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In this age of confrontation, the secular Turkish model has been seen as a bridge between Islam and the West as well as the link between Europe and Asia. Now that model faces the most severe test in its history. How the current crisis is settled will frame future relations between Islam and the West no less than the events of 9/11.

In recent years, the intellectual tide has moved strongly against the kind of secular thinking that characterized Gellner's work. Whether couched in terms of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, genealogy, global understanding, political theology, or the revival of normative, metaphysical and openly religious perspectives, today's postsecular and even anti-secular mood in social theory seems to consign Gellner's project to the dustbin of history: a stern but doomed attempt to shore up western liberal rationalism. Under some revisionary lights, it has even become pointless to distinguish flexible secular thinking which still retains some firm 'bottom lines' from what is routinely portrayed as rampant ideological secularism. Unconvinced by key assumptions and motivations on this terrain, I reactivate Gellner's essential concerns and propositions around secularity and secularism, feeding these into the current debates. Whilst Gellner's stringent, unrivalled exposure of intellectual cant continues to be hugely valuable, and his sense of the utter historicity of social life and thought indispensable, Gellner's critical positivism could not, by his own admission, produce a coherent cultural politics.

The present paper seeks 'to explore the nature of Indian secularism, the difficulties it has run into, and the ways in which it may be revised'. This is a large undertaking for a short text, originally written as public lecture, particularly because the issues posed do nopt readily translate into plain questions. The most that I can hope to do is to raise some doubts and make a few suggestions for rethinking the issues involved.

Ward talks about secularism, which is a state-sponsored mythology that has evolved to replace the monarchic mythology of cuius regius eius religio. Laicite itself -- a complex and evolving idea that came to be understood in terms of state-monitored secularism -- goes back to laws preceding, including, and succeeding the Separation of Churches and State Act 1905. The fight here was State control of Roman Catholicism following years of conflict between republican anti-clericalism and Catholic anti-republicans. The 1905 law become the legal basis for laicite, but it has to be understood in terms of what it did not do. Adapted from the source document.