I also have a number of questions about what we are, or should be, looking at—the proper boundaries of the object of our inquiry.

Is this a particularly American phenomenon? After all, clerical sexual abuse has been reported in many parts of the world, even if nation-wide inquiries have been instituted in just a few places, such as the U.S. and Ireland. And is this an exclusively Christian (or even Catholic) phenomenon? In fact, a Chicago Tribune story from 2011 reported the laxity of control over Buddhist monks who engage in sexual abuse in the U.S., though interestingly the tenor of the story implies that the problem was the lack of central control of such priests, whereas in the cases we’re looking at here there are clear problems with the center itself.

But can we even say that this is an exclusively or an especially religious phenomenon and be sure that the levels of abuse we’ve witnessed in the archive greatly exceed those in society at large? That last question has to be asked, even if the answer seems likely to be in the affirmative.

A more historical question relates to the framing and trajectory of the issue in the archive itself and whether, for instance, we can discern a shift away from an exclusively spiritual framing of behavior by church officials towards one where both legal and psychiatric languages are being brought in, if sometimes also conspicuously ignored.

Thinking about the archive in terms of the history of Christianity prompts another question for me. I wonder about the extent to which invoking history suggests both causality and context. In other words, does locating these sexual acts in the context of the history of Christianity or Catholicism either explain them or explain them away? The answer to both of these questions should, I think, be “no,” but we still need to look for patterns and shifts in the trajectories of opinion or activity that we might deem to be significant. In what follows, I use different histories to show how they inflect my readings of the archives, though I do not attempt to connect these four historical fragments in a systematic way.

1.

My first fragment is one that I’ve derived both from my reading of the BishopAccountability.org materials and from a posting I remember from Katherine Ewing to The Immanent Frame on the subject of religion, spirituality, and sexual scandal. Ewing refers to the scandals around the Catholic Church but also to those relating to Independent Baptists and Muslims, noting that we are currently seeing a number of different religious institutions being rocked by such sexual episodes of accusation and outrage. This focus on the current situation invokes the need for historical consciousness: we need to be aware of how the scandals of today might, as Ewing implies, “articulate the sexual ‘orthodoxies’ of modern secularism and its discursive operations by locating specific structures of sexual desire, activity, and prohibition (such as the religious functionary who has sex with underage members of the church)….beyond the secular pale,” in other words highlighting acts that are considered “unthinkable for the liberal, secular subject.” Perhaps the scandalous, so defined, is dependent on certain definitions of childhood, of the legitimacy of the nuclear family, and of a modern sexual politics where spirituality marks an interior terrain parallel to and linked with sexuality—with both being seen as immanent sources of self within the liberal agentive subject. This is not for one instance to deny that Catholic conservatives might themselves be outraged by what has happened, but it is to point to wider and, to some degree, more historically specific dimensions of the character of current outrage and scandal.

2.

My second fragment is also recent but is more specific. As an anthropologist of evangelical Christianity as well as of varieties of Catholicism, I find it difficult to avoid reading these accusations and counter-accusations through the frame of the scandals amongst U.S. televangelicals of the 1980s and 1990s. To some degree, there are parallels—homosexuality features prominently in both forms of embodied submission and exchange, as do understandings of the power of sacred touch. In both cases, unsurprisingly, we see initial institutional attempts at concealment. But there are also some significant differences. Pedophilia does not feature particularly in televangelical discourses of the scandalous, for instance. Also significant is the way in which respective institutional discursive resources redefine and refine the scandal in the longer term. The Catholic archives tell a story of chronic, serial concealment and neutralization of morally reprehensible behavior through the creation of discursive disconnections, legal blockages, and so on. The rhetorical apparatus remains precisely private and in-house—or intra ecclesiam—as far as possible. But evangelical scandals often develop along a very different rhetorical and moral trajectory, eventually becoming grist to an evangelical mill of publicity and redemption for the perpetrator. Susan Harding remarks insightfully that scandals became part of the cultural instability that is an integral and productive force in American Protestant evangelical preaching, whereby preachers narrate and act out strategic indeterminacies—gaps, excesses, anomalies, breaches—that their followers harmonize and critics intensify. Such publicization and democratization of sin seems utterly different to that which we see in these archives.

3.

