Secular States, Religious Politics

Secular States, Religious Politics is a pioneering comparative study of the two major attempts to build secular states - where the constitutional identity and fundamental character of the state are not based on or derived from any religious faith - in the non-Western world. This book explains the political transformations of India and Turkey with deep insight and exceptional clarity. It shows the similarity of the two non-Western secular states in not being based on a Western-style principle of separation of church and state, but rather on an operational doctrine of state intervention in and regulation of the religious sphere. At the same time, the author highlights the very different motives behind the establishment of secular states in the two cases, and demonstrates that while state-secularism took a culturally deracinated and deeply authoritarian form in Turkey, it assumed a culturally rooted and democratic form in India.