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This article investigates Western European right-wing populists' ambiguous relationship with religion and secularism using the example of the French Rassemblement National (RN). Drawing on social cleavage theory, survey data and elite interviews with RN leaders, French mainstream politicians and Church authorities, it finds that the RN employs Catholicism and laïcité as cultural identity markers against Islam to mobilise voters around a new identity cleavage between liberal-cosmopolitans and populist-communitarians. However, instead of a rapprochement with Christian policy positions, ethics and institutions, this article finds that the RN is becoming increasingly secularist in its policies, personnel and electorate. This finding is of significant relevance for the broader populism and religion literature not only because it suggests the centrality of right-wing identity politics for populist parties, but also because it challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between right-wing populism and religion by providing evidence that in Western Europe the former is increasingly dominated by its 'post-religious' wing.

Modernity's emblematic faith in technology, the doctrine of progress, the centrality of instrumental reason, the sanctity of individual freedom, the denial of the sacred — all of these have been suggested as sources of an environmentally destructive cultural tendency. The common ground uniting all of these beliefs is the secular worldview, a historically specific story about reduction of reality to matter, the triumph of human reason over the vagaries of nature, and the colonization of space and time by material progress. Rather than reverting to a pre-modern worldview or promoting a deconstructive postmodernism that would reduce all worldviews to mere discourse, I draw upon the neglected understandings of evolutionary idealism to move towards a new story. Starting with the premise that consciousness is ontologically prior to action, I draw upon the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber to trace the outlines of an alternative metaphysic to secularism. The integral worldview, which understands history as Spirit in the process of becoming, offers such an alternative, one that moves beyond but also includes the secular story within its scope.

Contents: 1. Introduction: background and overview; 2. Classical juristic theories of the caliphate: from idealism to accomodation; 3. The caliphate in the colonial era; 4. Ali 'Abd al-Raziq's intellectual formation and his place among the disciples of Muhammad 'Abduh; 5. The central argument; 6. The ruling system in the time of the Prophet; 7. Critiques of 'Abd al-Raziq's position; 8. The implications of 'Abd al-Raziq's study for the debate over Islam and politics

Laicite, France's idiosyncratic form of secularism, is a complex concept that is dense with historical genealogy, practical contradictions and - crucially - political geographies. In particular, contemporary Laicite is characterized by a state-sponsored model of universal citizenship that regards French Muslims' identity claims with mistrust. This tension, always latent, was brought to the fore by a series of attacks perpetrated self-styled jihadists in January 2015, centered on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo notorious for its provocations against Islam. The attacks and their aftermath also highlighted a key space where conflicts over Laicite often play out: the French public school, the ecole republicaine. This institution was conceived in its modern form as a mechanism to assimilate through laique pedagogy. Today it is a highly visible space where the optics of race and gender contribute to a narrative of Muslim communautarisme, a willful and defiant communalism that rejects the republican community of citizens. Following a handful of incidents in which students refused to participate in a moment of silence for the victims of the January 2015 attacks, the Ministry of Education undertook an initiative involving disciplinary and pedagogical supports for Laicite in the schools, called the Great Mobilisation for the Republic's Values. Like other past interventions in this area, it operationalizes an assimilating vision of Laicite to bring recalcitrant peripheries into compliance with republican norms. At the same time, though, it reveals the agency of the peripheries to negotiate the terms of Laicite according to local knowledge and needs. On the basis of interviews with educators serving in schools where elements of the Grand Mobilisation were carried out, I show how they push back against the overarching narratives that characterize the initiative and in so doing construct localized and nuanced understandings of the laique social pact. ; Peer reviewed

This article examines the work of Indian-American poet Meena Alexander (1951-2018), one of postcolonial India's foremost poets, and argues that Alexander's combination of religion and secularism in her poetry gestures toward postsecular possibilities and conditions, especially as such postsecularism emerges from the worldly crises and violence of the twenty-first century. The secularisms that inform Alexander's work include state secularism in postcolonial India, and political and philosophical secularism in the west, especially in the US. In addition to these senses of secularism, I explore the secular as worldly, material, and historical, all three of which include the embodiments of gender, race, migration, and dislocation, especially as Alexander describes them in her collection of essays Poetics of Dislocation (2009). How can postcolonial poetry gesture toward, explore, and search for—in highly personal, experimental ways—some sense of affirmative values in the wake of the dissatisfactions and disenchantments of philosophical secularism, while retaining the inclusive, democratic aspirations of political secularism (as non-establishment of religion in the state)? What values and aesthetic forms—however precarious, fragile, and tentative—emerge for the postcolonial, transnational, dislocated poet, values that cannot return to the ideologies of religions that have so fueled violence?