In this paper, we show how this plural legal landscape is negotiated by litigants, especially women, and thereby illustrate the procedural interplay between civil and religious courts through this adjudication process. The ethnography of adjudication at the Darul-Qaza situated in a large Muslim neighbourhood in Kanpur and the institution’s intersections with the societal (We mean the tribunals that function at the neighbourhood or community level) secular courts show how Muslim personal law functions. In this paper, we identify both the links between the Darul-Qaza and civil courts, and the processes of evidence making and legal reasoning that are integral to this interlegality. We argue that the issue of personal law should be understood within the post-colonial legal structure of India and with a good understanding of the processes through which disputes in the delicate area of family, affect and kinship are addressed and resolved. The above case shows how resolution occurs in a family dispute when plural institutional mechanisms are at work. This paper explores the adjudication process at a Darul-Qaza to understand how religion-based family laws get constituted as litigants seek both religious counsel and civil authority.

For the last few decades, sociological debates about religion and secularisation have been characterised by confrontation between (often American) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularisation theories. There has also been a remarkable rise in academic and public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national as well as civilisational frameworks. These debates are shaped by the context of the changing position of the West in world politics, Islamist terror and the war on terror, struggles of religious minorities for recognition and influence, and the concomitant negotiations over the place of religion in the public sphere, as well as the emergence of post-national citizenship. Contributions from political theory, social anthropology and religious studies that emerged from this context have enriched the debate, but also contributed to fragmenting existing theories on the relationship between religion and modernity. Whereas scholars previously aimed to develop ‘general theories’ of secularisation that included deviations from the general model, newer approaches tend to highlight the specificity of Western European developments as opposed to those in the rest of the world, and sometimes even highlight their incomparability.

This article discusses four concepts: religionization, religio-secularization, religio-secularism, and religion-making. These concepts are proposed as heuristic devices for the analysis of the processes through which social networks, practices, and discourses come to be understood as ‘religious’ or ‘religion.’

Debates about the usability of the concept of ‘secularity’ in academic research are not merely theoretical. Standpoints are also politically informed and arguments are sometimes emotionally charged. To some, merely using the term ‘secularity’ seems to inflict violence upon certain objects of research or even upon themselves. Others object to applying the concept beyond a particular arrangement of secularity, lest that defense-worthy arrangement be undermined. Taking a step back, however, the actual hermeneutical problem and historical question still seems rather clearly to be this: is it possible to uncouple the link between secularism as a political regime and secularity as an analytical concept with broader historical purchase? In this paper, I argue that the basic approach of Multiple Secularities is indeed the commendable way forward, but could be refined and improved, also by learning from the valid points of its critical alternatives. Thus, this paper aspires to shed light on two basic questions, namely, how to take ‘secularity’ beyond the modern West, and, as a logical prior, why take ‘secularity’ beyond the modern West in the first place?

If any one thing marks early modern history, it is religious transformation. Confessional and pietist movements, both European firsts, are prominent examples of such catalysts for change.1 In large parts of the Islamic world in the 15th and 16th centuries, it was Sufi piety that carried the day. The historiographical record reveals strikingly new imaginaires and novel modes of connectivity to the past. The focus in this paper is on the manifold ways in which new forms of religiosity redefined the landscape of politics in the eastern Islamic world. It traces invocations of the past in Fakhr al-Dīn Kāshifī’s (d. 1532) Rashaḥāt ‘ayn al-ḥayāt 2 (Sprinklings from the Fountain of Life), a 16th-century collected biography of Naqshbandī Sufi masters, to argue that the classificatory schema adopted by the author reveals a template of secularity that marks a significant departure from past manners of adherence.

