"There is now a growing consensus among scholars that questions the prevalent notion of religion as a cultural universal. “Religion” is now understood to be a relatively recent invention that emerged during the course of the nineteenth century at the intersection of a variety of different discourses. It is increasingly accepted that the construction of religion as a concept cannot be separated from the formation of the comparative imaginary of the West. Indeed, Daniel Dubuisson has argued that “religion … must be considered the locus in which the identity or figure of the West has in principle been constituted and defined.” This is why, he suggests, that “instead of speaking about the religious consciousness of the West, it would surely be more judicious to say that the West is religious only in the very exact and strict sense that religion, as a notion intended to isolate a set of phenomena thenceforth considered homogenous, is the exclusive creation of the West, and is thus what may constitute its innermost nature.”
In her recent book, The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa echoes these sentiments, arguing that since the discourse of religion and religions was “from the very beginning a discourse of secularism, … these two wings of the religion discourse did the work of churning Europe’s epistemic domain” and “forged from that domain an enormous apparition: the essential identity of the West.” This essential identity not only crystallized into a self-sustaining belief in the West’s unique and sovereign nature, it also helped to preserve and promote its universalizing tendency, paradoxically, through a language of pluralism as found in the discourse of “world religions.” For Dubuisson, it is through the language of pluralism embedded in the discourse of “world religions” that the West has in a sense drawn around itself a magic—and narcissistic—circle. This charmed circle “both limits its reflections and flatters its epistemological talents. And with the inevitable reassuring effect that such a mechanism produces, the West believes all the more willingly in the relevance of this concept, since other civilizations merely faithfully reflect its own chimeras. And this will be the state of things as long as the debate is conducted exclusively on the conceptual field chosen and defined by the West alone."
[...] the mechanisms by which this apparition—what I call the “specter of the West”—has been, and continues to be, produced every time Indians retrieve for themselves a mode of identification through which they see themselves, and are seen by others, as members of a particular “world religion” (Hinduism or Sikhism) or as members of a nation (Indian or Sikh), for in doing so they must rely on a comparative imaginary and inadvertently help to solidify the specter that calls itself the West."
— "Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation" by Arvind-Pal S. Mandair
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