Authors: Tariq Modood & Thomas Sealy
Publisher: Polity, 2024
Format: Softback
Pages: 205
Source: https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-new-governance-of-religious-diversity–9780745653785
Professor Modood’s work, in collaboration with Thomas Sealy, is in the traditions of the University of Bristol’s sociology school of building theoretical frameworks based on empirical data. In this work, the authors provide a classification to describe how nation states manage religious diversity. This is based on data from 23 countries, which refreshingly is not limited to an euro-centric perspective, but includes the South.
The book proposes five different modes for the governance of religious diversity; these include the ‘Secularist Statism’ as found in France and the former Soviet Union; ‘Moderate Secularism’, characterised by Belgium and the United Kingdom; and ‘Pluralistic Nationalism’’ of Malaysia. The modes vary with respect to the place of religion in the public space, so ‘Secularist Statism’ at one extreme disallows public policy to be linked to religious reasons and confines religion to the private sphere; ‘Moderate Secularism’ accepts that religion serves a public good’, while ‘Pluralistic Nationalism’ has an institutional accommodation of religious diversity and allows for plural legal codes.
In Malaysia, an example of ‘ the legal system is plural, “the main court system incorporates a parallel one, in the form of Sharia courts, and two separate high courts, one for Peninsular Malaysia and one for Borneo states. The Malay rulers, who retain their positions as heads of Islam in their respective states, are responsible for overseeing the Sharia courts and appointing judges, a provision that gives each state the freedom to establish its own Islamic courts for the adjudication of disputes.”
The authors point out that ‘Secularist Statism’ does not mean the state is neutral on religion. France, for all its laïcité, has state-funded cathedrals and Catholic schools. Britain’s ‘Moderate Secularism’ accommodates the established Church of England with 26 bishops in the House of Lords so the Anglican voice can be heard in political debate. The authors make clear that there are blurred boundaries in their five-fold classification, but it will nevertheless be valuable to policy analysts in positing a country and undertaking a comparative assessment of its individual-level religious freedom and autonomy. The framework can provide warning signs if a nation is veering away from multicultural secularism towards majoritarian totalitarianism.
The authors are not concerned with the metaphysical aspects of secularism, but rather ‘political secularism’ “that covers the relationship between religion and politics or the state, and the governance of religion”, as conveyed by written and unwritten conventions and norms. They do not challenge the notion of secularism, in the way of Talal Asad considers it a colonial project. The authors also take the nation state as a given in which there is a level of agency to work out its mode of ‘political secularism’. In practice, styles of governance are often imposed on nations in the power play of the great powers. Contemporary example are of Egypt and Tunisia, where after the briefest of ‘Arab Springs’ that held hopes of freedom and plurality, there has been a return to repression.
The New Governance of Religious Diversity is a work of creativity and imagination and the fruit of Professor Modood’s long-standing defence of multiculturalism. It needs to be read with his Multiculturalism (Second Edition, Polity Books 2023).
JS, October 2024.