Women’s bodies, states Benhabib (Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011: 168), have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural differences and the forces of state power, whether in their civic-republican, liberal-democratic or multicultural form. One of the main reasons for the emergence of these confrontations or public debates, says Benhabib (2011: 169), is because of the actual location of ‘political theology’. She asserts that within the context (...) of globalization, the concept of ‘political theology’ is complicated by its unstable location between religion and the public square; between the private and official; and between individual rights to freedom of religion versus state security and public well-being. Ultimately, therefore, the nature of the tension between religion as a political theology and the forces of state power can at best be described as a clash between identities of a collective nature (as envisaged by the nation-state) and identities of an individual nature (as manifested in different religions and cultures). Ongoing attempts to counter the ascendancy of religion, and as will be discussed in this article, specifically the ascendancy and visibility of Islamic identity as practiced by Muslim women, has brought into serious debate the notion of a (post) secular society and its implications for religious rights. What emerges from the state’s insistence that individuals not be allowed to enter the public discourse as religious beings, are, on the one hand, the constraints imposed on Muslim women by liberal democracies, and on the other hand, that Islam, as represented by Muslim women, is not constitutive of democratic citizenship. Will the inclusion and recognition of Muslim women, therefore, necessarily augment a democratic citizenship agenda, and will it lead to an alleviation of the conflict? Then, in exploring a re-articulation of an inclusive citizenship—one which is held accountable by its minimization of social inequality—what ought to be the parameters of inclusion and how should it unfold differently to what is already happening in liberal democracies? (shrink)

This article offers broad lessons for ways to rethink the tangled relation among religion, modernity, and the secular. After characterizing what I mean by theories of secularization and how these theories have dominated our accounts of British romanticism, I consider two poems – one by Coleridge, the other by Wordsworth – that disrupt the view that British Romanticism replaces God with nature and discipline with unencumbered freedom. I conclude by suggesting that when we disclose the language and ways of religion (...) and practice in British Romanticism, we make more apparent its political and environmental dimensions. (shrink)

This article investigates the politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism. It turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge liberal and more critical perspectives. Without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects, the revisitation of secularism remains deficient, leaving the liberal politics of translation exclusionary and that of their critics ineffective. Pointing to the resources Derrida offers for a deeper understanding of the nature, political stakes, and implications of translation, this article (...) illuminates an understudied and yet crucial dimension of the relationship between religion and politics, and more generally of public life. (shrink)

This response draws on Saba Mahmood's work on Muslim subjectivities in order to consider how Stalnaker's conceptualization of virtue might be applied to non-Confucian sources. I argue that when applied cross-culturally, Stalnaker's revised definition of “skillful virtue” raises normative and metaethical questions about what counts as a skill versus a mere bodily practice, the process by how skill is acquired, and how we can both allow for the ambiguity of skills and continue to make constructive arguments about them.

This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo-Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross-pollination from a variety of disciplines is a (...) strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today. (shrink)

This article explores the work of the influential poststructuralist and postcolonial anthropologist Saba Mahmood. Mahmood’s work in anthropology adopts an Asadian and Butlerian approach, particularly in the seminal Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. In this work, Mahmood critically interpellates the categories of ‘Western’ secular feminism through an exploration of the lives of pious Muslim women of Salafi orientations in Cairo in Egypt. Mahmood’s work constitutes an important intervention at a point in time when secular feminist (...) discourses are increasingly instrumentalized across the political spectrum in anti-Muslim discourses in the ‘Western’ world and in Europe. I argue, however, that in wanting to use the understandings and practices of pious Muslim women in Egypt in order to critique Western secular feminism, Mahmood fails to pose critical questions about the historicity of these practices and understandings, and lends her analysis to a form of cultural relativism which offers few prospects for a way forward for feminism. (shrink)

The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker (...) of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible. (shrink)

