Syllabus
1) Introduction 2) Monserat Guibernau, John Rex (eds.), The Ethnicity Reader. Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration, Polity Press 2010: Benedict Anderson, The nation and the origin of national consciousness, pp. 56 – 63; Ernest Gellner, Nationalism as a product of industrial society, pp. 64 – 79; Eric Hobsbawm, An anti-nationalist account of nationalism since 1989, pp. 79 – 89. 3) Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism Wiles Lectures, Cambridge University Press 1996, Chapter I: The Nation and Nationalism, pp. 1 – 34. 4) A. Hastings, ibid., Chapter VIII: Religion further considered, pp. 185 – 209. 5) Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways, Oxford University Press 2013, Introduction, pp. 1 – 22. 6) O. Roy, ibid., Chapter I: When Religion Meets Culture, pp. 23 – 56. 7) O. Roy, ibid., Chapter II: From Civilization to Multiculturalism, pp. 57 – 66. 8) O. Roy, ibid., Chapter III: Religion, Ethnic Group, Nation, pp. 67 – 108. 9) O. Roy, ibid., Chapter IV: Culture and Religion: The Divide, pp. 109 – 148. 10) O. Roy, Is Europe Christian, Oxford University Press 2019, pp. 1 – 56.
Alternative Reading: O. Roy, Jihad and Death. The Global Appeal of Islamic State, Oxford University Press 2017, p. 1 – 29. 11) O. Roy, ibid., pp. 57 – 102. Alter.Read.: O. Roy, ibid., pp. 30 – 74. 12) O. Roy, ibid., pp. 103 – 154. Alter.Read.: O. Roy, ibid., pp. 75 – 100. 13) Closing Discussion
Annotation
The course starts with a short exposition of “modernist” theories of nation and nationalism which connect them – implicitly or explicitly – with the withering away of religion as a structuring force of human life and societal institutions. Adrian Hastings’ attack on those theories points to a much more complex relationship between religious and national identities than the modernist “substitution model” offers.
The bulk of the course is, then, devoted to Olivier Roy’s theory of the relationship between modernization, religion and culture. The last sessions apply this theory to an analysis of the current debates about “Christian Europe” and/or of the global jihadism as preached and practiced by the so-called Islamic State.