Social Science Research Council
Mark Juergensmeyer is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, professor of sociology, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include the forthcoming Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press 2008), the widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993), and Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005). He has edited the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (Oxford University Press 2006) and Religion in Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2005), and is co-editing The Encyclopedia of Global Religions (Sage Publications 2008). His 2006 Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University, God and War, will be published by Princeton University Press. He is the chair of the SSRC working group on religion, secularism, and international affairs.
Abdullahi An-Na’im is a man with a mission. As the expatriate Sudanese law professor told The New Yorker writer George Packer in a recent article, his new book on Islam and the Secular State was written as “a work of advocacy more than of scholarship.” But as an advocate to whom? [...]
The first time I met Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, many years ago, I bought a new suit for the occasion. He was Prime Minister of Pakistan at the time and I was representing Berkeley in an attempt to launch a new Urdu language program for American students to be based in Lahore. We needed the government’s approval, and that meant a nod from Bhutto. Being a young Californian, I was not used to wearing suits, but Bhutto was Bhutto, the very model of urbane sophistication, and I wanted to impress him. [...]
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