Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Juergensmeyer is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World (1992) and the author of Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith (1991) among other books.

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New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts Secular State

University of California Press

In the celebrations following the first stages of elections that threatened to bring Islamic nationalists to power in Algeria early in 1992, a jubilant supporter of the Islamic Front spied a foreigner on the streets of Algiers and grabbed her by the arm. "Please give my condolences to President Mitterrand," the Algerian said.1

Quoted in Kim Murphy, "Islamic Party Wins Power in Algeria," Los Angeles Times, December 28, 1991, p. A1. In February 1992, after the Islamic Party was crushed, an underground movement called The Faithful to the Promise vowed a jihad against the government that would be "in continuation" of Algeria's 1954 war for independence from France. Kim Murphy, "Algeria Cracks Down, Targets Islamic Front," Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1992, p. A10.

In the 1950s and 60s, when Algeria and many other former colonies in the Third World received their political independence, it was popular for Europeans and Americans to write with an almost religious fervor about the spread of nationalism throughout the world. Their zeal, however, was invariably for something secular: the emergence of new nations that elicited loyalties forged entirely from a sense of secular citizenship. These secular-nationalist loyalties were based on the idea that the legitimacy of the state was rooted in the will of the people, divorced from any religious sanction.

The secular nationalism of the day was defined also by what it was not: it was not one of the old ethnic and religious identities that had made nations parochial and quarrelsome in the past. For that reason, scholars viewed the spread of nationalism in a hopeful,almost eschatological, light: it was ushering in a new future. It meant, in essence, the emergence of mini-Americas all over the world.

Hans Kohn, his generation's best-known historian of nationalism, observed in 1955 that the twentieth century was unique: "It is the first period in history in which the whole of mankind has accepted one and the same political attitude, that of nationalism."2

Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1955), 89.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid.

Not only Western academics but a good number of new leaders?especially those in the emerging nations created out of former colonial empires?were swept up by the vision of a world of free and equal secular nations. The concept of secular nationalism gave them an ideological justification for being, and the electorate that subscribed to it provided them power bases from which they could vault into positions of leadership ahead of traditional ethnic and religious leaders. But secularism was more than just a political issue, it was also a matter of personal identity. A new kind of person had come into existence?the "Indian nationalist" or "Ceylonese nationalist" who possessed an abiding faith in a secular nationalism identified with his or her homeland. Perhaps none exemplified this new spirit more than Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of India. According to Nehru, "there is no going back" to a past full of religious identities, for the modern, secular "spirit of the age" will inevitably triumph throughout the world.5

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: John Day, 1946), 531-32.

Donald Smith has written poignantly of the followers of Nehru after India's independence: "The Indian nationalist felt compelled to assert that India was a nation," even though there were some "embarrassing facts"?such as divisive regional and religious loyalties?that had to be glossed over.6

Donald Eugene Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), 140.

without a nationality."7

Ibid., 141. Italics in the original.

Leaders of minority religious communities?such as Hindu Tamils in Ceylon and Coptic Christians in Egypt?seemed especially eager to embrace secular nationalism because a secular nation-state would assure that the public life of the country would not be dominated completely by the majority religious community. In India, where the Congress Party became the standard bearer of Nehru's vision, the party's most reliable supporters were those at the margins of Hindu society?untouchables and Muslims?who had the most to fear from an intolerant religious majority.

The main carriers of the banner of secular nationalism in these newly independent countries, however, were not members of any religious community at all, at least in a traditional sense. Rather, they were members of the urban educated elite. For many of them, embracing a secular form of nationalism was a way of promoting its major premise?the separation of religion and politics?and thereby avoiding the obstacles that religious loyalties create for a country's political goals. By implication, political power based on religious values and traditional communities held no sway.

The problem, however, was that in asserting that the nationalism of their country was secular, the new nationalists had to have faith in a secular culture that was at least as compelling as a sacred one. That meant, on a social level, thinking that secular nationalism could triumph over religion. It could also mean making secular nationalism a suprareligion of its own, which a society could aspire to beyond any single religious allegiance. In India, for example, political identity based on religious affiliation was termed communalism . In the view of Nehru and other secular nationalists, religion was the chief competitor of an even higher object of loyalty: secular India. Nehru implored his countrymen to get rid of what he called "that narrowing religious outlook" and to adopt a modern, nationalist viewpoint.8

Nehru, Discovery of India, 531.

The secular nationalists' attempts to give their ideologies an antireligious or a suprareligious force were encouraged, perhaps unwittingly, by their Western mentors. The words used to define nationalism by Western political...