Abbasi, Rushain. 2020. "Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular? The Din-Dunyā Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought." Journal of Islamic Studies no. 31:185–225.

"Timothy Fitzgerald, a prolific theorist in the study of religion, has devoted several works to arguing that the two fixed categories of the religious and secular are novel to modern Europe invented in early modern Europe and therefore sit uncomfortably within the Islamic context. My article aims to problematize this uncontested claim by illustrating how the medieval dīn–dunyawī distinction represents an autochthonous Islamic binary akin to the modern religious and secular." (pp. 185-186)

(...)

"My paper will demonstrate that the medieval dīn–dunyā binary represented a conceptual separation of the world into distinct religious and non-religious spheres analogous to the modern religious–secular, with things like worship, prayer, and divine law on one side and all worldly matters on the other. Similar to the modern conception, wherein ‘the secular’ is effectively equivalent to the ‘non-religious’, the Arabic term dunyawī is essentially defined by the non-dīn. In this sense, the categories are in a mutually-defining relationship, but not necessarily one of opposition, as will be shown. The dunyawī was also viewed as a more universal and neutral space, whereas the dīn was seen as particular and limited in scope and thus in more need of explication. Furthermore, the binary was not simply a banal feature of the the Arabic language, but was actively used to discuss and resolve major issues in Islamic thought." (pp. 191-192)

(...)

"Moving on to the specifics, the term ‘secular’ may not always be the best choice for translation since there also exists the term ‘worldly’, which accurately renders the term dunyawī in certain contexts, but without the extra baggage the term ‘secular’ carries within the modern world. I would leave it, then, to the translator’s discretion to choose which term functions more appropriately in context. In my opinion, it works well in some contexts and not in others. Nevertheless, ‘dīn’ as ‘religion’ almost always works as a useful translation, since there is no other word in the English lexicon that represents the totality of what dīn signifies, e.g., ritual, worship, and divine law. Moreover, the connotation of ‘religion’ in the modern context need not always signify some privatized belief in the divine. For example, Anglophone Muslims often use ‘religion’ as a general term for Islam and mean by it something far-removed from the uniquely Christian view that Ahmed and others maintain is inextricably linked to the term ‘religion’. Many Muslims today see Islam as ‘a way of life’, applicable to economics as much as it is to prayer, even as they use the term ‘religion’." (p. 225)

References

Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
———. 2021. "Islam and the Invention of Religion: A Study of Medieval Muslim Discourses on Dīn." Studia Islamica:1–108.

Abstract: "In recent years, the validity of the category of religion has been increasingly subjected to severe criticism across several academic disciplines. The thrust of this critical position – despite the nuances and sophistication of the various arguments advanced in support of it – rests, in the main, on one central claim: that the notion of religion did not exist in non-Western and premodern civilizations and is therefore a unique invention of the modern West. It is my contention, however, that in fixating on the Western construction of the category of religion and the theoretical problems associated with it, scholars have neglected to consider whether a similar concept might have existed prior to the modern West, and if so, what this might mean for our understanding of religion as a historical phenomenon. As a remedy to this trend, this article will engage in a comprehensive conceptual historical analysis of the Arabic term dīn (and its related terminology) in order to demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, premodern Muslims did indeed possess a concept akin to the modern sense of “religion” long before the rise of the modern West, and that, furthermore, they were the first historical community to sustain and develop a rich and robust analytical discourse around the idea of religion, which consequently played a major role in various social, political, and intellectual endeavors in Islamic history. My investigation will reveal that premodern Muslims continuously redefined and repurposed the concept of religion (based on a readily available conceptual vocabulary produced within the Late Antique Near East) in the process of offering particular sociological accounts of the origins and nature of religion, addressing political concerns like the unravelling of power, classifying the “Other,” and more."
Abdullah, Fatima, and Ibrahim, Haslina. 2013. "Wilfred Cantwell Smith on the meaning of religion and Islam. A pluralist dilemma reexamined." Al-Shajarah no. 18:85–102.

Abstract: "Wilfred Cantwell Smith deserves attention for the following two reasons: his critical, straightforwardness against the conventional Christian and Western secular viewpoints on religion and his interest for, and yet deconstructive insights, on the meaning of Islam. Smith indeed, was a scholar of a versatile academic background. He was a Christian theologian and a pluralist who rejected exclusivism (as a position in religion), a historian of religion and a phenomenologist who struggled to live the meaning of the sacred and the profane (in his redefinition of religion) and a missiologist who was fascinated with Islam (and yet deconstructed its meaning). This article relies heavily on textual, critical and comparative analysis and reexamines Smith’s understanding of religion and Islam. It is supposed that his ideas on religion and Islam were much shaped by his pluralist stance."
Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 3: Religion and Secular, Sacred and Profane, Theocentric and Anthropocentric, Total Social Fact, Family Resemblance , pp. 176-245.

"The most obvious conceptualization of Islam in the received terms both of scholarly and of popular analysis—namely, Islam as “religion”—has been considerably complicated, if not undermined outright, as the category of “religion” has (over the last two decades) been subjected to a severe—and, in my view, sound and instructive—interrogation and deconstruction in the scholarly discourse to the point that the meaningfulness and validity of the received category of “religion” has been put into question. It is not my purpose here to reprise in detail the now widely-available critique of “religion”: rather, I should like to highlight the implications for the conceptualization of Islam that arise from some of its foundational insights." (p. 176, a note omitted)

(...)

"Modern Western “reification” of religion (to use Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s famous term)—that is, “mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective, systematic entity”(4)—required the identification and stabilization of the objective component elements that identify and constitute religion. The elements that were identified as comprising and signalling the category of religion arose from the fact that the event of the Western Enlightenment Modern took place in and against Christian epistemology and Christian institution. Four elements are pre-eminent among these stabilizing measures of religion. First: religion is habitually seen as empirically unverifiable faith in the supernatural or transcendental—as distinct from empirical observation of verifiable facts in the natural, which we call “science.”

Second: religion is habitually seen as related to specialized institutions: especially with a specialized social institution, namely, the church, or something like it; and with a specialized textual institution, namely, scripture; and with the production by institutionally-authorized interpreters—that is, by a clergy or something like them—by their institutionalized and authorized reading of scripture of prescriptive and proscriptive institutional truths—that is, creeds and laws. Third: religion is habitually identified with the value of the sacred as distinct from the profane.(5) Fourth: religion is habitually identified with the performance of acts of self-and communal-constitution in terms of a higher power that is the object of faith and source of the the sacred, as well as self-and communal-subjection to a higher power that is the object of faith and source of the the sacred—with piety and worship—particularly the ritual performance of prayer for divine intervention." (pp. 177-178, a note omitted)

(4) [Winfred Cantwell] Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 51.

(5) On the sacred/profane distinction, see later in this chapter.
Brodeur, Patrice C. 2001. "Religion." In Encyclopaedia of the Qur'ān: Volume Four, edited by McAuliffe, Jane Dammen, 395–398. Leiden: Brill.

"Prior to the twentieth century, the English word “religion” had no direct equivalent in Arabic nor had the Arabic word dīn in English. They became partially synonymous only in the course of the twentieth century as a result of increased English-Arabic encounters and the need for consistency in translation (see TRANSLATIONS OF THE QUR'ÂN). In the same way the English word “religion” carries a genealogy of meanings, as revealed in W.C. Smith’s groundbreaking book The meaning and end of religion, so does the Arabic word dīn. This co-existence of diverse meanings makes the interpretation of both words fluid in terms of their current and past usages as well as their contemporary interrelationship.

The present examination of the concept of dīn in the Qur'ān therefore requires a dual approach: first, reconstructing its meanings within the linguistic context of the period during which the Qur'ān was revealed (cf. e.g. Bravmann, Spiritual background, 1-7, for discussion of the relationship between dīn and the pre-Islamic Arab concept of muruwwa; see also REVELATION AND INSPIRATION; ARABIC LANGUAGE; DIALECTS; PRE-ISLMIC ARABIA AND THE QUR'ÂN), using both intra- and inter-textual approaches to processes of interpretation (hermeneutics); second, writing those reconstructed meanings in English, using words with contemporary meanings that can only approximate their Arabic equivalents. In the face of this double challenge, the primary danger to avoid is the simplistic reduction of the Arabic word dīn to that of the English “religion.” A rich history of distinct past and interrelated current meanings emerges through an analysis of intra- and inter-textual qur'ānic hermeneutics." (p. 395)
Gardet, Louis. 1991. "Din." In The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition: Volume II: C - G edited by Lewis, Bernard, Pellat, Charles and Schacht, Joseph, 293–296. Leiden: Brill.

