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