Talal Asad

For more than a decade, criticisms levied against Muslims and Islam in Western European countries such as France and the Netherlands have been shielded under the auspices of a call for increased security and a desire to protect liberal secularism. An example of this can be found in the recent move by the Dutch cabinet to implement legislation to ban the burqa in public places such as schools, hospitals, government buildings, and public transportation. The proposed Dutch ban follows the French parliament who implemented similar legislation in 2011 restricting the presence of discernible religious symbols such as burqas and niqabs from the public sphere. In a statement to the press, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, explains the proposed ban " had nothing to do with religion, " but rather it is intended to help facilitate " recognizable communication " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). He clarifies " In a free country like the Netherlands, everyone has the right to dress how they choose, no matter what others think. That freedom is only limited in situations when it is essential for people to look at each other " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). In this statement the restrictions placed on full face-veils are steeped in concerns of contemporary cultural conflict, inflamed by language that claims that Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands need to be better integrated. In France and the Netherlands, full face-veils have become symbols of " religious extremism " that are actively legislated against. As such they are tied to a series of judgments and evaluations that situate them as objectionable cultural objects and indicative of problematic immigrant groups. Defined as " extremist " or " politically dangerous " this vision of full face-veils is based on normative conceptions of the subject. When considered in relation to the secular, violence is done to those who are visibly different, marked by religious symbols that are understood through binaries such as objectionable/unobjectionable, Western/Eastern, Islamic/Christian, religious/secular further problematizing them. These schisms have intensified in the aftermath of 9/11 and the global war on terror creating a rift between secular and religious worldviews. There is no greater symbolic target of this schism between the secular and the religious than the burqa. The polarization of these two groups, secular and religious has gained further strength when they are posited in relation to the nation state. Within this context secularism is invoked as that which protects the state, defines it, and transforms practices related to public and private life via institutions. This paper explores the invocation of normative dispositions of secularism and security in light of the increasing restrictions placed against Muslim women in the public sphere in France and the Netherlands within dominant discourse. Drawing from the draw work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad I explore how bodies are marked as " different " within public spaces, through a discussion of the schism between the secular/religious. Such an examination is significant as these legislations are some of the most prohibitive in the West.

Jürgen Habermas und Talal Asad zählen zu den bedeutendsten Protagonisten des Diskurses um die postsäkulare Gesellschaft. In der vorliegenden Arbeit unternehme ich eine vergleichende Lektüre zentraler Schriften beider Autoren. Dabei versuche ich, möglichst präzise zu beschreiben, wie Habermas und Asad einen neuen Blickwinkel auf die Verhältnisbestimmung von Religion und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart freigeben und plausibilisieren.
Einen zentralen Stellenwert schreibe ich der Tatsache zu, dass hierfür von beiden der Begriff der ‚Übersetzung‘ herangezogen wird. Ziel der Untersuchung ist es folglich, erste systematisierende Vorstöße bezüglich des Begriffspaars ‚Religion übersetzen‘ zu leisten. Dabei gilt es ein Bündel an Forschungsfragen zu beantworten: Wie wird der Begriff der Übersetzung verstanden? In welcher Art und Weise kommt Religion im Werk der Autoren zur Sprache? Auf welche Aspekte der Religion soll sich die Übersetzungsleistung beziehen? Wer sind die Subjekte dieser Übersetzung? Und schließlich, welche Chancen und Probleme bringen die beiden Ansätze für eine politiktheoretische Perspektive auf religiös-gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen mit sich?

‘[A] valid concept of “Islam” must denote and connote all possible “Islams,” whether abstract or “real,” mental or social’ (104)... Ahmed seeks to avoid two major pitfalls: (1) making Islam into a static essence or a category within an essentialist framework – such as proscription/prescription, ‘religion’,‘civilization’, ‘culture’, ‘orthodoxy’, etc., and (2) rendering Islam into a totally incoherent concept by conceding that there are as many islams as there are communities or individuals. Ahmed’s thesis (presented in Chapter 5) is that Islam is best conceptualized as a process of meaning-making or hermeneutical engagement in which the human agent engages with the Divine Revelation granted to Muhammad in one or more of this Revelation’s hierarchical dimensions – Pre-Text, Text, and Con-Text – in order to constitute meaning for himself."

