This book contributes to the study of religion in international relations by focusing on the concept of secularism as it is understood in international relations. It argues that secularism is a form of political or even theo-political authority, since to define the boundaries of the secular, the religious, and the political is itself a political decision. Therefore, the religious, the secular, and the political are not stable, value-neutral categories that can be used by positivist approaches to social science, but are socially constructed (and contested) in particular times and places.

The book argues that the politics of secularism have gone virtually unnoticed in the study of international relations because secular politics were taken for granted. Readers of this book will never again be able to look at secularism in the same way. Why does this matter? It matters because theory matters, and “poor concepts lead to poor policy” (p. 82), which is the point of the case studies on the U.S. and Iran, the EU and Turkey, political Islam, and the global resurgence of religion.

Hurd shows how secularism developed in Western politics and international relations through two trajectories—laicism, coming out of the Enlightenment critique of religion in France, and Judeo-Christian secularism, emerging out of the Judeo-Christian tradition (mainly in the United States, as interpreted by Alexis de Tocqueville). While many scholars will be familiar with these two trajectories of secularism (chapters 1 and 2), Hurd demonstrates that the adherents of both of them are not opposed to theological discourse, but enact their own theo-political discourse. She then argues that American and French trajectories of secularism, and the trajectory of Europe more generally, were constituted by their interaction with the Islamic world (chapter 3).

The case studies clearly show how the two trajectories of secularism shape the representations of domestic politics in Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, for example, how is the rise of the AKP, the main Islamic party, to be interpreted—as “political Islam,” an Islamic theocratic threat to Turkey's secular democracy (something for the EU to avoid), or as a new emerging Islamic model of religious separation and accommodation (something for the EU to embrace)? Western scholars, due to these secularist trajectories, represented the Iranian Revolution as simply a religious backlash against secular modernity, and portrayed Islam as a monolithic type of political Islam. In fact, what is now called the Iranian Revolution was a coalition of various types of Islamic movements, all of which were looking for ways to liberate Iran politically and intellectually from the West (chapter 4). Khomeini's form of Shi'ism was only one type of political Shi'ism on offer. The U.S. could have more actively engaged Khomeini's Islamic opposition, but U.S. foreign policy was predicated on the two trajectories of secularism, and so it lumped all Islamists together as hostile to the West and to secularism (chapter 6).

The same Western trajectories of secularism dominate the European debate over Turkey's accession to the European Union. Hurd argues that it will be very difficult for Turkey to be admitted to the EU even if it should meet the objective criteria for EU admission, not only because of conservative ideas of a Christian Europe, or liberal preoccupations with the separation of politics and religion. More fundamentally, Turkey disturbs what Europeans thought was most settled about themselves—how religion relates (or does not relate) to European identity and institutions (chapter 5).

Hurd proceeds to analyze the way Western trajectories of secularism are used to represent fundamentalism or political Islam (chapter 7). She denies what is taken for granted in the policy community—that religious fundamentalism is merely a backlash against modernization, and an epiphenomenal expression of material interests (p. 119). Her final chapter examines the global resurgence of religion, and argues that what is called the religious resurgence is neither a backlash against modernization nor a harbinger of a clash between civilizations, but instead a refashioning of the secular, a renegotiation of the boundaries of religion and politics (chapter 8).

Like all ambitious and important books, this one is liable to criticism. Its key concepts—laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism—although in many ways interesting, are too broad to carry all the explanatory power they are assigned by Hurd. It is too sweeping to argue that laicism emerged out of the Enlightenment. It was a question of the civil war in France between the Republic and French Catholicism. The religious question in France emerges, as Michael Burleigh points out in Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War (2007), to find a way through this controversy.

The book describes laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism as discursive traditions or formations. The problem with talking about discursive traditions, which may have different variations or versions (p. 38), is determining the meaningful boundaries of the traditions, their identifiable historical trajectories, and how and by whom they are appropriated today. Henry F. May, in The Enlightenment in America (1976), has shown that there are several traditions of the Enlightenment, and any account of laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism has to include the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on religion and politics in America. Also, how far do you have to go before you are out of the tradition (e.g., the Somali Islamic dissident Ayan Hirsi Ali or even Osama bin Laden)?

What theory and methodology can bring together an account of one tradition of Judeo-Christian secularism in the United States and all of Europe? How can figures as varied as George W. Bush, Richard John Neuhaus, William Gladstone, and Bartolus de Sassoferato (a prominent Italian jurist in the Middle Ages) all be said to subscribe to one tradition? If de Sassoferato is considered because of his views on empire, then why not Bartolomé de las Casas for his views against empire? How do Marsilius of Padua, and the other theologians of the reformist Conciliar movement, who certainly must be part of any European debate over the boundaries of the sacred and the secular in politics, fit into the Judeo-Christian tradition of secularism? If such a discursive tradition is a “living tradition,” then also missing is the ongoing development of that tradition in Catholic social teaching, Christian Democratic parties, and the Second Vatican Council.

Any discussion of secularism and Islam, certainly as it relates to the tradition of French laicism, seems incomplete without examining how knowledge of Islam in France has been influenced by the long history of the French Catholic tradition of Islamic studies. Ali Shari'ati, for example, who, Hurd acknowledges, is one of the founding influences on the Islamic revolution in Iran (pp. 77, 79, 80–81), has argued that during his time in France he was strongly influenced by Louis Massignon, the French Catholic specialist on Islam. There would seem to be a far more complex French tradition of laicism.

Far more research is required to substantiate the claim that European and American identities have been shaped and constituted by their interaction with Islam and the Middle East. Left out of this story of identity construction is Eastern Christianity and the Byzantine Empire, and this is why the focus on American identity and the Middle East, and French identity and North Africa, distorts much of the relevant history of Europe. The most fundamental political act creating “Europe” was not its relation to Islam, but its relation to paganism, Eastern Christianity, and the Byzantine Empire. It occurred much, much earlier in the gradual Christian evangelizing and conversion of Europe in which Islam had a very minor role, except in Spain and North Africa, and only later on in a series of defensive crusades to reclaim territory taken in the Muslim conquest of the Middle East.

Hurd convincingly demonstrates that any attempt to label the mixing of religion and politics pejoratively as “fundamentalism” or “political religion” obscures more than it clarifies. However, what other concepts should social scientists and policy-makers use in their comparative efforts to explain or understand fundamentalism, political religion, and the global resurgence of religion? The book argues, for example, that laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism represent Islamism in a distorted way—that they are ways of remaking the public realm, remixing religion and politics, and are not necessarily a threat to modern politics (p. 65). Could the same thing be said about the way the media and scholars have distorted evangelicals, Pentecostals, and their forms of religiously motivated politics? How are the examples given of political Islam—the AKP in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia, and the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan, which are labelled “moderate Islamic movements”—actually seeking to remake the public realm (pp. 124–25)? What are their precise principles and methods, such that policy-makers can distinguish them from “extremist” Islamic movements, beyond the question of a resort to violence? Even if such “moderate” Islamic movements could be more sharply distinguished, the visions they promote would still seem to be a far cry from an Egypt where a Coptic Christian could become president, or a Saudi Arabia where a Shi'ite can become leader, or Muslims could have the freedom to convert to Christianity, or gays and women could enjoy equal rights. It is therefore important to ask harder questions about the extent to which these visions really represent meaningful forms of Islamic secular possibility or offer alternatives to the Western discursive tradition of secularism.