"I. Definition and general notion.

It is usual to emphasize three distinct senses of din: (i) judgment, retribution; (2) custom, usage; (3) religion. The first refers to the Hebraeo-Aramaic root, the second to the Arabic root ddna, dayn (debt, money owing), the third to the Pehlevi děn (revelation, religion). This third etymology has been exploited by Noldeke and Vollers. We would agree with Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Mahomet,[Paris: Albin Michel 1957] 504) in not finding it convincing. In any case, the notion of "religion" in question is by no means identical in Mazdaism and Islam. On the contrary, the two first etymologies, Hebrew and Arabic, seem to interact, and the meanings are nothing like so diverse as has sometimes been stated.

(...)

"Thus din signifies obligation, direction, submission, retribution. Whether referring to the Hebrew-Aramaic sense or the ancient Arabic root, there will remain the ideas of debt to be discharged (hence obligation) and of direction imposed or to be followed with a submissive heart. From the standpoint of him who imposes obligation or direction, din rejoins the "judgment" of the Hebrew root; but from the standpoint of him who has to discharge the obligation and receive the direction, din must be translated "religion"—the most general and frequent sense.

There is no doubt about this translation. But the concept indicated by din does not exactly coincide with the ordinary concept of "religion", precisely because of the semantic connexions of the words.

Religio evokes primarily that which binds man to God; and din the obligations which God imposes on His "reasoning creatures" (ashdb al-'ukul, as Djurdjanĩ [Kitāb al-ta'rifāt, ed. Flügel, Leipzig 1845.p. 11]. Now the first of these obligations is to submit to God and surrender one's self to Him.

Since the etymological sense of islām is "surrender of self (to God)", the famous Kur'anic verse then shows its full meaning: "This day I have perfected your religion (din) for you and completed my favour unto you, and have chosen for you as religion al-Islām" (V 3; cf. II 126, III 19)." (p. 293)
Glei, Reinhold, and Reichmuth, Stefan. 2012. "Religion between Last Judgement, law and faith: Koranic dīn and its rendering in Latin translations of the Koran." Religion no. 42:247–271.

Abstract: "In this article, the meaning of the Latin term religio and its equivalents in European languages is considered in a diachronical perspective, with a special focus on the history of the Koranic term dīn and its rendering in Latin translations. It is shown that the Koranic concept of religion goes back to late-antique Middle East sources, responsible for the different meanings of dīn in Koranic usage. As can be seen, there is a development from an older meaning of ‘law, judgement’ to a younger one, ‘religion’. Looking at the Latin translations of dīn from the 12th century onwards, there seems to be a similar development from lex (‘law’) to religio. This reflects, however, not only the etymology of Arabic dīn but also the influence of St Paul’s theology of law picked up by Augustine and others. In the 15th century, then, Nicholas of Cusa was the first to use the term religio to denote Islam. This way, new light is shed on a (not exclusively) European Begriffsgeschichte of ‘religion ’."
Haddad, Yvonne Y. 1974. "The Conception of the Term dīn in the Qurʾān." Muslim World no. 64:114–123.

"Scholars have repeatedly attempted to understand the semantic and etymological meaning of the word dīn in the Qur’ān.(1) At different times, they have theorized that in some of its usages the term is a loan word from Hebrew, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac or Iranian.

It has become customary to understand the term as judgment or retribution, as custom or usage, and finally as religion.

This paper will not attempt to resolve the controversies concerning etymological roots of the word; rather, it will concentrate on an analysis of the use of the term dīn in the Qur’ān in the context in which it appears, attempting to consider the word as it was understood by the first listeners and in terms of its meaning in the world view of the Qur’ān.

Every occurrence of the term dīn in the Qur’ān has been noted and classified according to the dating suggested by Régis Blachère(2) in the chronology of the suras, leading to the discovery of a development in the differentiating words used in conjunction with the focus word dīn throughout the four revelation periods and suggesting a progression of and accretion to its meaning." (p. 114)

(1) Toshihiko Izutsu, God and Man in the Koran (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1964), pp. 219-229; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion {New York: Mentor Books, 1963), pp. 90-94, 99-100, 287-290; Helmer Ringgren. “The Pure Religion,” Oriens XV (1962). 93 ff.; Duncan B. Macdonald, “Din.” E.I. [Encylopedia of Islam], I, 1975; L. Gardet, “Din.” E.I., New Edition, II, 293-296; Arthur Jeffery. The

Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ān (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1938), pp. 131-132.

(2) Régis Blachère, Le Coran (Paris: G. P. Maisonneuve, 1947), pp. 12-18
Hödl, Hans Gerald. 2023. "Religion, dīn, and Islam: A Complex Web." In Transformation of Religion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Danz, Christian and Deibl, Jakob Helmut, 75–85. Paderborn: Brill Schöningh.

Abstract: "Thinking about religion is confronted with several problems. Is religion a term to be applied in every religious tradition? Are there other concepts used as an equivalent for religion? Is the meaning of the terminology used transhistorical or not? The contribution argues that in Arabic there is a term dīn indicating a complex and ambiguous meaning before modernity and adapting to the all-encompassing meaning of religion influenced by the colonial domination of meaning at a global level."

"Conclusion

The Arabic word dīn nowadays often translated as religion has a long history of complex meanings. Analyzing this history demonstrates the emergence of a colonial notion of religion as a homogenous semantic field pertaining to a set of dogmatic teachings becoming part of the worldview and way of living of believers. A historically informed investigation easily shows a more complex and ambiguous history of the meanings of dīn. A transhistorical concept of religion is no longer appropriate when these – Islamic and others – aspects are included." (p. 83)
Karamustafa, Ahmet T. 2017. "Islamic Dīn as an Alternative to Western Models of “Religion”." In Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies, edited by King, Richard, 163–171. New York: Columbia University Press.

"Even though Cantwell Smith’s penetrative examination of the history of the Western concept of religion had a formative impact on the development of religious studies as a separate academic field of study, surprisingly, only a few scholarly sequels to his account of the Islamic concept of dīn have appeared to this day.(9) Significantly, practically all of these later studies have focused solely on the uses of the category dīn in the Qur’ān, paying little or no attention to its historical development over time or to its undoubtedly complex cross-cultural journey across the numerous linguistic and cultural landscapes that came to be associated with the Islamic tradition.

What shape would such a historical and critical scrutiny of d ī n take, and how useful would it be?" (pp. 163-164)

(...)

"With a rich and long history, Islamic dīn is certainly a powerful reminder that “religion” is not a naturally universal category. At the very least, close scrutiny of dīn leads to a serious reconsideration of the legitimacy of characterizing Islam as a “religion.” Indeed, it is clear that “religion,” in any of the specific forms it took in Western history, is not an automatically suitable category to use in describing Islam. This conclusion not only enriches the ongoing discussions on the history and global applicability of the concept of religion within the academic discipline of religious studies; it also compels us to work toward alternative conceptualizations of Islam that would do justice to the historical record and self-images of this major tradition. In addition, a reconceptualization of Islam as a category other than “religion” (and dīn would work perfectly here) promises to transform prevalent perspectives on a host of significant issues of current interest such as secularization and democratization in Muslim communities, Muslim understandings of the discourse of human rights and gender equality, “religious” pluralism, and “religious” conflict.

It challenges the ways in which Islam is currently studied in academic settings and brings to greater relief the necessity of moving the scholarly scrutiny of Islam out of the confines of the departments of Middle and Near Eastern languages and civilizations as well as religious studies into the broader canvas of humanistic and social- scientific research in all its richness and diversity. (p. 169)
Kotorkoshi, Adamu Musa. 2024. "Meaning and Origin of Religion from the Reviewed Literature: An Islamic Perspective." Global Journal of Research in Education & Literature no. 4:1–8.

