VideoJohn Esposito, a famed scholar of Islam, says that to call Islam a religion is already to label it as an abnormal religion, because it doesn’t distinguish religion and politics in the way that Westerners are accustomed to. And so just using the word “religion” for Islam already kind of distorts the matter.
There are Hindu nationalists who refuse to call Hinduism a religion, because they insist that it’s not something private but it’s political, it’s social, it’s cultural, it encompasses all of these different things. And that whole history is very interesting; Hinduism becomes a religion in the 19th century under British occupation, and it’s a way of taking everything it means to be Indian and putting it into this box called “religion” and therefore you can kind of push it off to the side. So to be Indian is to be private, and to be British is to be public.
And there are similar histories that happen in Japan, in China – where you have Chinese scholars insisting that Confucianism is not a religion, and Western scholars insisting that it is. So a very interesting set of histories. But in the Western mindset it becomes a way of taking everything that goes, you know, under the rubric of Christianity, for example, and kind of marginalising it from public power.
Robert Shedinger has a very interesting book called Was Jesus a Muslim? and he says that the really odd thing is not the so-called politicisation of Islam, the odd thing in history is the religionisation of Christianity – the idea that you can kind of take something that ought to affect every aspect of a person’s life and just kind of make it into something that you do for an hour on Sunday.