"The Invention of Religion is a powerful collection of original essays on the multiple connections between religion and modernity in different parts of the world. It offers important insights that will appeal to a wide readership across disciplines."Peter van der Veer, University of Amsterdam

Is religion an obstacle to the values of modernity? Popular and scholarly opinion says that it is. In a world gripped in a clash of civilizations, religious absolutism seems to threaten the modern virtues of tolerance, reason, and freedom. This collection of historical essays argues that this popular viewreligion versus modernityis used by the politically powerful to construct the religious as irrational and antimodern. The authors study how nationalists, state officials, missionaries, and scholars in the West and in the colonized world defined and redefined the relationship between the political and the religious.

Part I of the book examines the political and scholarly stakes involved in defining religionsBuddhism, African traditional religion, and fundamentalist Judaismas subjective and apolitical belief systems. Part II takes up the relationship between religious reform and nationalism, asking how the formalization of religious practices helped define nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, Japan, and India. Part III turns to religious exhibits in Turkey and the southern United States, exploring how pilgrims and tourists convert museum displays into objects of religious veneration.

By treating religion as a contested social space, this book brings philosophy, theology, history, and political science together to show how struggles over the definition of the religious are bound up with colonial and national politics around the world.

Derek Peterson is an assistant professor of history at The College of New Jersey. His book, The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, will be published next year. Darren Walhof is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Gustavus Adolphus College.