Secularisms and Secularities

Qu’est-ce que la laïcité ? Comment, dans un contexte scolaire, faire
observer la laïcité, comme cadre neutre respectueux de tous ?
Comment, dans le cadre de cours, aborder la laïcité comme
principe structurant de notre société, mais aussi comme sujet
qui provoque débats, parce qu’il est le résultat d’évolutions historiques ?
Ce volume, fruit d’un travail collectif de personnes engagées sur différents
terrains du champ éducatif, cherche à présenter des pistes de réflexion sous
une forme dynamique, autour d’une architecture synthétique.
• Une dynamique structurée selon trois types de repères pour penser et
agir avec des élèves.
• Une dynamique liant des textes courts, des développements plus
conséquents à lire en ligne, des compléments en vidéo, des adresses utiles
vers les textes institutionnels. Des pictogrammes signalent ces ressources
et ces liens.
• Une dynamique à créer en proposant aux étudiants, aux stagiaires et
aux formateurs de se saisir de ces textes.
• Une dynamique à amplifier en alimentant la page Laïcité (www.univnantes/
espe/laicite) avec de nouvelles ressources.
Ce numéro de la collection « Repères » pour la laïcité est le produit du
partenariat entre l’ESPE de l’académie de Nantes (Université de Nantes) et
l’Institut du Pluralisme religieux et de l’Athéisme, réseau pluridisciplinaire
(créé par la région Pays de la Loire).
Anne Vézier, Maître de conférences en histoire et didactique de l’histoire,
Référente Laïcité ESPE Académie de Nantes, Université de Nantes
John Tolan, Professeur d’histoire médiévale, Université de Nantes
Dominique Avon, Professeur d’histoire contemporaine, Université du Maine

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?

Au cours des dernières décennies, la proportion des individus se déclarant « sans religion » dans le cadre de sondages et d’enquêtes de population a connu une hausse marquée dans la plupart des sociétés occidentales. Le Québec n’échappe pas à cette tendance, alors que ce phénomène de désidentification religieuse semble gagner en importance auprès des jeunes générations. En contexte franco-québécois, les études de nature qualitative et menées auprès de ce groupe démographique hétérogène se font rares. Alors que de plus en plus de jeunes s’identifient comme sans religion, force est d’admettre que nous en savons bien peu sur l’état de leurs croyances. Qui sont-ils et qu’est-ce qui les pousse à s’identifier ainsi ? Comment l’étiquette qu’ils réclament traduit-elle leur non-appartenance ? Comment le récit biographique de ces jeunes, issus de différents horizons, nous informe-t-il sur l’évolution de leur rapport à la religion ? Ce ne sont là que quelques-unes questions à l’origine de notre réflexion sur les manières implicites ou explicites dont est vécue l’absence de religion dans la vie de jeunes Québécois. Le spectre des sans religion est large et les identités sont poreuses, mais le principe de nonaffiliation constitue un facteur d’affirmation fort, dans une société où les débats entourant la place de la religion ne cessent de polariser. Ce mémoire veut décrire la configuration et la dynamique de l’imaginaire de jeunes Québécois sans religion en cernant leurs croyances, valeurs, normes, visions de la vie et de la mort et en saisissant comment ces différentes composantes interagissent entre elles. À partir de cette exploration, nous tenterons de dégager certains axes de la recomposition religieuse en cours

The contribution of Ambedkar in building secular deemocratic India is matchless. Through his writings and struggles he oriented his work around the values of Liberty, Equality and fraternity. The movements and struggles led by him underlined that social justice is the non negotiable part of s secular democracy.

This review essay on Jewish "traditionalism" (Hasidism, musar, Orthodoxy,etc.) argues that, notwithstanding a past tendency among historians to magnify secularist trends within modern East European Jewry, several new works suggest a revitalization of traditionalism in the region during the modern era.

Under Turkey’s neoconservative government, the Directorate of Religious Affairs deploys state-employed religious functionaries to provide Sunni Muslim citizens with advice and guidance on family life. By inculcating government-sanctioned sensibilities and dispositions related to kinship, these Islamic authorities have become instrumental to extending state power into the domestic lives of the religious majority. This particular entwinement of religion with state power is no aberration. Indeed, the Turkish case reveals a contradiction that lies at the heart of secular governance: the continuing involvement of religion in the politics of the family despite the assumed separation of religion and politics. Secular states may appropriate religious discourses and authority in regulating intimacy and the family while aligning these with biopolitical rationalities, as well as with secular laws and expertise. [secularism, kinship, family, intimacy, governmentality, the state, expertise, Islam, Turkey].

