Abstract
This book explores the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity. The political philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and Rawls are explored in three chapters to understand what coexisting religious forms are and why they matter for the idea of justice. The introduction defines religious forms as configurations of sensuous materials, which are indispensable to understanding religious matters in an entangled, pluralist world. However, this book does not exclude religious ideas, beliefs, and linguistic expressions: Religious forms of discourse are part of the analysis. These diverse religious forms—from buildings, images, and food to discourses—manifest in “domains,” which are private and public spaces whose existence depends on how political conceptions of justice are applied.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, which he gave in 1835–1838 (English translation 1975).
- 2.
See Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1992 [1968]) and his famous 1978 lecture on Spinoza’s concept of affect (available at https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/11, accessed July 2021). The critique of the Protestant bias in defining what the concept of religion means has been advanced, among other authors, by Talal Asad in Genealogies of Religion (1993).
- 3.
- 4.
Vincent Katz. Hunt Slonem: Discoverer of Pleasure. http://vincentkatz.net/abc3/books_abc3_Hunt.htm, accessed July 2021.
- 5.
For a comprehensive discussion of the role of adiaphora in political philosophers’ conceptions of toleration, see Forst (2013).
- 6.
- 7.
This is illustrated by historian Tisa Wenger’s meticulous study of the Native American Ghost Dance (2009). Under pressure from the United States’ authorities, the practitioners adapted their indigenous dances to be compatible with a Christian worldview. By focusing on the state regulation of a specific form, in this case a dance, Wenger is able to accurately describe a systematic bias in the concept of equal rights against those whose practices were considered “superstitious” and who were non-White, non-liberal, and non-Protestant. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood went further, reasoning that such a systematic bias is unavoidable, as it is essential to the governance that religious freedom requires, whether that be in Egypt, Italy, or the United States (Mahmood 2015). The political scientist Elizabeth Shakman Hurd also argues that systematic forms of bias “cannot be transcended by adopting a more informed understanding of contemporary religion or a more effective regime of rights implementation” (Hurd 2015: 54). Mahmood’s and Hurd’s pessimism rests on the realization that the regulation of public acts and practices can de facto also regulate the inner space of the individual’s conscience. This makes sense if we reason, as I do in this book, that forms, expressed in public, are deeply entangled with contents, which appear as ideas and beliefs in the mind. However, Mahmood’s and Hurd’s work also betrays an essentialist understanding of religious freedom and an implicit normative assumption that freedom entails total non-interference by state power, which I find unhelpful, because accepting them would undermine any attempt at a realistic political philosophy (cf. Decosimo 2018).
References
Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chidester, David. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Chidester, David. 2018. Religion: Material Dynamics. Oakland: University of California Press.
Decosimo, David. 2018. “The New Genealogy of Religious Freedom.” Journal of Law and Religion 33 (1): 3–41.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992 [1968]. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books.
Durkheim, Emile. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press.
Forst, Rainer. 2013. Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present. Translated by Ciaran Croni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1975 [1835–1838]. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by Thomas M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hobbes, Thomas. 1996 [1651]. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hurd, Elizabeth S. 2015. Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Locke, John. 1993. Political Writings of John Locke. Edited and with an introduction by David Wootton. New York: Mentor.
Mahmood, Saba. 2015. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Meyer, Birgit. 2009. Aesthetic Formations, Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meyer, Birgit. 2012. “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence. Towards a Material Approach to Religion.” Inaugural Lecture, Utrecht University.
Meyer, Birgit. 2016. “How to Capture the ‘Wow’: R. R. Marett’s Notion of Awe and the Study of Religion.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22 (1): 7–26.
Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Miller, David. 2016. “Majorities and Minarets: Religious Freedom and Public Space.” British Journal of Political Science 46 (2): 437–456.
Modood, Tariq. 2019. Essays on Secularism and Multiculturalism. London and New York: ECPR Press and Rowman & Littlefield International.
Morgan, David, ed. 2010. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Morgan, David. 2021. The Thing About Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 2012. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism. Expanded edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Spinoza. 1985. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tamimi Arab, Pooyan. 2017. Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape: Religious Pluralism and Secularism in The Netherlands. London: Bloomsbury.
Tamimi Arab, Pooyan. 2021. “Heritage versus Orthodoxy: Figural Paintings, Musical Instruments, and Wine Bowls at the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures.” Journal of Material Culture 26 (2): 178–200.
Wenger, Tisa J. 2009. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tamimi Arab, P. (2022). Introduction: What Is a Religious Form?. In: Why Do Religious Forms Matter?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95779-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95779-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-95778-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-95779-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)