As far as the philosophical view in general is concerned: cf. Jaeschke (1976); Jaeschke/Laeyendecker (1996); Jaeschke (2001).
With Lucian Hölscher one should rather assume that the European societies of the 18th century had an ideational affiliation with religion (cf. Hölscher 1990, p. 597).
See her contribution in this volume.
See also his contribution in this volume.
All figures and tables, as well as the respective empirical analyses in this article, are based on the author’s own findings.
The measurement is based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman-Index that is also used to measure cultural and ethnic diversity.
The problem is that the empirical material has been available only since the 1960s and 1970s.
I compiled these and the subsequent (Fig. 17 to Fig. 30) statistics on religion for the countries selected from the World Factbook (2005) and the World Christian Database (2005); the tables show rounded off figures, and generally only take into account larger religious communities and movements.
As the figures are from 1999, it would be advisable to verify, using more recent data, whether the attitudes of the American population have changed since the events of September 11, 2001, with regard to political religiosity. To date, however, no more recent data comparable to the World Value Survey is available from which the same indices could be compiled.
This paper uses a substantial amount of material from another paper, with a somewhat different focus: Ram-Prasad (2012).
This paper, inasmuch as it is part of my thinking on issues of philosophy, religion, politics and Indian thought, is deeply influenced by the work of Bhikhu Parekh and conversations with him over the past two decades.
Of course, the literature on liberalism and pluralism is vast, with formidable contributions from a range of thinkers. For my purpose, my own tour d’horizon of the relationship between them suffices. But for a range of views, see Bellamy (1999), Brooks (2002), Crowder (2002), Kekes (1992) and Talisse (2004).
On ethnic cores in liberal conceptions of nation (or “liberal nationalism”), see Abizadeh (2004).
See Kymlicka (2007), part II, for a cogent summary of his formidable oeuvre.
See the essays in Bhargava (2008) for a range of views on the theory and practice of the Indian Constitution.
For discussions of the Indian version of secularism in the context of various political theories concerned with the Western experience, see the essays in Bhargava (2008).
Indeed, a criticism of the Indian Constitution is that it did not make justiciable the articles under the Directive Principles of State Policy (that call for these principles to guide future laws), given that these principles are primarily concerned to bring about a fairer society in which justice is articulated primarily in terms of equality.
It is another, controversial matter that the institutional culture of the Indian State is seen by some to in fact make a majoritarian Hindu identity substantive.
This is the reason why I take this discussion to be quite different from ones about multiculturalist policies regarding group rights, such as rights of self-government, territorial autonomy, public funding of cultural life, etc. (cf. Kymlicka 2007). While some of these are indeed policy consequences of provisions of the Indian Constitution, they are also, in Western countries specifically, distinguished from liberal citizenship.
For a wide-ranging and incisive collection of views on the vision of the Indian Constitution and the challenges it has faced in practice, see the essays in Seminar (2010).
I am quoting from the prospectus for the Dahlem Humanities Center “Concept Laboratory” on Religion and Society in the 21st Century (May 4–6, 2011) that was sent to participants in January 2011 by Joachim Küpper.
The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for his/her comments on a draft of this essay. The usual caveats hold.
Data presented and discussed in this essay were collected during two phases of fieldwork in Nigeria in February/March and October 2010. This was also the campaign season for parliamentary, governorship, and presidential elections in the country. Campaign materials and political advertisement materials were collected in nine states (Abia, Akwa Ibom, Cross Rivers, Rivers, Imo, Oyo, Lagos and Ogun) in southern Nigeria and Kaduna state in northern Nigeria, and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory. The preponderance of Christian imagery and ideas in the examples to be used in this discussion is due to the fact that many of these states are made up of a majority of Christians with the exception of Oyo State, which is estimated to have equal numbers of Muslims and Christians. – Broadly speaking, there are nineteen northern states and seventeen southern states. States like Kwara, Plateau, Kogi and Benue, which geographically fall within the middle-belt, are frequently grouped with the northern states.
The 1999 election which foisted Olusegun Obasanjo on the country as president was generally judged as rigged by the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and characterised by pro-PDP malpractice which was supported by retired military generals in the party (cf. Ihonvbare 1999).