This working paper is derived from a larger research project exploring what I consider to be a tenuous but persistent form of “public culture” extending between Inner Asia and Europe over the course of the 18th and, especially, 19th centuries. This “stranger relationality,” as Michael Warner would have it, was mediated by new forms and routes of Eurasianist textual circulation. In this late imperial period, spread along the frontiers of the Qing, Tsarist, and British empires, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Buryat monks read works by European and East Asian intellectuals on all manner of technical knowledge, and began writing not to fellow scholastics or local readers, but to a global community of “the knowledgeable” (Tib. mkhas pa; Mon. baγsi, nomčin). The social site of what I am exploring as a new form of reading, interpreting, and writing in Asia’s heartland was the dispersed web of monastic colleges (Tib. grwa tshang; Mon. datsang) that connected generations of polyglot and cosmopolitan scholastics across the otherwise diverse and segregated socio-political blocs of late imperial Central and Eastern Tibet, north China, all Mongolian territories, and Siberia. My ongoing research is revealing how the practices of secularity (as defined by the Multiple Secularities framework) enacted by this commonwealth of frontier, synthetic scholastics was repurposed in the early 20th century, in the ruins of the Qing and Tsarist empires, to invent the social imaginaries, national subjects, civil societies, and other products of socialist secularism that produced modern Inner Asia (and continues to legitimize claims by Russia and the PRC on its Inner Asian frontiers). In this working paper, I will briefly introduce the social sites of my sources, the Buddhist monastic colleges that spanned the Sino-Russian frontiers, and provide a few examples of synthetic scholastic products that emerged in this previously unstudied form of Eurasianist public culture (c. 1750–1930s). I will also share some preliminary arguments I have drawn about the ways that practices of secularity amongst the actors my work considers led directly to the creation of the modern public sphere, civil society, and ironically, revolutionary institutional forms and models of history that had violently erased scholastic culture from public life.

No description available.

This paper will examine the transformation dynamics of social change in Kurdish Alevi communities, while mostly focusing on the increasing sociopolitical and religious role of talips. Until the end of the 20th century, the socio-religious structure of Kurdish Alevis was dominated by two hereditary social positions, much like a caste system: on the one hand, the members of the sacred lineages (ocaks), who embody the religious authority, and on the other hand, the talips who are subordinated to the sacred lineages. This socio-religious structure provided a framework for Kurdish Alevi socioreligious organisations.

The following is intended to suggest a fairly simple contention concerning a number of interconnected propositions made in connection with the debates on modernity and secularism. None of these propositions is particularly novel, nor is this the first time that they have been put forward. Yet the issues raised have remained with us and become all the more pressing; I can see that points that were made, against the flow, more than two decades ago, now stand out more cogently than ever, and are being revisited, rediscovered or simply discovered by many. The simple contention I wish to start with concerns Islamism, often brought out emblematically when secularism and modernity are discussed. Like other self-consciously retrogressive identitarian motifs, ideas, sensibilities, moods and inflections of politics that sustain differentialist culturalism and are sustained by it conceptually, Islamism has come to gain very considerable political and social traction over the past quarter of a century.

Disagreement over the nature of religion in China - a civilization that has long confounded the vocabulary of religious and secular - is nothing new. With an imperial institution that eclipsed confessional structures, and bound Heaven and Earth in ritual cosmology, China was what John Lagerwey called a “religious state.” When native notions of religion were forced into European-derived categories, the result was either a clash of interests, particularly with Christian missionaries, or dreadful mistranslations, such as the still pervasive idea of “emperor worship.” Religion in the twentieth century was been punctuated by periods of intense persecution, but the more longstanding policy of the People’s Republic has been to allow organized religion to exist, and even thrive, albeit at the cost of being coopted or transformed into a museum piece, its teaching is reduced to moral platitudes. The ideological wave under Xi Jinping is something new. Combining nationalism, personal advancement, economic welfare, and an unprecedented level of surveillance of public and virtual spaces, this wave has made the state more ideologically pervasive than it has been in half a century. It has tamed the independent charitable organizations that grew up over the previous decade, but even this is just a symptom of the larger reorientation of ideology to public spaces to become what I call the “Chinese secular.”