Introduction and first chapter of a new book: Even though ‘the crisis of secularism’ was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil ‘political religion’. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.

This research article will explain about the rise of secularism which was a by product of the oppression by the Roman empire during the ancient times. We have experience 4 different shifts because of the rise in rationalist beliefs. Allah has very clearly explain in the Qur'an about Dajaal and its effects. There this article is a study of how the thought process has changed and how Allah has predicted the effects of one's belief in the Qur'an.

Uno de los aspectos más sorprendentes de Thomas Hobbes, no sólo como teórico político, sino como filósofo, es su capacidad de sembrar visiones contrapuestas entre quienes lo leen. Mientras más se avanza en el estudio del filósofo inglés, más lejos se está de un consenso respecto al sentido de los postulados centrales de su herencia doctrinal, particularmente tratándose del "Leviatán".  Sin embargo, en este cuadro, hay algo que está claro: Hobbes constituye las bases del Estado laico, esto es, del poder absoluto.

This is my reply to Free Inquiry editor Tom Flynn's insistence that we do away with "spirituality" talk.  In it, I contend that some spirituality talk is perfectly consistent with a rigorous naturalism, and useful to boot.  In fact, "spirit" talk plays a vital (but generally misunderstood) role.  Rather than purge the language of spirit-talk, we should understand it naturalistically.

One of the major challenges facing modern-day secular states is the issue of social integration. The issue discussed in this article is how it is possible to arrive at unifying values in a multicultural society that is characterised by secularisation and disintegration of the Christian hegemony of former times on the one hand and by the emergence of cultural and religious diversity on the other. The analysis is centred around Norwegian kindergarten, which represent a key institution for communicating values and morals in contemporary Norwegian society. The objects clause states that the kindergarten is based on the fundamental values of Christian and humanistic heritage and traditions, combined with values that are expressed in different religions and philosophies and that are also clearly expressed in the Declaration of Human Rights. I argue that the objects clause can be understood as a form of ‘common ground strategy.’ This can be seen as a possible unifying values base and a key strategy for future social integration, across cultural affiliations.

The idea of State secularity—which needs to be distinguished from secularism—has never been easily accepted in Poland. The main reasons for that are the Polish experiences from the past, such as the traditionally strong position of the Roman Catholic Church and the episode of anti-religious oppression under communist rule, as well as the religious composition of the society, marked with the predominance of Roman Catholicism. This explains why the makers of the Polish Constitution of 1997, while adopting all the key features of the secular State, decided to avoid terms already known to the legal science; as a result, independence was mentioned instead of separation and impartiality instead of neutrality. However, using innovative terminology has its price, as it opens the Constitution to many conflicting interpretations, some of them being rather hostile to the idea of State secularity. Over the years, the constitutional practice has revealed a strong tendency to depart from that model by questioning the Polish secularity and/or adding more and more exceptions to it. The question remains open whether at some point the exceptions can annihilate the rule.

I argue that at least in my context the university might help to save the church from the forces of secularization – insofar as instrumentalization is one virulent form of secularization; that in so doing the University might recall the Church to the literal sense of scripture, and that the University might even remind the Church of her identity. I will also, however, argue that the University desperately needs the Church’s help if it is to be properly academic.

How did the concept of the secular state emerge and evolve in Australia and how has it impacted on its institutions? This is the most comprehensive study to date on the relationship between religion and the state in Australian history, focusing on the meaning of political secularity in a society that was from the beginning marked by a high degree of religious plurality.

This book tracks the rise and fall of the established Church of England, the transition to plural establishments, the struggle for a public Christian secular education system, and the eventual separation of church and state throughout the colonies. The study is unique in that it does not restrict its concern with religion to the churches but also examines how religious concepts and ideals infused apparently secular political and social thought and movements making the case that much Australian thought and institution building has had a sacral–secular quality. Social welfare reform, nationalism, and emerging conceptions of citizenship and civilisation were heavily influenced by religious ideals, rendering problematic traditional linear
narratives of secularisation.

Finally, the book considers present day pluralist Australia and new understandings of state secularity in light of massive social changes over recent generations.

