Articles

This critical review delves into Kevin Mazur’s latest publication, Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression (2021), which scrutinizes the transformation of a peaceful civil movement into a civil war characterized by ethnic divisions. The review offers a comprehensive assessment of Mazur’s approach to answering the pivotal question: How did the Syrian conflict evolve along ethnic lines? Spanning 306 pages, the book’s central premise revolves around the notion that the Syrian uprising’s evolution into an ethnicized conflict can be attributed to a confluence of factors, with the predominant catalyst being the ethnically exclusive nature of the incumbent political regime. Of particular interest in this review is the emphasis on the sectarian or ethnic perspective – a prominent lens used to analyse the political and societal landscapes of the Islamicate Arab world. Mazur’s ethno-sectarian perspective, commendably, avoids succumbing to primordial essentialism. However, this review contends that a critical appraisal is warranted regarding Mazur’s conceptualization of Syrians’ identities solely through religious, ethnic, or sectarian affiliations. Similarly, the presumption that these affiliations inherently explain attitudes towards both the ruling regime and the uprising against it raises valid concerns. One notable critique lies in the characterization of Syrians within Mazur’s narrative. Strikingly, absent are depictions of Syrians as a unified populace, individual actors or civic entities. This stems from the book’s classification framework, which hinges on two primary criteria: an ethnic-sectarian criterion and a local or regional one. This duality, while serving analytical purposes, potentially undermines the complexity and diversity inherent within Syrian society. In conclusion, this review acknowledges the significant contributions of Mazur’s book, recognizing its role in shedding light on the ethnicized trajectory of the Syrian conflict. Nonetheless, it urges cautious contemplation of the assumptions underpinning the ethnic-sectarian perspective. The book’s dual classification approach warrants critical consideration for its potential to oversimplify the multifaceted nature of Syrian identities. Thus, while appreciating the book’s value, this review underscores the need to acknowledge its limitations in fostering a comprehensive understanding of the Syrian conflict’s intricate dynamics.

Darwish, Housamedden. “From Peaceful Civil Movement to Civil War and Sectarian Polarization: A Critical Review of Kevin Mazur’s Revolution in Syria: Identity, Networks, and Repression.” International Sociology 14, no. 5 (2023): 552-561.

People in South Asia who neither believe in god(s) nor engage in religious practices nevertheless often self-identify as Muslims or Hindus rather than—or in addition to identifying as atheists. The situational and contextual dynamics generating such positionings have implications for the conceptualization of nonreligion and secular lives. Based on ethnographic research in India and Bangladesh and focusing on two individuals, we attend to embodied and more ambivalent modes of nonreligiosity. This enables us to understand nonreligion as situated social practices and beyond what is typically captured with the term ‘religion’. Studying nonreligion also where it is not visible as articulated conviction or identity not only contributes to accounting for the diversity of nonreligious configurations but also offers significant complementary insights.

Schulz, Mascha, and Johannes Quack "Who Counts as ‘None’? Ambivalent, Embodied, and Situational Modes of Nonreligiosity in Contemporary South Asia" Religion and Society 14 (2023).

This introduction engages with recent scholarship on what has been dubbed ‘lived’ forms of nonreligion. It aims to profile the anthropology of the secular and non-religion, no longer treating it as a subdiscipline or ‘emerging trend’ but as a substantial contribution to general debates in anthropology. Drawing on the ethnographic contributions to this special issue, we explore how novel approaches to embodiment, materiality, moral sensibilities, conceptual distinctions, and everyday practices signal new pathways for an anthropology of nonreligion that can lead beyond hitherto dominant concerns with the political governance of religion(s). Critically engaging with the notion of ‘lived’ nonreligion, we highlight the potential of ethnographic approaches to provide a uniquely anthropological perspective on secularism, irreligion, atheism, skepticism, and related phenomena.

Schulz, Mascha, and Stefan Binder. "Introduction: An Anthropology of Nonreligion?" Religion and Society 14 (2023).

