Secularism

Abstract: IN THE FALL OF 1989, three young North African immigrant women students in a French public secondary school insisted on wearing headscarves in class. In France, secularism in the schools is national policy, and the young women's insistence on keeping their heads covered in the classroom was locally interpreted as a religious challenge to academic regulations. They were suspended from school, but refused to return without the scarves. The incident gained national publicity, exciting a variety of passionate responses in support of the students and in support of the local school authorities. Eventually, the Socialist national minister of education ordered the students readmitted to class, prompting further debates about the capitulation of institutional authorities to fanaticism. In the public press, as well as in more specialized journals, the incident was known as l'affaire dufoulard: the affair of the headscarves, a discrete local problem that developed into a crisis of French national identity. In November 1993, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti's discussion of the original incident, "Citizenship and Equality: The Place for Toleration," was published

Abstract: Perhaps Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have won the argument for secularism with the majority of the West. But the facts point in the other direction: what no one has noticed is that far from declining, religious populations are actually multiplying. This extraordinary demographic phenomenon indicates that the more religious people are, the more children they will have. Within Judaism, the Ultra-Orthodox will almost certainly achieve a majority status over their liberal counterparts this century. Evangelical and neo-traditional Christians will follow suit and Islamist Muslims and are not far behind. Not only will the religious eventually triumph over the non-religious, but it is those who are the most extreme who have the largest families. Drawing on extensive demographic research, and considering questions of multiculturalism, nationalism and terrorism, Kaufmann examines the implications of the decline in liberal secularism as religious conservatism rises – and what it will mean for the future of western modernity.

Abstract: Spectacular new religious buildings on London’s outskirts are often cited as evidence of London’s multicultural diversity. However, the suburban location of these new buildings is usually dismissed as incongruous, drawing on familiar tropes of the suburbs as sites of modernisation, materialism and secularism. This paper uses this assumed incongruity to address the complexity of relationships between religion and suburban space by tracing the significance of religion in changing suburban geographies through a focus on London’s suburbs. The paper begins with a critique of the absence of religion in suburban studies, which emphasise secularisation and homogeneity. The rediscovery of the creative potential of the suburbs gives little consideration to religious creativity. Similarly recent work on diasporas and religion have little to say about the significance of the suburban. Our paper uses three case studies, of different faith groups, from North and West London to explore three distinctive articulations of the relationship between religion and suburban space that we call ‘semi-detached faith’, ‘edge-city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’. These examples are not intended as ideal types but as analytical categories that open up the relationships between space, faith and mobilities. We argue there is a need to more carefully theorise the ways in which faith communities have engaged with the challenges of suburban geographies including processes of secularisation and suggest that the study of faith in suburbia offers new ways of thinking about the complexity of suburban space.

Abstract: This article attends to the transformation of national identity that occurs in the context of 'the multicultural debate' in the Netherlands, and unfolds on the terrain of Dutch (secular and sexual) exceptionalism. First, it explores the connections between two topics that are prominent in the 'multicultural debates' all over Europe and undergird the civilizational discourse of a post-Cold War geopolitical era: discussions about secularism on the one hand, and gender and sexual politics on the other. Through a mode of 'secular nostalgia', which mobilizes the understanding of the Netherlands as a place par excellence of emancipation for both women and sexual minorities, the Dutch secular arrangement is restructured in new exclusionary ways. Second, it explores how dominant discourses on the symbolic and material borders of the nation interpellate young Muslim women who often figure as the central 'subjects of debate'. I rely on the notion of interpellation (Althusser) to explore the question of subject formation, with a particular attention to the epistemological conditions of 'talking back' as a subject whose constituency and agency is always already informed by the terms in which she is addressed.