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.
 
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]).

-, `The Goodness of Nations' in: van der Veer &c 1999, pp. 197-203.

Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993).

Calhoun, Craig, `Civil Society and the Public Sphere', Public Culture 5 (1993), 2, pp. 267-281.

- (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

Dean, Jodi, 'Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture', Public Culture 13 (2001), 2, pp. 243-267.

Eade, John, `Nationalism, Community, and the Islamization of Space in London' in: Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Muslim Space (California: University of California Press,

1997), pp. 217-234.

Eickelman, Dale F., `Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies', American Ethnologist 19 (1992), 4, pp. 643-655.

Geertz, Clifford, `The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States', in: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 255-311.

Gombrich, Richard, and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988).

Habermas, Jürgen, 'Zur Kritik an der Geschichtsphilosophie (R. Koselleck, H. Kesting)' in: Jürgen Habermas, Kultur and Kritik• Verstreute Aufsatze (Frankfurt

a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 355-364.

-, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1962] 1989).

Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink, `Historical Precursors to Modern Transnational Social Movements and Networks' in: John Guidry, Michael Kennedy, and Mayer Zald, Globalizations and Social Movements. Culture, Power and the Transnational Public Sphere (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 35-54. Koselleck, Reinhart, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1959] 1988).

Mauss, Marcel, `La nation', in: Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969), 3, pp. 573-625. Original from the 1920s.

McLeod, Hugh, `Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815-1945' in: van der Veer &c 1999, pp. 44-71.

Mitchell, Timothy, The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics', American Political Science Review 85 (1991), 1, pp. 77-96.

Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: New Left Books, 1981).

Oncu, Ayse, `Packaging Islam: Cultural politics on the Landscape of Turkish Commercial Television', Public Culture 8 (1995), 1, pp. 51-73.

Robbins, Keith, `Religion and Identity in Modern British History', in: Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity [Studies in Church History, Vol 18] (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 465-487. Robinson, Francis, `Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print', Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993), 1, pp. 229-25 1.

Suleri, Sara, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Taylor, Charles, `Modes of Secularism', in: Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and its Critics (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998), pp. 31-53.

van der Veer, Peter, Imperial Encounters. Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).

van der Veer, Peter, and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999).

van Rooden, Peter, `History, the Nation, and Religion: The Transformations of the Dutch Religious Past', in: van der Veer &c 1999, pp. 96-112.



For updates click homepage here

 

 

 

 

shopify analytics