Abstract
Inspired by the seminal work of Talal Asad, important studies, both within and outside anthropology, have pointed to secularism as a modern ideology resting on a distinction between “secular” and “religious” domains whose genealogy can be traced back to specific developments within early modern European history. Instead, emerging new sociological scholarship suggests investigating “multiple secularities,” namely the many ways in which the boundary between these secular and religious spheres has been marked in non-European settings. After exploring these two scholarly approaches to secularism, the chapter relies on a few studies in historical sociology to single out the emergence of a separated “secular” sphere within bureaucratic culture in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century. It will be argued that although the “religious” and the “secular” were certainly intertwined within the Empire, a distinction between the two existed largely before European expansion in the MENA region. In this way, the chapter questions the common view that sees secularization as being mainly a Western import and points to the Ottoman state’s administrative and economic machine as a fruitful domain for exploring the secular/religion distinction in Muslim-majority contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
The other two propositions were the decline of religious practice (a view that had been defended by the advocates of the modernization thesis) and the shrinking of religion to the private dimension. According to Casanova (1994), both have been disproven by the current religious revival.
- 2.
In this updated version of his theory, Casanova (2006) agrees with Asad’s critique of his original position but maintains that the search for a theory of secularism resting on a more traditional comparative historical and sociological perspective should still be pursued because dropping it entirely would leave us without adequate analytical tools to understand the phenomenon.
- 3.
However, the multiple secularities project differs from the multiple modernities paradigm on at least two points. First, it aims to be more empirical and less abstract by focusing on “cultures of secularity” rather than on grand civilizational pathways. Second, in addition to investigating the appearance of the secular/religious divide within ancient pre-modern civilizations, it is also interested in recent (including contemporary) articulations of secularity in every region of the world (see Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 17–19).
- 4.
The full passage is as follows: “While the secularisation paradigm is often considered to be Eurocentric and antireligious, recent research generally fashions itself as sympathetic toward religion. At times, the studies evoke the impression of a ‘natural’ religiosity among the population and of an ideological secularism founded on an alliance between political and academic elites. Compared to the older debate, recent contributions often engender an inversion of the subject and object of the critique: Whereas secularism used to be regarded as a means of liberation from the constraints of traditional and religious authority, religion now appears as a space of freedom, and secularism as an instrument of regimentation and of exclusion. The heightened awareness of secularism’s articulation of power relationships and knowledge regimes, and its selective authorisation of forms of religious subjectivity and expression that are compatible with liberal modernity, is significant. However, such an awareness becomes flawed when it downplays the role of the autonomy associated with modernity and secularity, compared to that of moments of domination, as well as when it defines modernity in a manner that excludes religious freedom” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2017: 10, 11).
- 5.
- 6.
Although the emergence of a first separation of religious and political functions can be traced back to the third and fourth millenniums BCE, Lapidus (1996) clarifies that it became more discernible only later in the Roman Empire, where Christianity had established its autonomous legal institutions already before becoming the official religion.
- 7.
One of the most basic and common examples of how the Sultan used the kanun to legislate beyond the sharia is the charge of interests. This was permitted by Ottoman law, although within certain limits. For instance, under Suleiman I, the kanun approved a charge of interests only within the limit of 10% (Gerber 1994: 73–75, quoted in Barkey 2014: 474).
- 8.
Particularly relevant here according to Salvatore (2016: 124, 2018: 10, 11) was the role of the Sufi networks in trickling down elite etiquette taken from the adab tradition to groups of more ordinary people—especially merchants belonging to the higher middle strata of society—between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries.
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Vicini, F. (2020). The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to the Multiple Manifestations of the Secular. In: Ünsar, S., Ünal Eriş, Ö. (eds) Revisiting Secularism in Theory and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37456-3_6
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