These essays were conceived among a handful of scholars from a range of disciplines (history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, law) and provoked by the intellectual claims of an impressive book by Charles Taylor published a few years ago, bearing the title A Secular Age. The provocation was simply this: Could a work that had analyzed in great historical and analytical detail the emergence of the secular in Latin Christendom carry lessons for other parts of the world?
Though Taylor himself had avowedly restricted himself to a focus on the Latin West, given the intrinsic generality of the concept of the secular as well as the ideological mobilization that European imperial conquest of distant lands had made possible, a question about the reach of the concept was never far from the offing for Taylor himself and for anyone reading his book with an alertness to its widest implications.
The authors of these essays, though they are by no means all restricted to Columbia University, got together several times over three years or more at Columbia University (and at periodic retreats in nearby Tarrytown, New York) to pursue this large question. The discussions proved so fruitful and exciting that we decided to gather our thoughts and deliver them in essays, which Columbia University Press has helpfully agreed to publish as one among its cluster of publications on the themes of secularism and tolerance.
The essays were always intended by us as looking to the interest of the secular in many different parts of the world beyond Christendom, but no group of scholars could possibly aspire to comprehensiveness on this score. Still, when China, India, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are all on offer in one or other essay, it is no small spread. Regional range apart, there are also diverse intellectual and methodological angles provided by the different disciplinary locations of the authors, and there is an illuminating balance between observing the points of affinity and departure from the genealogical roots of the secular in Europe, while also elaborating the local flowering of secularity in quite autonomous terms in these distant settings. India, unsurprisingly, gets somewhat more play in the volume than other settings, because secularism (the specifically political doctrine that emerges from the ideal of the secular) has been a subject of such intense and prolonged discussion there just prior to and since decolonization, and it raises questions of its own as to why this should be so or comparatively more so than in other regions of the global South. In general, as one would expect, the essays raise as many questions of this sort and others as they answer.
Many of these questions are very usefully and clearly introduced by Taylor himself in an opening chapter. It would be redundant of me, therefore, to do so in this short preface, as it would be for me to present summaries of the essays that follow, because Taylor himself provides them in an equally valuable set of replies in the concluding chapter.
The volume, thus, owes greatly to Taylor’s most obliging willingness to participate in these proceedings and to Al Stepan’s inspiring enthusiasm for the subject that infected each one of us. I would like to thank them both and all the other contributors to the book for their essays, a thoroughly fitting outcome of some of the most searching and lively discussions one could hope to have with one’s academic colleagues. My thanks too to the Institute of Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University for bringing many of us together frequently and for its various hospitalities over the years, and especially to Melissa Van for her vigilant eye on all matters of organization and her gently prompting presence during the editing of this volume.
Akeel Bilgrami