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The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment. Adapted from the source document.

This article situates the emergence of the Deoband movement, an Islamic revivalist movement based at India's Dar al-'Ulum Deoband madrasa (seminary), within concepts of colonial secularity in British India. It shows how the decline of first Mughal and then British patronage for Islamic learning, as well as the post-1857 British policy of non-interference in 'religious' matters, opened up a space for Deobandi scholars to re-conceive the madrasa as a 'religious' institution rather than one engaged in the production of civil servants, to reimagine the 'ulama' as stewards of public morality rather than professionals in the service of the state, and to reframe the knowledge they purveyed as 'religious' knowledge distinct from the 'useful' secular knowledge promoted by the British. The article treats this production of 'religious' knowledge and space as discourse of distinction similar to those explored elsewhere in this HSR Special Issue.

At the time of data analysis for this report there were 193 countries in the world. Various institutions – the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the CIA, the World Values Survey, Gallup, and many others – have performed sophisticated statistical analyses on cross-national data. The present investigation demonstrates that valid and reliable data concerning religiosity and secularity exist for most countries and that these data are comparable. Cross-national data relating to social, political, economic and cultural aspects of life were tested for correlation with religiosity/secularity. In contrast to the most widely accepted general account of secularity, the Existential Security Framework (ESF; Norris & Inglehart, 2004), secularity was not most highly related to material security, though these were highly related. Rather, secularity was most strongly related to the degree of formal education attained. Material security explained no significant variance beyond education. Thus, religion's primary function in the world today is being replaced, not so much by the pseudo-materialistic supplication for better living conditions as posited by the ESF, but by contemporary education – extensive knowledge of contemporary cultures, philosophy, modes of thought or processes of reasoning.

A great deal of attention has been given over the past several years to the question: What is secularism? In On Diaspora, Daniel Barber provides an intervention into this debate by arguing that a theory of secularism cannot be divorced from theories of religion, Christianity, and even being. Accordingly, Barber's argument ranges across matters proper to philosophy, religious studies, cultural studies, theology, and anthropology. It is able to do so in a coherent manner as a result of its overarching concern with the concept of diaspora. It is the concept of diaspora, Barber argues, that allows us to think in genuinely novel ways about the relationship between particularity and universality, and as a consequence about Christianity, religion, and secularism

The role of religion in the structure of European identity was not on the top of agenda before the discussion of the Constitution project, but in the light of the intensive migration and Brexit this question appears to be more and more important. The issue of the interconnection between religion and European identity has several dimensions: the role of believing and belonging as well as Christianity and it forms in construction and functioning of European identity and feeling of Europeanness. The correlation analysis of Eurobarometer data (2009-2019), European Value Study (2d and 3d waves) and World Value Survey (1st-6th waves) data allows us to prove that, being secular in its roots, European identity has intense ties with religiousness. Religion appears to be a factor of European identity not within any confession, but more as a faith. Nevertheless, correlation analysis also demonstrates differences in the influence of Christian confessions on the one's self-identification as European, which allows to look wider at the religion function in European Identity and claimed European values (mainly of secular and Enlightenment origin) in historical retrospective. This means that religion perspective not only reopens the discussion of the substance of being European, but also is one of key approaches to the urgent issues of peaceful group coexistence within European Union.

Scholarly predictions of the secularization of the world have proven premature. We see a heterogeneous world in which religion remains a significant and vital social and political force. This paper reflects critically upon secularization theory in order to see how scholars can productively respond to the, at least partly, religious condition of the world at the beginning of the twenty first century. We note that conventional multiculturalism theory and policy neglects religion, and argue the need for a reconceptualization of understanding of religion and secularity, particularly in a context of multicultural citizenship — such as in Australia and Indonesia. We consider the possibilities for religious pluralism in citizenship and for "religious citizenship". Finally, we propose that religious citizenship education might be a site for fostering a tolerant and enquiring attitude towards religious diversity.

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

AbstractOn 17 April 1996, police opened fire on more than 1,500 unarmed protesters of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) in Southeast Pará, Brazil, killing nineteen and wounding seventy‐nine. Two years later, Osias, one of the wounded survivors, awoke to find that he had written a messianic prophecy, which he decided to share because it contained 'a lot of reality'. This article explores what conditioned Osias's expectation that his text could provoke public reflections on reality. As such, it engages with a question unexplored by current scholarship: why the will to publicity might be inextricable from secularity, which I define as the condition of living with secularization, understood in turn not as the rise of unbelief, but as the expansion of a domain of thought and practice distinguished from religion. The ethnography ultimately inspires a rereading of Asad's Formations of the secular, interrogates assumptions about the determining reality of 'secularism' and 'politics', and makes more visible how anthropological writing is shaped by secularity. With a postscript on the October 2018 presidential elections.