The chapter articulates a political theory of secularism that can be defended against common, legitimate criticisms of existing forms of secularism. What I call minimal secularism is not vulnerable to the claim that secularism is hostile to religion, marked by an ethnocentric legacy of church-state separation, or committed to a Christian, and specifically Protestant, conception of religion. In addition, it is more structured and precise than liberal philosophies advocating state ‘neutrality’ towards the plurality of conceptions of the good life. Minimal secularism is a thin, yet attractive, transnational ideal for progressive politics.

Five contexts conditioned papal relations to enslavement 1500–1800. (1) From Roman times, Christians understood enslavement as morally licit, and Christian thought was necessarily conservative when it came to social action. (2) Centuries of Christian–Muslim military conflict and mutual enslavement in the Mediterranean – and thus religious and not racial concerns – underwrote bulls authorizing Portuguese slaving in Africa. (3) While popes could make recommendations and excommunicate transgressors, the forces of state power and creeping secularism were infinitely greater. Thus, when popes called to cease or modify terms of enslavement, burgeoning capitalist goals often led colonial settlers and individual merchant opportunists to ignore these directives. (4) In Rome, the Papal States, and the early modern Mediterranean, popes employed slaves of various ethnicities to labor throughout their realms. (5) Both at home and overseas, papal will was extended, mediated, and at times altered by a broad universe of agents such as cardinals, nuncios, and missionaries.

This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

The ethos of responsibility promoted by Muslim leaders of the UOIF assumes a particular flavor in the context of tight secular constraints. In France, the renewal of public discussions on laïcité since the 1990s has resulted in the consolidation of a hard, exclusivist understanding of secularism. Against the backdrop of such constraints and aligned with the revivalist tradition of contextually adapted Islamic rulings, Muslim leaders emphasize the importance of low-profile, unobtrusive forms of religiosity over more public forms. They exhort their coreligionists to practice discretion and self-restraint, whether in their sartorial practices, in the architecture of their mosques, or during the celebration of Ramadan. This requirement for discretion goes hand in hand with the celebration of an “intelligent” reading of the Scriptures. This class-layered exercise goes against the “ignorant” interpretations of migrant workers and Salafi followers while being aligned with the Islamic tradition of moderation (wasaṭiyya). The chapter concludes by delving into the case of Tareq Oubrou, a renowned Muslim scholar in Bordeaux, who advocates for a “theology of acculturation” in harmony with French republicanism. Oubrou’s theological endeavors further exemplify the reflective, intellectualized approach to religion promoted by UOIF leaders, as well as their middle-class sensibilities.

French Muslim leaders regularly engage in praxis of self-restraint, politeness, and social upliftment in the context of strong assimilationist pressures. Their everyday acts of piety indicate the crafting of a discreet Islam, geared toward appeasing tensions around Muslim presence in France and encouraging justice and respect for minority citizens. These self-limiting forms of political claims – which have gone hitherto unexplored – should be understood as their politics of respectability. This concept, borrowed from Black studies in the US, is used to shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of discreet Islam, whether its incorporation through morals and manners, its grounding in middle-class attributes, or its political ambivalence, resulting in both conservative and emancipatory outcomes for minority citizens. Moreover, studying the respectability politics of French Muslim leaders allows for important epistemological acts, such as moving beyond the images of in-your-face Muslim politics that saturate public discussions, taking the religious commitment of minority citizens seriously, and opening a transatlantic conversation on class and morals in minority politics. To do so, the book builds on an ethnographic inquiry with one of France’s most influential Muslim organizations, the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France), in the context of a tense France following the 2015 terror attacks.

The second chapter places Walter Pater, the widely acknowledged founder of British aestheticism, in conversation with mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford in order to illuminate the overlapping development of aestheticism and evolutionism in the 1860s and 1870s. Around the same time that Pater made the case for “art for art’s sake,” Clifford laid out a sweeping secular humanism that reaffirmed an anthropocentric and pseudo-religious view of the cosmos. Clifford’s optimistic reinterpretation of evolutionary science, this chapter argues, reinforced and drew on Pater’s contemporary conception of the aesthetic temperament: a discriminating, tasteful personality capable of transforming, in Pater’s words, the “ghastly spectacle of the endless material universe” into the “delightful consciousness of an ever-widening kinship and sympathy.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the work of Mathilde Blind, who synthesized Clifford’s and Pater’s ideas in a poetic oeuvre that sought to inculcate readers into reverent ways of experiencing an otherwise atheistic world.

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

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.

In Sydney’s north, planning for an eruv began in the early 2000s by a group of Shabbat-observant Jews. What looked like an innocent project that did not involve much more than erecting a couple of poles in inconspicuous colours with wire attached to them, most of them on private land with the consent of the owners, became a several years-long dispute in which the imagined boundary turned into a real one for many residents, which they sought to prevent by recourse to planning law. This chapter explores how residents and councillors in St. Ives mobilised planning law to draw the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness. By analysing public documents, including a survey on the eruv commissioned by the Local Council as well as Council meeting minutes, media reports, and submissions to local newspapers, I trace the implicit religious and racial boundaries of belonging in this Australian suburb that the eruv rendered visible and I examine how the planning law regime participated in protecting these boundaries, thereby affirming White Christian settlers as rightful inhabitants of this suburban land.

This chapter introduces a new research program on the politics of religion and secularism. A focus on the politics of religion and secularism offers a productive port of entry into the study of international politics. Following a brief introduction to religion and international relations, it offers a basic introduction to the concept of secularism, explains why the politics of secularism is significant to the study of global politics and concludes with a discussion of the politics of secularism in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79.

Any constitution holds the nation’s past, aspires to live the present, and promises to build a thriving future. Differentiating a nation’s collective identity from its constitutional identity is, thus, often difficult, or even impossible. This chapter shows that, at its founding moment, Bangladesh’s national identity and constitutional identity merged into one another, although the national Bengali identity was flawed and exclusionary. Bangladesh’s four-pronged constitutional identity – based on the principles of nationalism, secularism, democracy, and socialism – evolved through a revolutionary and popular process but has since remained ever contested. These four identity principles have been subject to multiple changes, signifying their contestation and contentiousness. One possible reason for the continuing contestation about constitutional identity is, arguably, the ignorance of the religious sentiment of the Muslim majority citizenry. An analogous argument has been that Bangladesh’s constitutional (or national) identity is fraught with an exclusionary or hegemonic approach to nationality.