The project seeks to explore the boundaries that distinguish between the religious and non-religious, in modern as well as pre-modern societies. In doing so, we are aligning ourselves with current debates but we are approaching the debated issues from a basic theoretical perspective. At present, a general distinction can be drawn between three narratives: The first claims the dwindling presence and relevance of religion (“secularisation”); the second regards religion to be returning globally, consequently irritating the self-perception of modern societies (“return of religions”, “post-secular society”). According to the third, religion has always been present and has simply changed shape, meaning secularisation assumptions are misleading (“invisible religion”). There is also a theoretical-methodological conflict to be taken into consideration. Where the secularisation hypothesis considers its theories and methods to be universally applicable, the critics of this theory not only increasingly challenge the transferability of Western development paths, but also the transferability of the concepts used. This applies right down to the challenge of the religious/secular dual, which is understood to be an expression of Western experience and power of interpretation that forces other cultures into Western schematisations. In contrast, we are formulating an alternative position, in which we are trying to explore the boundaries between the religious and non-religious beyond normative concepts. We are particularly seeking such boundaries in regions that differ greatly from the so-called “West” in the “Modern World” in terms of culture and history: In various Asian regions and – partly overlapping with these – in the so-called “Islamic World”, but also in different epochs. This is linked to a plea for comparability across multifaceted regions and cultural contexts, and for investigating their entangled history.

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.

The goal of this paper is to provide a bird’s eye view on what might qualify as ‘the mother of all distinctions’ within Islamicate history affecting the regulation of human conduct. It is a rather ‘soft’ distinction, whereby the ethical and literary tradition of adab works as an harmonious counterpoint, more than as a sheer alternative, to the normative discourse subsumed under the notion of shari‘a, the law originating from Divine will (shar‘). Adab does so, however, while clearly affirming a distinctive, non-divine (and in this sense ‘secular’) source of norms of human interaction. The paper is divided into two parts: the first delineates the traits of adab in pre-colonial times, while the second focuses on key transformations it underwent during the colonial era.

A wide variety of Buddhist writings originating on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere in South and Southeast Asia were translated into Chinese between the mid-second and the early eleventh centuries C.E. As this material was read, digested, commented upon, and integrated into daily life, Chinese audiences came to be familiar with Buddhism’s basic teaching that overcoming all forms of suffering (Ch. ku 苦; Skt. duḥkha) is its core function. As one of the most obvious forms of suffering encountered in everyday human life, illness was a frequent topic of concern in these discourses. Of particular concern was the question of the relationship between the alleviation of the suffering of illness and the total, final salvation from suffering of all kinds (commonly referred to as Ch. niepan 涅槃; Skt. nirvāṇa; among other terms). This question appears and reappears across the genres of the Buddhist canon. From sūtras (loosely meaning “scriptures”), to disciplinary texts, ritual manuals, narratives, parables, philosophical treatises, and poetry, illness and healing are everywhere in Buddhist literature.

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Report of a hybrid Workshop on “Differentiation Theory and the Sociology of Religion and Secularity” on 8 and 9 October 2020 hosted by the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CASHSS) “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at Leipzig University and organised by the CASHSS's directors Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr together with Daniel Witte from the University of Bonn.

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.