My third fragment is one I find harder to use as a frame in reading the archival material, and yet it’s surely relevant. It emerges out of my ethnographic and archival work on the Marian pilgrimage site of Walsingham in England. Walsingham is hardly alone in the Roman or Anglo-Catholic world in being a site where, from the medieval period to the present, we see morally and politically charged action carried out in relation to changing geographical and political landscapes but also—at the same time—to shifting ideas of the body, sexuality, gender, and family. Throughout the last century in particular Walsingham has encompassed battles between sites of celibacy, sexual repression, and explicit forms of mostly, but not exclusively, homosexual identity that, according to Dominic Janes, have combined to allow Walsingham to be imagined precisely as a space of queer desire—where the notion of queerness both includes and exceeds its sexual connotation. Of course, queerness must not be conflated with pedophilia, even as it mediates at Walsingham between the potent and the “merely” picturesque. There’s also the problem of how to avoid anachronisms in looking at the serial sexualization of such a Catholic site over the longue durée. But perhaps more relevant here is the fragile boundary between orthodoxy and transgression that we see at a site such as Walsingham and in the BishopAccountability.org archives. The question becomes: Does a religious context combining touch, co-presence, incarnation, hierarchical authority, and compartmentalization of spaces of action lend itself to catalyzing certain forms of sexual activity? Again, causalities cannot be asserted, but we should at least ask whether the kinds of sexual contacts we see in these archives form an unofficial and yet patterned form of what Webb Keane sees as a semiotic ideology, a coming together of words, objects, and bodies—in particular configurations that constitute and define different religious groups and their worlds. Sexual actions in this sense are both transgressive and somehow resonant of a religious world, constituting its semiotic make-up in patterned though not determined ways.

In a roughly similar semiotic vein, I would also invoke a historian of Walsingham, Susan Signe Morrison, who has written fascinatingly of how the figure of Ophelia in Hamlet, created not so many decades after the Reformation and the destruction of much of Walsingham, can be shown to exist as a trace of the Virgin of the pre-Reformation shrine: profaned, laid waste, destroyed. Ophelia becomes detritus through rhetorical and dramatic idioms of trash and sexualization. In turn, thinking of how some priests engage with and then drop their sexual prey, I confess that images of the making of waste, the creation and then discarding of matter and memories seen as out of place in relation to the institution of the church, kept coming to my mind as I perused the archive.

4.

My final fragment is both historical and ethnographic, and it’s one that is, I suppose, a typical knee-jerk reaction from an anthropologist to this kind of material. The history of anthropology and Christianity is riven with questions of how to deal with witchcraft but also with witchcraft accusations—with the epistemologies as well as the social and institutional arrangements behind episodes, moral dramas of allegation, accountability, and resolution. Much could be said about this, but I’ll confine myself to just two points, leaping off from how the material we’re looking at compares with the type of witchcraft accusations described by E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Evans-Pritchard stresses that accusations among the Azande, if they are to become socially and culturally salient, should take place among broad equals, often rivals. The cases we’ve been looking at raise complex questions concerning the very lack of equality—in relation to the respective ages of victim and accused, status within the church, perhaps also class. But we also see two institutional systems of determining status combining and clashing: that of the church and its sense of spiritual hierarchy and that of secular human rights, where equality before the law is more likely to be asserted. Secondly, Evans-Pritchard makes an epistemological point: the Azande do not allow individual cases where their system of explanation and accountability seems to fail to actually challenge their assumption that the system itself is to be relied upon. What strikes me about the archives is the way we see episodes of abuse leading us in two rather different moral, religious, and perhaps epistemological directions. On the one hand, episodes of abuse find lay victims losing faith in both the church and its system of accountability; on the other hand, following episodes of abuse many of the priests involved seem to gain in their faith in the system.

What these four fragments have in common are not only worries over how we make comparisons but also the conviction that a focus on the Catholic Church alone is not enough; not if we want to understand both the particularities and the banalities of its construction and response to abuse.

In this installment of the Rites and Responsibilities dialogue series, I met with the Boston University anthropologist and scholar of Islam Robert W. Hefner. A world renowned expert on Muslim culture, politics, and education in Southeast Asia and beyond, Hefner is the author or co-editor of more than a dozen books, including

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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DKK: If we consider concepts like “Muslim democrats” or “Muslim democratic formation”—I don’t know if you use that phrase—it seems clear that these concepts have either been under-acknowledged or under-recognized. Given these conditions, can you give us an example of democratic formation in a Muslim-majority country that would be an instructive example to and for the West? An example that says, “Here is a vibrant form of democratic life, and it took place or is taking place within the Islamic world, not despite Islam.” I think one of the bad-faith narratives about Islam says that democracy happens in the Muslim world despite Islam, despite what Islam wants for itself.

