Civil society and religion: retrospective reflections on Catholicism and prospective reflections on Islam

Social Research, Winter, 2001 by Jose Casanova

The relevant question, of course, is whether one should attribute the widespread impulse found in the contemporary politics of Muslim countries to establish "Islamic" states to some Islamic essence Muslims cannot relinquish without also abandoning their religious tradition and their identity; or alternatively whether "it is the product of modern politics and the modernising state" (Asad, 1997: 190). I am not in a position to evaluate the competing claims concerning the history of Islam, but since one finds similar "fundamentalist" impulses to symbiotic fusions of religions and politics throughout the history of nation-state formation in the Christian West and similar "fundamentalist" impulses today within Judaism in Israel, within Hinduism in India, and within Buddhism in Sri Lanka (van der Veer and Lehman, 1999; Marty and Appleby, 1991), I would be inclined to attribute the common "fundamentalist" impulse to the common context of nation-state formation, rather than to some common symbiotic fusion of religion and politics at the genesis of all these religions that has left an indelible mark in their makeup.

Only with great poetic license could one possibly construct such a myth of origin in the case of Hinduism or Buddhism. Yet, even in the absence of such original historical precedent, the modern nationalist impulse to fuse the religious and the political communities obviously is operative in both cases. In the case of Judaism such a myth of origin was of course readily available in the image of ancient Israel depicted in the Torah, although at first only secular Zionists found an interest in re-creating the myth for modern nationalist purposes. The scant interest prior to the Holocaust on the part of world Jewry, Orthodox Jews in particular, in joining or supporting the Zionist project would seem to indicate that most Jews did not consider that having a Jewish nation-state essential to Judaism.

It is an undeniable fact that religion is at the center of politics in Muslim countries. This fact in itself is neither so remarkable nor unique. Only the blinders of secularist and liberal ideologies have obscured the fact that religion has historically been and in many cases still is a pervasive factor in the politics of modern Western countries. Certainly the party system of most continental European countries shows how central religion has been to political conflicts there. In the United States the party system was not structured along denominational lines or along religious-secularist cleavages as in Europe, but religion has certainly been and still is an important factor in American politics. But secularists tend to hold on to the notion that this is a traditional residue likely to disappear with progressive modernization and secularization, or that it is a manifestation of American "exceptionalism." What is remarkable given this context is to find Ernest Gellner (1992), an anthropologist of Islam and student of modern European nationalism, proposing the thesis that the continuous vitality of religion in modern Muslim countries, a vitality that actually seems to increase rather than decrease with modernization and that he attributes to the fusion of religious and national identities, is a peculiar form of "Islamic exceptionalism." Islam, according to Gellner, is proving to be exceptionally immune to the allegedly general forces of secularization, otherwise operative elsewhere. Of course, similar arguments have been made about Hindu and Japanese "exceptionalisms." Indeed, after so many exceptionalisms one wonders what is left of the European rule of secularization. More and more it looks as if European secularization is the one historical process that is truly "exceptional" (Casanova, 2002).