A new book on the global politics of religion

by Salman Hameed

If you are interested in the ways religion gets defined and used in 'freedom of religion' debates, then check out this new book by Elizabeth Hurd titled Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion. And of course, I learnt about it through the incredibly invaluable New Books Network podcast (this was part of the series on Middle Eastern Studies and Religion). Here is the interview podcast with Elizabeth Hurd (or download it here).

One of the things that really stood out for me from the interview was her discussion of "good" and "bad" religion as constructed by various international organizations - with their own agendas and goals - and how it skips all the messiness of the actual lived experiences (around 16 minutes in). I also found her discussion of Turkish Alevis, and the varied construction of their religious identity by the Turkish state and the European Union (in the latter half of the interview). She also discusses the book cover (see above) - which shows a photograph of a wall that the Moroccan government built to keep out and demarcate the Sahrarawi people of Western Sahara (for more on this, here is a brief article from Al Jazeera last year: Western Sahara's Struggle for Freedom Cutoff by a Wall).

In any case, listen to this fascinating interview (about 45 minutes long). Here is a blurb about the book from the New Books Network site:

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at Northwestern University, explores the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion in the name of promoting religious freedom. Through a careful examination of the discourses and activities of a range of state and non-state actors, in the US and elsewhere, Hurd demonstrates that international regimes of religious freedom advocacy actively participate in the labor of defining and generating particular notions of good and normative religion that privilege particular actors and institutions over others. However, as Hurd brilliantly shows and argues, such attempts to canonize good religion, which often corresponds to the articulation of religion most amenable to US imperial interests, remains thwarted and unsuccessful. This is so because the global industry of producing good, moderate religion cannot come to grips with the messiness and complexities of lived religion that is unavailable for neat, digestible, and ultimately misleading generalized categorizations. In short, this book represents a profound and meticulously documented argument for the unavailability of religion for projects of moderation, division, and bifurcation into good and bad religion. Hurd assembles this argument by discussing the discourse of the two faces of faith in international relations circuits, the politics of religion-making in international religious advocacy programs, overseas religious engagement programs sponsored by the US government, and the construction of religious minorities as endangered corporate bodies. Beyond Religious Freedom is as mellifluously written as it is analytically delicious. It will make an excellent reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam, Secularism, and Modernity, Middle Eastern Politics, religion and politics, and on theories and methods in Religion Studies.