Readers of this journal will need not much of an introduction to chal-lenges of the usefulness of “religion” as a category of transregional and transhistorical research. Who today would still plainly assert that religion is a universal phenomenon that can be identified in all human societies at all times? It has been no less than sixty years since the publication of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), now canonical in the Study of Religion. Subsequently, post-colonial perspec-tives have heightened attentiveness to the nexus between knowledge and power more broadly. In the case of “religion”, this nexus arguably mani-fested itself in a modern Christian, sometimes said to be more specific liberal Protestant, understanding of religion that was spread (if not vio-lently institutionalized) globally through the support of colonial power. According to Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), the academic discipline itself has been complicit in formatting and estab-lishing such a normatively biased category of “religion”. In a special issue of this very journal dedicated to his book “Twenty Years After,” Fitzger-ald (2019) extends his critique beyond “religion” to include other master categories of the humanities and social sciences as ideological carrier of liberal capitalism.

Zemmin, Florian. Editorial for "Global Perspectives on Religion as an Object of Historical and Social Scientific Study." Special issue, Implicit Religion 24, no. 3–4 (2023): 271–79.

The region of Latgale/Polish Livonia lies on the intersection between the Lutheran northern half of the Baltic region and the Roman Catholic southern part. Almost all of the local German nobility had accepted Lutheranism, but the region was politically a part of the Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Jesuit missionaries tried to re-Catholicise this region. The religious contact between the Catholic missionaries and the surrounding Lutheran and pagan countryside was diligently noted in the Jesuit reports, which became less polemical during the time period as the region’s inhabitants turned to the Catholic Church. While the missionaries were solitary fighters for Catholicism in 1625, they had become ordinary representatives of the local elite by 1772, when the region was ceded to the Russian Empire.

Rimestad, Sebastian. "Spreading the Catholic Faith in the Periphery: Jesuit Mission in Polish Livonia (1625–1772)." Entangled Religions 14, no. 6 (2023).

The Baltic region has always been situated on the crossroads of the three main branches of Christianity: Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism. As such, it has provided ample material for studying religious contact. This special issue brings together four contributions analysing such cases in this region during the early modern period. It shows the value of the Baltic region as a multi-ethnic melting pot of different Christian denominations, held together primarily by the change-resistant land-owning class of Baltic Germans.

Rimestad, Sebastian, and Knut Martin Stünkel. “Hegemonic Confessions at the Baltic Periphery: Religious Contact in the Early Modern Baltic Region.” Entangled Religions 14, no. 6 (2023).

This contribution analyses the relationship between Halle Pietism and Russian Orthodoxy with a focus on the mobility of actors on both sides. This included Halle Pietists travelling to Russia, but also young Russians being invited to Halle to study theology. The paper uses unpublished sources from the Archives of the Francke Foundations in Halle to paint a comprehensive picture of this mobility of people, but also of ideas and literature, which might not have achieved the intended aims on either side, but was still an important episode in German-Russian relations that has received very little attention in existing research. The relationship is looked at over four distinct chronological stages from the final decade of the 17^th century to the Catherinian era in the 1760s, with an additional section focusing on the Russian academic migration to Halle. Each of these stages must be seen both within the context of what happened in Russia at this time, as well as the developments in Halle. This paper takes all these aspects into account.

Haas, Daniel, Eugene Lyutko, and Sebastian Rimestad. “‘God Prepares the Way for his Light to enter into the terrible Darkness of Muscovy': Exchange and Mobility between Halle Pietism and Russian Orthodox Clergy in the 18th Century." Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Theologia Orthodoxa 68, no. 1 (2023):193–219.

The article is a re-examination of alterity as a component of the grammar of premodern political thought. The point of departure is a polyvalent anecdote found in several Islamic treatises on political thought with numerous cognates in texts from both the Islamic world and from further afield. The anecdote bears on the concept of rex inutilis, in the first instance, and ethnogenesis as situational construct in the second.  The article argues that if properly contextualized, alterity points to the relationship between ethics and politics, and even historicity and fictionality, and the manifold ways in which those respective taxonomies and conceptual lineages are twined in premodern political thought to theorize sovereignty and good rule.

