Friends and foes of liberal neutrality assume that neutrality presupposes pluralism. On this view, the state should be neutral among the many permissible conceptions of the individual good that citizens affirm. I argue that neutrality need not be construed as a response to pluralism. I focus on the case of specifically religious neutrality and argue that it can be an appropriate political response to what I call “the fact of religious hegemony,” which is a social scenario in which a particular (...) religion is unanimously recognized as dominant. Religious neutrality, in this kind of context, requires the state to avoid all religious words and symbols that can be taken as an expression of endorsement or criticism of religion. I take this conception of religious neutrality from both political history and current political practice and discourse. Neutrality was originally conceived of as a proper political response in contexts of religious hegemony both in France and in Mexico. Today, and despite the growth of religious pluralism, this conception continues to be a live political posture in the places where it first originated. I call it “neutrality as independence from religion” and argue that it differs from liberal neutrality in crucial respects. (shrink)

This article reveals the pathologies of the Turkish republican project of laicism by focusing on the differences between the ideas of Ziya Gökalp and the leading architects of this project. Ziya Gökalp reasoned within the logic of the empire and envisioned a synthesis among Turkism, westernism and Islam. The logic of the republic à la Turca, on the other hand, was shaped by a radical break from Islam. The distaste that the architects of the republican laicist project had developed towards (...) Islam became apparent during the years between 1920 and 1925. Accordingly, the republican project of laicism nurtured a highly visible control of the state over religion rather than a separation between the affairs of the state and religion. This article also discusses the possibilities of reforming the republican project of laicism that is congenial with democratization processes in Turkey. (shrink)

This article assesses the prospects for the adoption of Rawls’s political liberalism in non‐Western contexts. The argument centers on the religious resurgence in non‐Western societies and presents an evaluation of the viability and acceptability of political liberal principles in the face of the normative, theoretical and practical challenges posed by this development. Political liberalism emerges as a significant theoretical and normative resource; nevertheless, the socio‐political conditions in non‐Western societies may fall short of satisfying the sociological requirements of political liberalism. A (...) strong historical interpretation of Rawls’s sociological assumptions suggests that relatively younger and developing democracies where religious movements are in the ascendant, will have to wait centuries to live up to the social and moral standards of political liberalism. This article comes to a less negative conclusion. The normative arguments of political liberalism can rest on weaker sociological assumptions that do not require such a long period of time to emerge as Rawls appears to suppose. Indeed, the institution of a political liberal regime may be the condition of its own success, encouraging in its own right the necessary political reasonableness among religious views. (shrink)

This article analyses the debate about the Islamic headscarf in France and Turkey, with particular reference to the law passed in France in 2004. It aims to bring out the spatial dimension of the secular: first, by underlining how the issue of the veil collapses spatial scales, from the individual body to global geopolitical tensions; second, by looking at the specific place granted to schools as the primary focus of the political rows; and third, by teasing out some of the (...) implicit assumptions about the `location', in both France and Turkey, of the threat to secularism. It concludes that in France, at least, the debate had less to do with religion as such than with the place, both physical and metaphorical, granted to the Other in French society. (shrink)