Without denying
significant changes in the location of religion in British society at the
outset of the 20th century, I am wary of the assumptions inherent in the
concept of `secularity'. One major element in that concept is the separation of
Church and State. However, as we know, this element is not found in Britain.
The Queen is still head of that state church and the bishops, appointed by the
Crown on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, are present in the House of
Lords. And until recently articles in British newspapers even argued that it
would be undesirable for the Prince of Wales to re-marry, which he did.
However as Charles
Taylor argued, hierarchy and mediated access went together in the ancien regime, and modernity implies an image of
direct-access. (Taylor 1998, p.39.) Like Habermas and Anderson, Taylor
understands this within a larger narrative of liberation from religion.
Protestantism is then seen as a step in the unfolding story of secularization.
However, if one does not accept this story, it is possible to arrive at a
better understanding of the religious public sphere and the religious subject
under modern conditions of direct-access through literacy and mass education.
Not enough has been
done to understand the effects that literacy and the availability of printed
religious literature have had on the construction of the Christian subject and
his or her communication with the supernatural. The effects of developments
such as print and literacy on the construction of the Hindu subject or the
Muslim subject have, however, hardly begun to be examined. Furthermore, the
consequences of low and gendered literacy rates like those in Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and India on the spread of certain forms of religiosity as opposed
to others are underexamined. What we find in South Asia is an as yet
underdeveloped market for reading which competes with a rapidly expanding
market for viewing films, videos and television. In this and other cases, the
ideal-typical comparison with Protestantism opens up certain questions, but
might foreclose others.
Nevertheless, there
have been a great number of interesting attempts to use the sociological
interpretation of the rise of Protestantism as a model for understanding
transformations in Hinduism and Islam. These studies emphasize the commonality
of the search for the authentic authority of the basic texts and the
circumvention of received authority by reading these texts directly or by
reading pamphlets which refer to them. Crucial to this search is a religious
notion of Scripture as the ultimate source of truth. This notion is readily
available in religions in South Asia such as Islam and Sikhism, and to a lesser
extent in Buddhism and Hinduism.
That religion is
important in producing the modern subject should not sound too strange to those
familiar with Weber's discussion of the Protestant Ethic. That it also is
important in producing the modern public is perhaps more startling, especially
if one stresses that, in the 19th century, it is not only Protestantism that is
nationalized, but also Catholicism and many other religions, such as Islam and
Hinduism in India. One can hear the immediate objection that Protestantism had
already become the national religion of England and the Low Countries in the
16th century. However, I would suggest that there were Protestant state
churches in these countries in the early-modern period, but since the countries
were not yet nation-states, there was no national religion. In other words,
major changes in religion are underway in the 18th and 19th centuries, those
that will affect its organization, its impact and its reach. These changes have
to do with the rise of that hyphenated phenomenon: the nation-state. The modern
subject' is produced together with `the modern public' thus, religion is not
only important in the shaping of `individual conscience' and `civilized
conduct', but also in the creation of the public sphere.
Historical sociology
has always highlighted the profound effects of the rise of the market for
printed books on Christianity in Europe. The expansion of Protestantism is
generally thought to be connected to that historical phenomenon. Benedict
Anderson highlights how central Luther was to the great expansion of the market
for printed books in Germany in the early decades of the 16th century.
Protestantism was the main commodity on the vernacular print-market and created
new reading publics, essential for the rise of national consciousness. Before
the novel, we have the printed bible and the huge proliferation of religious
tracts which enabled Christians to have direct, personal access to religious
truth without the mediation of a class of priests and even involving, in some
cases, the abolition of a priesthood. What is important here is that the modern
reading public is a religious public. This is true not only for the period of
early Protestantism in the 16th but also for example Buddhism, which
stresses the authority of Scripture as against that of monastic hierarchy, as
well as the development of what they call spirit religion, in which divine
possession is central and positively valued.
The status of
Scripture in Hinduism is even more complicated than in Buddhism. On the one
hand, there is the great authority of the Vedic tradition, but, on the other
hand, that tradition can hardly be made available for moral guidance outside of
the strictly ritual sphere which is dominated by highly specialized priests.