No one has been able to state how a contraption put together by Lord Lugard in 1914 for the convenience of the British Empire became a divine “product” with the attributes of “indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God”.
The governor of Zamfara state signed the first of these hastily packaged Shari’ah rules into law on 27 October 1999, precipitating eleven other northern states to follow in its stride.
For members of a coalition of opposition parties, the acronym PDP stands for “Poverty Development Party”. They claim that the more than one decade in power of the ruling party at the federal level in Nigeria has turned the country into “a political and economic cemetery” (Adams Oshiomole, Governor of Edo state on the platform of Action Congress of Nigeria [ACN]): http://www.africanoutlookonline.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=834: nigeria-2011-its-ribadu-for-acn&catid=48:political-news&Itemid=29, visited on April 8, 2013.
Many of these never fielded a candidate or won any election in the country. Cf. INEC http://www.inecnigeria.org/index.php?cateid=3&contid=93, visited on April 8, 2013.
INEC also has the legal power to de-register a political party that fails to win any elections at the federal or state levels or supplies false or misleading information during its registration exercise.
The operative word in this provision is the verb “exploit” which means either, i) to take selfish or unfair advantage of a person or situation, usually for personal gain“, or, ii) ”to use or develop something in order to gain a benefit“ (Bloomsbury English Dictionary 2004, p. 652).
Section 10 of the Nigerian Constitution states ”[t]he Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion“.
John Campbell (2011, p. 43) writes in this respect: “Almost everybody, in what Americans would regard as secular circumstances, uses faith vocabulary. Almost all public events are opened and closed with prayer. Causation events, big and small, public or private, is [sic] routinely ascribed to divine intervention or the wilful lack thereof. Christians and Muslims in Nigeria share a rejection of the Western concept of a separation of the religious and secular spheres of life”. The open use of religious images and motifs in the marketing of goods and services started with producers and marketers of household goods and telecommunications services in Nigeria in the mid-1990s. When their market success was attributed to religion, politicians noticed the pattern and followed their example.
Holy Bible (1994); all Bible citations are from this edition, unless otherwise specified.
Nigerian state governors appropriate lump sums of money from the federal account as “Security Votes” and simply line their pockets with them (cf. Egbo/Nwakoby/Onwumere/Uche 2010). Even as the amount of money shared by governors grew, insecurity of life and property has become a defining feature of contemporary Nigeria (Omede 2011). Jonathan nearly bankrupted Bayelsa state as governor. As president, he has refused to declare his assets as demanded by law.
On the importance of the gaze or the role of images in the context mentioned above, see Morgan (2005).
One national legislator in Nigeria earns an average of 320 million Naira (€1,531,100.48) per annum, excluding bribes and rents s/he routinely demands and gets, contracts, “constituency projects” and other pecuniary perquisites (cf. El Rufai 2012; cf. Economic Confidential 2011). Concerning the cesspool of corruption in the Nigerian legislature, Wole Soyinka recently remarked: “The Nigerian legislative system is hydro-pus. There is no way you can fight corruption without changing the legislature. Here, the more corrupt a person is, the more chieftaincy he will get. We need a complete systemic transformation. Why should there be full-time legislation. Corruption is right at the top and percolates down” (quoted in: Adeniji 2012, par. 5).
According to Moses Ochonu (2010, par. 8), “[Nigerian] ‘Democracy’ has […] democratised corruption”. According to Adebanwi and Obadare (2011, p. 190), “Nigerian leaders have either stolen or mismanaged US$ 412 billion since independence […]”. Chinua Achebe (2012, p. 249) makes a similar claim in his recent book.
In the myriad commentaries and discussions of the akeda, the most influential for modern thinkers and writers has been that of Kierkegaard (1985 [1843]), who argued in 1843 that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac was a primordial act of faith that ushered in the dawn of monotheism and not an act to be emulated. The persistence of the story as template for behavior has nevertheless continued unabated, as we will see below.
All quotes from the Torah are from the translation of The Five Books of Moses (Alter 2004). Key Hebrew words have been cited in brackets.
