For those who see secularism as part of modernity, and modernity as fundamentally progress, the last few decades have been painful and bewildering. Powerful political mobilizations that appear to center on religion seem to betoken a return of what had already been safely relegated to the past.

Secularism has garnered little sustained attention from students of romanticism. In large part, this is because scholars of the period have treated religion as something that influenced romanticism or as something that romanticism secularized or humanized.

Since the events of September 11, 2001, against the backdrop of two decades of the ascendance of global religious politics, urgent calls for the reinstatement of secularism have reached a crescendo that cannot be ignored. The most obvious target of these strident calls is Islam, particularly those practices and discourses within Islam that are suspected of fostering fundamentalism and militancy.