Yavari, Neguin.  “Deciphering Difference in Medieval Islamic Political Thought.” In L’Adab, Toujours Recommencé: “Origins,” Transmission and Metamorphoses of Adab Literature, edited by Catherine Mayeur Jaouen, Francesca Bellino, and Luca Patrizi, 316–33. Leiden: Brill, 2023.

This essay looks at questions like what catalyzed the supra-confessional move in the post-Mongol Persophone zone, and what did it leave in place for the ideologues of Iran’s 1979 revolution—another watershed regularly misattributed to confessional tenets—to cultivate and propagate. Secularity, like sovereignty is an old unspoken concept. It critiques religion’s multifarious overtures to the conduct of politics to alloy governance, and for the premodern world, it is the grammar of that concession—the twinning of religion and politics is one such example—that has attracted scholarly attention. Secularity is wielded most frequently by religionists against various opponents, as for instance in the writings of al-Māwardī, (d. 1058), Imam al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) and Ghazali (d. 1111) who grappled with the fallout from a weakened caliphate in the eleventh century.

Yavari, Neguin. "Supra Confessionals in the Medieval and Early Modern Persophone Zone" Political Theology Network, 2023.

Some narratives about secularization and modernization processes which include pre-modern history still tend to postulate a trajectory of an early emergence of secularity in Europe, particularly in the form of a separation of church and state beginning during the European Middle Ages. But more recent findings suggest that medieval Christian Europe remained quite comparable to other cultural constellations: Rather than a secular sphere, political dynamics produced demands for the de-politicization of religion, or at most, situations and social spaces of ‘neutrality.’

In the introduction and the preceding essays in this series, Rushain Abbasi, Conor O’Brien and Christoph Kleine show us that pre-modern societies in the Middle East, Europe, and Japan – which were traditionally understood to lack secularity – already debated and applied distinctions separating religion from non-religion. In the present contribution, which returns to western Europe during the period c. 1050–1550 CE, I would like to complement their argumentation, stressing the need for caution and precision in our endeavour: We can indeed illuminate a cultural genealogy of modern secularities by revisiting forms of the secular from the distant past. But we also need to accommodate the cultural alterity of many historical constellations – not least to avoid the pull of older Eurocentric narratives.

Steckel, Sita. "Did medieval Christian Europe really produce early forms of secularity?" Political Theology Network, 2023.

In sociological theories, secularisation is often seen as the result of historical processes that initially took place in Europe and in Europe alone. Secularisation in other regions is said to be merely due to the influence of “the West.” Generally speaking, the term secularisation refers to a process of change in the relationship between the religious and the non-religious – usually to the detriment of the religious. In any case, secularisation presupposes a distinction between the religious and the non-religious. We refer to this binary distinction as “secularity.”

This essay makes a strong case that the social, political, economic and ideological developments that accompanied the transition from the Heian (794–1185) to the Kamakura period (1185–1333) generated epistemic and social structures of a longue durée that remained permanently available as a resource for a Japanese form of secularity.

Kleine, Christoph. "Preparing the Field for Secularity in Medieval Japan." Political Theology Network, 2023.

Russlands Krieg gegen die Ukraine wird zwar von der Führung der Russisch-Orthodoxen Kirche mit spirituellen Motivationen „unterfüttert“; allerdings stehen auch andere Glaubensgemeinschaften des Landes hinter dem Krieg, darunter maßgeblich die islamische. Die vorliegende Studie argumentiert, dass das gegenwärtige orthodox-islamische Bündnis zwar tiefe Wurzeln in der russischen Geschichte hat, sich aber keineswegs zwangsläufig aus der historischen Erfahrung ergibt.