RH: Well, I think there are two striking examples. And then there are a number of still important but, for a variety of reasons, less salient examples. But the two most striking examples of Muslim democracies today are Indonesia and Turkey. People will point out that the Turkish state was until recently Kemalist, and was therefore a largely laicist state. On these grounds some would say that the Turkish case is too exceptional to figure in any discussion of Islam and democracy. But since the 1970s Turkey has experienced an Islamic resurgence comparable to that which we’ve seen across most of the Muslim world. In Turkey, as the political scientist Ahmet Kuru has so insightfully argued, the state structure that was put in place during most of the twentieth century was more aggressively secularist than that in the great majority of Muslim societies around the world. Inevitably, then, Turkey’s democratization shows some path-dependent contingencies and imperfections, not least of all with regard to ethnic minorities like the Kurds or religious minorities like the Alevis. That said, the continuing relaxation of military controls, the growing openness of electoral competition, and the preference among observant Muslims for an ethicalized profession of Islam rather than a woodenly formalistic implementation of sharia codes—all this bespeaks a political development of global importance.

The path-dependent nature and imperfection of democratization in Indonesia is somewhat different. Indonesia is sometimes described as a secular-nationalist state, but the reality is more complex. The country’s constitutional framework is a multi-confessional, “confessionalized” state, in the sense that the state is actively committed to the promotion of religion as a public good.

But the way in which this confessional commitment has been realized has varied over time, in a manner that both expressed and influenced Indonesian politics. From ‘65-‘66 until 1998, Indonesia was ruled by an authoritarian and, at first, conservative, nationalist ruler, President Suharto. However, in the last fifteen years of Suharto’s New Order government, the country witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of Islamic observance in society. Although, in the last five years of his rule, Suharto attempted to deflect the growing opposition to his rule by cultivating ties to anti-democratic Islamists, in the 1990s the country nonetheless developed a lively pro-democracy movement at the forefront of which were Muslim activists and intellectuals. Since Suharto’s fall, conservative Islamists have been consistently rebuffed in national elections. But small alliances of radical Islamist militias have taken advantage of the post-Suharto spring to press, sometimes violently, for curbs on Christian church-building as well as non-conformist Muslim groupings like the Ahmadiyah. So yes, there are path-dependent peculiarities and imperfections to democratization in Indonesia, as in Turkey, but this is par for the course in the democratization game, including here in the West. Democratization is always characterized by heightened levels of public participation, and at times this participation may result in massification that undermines rather than strengthens citizen rights and democratic institutions.

DKK: By massification, I assume you mean, not just popularization, but a sort of populism that can infuse democratic systems. As you know, there is an anxiety even among democratic theorists that thoroughgoing democracy—not quite radical democracy—in that sense, isn’t necessarily a good thing, insofar as there are popular formations that are primarily concerned to establish the authority of a particular mindset.

RH: That’s right. Indeed, I use the term to refer to a situation in which one sees, in whatever sphere—be it religion, politics, cultural life, the economy, etc.—heightened rates of popular participation, but without that participation necessarily being regulated or regularized by democratic or pluralism-embracing norms. So, massification can lead in some instances to democratization, but it need not: it can team up with highly uncivil and anti-pluralist movements or imaginaries. The challenge in any modern democratic system, then, is to take that heightened mobility and mobilization that characterize so much of modern society and canalize them in ways that reinforce a culture of democratic proceduralism and citizen rights for all. The history of mass politics in the mid-twentieth century West reminds us that the outcome of efforts like these is never a foregone conclusion.

DKK: You have written that Suharto had, at one point, sought out either moderate or even liberal Muslim leaders as he was trying to re-think what Indonesia was as a nation. And then he moved away from these moderates and liberals toward more conservative, traditionalist, and dogmatic figures. How do you explain this move? Would you ascribe Suharto’s shift in policy to anxiety about massification, and the anxieties about the loss of control?

RH: There were issues related to massification, but Suharto, actually, was a fairly effective administrator and, more importantly, a brilliant if at times ruthless tactician, a master of selective mobilization, which in many instances took the form of “divide and conquer.” As the Islamic resurgence gained momentum, in the mid-1980s, he realized that it posed a threat to his rule. Indeed, as one of his advisers told me in 1992, he looked at what had happened in Iran, and he realized that, for tactical reasons, he’d better engage the organized Muslim community more effectively. But his first tack, as you said, was to reach out to Muslim moderates, if you will—indeed, even Muslim liberals, such as a dear friend and teacher of mine, Nurcholish Madjid, who died a few years ago, and who was really one of the great thinkers of late twentieth-century Islam. So, Suharto first reached out to Madjid, as well as to other Muslim reformers who were linked to mass organizations, thinking that intellectuals and leaders of Muslim mass organizations would allow him to co-opt and control the Muslim community.

