Introduction: Religious nationalism as a consequence of secularism

Abstract

Over the past two decades secular polities across the globe have witnessed an increasing turn to religion-based political movements, such as the rise of political Islam and Hindu nationalism, which have been fueling new and alternative notions of nationhood and national ideologies. The rise of such movements has initiated widespread debates over the meaning, efficacy, and normative worth of secularism. This new debate forces us to reconsider prevailing notions of secularism and to investigate the unique ways in which it has been institutionalized in different political, historical, and cultural contexts such as those of India, Turkey, Lebanon, or Egypt. A closer analysis reveals that these variable features of secularism stem from the different ways in which religion has played a role in these societies. In other words, we start with the premise that secularism cannot be adequately understood without due regard to its relation to religion. Accordingly, the essays in this collection examine the constitutive role of religion in the formation of secular-national public spheres in the Middle East and South Asia. Since secularism has been interpreted and institutionalized in unique ways in diverse contexts, we find it necessary to investigate secularism not as an abstract concept but as an ideological principle that has acquired quite distinctive and sometimes contrary meanings in practice in various contexts. Such an approach demands a reconceptualization of secularism as an array of contextually specific practices, ideologies, subjectivities, and "performances" rather than as simply an abstract legal bundle of rights and policies. For this reason the aim of this collection is to compare and examine the specific ways in which secularism is negotiated and experienced in practice in different local contexts. Hence, rather than seeking to draw generalizations and abstract conceptualizations of secularism, we seek to highlight the unique and particular ways in which secularism has been institutionalized in relation to religion in disparate circumstances. This insistence on studying secularism as practice, not only in the political realm but also in the context of daily life, led us to divert our methodological focus on the public sphere understood as a visually constituted field of performances and negotiations. We address these issues through a collaborative and comparative analysis of the formation and transformation of the public spheres in these countries, understood in terms of material practices and visual fields rather than as abstract and disembodied entities. Specifically, we examine three such fields-urban space and architecture, media, and public rituals such as parades, processions, and commemorative festivals-with a view to exploring how the relation between secularism, religion, and nationalism is displayed and performed. We also investigate how public enactments of the religious-secular relationship change over time as contending national projects with alternative visions of this relationship gain social and political prominence. Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012. All rights reserved.