rationale of policing and repairing the damage done by the political presence of these modern forms of religion. My essay’s argument is, therefore, entirely compatible with Asad’s work and Taylor’s book, though not the essay by Taylor which is the foil to my own essay. This is hardly surprising since it should be plain to a knowledgeable and comprehending reader of my essay that it was, in part, influenced by both of them. But all of this has manifestly escaped the author of this essay.

2. The reply then moves seamlessly from speaking about plurality of religions to speaking more generally about pluralist elements in culture in a sermon that is so familiar that it needs no response, especially since there is nothing in my essay that contradicts these familiar points. All this culminates in the assertion, by now a mantra in our intellectual culture, that identities are multiple, with the authority of Amartya Sen to underline it.

Nobody should deny that identities are multiple for the plain reason that nobody should deny facts. But it is equally a fact that sometimes (as in the case of religious majoritarian mobilization, which was a central concern of mine), people present themselves as having some of their multiple identities matter to them more than others, especially in the political realm, and they convince themselves that it is so. This may even be an illusion on their part. But, as Sen himself points out, a good deal of identity is subjective, not objective, and so calling it an illusion with a view to dismissing it is to simply fail to grasp this basic distinction. Societies can be highly plural in their cultures and yet some mobilizations can put aside the plurality for political and other hegemonic ends. Religion can be exploited for these purposes. When this happens there is a bad form of identity politics as, for instance, in India in the 1980s and 1990s, that appeals in name to religion. The same elementary principle that I invoked earlier when I offered the advice that one should not deny that identities are multiple, applies equally to those who would deny these latter points.

3. I made no empirical commitments whatever on the question of how widespread the practice of female genital mutilation is. My remarks on the subject were wholly in response to an example given by Taylor in his reactions to my paper and I very deliberately and carefully worded them in a conditional, precisely so as to make no such commitments. The essay seems keen to parade some numbers on this question, but there is nothing that they say by way of addressing anything in my essay directly. I was equally careful to expend quite a few words on the question of “who speaks for religions” and religious groups and raised an entire question about this and the difficulty of democratizing those aspects of society in which religious groups are to be counted, since often very unrepresentative points of view get to have a representative voice. The pertinence of this discussion is entirely overlooked in certain attributions that are made to me on this subject of “who speaks for religion,” which I don’t find anywhere in the original essay. The pedantic revisions of (S) offered at the end of the piece in which the term “religion” is changed to “religious persons” (a revision to which I have no objection, as should be evident from much of what I had myself said in my essay) could easily be inferred from precisely the words I expended on the importance (and difficulty) of democratizing the notion of “who speaks for a religion”.

4. At one point we are told that the very idea of a lexicographical ordering such as is found in (S) is only likely to be “available” to those who are already secular. I must confess to finding this so hazy that I don’t quite know how to respond.

Does the remark mean that someone cannot say, “If (S) is what secularism is, I am against it?” I know any number of people who say this. There are several essays by distinguished writers such as Ashis Nandy, written over the last two or three decades, which have said it about a doctrine that is non-neutralist in a way that my lexicographical ordering was trying to capture and roughly codify, essays with titles such as “An Anti-Secularist Manifesto.” Nandy, I wager, would agree that (S), rather than a neutralist ideal of Taylor’s sort, captures secularism, and it is precisely what he is against. I myself, as someone who offered (S), had said, as I offered it, that it is not normatively apt in many contexts. It was one of the chief and explicitly announced goals of my essay, indicated even in its title. And the essay, far from making a clean distinction between religion and politics as this response bizarrely assumes and asserts, actually takes the view that (S) should only be normatively advanced in rather specific contexts partly because in many other contexts and places, religion and politics do not separate and need not separate cleanly.

Or does the remark mean that (S) is not comprehensible to someone who is not already a secularist? If so, I can present to anybody who would make such an astonishing claim any number of people I know who have a perfectly clear understanding of what (S) means and are not secularists. In fact, as you would expect, all those in the first class of people I mentioned (such as Nandy) are a subset of this second class of people just mentioned.

5. The essay cites another paper of mine in which I make a point about how some of the political resentments and angers voiced by Osama bin Laden against American foreign policy, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, etc., finds assent on the street in various parts of the world with large Muslim populations, even as most of those who give this assent are appalled by terrorist violence and the religious absolutism that accompanies this anger and resentment on political matters. A skeptical question is raised about the confidence with which I say this. So let me just say that my confidence is based on what I read in newspapers, what I hear on radio reports and interviews, what I read in blogs on the internet, what I see and hear on television reports and interviews (including on Al-Jazeera), and what I hear in my own personal conversations with ordinary Muslims in different parts of the world that I have visited in the last decade and more.

We’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on the increasing influence of anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas and parties across Europe and to offer their thoughts on how best to accommodate minority claims (especially those involving Islam) in a democratic and liberal Europe.

Our respondents are:

Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University; Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

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Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

The breaking down of the cordon sanitaire surrounding right-wing populism is in fact not as recent a phenomenon as we like to think in Europe.  The political impulse to declare multiculturalism a dead letter—even where it never existed—seem to relate to the fallacious understandings of what multiculturalism might conceivably have meant prevailing among many European politicians. Critiques of multiculturalism are, these days, often used as rhetorical proxy for critiques of Islam and Muslims in Europe.  Anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiments need to be unpacked, analyzed, and responded to primarily at the level of particular nation-state histories and imaginaries. There is also an unprecedented level of co-ordination between various populist right-wing movements and activists across Europe. So much so that rhetorical tropes concerning Islam and Muslims travel seamlessly across the continent.  Right-wing populism in contemporary Europe also feeds on a liberal-secular nationalism of sorts, on anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and legitimate concerns over the future sustainability of European welfare states. Under the sign of democratic technocracy, across Europe we are witnessing a failure of political leadership and of intellectual vision, articulated in a conception of politics in which poll ratings and pandering to the shifting popular sentiment have become more important than the ideals and principles one espouses. This is a failure of both the mainstream political Left and Right. It requires a monumental intellectual effort by mainstream political parties to formulate more positive and less defensive narratives about the increasingly multicultural societies in which we happen to live; it is an effort still to be pursued in any systematic manner. Muslim minority claims are not necessarily the ‘special cases’ they are often made out to be; pragmatic approaches offer the best way forward.

Europe has a particularly dark history regarding its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and with that follows a burden of moral responsibility. It is a burden that must be shouldered even in the bleak and challenging times we are living in at present.

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Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University

Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

In interpreting contemporary debates about multiculturalism in Europe, it is critical to distinguish between political discourse and government policies. At the level of discourse, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ and that governments that once embraced a multicultural approach to diversity are turning away, adopting a strong emphasis on civic integration. This reaction, we are told, “reflects a seismic shift not just in the Netherlands, but in other European societies as well.” However, focusing on the level of government programs brings a very different pattern into view. New evidence from our Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP Index) tracks the strength of multicultural policies for European countries and several traditional countries of immigration at three points in time (1980, 2000, and 2010). The results—available here—paint a different picture of contemporary Europe. While a small number of countries, including most notably the Netherlands, have weakened established multicultural policies during the 2000s, such a shift is the exception. Most countries that adopted multicultural approaches in the later part of the twentieth century have maintained their programs; and several countries have added new ones. Indeed, for Europe as a whole, the average score on the MCP Index went up, not down, between 2000 and 2010. This suggests that civic integration initiatives are often being layered on top of existing multicultural programs, leading to a blended approach to diversity. Moreover, as we argue elsewhere, more liberal forms of civic integration can certainly be combined with multiculturalism. It is the more illiberal or coercive forms that are incompatible with a robust multicultural approach.

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Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Securing individual freedoms has been a strong point of Europe; handling diversity has not.

As is well known, the process of confessionalization in the early 16th century created religiously homogenized political units. Confessional dissenters were exterminated or expelled. A large majority of Jews were forced to immigrate to Poland. There were virtually no resident Muslims left in any part of Europe. This has changed in the 20th century. Cultural and religious diversity is precisely what characterizes Europe now.

Writing in the sixties, when Christianity was adapting to the intellectual hegemony of a scientific rationality, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote that the challenge posed to Christianity by science would be a cake-walk compared to the challenge of emerging religious diversity. Years later, writing specifically about Islam, Smith warned that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades. More than a millennia of animosity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not everywhere, not in everyone, but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

In order to accommodate minority claims involving Islam, these virtually invisible background conditions need to be altered. The collective memory of mutual hatred has to be addressed head on. The European Left needs to see multiculturalism or religious pluralism as an integral part of its ideology, not as an enemy or a conservative ideology merely to be tolerated. Religious diversity must be rescued from the conservatives.

It will help if liberals and democrats shed their individualist bias and learn to make a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and what we in India call ‘communal’—between those who see themselves as belonging to a community and those who view their communal affiliation as necessarily antagonistic towards other communities. Such a distinction exists at least implicitly in the European constitution. Therefore, the salvation of every single European country lies in a proper European union. The ills of Europe can be rid only by more of Europe.

Finally, it would not do right-thinking people any harm if they introduced a mixture of prudence and ancient wisdom into their universe of moral principles. Without all this, minority claims do not have much chance of being met in Europe. And this failure would be a big disaster for the entire world.

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Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

The recent victory of socialist François Hollande in France’s 2012 presidential election was certainly a turning point for the social and economic politics of France. Unfortunately, this is less true when it comes to immigration, race, and culture, evidenced by Hollande saying he would firmly support France’s ban on niqabs, or face-covering Islamic veils, and his stance against Turkish accession to the EU.

