Introduced in Québec in March 2010, Bill 94 proposed requiring women to unveil their faces if they wanted to work…
Short skirts and niqab bans: On sexuality and the secular body
secularism
Islamism beyond the Muslim Brotherhood
A few weeks after the ouster of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, the New York Times ran this headline:…
The specific order of difficulty of religion
In a recent essay on equality and citizenship in a multi-religious Sudan, Noah Salomon describes a commitment among development experts to…
The imaginary “war on religion”
Over at The Atlantic, Peter Beinhart recounts the results of a new survey on religious observance in America.
Modern spirits
The Modern Spirit of Asia is like a brilliant pencil sketch for an uncompleted oil painting. Something inspiring appears in…
Comparing China and India
The Modern Spirit of Asia is a book about India and China and the ways in which they have been…
Three observations on religion, politics, and the Muslim Brotherhood
In the following essay I would like to offer three observations about the use of religion in politics in Egypt…
Not secularism vs. Islamism
Field Marshal Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is the new Nasser, according to many Egyptians. The image of the military strong man…
Narratives of the Egyptian constitution
In The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh argues that the assumption that religion is inherently authoritarian, divisive, and predisposed to irrational…
Theorizing religion in modern Europe
On March 7-8, 2014, Harvard University will be hosting an international conference entitled "Theorizing Religion in Modern Europe."