¹ Apparently, the ‘postsecular’ impulse has come mainly from philosophers, not theologians or sociologists. A burgeoning literature on postsecular theorising is now available with notable contributions by leading social thinkers, including Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007)Google Scholar; Badiou, Alain, St. Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, trans. Brassier, Ray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Caputo, John, On Religion (London and New York, Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar; de Vries, Hent and Sullivan, Lawrence (eds), Political Theologies in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Acts of Religion, ed. and Introduction Anidjar, Gil (New York and London: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, trans. Cronin, Ciaran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Irigaray, Luce, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gill, G. C. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Joas, Hans, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence, trans. Skinner, Alex (Boulder, Colorado and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008)Google Scholar; Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007Google Scholar; Taylor, Mark C., Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Vattimo, Gianni, After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Blond, Philip (ed.), Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caputo, John D. and Vattimo, Gianni, After the Death of God, ed., Robbins, Jeffrey W., Afterword Vahanian, Gabriel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Davis, Creston, Milbank, John, and Žižek, Slavoj (eds), Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Caputo's insight aptly sums up the ‘postsecular’ impulse: ‘A post-secular philosophy, Caputo explains, emerges as a result of the death of God, spelling “the death of any kind of monism or reductionism, including secularism”’, On Religion, p. 133, emphasis added.

² Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Juergensmeyer, Mark, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (3rd edn, rev. and updated, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Thomas, Scott, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Casanova, José, ‘Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad’, in Hirschkind, Charles and Scott, David (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 18Google Scholar.

⁴ As with secularism, the discursive field of postsecularity remains principally Euro-American. Secularism, as Joseph A. Camilleri in this Special Issue reminds us, ‘is a distinctly European or Western project, which originates with the Westphalian response to the wars of religion in Europe and eventually adopts the Enlightenment's predilection for reason as the defining principle governing the public sphere’. See Joseph A. Camilleri, ‘Postsecularist discourse in an “age of transition”’.

⁵ Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁶ It is important to stress the plurality of secular models, avoiding generic understandings produced by hegemonic variants of secularisation theory. See Bhargava, Rajeev (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Also see Jakobsen, Janet R. and Pellegrini, Ann (eds), Secularisms (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Casanova cautions against reading secularisation as a single theory. Rather, it is best disaggregated into three propositions: ‘(1) secularization as a differentiation of the secular spheres from religious institutions and norms, (2) secularization as a decline of religious beliefs and practices, and (3) secularization as a marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere’, José Casanova, ‘Secularization Revisited’, p. 12.

⁷ The deployment of these terms alongside the ‘Islamic’ prefix fixes heterodox and fluid phenomena into neatly manufactured containers giving scarce justification for further interrogation or analysis.

⁸ The terminology of ‘Islamic Cultural Zones’ or ‘ICZs’ is used throughout this article to refer to Muslim majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory, and historical experience. The term stresses the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognisable semiotic markers, without essentialising Islamic identity.

⁹ The use of psychoanalytical terms to political analysis is not without its hazards, including the charge of ‘methodological individualism’. For present purposes, the deployment is to register principally a spatial shift in politics which inevitably entails psychic dimensions, including disorientation and closure. The latter may have significant effects on politics. To avoid methodological individualism, one scholar places these effects under the rubric of ‘cultural schizophrenia’. See Shayegan, Darius, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, trans. Howe, John (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Another problem with a reliance on ‘displacement’ in the present context is the impression of temporal fixity within the ICZs, compensated only by a spatial shift. Recognising this problem, the notion of ‘rupture’ is used to dispel that impression. Hence, ‘rupture’ and ‘displacement’ are conjoined to record the specific character of the postsecular in the ICZs.

¹⁰ Needless to say, in challenging hegemonic frames of understanding the relation between Islam and postsecularity, the discussion follows a more schematic format. The spatial and temporal heterogeneity of Islamic practice cannot obviously survive the bluntness of this choice.

¹¹ This sentiment is pervasive in both Orientalist and post-Orientalist (sociologically-oriented) interpretations of societal processes in the ICZs. For the former, see Lewis, Bernard, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2003)Google Scholar. Gellner, Ernest is a good representative of post-Orientalist mappings of Islam. See his important work, Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹² Bernard Lewis, ‘The Return of Islam’, Commentary (January 1976), pp. 39–49.

¹³ According to Ernest Gellner: ‘One of the most conspicuous and significant facts concerning our contemporary world is that, while the sociologists’ secularization thesis is all in all valid, one major part of the world remains absolutely secularization-resistant: the world of Islam. Today, the hold of Islam over the societies and over the societies and the minds of Muslims is at least as great as it was one or two centuries ago; in certain ways, it is probably more, not less, powerful.’ ‘The Civil and the Sacred’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Harvard University (20–1 March 1990), p. 318. {http://stevereads.com/papers_to_read/civil_and_the,_sacred_gellner.pdf} accessed 30 December 2011. Gellner explicates a similar argument in Ernest Gellner, ‘Religion and the Profane’, Eurozine (28 August 2000), {http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2000-8-28-gellner-en.html} accessed 1 January 2012.

