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TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON A GLOBAL SECULAR AGE - A Secular Age beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 440. $120.00 CAD (cloth); $34.99 CAD (paper); $28.00 USD (digital). ISBN: 9781108417716.

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A Secular Age beyond the West: Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, and Shylashri Shankar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 440. $120.00 CAD (cloth); $34.99 CAD (paper); $28.00 USD (digital). ISBN: 9781108417716.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2021

Clemens Six
Clemens Six*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Contemporary History, University of Groningen
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Abstract

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Keywords

secularismtransnational historyreligious affairs ministriesCold Warinternational lawanticommunism
Type
Book Review Symposium: A Secular Age Beyond the West
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , August 2021 , pp. 291 - 298
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

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References

1 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Taylor, A Secular Age, 21.

3 See, for example, Dominique Borne and Benoit Falaize eds., Religion et colonisation, XVIe–XXe siècle: Afrique—Amérique—Asie—Océanie [Religions and colonization, 16th–20th centuries] (Paris: Les Éditions de l'Atelier/Éditions Ouvrières, 2009).

4 While transnational perspectives are meanwhile well established in the fields of modern and contemporary world history, inter-imperiality is less so. For an outline of such a framework see Doyle, Laura, “Inter-imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History,” Interventions 16, no. 2 (2014): 159–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Boland, B. J., The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 105–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Seo, Myengkyo, State Management of Religion in Indonesia (London: Routledge, 2013), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Gözaydın, Istar B., “A Religious Administration to Secure Secularism: The Presidency of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Turkey,” Marburg Journal of Religion 11, no. 1 (2006): 1–8Google Scholar; Umut Azak, preface to Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), xi–xvi.

8 Bruinessen, Martin van, “The Governance of Islam in Two Secular Polities: Turkey's Diyanet and Indonesia's Ministry of Religious Affairs,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 27 (2018)Google Scholar, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.5964. For a similar effort on African history see Agensky, Jonathan C., “Who Governs? Religion and Order in Postcolonial Africa,” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2020): 583–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another comparison is provided in Sezgin, Yüksel and Künkler, Mirjam, “Regulation of ‘Religion’ and the ‘Religious’: The Politics of Judicialization and Bureaucratisation in Indian and Indonesia,” Comparative Sociology in Society and History 56, no. 2 (2014), 448–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 See, for example, Martin Ramstedt's study of the Balinese Hindu identity after Indonesia's independence: “Introduction: Negotiating Identities—Indonesian ‘Hindus’ between Local, National, and Global Interests,” in Hinduism in Modern Indonesia. A Minority Religion Between Local, National, and Global Interests, ed. Martin Ramstedt (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–44, at 6–18.

10 In my reading, though, Taylor's civilizational approach accommodates numerous cross-border dynamics and is therefore per definition transnational.

11 Chase-Dunn, Chris and Dudley, Jennifer S. K., “The Global Right in the World Revolutions of 1917 and 20xx,” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 17, no. 1/2 (2018): 55–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blee, Kathleen M. and Creasap, Kimberley A., “Conservative and Right-Wing Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 269–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin Durham and Margaret Power, “Introduction,” in New Perspectives on the Transnational Right, ed. M. Durham and Margaret Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–10.

12 A twentieth- and twenty-first-century perspective on this antagonism is provided in Christian Gerlach and Clemens Six eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-communist Persecutions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

13 Margaret Power, “Transnational, Conservative, Catholic, and Anti-communist: Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP),” in New Perspectives on the Transnational Right, ed. M. Durham and Margaret Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 85–105.

14 Power, Margaret, “Who but a Woman? The Transnational Diffusion of Anti-communism among Conservative Women in Brazil, Chile and the United States during the Cold War,” Journal of Latin American Studies 47, no. 1 (2015): 93–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace: Conservative Women and the Crusade against Communism (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008).

15 Clemens Six, Secularism, Decolonisation, and the Cold War in South and Southeast Asia (London: Routledge, 2018), 124–64; Hing, Lee Kam, “A Neglected Story: Christian Missionaries, Chinese New Villages, and Communists in the Battle for the ‘Hearts and Minds’ in Malaya, 1948–1960,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (2013): 1977–2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, “Rethinking the History of Internationalism,” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3–14; see also Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997), 2–3.

17 Such an understanding suggests Abigail Green, “Religious Internationalisms,” in Sluga and Clavin, Internationalisms, 17–37, at 18.

18 Vernacularization refers to the process by which international norms such as human rights become appropriated and adopted in local contexts. See Levitt, Peggy and Merry, Sally, “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women's Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States,” Global Networks 9, no. 4 (2009): 441–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 446.

19 Jong, Cornelis de, The Freedom of Thought, Conscience and Religion or Belief in the United Nations (1946–1992) (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2000), 8–9Google Scholar. See also Helge Årsheim, “Whose Religion, What Freedom? Discursive Constructions of Religion in the Work of UN Special Rapporteurs on the Freedom of Religion or Belief,” in Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion, ed. Frans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 287–316; Lindkvist, Linde, Religious Freedom and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 An investigation into the UN bodies and the European Court of Human Rights illustrates, however, that this “universal” right to religious freedom has been an important but unstable framework: Barras, Amélie, “Transnational Understandings of Secularisms and Their Impact on the Right to Religious Freedom—Exploring Religious Symbols Cases at the UN and ECHR,” Journal of Human Rights 11, no. 2 (2012): 263–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 37–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Place: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 8–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For more empirical details, see Clemens Six, The Transnationality of the Secular: Travelling Ideas and Shared Practices of Secularism in Decolonizing South and Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 12–21.

23 Nelson, Matthew J., “Constitutional Migration and the Meaning of Religious Freedom: From Ireland and India to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020): 129–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. [Note by the editors: this article is one of the results of a research group later organized by the same group of scholars who edited and contributed to A Secular Age beyond the West.]

24 The transfer of constitutional provisions between Ireland and Pakistan concerned primarily the references to religious freedom. In the course of Pakistan's contemporary history and the increasing influence of Muslim (that is, Sunni) majoritarianism, though, the meaning of these provisions changed significantly. The focus on individual rights and the rights of religious minorities was gradually replaced by a stronger emphasis on the rights and sensitivities of Pakistan's Sunni majority. See Nelson, “Constitutional Migration,” 2. The political and social costs of this development for religious, indigenous, and ethnic minorities were significant and deeply influence Pakistan's society until today. See Jaffrelot, Christophe, The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (London: Hurst, 2015), 439–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ali, Shaheen Sardar and Rehman, Javaid, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities of Pakistan: Constitutional and Legal Perspectives (Richmond: Curzon, 2001)Google Scholar.

25 On the intra-imperial and transnational circulations of constitutional provisions after 1945, including the very need to have a written constitution, see Go, Julian, “A Globalizing Constitutionalism? Views from the Postcolony, 1945–2000,” International Sociology 18, no. 1 (2003): 71–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.