The Gendered Invention of “Religion” in Colonial-Modernity & its Implication for Global Politics by Dr Rabea Khan

The goal of this seminar is to discuss the invention of “religion” in the modern-colonial West as a category which ensured and reified racial hierarchies around the world and tied Christianity to whiteness whilst simultaneously positioning other religions, including Islam, at the bottom of a racial-religious hierarchy. This modern invention of ‘religion’ was also a very gendered process that enabled the production of religious hierarchies while simultaneously rationalising and justifying the privatisation of religion in an Enlightenment, post-Westphalian European context. This gendered and modern-colonial invention of religion has implications for how religion and religious actors (or actors perceived as such) are discussed, perceived, and treated within the realm of Global Politics.