Thwarted agency and the strange afterlife of Islamism in militant laicism in Turkey

This article critically engages with recent theoretical writing on the anthropology of secularism by way of studying the perceptions and consciousness of those whom I name ‘militant laic actors’ in Turkey. Beginning with their key conviction that the present Government of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) possesses a hidden mission to Islamize the country, I argue that rather than relating to the actual policies of the AKP, such a conviction reflects the mood and emotions of laic actors. This perception is not without a social context. It relates to both the enlarged political power of the AKP and to the relative thwarting of social agency experienced by militant laic actors. The paper concludes by noting certain insufficiencies in both Charles Taylor’s and Talal Asad’s work as frameworks for explaining the dynamics of secularism while making a case for the significance of the Turkish situation in contributing to wider debates in the anthropology of secularism.     

CHURCH UNDER LEVIATHAN

Political philosophers have long disagreed on the issue of whether churches should exercise restraint in the appeal to religious reasons in public discussion and political mobilization. Exclusivists defend the restraint, whereas inclusivists reject it. Both sides, however, assume the existence of a democratic government. In this essay, I discuss whether churches should exercise restraint in a non‐democratic, authoritarian society. I defend inclusivism and believe that churches should not restrain themselves, especially when doing so can promote democracy and prevent severe injustices. First, I argue that two exclusivist arguments which justify the restraint cannot be applied in an authoritarian society. Second, I defend inclusivism because religious reasons are effective in cultivating active citizens that strengthen the democratic movement. Finally, I use the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong as an example to show how inclusivism can enhance democratic movements under authoritarianism.     

The Politics of Religious Heritage: Framing Claims to Religion as Culture in Spain

This article contributes to sociological theorizations of religion as heritage through analyzing the politics of religious heritage in Spain since its transition to democracy during the late 1970s. Our analysis is organized around three historical sequences of critical importance for understanding the political and legal significance of discourses that frame religion as cultural heritage in Spain: (1) negotiations that took place during Spain's democratic transition between 1977 and 1980; (2) discussions that surfaced in the context of the state's decision to recognize Islam, Protestantism, and Judaism in 1992; and (3) more recent debates regarding the incorporation of religious minorities in the context of increasing religious diversity, especially concerning places of worship. We show how framing “religion” using the language of cultural heritage has provided religious actors with a means of defending the connection between religion and national identity—and of protecting the privileges of majoritarian religious institutions without violating core tenets of secularism or pluralism. This scenario has created space for certain religious minorities to claim a place within Spain's evolving socioreligious landscape by invoking alternative heritages from Spain's multicultural past.     

Bifurcated loyalty and religious actors’ behaviour in democratic politics: the case of post-1967 religious Zionism in Israel

This paper deals with the political behaviour of religious groups in a democratic setting. In particular, it suggests an explanation as to why the same religious group might adopt very different modes of engagement with the state, over the same issues, at different times. The proposed framework combines two components: (1) a communitarian understanding of civil society; and (2) the concept of bifurcated loyalty which grasps the unique tension experienced by religious groups in democratic regimes, and its effect on their political behaviour. I go on to apply this framework in the case of religious Zionism in Israel. This case, which explores important events and trends in the history of the religious Zionist group in Israel, with special emphasis on the post-1967 era, nicely demonstrates the shifting strategies of engagement of this group with the state. The behaviour of this group ranged from constructive collaboration through participation in government to outright violent clashes with the state. Such dramatic changes expose the link between changing levels of bifurcated loyalty and political behaviour in response to changes in state policies towards religious actors and contents. The paper concludes with a brief discussion about the general applicability of such an approach to the study of religious groups in democratic politics and civil society.     

Justice without Solidarity? Collective Identity and the Fate of the ‘Ethical’ in Habermas' Recent Political Theory

In past work, Habermas has claimed that justice and solidarity stand in a complementary relationship—that ‘ethical’ relations of solidarity are the ‘reverse side’ of justice. Yet in a recent address to the World Congress of Philosophy, he rejects this idea. This paper argues against this rejection. After explaining the idea, arguing for its centrality to Habermas' thought, and evaluating Habermas' scant reflections on this major transformation, I argue that his rejection of the idea is a result of a newfound skepticism about the power of secular reason, and should thus be understood in terms of his corresponding turn to religious traditions as alternative sources of solidarity. I argue against this ‘religious turn’ by developing an alternative advocated by Habermas himself in earlier reflections—attention to real sociopolitical movements. In particular, I analyze feminist and black liberation movements to demonstrate that Habermas' pessimism about secular sources of justice‐producing solidarity is unwarranted, and that, while ‘postsecular’ sources may provide one avenue for actionable solidarity, they are not the only one. I conclude by identifying a conceptual commonality in these two alternatives: an inclusive conception of what it means to be human.     

