27. which of the following is a secular leader

The crucial historical moment at which the changed role of Diyanet became apparent was the night of the coup attempt of July Diyanet had become a vital tool in the mobilisation, rather than the governance, of the pious masses. The change began, in fact, a decade earlier when, due to the end of the Cold War, Suharto could no longer count on the unconditional support of the United States and sought to broaden his domestic support by accommodating former Islamist critics and allowing Islam a greater visibility in the public sphere.

Strictly practising Muslims came to replace abangan and Christians as the dominant group in the military and the bureaucracy as well as in the government cabinets of the s Liddle ; Bruinessen Vocal Islamic groups gained an increasing influence on public discourse, and this trend was accelerated after the fall of the Suharto regime. Secular politicians, perceiving that they needed to win over Muslim constituencies, tended to make symbolic gestures serving the agenda of the most vocal and not necessarily most representative Muslim groups.

The longest-serving president since Suharto, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono , allowed conservative, bigoted and intolerant voices within the umma to gain discursive dominance and did little to protect minorities. Especially his second five-year term, when he made a particularly unfortunate choice of man to lead MORA, was a dark period for religious minorities and further empowered the more conservative segments of the umma as well as non-violent Islamic radicals Bush ; Bruinessen Although continuing to receive a modest amount of support from the government, it found a more important source of financing in the lucrative business of halal labelling, for the food and cosmetics industries as well as for banks moving into Shariah-compliant forms of banking.

It organised national congresses at which it co-opted new members. In other words, new staff and functionaries were no longer selected by the government, but neither did any representative body outside MUI itself have a say in this.

The new members included predominantly men affiliated with conservative and radical movements, and largely excluded liberals and progressives. This composition was reflected in the fatwas that the MUI issued in the following years. The MUI began to issue unsolicited advice to the government, and lobbied to have its fatwa s — including anti-minority fatwa s— adopted as the basis of legislation Ichwan ; Crouch The MUI allowed itself to become a vehicle for Islamist groups that wanted to change the existing secular order.

In both countries, conservative religious segments of the population that had been marginalised if not oppressed by military-backed authoritarian secularist regimes during the Cold War period have gained a great amount of political leverage. Each of the six recognised religions has its official body of representatives that acts as an interface with the government as well as with the other religious communities, and the government favours interreligious dialogue.

Each of the religions is to some extent represented in the Ministry of Religious Affairs, although the main task of the Ministry has undoubtedly been the administration of Islam.

Under Suharto, the Ministry adopted positions independent of the major Muslim associations and their demands, but in the post-Suharto period various factions of the Muslim umma have gained a foothold in the Ministry and made it a vehicle for partisan, often conservative, agendas. The Council liberated itself from its role as passive legitimiser of authoritarian government policies and positioned itself as part government adviser part spokesman for the umma — and especially for the more conservative sections of the umma.

The major Muslim associations have their representatives in the MUI, but also the more radical Islamist fringes. For the past fifteen years, the MUI has been at the forefront of a conservative backlash against progressive interpretations of Islam and tolerance of religious pluralism.

In several cases it has acted in concert with violent vigilante groups intimidating religious minorities. Officially, the state continues the policy of equal distance to the recognised religions, but government has repeatedly failed to protect religious minority rights, if only out of fear of losing legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim majority.

Radical preachers speaking in the name of Islam have gained a dominant voice in the public sphere and impact on policy decisions at various levels of government. The state of the secular order is precarious. After the coup, the military-backed government sought to promote a conservative religious-nationalistic doctrine, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, as a means of fighting socialism and communism as well as political Islam.

Diyanet was given an important role in this project, and the number of mosques and imams under its control rapidly expanded. Diyanet was moreover tasked with the surveillance of the Turkish diaspora.

Capable and reliable religious functionaries were needed, and the number of Imam Hatip schools expanded accordingly. These schools became popular among conservative Muslim families because of the limited religious part of the curriculum. Many graduates, however, had little desire to become mere prayer leaders and preachers; they sought to continue their education in various professional or academic institutions.

The educational and professional mobility of the community of Imam Hatip graduates was closely correlated with the emergence of a successful, conservative Muslim business community, and both lay at the roots of the rise of the AKP. The Imam Hatip schools played a part in the emancipation process. It is true that the government endorses conservative values, discourages alcohol consumption, and looks kindly on female veiling.

