Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Turkey’s traditional pro-Western foreign policy has become highly controversial. In this regard two clashing narratives of westernization and progress are of particular importance: an older secular and a newly transformed religious one. The first insists

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper suggests that much of the debate between religionists and secularists over religious freedom, at least in the United States (and most likely elsewhere), underestimates the complexity of both groups. Both authoritarian and majoritarian religionists generally favor government recognition and support of religion, but for quite different reasons. Moreover, political and ethical secularists generally do not favor government support of religion, but also for different reasons. Both religionists and secularists, however, seem to have more in common when it comes to the free exercise of religion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the changing voting behavior and party identification of secular voters in the United States using data from the American National Election Studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper uses the 1926 press debate over arch-secularist Taha Husayn’s controversial book Fi al-shi’r al-jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry) as a case study whose dynamics and outcome call into question the dominant conception that Egyptian national identity was secular during the 1900-1930 period. This controversy was one of the most important conflicts between secularists and Islamists in the early post-independence era, which scholars argue was characterized by a secular identity. My analysis shows that contrary to the literature on the debate, its outcome was a victory for Islamist ideology. In the paper, I use anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of a “social drama” to analyze the debate. Following the phases of a social drama, the paper is divided into four sections. Section one discusses why the ideas in On Pre-Islamic Poetry represented a “breach” of customary Egyptian societal norms. Section two describes the political “crisis” the book sparked. Section three dissects the “redression” stage of the social drama. I posit that the debate can be analyzed as a public ritual in which Egyptians “performed” a declaration that Islam was their primary identity referent. I suggest that like all ritual behavior, this public performance can be metaphorically viewed as having involved a script. To show this, I treat the secularist and Islamist camps in the debate as interactive fields of competing stances, disaggregating them into internal factions of moderates and radicals, with each having their own characterization of the debate’s significance and of the most effective tactics and strategies for making their ideology dominant. I then argue that the moderate Islamist script -- plotting the debate as one between Religion and Science, casting Taha Husayn as a wayward, but not beyond hope, secularist who defamed Islam, and starring moderate Islamists as voices of reason who would save Islam by making secularists see their errant ways -- was one that did not alienate moderate secularists and thus “converted” many of them to its cause. After discussing why radical positions on both sides of the debate were marginalized, I argue that the moderate Islamist script consequently became the sole script that the majority of both secularists and Islamists “read from” during the debate, thus moving the action of the social drama along to the outcome it plotted. In section four, I analyze the “reintegrative”of the social drama, in which Taha Husayn’s public apology was tantamount to a ritualistic sacrifice that symbolized the repair of the original breach and Egypt’s emergence from the social drama as a nation with a strengthened Islamic identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Evolution v. Intelligent Design. Abstinence-only sex education v. comprehensive sex education. Moments of silence and prayer in schools. “Homosexuality is shameful” t-shirts. Disputes about equality in schools with regard to race, sex, disability, and poverty still occur, but it seems to be disputes about alleged religious discrimination that most frequently make headlines these days—and the outcomes increasingly seem to be all-or-nothing propositions, with law used as a weapon to secure a desired result (the Court’s recent decision in PICS is a notable exception to this generalization). Yet, at the same time, if law does not secure the desired result, the defeat in a courtroom seems to be a minor setback, not the end of the story. This paper asks how school districts’ compliance with court decisions or regulations they may view as hostile to religion compares with school districts’ compliance with law related to other protected identity categories.