HENT DE VRIEStute an estimated 15 million, or 4 percent of the total population, a figure that is expected
to rise to 30 million, or 10 percent, by 2025, not taking into account Turkey’s eventually
joining the E.U. By contrast, the current estimated figures for the U.S. and Canada are
1.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. Moreover, the fear of an emerging ‘‘Eurabia’’
ignores the vast economic and cultural differences between immigrant populations in the
different European countries—and between these and the U.S. Moreover, references to
‘‘Eurabia’’ simultaneously overestimate and underestimate the present force of the politi-
cal elements and forms of Islam—and other major and minor religions. The fact that
religions constitute both an integrative and a potentially disintegrating or even violent
aspect of modern societies has to do less with persistent or newly emerging ties to nation
and traditional doctrine and law than with a novel configuration of post-secular identities,
whose volatile dynamics contain as much promise as potential for political havoc. To
begin to acknowledge and then interpret this built-in ambivalence of religion in relation
to the very definition of the political, as well as to concrete politics or policies, may well
be a key to the understanding and mitigation, if not anticipation or prevention, of reli-
gion’s most pernicious effects.
If there is any lesson to be drawn from the more extreme—and heavily mediatized—
phenomena of violence inspired or framed by religion, it is that the relationship between
the theological and the political is no longer obvious, let alone direct. Previously limited
to problems of national sovereignty (pitting the Holy Roman Empire against the princes,
stipulating religious allegiance based upon one’s belonging to a given territory) or of
constitutional law (the separation of church and state, the ban on ‘‘conspicuous religious
signs’’ in public schools in France and Turkey), the most interesting and troubling cases
of religion’s continuing and renewed role at present are more elusive, more delocalized
and hence difficult to grasp, both conceptually and empirically. We are left with blanks
and dots (that is to say, words, things, gestures, and powers)—the very stuff of utterances
and affects (both passive and active, destructive and salutary)—which we continue to
attribute to ‘‘religion,’’ as if we knew what that means. The ways these disarticulate and
reconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of political life in the twenty-first century
are no longer transparent, nor can they be reduced to simple empirical (naturalistic or,
philosophically speaking, immanent) terms. Rather, for all their this-worldly, indeed,
down-to-earth impact, they place great demand on our theoretical skill, even our specula-
tive imagination and sensibilities, in reading not so much the transcendent as the ab-
solute: that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts (including the context or
text of ‘‘existence,’’ hence of ontology, onto-theology, and its substitutes). New concepts
need to be coined, novel practices of research attempted, even though they may turn out
to be—may even need to be—out of sync with the phenomena in question (and hence
untimely in their intended timeliness). Such is the life of the mind. At least for now.
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