Last summer I read All Can Be Saved by the eminent historian of colonial Latin America, Stuart Schwartz. It’s a compelling story of inter-religious tolerance and boundary-blurring coexistence in the Hispanic world in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Near the end of the book, Schwartz sums up his approach: “One must go beneath the histories of state policies and religious dogmas that have dominated the writing of history, and one must look not primarily in learned discourse (usually controlled) and at the policy of government and kings, but in the actions and words of people who sought to think for themselves.” Beyond Religious Freedom addresses a parallel set of concerns in a different setting. It asks scholars of law, religion, and global politics to consider not only the histories of learned discourse (expert religion) and the policies of governments and kings (official or governed religion) but also the actions and words of ordinary people (lived or everyday religion). The interactions between these overlapping fields, the power dynamics through which they shape each other, and their deep immersion and fluid entanglements with their socio-cultural, legal, economic, and political surroundings are, on one level, the subject of the book.
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New editorial board
by The EditorsThe Immanent Frame is pleased to announce its first editorial board.
Robert P. Benedict Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy
by Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsUniversity of Cambridge historian John Robertson will be delivering this year's Robert P. Benedict Lectures on the History of Political Thought at Boston College entitled, The Sacred and the Social: 1650-1790.
Equality time
by Samera EsmeirMost of Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is an original and thorough exploration of the historical rise and unfolding of this finitude of our imagination—the difficulty of relating to the lives of religious communities, in their difference, without the arbitrating mediation of the state. Mahmood traces the gradual replacement of earlier Ottoman modalities of rule governing religious communities and the relationships between them by the state-centered secular mode of governance. The former was a tradition that did not promise equality but maintained religious pluralism, without intervening in what constituted religion and without attempting to reorganize religious life. Paradoxically, the hierarchy characteristic of that system of rule left religious communities more immune to the infiltration of state powers. On the other end, despite its promise of religious equality, secular governance, as Mahmood shows, contributed “to the exacerbation of religious tensions in postcolonial Egypt, hardening interfaith boundaries and polarizing religious difference.” At the center of the book is a story about the sovereign state, modern law—domestic and international—and the unequal power distributions between the West and the non-West during the colonial and post-colonial periods, all of which make up the forces of political secularism and the stage for its unfolding.
Minority matters
by Judith SurkisTrenchantly framed as “a minority report,” Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report offers more than just one dissenting opinion. The book makes at least three distinct interventions—archival, critical, and methodological—that together call state secularism into question as a political project and normative ideal. This “minority report” has major significance. It raises crucial historical and ethical questions about the power—and limits—of the state and law to achieve “religious equality.”
Thinking with Saba Mahmood
by Hussein Ali AgramaMahmood outlines a set of concepts that are historically central to the workings of secularism and elucidates how they facilitate outcomes that often differ starkly from our expectations. She shows how, because our commitments to religious liberty and equality have worked through these concepts, distinctions between majorities and minorities will be continually made and increasingly entrenched within social life, a process that thereby fosters conflict along the very lines that secularism promises to at least diminish if not dissolve. The answer to sectarian conflicts cannot therefore be more or better secularism, since it is secularism itself that shapes and provokes their current forms. That, as I understand it, is her overall thesis, and I found her arguments on its behalf to be powerfully persuasive. Embedded within her thesis is a potentially profound challenge to a set of claims that are strongly promoted by some theorists of secularism and many political liberals: that a harmonious religious pluralism can be achieved by finding shared foundational societal values, and that this can be done through an overlapping consensus.