Abstract: "The concept of religion has been a subject of debate. It generates many discussions in many academic fora. Various approaches in understanding the concept of religion were used and thus, different ideas and opinions were produced. According to some, religion is nothing rather than just a belief in spiritual beings. Others consider it as a way of life. But, to the anti-religious approach, religion is like a virus or opium of the people. As for the Muslims, Islam is the only religion and all other religions are null and void. This paper discusses the general concept of religion and the perspective of Islam on Muslims’ understanding. In achieving this objective, the paper analyzes some established relevant literature and all sources were duly acknowledged."
Maltese, Giovanni. 2021. "Islam Is Not a “Religion” – Global Religious History and Early Twentieth-Century Debates in British Malaya." Method and Theory in the Study of Religion no. 33:345–380.

Abstract: "Lately, Islamicists have called to discard “religion” as a conceptual tool and/or to use the “Qurʾānic term” dīn instead, arguing that “religion” entails Eurocentric bias.

Analyzing how Fazl-ur-Rahman Ansari conceptualized Islam and religion in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this article presents a threefold argument. Firstly, I argue that a global history approach which examines in a poststructuralist framework how “Islam” and “religion” are used in concrete contexts is better suited to address the problem of Eurocentrism in both Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. Secondly, I challenge the scholarly thesis that twentieth-century Southeast Asian intellectual debates which referred to Islam as religion were mere emulators of debates conducted in the “West.”

Instead of assuming isolated histories and ignoring Southeast Asian debates, I contend that the current use of and debates about conceptualizations of Islam as/and religion are the product of one and the same discourse – a result of global negotiation processes in which Europeans were as involved as Southeast Asia-based non-Europeans, even if they did not speak from the same position of power. Finally, I submit that the approach of global religious history opens new perspectives on contemporary Malaysian politics."
McCutcheom, Russell T. 2005. Religion and the Domestication of Dissent: or How to Live in a Less than Perfect Nation. London: Equinox.

"For example, that our Latin-based classification “religion” finds no equivalent in Arabic seems not to prevent well-meaning scholars—who otherwise lament the way some scholars trample over what they consider to be authentic, indigenous meanings that require respectful treatment—from calling Islam a religion. In fact, the Arabic term din is routinely translated as religion. But, as argued in The Encyclopeadia of Islam, the etymology of din involves three separate lines: (i) a Hebraeo-Arabic origin meaning “judgement” or “retribution;” (ii) an Arabic root meaning “a debt” or “money owing” that comes to mean “custom” or “usage”; and, finally (iii) a Pahlevi (i.e., Middle Persian) linguistic origin meaning “revelation” that is therefore translatable as “religion.” Disagreeing with the first and third etymologies, the article’s author [Louis Gardet] makes a persuasive case for considering din to develop from the notion of a debt that must be settled on a specific date, which in turn leads to such successive usages as: the idea of properly following an established custom of settling debts; the act of guiding one in a prescribed direction; the act of judging whether such a prescription has in fact been followed; visiting retribution upon one who has failed to follow the required path (see Lewis et al. 1965, 293-96). As such, yawm al-din, or “Day of Judgement,” therefore comes to signify the day when Allah gives direction to all human beings. So, much as with the relation between the geographic and prescriptive senses of such English words as “direction” and “directive,” we see here a gradual conflation of social exchange and social status with geographic movement and, eventually, with rules of propriety. Accordingly, din eventually moves from the more narrow sense of a debt to be discharged to being a term that stands in for “the body of obligatory prescriptions to which one must submit” (p. 293).

Therefore, it is rather misleading to suggest, as does one reference resource, that din is “employed to mean a religion together with its practices in general” (Glassé 1989, 99; emphasis added). Although italicizing this suggestion of intentionality may be too fine a nuance, din is not “employed to mean a religion’—as if early Arabic users were hunting for a local equivalent for what some of us now take to be the obviously universal concept that lurks deep within the word “religion”; instead, it is translated by contemporary English speakers by means of their local word, religion.

What's more, if the above etymology is persuasive, then there is a great deal lost in this translation, for “the concept indicated by din does not exactly coincide with the ordinary concept of ‘religion’ precisely because of the semantic conception of the word” (Lewis et al. 1965, 293)." (pp- 38-39)

References

Lewis, B. Ch. Pellat, and J. Schacht, eds. 1965. The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New edition. Vol. 2, C-G. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Sahas, Daniel J. 1994. "The Notion of “Religion” with reference to Islam in the Byzantine anti-Islamic Literature." In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 523–530. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

Reprinted in D. J. Sahas, Byzantium and Islam: Collected Studies on Byzantine-Muslim Encounters, Leiden: Brill 2022, pp. 3-12.

"Religion in general and Orthodox Christianity in particular, although an essential component of the Byzantine society(1) and the determining factor in refuting Islam, is nowhere defined in the Byzantine anti-islamic literature. To arrive at some idea of the Byzantine religious self-understanding and its treatment of Islam as a religion on the basis of this body of literature, one has to identify religious characteristics by means of inference, and reverse them to a positive statement~ because such references to Islam are characteristically negative, indeed, polemic." (p. 523)

(...)

"The other consideration is that θρησκεία and θεοσέβεια came from two spiritual figures, both of whom were intellectual ascetics and mystics. In treating Islam, they were not driven by military, political considerations, or behavioural manifestations, which yield a limited and distorted sense of the essence of a religious tradition. Both of them treated Islam and religion as a spiritual experience and a way of life. To make such a critical distinction was an even greater challenge during their time in the context of two theocracies battling each other, when religion and social behaviour were seen inseparably and interchangeably.

In summary, Religion although not defined by the Byzantines, is viewed as the substrate of one's own identity, civilization, culture, ethos, morality and practice; it is one's own ground of being. To Byzantines and Muslims alike, Religion was a matter of one's own self-identity and, thus, a matter of life and death! Such a notion of Religion explains the intensity in the Byzantine anti-Islamic literature and the ferocity in the Muslim-Byzantine relations." (p. 530)

(1) In the words of Harry Magoulias, "Byzantium's greatest creative contribution to mankind", Byzantine Christianity. Emperor. Church and the West, Detroit: Wayne State University, 1982, p. ix. Of the many monographs on Byzantine Christianity a notable one is by Joan M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1986.
Tayob, Abdulkader Ismail. 2007. "Religion in modern Islamic thought and practice." In Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, edited by Fitzgerald, Timothy, 176–192. New York: Routledge.

"This chapter is a proposal to take a careful look at the debate around religion and the religious in the modern discourse of Islam. It abandons the search for religion and the religious in modern Islam as clearly identifiable aspects of human life. And for now, it also does not pay attention to the way in which contemporary studies of Islam such as that of [H. A. R.] Gibb, [Wilfrferd Cantwell] Smith and [Fazlur] Rahman have applied explicit and implicit theories of religions to Islam. It puts the spotlight on how the concepts of religion and the religious have played crucial roles in the production of modern Islam. This chapter explores the elaboration of religion and the religious in Muslim discourses and practices. It argues that the articulation of modern Islam in theory and practice depends to a large extent on this discursive formation around the notion of religion and the religious. Both religion and the religious as generic terms are used in the Muslim discourse itself." (p. 179)

(...)

"This paper has highlighted the invocation and invention of a uniquely religious/Islamic aspect of modern society by the ulama. The ‘religious’ has emerged in the context of social and institutional changes of society. This particular Islamic invocation has been articulated in the simultaneous elaboration of secular sectors. The Islamic has been distinguished from these sectors while claming a totalizing judgement on them. This tension between being distinct and being relevant has obscured the emergence of the religious. But more careful observation and refl ection would illustrate the nature of this religious dimension, and its far-reaching implications for change and reformation in such societies." (p. 191)
Waardenburg, Jacques. 1994. "Muslims Notions of Religion as Manifested in Interreligious Discourse." In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 531–540. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

"This paper explores some Muslim concepts and notions of religion which have manifested themselves in meeting with other religions. Such concepts and notions were underlying the way in which Muslims have interpreted other religions as well as Islam when they have entered into dialogue with them. We are concerned here only with the meeting with three religions, or rather religio-cultural worlds, which have enriched an intellectual and spiritual Muslim elite at different moments in history. These are the world of Eastern Christianity, conveying the Greek and Hellenistic heritage, that of Hindu thinkers with the classical Indian heritage, and that of nineteenth-century western Christianity conveying the European heritage. In fact, Muslims have often been more interested in the cultural contribution of others, their knowledge and its practical applicability, than in alternative faiths and religions. But still, beyond the basic texts of Quran and Suuna various new concepts and notions of religion could, and did, emerge in these encounters and this fact is worth considering more closely." (p. 531, a note omitted)

Shinto

Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2003. "'Religion' and 'the Secular' in Japan. Problems in history, social anthropology and the study of religion." Electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies no. 10:1–43.