Beyond Establishment and Separation: Political Liberalism, Religion and Democracy

Does John Rawls??s political liberalism require the institutional separation between state and religion or does it allow space for moderate forms of religious establishment? In this paper I address this question by presenting and critically evaluating Cécile Laborde??s recent claim that political liberalism is ??inconclusive about the public place of religion?? and ??indeterminate about the symbolic dimensions of the public place of religion??. In response to Cécile Laborde, I argue that neither moderate separation nor moderate establishment, intended as regimes of religious governance that fix specific interpretations of principles of social and economic justice, are compatible with Rawls??s political liberalism. Furthermore, I claim that a state can ensure that both its religious and non-religious citizens enjoy a sense of self-respect and identification with their polity by leaving issues of symbolic establishment and separation open to democratic debate. I conclude that Rawls??s political liberalism transcends the standard distinction between moderate establishment and moderate separation and leaves the public place of religion open to the democratic contestation of ordinary legislative politics.     

Contributions of Religious Actors to Peace and Security

The past decade has seen a shift of rhetoric, where religious actors are presented not just as aberrations in the secular and democratic order, but also as significant players in the development of peaceful and diversified societies. However, experiences of extremist religious groups raise questions about the legitimacy of involving religious actors in these kinds of processes, in particular in relation to security, which according to a classical perspective is a matter of national and international security agencies. This paper analyzes the challenges relating to the inclusion of religious actors in security situations in East Africa, particularly those involving confrontations between religious actors, in which the concept of the “religious other” has a specific reference. The main finding is that religious actors have a contribution to make in relation to security and conflict involving religion and faith, given that security is understood in a broader sense than the classical.     

Insights from a deradicalization program in Indonesian prisons: The potential benefits of psychological intervention prior to ideological discussion

Discussions that are based on religious understanding and aimed at reducing terrorists' hostility have been used as a central part of terrorist deradicalization programs in many countries where acts of Islamic terrorism are prevalent. Currently, various psychological approaches such as presenting social support and providing counseling sessions are being applied alongside religious discussions. Observers of these programs have reported benefits and positive responses to the psychological approaches, but there is still a lack of empirical evidence confirming this. In the current study, we examine the effects of two psychological interventions—emotional expression training and cognitive flexibility training—in predicting detainees’ acceptance of the idea of democratic life. We investigated the observational records taken during the psychological interventions and religious discussions. Results showed no main effect of emotional expression and cognitive flexibility in predicting one’s acceptance of democratic civil life, but there was a significant interaction between the two predictors. Among those who scored high in cognitive flexibility, detainees who scored also high in emotional expression were significantly more agreeable towards the state’s sovereignty over belief in an Islamic caliphate during religious discussions. Our findings suggest that psychological interventions do indeed offer benefits for detainees’ deradicalization programs.     

God and givenness: towards a phenomenology of mysticism

This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin.     

Governing Islam in French cities: defining ‘acceptable’ public religiosity through municipal consultative bodies

ABSTRACT

In recent years, European states have institutionalised relations with Islamic groups in the form of national Islam councils. Similarly, municipalities have set up more or less comparable bodies to address issues related to urban religious diversity. However, rather than being restricted to Muslim representatives, municipal consultative bodies usually incorporate a variety of religious actors. This contribution analyses three such bodies in the French cities of Rennes, Bordeaux, and Toulouse. Adopting a governance perspective and drawing on qualitative fieldwork, I argue that by providing concrete advice on how to address religious issues, these bodies define what are considered ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ public religious expressions, ultimately influencing normative ideas about laïcité. Moreover, I argue that the history of relationships between religious and municipal authorities and the political culture of the cities, among other factors, shape these local processes, thereby emphasising the distinct role of cities and urban actors in governing religion.     

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.     

Can religious arguments persuade?