This chapter explores a proposal that multicultural equality require some type of public multifaithism in a civic context where state–religion connections flourish. An establishment of religion, suitably pluralized, can offer one way forward. It deserves consideration as a practical option, especially if it would be the least disruptive and the least threatening to those for whom establishment is important or those who are uncomfortable with multiculturalism. Given the goal of citizen equality for democracy, this challenge deserves an adequate response: how will ethnoreligious groups receive appropriate recognition unless existing state–religion connections are sufficiently pluralized? By attaining that goal, a multiculturalism in which religion is just one of a number of valued identities and forms of social organization can be recognized as such in a public and political way.

This paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly
accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts
by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples
of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It
argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression
fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of
cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous
expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of
our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from
affect theory, this paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet
nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in
the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented
certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious
ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious
affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual
spaces that are both publically private and privately public, carved
by contemporary renewal movements. Two of these ‘formations of
the post-secular’ are explored here: the Sunday Assembly, a secular
church, and Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, an international
Pentecostal Deliverance church.

The case of Lautsi v. Italy, better known as the “Crucifix Case,” is a particularly significant case. Its significance is not only political and legal, but also religious. Never before in the history of the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe has a case raised so much public attention and debate. The debate regarding the legitimacy of the symbol of Christ’s presence in Italian schools is emblematic of the cultural crisis in Western Europe regarding religion. Twenty-one State parties to the European Convention on Human Rights, in an unprecedented move, joined Italy to reassert the legitimacy of the public display of Christian symbols in European society. The Court finally recognized, in substance, that in countries of Christian tradition, Christianity enjoys a special social legitimacy that distinguishes it from other philosophical and religious belief systems. In other words, because Italy is a country of Christian tradition, Christian symbols may legitimately enjoy greater visibility in Italian society than other religious or ideological symbols.

In this essay, Talal Asad reflects on politics in contemporary Egypt and its relationship with Islamic tradition. Against the background of the Egyptian revolution of January 2011 and its following events, including hostility towards the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, Asad not only looks at the links between the modern secular worldview and Islam but fundamentally for the aspects of this tradition that, according to secularists, are incompatible with the modern sovereign state. Assuming a critical stance on modern practice and discourse – aimed at undermining Islamic tradition – the author explores the possibilities of reintegrating this tradition into the post-2011 Egyptian democratic path but using it only as a model for how liberal states can benefit from a kind of embodiment of customs and ethical principles offered by tradition.

Between September 2013 and January 2014 I completed a small study of interfaith dialogue in Coventry, a small city in the Midlands region of England using a combination of interviews, participant observation and focus groups. From the data, what becomes apparent is the difficulty of engaging with the wider population. There are committed individuals who work hard running interfaith activities and organisations and the local authority is taking a leading role in supporting these. However, the reach of such work is unclear.

Practitioners speak about pursuing social cohesion through dialogue and the commonalities across religions in terms of shared belief in God and values expressed in texts. Yet, such discourse excludes the growing numbers nationally and locally who appear to be religiously indifferent and uninterested, as well as the actively nonreligious minority. They are not considered. Yet, focus group participants from across the city, both religious and nonreligious, expressed little awareness of interfaith work, or concern with it. This chapter explores this tension against the backdrop of wider sociological research on indifference and social change, youth and religion in Britain, and interfaith dialogue and cohesion. Religious indifference is ambivalent in the religiously ambivalent context of contemporary Britain, with power, relevance, and peaceful coexistence at stake.