François Hollande has made clear that he will address the material conditions and worries of French citizens. But he has been quite silent on questions pertaining to cultural diversity and social cohesion, for the simple reason that he shares with Sarkozy the same conception of French national identity, defined as an abstract community of citizens bound together by principles of equality and liberty. In these conditions, the cultural and religious background of citizens is not part and should not interfere with civic solidarity and public life.

However, such an ideal has been increasingly difficult to uphold when Muslims, among other cultural and regional groups, are claiming their right to express their specificity in public space, which has in turn raised the anxiety and fears of a lot of French citizens. These fears have been the main reason for the long-standing political success of the National Front, from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine, the current leader of the party . At the same time, Muslims of all colors and stripes keep asserting that there is no contradiction between being French and being a Muslim.

Nations or groups need to exist in opposition to an ‘Other,’ and in today’s national imagination, Islam plays that role. It may be impossible for societies to completely rid themselves of this polarizing rhetoric.

That said, societies differ in how much their political imaginations are subjected to open critical discussion. Accordingly, it is necessary for French politicians across the political spectrum to explicitly reject economic and social issues being linked to cultural issues or the ‘Islamization’ of Europe. It is also imperative for policymakers to change the dominant narrative of French national identity by including Islamic culture and history.

Such a change would involve a new education project where, from history to arts and culture, Muslims are not described as the Other. It means acknowledging the cross pollination of philosophical and scientific ideas as well as the multiple encounters of artists, merchants, clerics, and migrants from medieval times to the immigration waves after WWII. Most Muslims already acknowledge France as their home and have made numerous artistic and cultural contributions to the French ‘patrimoine.’ The challenge is to reshape French imagination so Muslims can be seen as legitimate fellow citizens.

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Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Two things are happening at once in European societies. On one hand the process of secularization continues, at times remorselessly; on the other religion has returned to the public sphere. The combination is difficult to handle. Continuing secularization has led, amongst other things, to a marked decline in religious literacy. At the same time complex religious questions make new demands on the knowledge and sensitivities of the actors involved. Hence an uncomfortable paradox: at precisely the moment European populations need them most, they are losing the vocabulary, concepts, and narratives that are necessary to take part in serious conversation about religion. The result, all too often, is a debate that is ill-mannered and ill-informed.

A debate that is ill-mannered denotes a lack of respect for both people and issues. Even more serious is the lack of regard for religion as such. Those for whom religion means little are unable to imagine the damage that is done by the public denigration of faith, be it Christian or other. Legitimate claims, frequently those of minority faiths (such as Islam), are lost in the confusion.

A debate that is ill-informed means that European populations are increasingly susceptible to error and exaggeration. An excellent example can be found in the wildly exaggerated statistics concerning immigration in general and Islam in particular. Astute politicians know this and—at times—overstep the mark. Unfortunately, acute economic uncertainty will make matters worse.

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Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Over the past two decades, surveys have consistently noted a clear message: European citizens are anxious about immigration and its impact on society. Throughout this time, mainstream political parties and European political elites have attempted to respond to these trends: demonstrating the economic and demographic benefits of immigration; encouraging and promoting multicultural initiatives; consolidating and institutionalizing an anti-discrimination framework through EU directives, regulations, and national legislation; and adopting an inclusive discourse promoting the value of diversity, cultural exchange, toleration, and pluralism. They have also become increasingly detached from their base through the professionalization of politics. Throughout this same period, populist and extremist parties have done precisely the opposite. Positioning themselves as representatives of the ‘simple, average citizen’ they have been speaking out about the ‘real and everyday’ threats posed by ‘uncontrolled,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘massive’ immigration and of the ‘incapacity’ or ‘unwillingness’ of Muslim communities to integrate. They have gradually moved from underdog parties on the fringes to actually framing and conditioning pre-election debates and changes in citizenship and migration policies. Moreover, they have built an active presence at the neighborhood and local levels. The lower middle classes, skilled and unskilled working class citizens who increasingly find themselves in conditions of economic insecurity—whether due to the pressures of globalization, the eurozone crisis, or economic recession—have been identifying with the latter’s discourse, finding resonance and comfort in the statements of right-wing populists. Economic grievances, induced by insecure job prospects and shrinking wages and the perception of unfair competition over increasingly scarce social goods such as social housing, health, and pension coverage, are being coupled with strong feelings of cultural threat and the opinion that Muslim migrant communities pose an evident threat to national identity, civic values, and the country’s overall way of life. What is even more disconcerting is that this is taking place against a wider backdrop of dissatisfaction with the functioning of the country’s democratic governance and with falling trust in the mainstream political parties, exacerbated in many cases by corruption and mismanagement scandals.

It is urgent that mainstream political parties re-engage with the local level. There has been a growing gap between governing parties and their constituencies. In order to counter the influence of populist extremists, mainstream parties need to engage once again with voters who feel alienated and become once again integral parts of the communities they represent. At the same time, activities that encourage sustainable and meaningful interaction between different communities at the neighborhood, at the city, and at the regional levels must be intensified. Bringing together members of different groups has always increased understanding, countered perceptions of threat, and created ties that are much needed today to maintain the civic and social cohesion of European societies.

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Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

The success of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi), a fascist party that secured 21 seats in the Greek parliament on the strength of 7 percent of the popular vote, mirrors the alarming consolidation of far-right political parties and social movements underway across the Continent since the end of the last decade.

The Golden Dawn leadership drew directly from the toolbox of the New European Right—by mixing fascistic symbols, ethno-nationalist discourse, an anti-immigrant platform, and the use of street violence—to critique the colossal governance failures of Greece’s traditional political parties (left-of-center PASOK and right-of-center New Democracy). Golden Dawn spun standard, if extremist, Euro-populist discourse to excoriate mainstream PASOK and New Democracy leaders for bankrupting Greece, and this narrative resonated with the country’s shell-shocked middle- and working-classes voters. Similarly, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos echoed the xenophobic chauvinism of European rightists, such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Umberto Bossi, in linking Greece’s economic travails to immigration patterns that have produced one of the most accelerated demographic pluralizations in post-Cold War Europe.

Golden Dawn, then, is not a tale of putative Greek exceptionalism vis-à-vis a norm of EU modernity, but instead points to socio-political diffusion from ‘center’ to ‘periphery’ in Europe.

At the same time, Golden Dawn diverges notably from its far-right cohort in other EU member-states. For starters, the Golden Dawn qua party is likely to be an ephemeral force in politics. Most polls predict a decline in electoral support for Golden Dawn in the upcoming national elections in June, as protest-voters turn away from the party as a credible governing option.

More significantly, there is a specificity to the extreme Right’s message in Greece, which stands apart from the Islamophobic essentialism that has come to define the New European Right in other EU member-states. Chrysi Avgi blames clandestine, external forces as the cause for Greece’s economic travails; given the likelihood that the country’s economic implosion will continue apace in the near term, the search for ‘foreign’ culprits will maintain purchase in Greek society. But anti-immigrant intolerance, as well as some racist sloganeering and violent hooliganism, in Greece have been absent the deliberately, explicitly religious—read: anti-Muslim—vector of discrimination and prejudice that orients the New Right in the aforementioned European cases. Instead, Greece’s right-wing ideologues have deployed the broad rubric ‘foreign’—immigrants, Great Powers, and historical foes in the region—in a manner designed to evoke and to amplify a historical record marked by chronic linkages between the loss of economic sovereignty, on the one hand, and conditionalized political sovereignty and territorial loss, on the other. The origins and evolution of this distinction in Greece’s version of the New European Right bears additional study and attention, as part of any efficacious response by liberal democratic forces to reinforce tolerance, civility, and pluralism in EU politics and society.

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Our appreciation of the more complex history of religious governance in the West does not necessarily refute the normative importance of religious freedom in contemporary debates about religion and democracy. Indeed, as I hope will be clear in the following remarks, I personally endorse such efforts, at least where—as is the case in significant portions of the global south today—they resonate with the aspirations and circumstances of local actors. To understand such resonances as well as the alterities and resistances that ideas of religious freedom may encounter, it behooves us to deepen our understanding of the genealogy of democracy and religious freedom in the West. I do so here by way of three brief points.

The first is that democratization in the modern West did not give rise to a stable and universally valid practice of religious liberty, but a variety of governance regimes that, in most countries, secured religious freedom for some faith communities while restricting rights and privileges for those outside the imagined national community. Second, the form religious freedom and governance took in each Western country bore the unmistakable imprint of path-dependent struggles among different religious and class coalitions, all attempting to project their influence into the structures of religious governance. Third, the resulting varieties of religious governance seen in the modern West remind us that the practice of religious freedom was never the result of some unitary principle or hegemonic discourse, liberal or otherwise. Inasmuch as this is the case, those interested today in promoting—or critiquing—efforts to develop a more inclusive practice of religious citizenship in the world would do well to direct their attention to not just abstract principles of individual autonomy, but also to the situated practices, coalitions, and balances-of-social-power that ultimately determine which among the several varieties of religious governance are likely to prevail.

Behind my comments is a general reservation with regard to current debates on religious freedom. There is a tendency among proponents and critics of liberal freedom alike to over-intellectualize and homogenize the genealogy of religious freedom in the modern West. This simplification results in part from a tendency to conflate philosophical genealogies of religious freedom with a more comprehensive sociology of the real-and-existing varieties of religious governance. Although philosophies of religious freedom offer insights into the ways in which human rights and subjectivity were imagined and rationalized by intellectual elites, the struggles that gave rise to different systems of religious governance involved a more varied assortment of actors, norms, and powers. More important yet, the individuals and groups involved in such contests came to subscribe to notions of religious freedom, where they did so at all, on grounds that had as much to do with group identities and interests, and social pacts through which both were advanced, as they did any ontological commitment to individual autonomy or the sanctity of personal belief.  All evidence suggests that there is a similar diversity of motivations and political ontologies operative among those in the global south today who have concluded that some variety of religious freedom is congruent with their own needs and aspirations, even where liberal-philosophical ideals of individual autonomy are not. In settings like these, it may be more sociologically realistic to speak of “civic pluralist” rather than just “liberal” religious freedom, so as to emphasize that individual rights here may be most effectively secured through social pacts and arrangements that recognize group identities and rights as well as philosophical liberalism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the individual.

