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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.

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Diese Schriftenreihe dokumentiert die Forschungsergebnisse des Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies 'Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities' (Kolleg-Forschergruppe KFG).

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.

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.

In this article, I undertake several lines of enquiry in the history of ideological and political movements centered on the “modernity” polemic at the transnational level. By analyzing these movements in juxtaposition, I explore the possibility of more diverse narratives of modernity and antimodernity than are assumed by conventional dichotomies in contemporary academic writings. The results of my enquiry challenge several pervasive “dogmas” of post-colonial theory: that orientalism is a purely modernist intellectual project, while anti-orientalism is by necessity its more “local” discursive counterpart in a dualism of East and West.

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?