Laïcité

Saba Mahmood in her recent book Religious Difference in a Secular Age delves deeply into the nuances of how the secular state acts in regards to religious freedom and minorities. While we had seen such ideas such as the secular state’s ability to craft a particular definition of religion when creating governmental policies in Elizabeth Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom, Mahmood pieces much more of the theoretical depth underpinning the secular state (its role, premises, temporality, and religious and explicitly non-religious policies), and additionally she provides good, concrete examples to illustrate her points (Coptic laity versus the ecclesiastical class). While each chapter provides an important argument, her overarching thesis argues the paradoxical nature the secular state plays in privatizing and publicizing religion, a role that only exacerbates and amplifies religious polarization and conflicts. She explores this claim through many perspectives, particularly relevant to Egypt and its Coptic and Baha’i communities: the history of the terms equality and religious freedom and their utilization by European powers to undermine non-European empires and regimes, the concerns and advantages the term minority has possessed historically for certain communities within a nationalist orientated populace, and the relationship between history, literature, and secularity by discussing the conflict between the Coptic clergy and the secular author of the acclaimed historical fiction…

key to the French Republic. This essay discusses the Hijab in France in regard to Jeffrey Stout’s ‘The Folly of Secularism’ and is structured in three main parts. The first part looks at how Secularism is reasserted, the way in which event intellectual, political, social shifts are changing through analysing firstly the controversy itself, then laïcité. The second part discusses…

Secularity in France targets the public sphere, the treatment of religious symbolism in French law raises issues of how the maintenance of secularity should go about in a nation, forcibly removing ‘visible religion’ from the public sphere, implies a lack of pluralism in a nation, laïcité then could be considered relatively undemocratic. What exactly was meant by ‘ostentatious’ is a matter of much debate, to what extent must a symbol of religious affiliation be ‘ostentatious’. This year, a 15…

subordination of women. It is as if patriarchy were a uniquely Islamic phenomenon! (4) Scott questions why the veil is the focus of the controversy and states that the politicians who passed the law did not provide sufficient answers to her question (3). She points out that the purpose the law serves is not to bolster gender equality as it targets the Muslim community for its patriarchal values as if other groups did not practice similar values of inferiorizing women. The French republic uses…

faced with multiculturalism. France is one amongst them and the motto is the evident proof for it “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. France is one of the most countries welcoming people from different part of the world and provides shelter for them with generosity. The culture diversification in France is often referred as “culture cocktail” where all the cultures are mixed in a jurisdiction or society. France is providing lots of opportunities to youngsters from different part of the world to…

prevalent within today’s society in the forms of social media, news outlets, and word of mouth. It is a danger that has grown exponentially over the past few years. However, people are unaware of where the foundations of modern terrorism lie. The belief is that the French Revolution was the catalyst that began modern terrorism and it is reason France is incredibly susceptible to terror attacks in the present. The multitude of terror attacks on France’s soil can be linked back to the history of…

Page 106 2005). In November of that same year, the Conseil d'État (legal adviser of the executive branch and as the supreme court for administrative justice) ruled that the scarf's contradicted the principle of Laïcité (French secularism) on which the French republic is built on (Scott, Joan W., Page 107 2005). In September 1994, a new memorandum, the "François Bayrou memo" was published and it outlined the difference between "discreet" religious symbols, which were appropriate for the…

Also, we can never win against a nation that utilizes globalization, and has a continuous supply of people that they will use to sacrifice their lives just to kill us all under the discasise of religious beliefs. Our nation does not and will not follow this type of sacrifice at any time, because it is wrong on all levels. References Davis, K. C. (2010). America's True History of Religious Tolerance. Retrieved from…

Scott first leads the reader through the important years of the Islamic scarf debate: 1989, 1994, and 2003. All of these debates, she argues, was resulting from the colonial mindset France still maintained. Her strongest chapter in the book about racism explains how France views their Arab/Muslim population as subordinate to the dominate French populus due to racial context. The wearing of the veil, therefore, has been seen as the “irreducible difference” and “inadmissibility of Islam,” (p. 45).…

hat the world would be a better place if only secularist politics, were comprehensively instituted within political institutions. I will discuss this argument by looking at the issues that arise from theocracy in Iran, specifically the incompatibility of theocracy and democracy, and the issue of entrenching political policies in religious doctrines and what that means for change. I will then examine the different forms that secularism can take. Firstly, by examining the forced atheism of Soviet…