Im Fokus dieser Dissertation steht die sozial-liberale Partei D66 (Demokraten 66) und deren Säkularitätspolitik in den Niederlanden. Die Arbeit nimmt die Partei zum Ausgangspunkt, um politische Kämpfe um konkurrierende Säkularitätsmodelle zu untersuchen. Die Arbeit umfasst erstens eine historische Analyse des säkularitätsbezogenen Wandels in den Niederlanden und zweitens mehrere umfassende Fallstudien zu gegenwärtigen Auseinandersetzungen um Säkularität in unterschiedlichen Settings.:Table of Contents 2 List of Tables and Figures 6 List of Abbreviations 7 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction: Politics of Secularity 10 1 A Theoretical Approach on the Politics of Secularity 21 1.1 Contested Secularity 22 1.2 Multiple Secularities 26 1.3 The Diversity of Nonreligion 31 1.4 The Political Field as an Arena for Contested Secularities 36 1.5 The Rhetoric of Political Struggles 42 2 Data Collection and Interpretation 46 2.1 The Grounded Theory Approach in Very Brief 46 2.2 The Research Process 48 3 The Secularity of Politics 63 3.1 The Construction of a Pluralist Modernity since mid-19th Century 63 3.2 D66 and the Secularization of Dutch Politics 82 3.3 Summary and Discussion 98 4 Secularity for the Sake of Individual Equality and Liberty 104 4.1 Contested Individualism and Shifting Power Relations 105 4.2 The Opening of Civil Marriage 121 4.3 Self-Determination and Euthanasia 131 4.4 Blasphemy, Demonization, and Secular Politics 139 4.5 The Contested Purple Heritage 146 4.6 Summary and Discussion 150 5 Islam and the Renegotiation of Secularity 155 5.1 Shifting Integration Policies, Shifting Secularities 156 5.2 Searching for A Positioning in the Debate on Islam 188 5.3 Defending the Liberal Model 200 5.4 Summary and Discussion 214 6 A Party Working Group on Religion and Worldviews 218 7 The Political Integration of Muslims: A Case Study from a Secular City 230 7.1 Religion in a Secular City 235 7.2 A Liberal Campaign in a Secular City 238 7.3 A Campaign for Migrant Voters 244 7.4 Summary and Discussion 262 8 Politics of Secularity in the Bible Belt 266 8.1 A Small Town in the Bible Belt 267 8.2 Confessionalizing the Public 274 8.3 A Contested Public Order 292 8.4 Pluralist and Individualist Aspects of the Election Campaign 316 8.5 Summary 324 9 Overall Summary and Discussion 328 9.1 Summary 328 9.2 Discussion 351 References 365 Appendix 390

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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.”

In the first half of the 17th century, three major Buddhist governments that combined a twofold religious and political structure under a Buddhist ruler were established in the Tibetan cultural area (hereafter: Joint Twofold System of Governance).1 In 1625/26,2 Bhutan was united under the rule of a charismatic Tibetan Buddhist master, Zhabdrung Ngawang Namgyel (1594– ca. 1651; hereafter: Zhabdrung); Tibet and Sikkim followed, both in 1642 – although with significant differences in their respective institutionalisation. The Bhutanese government as a constitutional monarchy with a Buddhist king is the only one among the three still in existence today. Bhutan’s transformation into a modern society along the lines of this Joint Twofold System of Governance under the conditions of non-colonialisation but with crucial and intense encounters of its societal elites with Western and Asian forms of modernity and secularity represents, therefore, a unique case in point.

This article aims to analyse the relationship between state and religion (in this case, Islam) in political and legal developments in Indonesia from colonial times to the present, and to determine the model of Indonesian secularity within the multiple secularities approach. The legal and political developments relating to the relationship between the state and Islam in Indonesia are understood to be the products of societal debate as well as instruments for solving particular societal problems, guided by certain guiding ideas1 that shape Indonesian secularity. The paper first describes Indonesia’s evolving socio-political conditions, noting in particular the emergence of two distinct groups: Islamic groups calling for Islam to be made the foundation of the Indonesian state and for Islamic law to be enforced for Muslims in Indonesia, and nationalist groups that support the idea of a secular nation-state based on Pancasila, a set of five founding principles. In the second part, the paper outlines the development of Pancasila as a national agreement and state ideology. The third part analyses the state’s legal policy on Islamic law. The fourth part analyses the relationship between the character of the contemporaneous regime and its attitude towards the aspirations of Islamic law. The fifth part analyses some state laws in Indonesia that relate to Islamic law in order to establish whether they constitute a legalisation of Islamic law and to what end the laws were created. The sixth part determines the model of Indonesian secularity based on the societal problems to be solved by the legal and political developments and the guiding ideas referred to. The final part defines the general boundaries between the state and Islam.

This working paper is part of a larger research project on emerging visualities and imaginaries of living together in plurality and on equal terms. Against the background of growing majoritarianism in India and the normalization of violence against religious minorities and marginalized communities, the search for new visual forms and aesthetic means to counter increasing divisiveness and conflict has acquired exceptional urgency. It is a search pursued by many and in multiple directions, occasionally even in the realm of marketing and advertising which is the focus of this article. The larger project considers documentaries, fictional films and transmedia interventions in order to understand how different actors seek to create new visualities that are markedly different from earlier form(at)s used to visually mediate the normative project of political secularism for many decades, but nevertheless draw on the idea that secularity is a mode of living together and socially interacting in plural societies.

Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906 is arguably the most significant turn toward the secular in its modern history.1 I start this investigation by making a conceptual distinction between secularism and secularity.2 Here, secularism is defined as the ideologically-driven separation of religion and state according to an agenda, a blueprint, a model, that could be indigenously, or externally informed and is achieved with the assistance of the modern state and explicit political motivations. Secularity, on the other hand, is expressed in terms of a non-ideological separation that comes about unintentionally. In some accounts, this separation may take on evolutionary connotations in terms of the natural separation of functions as a result of the growing complexity of a natural organism or social system. What I have in mind here is a separation of functions that is agent-driven but the secularity that emerges is both unintentional and unideological.

In the context of my involvement with the CASHSS Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’ research programme, I chose Ghazali’s autobiography, and in particular his “crisis of indecision,” as an example of a pre-modern negotiation of the boundaries of religion at the micro level. The research programme suggests employing the analytical concept of secularity to investigate both non-Western and pre-modern forms of secularity, in terms of conceptual distinctions and institutional differentiations between religious and non-religious social spheres. In this essay, I would like to propose a method of pursuing these goals from my own theoretical perspective. More specifically, I will argue that in Ghazali’s reflections on spiritual religiosity, theology, philosophy and science, we can discern the individual engagement of a prominent Muslim thinker with emerging communicative realms. In the Modern Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann, these realms are taken to represent functionally differentiated subsystems of modern society.