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Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualizereligion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's argument about the impossibility of defining religion, connected to his contention that "life is essentially itself," helps us think about the un-translatability of life. Closely paralleling Nietzsche and Heidegger's reflections on existence and memory-but largely unthought by contemporary theorists of religion-Asad's thinking about religion is a refusal to historicize life.

The main objective of this work is to sharpen some of the concepts we have in the sociology of religion, with specific focus on the categories of secularization and secularism. The objective is to show how both concepts are managed not only by thinkers like Talal Asad and Jose Casanova, that largely deal with the subject, but also by Brazilian authors whose analyzes justify a critical revision. In the first session, the concept of secularization is clarified by two major axes: 1) the cultural decline of religious institutions and ideologies, which formerly played the role of giving cohesion to the social world; 2) the subtraction of sacred metaphysical foundations, which once guaranteed legitimacy to political power. The second section discusses: 1) how the process of secularization afforded the coexistence of different religious beliefs and, in parallel, enabled the public affirmation of ideals contrary to these beliefs; 2) the problems arising from using the inconsistent concept of secularism sometimes as a category of identity, sometimes as a qualifier of an ideology, or even as an analytical and descriptive category. At the end of this argumentative exercise, it may be possible to clearly recognize the non-conformity between the social phenomenon defined as secularization and the identity that is named secularist.

O objetivo maior deste trabalho é afiar algumas das armas conceituais que dispomos na sociologia da religião, com foco específico nos conceitos de secularização e secularismo. Procura-se abordar como ambos os conceitos são manejados não somente por pensadores como Talal Asad e José Casanova, que muito tratam do tema, mas também por autores brasileiros cujas análises justificam uma revisão crítica. Na sessão inicial, é feito um destrinchamento da categoria secularização a partir de dois eixos principais: 1) a derrocada cultural de instituições e ideários religiosos, que antes desempenhavam o papel de matriz organizadora do mundo social; 2) a subtração de fundamentos metafísicos sagrados, que outrora garantiam legitimidade ao poder político. Já a segunda sessão discute: 1) como o processo de secularização possibilitou a coexistência de diferentes crenças religiosas e, em paralelo, a afirmação pública de ideais contrários a essas crenças; 2) os problemas decorrentes do uso do inconsistente conceito de secularismo ora enquanto categoria de identidade, ora como qualificador de uma ideologia, ou ainda como categoria analítica e descritiva. Ao final deste exercício argumentativo, esperamos que se possa reconhecer, com nitidez, a não conformidade necessária entre o fenômeno social definido como secularização e a identidade que é nomeada de secularista.

Talal Asad’s essay “What do Human Rights Do?” was published
in the year 2000 in the immediate aftermath of the NATO bombing
campaign against Serbia. That same year, Amnesty International
(AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) both released reports
that documented and evaluated the civilian deaths during “Operation
Allied Force”. Both reports sought to determine whether these deaths
complied with international humanitarian law and could therefore be
regarded as “collateral damage”, which HRW, following US military
usage, defined as “damage to civilian objects and civilian casualties
that are incidental to lawful attacks on military objectives.”1
One answer to Asad’s question, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?” is suggested
by the title of Amnesty International’s report on the NATO military
campaign, “‘Collateral Damage’ or Unlawful Killing”: human rights
has become one language used to define certain forms of killing as
‘mere’ “collateral damage”.

