Chapter Abstract
How do religious beliefs affect politics? This chapter examines complex questions about how religious beliefs shape global politics, focusing on how different Islamic movements have influenced politics in different places, at different times. In doing so, this chapter looks at how religion is defined, the disagreements surrounding these definitions, and the political assumptions that inform these debates. The chapter considers whether religion and politics should mix, focusing on debates about secularism in global politics, and the blurred boundaries between the religious and the secular. Finally, the chapter examines how religion is represented in global politics, and how these representations can work to demonise certain religious groups.
Additional web content and audio-visual materials
1. Should Religion Stay out of Politics? – The People Speak: Young people of varied background share their views with VICE News on the relationship between religion and politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7QlUH6kLeI
2. The Future of World Religion: What do we learn about the future of world religion when we study it through demographic data? These videos from the Pew Research Centre include demographic data and a panel of experts discussing likely world trends in religion going forward.
- Panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF23JLZWDH0;
- Demographic projections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJn6vMjHhCA
3. The Future of Political Islam – Trends and Prospects: Leading experts on political Islam talk about the future of Islam and politics after the Arab Spring of 2011 at the Brookings Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvGnjJNVXeU
4. Edward Said on Orientalism: Edward Said reflects on the legacy of his classic work on the relationship between power, knowledge, and the representation of culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8EYd_Z_g
Global Politics Film Club
Four Days In July (1984) , dir. Mike Leigh
“Four Days in July,” a documentary movie by Mike Leigh that looks at the religious divide and political conflict in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the mid 1980s. While often described as a dispute between Catholics and Protestants, where and how does religion actually play a role in this conflict?
Seminar room activities
Activity: On your smart phone, tablet, or laptop type the names of several major world religion into a major search engine such as Google and select the ‘image’ results. Compare and contrast the types of imagery that appear for each religious tradition. What kinds of images seem to relate to global politics? Spend some time discussing how what you found might help us to understand how representations and discourses about particular religions are produced.
Assessment Questions
- How did “religion” and “politics” emerge as categories and domains of human life and what forces have shaped our assumptions about the appropriate relationship between them?
- To what extent is political Islam a function of religious idea or ideology, and to what extent is it produced by social, political, and economic circumstances in different countries?
- What are some of the different ways that secularism as a principle or idea is expressed in laws and norms, and how can we account for this variation across different countries and cultures?
- Provide an overview and assessment of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism. What do you view as the legacy of his ideas?