My emphasis.
For an elaboration of the process by which the story and place of sacrifice congeal in the Hebrew Bible, see Ezrahi (2007).
For a larger discussion of the place of “place” in the Jewish imagination, see Ezrahi (2000); Eisen (1986); Gurevitch and Aran (1997). In GenR/BerR (68:9) it is stated that God “is the place of the universe though the universe is not His place.”
See mYom (5:2); ySan (10:29); for the Muslim reference, see Makiya (2001, p. 182, p. 322–325).
My translation.
For a more extensive discussion of distance as a critical ingredient in the diasporic imagination, see Ezrahi (2000, especially p. 3–31).
See among others, poems by the following Hebrew poets: Bialik, “Al ha-shehitah” [On the Slaughter]; Yitzhak Lamdan, “Al ha-mizbeah” [On the Altar], Amir Gilboa, “Yitzhak”; Haim Guri, “Yerusha” [Heritage]; A. B. Yehoshua, “Be-kayitz 1970” [In the Summer of 1970] and Mr. Mani; see also the work of Tuvya Rubner, Avot Yeshurun and T. Carmi.
For a more extensive discussion of Mr. Mani and of the repercussions of a culture of sacrifice in modern Israel, see Ezrahi (2012).
Numerous poetic and fictional reworkings of the akeda in modern Hebrew literature are considered in Feldman (2010); see also Kartun-Blum (1999).
See, for example, the case of the poet Raya Harnik, who wrote, “I will not sacrifice / my first born as a burnt offering. / Not me” – twelve years before her son Guni was killed in the Beaufort Castle just preceding the Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000 (quoted in Feldman 2010, p. 277). See also Grossman’s powerful novel (2010). While the story of a woman running away from the anticipated announcement of her soldier-son’s death in many ways calls for the akeda, only briefly and fleetingly does the main character, Ora, consider this topos and its “comforts” before rejecting them. Hanokh Levin and David Avidan also “joined the women” by rejecting the adequacy of the akeda in the 1960s and 1970s.
For an elaboration of this subject and of Pagis’ poetic achievement, see Ezrahi (1990).
The original,“Be-layl geshem bi-yirushalayim”, appeared in a cycle of poems entitled “Masa va-nevel” [Journey with a Harp], published in the Rosh Hashana issue of Luah ha-aretz, September, 1953. This poem never appeared in any of Greenberg’s published collections. Posthumously it was published in one Greenberg collection (1995).
“Yakholnu le-hahzir et yerushalayim ’im har ha-bayit ve-kol ha-kodesh she-bein ha-homot lanu u-le-vaneinu – be-mehi ahat: begevurah”. Quoted from Divrei ha-knesset [Protocols of the Knesset], 1949, in Hever (2004, p. 153).
See Girard’s work on “mimetic desire” (1965).
“Kisuf politi” in Greenberg’s words. Hever (2004, p. 153) glosses this term, which means political yearning, as the more psychoanalytically resonant “teshuka politit” [political desire].
One of the most fascinating sections in this book is Hever’s discussion of the complex relationship between Greenberg and David Ben-Gurion, the leader he invested with messianic status.
See the “avalei tzion” [the mourners of Zion] of the ninth century or the aborted journey of Yehuda Halevi to the Holy Land in the twelfth century (Ezrahi 2000, p. 33–51).
In Nostalgia and Nightmare, Band (1968) was among the first to indicate the dialectical swings between the poles I prefer to call “tradition” and “the modern.”
The following discussion contains a brief version of some of the arguments I make in that much longer essay on this novel.
The reference here is to Nadav and Avihu, the two sons of Aaron the Priest, who brought their burning censers before the Lord, unauthorized and unbidden, and paid for it with their lives. See Lev. 10:1.
My emphasis.
Eshel (2003, p. 131) sees in Balak the exilic alternative to a centripetal Zionist vision. I see it in Isaac. But Isaac’s painting on the dog’s back, and Balak’s subsequent sinking his teeth into Isaac’s flesh, both violate the principles that governed their own natures.