This is my contribution to the twentieth anniversary edition of Theory and Event. This is how the editors describe the idea:

"The first is a look back at the founding of the journal through the implications of the present. What is T&E for younger scholars, academics whose intellectual careers postdate its founding? In other words, we wanted the perspectives of those for whom the journal has always been present.  As a gesture toward (and recognition of) the past, and inspired by a conversation with Wendy Brown and William Connolly about the emergence of the journal, we asked a number of such theorists to select an essay from the first five volumes of the journal and engage its insights and influences.  As the reader will quickly realize, these are neither summaries nor histories, but continued engagements with the persistent issues raised by the original work.  Each scholar’s contentions and critique of ideas from a generation ago continue the intellectual project of the journal."

The entire edition is currently free to download here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/35735

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Talal Asad has developed his famous “idea of an anthropology of Islam” (1986) based on Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding of tradition and virtue and on Michel Foucault’s definition of power and discourse. Through Taha Abderrahmane’s “Trusteeship Philosophy” which is rooted in the Qurʾanic idea of trust (amāna) that bonds the divine, I intend to reread Asad’s anthropology of Islam and analyse anthropological works categorised as belonging to the “ethical turn” (Fassin 2014), particularly Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). The objective is to show how neglecting Islam at the level of analysis can downplay important and crucial aspects of the reality of faith—particularly the modalities of Muslim-God relationship. After depicting some of the similarities between the two intellectual projects, I will scrutinize the concept of “discursive tradition” that has produced an “ethical turn” in—and beyond—the discipline of anthropology in the sense of focusing on ethical self-making. I will question Asad and Mahmood’s use of MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy by unpacking the notion of the “correct model” or “apt performance” that Asad uses in his conceptualisation as a way to explain what Muslims seek to achieve in order to have ethical coherence. Finally, I will discuss the importance of the trusteeship paradigm’s principles for the anthropological study of Muslims: the principle of requisition, i.e. returning deposits (mabdaʾ al-īdāʿiyya), the principle of signification (mabdaʾ al-āyātiyya), the principle of innateness (mabdaʾ al-fiṭriyya), the principle of wholeness (mabdaʾ al-jamʿiyya), and the principle of testimony or witnessing (mabdaʾ al-shāhidiyya). This article acts as an introduction to a philosophical discussion that is sorely lacking within the ethnographic debate between the proponents of the “ethical turn” and those calling to focus on the “everyday.”

ستفيضُ الدكتور عصام عيدو (Issam Eido)، الأستاذ الزائر بكليّة اللاهوت في جامعة شيكاغو، في هذا الحوار المطوّل حول قضايا ترتبطُ بشكلٍ أساسيّ بالاستشراق عمومًا، والاستشراق القرآنيّ خصوصًا، خاصّةً بعد اكتشاف مخطوطات برمنغهام للقرآن الكريم، وهو الحدث الذي أثارَ جدلًا على الصعيدين العربيّ والغربيّ، وموقف مناهج الاستشراق القرآنيّ عمومًا من التعاطي مع القرآن وتطوّرها.



ولذلك قمنا بإجراء هذا الحوار العلميّ مع عيدو في ضوء الدعوات المترامية حول "أفول" الاستشراق، وصحّة هذه الدعوات من بطلانها، وهل من مستقبلٍ للاستشراق بشكله الكلاسيكيّ؟ أم أنّ الاستشراق يُعيد بناء ذاته في صيغٍ جديدة؟ وما علاقة ذلك كلّه بمصطلح "الإسلام" و"المسلمين" في أوروبّا وأمريكا اليوم؟ ووضع المسلمين بالتحديد داخل الغرب بما أنّ الغرب، كما صِيغَ استشراقيًّا، راح يُعرَّف بما أنّه مسيحيّ - يهوديّ.



يأتي هذا الحوار في وقتٍ فارقٍ، وفي لحظاتٍ تمسُّ الشّرط الإنسانيّ برمّته في ظلّ هذه الظروف كلّها التي نحياها اليوم. لذا، فإنّ أجوبة عيدو تكون أهمّيتها مضاعفة؛ من ناحيةٍ فهي أجوبة علميّة خالصة ومقتدِرة نظريًّا، ومن ناحية ثانية فهي تمسّ كلّ مَن يهتمّ بحقل "الدراسات الإسلاميّة" غربًا وشرقًا.

