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Full Description
Is religion an obstacle to enlightenment? Popular and scholarly opinion says that it is. In a world gripped in a clash of civilizations, the virtues of tolerance, reason, and freedom seem to be under siege by religious absolutism. This collection of historical essays argues that the conventional wisdom on religion makes sense only as a strategy of intellectual and political control. The authors study how nationalists, state officials, missionaries and scholars in the West and in the colonized world defined and redefined the relationship between the political and the religious. Recasting and representing religious beliefs and practices, the authors show, was for modernizing elites a means of consolidating new political communities.
Part 1 of the book examines the political and scholarly stakes involved in defining Buddhism, African traditional religion, and fundamentalist Judaism as subjective and apolitical belief systems. Part 2 takes up the relationship between religious reform and nationalism, asking how the formalization of religious practices in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, Japan, and India helped define nationalist ideologies. Part 3 turns to religious exhibits in Turkey and the southern United States, exploring how pilgrims and tourists convert museum displays into objects of religious veneration.
By treating religion as a contested social space, this book brings philosophy, theology, history, and political science together to show how struggles over religious practices are bound up with colonial and national politics around the world.
Contents
Rethinking religion / Derek R. Peterson and Darren R. Walhof
Why study Indian Buddhism? / Richard S. Cohen
Gambling with God: rethinking religion in colonial central Kenya / Derek R. Peterson
Here (we) are the Haredim: intertextuality and the voice of authority in the representation of a religious fundamentalist movement / Jeremy Stolow
Republicizing religiosity: modernity, religion, and the middle class / Sanjay Joshi
A religion that was not a religion: the creation of modern Shinto in nineteenth-century Japan / Sarah Thal
Secularism and religion in the Arab Middle East: reinventing Islam in a world of nation-states / James L. Gelvin
Tra(ve)ils of secularism: Islam in museums from the Ottoman empire to the Turkish republic / Wendy M.K. Shaw
"These hills will give you great treasure": Ozark tourism and the collapse of sacred and secular / Aaron K. Ketchell
World religions and secularization from a postcolonial and anti-Eurocentric perspective / Enrique Dussel
Literacy in the eye of the conversion storm / Gauri Viswanathan