¹⁴ Hutchings, Kimberly, Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Tibi, Bassam, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ This raises the important question not only about the operational code that defines religion, but the larger issue of the lines separating the sacred and the profane. The notion of piety may offer an opening into this wider conversation. I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to the forefront.

¹⁷ Esposito, John L. (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Ayubi, Nazih N., Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (New York: Routledge 1991)Google Scholar; Roy, Olivier, The Failure of Political Islam (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994)Google Scholar; Kepel, Gilles, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Roberts, Anthony F. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003)Google Scholar; Mandaville, Peter, Global Political Islam (London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; Ayoob, Mohammed, The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ ‘Men [and women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’ Marx, Karl, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: The Electric Book Company 2001 [orig. pub. 1852]), p. 7Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Odysseos, Louiza and Petito, Fabio (eds), The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; Luoma-aho, Mika, ‘Political Theology, Anthropomorphism, and Person-hood of the State: The Religion of IR’, International Political Sociology, 3 (2009), pp. 293–309CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Guilhot, Nicholas, ‘American Katechon: When Political Theology Became International Theory’, Constellations, 17 (2010), pp. 224–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Secularisation theorists distort Weber, as Habermas points out: ‘The theory of modernization performs two abstractions on Weber's concept of “modernity”. It dissociates “modernity” from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio-temporally neutral model for processes of social development in general. Furthermore, it breaks the internal connection between modernity and the historical context of Western rationalism, so that processes of modernization can no longer be conceived of as rationalization, as the historical objectification of rational structures.’ Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity), p. 2Google Scholar.

²¹ Westphalia as the originary moment of the birth of IR, however, is open to question. See de Carvalho, Benjamin, Leira, Halvard, and Hobson, John B., ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Tell You about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39 (2011), pp. 735–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Osiander also shows that cuius region, eius religio was actually stronger in the Augsburg Treaty than in the Westphalian ones already 20 years ago. See Osiander, Andreas, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization, 55 (2001), pp. 251–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for these points.

²² Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, The Silencing of the Past: Power and Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

²³ On the ‘return of religion’ to IR, see notably Esposito, John L. and Watson, Michael (eds), Religion and the Global Order (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Fox, Jonathan and Sandler, Shmuel, Bringing Religion into International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haynes, Jeffrey (eds), Religion and Politics: Critical Concepts, 4 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Petito, Fabio and Hatzopoulos, Pavlos (eds), Religion in International Relations: The Return from Exile (New York: Palgrave, 2003)Google Scholar; Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion; and Westerlund, David (ed.), Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide Resurgence of Religion in Politics (London: Hurst, 2002)Google Scholar. For a broader picture of the terrain of ‘secularising’ currents, see Appleby, R. Scott, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)Google Scholar; Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Berger, Peter L. (ed.), The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999)Google Scholar; Connolly, William E., Why I Am Not a Secularist (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Norris, Pippa and Ingelhart, Ronald, Sacred and the Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ See Luoma-aho, ‘Political Theology, Anthropomorphism, and Person-hood of the State’; Guilhot, Nicholas, ‘Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory’, International Political Sociology, 2 (2008), pp. 281–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Philpott, Daniel, ‘The Religious Roots of Modern International Relations’, World Politics, 52 (2000), pp. 206–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ Casanova links the secular to developments within European Christianity. ‘Protestant Christianity is intrinsically implicated in the development of secular modernity. One could say that the existence of a theological discourse of the “saeculum” within medieval Christianity was the very condition of possibility and the point of departure of the process of secularization.’ ‘Secularization Revisited’, p. 23.

²⁶ As Calhoun stresses, ‘The Peace of Westphalia did not make states secular. It established the principle of cuius regio eius religio – who rule, his religion.’ Craig Calhoun, ‘Rethinking Secularism’, The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2010), p. 41.

²⁷ Butler, Judith, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time’, The British Journal of Sociology, 59 (2008), pp. 1–23CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁸ Walker, R. B. J., ‘The Hierarchalization of Political Community’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), pp. 151–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Camilleri's critical intervention highlights ‘the need to rethink the simplistic separation of religion and politics and the consequent need to redefine political space and authority; the unveiling of some of the cognitive and normative underpinnings of distrust, verging on rupture, between Islam and the West; and, perhaps, most importantly, the search for a new conception of political pluralism that can more effectively address the challenges posed by rising levels of religious and cultural diversity’. See Camilleri, ‘Postsecularist Discourse in an “Age of Transition”’.