Something similar can be said about more regional scriptural traditions, such
as the Agamas, which are crucial in South Indian temple practice. Nevertheless,
even Hinduism has witnessed some quasi-Protestant movements, such as the
successful Arya Samaj, which advocates a return to the
Vedic tradition, while at the same time completely transforming it. Similarly,
in South India there has been a strong lay movement to force Brahman priests to
make a scriptural knowledge of the Agamas more central to their practice.
The comparison with
Christian Protestantism is often forcefully made in the case of Islam. It is
especially the attack on traditional Islam, characterized by the worship of
Sufi saints, which may strike us as a Protestant iconoclasm. This attack also
entails the undermining of the traditional authority of Sufi Shaikhs and ulama with the ascendancy of the literate
middle class. Islam has in the Quran something similar to the Bible, a central
Scripture which can be used to give moral guidance; however, it is important to
observe that Quranic interpretation has never been carried out in one
centralized authority-structure like a church.
It is striking that
the Islamic world rejected the 'printing of religious books until the 19th
century and that it was only in the 1920s that the Egyptian standard edition of
the Quran started rolling from the presses. Francis Robinson argues that the
negative Muslim response to printing must be explained by the nature of the
Islamic transmission of knowledge.23 He neglects the extent to which imperial
structures like the Ottoman and Mughal empires have been obstacles for the
spread of print, but he certainly brings out an important element: for Muslims,
the Quran is God's very word, and this had always been transmitted orally.
Learning the Quran by heart and reciting has always been the defining feature
of Islamic education in madrasas. This system is also the basis for the
transmission of other knowledge. Written texts are only used as memory aids
(often in rhyme) for learning by heart. The oral tradition which transmits
knowledge from person to person, always referring back to the original author,
is superior to writing. According to Robinson, Muslims only adopted print when
it was felt to be a necessary weapon in the defense of Islam against attacks
from Christian missionaries.
This brings out the
point that the ideal-typical comparison with Protestantism should not obscure
the real influence of Christianity on other religions in the colonized world.
Islamic books were first printed in South Asia (where one-fourth of the world's
Muslims live) in the early part of the 19th century. The earliest of these were
revivalist books by Saiyid Ahmad Barelvi. In the
latter part of the 19th century, revivalists at Deoband in Northern India
started a great program of translating Arabic and Persian works into Urdu.
Along with the emergence of Muslim newspapers, this facilitated a fostering of
interest in things Islamic which extended beyond the South Asian region to a
larger part of the Muslim world. The most important change was, however, the
decline of the authority of the ulama in relation to the well-educated laity.
Their challengers were modernists like Saiyid Ahmad Khan, founder of Aligarh
Muslim University, and Islamists like Saiyid Abu Ala Maududi,
founder of the Jamaat-i-Islami.
Both were laymen who were not traditionally educated.
Although the
ideal-typical comparison with Protestantism offers a number of important
parallels with the history of other religions, such as Islam and Hinduism, it
is crucial to recognize that the place of scriptural authority and the nature
of Scripture is quite different in different religions and thus cannot be
easily compared. If we can demonstrate that the authority of Scripture becomes
more important in a kind of Protestant revolution in a number of religions in
the modem period, it does not imply that the construction of scriptural
authority therefore has the same or even similar religious and political
effects. Not only is the text different, but the context also differs. The
Protestant Revolution is a 16th century phenomenon in Europe which is not
easily comparable to 19th or 20th century developments elsewhere.
It seems to me that
there are at least two major developments that affect the relation between
modern society and modern religion: mass education and mass communication.
These developments result in a certain measure of objectification and packaging
of religion. Dale Eickelman calls 'objectification'
`the process by which three kinds of questions come to be foregrounded in the cons$iousness of large numbers of believers: What is my
religion? Why is it important to my life? and, How do my beliefs guide my
conduct? 24 Eickelman argues that the fact that
numerous people are debating these questions is a distinctively modern
phenomenon. He observes that engineers (like the leaders of the Refah party in Turkey), journalists (like Maududi), literary critics (like Qutb
in Egypt), Sorbonne-trained lawyers (like the Sudanese leader Hasan al-Turabi)
have replaced the ulama as leaders of religious opinion. Islam (like Sinhalese
Buddhism) has now seen the emergence of the notion of a religious curriculum
and of a catechism. These developments are crucial to the `objectification' of
religion. Religious statements become more explicit, and less contextualized
when broadcast on television and radio or incorporated into general textbooks.