DKK: Normatively speaking, in terms of these moderate or liberal Muslim political theorists, what were they telling Suharto, particularly in contrast to the conservative views he sought out later on? I’m curious about that difference.

RH: What those leaders told Suharto is that he had to take steps to contain corruption, including that of his children, and to transition to a democratic political order. Nurcholish Madjid was quite explicit about this in his speeches and writings, though he was not a vociferous, street-fighting opponent of Suharto—other people, like Abdurrahman Wahid, the now-deceased head of Nahdlatul Ulama, and the man who was president of Indonesia from late 1998 to 2001, played a more complex and mass-politics game. Both men, however, spoke of the importance of free elections, a deepening of citizen rights, religious freedom, and civil society, and both too saw parallels between Indonesia and the earlier processes of democratization in Taiwan and Korea.

DKK: “Five Tigers.” That sort of rhetoric.

RH: That’s right. Indonesia has always been unusual in that, although it is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, on matters of politics and economics many in the political class have looked as readily to East Asia as they have the Middle East for political and economic lessons.

In any case, because Madjid, Wahid, and others continued to press for democratic reforms, from about 1994 to 1998 President Suharto reached out to hardline Islamists who had earlier been his critics, and he succeeded in winning them to his cause by alleging that the democracy movement was really a kind of Christian-influenced organization, and that democracy itself was antithetical to Islam. But the great majority of Muslim leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s had already concluded that constitutionalism and democracy were not merely compatible with Islam but required by the circumstances of modern life and politics.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

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NS: I know you have been following the events in Egypt and have even been back a couple of times since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. How would you describe the situation?

SM: I think this is an incredibly interesting time in Egypt. The country is involved in a historic and heady process of political transformation. The stakes are very high, and it is unclear whether the kind of changes—political, social, and economic—that the January 25 Revolution envisioned will, in fact, be possible. Like any other revolution in modern history, this one faces immense challenges from both within and without.

NS: What exactly are those challenges, in your view?

SM: Well, after the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, as one would expect, the movement became divided over what the collective future of the country should be. Old differences that had been set aside to topple the Mubarak regime have come to the fore again—differences of class, ideology, and religion, all of which affect the vision of what a just society should be. Second, there is the issue of transforming the political system from within to create a democratic structure—which entails, not only promulgating new electoral laws and procedures, but also forging laws that address the demands of a democratic society. Then there is the challenge of how to dismantle the much-despised state security apparatus, with its bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of surveillance and vengeance, and the Emergency Law—in place for over twenty years—that has facilitated its operations. In recent months, protestors have taken to the streets again to demand an end to the military trials that have continued since the overthrow of Mubarak. (Some report that more than 10,000 people have been tried in military courts since the revolution.) These military trials are a symbol of the old system that is still intact, and which the protestors of the January 25 Revolution had sought to dismantle. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are economic issues that are systemic, and that are not simply Egypt’s but belong to the international system of finance and capital. Egypt, like any other Third World country, is hostage right now to the global economic crisis and the immense pressure put upon those countries by international institutions (like the World Bank and IMF) and geopolitical powers (the US and Western Europe) to resist the demand for socially progressive economic reforms. The Egyptian military is part of this system and has benefitted from it immensely. I cannot see how the military, as the primary institution in charge of this “transition,” is going to set aside its economic interests to yield to the popular demand for economic justice. This is in part why Egyptians from various walks of life continue to stage sit-ins and protests across the country.

NS: How do you think these challenges might be overcome?

SM: Well, I have faith in the Egyptian people and their thirst and desire to transform the status quo. None of us expected or predicted what the Egyptians were able to achieve on February 11, 2011, with their determination and political will. The unimaginable became imaginable. The same powers are in play right now, and I suspect we all will have a lot to learn from the developments that unfold in Egypt in the coming years.

NS: Without a doubt. But let’s back up a bit now. I first read your essay on “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” when I was a freshman in college, and it had a big influence on how I came to think about the practice of religion. I still look back to it. In that vein, I wonder if you, too, had an experience early on that reoriented your own thinking.