As the sociologist David Martin pointed out more than a generation ago in his A General Theory of Secularization, and as historians of religion like Hugh McLeod or political scientists like Ahmet Kuru and Jonathan Fox have more recently underscored, there was no single pattern of confessional freedom in modern Western Europe during the long century in which electoral democracy took hold. No European democracy, including laicist France, adopted the American model of a constitutional wall of separation combined with a relatively competitive and religionized public sphere. The majority of Western European countries recognized a state religion or several state-approved religions; most still do today. Most regimes of religious governance countenanced religious education in public schools. With a few notable exceptions like France, the majority of European countries do still today, although the aims of the courses in some schools are shifting from indoctrination into a particular faith tradition to education about religions. Most European states also provided tax revenues for the maintenance of schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and religiously-based associations.

Although some European countries extended state support to several religious communities, no European country provided equal treatment for the entire array of religious communities resident within its borders. In this sense, full religious freedom for most of the modern period was not universal, but selective and circumscribed. As with Jewish communities in the late nineteenth century and Muslim communities in Europe today, the terms for admission to the ranks of state-recognized religions were usually not constitutionally specified; they were instead the contingent result of social struggles and political pacts among representatives of different religious and class coalitions.

Today some supporters of religious freedom might be tempted to dismiss these examples as illiberal and undemocratic, and leave the matter there. But my point is simpler: these and other examples demonstrate that the history of democratization is not the story of the progressive maximization of any single democratic value, whether the autonomy of the individual or some other, but an evolving balance among several, sometimes discordant, public ethical values, along with the social groupings who served as their carriers. The history of religious governance in modern Europe’s consociational democracies, like the Netherlands and Belgium, illustrates this point with particular clarity.

Until the 1960s, the Netherlands—a laboratory for many Western ideas on republican freedom and economic liberalism—had a political and religious system organized around guaranteed group representation by way of what were known as religious “pillars” (verzuilingen). This arrangement was the pacted framework within which democratization in the modern Netherlands emerged, and it was premised on a more communitarian notion of citizenship than acknowledged in Atlantic liberal models of democracy. The pillars were vertical social structures based on the Netherlands’ four major ethico-religious groupings: Roman Catholics, orthodox Protestants, Reformed Protestants, and secular humanists. Since the 1990s, efforts have been made, still not fully successful, to secure state recognition for a fifth pillar, the growing community of Dutch Muslims.

In their heyday, the pillars were social and not ecclesiastical organizations, governed by a non-clerical administrative board. Established in the aftermath of the nineteenth century’s struggles among Dutch religious communities and secular humanists, pillar administration provided state funds for religious education, hospitals, and other social services. Even labor unions were organized in a pillarized way. Although regarded as prerequisites for the democratic peace, the pillars were controlled by leaders in a way that was, as the Dutch sociologist Anton Zijderveld once put it, “rather authoritarian and elitist,” even if allowing a “remarkable social and political pacification.” Civic peace and religious freedom were thereby secured by way of mechanisms that were as much vertical and communitarian as they were liberal.

The point of this comparison is not to suggest that religious governance in Dutch society was somehow an exception to the Western liberal rule. On the contrary, the consociational example is interesting because it makes more salient processes and tensions endemic to democratization and religious governance across all of Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Even as electoral democracy was being established, the emerging system of religious governance had as much or even more to do with group rights and elite pacts as it did any foundational commitment to individual autonomy. The precise balance of religious rights and exclusions also showed the imprint of nationally-specific cultures, struggles, and compromises. One could say that the history of religious freedom in the modern West looks very different when seen from the perspective of mundane struggles over religious education and finance rather than, say, liberal philosophers’ political ontologies.

It is also useful to make comparisons like these because the situations they evoke are far closer in organization and political dynamic to the religious landscapes in much of today’s global south. In matters of religion and governance, of course, there is no single “global south” or “new majority.”  The religious and political heritage varies greatly in different countries and regions. What is similar between parts of the global south and modern Europe, however, is the way in which the heightened mobility and plurality of people, goods, and ideas have given rise to new religious and ethical movements and, with them, calls for regimes of religious governance capable of accommodating the new plurality. Just as was and is still the case in the West, the precise form of these appeals has varied. In countries where national identity has long been fused with a more-or-less established religious community whose borders are policed by well-entrenched elites, pluralism and religious freedom, even in a consociational form, may appear or be portrayed as intrusive and inauthentic.  Elsewhere, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa or East-Southeast Asia, the relative weakness of a hegemonic world religion may create a more open and competitive religious market. Even here, however, the task of scaling up from religious diversity to a public ethical and legal framework that explicitly embraces such plurality is anything but guaranteed, dependent as it is on the passions and interests of different religious and class groupings.

The implications of this analysis for proponents of religious freedom are by no means dire, but they are cautionary. They imply that progress toward a sustainable and inclusive religious freedom depends, not only on the constitutional affirmation of principles of individual freedom, but on the creation of a public ethical culture and alliances of interest across and within ethical communities. No less important, and, again, contrary to some philosophical representations of religious freedom, the social motivations for popular support of religious freedom may have as much to do with the recognition and defense of group identities and interests as it does any self-conscious commitment to the autonomy of the individual.

Rather than a counsel of pessimism, however, this prescription is, as I understand it, quietly encouraging. It suggests that religious or—as I prefer to call it, subsuming it within a more plural and contingent ideal—civic pluralist freedom is a condition to which people in diverse societies can and will aspire because it allows them to resolve certain problems of co-existence in conditions of deep religious and ethical difference. Inasmuch as this challenge is pervasive in contemporary societies, we should not be surprised to see that many non-Western moderns rally to some variety of civic pluralist freedom. Equally important, and as has always been the case in Western democracies, even where people in different societies embrace civic pluralist freedoms, their reasons for doing so may well be based on religious ontologies more varied than those highlighted in liberal philosophy’s imaginary of autonomous individuals.

1. In 2001, the imam of a small town in Ajara, a predominantly Muslim region of Georgia, told me: “During Communism we had more freedom; we still had our own lives. Now, we are losing everything.”
2. In 2004, I talked with a Pentecostal pastor in Kyrgyzstan about the history of his church, including the forms of opposition his church encountered in this Muslim-majority context. He remarked: “We pray for [local government] officials to stop hindering us. But this may not be God’s way. Our faith thrives when it is being repressed.”

These two examples reveal a rather odd nostalgia for religious repression, but they do so in quite distinct ways. The imam’s intimation, that the new era of “religious freedom” was less free than the era of repression, points to tensions that have accompanied the post-Soviet de-privatization of religion, which can render certain religious tenets more vulnerable or disadvantaged than they previously had been. By contrast, the Pentecostal pastor did not so much call “freedom” into question as suggest that freedom is not necessarily beneficial to a church like his own. The unstated logic was that “passionate religious movements” can only remain passionate as long as they provide their member with a sense of exclusivity. Neither the imam’s nor the pastor’s comments should be accepted at face value, but they do require a re-evaluation of what is meant by “religious repression” and “religious freedom.” Indirectly they draw attention to the role of the law, and here it is useful to provide two further examples.

1. In 2004, a functionary of the state committee of religious affairs in Kyrgyzstan lamented to me: “[These evangelical missionaries] only want to talk about rights, rights, rights! For them it is easy. After a few years they leave again, having no idea about the mess they leave behind.”
2. Studying the Tablighi Jamaat (an Islamic piety movement) in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, I asked how the 2009 law prohibiting proselytizing activities had impacted them. They were untroubled, in the words of one: “People have gotten used to our approach. This law is only intended for Jehovah Witnesses.”

The quotations both point to the role of the law, but do so in different ways. The functionary’s complaint about foreign religious groups “abusing” the law suggests that state laws are, at least in the case of Kyrgyzstan, not solely owned by the state. The notable point in the Tablighi example is that some groups are more vulnerable to the law than others. The first example suggests that the law can become a tool to advance the interests of some religious groups, and in the second example we see a glimpse of the uneven application of the law by power holders. In both cases we need to focus on the interplay between the law and the social field in which it operates.

In short, the quotations raise at least four important questions:

1. What forms or “freedom” does religious repression produce?
2. What constraints and inequalities are produced through religious freedom?
3. Who owns religious freedom laws?
4. How can religion laws be variously employed?

In this contribution I comment on each of these questions, using empirical material from Georgia and Kyrgyzstan to illuminate the contradictions of religious freedom and repression.

Freedom in repression and repression in freedom in Georgia

What was the nostalgia for religious repression expressed by the imam quoted in the introduction all about? The short answer is that repression and freedom imply each other in unexpected ways.

Importantly, the imam was not referring to the violent repressions of the 1930s but talked instead about the 1970s and 1980s, when religion was banned from much of public life, but a relatively stable status quo existed. During this period, Moscow’s anti-religious line did not always travel intact to local contexts. As has also been documented for Soviet Central Asia, local officials would sometimes participate in religious events such as circumcision feasts and Islamic funerals. The popular Soviet joke “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” could with some justification be translated into “they pretend to eradicate religion, and we pretend not to practice religion.”

