In 2012, a German district court in the city of Cologne decided that male circumcision for non-therapeutical reasons amounted to criminal assault that could not be justified by parental consent. Over a period of several months, between the decision and the drafting of the amending legislation, the German public and academy became embroiled in a remarkably heated and emotional debate about the future of the practice. But this time, the resentment did not just appear in the notorious online world but became woven into medical and legal arguments against circumcision. Even though critics of circumcision were eager to stress that their concerns were children’s rights alone, the Cologne debate sent a signal to Germany’s Jews that the law could easily turn them into strangers again. Through a close reading of this legal controversy, this chapter examines how contemporary secular legal responses to religious infant male circumcision reproduce Christian ambivalence and rely on a supersessionary logic that renders Jews as stuck in a backward past, while constituting the majoritarian secularised Christian culture as a superior locus of equality and progress.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

In the Middle East’s secularist regimes, the exclusion of religion from public life sowed discontent, as did the regulation of private religious activity. Defiance of secular mandates became increasingly common. In response, secularist leaders intensified the repression of groups opposed to reforms. But they also made concessions to politically tame groups that wanted to lead openly religious lives. The resurfacing of public religiosity induced adjustments in the public persona of secular elites themselves. Politicians, entertainers, and journalists started pandering to the pious by feigning religiosity. Reversing direction, religious preference falsification now exaggerated not genuine irreligiosity but, rather, genuine piety. Regimes that were once assertively secularist turned into religiously hybrid regimes drawing some legitimacy from Islam. This softening of secularism set the stage for regimes dedicated, in one form or another, to homogenizing society according to a religious blueprint. Under assertively Islamist regimes, longstanding Islamic instruments of repression have transformed religious freedoms, with some groups becoming freer and others less so. Secularists and heterodox believers have been among the losers. The breadth and severity of the ensuing religious repression hides diverse strands of discontent. Public religious discourses and performances disguise rising irreligiosity, deism, and atheism.

Disagreements over a religion’s interpretation can cause a schism – a formal division into variants with their own officials, doctrines, and rituals. Islam’s Sunni–Shii split over succession disputes came early in its history. One might expect either Muslim modernizers or liberal Muslims to have split Islam further. They have done so only informally, in that the global Muslim community is divided between practicing and nominal Muslims. But nowhere in the Middle East is discontent lacking among practicing Muslims over state-approved interpretations. This is evident in the popularity of unregulated fatwa services. Substantial constituencies consider rituals outdated, clerics unprincipled, and gender discrimination unacceptable. But widespread discontent within a religious community need not generate a disunion. If the risk of joining the leavers is grave enough, disaffected members will stick with the status quo. A successful schism requires, at some stage, open collective action on the part of a constituency with a shared religious vision, possibly under leaders able to strategize, represent the membership, and coordinate moves. Also necessary is that supporters of the religious status quo lack the organizational capacity to erect roadblocks. At present, any group trying to develop an alternative to Sunnism or Shiism would face major resistance.

Millions of “secular Muslims” would become “practicing Muslims” if there existed a variant of Islam compatible with their values, for instance one that would broaden women’s rights and adapt rites to the rhythms of modern life. If no liberal variant has emerged, the reason is not that Islam is monolithic. As with other religions, it admits diverse interpretations. Yet over fourteen centuries, variations in interpretation have produced just one major schism: the Sunni–Shii split of 661. This is puzzling because Christianity, the other monotheism with over a billion adherents, sees schisms frequently. If the collective action necessary for a liberal schism has not materialized, a basic reason lies in obstacles to conducting honest discussions on what Islam represents. Liberal Muslims are intrinsically opposed to settling conflicts through violence, which handicaps them vis-à-vis groups prepared to charge them with physically punishable religious offenses. Easily victimized, they cannot fight back as effectively. Thus, apostasy and blasphemy rules, the two most lethal weapons of Islamic illiberalism, reproduce the fears that allow their preservation. To avoid personal trouble, liberal Muslims, atheists, non-Muslim believers, and assorted other dissenters all avoid repudiating the notion that apostasy and blasphemy are acts that require temporal punishment.

