Islam, public religions and the secularization debate

By now there is much academic talk about the limitations and failures of the conventional secularization thesis and much has consequently been written about religious revivalism. In the 1960s sociologists of religion like Bryan Wilson (1966 and 1976) confidently predicted the decline of religion as a result of modernization. There is now the general conclusion that the secularization thesis was too narrow and too specific to Europe. Whereas sociologists of religion treated the United States as exceptional because its religious patterns did not appear to support the association of modernity with secularization, we now look towards northern Europe as the principal example of ‘exceptionalism’.While the notion that religion would decline with growing urbanization, rationalization and secularization now looks hopelessly inaccurate, secularization itself looks far more complicated and we now have far more sophisticated analyses of the process available in such works as Charles Taylor’s two monumental publications – Varieties of Religion Today (2002) and A Secular Age (2007). While the secularization thesis of the 1960s is untenable, what might be put in its place is not entirely clear and self-evident. In any case we are now far more aware of the impact of the globalization of religion than in the 1960s, and whatever answer we propose has to take far more notice of global than merely national examples (Berger 1999). In this chapter I look at the interconnections between changes in the public or political domain (deprivatization) and transformations of personal religious behaviour in the everyday or social domain. These developments in contemporary society raise critical issues about the nature of religious authority with modern secularization and I examine these issues with reference to the evolution of shari’a especially in multicultural societies (Turner and Vopli 2007)