Moreover, there is “freedom” in being able to affiliate oneself with a religion without having to conform to doctrinal demands. During Soviet times religious affiliation did not always have to be accompanied with other displays of commitment such as fasting, regular prayer, or abstaining from alcohol because the ban on religion made this either impossible or provided good excuses not to be bothered. The possibilities were convenient to those who were “not very religious,” but what about those who cared a great deal about their faith? The Pentecostal pastor quoted in the introduction alluded to the possibility that the intensity of faith-based communal life may depend on repression. Similar suggestions emerged from the stories of devout elderly men about life in the Soviet region of Ajara. The danger of being reported, restrictions on conducting religious rituals, and bans on religious literature produced an intensification of ties between committed members of a religious community.

None of this denies the horrific fate of the ten-thousands of clergy, the desperation of those who sent off their deceased in unholy manners, the countless people who lost their position because their relatives were linked to religious institutions. But it is nevertheless important to highlight some of the counterintuitive effects of religious repression: that repression creates opportunities (and some liberties), several of which were lost when the ban on religion was lifted.

The above does not yet clarify the imam’s implied indictment of post-Soviet religious “freedom.” The points to be stressed are that “freedom” may produce new inequalities and may reduce rather than boost commitment to religious communities.

This point was particularly sensitive for the imam, who struggled to persuade people to attend the Friday prayers and had been witnessing a steady process of conversion to Orthodox Christianity. It is important to mention that the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries and that the local population had converted to Islam during that time. When the region became part of Soviet Georgia (as an Autonomous Republic) its Georgian-speaking inhabitants were classified as Georgians even though their religious affiliation set them apart from other Georgians. The Soviet domestication of religion proved useful in the sense that it allowed Ajarans to continue to be Muslim at home while increasingly becoming secular (Soviet) Georgians in public. This fragile balance was disrupted when in the 1990s Georgian nationality was framed in Orthodox Christian terms. It is within this context that the imam’s nostalgia for religious repression makes perfect sense. Despite the specificities, the mentioned complications are instructive for other contexts as well, especially those in which notions of ethnicity and religion are closely entwined.

First, religious freedom changed expectations concerning religious affiliation. During Soviet times, identifying as a Muslim was often a matter of background. If you were Kyrgyz, Uzbek, or Ajaran, you were Muslim by default, irrespective of your knowledge of Islam and your conduct. But “nominal” dispositions became less acceptable when religious affiliation obtained more content. For significant groups of people this created problems. Can a Georgian be Muslim? Is it possible to be a divorced Muslim woman? Can you consider yourself Muslim when you drink alcohol or eat pork?

Second, “religious freedom” is more free for some than for others. In Ajara, Islam had to compete against a well-funded Orthodox Christian church, which was backed by a powerful national discourse according to which Georgians ought to be Christian. Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, many of the “traditional religions” felt that they were up against unfair competition of rich evangelical denominations with their basis in Western Europe or North America.

The end of Communism undeniably widened the scope for religious activity, but the return of religion to the public sphere also produced new tensions and new constraints. These ran from social pressure to participate in religious activities to new dynamics of exclusion that accompany the politicization of religion: the entanglement of religious and national identities, the sacralization of secular power, and the reverberations of the global discourse of terrorism. These ironies of Soviet and post-Soviet times warn against making simple assumptions about either “repression” or “freedom.”

Religious liberalization and its discontents in Kyrgyzstan

The case of Kyrgyzstan is instructive because of the speed with which the country lifted restrictions on religious activity after 1990. Forum 18, a Scandinavia-based religious rights NGO, mentioned that in Kyrgyzstan “both registered and unregistered religious communities were able to function freely” between the early 1990s and 2005. The deputy director of the State Agency for Religious Affairs pointed out to me in 2004: “Our laws on religion are far more liberal than those held by European countries.”  He was not boasting of the democratic credentials of his country, but rather bemoaning what he saw as a chaotic situation. The implied rift between the state and its laws prompt the question: Who owns the law? And related: What possibilities exist for using and manipulating the law?

The Kyrgyz government’s embrace of religious freedom was part of a larger foreign-designed “shock therapy” package that was accepted by the Kyrgyz government in the early 1990s. These reforms had unforeseen and often undesired effects. Contradicting all expert knowledge, the dismantling of the planned economy failed to attract the hoped-for foreign direct investment. In the religious sphere, by contrast, the government had assumed that “traditional religions” would resume their activities, but above and beyond that, liberalization triggered massive religious “foreign direct investment,” of which evangelical missions and Islamic piety movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat were the most visible and successful. The data suggest that in Kyrgyzstan, liberalization was particularly beneficial to religious groups with transnational (financial) connections, which had a strong mission component, focused on the individual, and stressed that faith and culture should be disentangled. Kyrgyz politicians perceived these developments as a threat to the collective good, and after several failed attempts to amend existing law, in 2009 a new Religion Law was adopted which outlawed proselytizing and prohibited religious activities that undermined national integrity.

The 2009 Religion Law threatened to severely restrict the activities of “non-traditional” religions, triggering the protests from religious rights movements and representatives of evangelical churches. Apart from several raids on Jehovah Witnesses and some closures of evangelical Churches, the full effects of the Religion Law are not yet clear because in 2010 the government was ousted from power and replaced with a potentially more liberal but weak temporary government. Still, it is useful to refer back to the Tablighi quoted in the introduction, who were unperturbed by the adoption of the new Religion Law, despite officially rendering illegal their central practice of davit (proselytizing tours).

This untroubled attitude indicated a realistic view of the fragility of the law, combined with a conviction that God’s plan cannot be known. I already alluded to the idea that repression may positively contribute to the intensity of religious experience. This idea resonated in the Tablighi’s heroic stories about the suspicion they encountered in the 1990s. These stories also revealed that the liberal laws of the 1990s were more useful to religious groups who fit the “freedom image” than those who were easily associated with danger (such as the Tablighi). The implementation of the repressive 2009 Religion Law was equally partial. During the preceding decade the Tablighi had strengthened their links to the Muftiate of Kyrgyzstan while their activities had gained (reluctant) acceptance among the population and secular authorities. The Tablighi were untroubled by the legal changes because their integration in a number of informal orders had made them less vulnerable to the letter of the law. However, groups that had not been able to secure such a position—because they were disconnected or because they were disliked—found themselves in an increasingly vulnerable position.

Final note

One point of this paper has been to illuminate the uneven effects of freedom and repression on different religious groups, depending on the position they occupy in society. Another point has been to stress that “freedom” and “repression” do not exist as absolutes and might imply each other in a number of ways. Both points suggest that the “religious freedom” rhetoric should not be taken for granted. But the conclusion should certainly not be that there is little difference between “freedom” and “repression.” I agree with Sullivan that liberal laws are not able to protect religious freedom, maybe especially when the law itself is fragile. But even if it cannot guarantee rights, this does not indicate irrelevance. Its relevance need not be about the protection that is offered, but about the ways in which the law can be used and manipulated.

In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: If we consider concepts like “Muslim democrats” or “Muslim democratic formation”—I don’t know if you use that phrase—it seems clear that these concepts have either been under-acknowledged or under-recognized. Given these conditions, can you give us an example of democratic formation in a Muslim-majority country that would be an instructive example to and for the West? An example that says, “Here is a vibrant form of democratic life, and it took place or is taking place within the Islamic world, not despite Islam.” I think one of the bad-faith narratives about Islam says that democracy happens in the Muslim world despite Islam, despite what Islam wants for itself.

RH: Well, I think there are two striking examples. And then there are a number of still important but, for a variety of reasons, less salient examples. But the two most striking examples of Muslim democracies today are Indonesia and Turkey. People will point out that the Turkish state was until recently Kemalist, and was therefore a largely laicist state. On these grounds some would say that the Turkish case is too exceptional to figure in any discussion of Islam and democracy. But since the 1970s Turkey has experienced an Islamic resurgence comparable to that which we’ve seen across most of the Muslim world. In Turkey, as the political scientist Ahmet Kuru has so insightfully argued, the state structure that was put in place during most of the twentieth century was more aggressively secularist than that in the great majority of Muslim societies around the world. Inevitably, then, Turkey’s democratization shows some path-dependent contingencies and imperfections, not least of all with regard to ethnic minorities like the Kurds or religious minorities like the Alevis. That said, the continuing relaxation of military controls, the growing openness of electoral competition, and the preference among observant Muslims for an ethicalized profession of Islam rather than a woodenly formalistic implementation of sharia codes—all this bespeaks a political development of global importance.

The path-dependent nature and imperfection of democratization in Indonesia is somewhat different. Indonesia is sometimes described as a secular-nationalist state, but the reality is more complex. The country’s constitutional framework is a multi-confessional, “confessionalized” state, in the sense that the state is actively committed to the promotion of religion as a public good.

But the way in which this confessional commitment has been realized has varied over time, in a manner that both expressed and influenced Indonesian politics. From ‘65-‘66 until 1998, Indonesia was ruled by an authoritarian and, at first, conservative, nationalist ruler, President Suharto. However, in the last fifteen years of Suharto’s New Order government, the country witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of Islamic observance in society. Although, in the last five years of his rule, Suharto attempted to deflect the growing opposition to his rule by cultivating ties to anti-democratic Islamists, in the 1990s the country nonetheless developed a lively pro-democracy movement at the forefront of which were Muslim activists and intellectuals. Since Suharto’s fall, conservative Islamists have been consistently rebuffed in national elections. But small alliances of radical Islamist militias have taken advantage of the post-Suharto spring to press, sometimes violently, for curbs on Christian church-building as well as non-conformist Muslim groupings like the Ahmadiyah. So yes, there are path-dependent peculiarities and imperfections to democratization in Indonesia, as in Turkey, but this is par for the course in the democratization game, including here in the West. Democratization is always characterized by heightened levels of public participation, and at times this participation may result in massification that undermines rather than strengthens citizen rights and democratic institutions.

