Empire’s embrace of secular governmentality called for a rhetoric of state separation from religion. At the same time, however, the state’s promise of religious autonomy and the ideological underpinnings and administrative exigencies of indirect rule translated into the co-option, regulation, and transformation of religion and religious institutions. In the end, therefore, imperial secular governmentality–in its varied spatial and temporal manifestations–entailed an uneasy truce between the rhetoric of state-religion separation, and the everyday intimacy of religion and state authority. The conclusion argues that that paradox is central to the law and politics of the modern state’s governance of religious difference.

Set in Africa’s most populous Muslim country, the book takes on a paradox: colonial governance in Northern Nigeria entailed indirect rule through Muslim intermediaries and caliphate institutions; yet, the state insisted on its secularity. In unravelling this puzzle, the book offers a provocative account of secularism as a contested yet contingent mode of governing and religious difference. Drawing on detailed archival research, the book illustrates constitutional struggles triggered by the colonial state’s governance of religion and interrogates its legacy in the postcolonial state. The book illuminates the dynamic interplay between law, religion, and power in the political context of the modern state’s unique emergence from colonial processes.

This chapter analyzes how the distinctive institutional environments and their corollary ramifications on religious authority drive religious movements to adopt different strategies in shaping their political activism and creating religious parties, focusing on religious competition and conflict. Islamist movements, unperturbed by a hierarchical religious authority, found the liberty to pursue hybrid organizational structures. This carte blanche to assume religious authority enabled Islamist movements to operate both as a religious movement that serves in religious, social, and educational areas and as a religious party in the political arena. The Church hierarchy, by contrast, forced Catholic mass movement leaders to choose between expulsion and avoiding political activism in the name of Catholicism. Catholic political activists largely responded to this challenge by formally parting ways with mass movements and creating their own Catholic parties without the Church's blessing, ultimately deprived of the ability to rely on religious authority in their political ventures. In addition, this chapter focuses on the implications of distinct organizational trajectories on the electorate.

Pufendorf was a political humanist, that is, an intellectual who engaged with political and religious thought through an erudite philological and analytical scrutiny of classical and modern texts in these fields. Born into a Saxon Lutheran clerical household in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he had first-hand experience of religious and political conflict during his childhood. His mastery of Latinate humanistic erudition was formed through his rhetorical education at the Grimma grammar school and then through his studies in history, philology and politics at the University of Leipzig. Pufendorf used his humanistic erudition as a key resource in his fundamental reconstruction of the discipline of natural law in his Law of Nature and Nations of 1672. In this work he sought to provide a model of political authority suited to governing divided religious communities, in part to defend the Protestant religion against the threat of political Catholicism, but primarily to achieve peaceful co-existence among different religions under the umbrella of a secular sovereign state. His work as an historian and political adviser to the Swedish and Brandenburg courts reflects the engaged nature of his humanistic learning.

To provide a historical, political, and socio-economic context for the emergence of the religious assemblages described in this book, Chapter 2 outlines the pluriform religious setting in south-western Nigeria, an area known as Yorubaland with Lagos as its economic, financial, and cultural hub. It compares the religious situation in Yorubaland with a ‘religious marketplace’, where religious shoppers pick and choose from the religious traditions that are available to them. I argue that if we aim to understand Muslim–Christian encounters in Nigeria beyond the ingrained conflict–cooperation continuum, we must pay attention to how Muslims and Christians actually live their religion and how their ways of living religion relate to each other. By analyzing Yorubaland as a religious marketplace and the Yoruba as religious shoppers, I show the limits of existing approaches that understand religious difference as a ground for religious violence and open an avenue for a more nuanced analysis of interreligious encounters.

Peace settlements are notoriously difficult to reach in religiously associated conflicts, particularly in intra-state armed conflicts where the religious identity and nature of the state is at stake. Despite that apparent intractability, however, some peace settlements have been crafted for contemporary intra-state armed conflicts where there have been religious incompatible claims and aspirations. This chapter explores the legal tools developed in such settlements and discusses their wider applicability as conflict resolution mechanisms. The analysis identifies seven specific conflict resolution mechanisms that have been utilised to address the religious dimensions of armed conflicts: constitutional secularism, religious freedom, religious power-sharing, religious autonomy, legalisation of religious political parties, inclusion of religious civil society actors and religious bonding. These seven mechanisms are analysed as part of two fundamentally different approaches to conflict resolution of religious dimensions: division vs integration; and reinforcement or decrease in the role of religion. The chapter demonstrates how religiously defined conflicts can also be transformed and brought to peaceful, negotiated endings.

This chapter explores the development of primary education, the relative role of state and church, and battles over governance.

This chapter explores the ways cultures define their parameters while engaging in dialogue with their cultural others. In my reading, cultures are open systems that are constantly in dialogue, whether the dialogue has a particular structure or not. Rather than functioning within the determined parameters, dialogues negotiate and re-constitute the existing boundaries, and in this sense, dialogues are not means to an end but are capable of determining their own course. Violence, accordingly, is a form of dialogue, although simultaneously a rupture in the life of autonomous self-constituting dialogue. By reading classical Hindu world that devised mechanisms for cultural synthesis and symbiosis on one hand and systematic models for dialogue on the other that took away societal tension from the public to the limited philosophers and theologians, I explore in this chapter the creative domains of cultural dialogue in constituting non-violent society. Dialogical reading of cultures reveals its complexity, as every single culture is a never-ending synthesis. This very awareness of the factors of synthesis, I argue, opens the possibility of resolving cultural tension that often stems from the failure of recognizing the parameters that sustain difference. Dialogues, therefore, are not meant to dissolve difference. On the contrary, the function of healthy dialogue is to sustain difference while also sustaining the dialogue itself.