Introduction: Affect and emotion in multi-religious secular societies

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides insights into the extraordinarily broad spectrum of approaches to religion and to secularity as they are informed by theories of affect and emotion. It shows that the potential for a fresh take on issues of secularization and the relationship between the secular and the religious from an affect- and emotion-focused perspective. The book explores the issue of emotion and affect in the social practices associated with popular lived Sufism. It aims to understand sensation and perception not as bodily reactions toward an object, but as something that is actively carried out with the aim of producing specific emotions. The book argues that religious conversions signify a symbolic transformation of the self. It focuses on the boundaries between the inside and the outside of subjective feelings and emotions, analyzing people's attempts at describing their inner religious feelings to an outside world.