Sekülerliğin Biçimleri
Hıristiyanlık, İslamiyet ve Modernlik
Özgün adı: Formations of the Secular
Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Çeviri: Ferit Burak Aydar
Yayına Hazırlayan: Bülent Doğan
Kapak Resmi: Emîr Husrev Dehlevî
Kapak Tasarımı: Emine Bora
Kitabın Baskıları:
1. Basım: Kasım 2007
Talal Asad, Ortadoğu başta olmak üzere dünyanın pek çok yerinde sert kamusal tartışmalar yaratan bir kavram olan laikliği ya da sekülarizmi, genellikle dinleri konu almış olan antropolojinin araştırma nesnesi haline getiriyor bu kafa açıcı kitabında. Wittgenstein'dan esinlenen bir perspektif benimseyen Asad, bu kavramın Hıristiyanlık ve İslam tarihi içinde izlediği gelişim sürecini izliyor: Din ve sekülarizm etrafındaki kavramlar "gramer"indeki değişikliklerin, bu tarih içindeki pratik değişiklikleri nasıl dile getirdiğini analitik bir biçimde serimliyor. Ona göre, dini ve seküler gibi kavramlar esasen sabit kategoriler değil, iç içe geçişler ve kopmalarla dolu devingen kategoriler.
Modern seküler anlayışların biçimlenişinde faillik ve acı kavrayışlarının, insanın acıyı ortadan kaldırma sorumluluğu hakkındaki fikirlerin çok önemli bir yeri olduğunu gösteren Asad, buradan işkence, zulüm ve savaş konusuna geçerek seküler devletlerde bunların nasıl meşrulaştırılabilmiş olduğunu inceliyor ("İnsan yaşamı kutsaldır, ama yalnızca devletin tanımladığı belirli bağlamlarda"). Ardından insan hakları anlayışının gelişimine değinerek, kimin insan sayıldığı kimin sayılmadığı noktasından hareketle Müslümanlara yönelik önyargıların ve ayrımcılığın altında yatan sömürgecilik mazisini, milliyetçilik-sekülarizm ilişkisini ve bunlarla bağlantılı sekülerleştirme çabalarını inceliyor.
Batı ve İslam düşüncesinde dinin yeri konusundaki yetkin araştırmalarıyla tanınan Asad’ın bu kitaptaki analitik, serinkanlı yaklaşımının, laiklik, sekülerlik, din gibi kavramlar konusunda tam bir kafa karışıklığının yaşandığı entelektüel ve siyasi ortamımızda hak ettiği ilgiyi görüp verimli tartışmalar yaratacağını umuyoruz.
İÇİNDEKİLER
Giriş: Sekülarizm Hakkında Düşünceler
SEKÜLER
1. Sekülarizm Antropolojisi Diye Bir Şey Olsa Neye Benzerdi?
  Kökenlere İlişkin Bir Okuma: Mit, Hakikat ve Güç
  "Kutsal" ve "Dindışı" Üzerine Bir Yan Tartışma
  Mit ve Kutsal?Kitaplar
  Şamanizm: Esinlenme ve Duyarlılık
  Mit, Şiir Sanatı ve Seküler Duyarlılık
  Demokratik Liberalizm ve Mit
  Sonsöz Yerine: Seküler Üzerine İki Modern Metin
2. Faillik ve Acı Üzerine
  Faillik
  Acı
  Din Tarihinde ve Etnografyasında Faillikle İlgili Acı
  Ahlaki Faillik, Sorumluluk ve Ceza
  Bitiriş Yorumu
3. Zulüm ve İşkence Üzerine
  İşkencenin İki Tarihi
  İşkenceyi Kaldırmak
  Dünyayı İnsanlaştırmak
  "İşkence"nin Sunumu: Kasıtlı Zalimlikle Hareket Etmek
  Kişinin Kendisini "Zalimce ve Onur Kırıcı
  Davranışa" Maruz Bırakması
SEKÜLARİZM
4. İnsan Hakları Aracılığıyla "İnsan"ı Kurtarmak
  Doğal Haklar Üzerine Birkaç Söz
  Egemen Birey ve Egemen Devlet
  İnsanın Kurtarılması
  Kendi Kendinin Sahibi "İnsan"
  Özneleri "İnsan" Sıfatıyla Dahil Etmek ya da Hariç Tutmak
5. Avrupa'da Bir "Dini Azınlık"?Olarak Müslümanlar
  Müslümanlar ve Avrupa Fikri
  İslam ve Avrupa Anlatısı
  Modern Avrupa'nın Değişen Sınırları mı?
  Avrupa Liberal Demokrasisi ve Azınlıkların Temsili
6. Sekülarizm, Ulus-Devlet ve Din
  Milliyetçilik Sekülerleşmiş Din Olarak mı Anlaşılmalıdır?
  Yoksa İslamcılık mı Milliyetçilik Olarak Anlaşılmalıdır?
  Bazı Önemli Sorular
SEKÜLERLEŞME
7. Sömürge Mısır'da Hukuk ve Ahlak Alanının Yeniden Düzenlenişi
  Hukuk Reformunun Hikâyesi
  Niçin Bu Reform?
  İslam Hukukunda Reform Yoluyla İslamda Reform
  Ahlaki Özerklik ve Aile Hukuku
  Modern "Aile"
  Modern Ahlak Açısından Seküler Hukukun Tanımlanması
  Ortaçağ "Fıkıh"ı Üzerine Bir Yan Tartışma
  Geleneksel Bir Disiplin Olarak Şeriat
Sonuçlar
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In Euro-American Islamic Studies, the terms orthodox and orthodoxy have a history of imprecision and collusion in theological axe-grinding. Yet despite their oft-noted inadequacies, scholars continue to invoke and retool the terms with a perplexing persistence. The resilient reworking of the term has resulted in a marked indeterminacy which renders orthodoxy a liability rather than an asset in scholarly nomenclature. This paper examines the trajectory of orthodoxy in scholarly works on Islam, outlines its conceptual problems, and probes its place within the conceptual "religionization" of Islam. Special attention is paid to Talal Asad's influential usage and revival of the term. Despite its newfound life, this paper concludes that orthodoxy remains as problematic as ever.