DKK: By massification, I assume you mean, not just popularization, but a sort of populism that can infuse democratic systems. As you know, there is an anxiety even among democratic theorists that thoroughgoing democracy—not quite radical democracy—in that sense, isn’t necessarily a good thing, insofar as there are popular formations that are primarily concerned to establish the authority of a particular mindset.

RH: That’s right. Indeed, I use the term to refer to a situation in which one sees, in whatever sphere—be it religion, politics, cultural life, the economy, etc.—heightened rates of popular participation, but without that participation necessarily being regulated or regularized by democratic or pluralism-embracing norms. So, massification can lead in some instances to democratization, but it need not: it can team up with highly uncivil and anti-pluralist movements or imaginaries. The challenge in any modern democratic system, then, is to take that heightened mobility and mobilization that characterize so much of modern society and canalize them in ways that reinforce a culture of democratic proceduralism and citizen rights for all. The history of mass politics in the mid-twentieth century West reminds us that the outcome of efforts like these is never a foregone conclusion.

DKK: You have written that Suharto had, at one point, sought out either moderate or even liberal Muslim leaders as he was trying to re-think what Indonesia was as a nation. And then he moved away from these moderates and liberals toward more conservative, traditionalist, and dogmatic figures. How do you explain this move? Would you ascribe Suharto’s shift in policy to anxiety about massification, and the anxieties about the loss of control?

RH: There were issues related to massification, but Suharto, actually, was a fairly effective administrator and, more importantly, a brilliant if at times ruthless tactician, a master of selective mobilization, which in many instances took the form of “divide and conquer.” As the Islamic resurgence gained momentum, in the mid-1980s, he realized that it posed a threat to his rule. Indeed, as one of his advisers told me in 1992, he looked at what had happened in Iran, and he realized that, for tactical reasons, he’d better engage the organized Muslim community more effectively. But his first tack, as you said, was to reach out to Muslim moderates, if you will—indeed, even Muslim liberals, such as a dear friend and teacher of mine, Nurcholish Madjid, who died a few years ago, and who was really one of the great thinkers of late twentieth-century Islam. So, Suharto first reached out to Madjid, as well as to other Muslim reformers who were linked to mass organizations, thinking that intellectuals and leaders of Muslim mass organizations would allow him to co-opt and control the Muslim community.

DKK: Normatively speaking, in terms of these moderate or liberal Muslim political theorists, what were they telling Suharto, particularly in contrast to the conservative views he sought out later on? I’m curious about that difference.

RH: What those leaders told Suharto is that he had to take steps to contain corruption, including that of his children, and to transition to a democratic political order. Nurcholish Madjid was quite explicit about this in his speeches and writings, though he was not a vociferous, street-fighting opponent of Suharto—other people, like Abdurrahman Wahid, the now-deceased head of Nahdlatul Ulama, and the man who was president of Indonesia from late 1998 to 2001, played a more complex and mass-politics game. Both men, however, spoke of the importance of free elections, a deepening of citizen rights, religious freedom, and civil society, and both too saw parallels between Indonesia and the earlier processes of democratization in Taiwan and Korea.

DKK: “Five Tigers.” That sort of rhetoric.

RH: That’s right. Indonesia has always been unusual in that, although it is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on matters of politics and economics many in the political class have looked as readily to East Asia as they have the Middle East for political and economic lessons.

In any case, because Madjid, Wahid, and others continued to press for democratic reforms, from about 1994 to 1998 President Suharto reached out to hardline Islamists who had earlier been his critics, and he succeeded in winning them to his cause by alleging that the democracy movement was really a kind of Christian-influenced organization, and that democracy itself was antithetical to Islam. But the great majority of Muslim leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s had already concluded that constitutionalism and democracy were not merely compatible with Islam but required by the circumstances of modern life and politics.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

And the possibilities, at least in those first days, were seemingly endless. Some stressed continuity with the past, riffing off the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM, the former southern rebel movement, then political party, and the current government of South Sudan) secretary general Pagan Amum’s comments at the independence ceremony when he lowered the old Sudanese flag for the last time—in preparation for the raising of the South Sudanese flag—telling the crowd that he would not be handing it over to Khartoum in a gesture of good riddance, but rather would hold on to it in the soon to be formed national archive, in memory of the shared history, the shared struggle, and indeed the shared future that northerners and southerners have and would continue to experience together. Others imagined a cleaner break. One bilingual sign held high at the independence ceremonies read, “From this day our identity is southern and African and not Arab and Islamic. We are not the worst of Arabs, but rather the best of Africans” (the sign was, I should note, in both Arabic, from which I translate, and choppy English, held up at an ceremony largely conducted in Arabic, still the de facto lingua franca of South Sudan despite official efforts to switch to English, and thus belying the difficulties inherent in making such a clean break overnight). The discursive historical reality of independence, of sharp bold-lines on the map, was matched in intensity by the sociological reality of entanglement (by choice and by force), of blurry lines. North and South could not be so easily disaggregated.

The tension between a model that stressed continuity with the past and one that proposed a break with what was certainly a painful history plagued Muslim South Sudanese perhaps most of all. Muslim South Sudanese, who make up a significant portion of the population, are individuals whose very identity challenges the distinct categories for which “clean break” models of partition strive. Islam came primarily from the North (from which the South was now separating), tying together families, trade routes, and pilgrimage networks, despite aggressive British colonial efforts to stop its spread. These links were not so easily sundered. While many non-Muslim South Sudanese had assumed that Islam was a political identity, somehow tied to the North, and imagined mass-apostasy coinciding with southern independence, South Sudanese Muslims insisted that to be southern and Muslim was not a contradiction in terms. Continuity with a past in which southern Muslims suffered discrimination in the North for being southerners and in the South for being Muslims at a time of rebellion against (at least in part) state-driven Islamization, did not seem like a good option. (I should note, though, that this latter discrimination was by no means universal: Muslims were part and parcel of the SPLM throughout the war.) Though the sentiment certainly was not universal, the vast majority of Muslims with whom I spoke in the summer of 2011 favored southern independence, a clean break from the North, and were actively debating how Muslim identity had changed under the new political arrangements they’d entered (South Sudanese Muslims had gone from being part of what demographers call a national majority, to being a “minority group” literally over night, and without traveling anywhere). The nature of “South Sudanese Islam” was being renegotiated, but most seemed to agree that the particular cultural stamp of the North would have to be transcended if the name of Islam was to wash out the stain of its bad reputation acquired during the war and flourish in the new state.

On the other hand, the notion of a clean break that sought to define South Sudan as explicitly non-Muslim (whether or not it was thereby “Christian” was a topic of debate, to which I will return below) and non-Arab made South Sudanese Muslims worry that the “New Sudan” imagined by John Garang, which was to embrace Sudanese of all religions and ethnicities, was quickly taking on an ethnically and religiously exclusive color. Muslim communities feared persecution in the new state after decades of civil war in which Islamization, if not Islam, was portrayed as a prime adversary to southern flourishing. The uneven (but active) banning of headscarfs in southern public schools after the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, which reverted control of the South to southerners, led to protests in at least one major Muslim center I visited (the city of Malakal) and the founding of a Muslim girls school there. The banning of religious political organizations forwarded by the new Advisor to the Presidency on Religious Affairs was taken by many Muslims to be directed at Islam, as Christian majority parties (under secular names) were certainly plentiful. Such incidents further raised suspicion that the equality and secularism that the new government was promising was a coded way of promoting “tyranny of the majority” and a state from which Muslim communities would be marginalized. The southern state’s resistance to a quota system (in which a certain amount of ministries or parliamentary seats would be given to Muslims qua Muslims), under the logic of blindness to religious identity, led to a short-lived but significant armed rebellion in Northern Bahr al-Ghazzal—active during the time I was in South Sudan, but now quelled—demanding 30 percent representation for Muslims in the new government.

The desire to “politically transform difference into sameness,” as Saba Mahmood has put it, has certainly been at the top of the state’s agenda in its quest to establish something called a South Sudanese citizen out of the dizzyingly diverse cultures, languages, and religions that make up the demographic landscape. What that “sameness” was to consist in, and what degree of diversity was still possible in spite of it, was a primary object of debate. My recent research—part of a multi-site project on religious minorities in Sudan and South Sudan following partition, conducted by Centre d’Ètudes et de Documentation Èconomique, Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) and the University of Khartoum—explores the mechanics of nation-building in South Sudan with particular attention to the fate of Muslim minorities following independence. Through field research in the national capital of Juba and the northern (South Sudanese) city of Malakal, I hope to understand what it means to be constituted as a religious minority under the regime of international religious freedom at the very moment in which this resignification—from “southerners” practicing Islam to a South Sudanese minority community of believers with a specific retinue of national rights and duties—takes place.

In a nation where neither tribes, nor regions, nor even individual families are traditionally divided on the basis of religion, how will South Sudan’s adoption of internationalist languages of religious freedom, and the concomitant constituting of Muslims as a distinct demographic, affect the existing social fabric in which it is easy to find households containing Muslims, Christians, and adherents of local traditions under the same roof? While there certainly have been Muslim communities across the South for some time, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of Muslim leaders did not emerge from those communities but were converts. Why have these “new Muslims” taken on such a prominent role in the organizational structures of the emergent Muslim minority? What makes them, rather than the entrenched Muslim communities, so much more suitable for the formation of a Muslim civil society that the state seems to both fear and demand?

