Religious-secular distinctions have been crucial to the way in which modern governments have rationalised their governance and marked out their sovereignty – as crucial as the territorial boundaries that they have drawn around nations. The authors of this volume provide a multi-dimensional picture of how the category of religion has served the ends of modern government. They draw on perspectives from history, anthropology, moral philosophy, theology and religious studies, as well as empirical analysis of India, Japan, Mexico, the United States, (...) Israel-Palestine, France and the United Kingdom. (shrink)

The purpose of this response piece is to summarize what is meant by “critical religion” as a contribution to the ongoing debates within the discipline, and specifically in relation to critical research on religion.

The collection of essays in this volume critically explore various aspects of the modern development of the religion-secular dichotomy and its ideological function in the assertion of colonial power since the 16th century. The authors hope to illuminate the role and formation of the modern category of religion, and of the academic study of religion, as colonial instruments in the more general subjection of indigenous concepts of order to the classificatory needs of Euro-America. The methodology tends to overflow traditional disciplinary (...) boundaries and offers analyses that are historiographical, literary and ethnographical. However, rather than seeking comprehensiveness in such a vast field, the authors here concentrate on specific aspects of the colonial relationship either from the point of view of a particular colonized culture, for example Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Japan, South Africa, Canada; or from the point of view of the colonizing powers, in this case England, Germany and the United States. The authors hope to encourage further studies by specialists in different cultures and languages in the problems of imposition, translation, and reception of the separation of 'religion' from other domains such as 'politics', 'economics' and the 'non-religious' civil domain. (shrink)

In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the category of ''religion'' to describe a distinctive form of human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of Religious Studies, Timothy Fitzgerald argued that ''religion'' was not a private area of human existence that could be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion as such was thus impossibility. In this new book he examines a wide range of English-language texts to show how (...) religion became transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society. These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are also tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively indiscriminate use of ''religion'' as an a priori valid cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology. Fitzgerald seeks to link the argument about religion to the parallel formation of the ''non-religious'' and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument is that the category ''religion'' has a different logic compared to the category ''sacred,'' but the two have been consistently confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade. Fitzgerald contends that ''religion'' imagined as a private belief in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space for the simultaneous imagining of ''secular'' practices and institutions such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of ''religion'' as a universal type of experience, practice, and institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying ''scientific'' rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a different logic of use. (shrink)

This response takes up some of the editorial comments for further clarification and critique. My point has been that ‘politics’ is as much a modern invention as ‘religion’. We cannot understand the rhetorical function of ‘religion’ if we treat it as a stand-alone category referring to some supposed object or objects in the world. I am especially concerned here to keep in view the oscillating binary categories of which ‘religion' forms one parasitic half, and ‘politics' or ‘science' the other. This (...) critical problematization of the liberal categories of the understanding opposes and challenges their current institutionalization in the liberal academy, where they now serve the Neoliberal agenda and the reproduction of the dominant, globalising imperatives of private property. (shrink)

Islamic legal studies continues to be a productive field in combination with Middle Eastern history. Ever wider conceptions of ‘Islamic law’ and ‘law’ itself ha.