The Case for Idolatry: A Reply to Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal by Koenraad Elst

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Koenraad Elst

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Koenraad Elst

The Case for Idolatry: A Reply to Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal
Author:	Koenraad Elst
ISBN:	9789376540617
Binding:	Hardcover
Year:	2027
Size:	16 x 24 cm
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About the Book

An image may be an object of devotion in one religious tradition and an idol in the eyes of another. That difference is more than a dispute over religious practice: it raises fundamental questions about the nature of the divine, the meaning of worship, and the authority to judge another tradition’s understanding of the sacred. What, precisely, makes an act of worship idolatrous? And whose assumptions determine the answer?

In The Case for Idolatry: A Reply to Avishai Margalit & Moshe Halbertal, Koenraad Elst takes up these questions through a critical engagement with Idolatry, the influential philosophical study by Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal. Drawing primarily on Jewish religious thought, their work investigates the prohibition of idolatry and its implications for questions of belief, religious representation, and the distinction between true and false worship. Elst approaches this debate from an intellectual perspective shaped by his longstanding engagement with Hindu religious traditions, polytheism, and the philosophical significance of sacred images.

The encounter opens up a broader philosophical inquiry. Must devotion to the divine exclude multiplicity of forms? Is religious representation necessarily a distortion of what it seeks to express? Can the categories of one religious tradition adequately account for the beliefs and practices of another? Such questions extend beyond the opposition between monotheism and polytheism to illuminate deeper issues concerning symbolism, religious experience, competing conceptions of truth, and the limits of theological interpretation.

By placing the concept of idolatry itself under scrutiny, The Case for Idolatry invites a reconsideration of the assumptions through which religious practices are classified and judged. Its central provocation lies in turning a longstanding accusation into a subject of philosophical debate, bringing questions of divine representation, religious plurality, and theological authority into sharp focus.

About the Author

Koenraad Elst

Koenraad Elst is an independent scholar and author whose work encompasses Indology, comparative religion, Asian philosophy, and the intellectual and religious history of India. He studied Sinology, Indology, and Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, where he earned his doctorate in 1998 for research on the ideological development of Hindu revivalism. A period of research at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, helped shape his longstanding engagement with Indian religious and intellectual traditions.

Over several decades, Elst has written extensively on Hindu philosophy and religious traditions, interreligious relations, secularism, the relationship between religion and politics, and debates concerning Indo-European origins and Indian history. His publications include Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, Who Is a Hindu?, The Problem with Secularism, The Argumentative Hindu, and Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars. His writings examine the ways in which religious identities, philosophical traditions, and historical interpretations are understood, contested, and reinterpreted within changing intellectual and political contexts. Alongside his independent research and writing, he has worked in journalism, served as a foreign policy assistant in the Belgian Senate, and held teaching appointments in India.

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