Such individuals live in households that are extremely diverse (a father who follows the Prophet Ngundeng, a Christian Mother, and Muslim son is not at all uncommon) and one wonders how (or perhaps if) this status quo will be interrupted by the emergent notion of confessional community that is being forwarded by Muslim organizations and state demographers alike. I came to recognize early in my research that, though old established Muslim neighborhoods existed, the bulk of my work was being done not with Muslim communities, but rather with Muslim individuals and the associations they had joined. Most of these Muslims seemed to experience religion as a mode of being that did not necessitate the discarding of other modes of belonging (tribe, family, social class, etc.). Indeed, even the associational spaces themselves (Muslim councils and organizations, mosques, etc.) were not as restricted as one might assume. For example, at the Islamic Council for South Sudan office in Malakal, a good portion of the young men hanging out in the inner courtyard were in fact Christians and followers of traditional faiths: this space was by no means restricted as a Muslim gathering place. The modern state’s voracious appetite for categorization, and that of those who have been stamped by its logic, may have trouble coming to terms with the lack of neat lines demanded by international regimes of religious freedom in order to dole out their goods (protection from persecution, the development of networks with global “communities of faith,” etc.), neat lines drawn on a map wherein what constitutes religion and religious belonging are far more settled than they are on the ground.

One wonders what particular iteration “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. The Transitional Constitution of South Sudan nowhere mentions “Freedom of Religion” but rather offers a very specific retinue of “religious rights” (Article 23). On the ground, the new government has not been shy about managing and taxonomizing religions, minority and majority—policing the line that divides religion and state, and even religious orthodoxy itself. Government offices registered “Faith Based Organizations” and often rejected applications of, for example, “Christian” organizations “if the constitution of a particular group is not lining up with the Biblical chapters or verses,” as one Inspector in the Bureau of Religious Affairs put it to me. This effort formed part of a program to protect the nation from what he called “cults,” although which groups would qualify as Christian and Muslim and which as “cults” was still in flux during the time I was there. One wonders if these inspectors’ interest in doctrinal purity might indeed be a coming to life of Beth Hurd’s notion that the prevailing “foreclosure on religion without belief” by international regimes of religious freedom “leave little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside…‘faith communities’….[for] it endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction.”

I do not wish to come to premature conclusions about what form “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. I was there in the early days of the formation of this new state and the situation was still very much in flux. The intelligence and good will of the government servants I met—who had often left comfortable lives abroad to suffer much risk and hardship in service of building a new Sudan—suggests to me that a bright future is certainly not out of reach. The new state of South Sudan promised (and in its early days certainly has achieved) a very different approach to the relationship between religion and politics from that of the Sudan southerners had lived under until July 9, in which the central government in Khartoum had attempted to craft an “Islamic state.” However, the variety of secularism to be instantiated in the new state, particularly in a context in which voices calling for a Christian nation were still very loud, was still up in the air. As I walked the streets of Juba, listening to the new national anthem played over and over (“Oh God, we praise and glorify you, for your grace on South Sudan”), I wondered not only where Muslims would figure into the imaginings of this new nation, but where all the “African traditional religions” (or “ATRs,” as government officials called the variety of ancestor veneration, spirit, and divination practices extent in South Sudan) would figure into the national image. While there was an explicit attempt to give time to Muslim and Christian prayer in official fora, such as at the independence ceremony when a Christian benediction as well as verses from the Qur’an were recited, symbols of these traditional practices were not present at the podium. The official party line seems to be that ATRs should be represented within the state, constituted as distinct faith communities (“diin”s, as expressed in my Arabic-language interviews with government officials), minorities on the same footing as Islam and under the shadow of the dominant Christian faith. However, scholars of South Sudan (affirmed by a personal communication with Dr. Cherry Leonardi) point out that to think of such “traditional” practices as distinct confessions does not represent the reality of South Sudanese who may identify as Christians and at the same time see no contradiction in maintaining these rites and rituals. One wonders, then, what the state’s attempt to constitute such practices as discrete “religions” (and distinctly not part of what it means to be Christian) will have on those engaged in such practices, and whether it will make this kind of lived hybridity between Christianity and other modes of approaching the divine less sustainable, thus rendering Christianity and ATRs as much more polar forms of identity than they are currently. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether an official Council of Traditional Religions, constructed to represent ATRs, will indeed be forthcoming, as some officials promised me it would, for indeed others assured me that traditional religions had no place in South Sudan’s future, being relics of a past that Christianity had superseded.

The seal of the new Bureau of Religious Affairs (at right) expresses graphically what the national ideal may come to be: a large cross at the center, with a smaller hilaal (representing Islam) and a spear (representing “traditional religions”) at either side, indicating, it seems, a Christian-majority state in which other “religions,” safely construed and confined as minorities, would be protected. What exactly will have been freed through this arrangement, and what this freedom will entail for the newfound minorities and majorities, is yet to be determined.

Routing my response through a close reading of Bilgrami’s secularism thesis, I aim to achieve a few interrelated goals: first, by examining a few worldly and literary examples, to problematize the concept of religious homogeneity that constitutes the tacit alternative to pluralism in Bilgrami’s essay. Second, I try to suggest both that the world is more plural than we often take it to be and, more controversially, that in terms of religion, all societies manifest deep and significant internal pluralism—a form of diversity at least as important as inter-religious differences. Finally, I try to clarify the shift in Bilgrami’s thesis from individual subjects and objects—the “we” of Bilgrami’s proviso—to corporate and conceptual ones, a slippage symptomatic of the way Bilgrami describes the kinds of things religion and pluralism are.

“The ‘qualifier’ that (S) opens with,” writes Bilgrami, “is there to point out that secularism is a doctrine that may be relevant even in societies where there is no religious plurality” (emphasis added). We can imagine possible worlds (utopian and dystopian) that display the technical characteristics of capitalist global modernity, and might, in a superficial sense, qualify as being religiously homogeneous. The scholarly literature on ethnoreligious monocultures, a term adopted by sociologists from modern agribusiness, disputes their supposed advantages and disadvantages, but generally accepts their existence. Most examples of homogenous societies, however, are located problematically in the distant historical past (thus apt to be tinted by nostalgia, as are many yearnings for the apparent security of naïve belief), or amidst uncontacted, preliterate rainforest tribes—they are not societies in which “we” might be living, let alone ones that have written constitutions and “stated fundamental rights.” As with nostalgic yearnings for the pleasures of an enchanted world, we would do well to regard most claims about religious monocultures as the likely product of projective fantasy. As Bilgrami himself acknowledges, even ostensible religious monocultures will eventually fracture through internal sectarian conflict. History, meanwhile, makes it clear that in nations appearing (or claiming) to be religiously homogeneous, people are very likely living in tyranny or its recent shadow. As with total consensus on any major issue, a great deal of bloodshed or repression is the likely cause and cost of a religious monoculture.

One of the main problems with monocultures is that frequently invoked contemporary examples—like Japan, a nation whose high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity is often remarked upon by Japanese and visitors alike—turn out to be more diverse upon closer inspection. Indigenous groups like the Ainu, whose histories resemble that of some Native American tribes, have long inhabited the islands of the Japanese archipelago. Readers of Haruki Murakami’s recent novel IQ84 may recall the extended account of Ainu village life on Sakhalin and Hokkaido the protagonist reads aloud in an interpolated tale from a Japanese translation of a story by Anton Chekhov, or his descriptions of Ainu villages on the northern Island of Hokkaido in A Wild Sheep Chase. Far more significant in numeric terms, the population of Korean Japanese, often called zai-nichi, constitute an undocumented minority numbering perhaps several million living as an underclass with problematic citizenship status, a reminder that Japanese ethnic homogeneity is part of the machinery of social hierarchy. Large non-citizen laborer populations of industrial and post-industrial nations clearly should be—but most often are not—recognized in data on ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity.

When James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus collects his teacher’s wages at the end of book two of Ulysses, he endures a lecture on Anglo-Irish history, fiscal responsibility, and the Jews from his headmaster, who chases after him to offer the following coup de grâce on the question of Irish religious homogeneity:

Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews [sic]. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

Even if Deasy is convinced, erroneously of course, that Ireland is a uniformly Christian society, the long history of “the Troubles” should immediately emphasize the important denominational differences occluded by the category of “Christian.” As political scientist James Fearon emphasizes, “it rapidly becomes clear that one must make all manner of borderline-arbitrary decisions” in the process of ethnic categorization; “constructivist or instrumentalist arguments about the contingent, fuzzy, and situational character of ethnicity seem amply supported” by the character of taxonomic decisions. If ethnic and linguistic monocultures are always already problematic, claims about religious homogeneity are further complicated by the nature of religious belonging. Even in a hypothetical society where 100% of the population might name the same group when asked to state their religion—answering “Christian” or “Muslim” to the question marked “religion” in a Pew Research Center survey, for instance—individuals within the society will differ widely in the intensity, sites, and modalities that define their experience of religion.

Before I get deeper into what is at stake in the proviso through which Bilgrami seeks to limit secularism’s problematic claims to universality, I want to summarize a few of the key points along the fast-paced itinerary of his argument. As an effort to nail down the slippery terminology of the secular and its various cognates, Bilgrami’s essay represents an incisive intervention in the critical study of secularity. While Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age dismantles oppositional conceptions of religion and secularity, Bilgrami aims to restore secularism’s oppositionality but limit its applicability. He asserts that there are three “invariant forms” characteristic of secularism as a political stance: first, that secularism is a structural relationship or an attitude toward religion rather than a thing in itself; second, that secularism is a political doctrine about, but not against, religion; and third, that secularism is not a good in and of itself. For Bilgrami, secularism simply isn’t justifiable on rational grounds: “there are no…secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.” What’s more, he warns, secularism “is only a good in some contexts, and therefore not always to be embraced even in temporal modernity.”