Ferner wird am historischen Umgang Russlands mit Muslimen gezeigt, dass religiöse Vielfalt über weite Strecken der russischen Geschichte keineswegs die Säkularität stärkte – das russische Diversitätsmanagement kam (und kommt) häufig ohne eine religionsneutrale Plattform der Verständigung aus. Das erscheint aus westlicher Sicht problematisch, weil in unsere Vorstellungen einer „regelbasierten Weltordnung“ das Menschenrecht auf Gewissensfreiheit tief eingeschrieben ist. Vor der Vergleichsfolie nicht-westlicher Gesellschaften (z.B. Indiens) erscheint das „konservative Diversitätsmanagement“, welches auf einer Schnittmenge von religionsübergreifend geteilten Vorstellungen und traditionellen Verhaltensmustern basiert, aber keineswegs ungewöhnlich.

Buchenau, Klaus. “Eine russisch-islamische Synthese? Interaktionsmuster zwischen Christen, Muslimen und Staat im Wolgaraum vom Mittelalter bis in die Gegenwart.” IOS Mitteilungen 70. Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, 2023.

What do the terms or concepts “civil state,” “secular state,” and “religious/Islamic state” mean? How can we understand the existing or possible relationships between religion/Islam and the state or politics in the Arab-Islamicate contexts based on the aforementioned concepts and their relationship to the concept of democracy? These were the two main questions that the conference “The Relationship between State and Religion in Arab and Islamic Contexts: The Civil State, the Secular State, and the Religious/Islamic State” sought to address, exploring multiple possibilities and perspectives. These two questions, as well as other related questions, deal with two distinct and overlapping aspects of the actual and/or potential relationship between the state and/or politics and religion/Islam. They include both a descriptive aspect, that seeks to reveal “what is,” and a normative aspect that shows, from an ethical, political, and philosophical perspective, “what should be.”

The papers presented at the conference covered studies on the relationship of religion with the state in many Arab Islamic countries (Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, etc.), as well as reflections and theoretical discussion from various academic disciplines and different political perspectives in Arab and Islamic countries. These papers attempted to answer the following questions: What are the forms and implications of the relationship between state and religion in Arab-Islamicate contexts? How could/should we theoretically approach the concepts that express this relationship? What is the relationship between state and religion in intellectual and political Arab and Islamicate contexts? In what sense and to what extent can we talk about a state as civil, secular and/or religious/Islamic? Does secularism mean the separation of religion (or church) from state, politics, or sovereignty? Or does it mean the separation of religious and political authorities? What are the practical and conceptual differences between these definitions and meanings of secularism? Can the concept of “civil state” be a complementary, substitute, or alternative concept to those of “secular state” and “religious/Islamic state”? In what sense and to what extent can each of these states be democratic?

Housamedden Darwish. “Conference Report: The Relationship Between State and Religion in the Arab and Islamicate Contexts: Civil State, Secular State, Religious/Islamic State.” 9-10 December 2021, Leipzig University, 2023.

This paper critically discusses the pioneering formulation of secularity and secularism in the Arab-Islamicate world(s) found in Butrus al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria (1860–1861). The paper relies on the conceptual framework adopted and developed by the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences “Multiple Secularities—Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at the University of Leipzig. According to this conceptual framework, secularity, as an analytical concept, concerns what is. It refers to the institutional and practical differentiation, and the theoretical or epistemological distinction, between the religious and the non-religious. This paper provides a conceptual analysis of secularity, secularism, and secularization, highlighting the differences between them, as well as the epistemological and methodological requirements for drawing a distinction between them in modern and contemporary Arab thought. It also reflects on the linguistic and historical context, looking at the concepts of secularity and secularism in Arab thought prior to al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria.

Darwish, Housamedden. “The Pioneering Formulation of the Concepts of Secularity and Secularism in the Arab-Islamicate World(s): Butrus Al-Bustani’s The Clarion of Syria.” Religions 14, no. 3:286 (2023): 286.