ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides historian's contribution to secularism studies, an increasingly rich research field that has so far been dominated by sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion. Secularism studies are over-determined by the focus on institutions in general and state institutions, state law, and state actors more specifically. Secularism is a comprehensive effort to accommodate religious diversity by locating the state beyond individual religious communities in a mode of strategic distance. Secularism projects were part of late colonial and early postcolonial power struggles and thus themselves decisive arenas in which struggles over domination and subordination took place. Decolonisation and the Cold War exerted a defining influence on the secularism projects in the region's societies after 1945. Emerging secularism projects were scuffles for positions between religious and non-religious protagonists in which the state was centrally involved.
