| Summary: | Given the spontaneous intersectionality of religious and racial identities, it is surprising that western political theory has maintained an ‘acoustical separation’ (Stolzenberg 2011), between the two. In the work of John Rawls, for example, race and religion are distinct categories that pertain to different normative universes. The pioneering work of Tariq Modood offers a welcome corrective to this tendency. It draws on a distinctive European (and global) historical sociology, whereas much of Rawlsian and post-Rawlsian political philosophy remains more comfortable in the intellectual home of the US constitution and the specific trajectory of American law. In this chapter, I seek to explain what is at stake in these differing conceptualisations of race and religion. I first account for Rawls’s bifurcated views of religion and race, before describing the rationale behind Modood’s more integrated view. In the last section, I will offer some thoughts towards an interpretive framework that retrieves the gist of Rawls’s insights while shedding light on the crucial normative dimensions of Modood’s theory.
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