A Secular Age beyond the West
Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa

This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Mirjam Künkler (Edited by), John Madeley (Edited by), Shylashri Shankar (Edited by)

9781108405614, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 February 2019

440 pages
23 x 15.3 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

'A Secular Age beyond the West is an important and impressively conceptualized volume. Too often non-Western experience is excluded from broad theoretical discussions of the nature of, and relationship between, religion, secularism, and culture … In this rich volume editors Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar assemble an excellent group of scholars to explore the implications of Taylor's concepts in an array of countries beyond the West.' Frank Ravitch, Michigan State University College of Law

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

1. Introduction Mirjam Künkler and Shylashri Shankar
2. Secularity I: varieties and dilemmas Philip Gorski
3. The origins of secular public space: religion, education, and politics in modern China Zhe Ji
4. The formation of secularism in Japan Helen Hardacre
5. Law, legitimacy, and equality: the bureaucratization of religion and conditions of belief in Indonesia Mirjam Künkler
6. Secularity and Hinduism's imaginaries in India Shylashri Shankar
7. Secularity without secularism in Pakistan: the politics of Islam from Sir Syed to Zia Christophe Jaffrelot
8. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and secularization from below in Iran Nader Hashemi
9. The politics of Jewish secularization in Israel Hanna Lerner
10. A Kemalist secular age? Cultural politics and radical republicanism in Turkey Asli Bali
11. Enigmatic variations: Russia and the three secularities John Madeley
12. Piety, politics and identity: configurations of secularity in Egypt Gudrun Krämer
13. The commander of the faithful and Moroccan secularity Jonathan Wyrtzen
14. Conclusions: the prevalence of the 'marked state' Mirjam Künkler and John Madeley
15. Afterword and corrections Charles Taylor.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Social theory [JHBA], Sociology [JHB], Religion & politics [HRAM2]