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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.

Angesichts der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen wird inzwischen auch aus feministischer Perspektive ein wachsender Bedarf artikuliert, das Verhältnis zwischen Religion, Staat und Politik neu zu überdenken. Dabei wird eine Reihe von Kritiken am Säkularismus formuliert, unter anderem, dass er nie in 'reiner Form' existiert habe, ein konstitutiver Zusammenhang zwischen Säkularismus, Kolonialismus und Rassismus bestehe und er zur Zementierung der traditionellen bürgerlichen Geschlechterordnung beigetragen habe. Diese Kritiken am Säkularismus sind zweifellos berechtigt. Problematisch erscheint mir jedoch, wenn daraus die Konsequenz einer Verabschiedung des Säkularismus gezogen und von einer postsäkularen Zeit gesprochen wird. Demgegenüber votiere ich vor dem Hintergrund der zu beobachtenden Revitalisierung von Religionen für ein Festhalten am Säkularismus. Allerdings ist dafür eine hegemonie(selbst)kritische Reformulierung des Säkularismus im Rahmen eines pluralen Universalismus nötig.

The Islamic revolution in Iran at the closing decades of the twentieth century was a shocking, unexpected phenomenon in the context of modern history. Its religious emblem, the presence of the Shiite clerics as it's mobilizing motor for mass demonstrations and, eventually, the bizarre composition of Islam and revolution—an amalgam of two conceptually alien elements, with unprecedented ideological claims— created a new peculiar model of state and statecraft. The substitution of a fundamentalist regime for a semisecular monarchy replaced the crown with the turban as the paramount symbol of the Iranian national sovereignty, under the fundamentalist formulation of the "governance of the canonist" (velayat-e faqih). This new state manifesting itself through specific signs, symbols, slogans, discourses, and behaviors, as well as by appropriation of modern means of ideological propaganda, the use of revolutionary violence, and organized terror, embodied in the very structure of a state, addressed itself to the world as a new militant ideological and political power aiming, once again, to change the world. How could this extremely unexpected event happen? Explanations are various and they focus either on the dictatorial manners and erroneous actions of the shah, alongside the role played by the Western powers, specifically the United States, or on the presence and the political role of Shiism and its clergy in Iranian history. However, a few fundamental questions remain unanswered. How could a radically traditionalist religious establishment, which was normally marked by modern revolutionaries as reactionary, merge with the most radical revolutionary groups and views? What are the universal results of such a "chemical" composition for both the otherworldly religionism and secular revolutionism? How do they essentially differ in action and discourse from what they had been previously? What were the innermost historical forces that made possible this seemingly impossible phenomenon?

They describe the role of Iranian civil society in the process of transition to democracy in Iran and offer insight about the enduring legacy of previous social and political movementsstarting with the Constitutional Revolution of . ; 1st (Edition) ; Published version