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Language and religion are arguably the two most socially and politically consequential domains of cultural difference in the modern world. Yet there have been very few efforts to compare the two in any sustained way. I begin by aligning language and religion, provisionally, with ethnicity and nationhood, and by sketching five ways in which language and religion are both similar to and similarly intertwined with ethnicity and nationhood. I then identify a series of key differences between language and religion and draw out their implications for the political accommodation of cultural heterogeneity. I show that religious pluralism tends to be more intergenerationally robust and more deeply institutionalised than linguistic pluralism in western liberal democracies, and I argue that religious pluralism entails deeper and more divisive forms of diversity. The upshot is that religion has tended to displace language as the cutting edge of contestation over the political accommodation of cultural difference -- a striking reversal of the longer-term historical process through which language had previously displaced religion as the primary focus of contention. Adapted from the source document.

Radical Islamism has become the "sexiest" issue in the international scholarship of religion since the September 11 tragedy in 2001. It has been associated with a number of terrorist attacks not only in the West but also in Muslim countries. Every single of radical Islamism has caught the interest of not only scholars and policy makers but also general public. Interestingly, the general assumption that religion is the source of peace has been seriously challenged, not by non-religious communities, but by the violent practices of particular religious groups, however small they are. Indeed, there are certain groups striving for Islam but by using acts which could give awful image on Islam itself and against humanity.

AbstractComparative research on authoritarianism has largely neglected religion. Yet, in order to understand the logic of authoritarian control over the civil society, it is necessary to study how the authoritarian regimes deal with religious groups. In this paper, lessons from the two rapidly expanding fields on regulation of religion and comparative authoritarianism are combined. In particular, a conceptualization of regulation of religion in the authoritarian context is proposed, according to which positive endorsement of religion can be understood as co-optation, whereas negative restrictions can be seen as repression. By employing data on positive endorsement and negative restrictions on religion from 2014 for ca. 70 countries, three different clusters of authoritarian countries regarding the regulation of religion are identified. Finally, it is argued that capacity and ambition of both the religious groups and the authoritarian regimes are the main determinants of regulation.