In his famous essay “The Ethics of Belief,” William K. Clifford claimed “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” (Clifford’s essay was originally published in Contemporary Review in 1877; it is presently in print in Madigan (1999)). One might claim that a corollary to Clifford’s Law is that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to withhold belief when faced with sufficient evidence. Seeming to operate on this principle, many religious philosophers—from St. Anselm to Alvin Plantinga—have claimed that non-believers are psychologically or cognitively deficient if they refuse to believe in the existence of God, when presented with evidence for His existence in the form of relevant experience or religious arguments that are prima facie unassailable. Similarly, many atheists fail to see how believers can confront the problem of evil and still assert their belief in a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient Creator. In this paper, I propose to explain why religious arguments so often fail to persuade (I take the term ‘religious argument’ to include arguments whose conclusions are either assertions or denials of religious claims). In doing so, I first offer an account of persuasion and then apply it to religious arguments. I go on to argue that at least some religious arguments commit a form of question-begging, which I call “begging the doxastic question.”~An argument begs the doxastic question, on my account, when a subject would find the argument persuasive only if she antecedently believes the argument’s conclusion. This form of question begging is not, strictly speaking, a case of circularity and thus, is not a fallacy; rather, it would explain why one coming to the argument would fail to be persuaded by it unless he already accepted its conclusion. This has the effect, when applied to religious argumentation, that religious arguments are rarely persuasive, which raises the further question: what good are religious arguments? I end by suggesting some non-persuasive functions of religious argument. Finally, I suggest that a full understanding of religious argumentation should give evidentialists pause, for religious beliefs look less like belief states that are sensitive to evidentiary states and more like framework principles or fundamental commitments.     

Islamist Women's Agency and Relational Autonomy

Mainstream conceptions of autonomy have been surreptitiously gender‐specific and masculinist. Feminist philosophers have reclaimed autonomy as a feminist value, while retaining its core ideal as self‐government, by reconceptualizing it as “relational autonomy.” This article examines whether feminist theories of relational autonomy can adequately illuminate the agency of Islamist women who defend their nonliberal religious values and practices and assiduously attempt to enact them in their daily lives. I focus on two notable feminist theories of relational autonomy advanced by Marina Oshana and Andrea Westlund and apply them to the case of Women's Mosque Movement participants in Egypt. I argue that feminist conceptions of relational autonomy, centered around the ideal of self‐government, cannot elucidate the agency of Women's Mosque Movement participants whose normative ideal involves perfecting their moral capacity.     

Legal rulings on suicide in India and implications for the right to die

In this paper I am concerned to address the question of voluntary or self‐willed death from two distinct positions—a particular community's socio‐religious practice (viz. Jaina sallekhanā) and as the matter stands in law (penal code, constitution, judicial wisdom, etc.) in India—in the light of the recent move by a bench of its apex court striking down the penal code section proscribing suicide. I also wish to draw out some implications of these deliberations for the beneficence of medical practice and related bio‐ethical ramifications in the Indian context.     

The Judicialization of Religious Freedom: An Institutionalist Approach

Recent years have seen growing interest in the judicialization of religious freedom (JRF). In this article, I identify two distinct meanings of JRF, which are often conflated but which need to be kept separate. I then argue for a stronger institutionalist approach to JRF. An institutionalist approach focuses our attention on both the rules internal to courts, and the relationship of courts to administrative agencies, legislatures, and other governing bodies. I argue that there is room to strengthen our analyses of JRF by paying greater attention to these institutional dynamics. I demonstrate this by highlighting two overlooked features of courts—interpretive rules and access rules—that are particularly important for governing JRF; and by developing a framework that relates the courts to other institutional venues and political actors. In so doing, I identify a number of promising directions for future research into the causes and consequences of JRF.     

Theorizing Democratic Education from a Senian Perspective

Despite the growing body of literature and general interest in the intersection between the capabilities approach (CA) and education, little work has been done so far to theorize democratic education from a CA perspective. This essay attempts to do so by, first, getting clear about the theory of democracy that has emerged from Amartya Sen’s recent work and understanding how it informs his CA; and, second, by carefully drawing out the implications of these aspects of Sen’s thinking for democratic education. Ultimately, I argue that Senian democratic education (SDE) is a composite of various learning processes that enhance one’s capability for social and political (democratic) participation. Particular attention is given to the learning that happens through one’s actual engagement in democratic practices and that which happens through one’s formal schooling. I call the former of these learning processes SDEp and the latter SDEs. SDEp is democratic life itself, and its effectiveness both depends on and contributes to the development of a culture of political participation within society. SDEs is best understood as the process of facilitating children’s achievement of democratic functioning, that is, children’s achievement of certain “beings and doings” associated with the emergence and exercise of their individual and collective democratic existence.     

