While over a long time the dominant trend in academia assumed the emergence and development of the state to be a process of secularization, current political developments around the globe have given rise to a renewed scholarly interest into, what has been called, the “resurgence of religion”. Interpretations of the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen as “sectarian” struggles abound in public discourse. The fate of Yezidis in Iraq and Rohingya in Myanmar, among others, has propelled concerns about persecuted “religious minorities” to the center of international attention. The public discourse that uses “religion” as a central descriptive and explanatory category connects to, but stands orthogonal to, academic discourses on secularization, especially in Europe. Thus, more and more scholars have come to problematize both the “secularization” and the “religious resurgence” paradigms for their inability to account for the modern state's continuous engagement with religion. Talal Asad’s path breaking work has particularly shaped the emerging field of “secularism studies”. Asad challenges the liberal narrative of “Euro-American” democracies as “secular” and questions the analytical value of understanding “secularism” as separation of church and state, religion and politics. For Asad, the essence of secularism is not the protection of civil liberties against the tyranny of religious discourse. He suggests that neither religious indifference, nor rational ethics, nor political toleration are characteristics of the secular state. Rather, the secular state is “a complex arrangement of legal reasoning, moral practice and political authority” that constantly re-negotiates the place of religion in society