Sunday, June 19, 2005

Secularism and its Discontents

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Nikki R. Keddie, Univ. of California-Los Angeles
Dædalus Summer 2003


In the quarter century since the Iranian Revolution took much of the world by surprise–not least in the way its religious leadership mobilized a genuinely popular uprising–many commentators in the West have been inclined to see the Middle East and South Asia as cultural backwaters, where religion-based politics are overcoming the secular forms of political organization appropriate to modern industrial societies.
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But this understanding of recent events is misleading. A comparative historical survey of the rise and fall of successive waves of secularism in the modern era reveals a more complicated and paradoxical picture of trends in Western countries and of the impact of these trends on societies struggling to emulate the economic success of the modern West.
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In the survey that follows, I will focus on the conflict between secularist and antisecularist trends in a variety of different states, starting with the rise of secularism in the West. Before I begin, it will be useful to examine more closely the history of some key terms...
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