“Religion and Secular”: The Decolonial Project Of Mitsutoshi Horii: Presentation, Debate And Comments

Soufyane Badraoui     [email protected]  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9944-0767

Imad Charef     [email protected]  

Maria Pescaru     [email protected]   https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1571-9443 

 

Abatract

This work aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between religion and secular rationality within the framework of Western social consciousness, focusing on Horii's book 'Religion' and 'Secular' Categories in Sociology: Decolonizing the Modern Myth, published in 2021. Houri seeks to deconstruct standard Western classifications as a way to restore structural criticism of Euro-American modernity. He also proposes refraining from the literal analytical use of these classifications as a way to transcend the limitations of modernity and end the traditional divisions between the religious and secular spheres. Within a historical framework, the book reviews the most prominent social theory frameworks and introduces the concept of "critical religion" as a measure that challenges the traditional distinction between religion and the secular world. The work calls for a rethinking of the assumption that sociology has separated religion and secularism, and advocates a more comprehensive perspective that transcends prevailing distinctions in order to bring about an inevitable break with the discourse of epistemic colonialism in social studies.

Keywords: Religion, Secularism, European-American modernity, Colonial knowledge, Critical religion, Global South perspective.