An excerpt of Distinguished Professor Ali Riaz’s book Undying Issues: Critical Debates about Contemporary Challenges has been published in a leading Bangladeshi newspaper, the Daily Observer.
The excerpt is titled “Governance, secularism and religion as a political ideology.” In this excerpt, Riaz explored the relationship between governance, secularism, and the appeal of religion as a political ideology in South Asia. He insists that there are intrinsic connections between these aspects, although dominant discussions on these issues continue to ignore this association.
Riaz states that understanding the rise of religio-political forces in any society, particularly in South Asia, requires exploration of the relationship between governance, especially the legitimation capacity of the state, the inability of the current interpretation of secularism to act as the legitimizing ideology, and the emergence of religion as counter-hegemonic ideology. The book is published by Pathak Samabesh in Bangladesh.