;" ‘Religion’ and its tacit distinction from ‘the secular’ is a category that is being constantly used by academics and the media, as well as inordinary conversation, to refer to a large number of quite disparate things in a wide variety of situations. Among those things there are some uses and referents of ‘religion’ that occur more frequently than others, for example belief in gods, or soteriological doctrines, or ritual in general, or some special kind of religious ritual, or cosmology, or the basic values and norms of a society, its ideology and so on. All of these ideas about the meaning and definition of religion can be found in the huge number of texts produced on the elusive subject; and frequently many different usages can be found in the same text.

(...)

"We can notice that this general category is an English language word derived from Latin ‘religio’ and with close equivalents in otheruropean languages. There is a historical context and geographical location. It seems that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries the word ‘religion’ began to be used in new reified ways that reflected the ideological revolution of early modernity (Bossy, 1982). But many scholars in religion, and in other disciplines such as history, sociology and social anthropology, still apply it freely to any historical period in virtually any society. We can easily find books and articles about thereligions of the native American peoples, about African religions, aboutthe religion of the Buddha in ancient India, about Japanese religion in the Heian or Kamakura periods, about the religious currents of contemporary Japanese society, and so on." (p. 4)

References

Bossy, J. (1982) “Some elementary forms of Durkheim”, Past and Present, xcv: 3-18.
Horii, Mitsutoshi. 2018. The Category of ‘Religion’ in Contemporary Japan: Shūkyō and Temple Buddhism. Cham (Switzerland): Palgrave Macmillan.

;Foreword by Timothy Fitzgerald.

"This volume aims to be a modest contribution to a critical discursive study of ‘religion’ within the academic theories and practices on ‘Japanese religion.’ The argument presented in this book has been informed by a body of theory often referred to as “critical religion” (e.g. Fitzgerald 2000, 2007a, b; Masuzawa 2005; McCutcheon 1997, 2001).

(...)

In other words, the term ‘religion’ as an empty signifier, “can be activated with definitions, meanings, and communicational practices” (von Stuckrad 2013, p. 17). Pointing out the ‘emptiness’ of this category does not mean that religion (however defined) does not exist.

‘Emptiness’ is the very nature of any social category, and this does not mean that these are ‘unreal’ and unimportant. The empty category of religion is ‘real’ and important, as Beckford (2003, p. 24) rightly highlighted, “in the sense of producing effects on some human lives and societies.”

Therefore, what can be meaningfully studied about ‘religion’ is “the processes of communicational generation, legitimatization, and negotiation of meaning system” (von Stuckrad 2013, p. 18) carried out by the employment of the term ‘religion’ in a specific historical and cultural context.

(...)

It is in this context that what appears ‘religious’ in Japan would be very different for example, between what scholars in Japanese Religion(s) expects as ‘religious’ and what ordinary Japanese people regard as ‘religious’ in their everyday discourse.

This chapter interrogates the term ‘religion’ in some major scholarly works on contemporary ‘Japanese religion(s).’ It concludes with some methodological notes to suggest how to study the things which used to be called ‘religion,’ after the term has been deconstructed. This provides the conceptual foundation for the following chapters of the book." (pp. 23-24)

References

Beckford, James A. 2003. Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2007a. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fitzgerald, Timothy ed. 2007b. Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. Equinox.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. London: University of Chicago Press.

McCutcheon, Russell. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McCutcheon, Russell. 2001. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Struckrad, Kocku von. 2013. Discursive Study of Religion: Approaches, Definitions, Implications. Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion 25: pp. 5–25.
Isomae, Jun'ichi. 2005. "Deconstructing "Japanese Religion": A Historical Survey." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies no. 32:235–248.

;Abstract: "The term "Japanese religion" was first coined by Anesaki Masaharu in 1907 for readers of English, and then introduced into Japanese society. Originally, this term has a dual meaning: one refers to a unified religion particular to Japan, the other refers to the diverse religions in Japan. The former is exclusive, the latter is inclusive. Most Japanese scholars have deliberately avoided the term in the former, exclusive, sense. In their research they have, at times, understood Japanese religion in the latter sense. The discourse on "Japanese religion" becomes a dialogical and hybrid space between diverse religions that have existed in Japan as a result of the dynamic movement of exchange and conflict between Westernization and indigenization within religious traditions-Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, new religions, and folk religions. Through such an attempt to deconstruct "Japanese Religion" the exclusive sense can be clarified in contrast to the inclusive, heterogeneous sense."

References

Anesaki Masaharu, Religious History of Japan: An Outline With Two Appendices on the Textual History of the Buddhist Scriptures, Tōkyō 1907.
———. 2007. "The formative process of State Shinto in relation to the Westernization of Japan: the concept of ‘religion’ and ‘Shinto’." In Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, edited by Fitzgerald, Timothy, 93–101. New York: Routledge.

;Translated by Michael S. Wood.

"Accompanying the overseas advancement of various Western nation states, Christianity and even more so the very concept of ‘religion’ fundamentally based on Christianity came to proliferate throughout the world. Japan and other nations that were at least nominally politically independent came under the encroaching cultural dominance of the West. With the opening of the country to the West, mid-nineteenth-century Japan’s status as a sovereign nation state remained elusive owing to unfair treaties established with Western countries. Whether Japan was to be acknowledged as an independent nation state, or instead follow the path of a colonial state depended on how well the country could adapt to a Western-style nation state model. Essential conditions to be achieved included the establishment of a constitution and recognition of Christianity. The recognition of Christianity took place in 1873, at which time a specifi c concept of religion began to spread throughout society primarily through intellectuals. This new concept of shûkyô or ‘religion’ was based on the central characteristics of Christianity but was also embraced as a larger category that included various other non-Christian practices and social formations that appeared in some respects analogous to Christianity.(1)" (p. 93)

(1) This was taking place at roughly the same time as the notion of world religions was being established. For mid- to late-nineteenth-century Japan the problem became one of having Japanese indigenous practice recognized as a unique, yet not inferior, manifestation of culture. [Translator’s note.]
———. 2017. "Religion, Religious Studies, and Shinto in Modern Japan." In Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies, edited by King, Richard, 87–93. New York: Columbia University Press.

;"When Japan opened to the West in 1858 the concept of “religion” was imported into Japanese society with all its political connotations."

(...)

"Originally the Japanese term shūkyō developed as a Japanese rendering of the Chinese term zongjiao, which occurred in various Buddhist sutras where it had the doctrinal meaning of “teaching” (as in “the teachings of the Buddha” and the like).

However, the new modern Japanese understanding of “religion,” imported from the West, centered on doctrinal belief and reflected a Protestant conception of “religion” positing a founder, set of scripture, and a church. This was very different from the Japanese case, where “religious” practice is part of everyday life as manifest in certain ritual behaviors. With the promulgation of the Japanese Imperial Constitution in 1889, the concept of “religion” came to be located in the private sphere, while the concept of “ritual,” overlapping with “morality,” was placed in the public sphere, dependent as these were on the Western dichotomy of “religion” and “the secular.”

Within such a dichotomy, obviously Christianity (which in Japan meant Protestantism due to the energetic activity of American missionaries) was perceived as belonging to the private sphere of religion. Of course such a Protestant notion of “religion” is far removed from the cultural reality of Japan, a factor that helps to explain why today so few Japanese have adopted Christianity." (pp. 87-88)
Josephson, Jason Ānanda. 2009. "Evil Cults, Monstrous Gods, and the Labyrinth of Delusion: Rhetorical Enemies and Symbolic Boundaries in the Construction of “Religion” in Japan." Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienfroschung no. 33:39–59.

;Abstract: "The formation of the category religion (Jap. shūkyō) in Japan was more than merely the search for a definition or an appropriate translation term. As this essay demonstrates, of vital importance in formulating “religion” were certain logics of exclusion, which came to demarcate the limits of what was meant by “religion”. This paper traces the various forms of boundary-drawing essential to the construction of the category. To do so, it first establishes the background for the Japanese conception of “heresy”. It then discusses some of the early Meiji policies to suppress “heresy” and “superstition”, and it then briefly touches on some of the debates about the legal limits of “religion” and “religious freedom”."
———. 2015. "The invention of religions in East Asia." In Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia, edited by Turner, Bryan S. and Salemink, Oscar, 17–29. New York: Routledge.

