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Soleimani, “Islam and Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East, 1876-1926”

In June, Palgrave Macmillan will release “Islam and Competing Nationalisms in the Middle East, 1876-1926” by Kamal Soleimani (historian of the Modern Middle East and Islamic world). The publisher’s description follows:

Opposing a binary perspective that consolidates ethnicity, religion, and Unknownnationalism into separate spheres, this book demonstrates that neither nationalism nor religion can be studied in isolation in the Middle East. Religious interpretation, like other systems of meaning-production, is affected by its historical and political contexts, and the processes of interpretation and religious translation bleed into the institutional discourses and processes of nation-building. This book calls into question the foundational epistemologies of the nation-state by centering on the pivotal and intimate role Islam played in the emergence of the nation-state, showing the entanglements and reciprocities of nationalism and religious thought as they played out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Middle East.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

New Journal – Call for Papers – Brill Perspectives in Law and Religion

Brill Publishers, in cooperation with the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University, has announced the publication of a new journal, Brill Research Perspectives in Law and Religion.  Brill has also issued a call for papers. The publisher’s description follows:

Legal issues concerning religion increasingly make the news headlines these days. As a result, the intersection of law and religion is today an established but growing field 36835of scholarship worldwide. Just as the burgeoning field whose name it shares, Brill Research Perspectives in Law and Religion seeks better to understand how the phenomena of law and religion interact and to stimulate practical debate on the diverse range of issues involved. The place of religion in society, religious pluralism, the fear of religious extremism, and the terms and limits of religious freedom generate a host of important questions on the interface of law and religion. In response, law and religion scholars themselves recognise the need for interdisciplinary approaches to this developing field. Secular laws on religion, at the international and national levels, as well as their historical, political, philosophical, sociological, and comparative analysis, all form part of the canon of law and religion. Alongside these are the religious laws and other regulatory entities of religious traditions and organisations, all shaped by their distinct theological postures.

Brill Research Perspectives in Law and Religion encourages the publication of studies of the highest quality, for scholarly analysis and for public debate, associated with the regulation of religion in society and the regulation of the internal life of religious traditions. Its primary readership includes academics, researchers, practitioners, policy makers, educators, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Each issue consists of one uniquely focused article of 50-100 pages. To facilitate the efforts of researchers and educators alike, each journal issue will also be available as a book in both print and electronic format.

Brill Research Perspectives in Law and Religion is published in close cooperation with the Cardiff University Centre for Law and Religion.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

“Law and Religious Minorities in Medieval Societies” (Echevarria et al, eds.)

In June, Brepols Publishers will release “Law and Religious Minorities in Medieval Societies: Between Theory and Praxis,” edited by Ana Echevarria (UNED, Madrid) Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala (University of Cordoba), and John V. Tolan (Universit de Nantes). The publisher’s description follows: 

Muslim law developed a clear legal cadre for dhimmīs, inferior but protected non-Muslim communities (in particular Jews and Christians) and Roman Canon law brepols-publishers-logodecreed a similar status for Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe.  Yet the theoretical hierarchies between faithful and infidel were constantly brought into question in the daily interactions between men and women of different faiths in streets, markets, bath-houses, law courts, etc.  The twelve essays in this volume explore these tensions and attempts to resolve them.  These contributions show law was used to attempt to erect boundaries between communities in order to regulate or restrict interaction between faithful and non-faithful—at at the same time how these boundaries were repeatedly transgressed and negotiated.  These essays explore the possibilities and the limits of the use of legal sources for the social historian.
Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Banack, “God’s Province”

In June, the McGill-Queens University Press will release “God’s Province: Evangelical Christianity, Political Thought, and Conservatism in Alberta,” by Clark Banack (York University).  The publisher’s description follows:

Compared to the United States, it is assumed that religion has not been a significant factor in Canada’s political development. In God’s Province, Clark9780773547148 Banack challenges this assumption, showing that, in Alberta, religious motivation has played a vital role in shaping its political trajectory.

For Henry Wise Wood, president of the United Farmers of Alberta from 1916 until 1931, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, founder of the Alberta Social Credit Party and premier from 1935 until 1943, Aberhart’s protégé Ernest Manning, Alberta’s longest serving premier (1943-1968), and Manning’s son Preston, founder of the Alberta-based federal Reform Party of Canada, religion was central to their thinking about human agency, the purpose of politics, the role of the state, the nature of the economy, and the proper duties of citizens. Drawing on substantial archival research and in-depth interviews, God’s Province highlights the strong link that exists between the religiously inspired political thought and action of these formative leaders, the US evangelical Protestant tradition from which they drew, and the emergence of an individualistic, populist, and anti-statist sentiment in Alberta that is largely unfamiliar to the rest of Canada.

