Articles tagged as "Secularization"

Many Humanisms, Many Modernities: Contesting Talal Asad’s Anti-Humanist Critique of Humanitarianism


Due to his sole preoccupation with a secularized Christian and Western story of human-humanism-humanitarianism, Asad’s genealogy misses ongoing, creative, and complex contemporary engagements with the ethics and practices, promises and ambivalences of all humanistic projects—engagements that can and do inform the ways in which humanitarianism is being envisioned, enacted, and critiqued.

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Young women model MLine apparel, fashion for Muslim women

Turkish Muslimism: A New Islamic Engagement with Modernity


The engagement between modernity and religion is often presented through the use of binaries: secular and religious, public and private, liberalism and fundamentalism. But in a new volume, Muslimism in Turkey and Beyond, Turkish sociologist of religion Neslihan Cevik explores forms of religious engagement with modernity that resist these crude divisions, pointing instead to the possibility of a hybridity that blurs the lines between categories often viewed as diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. Read the full article »

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Five Observations on Muslimism


SLAVICA JAKELIĆ

Cevik is rightly careful about the future developments of Muslimism, as they depend on various factors (political, economic, religious). On my reading, this cautious approach also ought to be taken with any comparisons between Muslimists and, say, Pentecostals in Latin America or US Evangelicals. Any comparative work in this area needs to be alert to the possible simplifications and repetitions of the old subtraction narratives about the ultimate victory of the secularizing impetus in modernity. Read the full article »

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Further Reflections on Muslimism


What Muslimists achieve is a conservative transformation of the concept of umma as something that has acquired throughout the ages an authoritarian style and conceptualization. It is not a rejection of umma or communal experience per se, but it is the demand that community, as an external source of power, is not the main agent of morality. For example, many Islamists see the hijab as a making symbol of Muslim community, a symbol that creates the Muslim community in its differentiation from others. Read the full article »

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The Secularization Debate in Indonesia and Egypt


MUN’IM SIRRY

Literature on the secularization debate seldom alludes to Muslim discussions of the issue. During the 1970s and 1980s Indonesia and Egypt witnessed public debates involving both proponents and opponents of secularization. While it is difficult to assess the extent of the impact of these public debates, the complexity of Muslim discussions of secularization in Islamic lands, and their engagements with Western scholarship, should not be overlooked. Read the full article »

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The Tyranny of Practice


It is characteristic of Western modernity that in discussions of schooling and business and politics there is a common truism: “theory into practice.” At the very least, the underlying assumption of this truism can readily be found there. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in schools of education, teacher education programs, and the institutional teaching and learning efforts of higher education. This saying yields a soft hammer, a gentle reminder that the theory must always be “grounded in practice” in order to be worthwhile — and profitable.

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Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame

Series:

I’m not a cheerleader for the Fighting Irish. (I certainly don’t look like one). I’m not even Roman Catholic or a Notre Dame alum. Nor am I a Muslim. I’m not “secular” either. So perhaps I’ll be forgiven for indulging in a little rah-rah for Notre Dame and its recently initiated project on Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.

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What is Contending Modernities?

Series:

What is “Contending Modernities”? In a sentence, it’s an effort to confront the fact that the relationship between religion and modernity is a lot more complex than many people anticipated. This relationship has proven more complex in at least two ways. One largely unanticipated complexity is that religion has proven pretty resilient in the face of modernity in all its forms. Religion and secularity are surviving and thriving together, creating a vast diversity of modern ways of life.

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