;"The following pages discuss ongoing debates about the continuities and discontinuities of “religion” in East Asia. Were there native conceptions of religion or was its appearance an imposition?

Are there clearly defined separate Chinese or Japanese religions? If so, what is their proper taxonomy? At stake in these issues is not only scholarship focused on East Asian religions, but more fundamentally the universality of the term “religion.”

At first glance, the similarity of the words for “religion” in contemporary European languages is striking (Ger. Religion, Dut. religie, Fr. religion, It. religione, Sp. religion, Pg. religião, Rm. religia, Pl. religia, Rs. религия ryeligiya). This resemblance betrays their common origin in the Latin “religio.” In pre-Christian Roman usage, however, “religio” generally referred to a prohibition or an obligation, not to anything we would today recognize as a religion. In even a cursory analysis, the term “religion” shows all the signs of being a fairly recent invention, burdened with the marks of a particular cultural moment.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that attempts to historicize “religion” have been going on for some time. Over 50 years ago, Wilfred Cantwell Smith in The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) criticized essentialist approaches to religious studies, arguing that the term “religion” was of dubious usefulness.

(...)

Although these genealogies of religion have been valuable for the discipline, they have focused almost exclusively on the writing of Europeans and Americans. Taken together, they have tended to foster the conception that “religion” attained international hegemony unilaterally and without resistance. Additionally, they have tended to ignore the other part of the equation – the other terms that were overwritten or produced in response to the globalization of the Euro-American “religion.” In a sense, they have been preoccupied with a single etymology without tracing the other terms with which it has intersected." (p. 19, a note omitted)

(...)

"On the one hand, scholars working on Chinese, Korean, or Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto or Daoism are now free to pursue their respective research without the confines of the Western category of religion. These traditions can be, and in my assessment should be, analysed in the pre-modern period according to indigenous categories (like jiao). However, I would humbly suggest that instead of anachronistic readings of pre- modern Asian cultural or intellectual history, scholars would benefit from reflecting on the shifts that occurred in nineteenth-century Japan, and that were later transmitted throughout the region (for my own humble efforts in this regard, see Josephson 2012)."

References

Josephson, Jason Ananda. 2012. The Invention of Religion in Japan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Krämer, Hans Martin. 2013. "How "Religion" Came to Be Translated as "Shūkyō": Shimaji Mokurai and the Appropriation of Religion in Early Meiji Japan." Japan Review no. 25:89–111.

;Abstract: "Investigations into the modern concept of "religion" in Japan usually stress its Western origins. According to this argument, shükyö was shaped following Christian, more precisely Protestant, notions of what religion was (and what not). Yet, in explaining why it was the word shükyö that eventually prevailed as the standard translation term for "religion," pointing to the West is of little help. Instead we have to turn to the earliest discussions about religion at the very beginning of the Meiji period, in texts by Buddhist authors with domestic agendas little influenced by the Western notion of religion. It was rather the religious policy of the Meiji government, up to the mid- 1870s deeply colored by the interests of the Shintoist group in the Bureau of Divinity and the Ministry of Doctrine, that prompted Buddhist authors, especially of the Jõdo Shin persuasion, to theorize about religion and its relationship to the state. The most prominent of these was Shimaji Mokurai, who not only stressed the distinctness of religion from politics, but also came up with another conceptual opposition, one that would eventually yield the term shükyö as expressing the realm of "religion." It is this terminological opposition which will be traced genealogically in the second half of the article; and through this exercise it will be shown that the main motive for Buddhist authors in definining shükyö in the early Meiji years was to come to terms with the role of Shinto within the modern polity, i.e. a purely domestic concern hardly affected by Western cultural dominance."
———. 2015. Shimaji Mokurai and the Reconception of Religion and the Secular in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

;"After generations of conceiving religion as a cultural universal, scholars have now spent more than a decade working out how “religion” functioned as a Christian imposition.(1) They have shown not only how, throughout Asia, European scholars, colonial bureaucrats, and Christian missionaries gave force to the modern concept of “religion” but also how imposed notions of the distinction between religion and the secular, which had been worked out as a Catholic-Protestant compromise in Europe, became the norm all over the globe. What has been largely overlooked in these recent studies, however, is the importance of non-Christian actors in reconceptualizing the categories of “religion” and the “secular” for their own purposes.(2) In particular, this study shows how one man, the Japanese Buddhist priest Shimaji Mokurai (1838–1911), more than anyone else gave shape to the modern Japanese concept of religion—and how, ironically, by carving out a place for Buddhism, he also paved the way for Japanese secularization." (Introdcution, p. 1)

(1) After the groundbreaking work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (The Meaning and End of Religion), this newer approach has been refined by Jonathan Z. Smith (“Religion, Religions, Religious”) and Tomoko Masuzawa (The Invention of World Religions), among many others.

(2) Exceptions to this trend are the very recent books by Jason Josephson (The Invention of Religion in Japan), Trent Maxey (The “Greatest Problem”), Anna Sun (Confucianism as a World Religion), and, to a lesser extent, Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer (The Religious Question in Modern China).
Kuroda, Toshio. 1981. "Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion." Journal of Japanese Studies no. 7:1–21.

;Translated by James C. Dobbins and Suzanne Gay.

"It is hoped that this article will demonstrate that before modern times Shinto did not exist as an independent religion. The main points of my argument will be as follows:

1) It is generally held that an indigenous self-consciousness is embodied in the word Shinto. I would argue that the original meaning of the word differs from how it is understood today.

2) The ceremonies of Ise Shrine, as well as those of the imperial court and the early provincial government, are said to have been forms of "pure Shinto." I would like to show that they actually became one component of a unique system of Buddhism which emerged in Japan and were perceived as an extension of Buddhism.

3) It is said that Shinto played a secular role in society and existed in a completely different sphere from Buddhism. I would maintain that this very secularity was permeated with Buddhist concepts and was itself religious in nature. The greater part of this paper will examine this question and the preceding two in their ancient and medieval contexts.

4) Finally, I would like to trace the historical stages and the rationale whereby the term Shinto came to mean the indigenous religion or national faith of Japan and to clarify how and when Shinto came to be viewed as an independent religion." (p. 3)
Maxey, Trent E. 2014. The "Greatest Problem": Religion and State Formation in Meiji Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

;"Global Grammar of Religion

The Japanese word shūkyō acquired its modern lexical range by serving as a translation for the Latinate term "religion." The grammar of religionin Meiji Japan has thus been approached as a matter of translation and the adoption of Western norms. Clearly, shukyo gained currency as a translation with traces of its foreign derivation never fully exorcized. At the same time, the significance of religion as a new discursive grammar cannot be reduced to its foreign derivation. That is to say, while the novel category of religion, conceived of as private, doctrinal assent, appeared incommensurate with existing forms of belief, ritual practice, and their place in Japanese daily life, that dissonance cannot be reduced to an assumed incommensurability between Japan and the West.

Religion nonetheless took on political salience in Meiji Japan within global crosscurrents. The semicolonial regime imposed by the so-called unequal treaties made religion a topic of debate, with Christianity informing the Meiji state's diplomatic calculations and its definition of religion.

Historicizing critiques of the modern construction of religion commonly stress the privileging of private, individual belief (that is, Protestant Christianity) as the normative definition of religion and religiosity.

The application of that definition of religion was intimately linked to the rise of Western imperialism and colonial administration.

By emphasizing private, individual belief, the grammar of religion mapped the world in terms of temporal progress: primitive, natural religion at the periphery and progressive, rational Protestantism at the center.(19) The political and intellectual elite of Meiji Japan grew keenly aware of this hierarchy, and the language of "Christian civilization" accompanied the diplomaticinteraction between the Meiji government and the dominant treaty powers. Religion constituted one site among many wherein Japan negotiated its place within a global hierarchy." (pp. 7-8)

(19) See, for example, Veer and Lehmann, Nation and Religion; Yasumaru Yoshio, "Minshu shukyo to 'kindai' to iu keiken."