Each of these points is contentious in its own right; by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion. Narrowing his focus to legitimating state secularism, Bilgrami’s thesis reads:

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, secularism requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first. (Italics his)

The concept of lexical ordering—a final propositional jab in a series of subordinate clauses—is Bilgrami’s attempt to offer a principle for adjudicating questions of moral priority, here by ranking religious practices lower than those that result from those of a polity’s ideals. Put more simply, lexical ordering is the process by which we weigh competing goods. For Bilgrami, the way to reassert secularism’s ethical mandate, despite its relativism, is not to redefine it, as Taylor and others have suggested, but to assert the importance of respecting a particular group’s vision of its own ideals, which can be, at least according to Bilgrami, articulated without reference to religion.

One of the strengths Bilgrami identifies in his argument is the way it helps him to negotiate several hot-button issues in what he calls “the present cold war being waged against ‘Islam.’” Quoting Taylor’s concern that secularists might misguidedly, to Taylor’s mind, “attack ‘Islam’ for instance for female genital mutilation [FGM], and for honor killings,” Bilgrami defends his version of the thesis (S) on the grounds that “when female genital mutilation or honour killings are identified as practices to be placed second in the lexical ordering, [i.e. to be objected to] Islam, as a generality, is not ‘under attack.’ Rather, the claim is entirely conditional: If there be a claim by those by those who practice them that these practices owe to a religion and if that claim is correct,” and so on. Lexical ordering allows Bilgrami to avoid being charged with attacking religion without adopting a position of neutrality towards its claims. Though neither Taylor nor Bilgrami intend it as such, female genital mutilation offers a good example of the internal diversity and syncretism of all religious traditions and of the difficulties one encounters when attempting to define what constitutes a religious practice. In Egypt, where over 99% of the population identifies as ethnical Egyptian and 94% as Sunni Muslim (a statistic growing higher, I fear, given recent violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christians) the U.S. Department of State reports that female genital mutilation is “nearly universal among women of reproductive age.” This is a sobering and distressing statistic, but FGM, which is practiced extensively across Africa and the Middle East, is not “Islamic” in origin; it seems to have originated in Ancient Egypt long before the rise of Islam. The prevalence of FGM in North Africa and its relative rarity in many Asian Muslim communities underscores the complex processes of local accommodation and syncretistic cultural absorption attendant to Islam’s globalization and indigenization.

It is rare point of agreement between Euro-American academics and practicing Muslims that, relative to other religions, Islam is a total way of life; similarly, both groups acknowledge the singular importance of the ummah. Even admitting that mainstream Islamic traditions place more emphasis on ritual observance than their contemporary Christian counterparts, the notion of a homogeneous “Islamic world” is, of course, highly problematic. According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religious and Public Life’s 2009 analysis of global Muslim populations, Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Tunisia, Western Sahara, and Yemen all report that Muslims constitute over 99% of the population, but to assume that the result of even this high degree of apparent religious uniformity is a meaningful religious monoculture would be to fall victim to what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adiche calls “the danger of a single story.” In her 2009 TED talk, Adiche critiques the powers that reduce a society’s pluralism to a single story, as European stories forged Africa as “a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness.” For Adiche, the problem is not that stereotypes are untrue but that they “flatten [our] experience and overlook the many other stories that inform” our sense of self and that they blind us to the importance of internal diversity.

One way to clarify the deeper philosophical issue at stake here is by appealing to Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, in which plurality and freedom are ontological conditions on which any meaningful concept of agency must be predicated. For Arendt, the ability to act, to introduce something new and unexpected into the world, can only arise in a condition of pluralism. In a famous passage at the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt describes the human condition as one of plurality owing “to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world…this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.” By linking action to freedom and freedom to plurality Arendt means to emphasize that the capacity to introduce novelty into the world depends upon a quality of openness antithetical to a monoculture. On a practical level, as we adopt increasingly flexible and, as Amartya Sen calls them, “robustly plural” senses of our own identity based on multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging, the purely hypothetical nature of a religious monoculture becomes increasingly apparent.

Because modern world religions aggregate individuals often lacking other common bonds in custom, language, or ethnicity, it seems particularly problematic that the grammatical object of Bilgrami’s thesis (S) becomes “religion” itself: “[Secularism] requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be treated evenhandedly” (emphasis added). Why are “religions” as such, and not “religious individuals,” the agents bearing the “privilege” (not the right?) to free exercise? Returning to the example of Japan provides clarification on what is at stake here. It is important to note that Japan’s high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity does not correlate to religious uniformity. Indeed, in addition to its Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian communities, the modern period has seen the explosive growth of new religious movements in Japan and a rise in multiple religious affiliations (self-reported membership in religious groups totals nearly twice the nation’s population). There are almost two hundred thousand religious organizations registered under Japan’s 1951 Religious Judicial Persons Law, which secures corporate legal personhood and various tax benefits for registered religious movements, but also entangles religious organizations with state power. Murakami’s Underground examines the legacy of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo, Japan’s most notorious new religious movement, a trope that reemerges in the alter-reality of IQ84 as the cultish Sakigake organization, a messianic new religious movement with a charismatic leader, a heavily armed military compound, and an elaborate network of political and economic influence. IQ84’s dystopian possible world highlights (and sensationalizes) the danger of a system where rights accrue to religions rather than to individuals. Sakigake’s mysterious “Leader” raises the question of who speaks for a religion. When an elected official in a democratic government speaks on behalf of a community, her legitimacy and sovereignty is contingent upon the consent of the governed, at least in liberal political thought. The question of who speaks for a religion, by what right and chosen by whom, is another matter; before granting Bilgrami’s claim that religions should have rights, we need to think more about the processes and systems that legitimate those who speak for a religion.

In a relatively recent essay in Critical Inquiry “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment,” the subject of a heated exchange on the popular blog Three Quarks Daily, Bilgrami makes some very confident claims about what “ordinary Muslim people” think and feel. Bilgrami writes:

Ordinary Muslims on the street are clear and perfectly precise about what they claim and want: that they are fighting back against centuries of colonial subjugation; that they want the military and corporate presence of the West (primarily the United States), which continues that subjugation in new and more subtle forms, out of their lands; that they want a just solution for the colonized, brutalized Palestinian people; that they want an end to the cynical support by the west…of corrupt regimes in their midst…that they will retaliate (or not speak out against those who retaliate) with an endless cycle of violence unless there is an end to…endless state-terrorist actions.

I am in no personal position to dispute the accuracy of this list, but I am struck by the relative confidence with which Bilgrami takes the pulse of the Muslim street. In his working paper on secularism he makes a strikingly similar claim: “The right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake [in relationships with the Muslim world]: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination against migrants in Europe, and so on.” I see at least two issues at stake here. The first is practical: for Bilgrami, the “right thing to do” centers on addressing violations perpetrated by Euro-Americans in the name of secularism against Muslims. One thing made clear by the slogans and demands of the Arab Spring, however, is that its supporters are motivated by issues like government injustice, economic decline, and restrictions on basic freedoms—a list more in line with the demands and deficits identified by recent UN reports on human development in the Muslim world. The second is more philosophical: I am wary of confident generalization about the Arab street (or even about people down the street, for that matter). The kind of clean distinctions between politics and religion, public and private implicit in the idea of lexical ordering are likely to be available only to those who are already secular.

Mindful of the fact that a course on modal logic was the reason I changed my undergraduate major from philosophy to English, I conclude with an amendment to Bilgrami’s thesis, which incorporates the revisions to (S) that might follow if my critique of modern religious monocultures is convincing, in a thought-experiment I call (SN):

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, s Secularism requires that all religious people religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s religious person’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals, often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

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.

Each country in Western Europe is a secular state and while each has its own distinctive take on what this means, there are, nevertheless, two main historical strands of secularism, a main and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laïcité, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, which I call moderate secularism, however, sees organized religion as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances advance—even through an “established” church. Its public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability, or that contribute to conceptions of national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and national ceremonies.

Western Europe has often been a site of struggle between historical public churches and political secularists, yet during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during the latter and especially in Protestant-majority societies, this has not been deeply conflictual and has taken the form of various shifting compromises. The compromises consisted of a successful accommodation of an expanding number of Christian churches within the actual and symbolic workings of the state, yet were marked by a gradual but decisive weakening of the public and political character of the churches. From the 1960s through the end of the century, there was a particularly strong movement of opinion and politics in favor of the secularists. In Western Europe, the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been broadly accepted; not only has there been no major, sustained counter-movement, but it has expanded beyond north-western Protestant/secular Europe into Catholic Europe. So, for example, the national system of ‘pillarization’ in the Netherlands, by which Protestants and Catholics had separate access to some of the state’s resources, emerged in the nineteenth century, declined sharply in the middle of the twentieth, and was formally concluded in 1983. The Lutheran Church in Sweden was disestablished in 2000. In the UK, disestablishment of the Church of England was embraced in the early 1990s by key sections of the center left. Catholic countries—Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland—in the 1980s and 1990s rapidly showed signs of the secularization characteristic of Protestant Europe.

There is no endogenous diminution of secularization in relation to organized religion, attendance at church services, and traditional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. Whether the decline of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or by new ways of being religious or spiritual, neither mode is inspiring an attempt to connect with or reform political institutions and government policies. There is no challenge to political secularism there.

This is the context in which non-Christian migrants have been arriving and settling and in which they and the next generation are becoming active members of their societies, including making political claims of equality and accommodation. As the most salient post-immigration formation relates to Muslims, some of these claims relate to the place of religious identity in the public sphere.