SM: One thing that had a decisive impact on me was Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I was working on issues of religion at a moment when there was little interest in the subject within the discipline of anthropology. This was pre-9/11, and people didn’t think that religion was of great importance. I was reading a lot on my own, and this essay came up in footnotes. Our library didn’t even have a copy of it, so I had to request it through interlibrary loan. I sat down, and I distinctly remember reading and then rereading it several times. I was really challenged by the questions that the article forced the reader to ask, not just of Islam but of religion in general. It’s a very well-circulated paper now, and most students of religion and Islam tend to read it, but at the time, it was a buried treasure.

NS: Tell me about what brought you to anthropology in the first place. You were an architect before that?

SM: Yes, I practiced architecture for four years. At the time I was also involved in activism against U.S. foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. When the first Gulf War broke out, I realized that there were many pressing questions, which the war had brought to the fore, that I hadn’t really resolved for myself. These were questions that had to do with the transformed political and social landscape of the Muslim world, the ascendance of Islamic politics and the challenge this posed to those of us who grew up believing in the promise of secular nationalism to forge a different future. Following the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, Islamic movements had become the primary expression of political dissent in a variety of Muslim countries. In order to think about the transformations this ascendance had caused in the social and political landscape of Muslim societies, I resolved that I would go back to graduate school. At the time, I did not really know much about anthropology; so I enrolled in a political science graduate program, which I found to be very Eurocentric. I realized that this discipline would not help me explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to anthropology at the time, and it has been my disciplinary home since.

NS: Have you found anthropology to be a discipline in which questions that concerned you as an activist can be addressed?

SM: My activism would probably have been accommodated in any discipline. But what anthropology has allowed me to do in a serious way is pursue the question of difference. The traditional aim of socio-cultural anthropology was to study the primitive other in order to reflect upon the peculiarity—and often superiority—of Western cultural and social norms. In the late 1980s, anthropologists and others launched a robust critique of the essentialized and ahistorical notion of cultural difference that had served the discipline for so long. One important result of this critique was that the discipline moved to think critically about the question of difference—not just cultural difference but how different histories, traditions, and arrangements of power force people to live and experience life in heterogeneous ways. In general I find anthropology’s commitment to thinking critically about difference unique in the human sciences and worthy of engagement and exploration. So, in answer to your question, it is not so much that anthropology is especially open to activism, but rather its insistence that we engage with difference, while being attentive to relations of power that hierarchicalize and essentialize differences, that has enabled me to work productively in the discipline.

NS: On your website, you also say that your experience in architecture influenced your work as an anthropologist. Can you say something about how?

SM: That’s probably overstated! But when I was practicing architecture, I realized I wasn’t very happy with the elitist and technological bent of the profession. I started working instead with the homeless, designing, financing, and constructing housing for people who couldn’t afford to pay rent or mortgage. The work I did was mostly in dense, urban communities, both in the U.S. and, briefly, in Pakistan. This experience left me with an appreciation for the grit of urban life, the challenges it throws up to people, and how they manage them. In a sense, this is what Politics of Piety is about, too—people trying to make sense of a world that has completely undone the possibility of a wholesome life, but in which people still try to recreate that possibility through suturing various kinds of disparate practices and habits.

NS: Why did you choose Cairo as the site of your fieldwork?

SM: At first I went to Algiers, but it was in the throes of a civil war, which made fieldwork impossible. I also went to Fes and Casablanca but found that political debate was very guarded and muffled, making it difficult to pursue the kinds of questions I was interested in. In Cairo, however, I found a place that was very vibrant and alive with debates about the importance of secularism, Islamism, and what it means to live as a Muslim in the contemporary world. The city streets pulsated with these debates, and Egyptians generally did not feel restrained in expressing their religious and political views. I found the public culture of the city very conducive to the project I wanted to pursue, and so I stayed.

NS: What brought you to the theoretical tools that would help you interpret that experience in Politics of Piety?

SM: By the time I went to do fieldwork in Cairo, I was already very critical of how the existing literature analyzed Islamist movements, largely in functionalist and reductive terms. It seemed to subscribe to a hydraulic conception of politics: you squish something down in one place and it bubbles up in another. Islamic politics, in other words, was a displacement of something more fundamental—economic frustration, lack of democracy, and so on. But I was far less prepared to think about the range of embodied religious practices I encountered and how these inform or undergird politics. It was really a challenge for me to think about people’s preoccupation with the minutiae of bodily practices and not to read them as misguided or misplaced religiosity. Like countless other scholars, I initially tended to view them as inconsequential both to politics and to the substance of religion. It was really only after doing the fieldwork, when I came back and started writing, that I began to think more deeply about these issues and my own inadequate response to what I had observed in the field. This process of reflection and writing brought me to rethink the distinction drawn between ethics and politics in liberal political theory, as well as the centrality of affect and embodied praxis to political imaginaries and projects.