It is interesting
that the new media are simultaneously building on the earlier Muslim preference
for orality and presence, while enabling the decontextualization and
objectification of religious messages. Eickelman
points out that Islam becomes a subject that has to be explained or understood.
A local group's particular understanding of Islam can become a subject of
transnational debate thanks to the new media. As everywhere, states try to
limit and control these debates, but they face great difficulties in doing so.
Since it is often religious and political activists who try to dominate the
debate about religion in the new media, control over the media is of paramount
political significance.
The objectification
of Islam in mass education is paralleled by the packaging of Islam on
television. In a penetrating analysis of the emergence of commercial television
in Turkey in the 1990s, Ayse Oncu
speaks of the 'issuetization' of Islam on television:
`Islam, as packaged for consumption by heterogeneous audiences, becomes an
"issue" - something that has to be addressed and confronted -
demanding each and every member of the audience to make a choice and decide
where they stand, for or against.' While secular state television made
Islam invisible, as it were, commercial television packages it either as `a
viewpoint' on a number of issues and thus as part of a democratic debate, or as
a `global machination' that is a matter of international conspiracies. Oncu's general point is that Islam is no longer something
relegated to tradition or to `the bazaar mentality of small town shopkeepers';
rather, by means of its packaging on commercial television, Islam is part of
the culture of the present. The effects for Turkish politics, but also for the
Muslim subject, are significant.
Following some concluding reflections on this topic:
1. The transnational
public sphere today is the successor of a public sphere that in many societies
is formed in the context of the interaction between 25. Onu
1995. empire and the nation-state. When one examines the colonial context of
British India, one finds a public sphere that is perhaps better characterized
as a public arena in which religious movements challenge the colonial state,
as well as each other. The form of criticism is not only debate, although
public oratory (as, for example, in religious polemic, such as shastrartha in Hinduism) is crucial, along with pamphlets
and lithographic posters, but also religious symbolism and ritual processions.
Gandhi was a genius in articulating such criticism, as, for example, in the
Salt March where he criticized colonial taxation. Hindu nationalists today have
adopted his repertoire of symbolic action and have simultaneously given
Hindu-Muslim relations a severe blow and gained considerable electoral success.
2. Religious issues
and the movements that articulate them are crucial in the formation of the
public sphere. Within democratic politics of a colonial or national state, the
context of the articulation of religious issues such as conversion is
especially a politics of numbers. The debates around these issues do involve
critical, rational discussions of history and geography, but also violent
attacks on the symbols of the other community. It is striking to what extent
the forms of mass mobilization in South Asia are prefigured in the colonial
period.
3. Mass education,
mass media, and mass politics are essential elements of the transformation of
the public sphere. Transnational migration is a defining element in these new
religious movements and in the emergence of a transnational public sphere. The
technologies of transport and communication that have developed under the present
conditions of global forms of production and consumption define the
transformation of the lifeworld of growing numbers of people, as well as their
religious responses to it. It is especially the constant shuttling between
countries of origin and countries of immigration that constitutes such a
transnational field.
4. Technologies of
communication, such as print and the internet, do not only create a new sense
of community and of the public sphere, but also of the self. The act of reading
in private shields individuals from direct interactions with the immediate
lifeworld, while linking them to a larger world of virtual interactions. The
same seems to be true for the internet; the act of reading and writing
constitute the world of the internet as well as the world of print. The kinds
of virtual interactions that are enabled by the Web are characterized by
indeterminacy and secrecy. The decentralized nature of the internet allows for
secrecy even at the level of authorship; copyright has made this difficult in
the world of print. Again, in cybersalons as in
religious movements, it seems that it is the play between publicity and secrecy
that constitutes the critical debate.
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