{"title":"Liberalism and the Path to Treason in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1923","authors":"Christine M. Philliou","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter looks at the final decade of the Ottoman Empire to examine the way that liberalism went from being part of the sensibility and worldview of an elitist Ottoman establishment, to a term of opprobrium as the Committee of Union and Progress took up the reins of power in the Ottoman government and state. While in recent years the discussion of pluralism has focused on how one state, as a unitary actor, has treated confessional or ethnic minorities, I show here that the very question of political pluralism was the source of a fissure in the Ottoman establishment, and ultimately a cause of conflict as the empire was dissolved and the Kemalist Republic was established.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"80 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130647906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conflict, Secularism, and Toleration","authors":"U. Mehta","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter is organized around a contrast between two views relating to religious diversity and toleration and the differing logics implicit in them. The first is that of M. K. Gandhi, in which religious diversity and toleration was taken to be a given feature of the fluid historical, social, and normative texture of India. It therefore did not take toleration as requiring a special intervention. In contrast, the second takes diversity as given, which necessarily tends toward conflict, and hence toward anarchy and ultimately death. The first takes religious identities and diversity as given; the second is reliant on the functioning of the state, because it has to mediate between the contending claims of identity.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131204769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Legal Contention and Minorities in Turkey","authors":"Senem Aslan","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter analyzes state-minority relations in Turkey as the state sought closer relations with the European Union over the last three decades. It examines the implementation of decisions by the European Court of Human Rights and the domestic courts as well as of legal reforms passed by the Turkish parliament that relate to the cultural demands of two largest minorities in Turkey, the Kurds and the Alevis. It underlines that in Turkey legislative reforms and progressive court judgments in favor of minority rights do not have much effect on shifting state policy on the ground. This is because state officials can act with impunity, enjoying wide discretionary authority and allowing extralegal and informal forms of official discrimination. Official discrimination can be best examined by focusing on administrative implementation rather than legal texts. This study also shows that the implementation of minority rights reforms is a contentious process that largely depends on bottom-up pressures through persistent social and political mobilization. In the absence of a strong movement, neither international pressure nor legal contention is adequate to change state policy on the ground.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116683399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plurality and Pluralism","authors":"S. Kaviraj","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter demonstrates the decline of state pluralism, the logic of aggregative identities in political mobilization in independent India, and, in closing, the moral psychology and institutional structure of democratic violence. It argues that caste’s hierarchical and segmenting features produced a logic of mobilization that, over time, accorded legitimacy to identitarian aggregation of all shades—not just those identified by the constitution-makers as deserving of recognition on the grounds of social justice. Simultaneously, the chapter shows how the definition of Hinduness acquired meaning through the differences with Muslims and Christians. Electorally, this identity took shape only over the past three decades, and the BJP’s electoral rise and sustenance have come alongside a rise in “everyday violence.” This chapter explores the conditions of possibility for such violence—the complexity of agential structures in the modern Indian state; the nature of mob violence; and mismatch between a social organization’s incentives and a political party’s compulsions.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128875110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representative Democracy and Religious Thought in South Asia","authors":"H. Iqtidar","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"What role did popular enthusiasm about democratic participation in the early twentieth century play in the ideas of two key religious revivalists in South Asia: Abul A‘la Maududi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar? This chapter lays out the differently inflected visions of the two thinkers to argue that they were both working through new conceptions of religion and society, which crystallized around the mythical entity “the people.” How to recognize and organize the people who form the constituency as well as the legislators of a democratic polity was the challenge they tackled. They differed sharply in their analysis of nationalism as the glue that held “the people” together, and in their resistance to prevailing European theories of nationalism and representative government. Despite many differences, the two thinkers were united in an enthusiasm for democratic politics. Understanding the political manifestations of their ideas today requires a reckoning with their respective visions of democracy.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130911390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Stranger, Enemy”","authors":"Nosheen Ali","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the making of anti-Shia hostility, humiliation, and annihilatory politics in contemporary Pakistan. It argues that in order to make sense of the violence against the Shia in Pakistan, we need to go beyond the typical analysis, which is couched in the framework of Islam, religion, theological difference, and sectarianism. Instead, this chapter proposes that the social dimension of Shia minoritization in Pakistan is better understood through the concept of “sectism,” which theoretically draws upon the ways in which racism, casteism, and sexism have been understood as projects of majoritarian privilege and domination. Moreover, it argues that questions of sect and gender have become intrinsically linked in contemporary Muslim contexts, and hence must be understood relationally in order to examine the religio-political, hegemonic formations of military-militant Islam in Pakistan. Finally, the chapter offers broader reflections on the question of Islam, feminism, and democracy in Pakistan.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125546902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Islam, Modernity, and the Question of Religious Heterodoxy","authors":"Sadia Saeed","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197530016.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter undertakes a comparative and historical inquiry to address the role of sharia in shaping concrete state responses toward managing “heterodox” religious communities across time and space. The aim of this inquiry is, first, to undertake a critique of civilizational analyses that seek to capture supposedly essential features of Muslim societies, and second, to underscore the marginal role of sharia in adjudicating issues related to religious heterodoxy in both early modern empires and modern Muslim states. It analyzes, first, how Muslim rulers in two early modern Muslim empires, Safavid Iran and Mughal India, dealt with the same heterodox group, the Nuqtavi Sufi order. Next, it focuses on how two contemporary Muslim-majority states that emerged from these empires, Iran and Pakistan, have sought to regulate and discipline “heretical” groups in their midst—Baha’is in Iran and the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan. The analysis opens space for formulating alternative accounts of transitions to modernity that are not beholden to teleological Eurocentric notions that normalize notions of unredeemable and non-usable pasts and always-already open and progressive futures.","PeriodicalId":430862,"journal":{"name":"Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism","volume":"108 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132054444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}