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AbstractThis article looks at the relationship of the religious and the secular from a historical perspective. Contrasting historical facts, including a traditional religious consciousness, and the political religious language of recent times, it is shown that there is no natural given boundary separating the two dimensions. Instead, the whole discussion derives from an advanced state of a secular mind. In nineteenth and the twentieth century thought in institutions in the Middle East, for example, in the fields of law, education, administration and mass culture, there was experienced an irreversible process of change towards secularity. This process was facilitated by the co-existence and intersection of the religious and the secular. The dichotomy of the religious and the secular emerged within popularized fundamentalism, which itself has to be seen as a fruit of the secularization process encouraging religion to turn into a matter of politics and "social engineering".

Argues that there were ample disruptions in religio-community boundaries to allow the emergence of "cosmopolitan milieux" in the modern Middle East. Discussion opens with a look at 19th-century Muslim reformer Jamaleddin al-Afghani, described as a representative of the Middle East's golden age of cosmopolitanism of the 19th & 20th centuries. It was then that cosmopolitanism found purchase in the spaces created with the opening of once closed communities & with education, printing, & migration, with Egypt seen as a particular site of it. Attention turns to the contemporary period, marked by profound advances in telecommunications. At issue is whether cultural globalization represents a heightened cosmopolitanism & whether political Islam's xenophobic reaction represents a backlash. In light of this clash, Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism currently flourishes in Western Europe. J. Zendejas

"Civil society" has become a key concept and a central quest
in the search for paths to democracy and liberty in many parts
of the world. This search has been particularly notable in
Egypt, where an increasingly totalitarian state has sought in
recent decades to project an image of democracy but at the
same time attack and undermine all potential bases of social
autonomy and political action. These are the central issues
discussed in this book. The picture is complicated by the
prominent part played by religious and religio-communal
politics on the Egyptian stage. Are Islamic associations and
forms of political action forces of civil society engaged in the
quest for social autonomies and liberation from authoritarian
strictures, or do they themselves add another tier of repres-
sion in the name of religious conformity and moral conduct?