ABSTRACT
The main premise of this book is that religion has left its assigned place in the private sphere in both Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), becoming politically active in various ways and with assorted outcomes. The starting point is to note that from the 1980s, ‘what was new and became “news” . . . was the widespread and simultaneous refusal of religions to be restricted to the private sphere’ (Casanova 1994: 6). This involves a remodelling and reassumption of public roles by religious actors – which theories of secularisation had long condemned to social and political marginalisation. This is what the chapters of this book collectively seek to accomplish. While differing in terms of specific issues that encourage them to act politically, religious entities commonly reject the secular ideals that have long dominated theories of political development in both developed and developing countries, appearing instead as champions of alternative, confessional outlooks, programmes and policies. Seeking to keep faith with what they interpret as divine decree, religious entities1 typically refuse to render to secular power holders automatic material or moral support. They are concerned with various social, moral and ethical issues, which are nearly always political. They may challenge or undermine both the legitimacy and autonomy of the state’s main secular spheres, including government and more widely political society. In addition, many churches and other comparable religious entities no longer restrict themselves to the pastoral care of individual souls. Now, they raise questions about, inter alia, interconnections of private and public morality, claims of states and markets to be exempt from extrinsic normative considerations, and modes and concerns of government. What they also have in common is a shared concern for retaining and increasing their social importance. To this end, many religious entities now seek to bypass or elude what they regard as the cumbersome constraints of temporal authority and, as a result, threaten to undermine the latter’s constituted political functions. In short, refusing to be condemned to the realm of privatised belief,religion has widely reappeared in the public sphere, thrusting itself into issues of social, moral and ethical – in short, political – contestation. The aim of this book is to examine the current relationship between selected religious actors and the state in Europe and the MENA. Its title, Religion and Politics in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, seeks to capture what its
authors believe are the key analytical issues in this context. Overall, the book is concerned with the outcomes of political interactions involving the state and selected religious entities in various countries in both regions. In Europe, the main religious actors on which we focus are Christian churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, while in the MENA Islamic and Judaist entities are the centre of attention. The key point, however, is not from which religious tradition individual religious actors come. In both Europe and the MENA, all of the religious entities on which we focus share a desire: to change their societies in directions where what they regard as religiously acceptable standards of behaviour are central to public life. Pursuing such objectives, they use a variety of tactics and methods. For example, the Roman Catholic Church in both Italy and Poland and the Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan in Morocco operate at the level of civil society, although their concerns also spill over into the realm of formal politics – that is, political society. Our examples from Israel and Turkey highlight a different context and form of politics. They focus on what Ben-Porat, following Beck (1994, 1997), describes in his chapter in this collection as ‘sub-politics’. This is where struggles over the role of religion in public life are absent from or marginal to the formal political arena – that is, political society. Instead of focusing exclusively on formal politics, Beck suggests, scholars need also to pay attention to ‘subpolitics’. This is regarded as the ‘new’ politics, often played out not in the formal political arena but instead promulgated at the level of civil society. Ben-Porat argues that sub-politics rises in prominence when significant numbers of citizens lose all or most of their faith in formal political institutions – including political parties and the state. In sum, these are the main conclusions of the book:
• In both Europe and the MENA, there is a formal, tripartite division of polities into state, political society and civil society.