Structurally, however, little has changed. Religious thinkers, ulama and Sufi shaykhs have not been empowered, the Shariah is not accepted as a source of legislation, religious thought has no significant influence in the political process, the state retains its monopoly on religious education and outreach, and religious congregations [ cemaat s ] are tightly controlled.

All of this is quite unlike the situation in Indonesia. The budget of Diyanet has continued to increase and most of its personnel no doubt are close to the AKP in social background and social-religious convictions. However, this has not given the institution a greater influence in shaping policy and reconceptualising state-Islam relations.

Diyanet remains an instrument of government policy and state interest, as it was before. Tauris, p. Aktay, Yasin Yaran eds. Change and essence: dialectical relations between change and continuity in the Turkish intellectual tradition , Washington DC, The Council for Values and Philosophy, p. Asad, Talal Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity.

Beatty, Andrew Varieties of Javanese religion: an anthropological account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, Robert N. Benda, Harry J. The Hague, W. Boland, B. The Struggle of Islam in Modern Indonesia. The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff. Bruinessen, Martin van Indonesien am Ende des Jahrhunderts , Hamburg, Abera-Verlag, p.

Le monde turco-iranien en question , Paris: Karthala, p. Bush, Robin Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Istanbul, Metis. Rethinking secularism. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Public religions in the modern world. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. DOI: Crouch, Melissa Amy Exter, Jak den Beverwijk, Centrum Buitenlanders Peregrinus.

Fahmi, Georges The Egyptian state and the religious sphere. Carnegie Middle East Center paper. Geertz, Clifford That obviously is not correct. What it means is that it is a state which honors all faiths equally and gives them equal opportunities. Indeed, as political theorist Rajeev Bhargava has argued, Indian secularism has not meant that the government abstains from intervening in religious matters.

For example, the state reformed Hindu personal laws according to a series of new Hindu code bills without imposing similar changes on religious minorities. Muslims, for instance, were allowed to retain sharia law. Similarly, the Indian state subsidizes different religious pilgrimages albeit not necessarily to the same extent , including Sikhs going to Pakistan, Hindus visiting Amarnath Cave in Jammu and Kashmir, and Muslims going to Mecca for the hajj.

The state also contributes financially to major religious celebrations such as the Hindu Kumbha Mela; the festivities in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, cost 1. Starting in the s, Indian secularism came under more severe strain. The Congress Party began opportunistically pandering to one religious community after another more overtly, and Indian secularism was deeply damaged as a result. To begin with, prime minister Indira Gandhi sought to capitalize on religious differences in several blatantly cynical ways.

In the course of handling the divisive Shah Bano case, he sought to invoke sharia as the template for Muslim communal law in India as a way to mollify Indian Muslims. Savarkar in Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? While the Hindu Mahasabha, the right wing of the Congress Party until Savarkar transformed it into a separate party in , engaged in electoral politics even prior to independence, the RSS chose to focus on developing a dense network of local branches and creating front organizations, including a student union and a labor union.

In , the RSS decided it could no longer remain disengaged from electoral politics, so it helped establish a political party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh BJS , in conjunction with former Hindu Mahasabha leaders. Exploiting the missteps of the Congress Party, Hindu nationalists began accusing it of playing vote bank politics with Muslims.

But, at the same time, the RSS played the same card with Hindu voters. Hindu nationalist political entrepreneurs decided to turn the majority community into a vote bank when secular leaders of the Janata Party accused ex-Jana Sanghis of paying allegiance to the RSS.

Once Hindus get united, the government would start caring for them also. The launch of the Ayodhya movement must be understood in light of this speech. The campaign around a prospective Ram mandir temple in resulted in a wave of riots that polarized voters along religious lines.

Such polarization helped the BJP win the state elections in Uttar Pradesh where, in , activists tore the Babri Masjid to the ground to make way for a Ram temple. A handful of years after the Ayodhya movement, the BJP briefly rose to power in New Delhi in and won elections again in On both occasions, however, the party was at the helm of a larger coalition, the National Democratic Alliance NDA , whose other members did not all share a Hindu nationalist agenda.

The BJP lost the general elections, and the Congress-led coalition that took over from the NDA, the United Progressive Alliance UPA , returned to a more secular brand of politics, as evident from the appointment of the Sachar Committee to assess the socioeconomic conditions of the Muslim community, 15 which the report demonstrated was pitiable.

