Author: Philippe Portier
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000593304
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
This volume explores the dynamic life of religion and politics in France. The separation of church and state and the autonomy of school education from religion are the two fundamental pillars of France as a secular republic. The historical construction of French secularism (laïcité) was particularly marked by the strong opposition between the state and the Catholic church. However, the religious disaffiliation of a significant proportion of the French strengthened state secularism, which gradually became more consensual – despite some persisting tensions in the school context. Yet, in the last decades, several factors have revived public debate on laicity: the quarrel over ‘sects’ and new religious movements; controversies over Islam, today the second-largest religion in France; and, more recently, dispute over bioethics. Faced with these challenges, laicity as well as the religious groups involved have been changing. The authors of this book, ranking amongst the best French experts in the study of religion and secularism, introduce the reader to a living and lived laicity influenced by the social and religious dynamics of contemporary France. They demonstrate that the configurations of French secularism are both more flexible and complex than they appear to be. The volume investigates the extent to which the French idea of secularization has been pushed to be more thorough and radical in its interaction with its other European counterparts. A key work on French political thought, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of international politics, political philosophy, political sociology, and religion and politics.
Author: Ahmet T. Kuru
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052151780X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Comparing policy in America, France, and Turkey, this book analyzes the impact of ideological struggles on public policies toward religion.
Author: Mayanthi L. Fernando
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.
Author: L. Cady
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230106706
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
The history and politics of secularism and the public role of religion in France, India, Turkey, and the United States. It interprets the varieties of secularism as a series of evolving and contested processes of defining and remaking religion, rather than a static solution to the challenges posed by religious and political difference.
Author: Murat Akan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543808
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435
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Book Description
Discussions of modernity—or alternative and multiple modernities—often hinge on the question of secularism, especially how it travels outside its original European context. Too often, attempts to answer this question either imagine a universal model derived from the history of Western Europe, which neglects the experience of much of the world, or emphasize a local, non-European context that limits the potential for comparison. In The Politics of Secularism, Murat Akan reframes the question of secularism, exploring its presence both outside and inside Europe and offering a rich empirical account of how it moves across borders and through time. Akan uses France and Turkey to analyze political actors' comparative discussions of secularism, struggles for power, and historical contextual constraints at potential moments of institutional change. France and Turkey are critical sites of secularism: France exemplifies European political modernity, and Turkey has long been the model of secularism in a Muslim-majority country. Akan analyzes prominent debates in both countries on topics such as the visibility of the headscarf and other religious symbols, religion courses in the public school curriculum, and state salaries for clerics and imams. Akan lays out the institutional struggles between three distinct political currents—anti-clericalism, liberalism, and what he terms state-civil religionism—detailing the nuances of how political movements articulate the boundary between the secular and the religious. Disputing the prevalent idea that diversity is a new challenge to secularism and focusing on comparison itself as part of the politics of secularism, this book makes a major contribution to understanding secular politics and its limits.
Author: David Koussens
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031182316
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176
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Book Description
The increasing visibility of Islam in France and the vehemence of debates about it have often contributed to narrow public perceptions of secularism to a simplistic antireligious crusade, a misleading image disseminated by the media and politicians alike. Taking the opposite stand, this book embarks on a comprehensive effort to document the multiple areas in which French secularism plays out - in debates over “cults,” places of worship, chaplaincy services in public institutions, the recognition of associations of worship, and more -, outlining and analizing the legal paths favored by the state in the regulation of religious diversity. While Islam has undoubtedly contributed to the reshaping of French secularism in the last decades, the book moves beyond what has come to be known as the "Muslim Question" to look at the multiplicity of challenges contemporary religious beliefs, practices, and organizations now pose to the state. David Koussens examines the main political and legal configurations of French secularism over the last thirty years through a sociological and juridical lens, in order to better document its diversity. Such a portrait emphasizes that French secularism is not a univocal phenomenon but one that appears in many guises.
Author: Stephen M. Davis
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725264099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Americans are often baffled by France’s general indifference to religion and laws forbidding religious symbols in public schools, full-face veils in public places, and even the interdiction of burkinis on French beaches. An understanding of laïcité provides insight in beginning to understand France and its people. Laïcité has been described as the complete secularization of institutions as a necessity to prevent a return to the Ancien Régime characterized by the union of church and state. To understand the concept of laïcité, one must begin in the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation and freedom of conscience recognized by the Edict of Nantes in 1598. This has been called the period of incipient laïcité in the toleration of Protestantism. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 reestablished the union of the throne and altar, which resulted in persecution of the Huguenots who fought for the principle of the freedom of conscience. French laïcité presents a specificity in origin, definition, and evolution which led to the official separation of church and state in 1905. The question in the early twentieth century concerned the Roman Catholic Church’s compatibility with democracy. That same question is being asked of Islam in the twenty-first century.
Author: Raphael Cohen-Almagor
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303094669X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 74
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Book Description
This book analyses French cultural policies in the face of what the French government perceives as a challenge to its Republican secular raison d'être. It makes general arguments about France’s changing identity and specific arguments about the burqa and niqab ban. The book further explains how French history shaped the ideology of secularism and of public civil religion, and how colonial legacy, immigration, fear of terrorism, and security needs have led France to adopt the trinity of indivisibilité, sécurité, laïcité while paying homage to the traditional trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The book argues that while this motto of the French Revolution is still symbolically and politically important, its practical significance as it has been translated to policy implementation has been eroded. It shows how the emergence of the new trinity at the expense of the old one is evident when analyzing the debates concerning cultural policies in France in the face of the Islamic garb, the burqa, and the niqab, which are perceived as a challenge to France’s national secular raison d'être. Subsequently, the book raises various important questions, such as: Is the burqa and niqab ban socially just? Does it reasonably balance the preservation of societal values and freedom of conscience? What are the true motives behind the ban? Has the discourse changed in the age of COVID-19, when all people are required to wear a mask in the public space? Therefore, this book is a must-read for students, scholars, and researchers of political science, as well as a general audience interested in a better understanding of French politics, elections, cultural policy, secularism, and identity.
Author: Per-Erik Nilsson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004356037
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
In Unveiling the French Republic, Per-Erik Nilsson engages in a critical analysis of national identity, secularism, and Islam in France. He argues that secular ideology has been used to justify religious intolerance, mask ethnic prejudice, and reify French national identity.
Author: Andrew Copson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198809131
Category : RELIGION
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
What is secularism? -- Secularism in Western societies -- Secularism diversifies -- The case for Secularism -- The case against Secularism -- Conceptions of Secularism -- Hard questions and new conflicts -- Afterword: the future of Secularism