References

Veer, Peter van der, and Hartmut Lehmann. Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Yasumaru Yoshio. "Minshu shukyo to 'kindai' to iu keiken." In Bunmeika no keiken: kindai tenkanki no Nihon, 337-62. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2007.
Nakamura, Hajime. 1988. "The Meaning of the Terms 'Philosophy' and 'Religion' in Various Traditions." In Interpreting Acrosss Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, edited by Larson, Gerald James and Deutsch, Eliot, 137–151. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

;"In any case, the terms 'religion' and 'philosophy', though difficult to define, have nevertheless been fairly sharply distinguished from each other in the West, while in eastern traditions the dividing line is often difficult to discern. Whether there has existed what is called philosophy in eastern traditions has been controversial. It is likely that countries of the Far East did not have the counterpart to 'philosophy' in the meaning of modern philosophy. When Japanese intellectuals first encountered modern western philosophy more than a century ago, they thought that philosophy was something new to them.

They were surprised. Amane Nishi (1829-1897), who endeavored to introduce western philosophy into Japan, coined a new word tetsugaku to mean "philosophy" and used it in his work Hyakuichi Shimon [A New Theory on the Hundred and One (Doctrines)] in 1874.

In old Japan, of course, Japanese intellectuals engaged in philosophical thinking. There was no separate branch of scholarship called philosophy, however. Probably one reason was that there was no antagonism toward religion, and intellectuals saw no need to develop a separate discipline with a different name. When Amane Nishi coined the word tetsugaku as the Japanese translation of the term 'philosophy', he meant both the "Way of Heaven" (Tendo) and the "Way of Man" (Jindo).

He included Confucianism, Buddhism, and all other ideologies within the concept of tetsugaku. At any rate, since Amane Nishi, the use of the term tetsugaku has been fixed or settled.

It was introduced into Korea, China, and Vietnam and has come to be widely used in East Asia. This fact suggests that "philosophy" was something new to intellectuals in the Far East, and that what is called philosophy in the modern West was lacking in the Far East before the term tetsugaku was coined." (p. 138)
Oh, Kang-Nam. 1994. "Is Zen a Religion?" In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 583–590. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

;"Is Zen a religion? Judging from what he said, it is obvious that Merton [*] would respond ,vith a definite "no!" to this question. This paper, however, will examine what other scholars, especially the renowned Zen scholar, D.T. Suzuki, would say about this question. As expected, the answer drawn from the writings of these scholars is both yes and no; and we will examine some bases for this ambivalent answer. We will further show that in the final analysis the issue is not whether we can define Zen as a religion, but it is rather whether we can apply Zen principles cross-culturally and cross-religiously to the life of modern men and women. More specifically, the paper will explore whether there can be a "universal Zen" which can contribute to the well-being of men and women regardless of their religious and cultural upbringing." (p. 583)

[*] Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, New York: A New Direction, 1968, p. 33.
Pye, Michael. 1994. "What is "Religion" in East Asia?" In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 115–122. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

;"The fundamental thesis of this paper is that it is not possible to reflect about the nature, functioning or meaning of religions in their plurality and diversity without forming au abstracted and general notion of religion, and that just such a notion developed in East Asia as it did in Europe." (p. 115)

(...)

"East Asian reflection on "religion" (Chinese and Japanese terminology will appear shortly) has been shaped by the religious history of the region in various ways. In particular two sets of questions, which occasionally interact, have been of importance in providing the matrix for the emergence of critical reflection on religion. The first is religious diversity, or pluralism, perceived as a challenge to the religious intellectual and the administrator alike. This found influential if notably succinct expression in the SanJiao-lun of the first Ming Emperor (Ming Tai Tsu, reigned 1368-98). (1) The second is the problem of diversity within any one specific religion, posed especially by the complex transmission of Buddhism from India through China to Korea and to Japan. This problem was treated in the major extant work of the Japanese writer Tominaga Nakamoto (1715-46), entitled Shutsujōkōgo and in the English translation Emerging from Tradition,(2) which implies among other things awakening from dogmatic slumbers.

His theory, or model, for explaining such diversity, was also applied to Confucianism and Shinto. Moreover on this basis he turned his attention in one important chapter to the same question about the "three teachings" (san-jiao, in Japanese sankyō), which had exercised the mind of Ming Tai Tsu. For this reason brief comments will be made on the san-jiao theory of these two writers, paying attention both to their underlying assumptions and to a few particularly relevant terminological details."

(1) Ming Tai-Tsu Yu-chih wen-chi, Taipai, Chin. Rep. 54 i.e. 1965. An English translation has been provided by Romeyn Taylor in: An Imperial Endorsement of Syncretism. Ming T'ai Tsu's Essay on Three Teachings: Translation and Commentary, Ming Studies 16, spring 1983, 31-38.

(2) Nakamoto Tominaga, Emerging from Meditation 11, (Eng. Trans. by Michael Pye), London and Honolulu 1990. This volume contains new translations of Okina no fumi fwni and the first western translation of Shutsujōkōgo.
Reader, Ian. 2004. "Dichotomies, Contested Terms and Contemporary Issues in the Study of Religion." Electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies no. 4:1–14.

;"This article has been written to try to move forward the debate onreligious terminology between Tim Fitzgerald, Michael Shackleton, andmyself that has been published in both the JAWS [Japan Anthropology Workahop] Newsletter and the electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies.

The papers are listedbelow in order, with the most recent at the top.

Fitzgerald, T (2004) The Religion-Secular Dichotomy: A Response to Responses. electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, Discussion Paper 2 in 2004, First Posted on 6 April 2004.

Reader, Ian (2004) Ideology, Academic Inventions and Mystical Anthropology: Responding to Fitzgerald's Errors and Misguided Polemics, electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, Discussion Paper 1 in 2004, First Posted on 3 March 2004.

Fitzgerald, T. (2003) 'Religion' and 'the Secular' in Japan: Problems in history, social anthropology, and religion, electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, Discussion Paper 3 in 2003, First Posted on 10 July 2003.
———. 2004. "Ideology, Academic Inventions and Mystical Anthropology. Responding to Fitzgerald's Errors and Misguided Polemics." Electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies no. 4:1–27.

;"This article was written in order to respond to arguments made in Tim Fitzgerald’s article in the JAWS Newsletter (Japan Anthropology Workshop) in November 2002 and to correct factual errors in it. Since Fitzgerald’s article (amended in November 2003 at the time my response was published) has since been posted as a discussion paper on this site, my response, too, has been included here, with slight amendments made to incorporate amendments made by Fitzgerald in the article as posted here. Please find below a reference and link to Fitzgerald's discussion paper.

Fitzgerald, T. (2003) 'Religion' and 'the Secular' in Japan: Problems inhistory, social anthropology, and religion, electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies, Discussion Paper 3 in 2003, First Posted on 10 July 2003." (p. 1)
Suzuki, Norihisa. 1970. "Nobuta Kishimoto and the Beginnings of the Scientific Study of Religion in Modern Japan." Contemporary Religions in Japan no. 11 (155-180).

;"It was not until the inauguration of a lectureship in the science of religion at Tokyo Imperial University's College of Liberal Arts in 1905 that shūkyōgaku [religious studies] acquired the respectability of an academic field of study for the first time. The professor in charge of these lectures was the well-known scholar of religion Anesaki Masaharu.

But the story begins somewhat earlier with a different personality.

Nine years earlier, in 1896, Anesaki and a certain Kishimoto Nobuta had established an organization known as the Society of Comparative Religion (hikaku shūkyō gakkai). As will be described below, Kishimoto played an exceedingly important role in the founding of this society. Moreover, it was primarily Kishimoto who bridged the earlier development of lectures at various educational institutions in the second half of the 1880s and the inauguration of the above-mentioned lectureship at Tokyo Imperial University in 1905. In this brief essay I would like to examine the early development of the science of religion in modern Japan, focusing on Kishimoto Nobuta and his understanding of this field of study." (pp. 159-160
Teeuwen, Mark. 2002. "From Jindō to Shinto: A Concept Takes Shape." Japanese Journal of Religious Studies no. 29:233–263.

;Abstract: "This article traces the origin and development of the term Shinto. This word was created from an earlier Buddhist term "jindo, " which was used in, for example, the Nihon shoki as a collective noun referring to "the realm of the (non-Buddhist) deities." The form "shinto" occurred first in the context of esoteric initiations into kami knowledge, probably in the fourteenth century. The article explores how the older term jindo was given a new meaning and a new reading in a discourse that drew both on hon-gaku ideas and Yin-Yang cosmology. It argues that, in contrast to the older jindo, the neologism shinto functioned as a "concept" as defined by Reinhart Koselleck, in the sense that it had a clear historical impact as both a factor and an indicator of historical change.