In , for the first time, the BJP won an absolute majority in the lower house of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha. Having tasted political power on the national stage for the first time in a decade, the party chose not to resuscitate the three controversial issues mentioned above, but it did pursue actions intended to marginalize Muslims through unofficial channels. For instance, groups of Hindu vigilantes tried to discipline minorities Muslims and Christians with the blessing of the state apparatus using a form of cultural policing that had previously been restricted to BJP-ruled states.

But it has also spread beyond them. Such Hindu vigilantism has manifested in a variety of ways. Since , vigilante groups have targeted Muslims accused of seducing and marrying young Hindu women to convert them, a phenomenon some have labeled love jihad.

This campaign was followed by the ghar wapsi or homecoming movement, which aimed to re convert Muslims and Christians to the Hindu faith as a reaction to Muslim and Christian proselytism. The issue of cow protection was an even more effective way of organizing activists, who formed a new movement called Gau Raksha Dal.

Founded in , the Indian National Congress was predominantly liberal-secular, and officially neutral regarding religion. Such religious neutrality seemed necessary if the party was to enlist both Muslims and Hindus in the struggle for national independence. Tilak attracted mostly Hindu support and alienated some non-Hindus.

In the first years of the twentieth century, divisive communal issues came to the fore with the abortive partition of Bengal, favored by Muslims but broadly opposed by Hindus. The dispute over Bengal led to the formation of the Muslim League and to the granting of separate electorates, at first for local bodies, based on religion.

The Congress Party attracted a number of Muslim politicians, most prominently A. Azad, at a time when the Muslim League was far from securing the majority of Muslim voters. On the other hand, the religious Gandhi and his agnostic fellow Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru were in agreement that the national movement and ultimate national government of a united India should be secular in its policies and treat all religions equally.

In elections for provincial legislatures in , the Muslim League did not get the majority of Muslim votes, but subsequently many Muslims found the performance of the Congress-dominated legislatures pro-Hindu and discriminatory. While partition might have been avoided—especially if Nehru had accepted proposals for substantial autonomy for Muslim regions— it instead took effect with brutal suddenness after the hasty departure of the British in Large-scale massacres occurred on both sides.

In India after the partition, maintaining state secularism and religious neutrality proved difficult, and the Indian constitution did not establish a uniform civil code. In , a crisis ensued when a branch of the Indian supreme court ruled that an elderly Muslim woman, Shah Bano, was entitled to maintenance by her ex-husband under a section of the Indian Criminal Code, and went beyond this in advocating a uniform civil code.

This led to significant Hindu-Muslim conflict, though some Muslim women and liberals agreed with the judgment. A Hindu nationalist backlash was a factor in the ultimately successful campaign to demolish the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. In recent years, Hindu nationalism has grown in power; its party, the BJP, currently leads the government. A number of intellectuals, including Ashis Nandy, T. Madan, and Partha Chatterjee, have questioned either secularism itself or the particular secularist policies of past governments.

Some Indian intellectuals defend secularism, but criticize its application, arguing, for example, that Nehru and his followers adopted a top-down policy, doing little to negotiate with religious people before handling problems with insensitivity. The conflict between secularism and religious nationalism has been a recurrent theme of recent South Asian history not only in India but also in Sri Lanka.

In reaction to Hindu and Muslim versions of religious nationalism, Sikh and Buddhist nationalist movements have emerged in South Asia.

All of these religious nationalist movements have contributed to a weakening of secularism in the region. The Indian situation differs from that of the Muslim world in that it involves reactions against a longstanding secular government with democratic elections. At the same time, Western political hegemony is less of an issue in India. India and the Muslim world are similar in that secularism developed there much more rapidly than in the West—imposed top-down on populations that have not yet embraced a secular outlook.

Another area where secularism has been on the defensive, and religio-politics on the rise, is a very different country, neither third world nor newly established: the United States.

The United States has little in common with the countries surveyed so far, and very possibly most of the reasons for the attacks on secularism in the United States are different from those elsewhere, even though its antisecular forces became strong almost simultaneously. There do, however, seem to be some similarities. Notably, the rise of the New Religious Politics since is in part a reaction to strong and sometimes resented secular measures, accompanied by a rise in government centralization and increasing encroachment in many spheres of life.

