ABSTRACT
These five quotations give some sense of the breadth of perceptions of and predictions about the role of religion in the contemporary world. Classical social theory widely anticipated the demise of religion, an expectation which seems to have been realized in most of contemporary Europe, according to Bruce. Yet across the Mediterranean, in Egypt, the reverse appears to be the case: although the demise of religion as a factor in public life was widely anticipated here too, since the late 1960s
the influence of religion on society appears to have increased to the extent that its presence is visible everywhere in public space. Nor is this a specifically Egyptian or even Islamic phenomenon: as Casanova argues, in the 1980s religion was at the forefront of collective action in many parts of the world (for example Poland, Nicaragua, Iran) and while in the 1990s the tide may have ebbed in some places (for example the religious right in the United States), in others (for example India and the increasing electoral success of the Hindu nationalist BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party (the Indian People’s Party)) it has continued to rise. Nor is this resurgence perceived as unconnected with the global processes to be discussed in this book by those who are part of it, as the Egyptian Islamist woman activist quoted here illustrates. Furthermore, such perspectives on these changes sometimes sharply challenge those of social scientists that ‘modernity’ and ‘secularization’ describe structural, unintended historical processes, as well as indicating the scale of the challenge to the prospect of a ‘global civil society’.
