Beyond Religious Freedom

Among the most frequent demands made of Islam and Muslims today is to become more moderate. But what counts as moderate and who will decide so are questions with less than obvious answers. In her timely and politically urgent new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), Elizabeth Hurd, Associate Professor of Religion and Political Science at Northwestern University, explores the powerful global networks that seek to regulate and moderate religion in the name of promoting religious freedom. Through a careful examination of the discourses and activities of a range of state and non-state actors, in the US and elsewhere, Hurd demonstrates that international regimes of religious freedom advocacy actively participate in the labor of defining and generating particular notions of good and normative religion that privilege particular actors and institutions over others. However, as Hurd brilliantly shows and argues, such attempts to canonize good religion, which often corresponds to the articulation of religion most amenable to US imperial interests, remains thwarted and unsuccessful. This is so because the global industry of producing good, moderate religion cannot come to grips with the messiness and complexities of lived religion that is unavailable for neat, digestible, and ultimately misleading generalized categorizations. In short, this book represents a profound and meticulously documented argument for the unavailability of religion for projects of moderation, division, and bifurcation into good and bad religion. Hurd assembles this argument by discussing the discourse of the two faces of faith in international relations circuits, the politics of religion-making in international religious advocacy programs, overseas religious engagement programs sponsored by the US government, and the construction of religious minorities as endangered corporate bodies. Beyond Religious Freedom is as mellifluously written as it is analytically delicious. It will make an excellent reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on Islam, Secularism, and Modernity, Middle Eastern Politics, religion and politics, and on theories and methods in Religion Studies.

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SherAli Tareen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His academic publications are available at https://fandm.academia.edu/SheraliTareen/. He can be reached at stareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome.