Secularism and Religion-Making

This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion. The individual contributions, written by a new generation of scholars with decisively interdisciplinary approaches, examine the processes of translation and globalization of historically specific concepts and practices of religion - and its dialectical counterpart, the secular - into new contexts. This volume contributes to the relatively new field of thought that aspires to unravel the thoroughly intertwined relationships between religion and secularism as modern concepts.

Markus Dressler has published extensively on Turkish Alevism. His further interests include the sociology and politics of Islam in Turkey, nationalist Turkish historiography, and Sufism in the West. Theoretically, his research engages in the work of concepts in the study of religion and Islam, as well as the interaction between religion, secularism, and nationalism.

Arvind-Pal S. Mandair is S.B.S.C. Associate Professor of Sikh Studies at the University of Michigan. His recent books include Religion and the Specter of the West and Teachings of the Sikh Gurus. He is a founding editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory and Assistant editor of Culture and Religion.