It is only when we are aware of the formative processes that fostered this new concept that we can understand such central Shinto themes as primeval purity and imperial spirituality."

References

Koselleck, Reinhart 1972 Einleitung. In Geschichtlich Grundbegriffe Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, xii-xxvii. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag.
Thal, Sarah. 2002. "A Religion That Was Not a Religion: The Creation of Modern Shinto in Nineteenth-Century Japan." In The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, edited by Petersen, Derek R. and Walhof, Darren R., 100–114. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

;"The term Shinto, referring to the worship of kami—powerful gods of the sun, creation, and other natural forces or objects—has existed since at least the eighth century of the common era.(2) Often adopted by ancient clans as tutelary or ancestral deities, kami were thought to guarantee good weather and prosperity to those who worshiped them correctly and to punish those who offended them with pain, illness, death, or natural calamities. Although at first considered antithetical to the buddhas and Buddhist rites that were imported from the Asian continent in the sixth century, the kami were soon absorbed into a combinatory religious universe of esoteric Buddhism and mountain worship. For approximately one thousand years, from the ninth century until the mid-nineteenth century, worship of the kami was interwoven with Buddhist rituals, teachings, and institutions. The Way of the Kami existed within a combinatory system dominated by Buddhism. It was neither a fully independent set of institutions nor a distinct philosophical tradition during most of the millennium before 1868.(3)" (p. 101)

(...)

!Instead of worship as an expression of belief, worship as an expression of tradition is considered much more acceptable. By removing Shinto from the realm of religion, the accumulated rhetoric of decades succeeded in establishing Shinto, in its nineteenth-century form, not as a religious belief but as the fundamental expression of Japanese identity. As advocates insisted, in language that pervaded public discourse until at least 1945, the Way both of the kami and of the Japanese people as a whole was natural and timeless, public and civic minded, civilized and therefore compatible with the modern, indeed the postmodern, age.

(...)

Using the concept of religion as a political tool, advocates of Shinto confounded the boundaries of church and state, religion and secularism, to shape the very idea of Japaneseness itself." (p. 112, a note omitted)

(2) Kuroda Toshio provides a concise history of the term Shinto in his classic essay, “Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion,” first published in translation in the Journal of Japanese Studies 7 (winter 1981): 1-21. My argument builds upon Kuroda’s insistence that Shinto only achieved the status of an independent religion after 1868.

African religions

Antonio, Edward P. 2017. "Indigenous African Traditions as Models for Theorizing Religion." In Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies, edited by King, Richard, 147–154. New York: Columbia University Press.

"The task of reflecting on the potential of indigenous African traditions to serve as models for theorizing religion is fraught with many difficulties. One difficulty is why this should be necessary at all. This is an important question because there is always the danger of positing these traditions as prototypes of religion. Evolutionary accounts of the history of religion made this mistake. It is a mistake that some anthropologists, missionaries, and African thinkers desirous to prove the religiosity of African cultures (and therefore their civilized status) have made. Some in granting the status of religion to African indigenous traditions have described them as “primal” religions.(1)" (p. 148)

(...)

"My approach here is as follows: since there is no prototype to work from, and since, as I argue below, the term “religion” is foreign to many African cultures, the movement of theorizing religion from the perspective of African traditions must be based on something else. I shall use the idea of a heuristic to provide such a basis.(6) A heuristic, as I use the term, is a clue or suggestion (a rule of thumb), a rough guide that aids the discovery of intelligibility and understanding in knowledge and interpretation.

The heuristic question that guides this essay is: How can indigenous African traditions, taken in the context of their everyday expression, that is, before they are reduced to or defined in terms of religion, help us better understand the various phenomena ordinarily subsumed under this latter term? I shall proceed by identifying several areas where I think African traditions can helpfully throw some theoretical light on functions of religion." (p. 148)

(1) Harold W. Turner, “The Way Forward in the Religious Study of African Primal Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 12, no. 1 (1981): 1–15.

The term “primal” is linked to preliterate and prehistoric phases of human evolution and stands for indigenous, tribal, and traditional beliefs and practices.

(6) My understanding of heuristics is informed by Bernard Lonergan, SJ, Insight: A Studyof Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
Beyers, Jaco. 2010. "What is religion? An African understanding." HTS Theological Studies no. 66:1–8.

;Abstract: "Western thought has influenced the way that religion is understood. Western philosophy supported the separation between the sacred and the profane. Modernism, focusing on human rationality, reduced religion to a set of correctly formulated dogmas and doctrines. Western thought, dominated by Christianity, created a hierarchical structure of world religions through a theology of religions. Can an African understanding of religion make a contribution to the understanding of what religion is? Such a question requires an African understanding of religion, as well as an understanding of African religion. From an African perspective, religion emphasises the human effort to systematise, in society, the continuation of a religious experience relevant to a specific context. Tradition, expressed in rituals and ethics, becomes the social expression of these religious experiences. African religion tends not to differentiate the transcendental from the earthly. African scholars do not present one unified understanding of religion. Some scholars would even argue that an African understanding is nothing more than an internalised form of Western perspectives. To characterise African Traditional Religion as a separate type of religion minimises the contribution that an African understanding can make to religion."
Chidester, David. 2007. "Real and imagined: imperial inventions of religion in colonial southern Africa." In Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, edited by Fitzgerald, Timothy, 153–175. New York: Routledge.

;"In this chapter, I want to go back through the historical relations between imperial centre and colonized periphery in order to replace everyone involved in the production of these categories back in the same time zone. I am not doing anything new in doing this. From Johannes Fabian’s (1983) insistence on co-temporality or “coevalness”, through Edward Said’s (1993) “contrapuntal reading”, to Van der Veer’s (2001) “interactive history”, many others have sought to analyse colonial relations as relations of mutual formation, as a “shared history”, in Ashis Nandy’s (1983) terms, mutually constituting the identities of colonizers and colonized, both reciprocally and antagonistically.

My focus on the category ‘religion’, therefore, will be situated primarily in the context of colonial dreams and colonial adventures in southern Africa. For the imperial comparative religion that emerged in Great Britain following the inaugural lectures by F. Max Müller in 1870, these dreams and adventures were crucial to its formation. The other theorists I consider in this chapter, Tylor and Lang, developed theories of religion based on colonial dreams and colonial adventures. As a result, their theories were directly related – as co-temporal, contrapuntal and interactive – to the colonial situations in which indigenous people and alien intruders, Christian missionaries and adventure novelists, and a host of others, were also involved in the process of producing knowledge about religion for a secular science of religion." (pp. 155-156)

References

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lang, Andrew. 1906. Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green.

Müller, F. Max. 1889. Natural Religion. London: Longmans, Green.

Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.

Tylor, E. B. 1871. Primitive Culture, 2 vols. London: John Murray.

Tylor, E. B. 1892. “The Limits of Savage Religion”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 283–301.

van der Veer, Peter. 2001. Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Asian religions

Chung, Chin Hong. 2007. "Religion-Before Religion and Religion-After Religion." In Religion and Society: An Agenda for the 21st Century, edited by ter Haar, Gerrie and Tsuruoka, Yoshio, 205–214. Leiden: Brill.

;"Let me draw attention to the word ‘religion’ ( jongkyo) which we use nowadays in Korea. As vocabulary, the term ‘religion’ is quite generally used not only in Korea but also in China and Japan. Yet ‘religion’ is not a word that ‘belongs’ to our culture and tradition. It was instead an alien term that was imported by Japan from the Western countries in the late nineteenth century. In the Korean language we had no word that corresponded to the term ‘religion’. However, we had no other way to accommodate it except by translating it as ‘religion’. This was certainly in part the consequence of Japan’s and the Western countries’ pressure through armed power that forced us to open the door toward Western culture and ‘modernity’. Therefore, the term religion existed as an enforced and indeed a never ‘experienced’ word until Korea became engaged in the process of modernisation in the late nineteenth century," (p. 206, a note omitted)
Lee, You Jae. 2009. "The Concept of Religion and the Reception of Christianity in Korea Around 1900." Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienfroschung no. 33:61–76.

;Abstract: "The concept of “religion” is an inherent part of the modern Korean language, although it is less than 150 years old. Like many other sociopolitical key concepts in Korea, “religion” is a translated term.