The Middle East’s modernization drives initiated in the 1800s transferred power in stages from clerics to secular officials. Turkey’s secularization under Atatürk and İnönü is the boldest effort in this vein. Other ambitious campaigns occurred in Iran under the Pahlavis, Egypt under Nasser, and Tunisia under Bourguiba. These regimes might have been expected to facilitate exits from Islam, radically reinterpret the Quran, and broaden religious freedoms generally. In fact, they simply made it easy to ignore Islam. Their ideal was to have citizens disconnect their public selves from religion, and they felt justified in imposing their preferences on the masses. Indeed, they treated certain Islamic practices as archaic and drove them out of the public realm. Just as heterodox Muslims were once repressed as heretics or apostates, so now under secular leaders the pious were persecuted as obscurantists. In the process, modernizers constricted all discourses on Islam. Quashing dissent on religious policies, they effectively replaced one form of religious repression with another. Some secularists considered their illiberal policies transitional. Religiosity would decline with economic development, they believed, and worldviews would become secularized. But resistance from the pious led, instead, to a softening of secularist repression.

Although entry into Islam is costless, exit was banned early on. According to a widely accepted interpretation of early Islam, soon after Muhammad’s death a precedent for banning apostasy was set. In fact, the underlying dispute was over zakat, and the episode amounted to enforcing the tax code. But recasting this historical detail would not necessarily settle controversies over Muslim religious freedoms. Certain Quran verses speak of retribution against nonbelievers. Others preclude compulsion, arguably establishing a right to leave Islam. Insofar as a textual inconsistency exists – and that itself is debatable – for advocates of liberalizing Islam the challenge boils down to prioritizing liberal verses. Blasphemy and heresy charges, used repeatedly to persecute heterodox sects, also restrict sundry liberties. The fear of getting accused of religious offense constrains political discourse and inhibits collective action. But a broadening of Muslim religious freedoms through the liberalization of apostasy and blasphemy rules is not unthinkable. Analogous transformations have occurred in other religions. Besides, Islam has been reinterpreted repeatedly since its emergence, radically so in modern times. Innovations include Islamic banks, which are business corporations, and various Islamic NGOs, which are organized as nonprofit corporations. Evidently, no absolute barrier exists to broadening Islamic religious freedoms.

Paths to a liberal order are not limited to those followed by Western countries. A possible Middle Eastern starting point was zakat, Islam’s only “pillar” with an explicitly economic function. Zakat appears in the Quran as a system that finances designated state expenses through a tax on wealth and income. The rates were low by the standards of Antiquity, and they were fixed. Besides, the payment of zakat legitimated the underlying wealth or income. Hence, it could have served as the foundation for political checks and balances based on secure private ownership. Yet zakat’s specifics were suited specifically to Arabia; it left out major sources of income and wealth in the broader Middle East. For these reasons alone, rulers imposed extra-Islamic taxes. Having set precedents for arbitrary taxation, they then essentially stopped enforcing zakat. A Quran-based Islamic institution for empowering the individual against the state thus turned into a minor device for local poor relief. The waqf’s emergence in the 700s as a core Islamic institution was a creative response to zakat’s abandonment as a state-enforced transfer system. Its unintended effects, such as the persistent weakness of civil society, are rooted, then, in zakat’s loss of relevance to Islamic governance.

This chapter contains readings on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Taoism, and localized so-called “animist” religions based on spirits and nature. Although in premodern legal systems, law and religion were virtually indistinguishable, “modernity” required a separation of the two concepts. The readings address the arrival of European-style legal systems, often (but not always) imposed by colonial authorities, which carried with them some version of the principle of “secularism.” In fact, secularism took on many different forms in Asian societies, each marking out a distinctive role for law, in some instances to police the separation of law and religion and, in other instances, to ensure that a particular religion retained a preferred place in society. The chapter concludes with readings about modern interactions between law and religion in three very different societies—Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Japan.

In the early socialist period, a spectacular and uniquely Polish form of protest was born – the “defence of the cross.” At this time, as a secularization program known as “decrucification” was causing tensions between the socialist authorities and the Catholic Church, mass outdoor religious events emerged as a platform to voice protest against Communist rule. The most iconic and violent demonstration of this kind was a “defence of the cross,” which took place in the model socialist metropolis of Nowa Huta in 1960 and transformed into bloody street riots against the Communist authorities. The story of how the “defence of the cross” established itself as a popular form of anti-systemic protest in Poland also provides a window onto how women in particular devised creative modes of nonconformist behavior in the gray zone between religiosity and rebellion.