Covering nearly a century of Alberta’s history, Banack offers an illuminating reconsideration of the political thought of these leaders, the goals of the movements they led, and the roots of Alberta’s distinctiveness within Canada. A fusion of religious history, intellectual history, and political thought, God’s Province exposes the ways in which individual politicians have shaped one province’s political culture.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Roundtable on “Christian Human Rights”

For readers who are interested, the H-Diplo Roundtable Review has published my essay 1716on Harvard Law Professor Samuel Moyn’s provocative recent monograph, Christian Human Rights (2015), as part of a roundtable discussion of the book. Along with Moyn, the other participants include Martin Conway (Balliol College Oxford) and David A. Hollinger (Berkeley).

Here’s snippet of my essay:

Similarly, Moyn’s reflections about whether contemporary human rights can improve upon Christianity as a moral movement, with which he ends the book, are misguided. Christianity offers human rights important lessons, he says. Institutionally, the religion has been a great success. But spiritually it has been a failure: it has not improved the souls of people who call themselves Christians. As a result of this failure, he says, Christianity has been forced to retreat into “opacity and mysticism” (180). Human rights must do better. It must, according to Moyn, actually change things in this world, or else it will be just another futile faith.

These remarks are rather dismissive of Christianity. More important, they reflect a fundamental misunderstanding – a category error. Christianity is not a moral movement in the way human rights is. It does not promise people a more perfect world; it offers them salvation. That has been the essence of its appeal across millennia and its appeal today – no longer in Europe, perhaps, but across the global South, where Christianity is experiencing explosive growth. Human rights, which is a political program, can never expect to have Christianity’s place in people’s lives. I am reminded of Talleyrand’s famous answer to an earnest revolutionary who asked him for advice on how to start a new, enlightened religion to replace Christianity: ‘I recommend that you be crucified and rise again on the third day.’

And Moyn’s response:

From a Christian perspective, Mark Movsesian goes very far in welcoming this project, and not at all selfservingly — since he is ready to agree that many Christians embraced human rights more recently than some would today like to believe. I would only comment that he may have misread my epilogue, which is not at all intended to be critical of Christianity as a faith, though I recognize that temptation as an outsider. Rather, my point was that the deepest Christians have always known that Christianity itself demands constant public reflection on its own failure — a practice in which even the best human rights activists may have learned to engage far too slowly. Further, it is out of respect for Christianity as ultimately a faith movement – a faith, as Movsesian points out, based on belief in Jesus Christ’s resurrection to begin with – that I distinguish human rights as a movement that has to be held to different standards. Unlike Christians, that is, these believers have to face failures and limitations without relying on the expectation that human rights work in mysterious ways. Yet these differences hardly imply that Christianity and human rights are entirely disanalogous either. Whatever else Christianity was and is, it is a moral vision, and – as both Barnett and Hollinger agree — the methods of its partisans in inculcating that vision seem to me profoundly relevant to any other moral agenda. Beyond whatever strictly historical contributions to rethinking the 1930 and 1940s birth of human rights it makes, my book, I hope, reminds secular progressives that Christianity remains the social movement to beat.

You can read the entire roundtable here.

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Rasmussen, “Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion”

In May, the University of Utah Press will release “Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion” by Matthew Lyman Rasmussen (University of Lancaster). The publisher’s description follows:

Mormonism in Britain began in the late 1830s with the arrival of American missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not long afterward, thousands of British converts emigrated to Utah and became a kind of lifeblood for the early Mormon Church. England’s North West, where Mormonism had its strongest presence, has become a place of profound significance to the church, yet its early importance to Mormonism has never been fully explored. Matthew Rasmussen’s detailed account examines how Mormonism has changed and endured in Britain.

After many British believers left for America, church membership in England fell so sharply that the movement in Britain seemed to be on the brink of collapse. Yet British Mormonism gradually rebuilt and continues today. How did this religious minority flourish when so many nineteenth-century revivalist movements did not? Rasmussen explains Mormonism’s inception, perpetuation, and maturation in Britain in a compelling case study of a “new religious movement” with staying power.