³⁰ Taylor, A Secular Age.

³¹ A problem with secularisation theory is the assumption, as Taylor notes that ‘the motivation to religious life in human beings is very shallow and not very profound, so that religious life is tied to certain sociological forms that existed earlier. And when these sociological forms are destabilized by modernity, religion disappears as well.’ See ‘A Secular Age: Akbar Ganji in conversation with Charles Taylor’, The Immanent Frame, Social Science Research Council, {http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/12/23/akbar-ganji-in-conversation-with-charles-taylor/} accessed 21 December 2011.

³² This point is explicated in Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations.

³³ Katzenstein, Peter J., ‘Multiple Modernities as Limits to Secular Europeanization’, in Byrnes, Timothy A. and Katzenstein, Peter J. (eds), Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–33Google Scholar.

³⁴ The slowness of its demise, however, does not necessarily diminish modernity's appeal for all, especially to those seeking emancipation from material want, alternate horizons of connectivity and belonging, or escape from ‘ascriptive’ identities.

³⁵ However, as Casanova notes, ‘Self-definitions of modernity are tautological insofar as secular differentiation is precisely what defines a society as modern.’ ‘Secularization Revisited’, p. 20.

³⁶ Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar.

³⁷ Ansari, Humayun, Muslims in Britain (London: Minority Rights Group International, 2002), p. 4Google Scholar.

³⁸ Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’, European Journal of Philosophy, 14 (2006), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A principal flaw of several extant dialogical approaches is their inherent propensity to reduce the problem of difference to language, stressing the need for translating incommensurable speech. The problem lies deeper. It is not merely one of language, even of metaphysical incompatibility, which are certainly important, but more crucially, one of recognising the heterogeneity of immanence/transcendence complexes in different cultural settings. In other words, postsecularity can offer more fruitful avenues of engagement not only if its proponents appreciate the limits of rationality, but also the multiplicity of attempts to reconcile rival claims of immanence and transcendence. For an excellent discussion of these and related issues, see Mavelli, Luca, Europe's Encounter With Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Casanova, José, Public Religion in a Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), especially chap. 8Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. Taylor's magisterial opus, A Secular Age, remains remarkably, albeit self-consciously, Eurocentric.

⁴² Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

⁴³ As Calhoun notes: ‘The “sharp binary of secularism and religion” obscures (a) the important ways in which religious people engage this-worldly, temporal life; (b) the important senses in which religion is established as a category not so much from within as from “secular” perspectives like that of the state; and (c) the ways in which there may be a secular orientation to the sacred or transcendent.’ Calhoun, ‘Rethinking Secularism’, p. 35.

⁴⁴ Asad, Formations of the Secular. As Waardenburg notes in reference to Islam: ‘The word “Islam” itself is used in very different senses: by scholars (Islamicists with different approaches) as a subject of study, or a “symbol” for their concrete subject of inquiry; by Muslims who, as Fazlur Rahman points out, may have different orientations as to what they consider to be religiously normative, to the; and in ordinary language in the West (with different evaluations and appreciations of what is felt to be “foreign” to the West.’ Waardenburg, Jacques, ‘Islamic Studies and the History of Religion: An Evaluation’, in Nanji, Azim (ed.), Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity and Change (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), p. 199Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ For Casanova ‘the core component of the theory of secularization was the conceptualization of societal modernization as a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres – primarily the modern state, the capitalist market economy, and modern science – from the religious sphere, and the concomitant differentiation and specialization of religion within its own newly found religious sphere’. ‘Secularization Revisited’, pp. 12–13.

⁴⁶ Al-Azmeh, , Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For a forceful engagement with Weberian readings of Islam, see Salvatore, Armando, ‘Beyond Orientalism: Max Weber and the Displacements of “Essentialism” in the Study of Islam’, Arabica, 43 (1996), pp. 457–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ See Taylor ‘Block Thinking’ (10 September 2007), {http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/taylor4/English} accessed 31 December 2011.

⁴⁹ Taylor, A Secular Age.

⁵⁰ An alternative to this recognised notion is the implicit distinction between modernisation and secularisation. Disjuncture between the two is likely to disrupt established narratives long naturalised in hegemonic frames. A disturbing question emerges: if Islam is modernizing but not secularizing, how does the postsecular turn simultaneously avoid post- or reflexive Orientalist mappings or the relativizing scheme of ‘multiple modernities’?

⁵¹ The ‘official’ religion, as Waardenburg notes, ‘is that of true Tawhid, and although Islam has no “official” organisation of its own, throughout Islamic history this Tawhid has been upheld by all religious scholars in opposition to the popular religion of shirk’. p. 318). By contrast, ‘popular’ Islam expresses the heterogeneity of everyday religious practice, open-ended, and fluid. Waardenburg, Jacques, ‘Official and Popular Religion in Islam’, Social Compass, 25:3–4, p. 318Google Scholar.

