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Religion and the World in Historical Perspective

This chapter problematises common assumptions about East/West and Islam/West divisions relating to religion, society and the state. It examines the concrete positions and functions of religion and religious institutions in public life in the historical practices and political thinking of Byzantine, medieval and early modern European, Abbasid and Ottoman societies. It devotes a special study to the historical realities of Muslim jurisprudence. This chapter proposes to treat secularism as a complex and objective political, social and cultural dynamic allied to global processes of modernisation, rather than a checklist of stable features which can be judged exist or to be absent in any given society. It proposes that the common idea that some societies are by nature receptive to secularism while others are not, is irrelevant to the issues that arise in concrete studies of secularism, and that secularism is never complete or unalloyed.