Description: Cesari argues that both religious and national communities are defined by the three Bs: belief, behaviour and belonging. By focusing on the ways in which these three Bs intersect, overlap or clash, she identifies the patterns of the politicization of religion, and vice versa, in any given context. Her approach has four advantages: firstly, it combines an exploration of institutional and ideational changes across time, which are usually separated by disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, it illustrates the heuristic value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by statistically testing the validity of the patterns identified in the qualitative historical phase of the research. Thirdly, it avoids reducing religion to beliefs by investigating the significance of the institution-ideas connections, and fourthly, it broadens the political approach beyond state-religion relations to take into account actions and ideas conveyed in other arenas such as education, welfare, and culture.
Brief description: Jocelyne Cesari Holds the Chair of Religion and Politics at the University of Birmingham, UK, is Senior Fellow at Georgetown University's Berkley Center on Religion, Peace and World Affairs and the T. J. Dermot Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence and Peacebuilding at Harvard Divinity School (2018-2021). Her other books include: What is Political Islam? (2018) (special mention of the religion and international section of the International Studies Association), and The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State (Cambridge, 2014).
Review Quotes: 'Built upon the simple but powerful notion that the global expansion of the modern nation-state beyond the West went hand in hand with the global expansion of the Western secular/religious divide, Cesari's book expands her analysis of political Islam to offer a rich comparative overview of the way in which these processes unfolded, similarly yet diversely, in India, China and Russia.' José Casanova, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University