“The Real Hero of the Sacrifice of Isaac” (Amichai 1994). I have changed this translation slightly, introducing the Hebrew word “akeda” in the first line instead of the word “sacrifice” in the English translation; and reintroducing the last line in the third verse – “And the thicket was his last friend” – which the translators deleted.
In this, the Biblical story is one of the earliest evidences in western literature of sacrifice as an act of substitution – elaborated in a comparative framework in the work of Girard (1977) and others, including Giorgio Agamben. But the important thing to note about the Biblical text is that sacrifice itself is valorized, even as human sacrifice is eschewed.
On Kadishman and the theme of the akeda, see http://www.kadishman.com/works/Sacrifice_of_Isaac/ .
“Tanakh, tanakh, itakh itakh u-midrashim aherim” [The Bible and You, the Bible and You [f.], and Other Midrashim], #20. My translation.
“The Bible and You, the Bible and You, and Other Midrashim,” #5.
This is a modified version of an article which first appeared in Approaching Religion (Amir-Moazami 2011a). The German version appeared in Migrationsreport 2010 (Amir-Moazami 2011b). For their valuable comments I would like to thank Werner Schiffauer, Mika Hannula and Heiko Henkel as well as the organizers and participants of the “Concept Laboratory Religion and Society in the 21st Century”. For his English translation I would like to thank Rod Sturdy.
For detailed information on the structure and development of the DIK see its homepage: http://www.deutsche-islamkonferenz.de.
By deliberation I here mean a participatory theoretical arrangement which aims to include as many people as possible in the procedural character of the political dialogue; its most important promoters are Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib and Amy Gutmann.
Translated by Rod Sturdy.
Mouffe proposes transforming antagonisms into agonisms. In so doing “them and us” differences would merely be kept under control, and not kept quiet or be overcome through consensus-forming (Mouffe 2007, p. 22).
This point has been elaborated upon more thoroughly by the sociologist Casanova’s (1994) prominent thesis of a “de-privatisation” of religion.
A prominent exponent of this argument, which is also quoted by Habermas, is Wolterstorff (1997). Wolterstorff for example accepts religious arguments even for democratic legislation.
Translated by Rod Sturdy; see for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).
Translated by Rod Sturdy.
Translated by Rod Sturdy; my emphasis.
At one point Habermas gives “religious citizens” a whole catalogue of characteristics to catch up on (Habermas 2009, p. 143f.).
See for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).
Wolfgang Schäuble stated this in his first speech to the DIK.
This marked emphasis is obvious from the title and subjects of the workshops, above all in the first round. For this, see Amir-Moazami (2009b). In fact the workshops in DIK II have been renamed. Nevertheless the emphasis on values remains.
Translated by Rod Sturdy; my italics; see also Schäuble (2008).
On this point I cannot be precise, as we are not dealing with a documented concept. I have however learned in the course of various conversations that this extra loyalty to the constitution has been termed “Constitution Plus” in state circles.
This information is taken from personal conversations with various people active in the DIK.
This is unpublished information that I gathered in personal interviews with participants in the working groups.
More comprehensively dealt with in Amir-Moazami (2009b). The Milli Görüs (IGMG) was offered mere “observer status” in the second round of the DIK, as the organization was at the time being investigated by the public prosecutor.
My italics; see for example Habermas (1981a, p. 71).
This quotation is taken from an interview I conducted with the General Secretary of the IGMG Oguz Ücüncü on April 1st, 2008 in Köln-Kerpen.
It would be worth looking more carefully into the genealogy of the right to religious freedom in this regard, namely for a case in point for built-in limitations of constitutional principles. José Casanova (1994, chap. 2), for example, reminds us that the very idea of religious freedom emerged in the first place as a right to protect the individual’s religious consciousness from externally prescribed religiosity. Its driving force has therefore been the privatization of belief instead of the claims towards worshipping in public.
This is one of the central arguments of Parekh (2008).
On this point, see chiefly Asad (2006).
Classical representatives of this position are, among others, Berger (1967) and Luckmann (1967).
Most important, Asad (1993).
Critically, Riesebrodt (2001, p. 15–33).