From its headquarters in Karachi, the traditionalist Sunni movement, Dawate Islami, has spread to a number of other countries and in 1996 it founded a branch in South Africa. South Africa, in turn, has witnessed a mushrooming of Dawate Islami centres in various towns and cities throughout the country and has been the base for further expansion of the movement to other parts of Africa.
What drives the members to the movement? How were they inducted as members? This paper explores these questions through portraits of two senior South African activists: Mufti Abdun Nabi Hamidi and Amirudeen Kajee. Drawing on the notions of ‘practices’ ‘virtues’ and ‘states of the self” inspired by the work of Talal Asad, this paper also seeks to provide a framework for understanding the nature of the activists’ belonging and commitment to the movement.

This article pursues an immanent critique of a scholarly movement and mood that I call “the new genealogy of religious freedom” and sketches an alternative proposal. The new genealogy of religious freedom claims that religious freedom is incoherent, systemically biased, oppressive, ideological—and necessarily so. Its critique deploys a methodology inherited from Nietzsche and targets a vision of religious freedom associated with “foundationalists” like Kant and Rawls. This article calls both the methodology and the vision into question. The version of genealogy that this movement promotes proves self-destructive and incoherent, veering toward nihilism and unable to account for its own status as critique. Its attack on foundationalist religious freedom is effective, but it presupposes—and targets—conceptions of freedom, neutrality, and power that we need not endorse. For foundationalists and genealogists alike, these assumptions define religious freedom. This article rejects those as...

