A Secular Age beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 110841771X ISBN 13: 9781108417716

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018

Synopsis

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'.

About this title

Book Description

Are societies outside the West secular? What precisely would that entail? This book examines notions of religion and secularity in eleven countries not shaped by Western Christianity and how they parallel or diverge from Charles Taylor's grand narrative of the North Atlantic world, A Secular Age (2007).

About the Author

Mirjam Künkler is a senior research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). Before joining SCAS, she taught Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, New Jersey, where she also directed the Oxford-Princeton research cluster on 'Traditional authority and transnational religious networks in contemporary Shi'i Islam' and co-directed the Luce Program on 'Religion and International Affairs' for several years. Her publications include Democracy and Islam in Indonesia (co-edited with Alfred Stepan, 2013), and many articles, inter alia in Party Politics, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the American Behavioral Scientist, Jahrbuch des Öffentlichen Rechts, the Asian Studies Review, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Democratization, and the Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion.

John Madeley taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science for some three decades. Starting as a specialist in the government and politics of the Nordic countries, during the second half of his career he concentrated on researching and teaching the linkages between and contrasting patterns of religion and politics, especially across Europe's fifty-odd countries. In addition to many journal articles and book chapters, he edited Church and State in Contemporary Europe: The Chimera of Neutrality (with Zsolt Enyedi, 2003), Religion and Politics (2003) and Religion, Law and Politics in the European Union (with Lucian Leustean, 2010).

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Scaling Justice: India's Supreme Court, Anti-Terror Laws and Social Rights (2009), and co-author of Battling Corruption (2013). In the past she has been a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and a co-convenor of a research group at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany. She is currently working on A Food Biography of India (forthcoming).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 110841771X
• ISBN 13: 9781108417716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440
• Editor: Künkler Mirjam, Madeley John, Shankar Shylashri