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Moreover, the soldiers they would have to rely on would not show the necessary asabiyya, or solidarity, were they not tied together by bonds of faith.

But as it bows before the heavenly Majesty, it reminds us of the relationship between the two.

Introduction: On the Relationship between Religious and Secular Power Before, as I will do below, explaining the choices that have structured this contribution, I need to explain some of the, not to everyone unproblematic, concepts that I propose to use, viz.

Religion Increasingly, Eurasians have difficulty in understanding (or making others understand) religion(s)certainly deistic-fideistic religion(s)as a central element in mans thinking and acting.

Thus, the sacred, in its multifarious, mostly visualized forms, becomes the condensation of a prevailing, dominant societal order, showing and prescribing what people are supposed to know, 3 to believe as true, as normal.

Therefore, religion is neither an eminently individual and, even, solitudinal state-of-mind, nor a solely collective one, but a complex mixture of both.

It always expresses itself in sacred, i.e.

Although ceremony and ritual are not, strictly speaking, the same, I will use the words rather indiscriminately.

They both are, I feel, forms of specialized behaviour meant to constituterather than only representhierarchical relations and thus to create power.

Ritual, to be understood as the more encompassing concept, is a mechanism, mostly in the form of dramatized cultural performance, that integrates thoughtbeliefs, ideasand actions.

Persons in power or seeking power will always try to use ritual to affect views within society, thus, inevitably, limiting individual autonomy.

Ceremonies and rituals constantly serve to (re-) connect the (collective) emotions needed to create the permanence of a community, a society, or, even, a state by, amongst other things, taking care of and control over collective prosperity.

Many feel that in our modern world, non-religious, so-called rational or civic argumentsoften presented as ingrained and indeed universally humanrightly and logically have replaced (older) belief systems as foundations of culture in general, and of power and politics in particular.

In Europe, and, indeed, the West, this process started, slowly, in the eighteenth century, first among parts of the educated elites, and became more widespread in the second half of the twentieth century.

In South and East Asia it started later, but, again, became more general in the late twentieth century.

In the worlds of Islam it started, hesitatingly, in the twentieth century, but yet has not become mainstream ideology.

As part of this development, in academia the majority of students now are ignorant of even the basics of the history of Eurasian religious cultures other than their own.

Moreover, most of those scholars who do study religious cultures do so from a disciplinary perspective.

In short, the millennial realities of religious culture have become hard to grasp: we are in the throes of a process of forgetting that religion has been the driving force in human culture since time immemorial.

This is the more strange since, to explore but two poles of contemporary culture, the worlds evermore booming tourist industry insofar as it is geared towards visiting the pastthe larger part of this search for alternative experiencesoften directs our gaze at what, in the widest sense, I would call sacred spaces, i.e.

Indeed, manymostly Westernpeople want to (re-) live the sacred, participating in all kinds of sacred rituals both from the various Christian traditions and from other (world) religions.

Conversely, many of yesterdays and todays (re-) current wars have been and still are being waged, at least partly, under the flag of religion, thus disproving predictions about the worldwide secularizing trend in cultural and societal developments.

Religion and Power In view of the above, I feel that, certainly scholarly speaking, we shall have to continue to try to come to grips with the role of religion as an element that structures the larger society, giving cohesion to it, and, hence, as a tool of power that could and still can be manipulated by those in power or seeking power.

Separating the political or social order from the religious, cosmic order is dangerous, since it tends to obscure their essential interdependence.

From the beginning, human societies somehow have sought and still seek to harness the primordial forces of nature to their needs for basic survival: food, clothing, and shelter.

Consequently, rulership, the ability to control a polity and give it order and cohesion, most often has been claimed successfully by those who were able to convince their fellow men they were uniquely qualified to achieve the cosmological balance that facilitates the fulfilment of those needsin short, men (or women) who pretend(-ed) to be able to somehow manage the super-natural, that fascinating and terrifying mystery.

To be sure, the systemic relationship between religion and power is not a scholarly, modern construct, only.

Indeed, according to some of Eurasias most eminent pre-modern political theorists, religion is a necessary element in the wielding of, especially, political power.

In the sixth century BCE, Confucius, whose, partly alleged, teachings Chinese rulers have used for more than two thousand years, stated no leader would ever be great, successful unless he obeyed the command of tian, Heaven; only by adopting virtue, his actions would correspond to Heaven; he would then bring his people the moral order that supposedly was embodied in the cosmos and to help them to actually realize it.

In the Islamic world, the less ethically minded fourteenth-century author Ibn Khaldun suggested that no new dynasty could take and claim power without using religious propaganda.

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