From the beginning, the concept of “religion” was equated with Christianity and was used very close to concepts such as civilization, nation, and society, which had strong positive associations. In the everyday life of Christians in particular, the concept of “religion” was understood as a bundle of civilized habits which were embedded within the “community of the twice-born”. This article extends Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte to translational history and combines it with the methodology of Alltagsgeschichte.

Due to this new methodological approach, a more focused investigation of everyday language and practices of actors is made possible."

Australian religions

Schlang, Stefan. 1994. "Te taha wairua: the Maori and the Concept of Religion." In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 157–162. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

;"The argument outlined in this paper is based on my own experience in New Zealand in 1985/86 when I undertook research on contemporary Maori religion. Although today most Maori are members of various Christian churches, their religion is still strongly influenced by beliefs and practices inherited from pre-European times.

Written material on this topic is rather scarce; therefore· the Maori people themselves, theologians and lay persons, became my main sources. When I asked them about religion, I repeatedly got an answer l would have listed under the heading "politics". A.t first I was surprised even though I kne that in traditional Maori society religion was not separated from other aspects of life and that there is no word in the traditional Maori language corresponding to our term "religion". It took me some time to realize what had happened. Unconsciously I had transferred the European concept "religion" to a cultural context which it did not fit into." (p. 157)

(..)

Following the Maori understanding of te taha wairua I can appreciate, too, that I got an answer about politics after asking a question about religion - to return to the example I began with. Since te taha wairua permeates all aspects of Maori culture and society, it is also reflected in what we would call "plain politics".

(...)

While talking about contemporary Maori religion, I had to take all this into account.

By looking for te taha wairua and following the Maori guide-lines, I was able to give a description of it in my dissertation(10), vhich hopefully furthers the outsider's understanding and at the same time is acceptable to the Maori themselves." (p. 161)

(10) S. Schlang, Religiöse Aspekte von Maoritanga (Mundus Reihe Ethnologie, Bd 30), Bonn 1989.
Turner, David H. 1994. "Australian Aborigenal Religion as "World Religion"." In The Notion of “Religion” in Comparative Research: Selected Proceedings of the XVI Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (I.A.H.R.), Rome, 3rd–8th September, 1990, edited by Bianchi, Ugo, 163–176. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

;"My thesis is that the Australian Aboriginals are unique in the degree to which they transcended material determination or determination "in the final analysis" by such "givens" as environmental conditions and human nature. In so doing they transcended the drive to autonomy and self-determination ou an individual or group basis that situates one in opposition to another and which has fueled so much of our own history. As a consequence, the technological and economic progress that is necessary to maintain that autonomy and self-determination was also arrested. In its place was peaceful coexistence on a group to group level, though killing as such ws not eliminated. Those who broke the laws that kept the peace were executed. what the Australians did was eliminate organized warfare for the purpose of appropriating resources and exterminating other peoples (with some possible exceptions in the Western Desert which I will discuss later). (2)" (p. 163)

(...)

"Though an adequate definition of "religious development" is yet to be formulated, for purposes of this preliminary exploration let us take it as the degree to which a society transcends material determination, realizes determination through Transcendent Forms rather than concrete content, and the extent to which a society achieves peaceful co-existence through these means. My thesis is that, evaluated in terms of these criteria, the Australians may well be the classic Christian Scriptures' case of the last (the Aborigines) being first, and of some of the first (ourselves) being last (Matt. 19:30, Mk, 9:35) (5)

By "Transcendent Forms" I have a specific meaning in mind-really a specific meaning in view-which I will discuss below. Australian social organization epitomizes what Durkheim(6) termed "organic solidarity". This is social organization based on an interdependence of differences or specializations. Mechanical solidarity, by contrast, is based on the unity of identities. Whereas our own society exhibits an elementary version of organic solidarity based as it is on the haphazard outcome of marketplace competition, amongst the Australians such solidarity seems to be the result of careful planning. Amongst the Australians organic solidarity emerges out of an institutionally established renunciative process of Forms expelling content in which one gives up one's exclusive self, possessions, resources, people, to "others", thereby creating a difference between "you and me" that "federates" rather than divides or unites.

By "federates" I mean that a part of you is in them and them in you such that to do harm to them is also to do harm to yourself."

(2) For discussion of this point see Noel Butliu, Our Original Aggression. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983 and W. E. H. Stanner. White Man Got No Dreaming, Canberra: Australian National University, 1979.

(5) A statistical demonstration of the nature and extent of the Aborigines' transcendence of material determination is found in my Kinship is Cosmology, Mankind, 19, 3, 1990.

(6) Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labour in Society. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964 [1896).

Manichaeism

BeDuhn, Jason. 2015. "Mani and the Crystallization of the Concept of ‘Religion’ in Third Century Iran." In Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings: Studies on the Chester Beatty Kephalaia Codex , edited by Gardner, Iain, BeDuhn, Jason and Dilley, Paul, 247–275. Leiden: Brill

Abstract: "The general trend of the modern academic study of religions has been to employ the concept of ‘religion’ to cover a universal type of activity or set of activities, a form of which can be found in any human society and culture. This broad application of the term has its uses. Yet its etic character, imposed at times on cultures that do not themselves recognize a distinct ‘religion’ category,

has been increasingly noted, often in connection with the idea that religion is a peculiarly modern, even modernist, idea. It is purely tautological, however, to say that the way we moderns use the term religion is a modern invention, informed by distinctive, historically conditioned shifts in discourse and social organization. That fact does not preclude the possibility of a pre-modern concept that anticipated the modern one by identifying the same socio-cultural entities we would place at the center of the modern category of religion. In what follows, I argue that Mani and his early successors in third-century Iran produced such a concept, within which they included such recognizable entities as Christianity, Mazdayasnianism, Buddhism and Jainism, as well as their own Manichaean community, in an unusually rich environment of cultural interchange and comparative awareness presaging the conditions typically associated with the modern era."

Zoroastrianism

Rezania, Kianoosh. 2020. "‘Religion’ in Late Antique Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. Developing a Term in Counterpoint." Entangled Religions no. 11:1–42

Abstract: "This article evaluates the development of a generic term for ‘religion’ in late antique Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism. It examines linguistic indications of the use of dēn/δēn as a generic term in the Manichaean Middle Iranian corpora, i.e. Middle Persian, Parthian, and Sogdian, as well as in the corpus of Zoroastrian Middle Persian. The paper considers declination in the plural, the attribution of universal quantifiers or demonstrative adjectives, comparison, and selection as they occur in the above corpora to be indicators of generic concepts. Acknowledging that third-century Manichaeism shaped the term for ‘religion’ in the Persian Empire, the paper scrutinizes the reflections of this formative process in Sasanian and also early Islamic Zoroastrianism. The resulting analysis of the linguistic evidence indicates that the newly coined Manichaean concept of ‘religion’ did not find considerable echoes in late antique Zoroastrianism. Furthermore, an investigation of the term daēnā - in the Avestan sources provides earlier evidence for the formation of the term ‘religion’ in pre-Sasanian Zoroastrianism. Finally, the paper highlights the significance of religious contact for the formation of a generic concept of religion."
Shaki, Mansour. 1996. "dēn." In Encyclopaedia Iranica Volume 7 , edited by Yarshater, Ehsan, 279–281. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda

"DĒN (Av. daēnā, trisyllabic in Old Av., disyllabic in Young Av.; Mid. Pers. dēn; NPers. dīn), theological and metaphysical term with a variety of meanings: “the sum of man’s spiritual attributes and individuality, vision, inner self, conscience, religion”." (p. 279)

(...)

"Dēn, the deification of the religion, and the deities of space (Gāh) and time (Zamān) are the three divine instruments of creation, as assistants of Ohrmazd (Bundahišn , tr. Anklesaria, p. 40, chap 3.12). The yazatā Daēnā is a daughter of Ahura Mazdā and Ārmaiti (q.v.; Yt. 17.16), but, according to an inscription found at Arebsun in Anatolia, she is the sister and wife of Ahura Mazdā (Boyce, Zoroastrianism II, p. 275). In the Dēn yašt (q.v.; Yt. 16) Daēnā praises the deity (Razišta) Čistā (q.v.), embodiment of “the most true wisdom,” which impregnates the Mazdean religion." (p. 280)

References

Boyce, Mary 1982, A History of Zoroastrianism , Vol. 2 (Handbuch der Orientalistik Series). Leiden: Brill.

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