Religion, for decades an apparently marginal area of interest in the dominantly secular Western academy, has been making a remarkable comeback onto degree courses and research agendas. Over the past two decades, this comeback has occurred in overt but also in less obvious ways. Across university departments, questions of religious belonging and identity, of belief and the expression of belief, have been treated with renewed intensity. Besides disciplines like religious studies and theology that are explicitly concerned with religious topics, other subject areas in which religion had not been a major concern since the post-World War II period have also dedicated research and teaching resources to the role of religion in the present. In the political and social sciences, religion has been recognized as a crucial factor in conflicts, but also as a resource in plural societies. Arts subjects, meanwhile, are paying increasing attention to religion as a topic of contemporary cultural production, as attested by a large number of book publications dedicated to art and religion, literature and religion, and so forth (e.g., Rosen 2015; Weidner 2016). In the field of history, too, interpretations of past events have shifted from ones that favor structural and economic explanations to a renewed focus on the belief structures underlying social and
In G. E Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779) Muslims are represented alongside Jews and Christians. These relationships are framed in terms of shared human morality and the shared biology of family, expressed through physical resemblance, rather than through similarities or differences of faith. Ultimately, it is the biological fact of consanguine family, not religion, which forms the basis of future human relationships. The Early Romantic Novalis, by contrast, sketches a figurative, interfaith family in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1801). This accommodates Christians and Muslims within a universal model of ‘aesthetic’ human religiosity, which nonetheless allows each faith to maintain distinctive, even mutually conflicting beliefs, and thus envisions a more pluralistic unity. Modelling interfaith relationships around familial similarities offers a tempting alternative to the mutual alienation and ‘othering’ of critical Orientalism, although this approach can fixate upon normative characteristics and deflect attention from the distinctiveness of differing faiths. Both writers locate their Muslim characters within differing trajectories of historical progress: for Lessing, humanity's future is grounded in a common humanity rooted in shared biology, with Islam rendered incidental or obscure, whereas Novalis envisions a pluralistic, multi‐perspectival future, marked by shifting, re‐imaginable familial relationships, within which Muslims can retain core aspects of their faith.
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