This chapter explores the political significance of time for the modern nation-state and its secularizing frameworks. It focuses on the impact of secular governance, underwritten by dominant secular concepts of time, on the lives of Muslim women living in European, majority Christian/secular nations. Specifically, it examines the different ways in which the efforts to regulate the tradition-based practices of Muslim women in secular society have meant that different strains of the national histories of the countries considered—Spain, France, and Germany—have been both controlled and legislated. To do so, the chapter begins by asking what time is, in order to point out that from the Christian theological perspective that informs later secular understandings God is beyond time and time is thus a worldly category that takes on the quality of sequential, continuous, and progressive temporality. The idea of temporal sequence is important for understanding how the present situates the past and the future by being the pivot point that grounds people's relationship to time. People's memories of the past and anticipations of the future are key to the forward movement of time, as the discussion shows in the second section. There the discussion focuses on how one of the key features of the modern nation-state lies in its ability to systematize time into patterns of regularity and sameness by rhetorically managing the memory of the past and stimulating anticipation about the future. Controlling time and creating one time frame for the writing of history become fundamental to the expanding project of modern territorial annexation and colonization and to ensuring the efficiency of labor and capitalist productivity. Universalizing this model of time means that historical categories are emptied of the defining events that interrupt patterns of continuity so that they can be applied to any context that needs political control; it involves doing away with the specific histories of minority groups. This emptying is a crucial step in defining European standards of rationality, modernity, and political belonging against which everybody else is compared. The modern territorial acquisition of land has forced colonizing states to figure out how to manage socially and politically the different forms of time in a very different array of cultures and traditions. Colonization is the context in which systems of governance were implemented as an apparently neutral, secular way to manage all these differences in the colonies. However, these systems were simultaneously developed within Europe, where all (religious) traditions were required to keep their tradition-based practices out of the public sphere.
A textbook chapter published in Gender: God
Sîan Melvill Hawthorne. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017. 414 pp.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, due 2016
Explores the relationship and dialogue between religion and atheism, focusing upon Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and other, e.g. Pagan, traditions in their encounter with secularism and atheism. It explores such issues as faith and reason, science and religion, gender and sexuality, 'texts of terror', and the use and abuse of arguments, evidence, and concepts.

This article suggests that the Gezi Park protests in general, and particularly the presence there of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims is a valuable example for studying the ambiguity and complexity of the secular/Islamic paradigm in Turkey. Conducting field research on the formation of the Anti-Capitalist Muslim identity, I argue that the secular/Islamic divide is politically produced, and potentially vulnerable to contestations and transformations, for it opens the socio-political landscape to the production of multiple secularisation projects beyond this divide.

How do ‘new’ and ’old’ Islamic actors in contemporary Albania define religious legitimacy, the nation and religious otherness? This chapter uses Olivier Roy’s analytical distinction between accommodationism and neo-fundamentalism as a compass to navigate through Albania’s complex religious landscape by exploring different sets of beliefs promulgated by a selection of Islamic groups (2010).  These are the Muslim Community of Albania, which represents ‘official Islam’ , and ‘mainstream’ Sunni Muslims, who are typically accommodationist. I also analyse a Sufi subgroup thereof, which is equally accommodationist, but in a slightly different manner. As a neo-fundamentalist counterpoint, I explore the ideas of a competing organisation composed of Salafi imams.

Accommodationism means that the bond between religion and a specific territory and culture of origin is tight. In this context, ‘culture’ refers to Albanian historical tradition and the language-based, secular nation-building project engineered by modernising state elites since the early 20th century. Neo-fundamentalism, conversely, is a globalised form of religion that emphasises the gap between faith and culture. As such, it represents a reformatted, exportable form of religiosity, which stands in contrast to cultural ethno-national ways of being Muslim. Neo-fundamentalist religious identity is faith-based, and seeks to ground itself solely upon explicit religious norms, at least in principle. Accordingly, these believers make their religiosity visible through a global uniform of religious markers detached from the surrounding culture.

In the Albanian Islamic context, the theoretically informed labels, neo-fundamentalist and accommodationist, roughly correspond to the ‘Albanianist’ versus the ‘Salafi’ forms of Islam. To some extent, this resonates with mainstream distinctions adopted in Albania and in the Balkans. A popular Albanian term for Muslims associated with neo-fundamentalist forms of Islam is ‘fanatic’ (fanatik). Accommodationism is commonly related to ‘old’ forms of Islam, which many be deemed as local, rooted, and European as well as tolerant and moderate. Neo-fundamentalism, conversely, refers to certain ‘new’ forms of Islam, i.e. those perceived to be imported, transnational, alien, ‘fanatic’ and a threat to local religious customs. This cultural distinction between what are deemed acceptable and unacceptable forms of Islam is often politicised and securitised. As I will show, the association between neo-fundamentalism and violence is not necessarily correct, and the Salafi community under scrutiny here can be defined as pacifist and purist (Wiktorowicz 2006). These two formats, moreover, clash and merge together as different local actors seek to recast and legitimize their respective positions.

Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor have been members of the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliées aux differences culturelles, which was established in 2007 by the Government of Quebec. In particular Taylor, with Gérard Bouchard, was the President of that Commission. Laïcitè et Liberté de Conscience deals with and deepens the issues faced by the Commission, namely the presence of religion in the public sphere and, more specifically, the claims for accommodation based on religious ...