Global Secularity. A Sourcebook
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Herausgegeben von:
Christoph Kleine
Diese Reihe ist das Ergebnis der interdisziplinären Kooperation innerhalb der Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe »Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities«. Dieses an der Universität Leipzig beheimatete Forschungsprojekt hatte es sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die vielfältigen Ausprägungen von Abgrenzungen und Arrangements zwischen dem Religiösen und dem Säkularen erklärend zu erfassen, sowohl in der globalen Moderne als auch darüber hinaus.
Dem zugrunde liegt die Annahme, dass die Vielfalt der Säkularitäten in unterschiedlichen Problem- und Interessenskonstellationen, verschiedenen Formen der Begegnung mit hegemonialen Mächten ›des Westens‹, eigenen kulturellen Prägungen und historischen Pfadabhängigkeiten verwurzelt ist. Infolgedessen haben sich in verschiedenen Gesellschaften sehr unterschiedliche Bedingungsgefüge herausgebildet, die jeweils zu einzigartigen, dabei oft umstrittenen, und manchmal fragilen Formen der Säkularität führten.
Die Bände dieser Reihe stellen Quellen zu verschiedenen konzeptionellen Unterscheidungen und institutionellen Unterschieden zwischen Religion und anderen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen auf der ganzen Welt vergleichend zusammen. Band 1 bildet die theoretische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema ab; die Folgebände sind verschiedenen Regionen gewidmet. Dabei werden sowohl regionale Besonderheiten als auch überregionale Verbindungen in der Entstehung von Säkularität auf der ganzen Welt beleuchtet.
Fachgebiete
This volume maps the international academic debate on secularity. It places seminal contributions from within ‘Western’ academia alongside less well-known texts from various parts of the world; in several cases this is the first time that they have been translated into English. The volume demonstrates that the academic debate on secularity was and is a global debate, with contributions from many regions. The collected texts relate to each other either directly or indirectly by referring to similar arguments – whether reinforcing or criticising them – and thus create a discourse. When speaking of global secularity, we therefore do not insinuate a uniform ‘world secularity’ resulting from the alleged global diffusion of ‘Western’ norms, ideas and concepts. It is rather a web of relations that is constituted via various different references. These references are not evenly distributed: the development in ‘the West’ is often the point of reference to which positions from other regions relate, to which they connect, or from which they distance themselves. But the references are not completely unidirectional: We also present texts from Europe that underline the multidirectionality of the process, even early on. Thereby, the volume offers the reader the material with which to trace these global exchanges and references.
This volume collects reflections on secularity from the Middle East and North Africa. To highlight proximate connections as well as resonances with debates elsewhere, it includes premodern contributions from the region as well as Jewish thought from Europe that have provided significant references for modern appropriations of secularity.
The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its great diversity. Thus, while Islam is a common reference for most of our authors, the selections point to its varied invocations in the interest of differing political ends. Others write from a Christian or Jewish perspective, or subscribe to non-religious intellectual traditions. They range from premodern Muslim jurisprudents and philosophers to Ottoman statesmen, Arab socialist and nationalist intellectuals of the interwar period, Iranian revolutionaries, Israeli novelists, and finally, post-secular intellectuals, lay and religious, predominantly from the former Islamic heartland: modern Arab states and Iran. Several introductions weave together the swathe of topics raised in the discussions, beginning with a schematic presentation of the concerns that undergird the volume’s organization.
This volume seeks to chart and elucidate the diverse relationships between the religious and secular spheres in regions of Asia that were significantly influenced – sometimes even dominated – by Buddhist discourses, ideas, and institutions. These regions include South Asia (India, Sri Lanka), East and Southeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), Inner Asia (Buryatia, Mongolia, Tibet), and the Himalayan region (Bhutan). These regions were connected by communicative networks long before the global modern age. They constituted an intricately entangled discursive sphere, shaped by the cross-regional spread of concepts and ideas from Buddhism and, in East Asia, Confucianism. The volume sheds light on the prehistory and development of culturally specific forms of secularity, and related concepts, in Asia. It comprises a wide range of texts spanning approximately 2000 years; in many cases this is the first time that they have been presented in English. The texts here are not merely reproduced, but are also introduced and contextualized. Through these materials, the volume highlights the fact that distinctions akin to those between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ were already prevalent in premodern Asia, laying the groundwork for the various forms of secularity which took shape in the modern period.
