Making Sense of the Secular Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia [Hardcover]

This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today  its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism  and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies.

Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and Chinas encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to terror ? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.

Introduction: Making Sense of the Secular Ranjan Ghosh  Part I: Europe  1. Formations of the Secular State and Islam in Britain Today Naheem Jabbar  2. The Evolution of French SecularismJean Baub?rot  3. How Do You Say Secular In Italian? Edoardo Tortorolo  4. Manifest Secularization Processes in Turkey and Belgium Karel Dobbelaere 5. Secularism in Eastern Europe Lavinia Stan and Dlc³