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View related articlesView Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles This special issue forms part of the output of a four-year research project, led by Yolande Jansen and Thijl Sunier, on 'Critique of Religion: Framing Jews and Muslims in Public Debate and Political Theory', funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), grant no. 327-25-009. The contributions were presented at a workshop of the same name held in Amsterdam in June 2017. The project will also result in two forthcoming dissertations, Matthea Westerduin's 'Supersessionist Geographies: Race and Religion in the (Re)making of "Europe" and "Islam"' (forthcoming Autumn 2020), and Anna Blijdenstein's 'Liberalism's Dangerous Religions: Enlightenment Legacies in Political Theory' (forthcoming Autumn 2020). The editors would like to thank Tamara van den Berg for her committed and accurate assistance in editing this issue, as well as Barbara Rosenbaum and colleagues at Patterns of Prejudice for their constructive support in bringing this special issue to fruition. They would also like to thank the other workshop participants for their comments and presentations:

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This article analyses how recent critiques of secularism in political philosophy and cultural anthropology might productively be combined and contrasted with each other. I will show that Jürgen Habermas' postsecularism takes insufficient account of elementary criticisms of secularism on the part of anthropologists such as Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. However, I shall also criticize Saba Mahmood’s reading of secularism by arguing that, in the end, she replaces the secular–religious divide with a secularity–piety divide; for example, in her reading of Nasr Abu Zayd’s secular Islamic hermeneutics. This inhibits the use of her framework of analysis for a criticism of a problem central to Habermas' postsecularism, namely that it remains focused on specific intensities of belief. I shall then argue that, combined with the anthropological critiques of the secular, the political-historical nature of the fanaticism–piety–violence nexus should be integrated into political philosophical debates on secularism and postsecularism.