Liberal Churches and Social Justice Movements: Analyzing the Limits of Inclusivity

Conservative Protestants have been successful in communicating their religious voice in the public sphere, while liberal Protestants have struggled to articulate a distinctly liberal, religious voice. In this article, I show that a major component of liberal Protestant identity—inclusivity—itself constitutes a fundamental barrier to developing that voice. Drawing on 26 interviews and a year of participant observation at a liberal Protestant congregation in the southeast, I first show that congregants construct their identity of inclusivity in response to cultural associations of Christianity with conservatism and exclusivism. I then analyze three discursive strategies that congregants use to make sense of individuals’ involvement in Moral Mondays, a left-leaning local social movement. By connecting Moral Mondays to social justice, to religious beliefs, and to individual commitments, congregants depoliticize involvement in Moral Mondays and maintain their commitment to inclusivity. I argue that inclusivity does not limit their participation, but rather limits their ability to connect that participation to their liberal religious voice. This research has important implications for understanding barriers to liberal Protestants’ articulation of a distinctly liberal and religious voice in the public sphere.     

SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION,HEALING, AND ALTRUISM: INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM

This essay introduces the five articles that follow, whose aim is to show how altruism emerges out of spiritual transformation and is integral to healing process in four kinds of ritual healing systems—popular, folk, an indigenous religious healing tradition, and complementary and alternative medicine represented by consciousness transformation movements. In this introduction I situate these largely marginalized religious and spiritual practices within the context of the religion‐science discourse, which has focused for the most part on the relationship between the established, mainstream religions and the dominant biomedical system. Antecedents of two of these types of religious practices, Spiritism and consciousness transformation movements, were part of the development of the psychological sciences in the nineteenth century but lost ground in the twentieth. Despite discrimination and persistent negative attitudes on the part of the established religions and biomedicine, these healing traditions have not only survived through the twentieth century but appear to have gained both followers and interest in the twenty‐first. In future decades, at least for complementary and alternative medical practices and perhaps also for spirit healing centers, there may be a reversal in status through greater acceptance of their unique combination of scientific and religious perspectives.     

Towards an anthropology of doubt: the case of religious reproduction in Orthodox Judaism

As Israel’s Orthodox Jews struggle to live up to high fertility norms rooted in religious and Zionist ideals, an obscured model of stratified critique has emerged. Based on an ethnography of Israel’s reproductive landscape, I demonstrate how critique of high fertility standards is based on particular social and cultural capital only available to the religious elite. While well-established, knowledgeable and assertive religious members find private ways to bypass the almost unachievable levels of fertility, a veil of secrecy leaves less privileged groups, particularly ba`aley teshuva (returnees) to carry most of the fertility load. Whereas scholars of religious transformation have demonstrated how religious elites act as actors and leaders of resistance, my findings illustrate an opposite pattern. Instead of disseminating this critique publicly, religious elites engage in private strategies of secrecy and creative performances of failure that enable these individuals to diverge from norms without publicly contesting them. I argue that not only is stratified critique based on social and cultural capital, it also reproduces social inequalities. By focusing on doubt, struggles, and failures engendered in “everyday Judaism,” these findings require us to refocus our inquiry on power structures within different sub-groups of Israel’s Orthodox Jews. Further, this unique case study highlights how stratified reproduction takes new shape as social and religious convictions gain and lose their force at a particular moment in history.     

Identity,Incentives, and Religious Defense of Human Rights: Marshall Meyer and the DAIA in Argentina's Dirty War

Whether religious groups advance or limit human rights has been a topic of recent debate among human rights scholars. This article studies the conditions under which religious leaders advance human rights in the context of Argentina's Jewish community during the country's 1976–1983 military dictatorship. Three major influences on religious support for human rights—autonomy from a religious community's establishment, a missionary-reformer identity, and congregational mobilization—are highlighted. Original archival research from the papers of U.S.-born rabbi Marshall T. Meyer illustrates his defense of human rights in Argentina, contrasting his work with the inaction of a major established Jewish organization. Quantitative cross-national analysis extends the case study findings by showing a relationship between religious institutions’ autonomy from the state and defense of human rights.