This essay examines contemporary liberal theory in light of the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The objective is both to show the limits of liberal theory, in particular with regard to constituents who do not share liberalism's view of acceptable harm, and to discuss how these limits give us reason to supplement liberal theory with other recourses from critical theory and phenomenology. The essay warns against a bifurcation of law and harm, and (...) instead argues for a pluralization of the possible links between them. To this end, the essay foregrounds what T.M. Scanlon dubs a certain ‘creative instability’, which works to energize liberalism's practice of free speech. The essay tracks this possibility in relation to the plurality and energy intrinsic to the 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons, and suggests that liberal theory can learn from thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze who focus on the variable impacts and framings of free speech. The upshot is a self-critical theory of free expression, one that links harmful speech to the affirmation of mutual contestation, social equality and respect for difference. (shrink)

This introductory essay discusses how the trope of “religious violence” is operative in contemporary discussions concerning the so-called “return of religion” and the “post-secular constellation.” The author argues that the development of a genuine phenomenology of “religious violence” calls on us to critically reconsider the modern discourses that all too unambiguously tie religion and violence together. In a first part, the paper fleshes out the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control. In a second part, it demonstrates (...) how the “liberal imaginary” revolves around individualist conceptions of freedom and sovereignty that, on their part, become parasitic upon imaginations of disorder, otherness and violence. In a third part, the author demonstrates how these insights call for developing a transformed phenomenological framework in order to give a more sensible account of “religious violence.” Finally, in presenting the articles gathered in this “special issue” of Continental Philosophy Review, some pathways into such a sensibilized phenomenology of “religious violence” are outlined. (shrink)

Within Muslim communities, the ‘ulama are considered the most crucial corporate social agency that drives the ideological and spiritual energy to the members of the society who find religious teachings necessary for their individual and social, if not always political, lives. However, when the ‘ulama of Bangladesh gathered under the umbrella platform of Hefazat-e-Islam in 2010, agitated by the numerous upheavals of the government’s policies, scholars and members of the civil society often dubbed them as regressive, reactionary, and insensitive to (...) modern changes. While anthropologists have challenged this dichotomy, this article aims to understand the HI ‘ulama’s views on modern changes and how the ‘ulama safeguard the traditional integrity in legal, educational, and gender aspects within the domain of the Bangladeshi state mechanism. Based on anthropological notions of tradition and piety, this article argues that the ‘ulama’s position on education, woman, and legal questions is neither monolithic nor static; rather there is always discussion, debate, and dynamism within the ‘ulama itself. (shrink)

This article heeds previous calls for revitalized feminist accounts of gender and religion. Having identified post-secular female pilgrimages as practices that actuate a ‘third space’, we claim that it is a space that cannot be adequately theorized from within secular feminist perspectives and attendant conceptions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy. Nor do perspectives from religious studies and its conceptions of piety as expressions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy do justice to the spatialities and subjectivities of post-secular female pilgrims. The article (...) aligns itself with the budding field of critical feminist studies of post-secularism. We argue that, in general, both the protagonists and the detractors of post-secularism fail to recognize feminist theorizations of religion, the post-secular debate in feminist studies, and the place and role of women in the emergence of the post-secular. Whence, our neologism post-sexularism. (shrink)

The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) project represented here through papers by Thomas Lewis, Aaron Stalnaker, Hans Lucht, and Lee Yearley (with responses) was motivated by the judgment that the trend toward a focus on virtue ethics, with attendant concern for techniques of forming selves, creates an opportunity for a dialogue with ethnographers. I argue that the CSWR essays neglect social and institutional considerations, as well as overdrawing the distinction between “formalist” and virtue approaches to the study (...) of comparative ethics. (shrink)

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities (...) on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities. (shrink)

This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida’s work entails that a secularism of this kind is both impossible (because religion remains influential in the wake of secularization) and unnecessary (because religious traditions are diverse and multivalent). (...) Some attempt to contain the disruptive force of religion by excluding it from the public sphere, but Derrida argues that one may endure instability for the sake of something more important than safety. Although Derrida admits that religion is dangerous, he demonstrates that it is nevertheless an indispensable resource for political reflection. (shrink)