The stark divide between the sacred and the profane engendered by the Great Separation between religion and politics in the West is put to the test in Saba Mahmood’s rich and fascinating study of secularism and its paradoxes. Challenging conventional understandings of secularism as the solution to the religion-fueled wars that have characterized much of human history through the Enlightenment, Mahmood boldly argues instead that secularism is one of the enabling conditions of conflict. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report offers an incisive and counterintuitive depiction of the strange career of secularism as anchored in the state’s sovereign power to define and regulate religious life—a sphere that by secularism’s own terms should have been private and depoliticized. This claim acquires particular significance when applied to the supposedly non-secular states in the Middle East. It turns out that when it comes to government intervention in religions, there is not much separating the liberal secular states of the West from the religious, authoritarian states of the Middle East. Could the Great Separation actually be one great con?
Latest posts
In praise of heresy
by Roxanne L. EubenIt seems as if there’s been an avalanche of inquiries into the precarious status of religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies in recent decades, much of it framed in terms of the incomplete secularization of Muslim states and/or the (in)compatibility of Islam with secularism, modernity, tolerance, and liberalism. Continual irruptions of interreligious tension and violence in the Middle East in particular have taken on an even more ominous cast in the shadow of ISIS/Da`ish, confirming the extent and depth, as well as the intractability, of “the Muslim problem” in the cottage industry of publications devoted to anatomizing it. In this context, the appearance of yet another excursus on religious minorities in a Muslim majority state seems little more than napworthy.
Conference: A Postsecular Age? New Narratives of Religion, Science, and Society
by Wei ZhuOn July 27-30, the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in conjunction with St. Anne's College at Oxford will be hosting a conference entitled, Postsecular Age? New Narratives of Religion, Science, and Society.
Legal age
by Gil Anidjar“Now let us see how Bauer formulates the role of the state,” writes Karl Marx in his famous take on the minority question, which Saba Mahmood aptly recalls and perceptively reads. Marx recognized that Bruno Bauer, his interlocutor, was also fighting for emancipation and equality; Bauer was fighting for political emancipation. But Bauer failed “to examine the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation.” He failed to recognize that, in Germany at least, the state is “a theologian ex professo.” Marx does grant that there may be some states where “the Jewish question loses its theological significance and becomes a truly secular question.” And yet he is also very clear that to stop at the secular (that is, at political emancipation) is insufficient. “Political emancipation from religion is not complete and consistent emancipation from religion, because political emancipation is not the complete and consistent form of human emancipation.” Her Marxian reservations notwithstanding, it is a proximate, urgent and enduring struggle, one for “religious equality,” that Mahmood documents and embraces. “As an aspiration and a principle, religious equality signaled a sea change in how interfaith inequality was historically perceived . . . the variety of social movements fighting for religious equality attests to the global reach of this ideal and its promise . . . The impossibility of its realization should not blind us to its power, its ongoing promise, and its constitutive contradictions.”
A thought-provoking study
by Talal AsadIn Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood has produced a valuable account both of how the idea of separating religion from politics came to be central to the development of the “religiously neutral” state in Europe (beginning with the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century and culminating in the new nations after the First World War) and of how that idea became politically important in the postcolonial Middle East. In particular, she describes how in constituting religious identities, the state in modern Egypt creates unexpected opportunities for political power and social confrontation among those who seek to regulate, as well as those who claim to represent, religious minorities. Her detailed analysis of the rich historical and ethnographic material she has assembled reinforces the conclusion that instead of regarding the secular state as the solution to discrimination against religious minorities, it must itself be understood as part of the problem. So I offer a few reflections prompted by her excellent study, first on liberal ideals that are commonly said to promote equal treatment for minorities, and then about the secular anxiety that preceded the 2013 coup against the elected president Mohamed Morsi.
Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report—An introduction
by Saba MahmoodIt is no exaggeration to say that the religious diversity that characterized the Middle East for centuries is in precipitous decline. The reasons for this are multiple, including civil wars that have ravaged Iraq, Syria, and Libya; territorial expansion of militant Islamist groups (like ISIS); and steady erosion of political and civil rights in the region. The US invasion of Iraq and subsequent intervention in Libya have left wide swaths of the Middle East in utter disarray and brought the plight of religious minorities to a new impasse. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is an exploration of the minority question not so much in the context of warfare but of stable governance where the promise of civil and political equality continues to hold sway. Because I am interested in how religious difference has come to be regulated and remade under secularism, I focus on the problem of religious minorities rather than groups defined by ethnic, linguistic, or other attributes.