In the United States there have been a number of secularizing governmental measures, but antisecular opposition has focused in particular on two Supreme Court decisions: the outlawing of school prayer in and the legalization of abortion in Throughout the world, the strengthening of antisecular political parties and movements has been accompanied by some weakening of secular parties and movements, a weakening due not only to political failures but also to popular disillusionment with the old secular ideologies and panaceas.

The end of Communism unleashed in some populations a renewal of religious traditions not wholly lost in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Among worldwide behavioral trends are the rise of freer sexual habits, resulting in more babies born out of wedlock and a rise in sexually transmitted diseases and crime rates, and a felt decline in community action and spirit, partly due to atomizing forces like television. Some people find in revived religious ties and morality a partial or complete solution for such problems.

In the past, when religion and government were usually intertwined, it was easy for dissidents to see the weakening of religious powers and the creation of secular states as major steps to solving social problems. Similarly, today, when secularism and government are usually intertwined, it is easy for dissidents to react against secular states and call for an obvious alternative—renewed political power for religion.

In the past, when secular ideologies like nationalism, socialism, and free market capitalism had not been widely tried, they could more easily be presented as keys to creating a better world. In recent decades this situation has been reversed, and religious groups no longer tied to government have been able to advance religious solutions to intractable secular problems.

A related dynamic is at work in some intellectual circles, in which disillusion with various older secular ideals has opened the door for some to reinstate religion or create new religious ideologies. This goes along with the upswing in identity politics in recent decades, where religion, along with ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference, has become a basis of political solidarity, in part replacing older identities based on class or patriotism, or on universalist worldviews like socialism and liberalism.

In some ways, however, the rise in religiosity and decline in secularism are perhaps less pervasive than they seem. For one thing, all sorts of traditions eschewed by the Westernized educated classes have come to be seen, often erroneously, as belonging to religious tradition. In the Islamic world as in the United States, the religious Right has embraced a romantic view of traditional social relations, projecting a picture of harmony that never, or rarely, existed. The backlash to secularism is likely to produce its own backlash, which is happening already in Iran, particularly among young people and women, who have been able to force some changes in policy.

In the United States too, for all the superior grassroots political organization of the religious Right, fundamentalism has so far been unable to win majority support, either in elections or in polling on major moral and social issues, even though it has importantly influenced Republican policies.

Taking the world as a whole, we see that secularism today is not in overwhelming retreat, although antisecular ideologies now have more strength than they did some decades ago. Still, the struggle between secular and religious worldviews is far from over. In conclusion, I think it is worth stressing two major points that emerge from this brief comparative historical survey of secularism around the world:. First, secularization around the world has been a far longer, more difficult, and more partial process than is usually assumed.

It requires a profound change in human outlook: in both the West and the East, the difficulties of establishing stable secular regimes have often been underestimated. Second, the Western path to secularism, and indeed the Western definitions of secularism, may not be fully applicable in all parts of the world, because of religious differences and the complex impact of Western colonialism.

It is therefore predictable that non-Western states that try to establish secularism quickly by government fiat, without marshaling popular support, will experience serious difficulties—and run the risk of provoking a religious backlash. Modern religious rule has not, however, solved the problems that brought it to power. It has increased inequalities between genders and among religious communities and has brought about its own backlash and countermobilizations. Carol Volk Cambridge, Mass.

John Ruedy New York: St. The leader failed me. A defence can be made by saying that she does talk about discrimination. But does this word articulate the injury to the souls of Indian Muslims, the stain of their blood on our streets and fields?

It can be argued that it is unfair to demand such boldness from a leader, who herself has been subjected to the vilest of attacks because of her religious antecedents and her place of origin. That is even more a reason for her, a leader of a party where she enjoys respect across factions, to assert the right of a Muslim or a Christian to live with full rights.

Should one say that the word communalism is inadequate to describe the politics of the BJP? It is aggressive majoritarianism which is disenfranchising Muslims in all aspects of national life.

We need extraordinary courage and moral clarity when faced with such an unprecedented and brazen attack on the fundamentals of our national life.

That clarity must be reflected in speech. Should I request Sonia Gandhi to read the letter that a young Indira Gandhi had written to her father, the first Prime Minister of India, in a similar moment of crisis?

Are we inviting the same fate to the country?