Religious-Secular Frontiers: State, Public Sphere, and the Self

The history of secularism is not confined to a given nation-state but follows transnational dynamics, unsettling distinctions and accelerating borrowings between the secular and the religious. Secularism is a mode of state governance as well as a set of moral values for the governance of the self. The claims of religious visibility and the controversies they provoke reveal the unspoken secular rules and norms of the public sphere in European countries. Nationalism, public sphere, and definitions of self are mainly conceptualized within the secular paradigm. Based on Turkish and Indian experiences of secularism, this chapter discusses the ways the revival of religion weakens the hegemony of the secular with regard to the state, the self, and public life.