⁵² ‘A sharp distinction should be made between “normative” Islam and “actual” Islam. Normative Islam consists of the prescriptions, norms, and values that are recognised as divine guidance by the whole community. These are taken from the basic normative texts, mostly with what is held to be normative interpretation. Actual Islam comprises all those forms and movements, practices and ideas that in fact have existed in the many Muslim communities in different times and places, and that have been considered to be “Islamic and subsequently legitimate and valid”’. Waardenburg, Jacques, ‘Islamic Studies and the History of Religions: An Evaluation’, in Nanji, Azim (ed.), Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity and Change (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), p. 199Google Scholar.

⁵³ Mavelli speaks directly to these struggles in his contribution to this Special Issue. See Luca Mavelli, ‘Postsecular Resistance, the Body, and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution’.

⁵⁴ Eisenstadt, S. N., ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129 (2000), pp. 1–29Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ ‘Contrary to what “area studies” implicitly presumes, a good part of the dynamic in early modern history was provided by the interface between the local and regional (which we may call the “micro”-level), and the supra-regional, at times even global (what we may term the “macro”-level)’, p. 745. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), pp. 735–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although addressing ‘early modern Eurasia’ Subrahmanyam's general point about connectivity applies with unequivocal force to entanglements between Islam and Europe.

⁵⁶ Huntington, Clash of Civilizations; Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ McNeill, William, Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963)Google Scholar. For an unambiguously hubristic recent statement, see Ferguson, Niall, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011)Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Zubaida, Sami, Law and Power in the Islamic World (London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 2003)Google Scholar. Calhoun's remarks seem relevant: ‘Europe's trajectory was state churches followed by militant laïcité … In fact, post colonial societies around the world have given rise to most of the regimes of religious pluralism and religious tolerance.’ Calhoun, ‘Rethinking Secularism’, p. 42.

⁵⁹ Gellner presents a provocative reading of the Islamic Reformation: ‘The great reformation which has overtaken the Muslim world in the last hundred years or so and which the West has noticed barely, if at all, has been the displacement of folk superstition, particularly the previously widespread practice of saint worship, by a more “proper”, scholarly, not to say scholastic, puritanical, scripturalist version of the faith. The high culture which had ever coexisted with a folk low culture, but had never been able to dominate it properly, has at last achieved a victory, thanks to modern condition.’ ‘The Civil and the Sacred’, p. 320.

⁶⁰ According to Casanova, the Islamic tradition has experienced ‘an unprecedented process of pluralization and fragmentation of religious authority’ (p. 1059). However, Casanova does not take into account processes that have given Scripturalist and puritanical variants of Islam greater visibility and force. The apparent democratisation of interpretation has not guaranteed that a more ‘open’ Islam would be accorded greater legitimacy. The potential for a more homogenised Islam to emerge in contexts of mass media dissemination is unaccounted for in Casanova's otherwise rich account. ‘The destabilisation of religious authority does not offer any insurance against a more puritanical version of the Faith to inspire the multitude under conditions of cultural or economic dislocation in much of the ICZs.’ Casanova, Jose, ‘Civil Society and Religion: Retrospective reflections on Catholicism and Prospective Reflections on Islam’, Social Research, 68 (2001), p. 1059Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Gellner, Muslim Society.

⁶² In his contribution to this Special Issue, Mavelli shows how the ‘secularist-Islamist polarisation’ has been defied in the recent struggle in Egypt.

⁶³ Roy, The Failure of Political Islam.

⁶⁴ Pasha, Mustapha Kamal, ‘Islam, Nihilism and Liberal Secularity’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 15 (2012), pp. 272–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁷ The notion of ‘borders’, however, is increasingly weak to comprehend global connectivities. Perhaps, a more accurate description of processes of religious deterritorialisation is to acknowledge spatio-temporal dislocation.

⁶⁸ Clearly, ruptures and displacements do not produce singular trajectories. As the recent ‘Arab Spring’ and its immediate aftermath highlight, the ‘religious’ question is not the most pivotal one in the politics of the ICZs. Protest and ‘revolution’ in globalising times may not herald ideological dreamworlds. Rather, the ordinariness of cries for justice in a world with few certainties may simply reveal the pervasiveness of the crisis that afflicts the ICZs. It is obviously too early to ascertain the contours of politics in the ICZs (or elsewhere) in the wake of the Arab Spring. A key point, though, is apparently the sudden disappearance of ‘religion’ in the analysis. Less noticeable, is the mutation within religion itself, not secularisation; religion finding new modes of instantiation.

⁶⁹ Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

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