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part enunciates the argu- ment about Hindu Orientalism and identifies the strategies of its operation. In the second part, I demonstrate the argument by discussing the responses to the SCR. Here I focus on the responses from the Hindutva formations, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS is the ideological fountainhead of anti-Muslims ethnic Hindu nationalism, which praises the Nazi ideology (Ahmad 2019a). I dwell on the responses from L. K. Advani, key leader of the BJP. I then discuss the response from RSS’s English mouthpiece, Organiser, as well as one of its key contemporary ideologues – Rakesh Sinha, a teacher at the University of Delhi. I close this section with a discussion of the opposition by Narendra Modi’s Gujarat Government to the implementation of the Scholarship Scheme rec- ommended by the SCR. Having demonstrated the Re-Orientalist opposition to the SCR and its eventual dumping by the current Union Government, in the second section I show that the victory of Re-Orientalism was not inevita- ble. Returning to Balram and Mohammad, I suggest there existed a possible path other than the triumph of Re-Orientalism. But the rampant notion of democracy – mediatised, ceremonial, statistical and corporate-driven – blocked this path. In the final and concluding part, I return to the key argu- ment of the chapter to conduct a critique of the idea of Re-Orientalism to situate its theoretical relevance differently.

For almost three decades the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” has been the object of critique by numerous scholars such as John Holt, Charles Hallisey, Anne Blackburn, Erik Braun, Alicia Turner, Sven Bretfeld, Steven Kemper, and others. They claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. By extension, these scholars seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, questioning postcolonial conceptions of history, time, and religious practice. But this story of temporality is staked on the question of “influence,” which has a genealogy that includes not just colonial, missionary, liberal politics but also contemporary legal-political questions about foreign influence on democracy and sovereignty. This article contests the ways in which the critiques of Protestant Buddhism conceptualize the so-called "local" colonial and postcolonial forms of time and tradition, translated in troubling imperious ways into universally​ identifiable signs of reason, agency, responsibility, etc. The article argues that the question of influence, which animates parts of the story of secular ways of inhabiting time, obscures not just how the encounter with the temporality of a tradition is an encounter with power. It obscures how even modern sensibilities of inhabiting time, ironically, require coherence even as they are repeatedly said to be constituted by "heterogeneous" forms of everyday life.

Only the quoted words have diacritics in this article.

In this paper I discuss selected aspects of the case of the Sami people in Norway, their struggle for influence over their own education institutions, and for equal as well as special rights in the Norwegian education system. Compared to many other Indigenous peoples, the case of the Sami in Norway appears to be a story of success. For example, the Norwegian Sami have their own education institutions, and they are among the most educated Indigenous peoples in the world. I also use the Sami case to reflect upon the relation between education and the self-identity of cultural minorities, here drawing upon (and discussing) the work of German social philosopher Axel Honneth.

I conclude that recognition is an important aspect of learning and education and that Honneth’s critical theory of recognition has explanatory force when analyzing the postcolonial situation of the Sami people of Norway. The Sami struggle for inclusion and influence over their own situation has to a large extent been fought as a struggle for rights and for cultural recognition. However, I also pointed to some problems in Honneth’s focus on the nation state as a given analytic entity; the legitimacy of the Norwegian nation state and its territorial claims, for example, have always been called into question by (some of) the Sami.

I am grateful to a range of people who helped me, supported me, or discussed aspects of my work in formal or informal settings. I am thankful to my supervisor, Jon Hellesnes, for his flexibility, patience, friendliness and qualified academic support. I am also indebted to colleagues and friends at the philosophy department, The Artic University of Tromsø, in particular members of the research group Pluralism, Democracy, and Justice:

I wrote this for profs wanting to assign Geertz and Asad to early undergraduates without overwhelming them. Those who have used it say it works! In the volume as a whole, there are other helpful articles written for UG teaching (see table of contents also attached here). In Handbooks on Religion Volume 2: Social Religion: Historical Consciousness and the Social Sciences. Edited by William B. Parsons. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. P.S. Palgrave didn't allow me to give this essay my own title...

