|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
The global rise of political religion is one of the defining and
most puzzling characteristics of current world politics. Since the
early 1990s, religious parties have achieved stunning electoral
victories around the world.
"Beyond Sacred and Secular" investigates religious politics and its
implications for contemporary democracy through a comparison of
political parties in Israel and Turkey. While the politics of
Judaism and Islam are typically seen as outgrowths of
oppositionally different beliefs, Sultan Tepe's comparative inquiry
shows how limiting this understanding of religious politics can be.
Her cross-country and cross-religion analysis develops a unique
approach to identify religious parties' idiosyncratic and shared
characteristics without reducing them to simple categories of
religious/secular, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, or
democratic/antidemocratic. Tepe shows that religious parties in
both Israel and Turkey attract broad coalitions of supporters and
skillfully inhabit religious and secular worlds simultaneously.
They imbue existing traditional ideas with new political messages,
blur conventional political lines and allegiances, offer strategic
political choices, and exhibit remarkably similar political views.
This book's findings will be especially relevant to those who want
to pass beyond rudimentary typologies to better assess religious
parties' capacities to undermine and contribute to liberal
democracy. The Israeli and Turkish cases open a window to better
understand the complexities of religious parties. Ultimately, this
book demonstrates that the characteristics of religious political
parties--whether Jewish, Muslim, or yet another religion--can be as
strikingin their similarities as in their differences.
This edited volume brings together chapters that offer
theoretically pertinent comparisons between various dimensions of
Israeli and Turkish politics. Each chapter covers a different
aspect of state-society interactions in both countries from a
comparative perspective, including the public role of religion,
political culture, women rights movements, religious education,
religious movements, marriage regulation, labor market inclusion,
and ethnic minorities. Israel and Turkey share significant
similarities, such as state formation under nationalist ideologies,
familiarity with democratic governance since the 1940s, strong
affiliation with the West, recent resurgence of religious parties,
ongoing conflict with ethno-national minority groups that challenge
the dominant national project, contemporary popular protests
against the incumbent regime, and recent serious erosion of
democratic rights. At the same time they differ on major variables,
such as size, majority religion, geopolitical location, level of
economic development, policy towards ethnic minorities, and
institutional arrangements to managing the state-religion
relations. The presence of these differences in face of common
backgrounds facilitates analytically grounded comparisons in a host
of dimensions. Therefore, employing a case-oriented comparative
method, this book provides historically interpretative and causally
analytic accounts on the politics of both societies. The
contributions reveal the dynamic and complex-rather than
one-dimensional and linear-nature of political processes in both
settings. This empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated
volume should contribute to a better understanding of these two
important states, and, no less important, stimulate new directions
for comparative research, especially on Middle East regimes, social
movements, and democratization.
|
|