In analyzing selected aspects of the debate over offending religious feelings, the author discusses Saby Mahmood’s argument that religiousness in public discourses of the Western world is basically perceived as a speculative phenomenon concerning the sphere of abstract beliefs. It is assumed therefore that the harm that can be produced by the publication of a blasphemous illustration is lesser and less palpable than in the case of hate speech directed toward a race or sexual orientation. The author’s analysis, which is undertaken from a Durkheim perspective, shows that, for example, the caricaturized presentation of a religious symbol constitutes not so much an act of undermining the abstract image as — in the affective perspective of the religious — an act violating the sense of ontological security of a given moral community which that symbol represents. At the same time, the Durkheim perspective facilitates an understanding of why religious symbolic resources can be ambivalently used in processes of legitimating social actions, beginning with constructive forms of civil public religions to extreme fundamentalist movements making use of violence and the discourses of political extremism.
You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.