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Stewart, “Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah”

In June, Routledge will release “Chinese Muslims and the Global Ummah: Islamic Revival and Ethnic Identity Among the Hui of Qinghai Province” by Alexander Stewart (University of California, San Diego). The publisher’s description follows:

The global spread of Islamic movements and the ascendance of a Chinese state that limits religious freedom have aroused anxieties about integrating Islam and protecting religious freedom around the world. Focusing on violent movements like the so-called Islamic State and Uygur separatists in China’s Xinjiang Province threatens to drown out the alternatives presented by apolitical and inwardly focused manifestations of transnational Islamic revival popular among groups like the Hui, China’s largest Muslim minority.

This book explores how Muslim revivalists in China’s Qinghai Province employ individual agency to reconcile transnational notions of religious orthodoxy with the materialist rationalism of atheist China. Based on a year immersed in one of China’s most concentrated and conservative urban Muslim communities in Xining, the book puts individuals’ struggles to navigate theological controversies in the contexts of global Islamic revival and Chinese modernization. By doing so, it reveals how attempts to revive the original essence of Islam can empower individuals to form peaceful and productive articulations with secular societies, and further suggests means of combatting radicalization and encouraging interfaith dialogue.

As the first major research monograph on Islamic revival in modern China, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Anthropology, Islamic Studies, and Chinese Studies.

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Around the Web This Week

Some interesting law and religion news stories from around the web this week:

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Areshidze, “Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama”

In June, the University Press of Kansas will release “Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama: Faith and the Civic Life of Democracy,” by Giorgi Areshidze (Claremont McKenna College).  The publisher’s description follows:

Debating or making speeches, American politicians invariably cite tenets of Christian faith—even as they unfailingly defend the liberal principles of tolerance and religious9780700622672 neutrality that underpin a pluralistic democracy. How these seemingly contradictory impulses can coexist—and whether this undermines the religious tradition that makes a liberal democracy possible—are the pressing questions that Giorgi Areshidze grapples with in this exploration of the civic role of religion in American political life.

The early modern Enlightenment political philosophy of John Locke has been deeply influential—if often misunderstood and sometimes contested—in shaping both the theoretical and practical contours of contemporary debates and anxieties about religion in a liberal society. Areshidze demonstrates that Locke anticipated a great theological transformation of Christianity in light of modern rationalism, one that would make Christianity into a tolerant religion compatible with liberal political principles. Locke’s experiment, as this book shows, has succeeded in important respects, but at a tremendous cost—by demanding a certain theological skepticism about revealed religion that could ultimately undermine the public concern for religious or theological truth altogether.

Democratic Religion from Locke to Obama evaluates these results in light of the role of religion in American political development, particularly as this role has been further defined in the work of political philosopher John Rawls. In the political theologies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama, Areshidze shows how, while working under Locke’s influence, all of these thinkers draw upon religion, including traditional revealed Christian ideas, in their efforts to reshape America’s moral consciousness—especially on the question of racial equality—in ways that might have surprised Locke.

Finally, drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville’s encounter with the Lockean experiment in America, this book suggests that the dissonance between how tolerant we want religion to be and what we expect it to accomplish in our civic life is a consequence of the liberal transformation of religion. By reminding us of this religious transformation, Tocqueville’s “political science” may explain some of the deepest spiritual and civic anxieties that continue to beset American democracy.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Kendhammer, “Muslims Talking Politics”

In June, the University of Chicago Press will release “Muslims Talking Politics: Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria,” by Brandon Kendhammer (Ohio University).  The publisher’s description follows:

For generations Islamic and Western intellectuals and policymakers have debated Islam’s compatibility with democratic government, usually with few solid conclusions.upso_ucplogo But where—Brandon Kendhammer asks in this book—have the voices of ordinary, working-class Muslims been in this conversation? Doesn’t the fate of democracy rest in their hands? Visiting with community members in northern Nigeria, he tells the complex story of the stunning return of democracy to a country that has also embraced Shariah law and endured the radical religious terrorism of Boko Haram.

Kendhammer argues that despite Nigeria’s struggles with jihadist insurgency, its recent history is really one of tenuous and fragile reconciliation between mass democratic aspirations and concerted popular efforts to preserve Islamic values in government and law. Combining an innovative analysis of Nigeria’s Islamic and political history with visits to the living rooms of working families, he sketches how this reconciliation has been constructed in the conversations, debates, and everyday experiences of Nigerian Muslims. In doing so, he uncovers valuable new lessons—ones rooted in the real politics of ordinary life—for how democracy might work alongside the legal recognition of Islamic values, a question that extends far beyond Nigeria and into the Muslim world at large.