It is here, if anywhere, that a sense of a crisis of secularism can be found. The pivotal moment, 1988-89, of this “crisis” was marked by two events. These created national and international storms, and set in motion political developments which have not been reversed, and they offer contrasting ways in which the two Western European secularisms are responding to the Muslim presence. The events were the protests, in Britain, against the novel The Satanic Verses by Sir Salman Rushdie; and, in France, the decision by a school head-teacher to prohibit entry to three girls unless they were willing to take off their headscarves on school premises.

The Satanic Verses was not banned in the UK, so in that sense the Muslim campaign clearly failed. In other respects, however, it galvanized many to seek a democratic multiculturalism that was inclusive of Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was established and has been very successful in relation to its founding agenda. By 2001, it had achieved its aim of having Muslim issues and Muslims as a group recognized apart from issues of race and ethnicity and of itself being accepted by government, media, and civil society as the spokesperson for British Muslims. Another two achieved aims were the state funding of Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools and getting Tony Blair—in spite of ministerial and civil service advice to the contrary—to insert a religion question into the 2001 Census. This meant that the ground was laid for the possible later introduction of policies targeting Muslims to match those targeting groups defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. The MCB had to wait a bit longer to get the legislative protection it sought, yet by the time New Labour left office in 2010, it had created the strongest protection against religious discrimination in the EU, including a law against incitement to religious hatred, the legislation most closely connected to the protests over The Satanic Verses, though there is no suggestion that the novel would have been banned by the legislation. Indeed, the protesters’ original demand that the blasphemy law be extended to cover Islam has been made inapplicable as the blasphemy law was abolished in 2008—with very little protest from anybody. These developments have taken place not only with the support of the leadership of the Church of England, but in a spirit of interfaith respect. (Given how adversarial English intellectual, journalistic, legal, and political culture is, religion in England is oddly fraternal and little effort is expended in proving that the other side is in a state of error and should convert.)

That is one path of development from 1988-89. It involved the mobilization of a minority group and the extension of minority policies from race to religion in order to accommodate the religious minority. The other course of development, namely, that which arose from l’affaire foulard, was one of top-down state action to prohibit certain minority practices. From the start, the majority of the country—represented by the media, public intellectuals, politicians, and public opinion polls—was supportive of the head teacher who refused to allow religious headscarves in school. Muslims either did not wish to or lacked the capacity to challenge this dominant view with anything like the publicity, organization, and appeal for international assistance that Muslims in Britain brought to bear on Rushdie’s novel. The threatened ban against the headscarf was passed with an overwhelming majority by Parliament in February 2004. A few years later, the target of secularist and majoritarian disapproval was focused on full face veils that leave just the eyes showing (the niqab or burqa), as are favored by a few hundred French Muslim women. This was banned in public places in April 2011. Belgium followed suit in July 2011 and Italy is in the process of doing so. Similar proposals are being discussed by governments and political parties across Western Europe.

Another example of this broad anti-Muslim coalition is the majority that voted in a referendum to ban the building of minarets in Switzerland in 2009. Analysis of this majority has explained that it ranges from individuals whose primary motivation is women’s rights to those “who simply feel that Islam is ‘foreign,’” who may have no problems with Muslims per se but who are not ready to accept “Islam’s acquiring of visibility in public spaces,” or who generally did not vote “out of a desire to oppress anybody, but because they are themselves feeling threatened by what they see as an Islam invasion.” So, prejudiced or fearful perceptions of Islam are capable of uniting a wide range of opinions into a majority, including those who have no strong views about church-state arrangements, as indeed has been apparent since Muslim claims first became public controversies.

This means that the current challenge to secularism in Western Europe is being debated not just in terms of the wider issues of integration and multiculturalism but also in terms of a hostility to Muslims and Islam based on stereotypes and scare stories in the media that are best understood as a specific form of cultural racism that has come to be called Islamophobia and is largely unrelated to questions of secularism.

The crisis of secularism is best understood, then, within a framework of multiculturalism. Of course, multiculturalism has few advocates at the moment and the term is highly damaged. Yet the repeated declarations from the senior politicians of the region that “multiculturalism is dead” are a reaction to the continuing potency of multiculturalism, which renders obsolete liberal takes on assimilation and integration with new forms of public gender and public ethnicity, and now public religion. Muslims are late joiners of this movement, but as they do so, it slowly becomes apparent that the secularist status quo, with certain residual privileges for Christians, is untenable as it stands. We can call this the challenge of integration rather than multiculturalism, as long as it is understood that we are not just talking about an integration into the day-to-day life of a society but also into its institutional architecture, grand narratives, and macro-symbolic sense of itself. If these issues were dead, we would not be having a debate about the role of public religion or coming up with proposals for dialogue with Muslims and the accommodation of Islam. The dynamic for change is not directly related to the historic religion nor to the historic secularism of Western Europe; rather, the novelty, which then has implications for Christians and secularists, and to which they are reacting, is the appearance of an assertive multiculturalism which cannot be contained within a matrix of individual rights, conscience, religious freedom, and so on. If any of these were different, the problems would be other than they are. Just as today we look at issues to do with, say, women or homosexuality not simply in terms of rights but in a political environment influenced by feminism and gay liberation, within a socio-political-intellectual culture in which the “assertion of positive difference” or “identity” is a shaping and forceful presence. It does not mean everybody is a feminist now, but a heightened consciousness of gender and equality creates a certain gender-equality sensibility. Similarly, my claim is that a multiculturalist sensibility today is present in Western Europe, and yet it is not comfortable with extending itself to accommodate Muslims, nor able to find reasons for not extending itself to Muslims without self-contradiction.

Political secularism has been destabilized, and in particular the historical flow from a moderate to radical secularism and the expectation of its continuation has been jolted. This is not because of any Christian desecularization or a “return of the repressed.” Rather, the jolt is created by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant number of Muslims; a multiculturalist sensibility which respects “difference”; and a moderate secularism, namely, that the historical compromises between the state and a church or churches in relation to public recognition and accommodation are still in place to some extent. To speak of a “crisis of secularism” is highly exaggerated, especially in relation to the state. It is true that the challenge is much greater for laïcité or radical secularism as an ideology. As many social and political theorists are sympathetic to this ideology, and in any case, being more sensitive to abstract ideas, they are less able to see that the actually-existing-secularism of Western Europe, with the exception of France, is not the radical variant. They thus mistakenly project the incompatibility between their ideas and the accommodation of Muslims onto the Western European states. Indeed, as applied to Western Europe, “crisis of secularism” is not only exaggerated but misleading. As I hope I have shown, the problem is more defined by issues of post-immigration integration than by the religion-state relation per se. The “crisis of secularism” is really the challenge of multiculturalism. Far from this entailing the end of secularism as we know it, moderate secularism offers some of the resources for accommodating Muslims. Political secularists should think pragmatically and institutionally about how to achieve this, namely, how to multiculturalize moderate secularism, and avoid exacerbating the crisis and limiting the room to maneuver, by pressing for further, radical secularism.

A longer version of this essay was first presented as the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, delivered in Las Vegas on August 19 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Translated by Matthias Fritsch.

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EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, one reaches back to one’s own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization, rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of “first-borns.” These discourses must become habitual [sich einspielen] under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If we were to learn one lesson from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution.

EM: Let me come back to my original question: If we no longer can explain modernization in terms of secularization, how then can we speak about societal progress?

JH: The secularization of state power is the hard core of the process of secularization. I see this as a liberal achievement that should not get lost in the dispute among world religions. But I never counted on progress in the complex dimension of the “good life”.  Why should we feel happier [glücklicher] than our grandparents or the liberated Greek slaves in ancient Rome? Of course one person is luckier [hat mehr Glück] than another. As if at sea, individual fates are exposed to a sea of contingencies. And happiness [das Glück] is distributed as unjustly today as ever. Perhaps something changed in the course of history in the subjective coloration of existential experiences. But no progress alters the crises of loss, love, and death. Nothing mitigates the personal pain of those who live in misery, who feel lonely or are sick, who experience tribulations, insults or humiliation. This existential insight into anthropological constants, however, should not lead us to forget the historical variations, including the indubitable historical progress that exists in all those dimensions in which human beings can learn. 

I do not mean to dispute that much has been forgotten in the course of history. But we cannot intentionally go back to a point prior to the results of learning processes. This explains the progress in technology and science, as well as the progress in morality and law—that is, the de-centering of our ego- or group-centered perspectives, when the point is to nonviolently end conflicts of action. These social-cognitive kinds of progress already refer to the further dimension of the increase in reflection, that is, the ability to step back behind oneself. This is what Max Weber meant when he spoke of “disenchantment.”

We can indeed trace the, for now, last socially relevant push in the reflexivity of consciousness to Western modernity. In early modernity, the instrumental attitude of state bureaucracy toward a political power largely free of moral norms signifies such a reflexive step, as does the instrumental attitude, appearing at about the same time, toward a methodologically objectified nature, which first of all makes possible modern science. Of course, I have in mind, above all, steps of self-reflection to which, in the seventeenth century, rational law and autonomous art owe themselves; then, in the eighteenth century, rational morality and the internalized religious and artistic forms of expression of pietism and romanticism; as well as, finally, in the nineteenth century, historical enlightenment and historicism. These are cognitive pushes that have widespread effects—and which do not permit themselves to be easily forgotten.

It is also in connection with this widespread push toward reflection that we have to view the progressive disintegration of traditional, popular piety. Two specifically modern forms of religious consciousness emerged from this: on the one hand, a fundamentalism that either withdraws from the modern world or turns aggressively toward it; on the other, a reflective faith that relates itself to other religions and respects the fallible insights of the institutionalized sciences as well as human rights. This faith is still anchored in the life of a congregation and should not be confused with the new, deinstitutionalized forms of a fickle religiosity that has withdrawn entirely into the subjective.

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