The ‘return of religion’ as a social phenomenon has aroused at least three different debates, with the first being the ‘clash of civilizations’, the second criticizing ‘modernity’, and the third focusing on the public/private distinction. This article uses Habermas’ idea of a post-secular society as a prism through which we examine the return of religion and impact on secularization. In doing so, we attempt to understand the new role of religion as a challenger of the liberal projects following the decline of communism. Against this background, section four focuses on Habermas’s central arguments in his proposal for a post-secular society. We claim that theproblematiquein Habermas’s analysis must be placed within the wider framework of an emerging global public sphere. In this context we examine the problem of religion’s place in political process and the two readings of Habermas as suggested by Simone Chambers.
This article claims that the revolutions in the Arab world foster insight into more than the spread of liberalism. Fukuyama's end of history has not just reached the Muslim world faster than expected. These revolutions show that strong religion and liberal democracy are compatible: they are postsecular revolutions. As already the revolutions of 1989 proved in some respect, in contrast to the secular ideals of the French Revolution, revolution and religion can go hand in hand in a postsecular way. Praying and making revolution does not need to end in a religious autocracy as 1979 in Iran. Religious citizens stood up praying for democracy and the rule of law against secular regimes which legitimised themselves as a bulwark against sinister forces of religion. Analysing the revolutions of 1989, Jü rgen Habermas speaks of 'catching-up revolutions' which brought nothing new to the course of history. Yet after 9/11 he started to develop his idea of a postsecular society in which secular and religious citizens are equally entitled to make their arguments in a public sphere. Criticising the early Habermas with the later, the article argues that the postsecular revolutions of 1989 and 2011 are preparing the ground for a postsecular democracy.
Embedded in a critically adapted version of Jürgen Habermas’ postsecular approach, this article analyzes empirically and evaluates normatively the role of religion in the Middle East. Integrating and adapting William Connolly’s understanding of political change as power politics of becoming, the argument is that an authoritarian pluralism is evolving that, in contrast to secular nationalism and Political Islam, can be called postsecular insofar as it attempts to integrate more strata of the population into the public discourse, regardless of their religious creed but based on interreligious plurality. The Document on Human Fraternity, signed 2019 in Abu Dhabi, is a prime example of that postsecular trend embedded in power politics. The article concludes that the turmoil of the Arab Spring did not pave the way for democracy but for authoritarian and partisan versions of a postsecular public that try to accommodate the plurality of the Middle East.
Global capitalism claims to offer emancipation as liberation from the bureaucratic cage of working routines, and justice as a result of global growth. The price for this model of emancipation and justice is constant change and flexibility of the self. I agree with Richard Sennett, who I take here as a representative of a pragmatic approach in critical theory, that this development leads to a corrosion of character, ultimately threatening the foundations of democracy and preventing the creation of a global community of political agency. What is needed is a cultural narrative enabling the self to act for a global community of political agency that favours ways to global justice. However, contrary to Sennett, I argue that this new self cannot be reinvented as the classical homo faber. I argue that the homo faber concept still breathes the obsolete notion of a powerful working class which is, like capitalism, based solely on production and consumption and cannot meet the ongoing fundamental change of the global age where the rise and fall of powerful subjects is as uncertain as is material growth. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective and engaging with critical theory, I turn to the post-secular concept of Jürgen Habermas. In the perspective of Habermas's post-secular society, I search for a narrative informed by religious semantics. The semantics of the pilgrim, common to almost all traditions of faith, stand for this emancipated self searching for ways to global justice and are offered here in a post-secular translation.
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