Some outstanding questions
In conclusion, I want to suggest that if the secularization thesis seems increasingly implausible to some of us this is not simply because religion is now playing a vibrant part in the modern world of nations.
In a sense what many would anachronistically call “religion” was always involved in the world of power. If the secularization thesis no. longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the categories of “politics” and “religion” turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accompanied our growing understanding of the powers of the modern nation-state. The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.True, the “proper domain of religion” is distinguished from and sep-
26. Thus when a delegate from Jordan at the conference (mentioned in note 20) maintained that disagreements between the aims of the Islamic movement and those of Arab nationalism were relatively minor, and that it was certain that “any movement that is to prevail in our Arab world must be either a nationalist movement incorporating the Islamic perspective with a commitment to democracy and social justice, or an Islamic movement incorporating nationalist perspectives” (Husain, ibid.), his assertion was strongly contested, especially—but not only—by delegates from non-Arab countries who insisted that the only bond between Muslims at present divided among nation-states was Islam.
Secularism, Nation-State, Religion 101 arated by the state in modern secular constitutions.[121] But formal constitutions never give the whole story. On the one hand objects, sites, practices, words, representations—even the minds and bodies of worshipers—cannot be confined within the exclusive space of what secularists name “religion.” They have their own ways of being. The historical elements of what come to be conceptualized as religion have disparate trajectories.
On the other hand the nation-state requires clearly demarcated spaces that it can classify and regulate: religion, education, health, leisure, work, income, justice, and war. The space that religion may properly occupy in society has to be continually redefined by the law because the reproduction of secular life within and beyond the nation-state continually affects the discursive clarity of that space. The unceasing pursuit of the new in productive effort, aesthetic experience, and claims to knowledge, as well as the unending struggle to extend individual self-creation, undermines the stability of established boundaries.I do not deny that religion, in the vernacular sense of that word, is and historically has been important for national politics in Euro-America as well as in the rest of the world. Recognition of this fact will no doubt continue to prompt useful work. But there are questions that need to be systematically addressed beyond this obvious fact. How, when, and by whom are the categories of religion and the secular defined? What assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them? Does the shift from a religious political order to one that is governed by a secular state simply involve the setting aside of divine authority in favor of human law? In the chapter that follows, I try to address this latter question iri relation to a particular place and a particular time.