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Religion is central to any religious discourse, but religion as an analytical category that facilitates the reexamination and reinvention of a particular religious tradition is more difficult to locate. This task is made particularly difficult in Islam, where the lines demarcating religion, culture, civilization and politics are deliberately ambiguous and fuzzy. The objective of this book is to identify and examine the place of religion as such an abstract category in modern Islamic discussions from the nineteenth century to the present. It shows how ideas of religion facilitated the transformation of religious discourses, both when accepting and resisting modernity. The central focus is on intellectuals who grappled with reconciling Islam with successive waves of modernization. Religion in Modern Islamic Discourse begins with early discussions in Egypt and colonial India on the essence of religion and its social value in the light of modern challenges in science and politics. It then moves from these discussions, and explores key contributions by twentieth century Muslim intellectuals on the meaning of identity, state, law, and gender. Above all, Abdulkader Tayob offers the reader a creative way of understanding modern Islamic discourse, uncovering the deep structural foundations of its approach to religion, religious values and spirituality.
This study analyzes Hegel's philosophy of religion in relation to ongoing debates about the relation between religion and politics as well as the history of their conceptualization in the modern West. Lewis argues that recent non-traditional, more Kantian interpretations of Hegel's project open up a new understanding of his treatment of religion.
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.
This study reconstructs the development of the term "political Islam" and looks at the current transcultural space between Islam and the West. It offers insights for those interested in cross-cultural relations and in Islam's changing political roles.
This book is the summation of many decades of work by Peter L. Berger, an internationally renowned sociologist of religion. Secularization theory—which saw modernity as leading to a decline of religion—has been empirically falsified. It should be replaced by a nuanced theory of pluralism. In this new book, Berger outlines the possible foundations for such a theory, addressing a wide range of issues spanning individual faith, interreligious societies, and the political order. He proposes a conversation around a new paradigm for religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities. The book also includes responses from three eminent scholars of religion: Nancy Ammerman, Detlef Pollack, and Fenggang Yang.
Bringing together empirical cultural and media studies of religion and critical social theory, Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity investigates powerful entanglement of religion and new media technologies taking place today, taking stock of the repercussions of digital technology and culture on various aspects of religious life and contemporary culture more broadly. Making the argument that religion and new media technologies come together to create "spheres"—environments produced by an architecture of digital technologies of all sorts, from projection screens to social networking sites, the book suggests that prior social scientific conceptions of religious worship, participation, community and membership are being recast. Using the case of the strain of American Christianity called "multi-site," an emergent and growing church-model that has begun to win favor largely among Protestants in the last decade, the book details and examines the way in which this new mode of religiosity bridges the realms of the technological and the physical. Lastly, the book situates and contextualizes these developments within the larger theoretical concerns regarding the place of religion in contemporary capitalism. Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity offers an important contribution to the study of religion, media, technology and culture in a post-secular world.
Geoffrey Nash explores the emergence of the revolutionary Babis and reformist Baha'is and their conflict with mainstream Shi'a Muslims in Iran, and of the parallel Ahmadi movement in North India. Comparing these movements shows that, together, they define important aspects of Islamic modernity.
Peter van der Veer has gathered together a groundbreaking collection of essays that suggests that conversion to forms of Christianity in the modern period is not only a conversion to modern forms of these religions, but also to religious forms of modernity. Religious perceptions of the self, of community, and of the state are transformed when Western discourses of modernity become dominant in the modern world. This volume seeks to relate Europe and its Others by exploring conversion both in modern Europe and in the colonized world.
“A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences
Informed by ‘critical religion’ perspective in Religious Studies and postcolonial self-reflection in Sociology, this book interrogates the ideas of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ in social theory and Sociology. It argues that as long as social theory and sociological discourse embed the religion-secular distinction and locate themselves on the ‘secular’ side of the binary, Sociology will continue to serve the very ideologies it tries to subvert – namely Western modernity/coloniality.