Winnifred Fallers Sullivan - Politics of Religious Freedom

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin

I n a remarkably short period, religious freedom has been naturalized in public discourse worldwide as an indispensable condition for peace in our time, advocated around the world and across the religious and political spectrum. Supported by a flood of reports purporting to document a rise in global religious suppression, a wide range of public and private international actorsincluding states, international organizations, private foundations, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as academicshave responded with laws, programs, projects, and policies designed actively to promote the right to religious freedom. Older guarantees to religious freedom built into laws and constitutions over the last few centuries are being mobilized, while such provisions are also being introduced into new legal instruments, trade agreements, constitutions, and legislation. In many legal and public policy circles today, religious freedom is being presented as the key to emancipating individuals and communities from violence, poverty, and oppression. Indeed, the gospel of religious freedom is often said to lead comprehensively to democracy, greater civil and political liberty, and prosperity.

Everyone seems to be for it. But what are they for? What exactly is being promoted through the discourse of religious freedom, and what is not? What is being protected under these various legal instruments? What forms of politics are enabled by these activities? How might we describe the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underlie this frenzy, and what is its longer history?

This volume brings together a collection of essays that emerged out of an edited set of blog posts on the Immanent Frame website (hosted by the Social Science Research Council) as a part of the Politics of Religious Freedom research project, a three-year effort funded by the Henry Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States; it later was expanded to include research on sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil. The volume is divided into four sections: Religion, History, Law/Politics, and Freedom, each with a brief preface by one of the editors.

Over the course of the project, the conversation has spread out well beyond the four project leaders and editors; it has become a broad collaborative effort to describe an importantly complex phenomenoncomplex well beyond our initial intuitions, one not easily reduced to a single narrative or explanatory framework. The scholars who responded to our invitations, many of whom are represented in this volume, and others who contributed to our other publications, have helped us to think through these questions in new ways. The essays collected here unsettle the assumptionso ubiquitous in policy circlesthat religious freedom is easily recognized and understood, and that the only problem lies in its incomplete realization.

Our project does not take a position for or against religious freedom. Rather, we are interested in laying out the kind of work that advocacy for religious freedom has done and is doing in various times and places, and the kind of political and legal worlds it has created and is creating. Our basic assumption is that, before either championing religious freedom or rejecting it, we need to understand the complex social and legal lives of this concept. Those impatient for an improved definition of religious freedom, or those demanding a political manifesto, may be disappointed by this book. But to understand the contested historical genealogy of the concept of religious liberty, we believe it is important to grasp the ways in which this seemingly obvious and neutral right has yielded mutually contradictory and often discriminatory results. Our hope is that policy makers, academics, and others will learn, as we have, from examining this often messy story.

We have also sought to learn from cases in which religious freedom discourse is or was absent, including examining the regulation of religion in places and times distant from the present. For example, looking at the various legal regimes that coexisted in Mughal-ruled India, as Nandini Chatterjees work has done, reveals not Muslim legal hegemony (or legal pluralism in a formal statist sense) but forum shopping and permissive legal centralization; not religious equality but religious multiplicity fitted into a system of religiopolitical hierarchy; not rigid faith boundaries but fluid and interpenetrating religious identities and communities, a situation that belies the common assumption that a Muslim state necessarily limits legal possibilities. Considering such examples poses crucial questions to those engaged in the promotion of religious freedom as a human right today. What is missing when religious freedom is imagined exclusively through the lexicon of liberal rights as a set of discrete freedoms claimed by individuals or groups from an assumedly neutral and secular state? What claims can and cannot be made regarding religion, personhood, and freedom? What modes of religiosity, notions of religious difference or nondifference, and idioms of social order and harmony are rendered unintelligible or incoherent?