Tafsir studies, due to its focus on reception history and tradition rather than on the origins of Islam, may be a locus of fruitful cooperation between the new field of Islamic theology and 'regular' Islamic studies that transcends the problematic dichotomy of insider/outsider perspectives. Redefining normativity as negotiating the future of Islam's discursive tradition, arguably a shared concern of Islamic theologians and Islamicists, although their motivations differ, may be a way to further neutralise the conundrum of normativity in Islamic studies. I argue that 'historically and sociologically informed normativity' is the way forward for Islamic theology, and will make the field relevant beyond its own disciplinary boundaries.

In questo libro, uscito presso Queriniana all'inizio del 2019, ricostruisco il dibattito recente sulla secolarizzazione, analizzando i lavori di H. Blumenberg, D. Martin, C. Taylor, H. Joas, T. Asad, M. Gauchet, J. Habermas e G. Vattimo. La tesi principale del libro è che ciò a cui abbiamo assistito negli ultimi 50 anni è un vero e proprio cambio di paradigma che ha influenzato sia i decostruttori sia i manutentori della teoria classica. Nell'estratto sono inclusi l'introduzione e l'indice.

Nagar kirtans are street assemblies with Sikh spiritual music, political marches, and free food distribution. They are especially large in April during the Punjabi harvest festival of Vaisakhi but also take place in other months. This paper explores the political praxis of nagar kirtans in Canada to contribute to critiques of secularism and theorize the political ontology in the Sikh context. I conceptualize nagar kirtan as a mobile court of both poetic pilgrimage and politics, which engage an embodied and performative world-making process, termed performed worlding, that is at odds with the modern ontology of the secular state. The empirical study analyzes early 20th century nagar kirtans in Vancouver and contemporary ones in urban Canada in the 2010-decade. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out between 2017 and 2018 including analysis of interviews and archival and media content. Early nagar kirtans in Vancouver were aligned with the anti-colonial Ghadar Movement to protest the racial state of Canada. In the contemporary context, the study reveals competing ways of worlding the political ontologies of the mobile court. On the one hand, there is an increased commodification and state presence that refashions the practice at larger Vaisakhi nagar kirtan to be marketable to Canadian multiculturalism. On the other hand, the bottom-up assembling of participants align a spiritual politics of Sikh and Punjabi world-making, one that is grounded in practices of horizontal organizing and mutual care and sustain a form of embodied expression against racial Canada.

This essay focuses on a paradoxical transformation that happened within Soviet ideological discourse at the very end of perestroika, around 1990-91. The Party's attempts to revitalize Soviet ideology by returning to the original word of Lenin unexpectedly produced the opposite result. The unquestionable external Truth from which Soviet ideological discourse drew its legitimacy-and that had always been identical with Lenin's wordsuddenly could no longer be known. This shift launched a rapid unraveling of the Soviet communist project. At the center of this unexpected transformation was the search for the true Lenin-a kind of Lenin that Soviet party theorists, bureaucrats, historians, and scientists hoped was still hidden in the midst of his unpublished texts and unknown facts of his biology, life, and death.

The role the religious 'heritage of Islam' plays in the life of Muslims around as a lived tradition is both dynamic and multifaceted. It has been subject to numerous shifts as Muslim reflect on their own moral, political, social, and historical conditions as well as the principles of the faith. This course provides the students with preliminary sociological tools to critically engage with the changing intellectual and social manifestations of Islam. It starts by introducing them to how Islam is studied as an academic field of inquiry; critically engaging notions of 'orientalism' and the representation of Muslims by anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad. By assessing notions of 'Religion', 'modernity', and 'secularism', the course inquires how different Islamic trends negotiated them in their selfunderstanding of Islam.

Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI) is a Ghanaian Pentecostal -charismatic organization with a transnational reach. In this article , I analyze the pedagogical system whereby this denomination has introduced converts into its 'church planting' mission. LCI leaders are keenly aware of both the necessity and the perils of discipline to the Christian life, exemplifying two stances of Pentecostal-charismatic ethics and politics: its quantitative concern with accessibility, and its qualitative concern with piety. Attempts to balance these relatively autonomous trends engender a gradational and distributive approach to discipline and leniency in LCI, which calibrates disciplinary demands according to converts' level of 'spiritual maturity'. This article takes the dialectics of discipline and lenience that characterizes LCI's ecclesiology as an opportunity to reconsider religious subject formation beyond the dominant problem of 'self-fashioning'.

Based on data from the Prison Statistics India, this article demonstrates an over-representation of minorities such as Muslims, Adivasis, and Dalits in Indian jails. It offers an anthropological and sociological analysis of this over-representation. The authors connect it to structural–political factors, a connection the scant Indian literature rarely makes. They relate the data to literature on over-representation of minorities in jails in Western democracies, about which scholars use terms such as “penal democracy” and “punishing democracy.” The authors then draw on recent memoirs of imprisoned Indian “terrorists,” and argue that their imprisonment generates a notion of democracy that is conceivably an alternative. At its heart is the identification imprisonment generates amongst fellow humans through a shared vocabulary of injustice, pain, human finitude, and vulnerability.

Ce texte s’intéresse aux embarras qui touchent – ou que suscite – la parole religieuse dans nos sociétés contemporaines, dès lors qu’elle se manifeste en public et tombe dans l’oreille de tiers. Par "parole religieuse", on entend ici tant les voix explicitement articulées à partir d’une tradition religieuse définie que les voix qui se prononcent sur les religions, notamment lors de "problèmes publics" impliquant les religions et leurs adeptes. Pour contraster ces embarras, comprendre le "travail" émotionnel qu’ils réalisent et saisir leur "composante pratique" , on les décompose selon trois axes (énonciation/réception, Christianisme/islam, Fondamentalisme/modernisme), sur deux terrains (les théories post-séculières et des émissions radiophoniques). Le texte montre alors comment le mode de publication de ces embarras participe de l'instauration d'une nouvelle "méthode de fixation des croyances" que nous nommons la "méthode de la sensiblerie" ; une "méthode" qui a l'insigne désavantage d'être résolument opposée à la "méthode de l’enquête" valorisée par Charles S. Peirce et John Dewey.

To say that secularism is the ideology that upholds the separation of church and state, or religion and politics, while true, says as much about secularism as the assertion “Islam means submission to one God” says about Islam. In other words, even though it is true, it does not begin to describe how such a separation is, in fact, made possible, enacted, and reenacted. The enactment of a proper sociopolitical community, norms, culture, and sensibilities, the power needed to do so and its justifications are all part of secularism. Add to this the need to instill a culture of neutrality and separation while also demanding adherence to secularism’s own values – values it imports after pruning their background justifications from the religions it displaces, often without acknowledging the source, an operation that one scholar has called “smuggling.”
Secularism even has its own “seventy-some sects” like any respectable religion; the constant bickering within these various denominations – liberal, republican, socialist, fascist, and so on – all are essential parts that make up this phenomenon. Crucial to the act or aspiration of separating is the characteristic set of distinctions that secularism requires between public and private, law and ethics, and so on, that are presumably prior to the act of separation, but often need to be created, defined, and promulgated by the state.
This analogy can be pressed a little further. Just as Islamic theology separates all beings into the Creator and the created, secularism divides all authority into state and church. Unsurprisingly, the former takes the place of the Creator, and the latter, the created. “Religion” is created in secular thought in two ways: (1) procedurally, “religion” as the very category along with (2) its proper place, definition, and limits, which are created by the state, primarily through law. But more interestingly, in the secular imagination, the secular realm (e.g., human fears, needs, and sense of wonder) constantly produces religion.