NS: In the preface to Politics of Piety, you speak very eloquently about the relationship between that project and your experience of coming of age in Pakistan. Does Pakistan continue to inform the questions that you pose and the ways in which you think about them? The country has certainly come to play a different role on the world stage in recent years. . . .

SM: The developments in Pakistan have been quite tragic. The Pakistani military has mortgaged the future of the country to fight a series of proxy wars for the U.S.—wars that have methodically destroyed its infrastructure, not to mention social and political life in the country. Politics of Piety is an analysis of a different kind of Islamic movement, in Egypt, that is transformative of social and political life but not destructive of its very possibility. In Pakistan, Islamist movements have largely played a very destructive role, especially with the ascendance of jihadi movements that have made a Faustian bargain with the Pakistani military, on the one hand, and U.S. strategic interests, on the other. It’s quite different in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest Islamist political organization in the country—has eschewed militancy at least since the 1950s, and the network of da’wa groups that I analyze in my book are reformist in nature, focused largely on proselytization and social welfare activities. The career of Islamic militants in Egypt was short-lived, and they do not command the kind of power that they do in Pakistan. As a result, the social and political profile of Islamism in Egypt is radically different from its counterpart in Pakistan. In my current project, I have begun to take up the question of how geopolitics transforms the ways religious coexistence is managed, produced, and transformed. But, while geopolitics has certainly transformed Pakistani life, in my current work I’m not thinking about it particularly in the Pakistani context.

NS: Can you tell me more about the project you’re involved in now?

SM: Well, I am engaged in a couple of related projects. My personal project focuses on how Christian-Muslim relations have been historically transformed through the introduction of the concepts of minority rights and religious liberty in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egypt. Aside from this, I am also working on a three-year collective project with three other colleagues (Elizabeth Hurd, Peter Danchin, and Winnifred Sullivan), funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It focuses on how religious freedom is being transformed through legal and political contestations in a variety of countries in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and South Asia. It’s called “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices.” Most of the scholarly work to date tends to treat religious freedom as a singular and stable principle, enshrined in international and national legal documents. Others tend to focus on how different religious traditions are either amenable or resistant to the incorporation of liberal conceptions of religious liberty. Our project is distinct in that it asks whether religious liberty can indeed be treated as a singular or stable principle aimed at achieving shared goals and objectives, given the diversity of historical and political contexts. We will track the variety of claims made in the name of religious liberty, with the aim of mapping out modular disagreements that occur in a variety of national and international political contexts. We are interested in this because we believe that, in order to reach any sort of agreement in the human rights community, it is important first to understand what is really at stake in battles over religious freedom. It is also important to ask whether religious freedom, given its manifold deployments and limitations, is the best way to achieve co-existence for the variety of actors involved.

NS: A thread that seems to connect the earlier work with what you’ve been doing more recently is the issue of freedom—from freedom as personal autonomy, in Politics of Piety, to religious freedom in international law, now. Has the one informed how you think about the other?

SM: That is an interesting question. I agree that liberty and freedom are at the center of both of my projects. The right to religious liberty is often conceived in individualist terms—whether in the First Amendment, the European Convention on Human Rights, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the right to religious liberty has also been imagined in collective terms as the right of a group to practice its traditions freely, without undue intervention or control. This latter conception has been very important to religious minorities in claiming a place of autonomy and freedom from majoritarian norms and state interventions. In my current work, I am trying to think through how these alternative conceptions of religious liberty stand in tension with each other and the sorts of impasses it produces.

NS: What kinds of methods are you using? Are you doing fieldwork again?

SM: Fieldwork is an important part, but the project has historical, geopolitical, and legal dimensions as well, since I’m interested in tracking how notions of religious liberty travel across time and history, and also across the divide between Western and non-Western. So, I’m looking at the UN charter, the UDHR, international laws and treaties, as well as particular legal precedents in Europe that have traveled to the Middle East and have gained particular traction there.

NS: Tell me more about what the fieldwork is like. After all, I imagine that the usual way of studying international law is primarily textual. How does fieldwork inform these kinds of questions?

SM: I’m interested in the social life of the law, especially since many court cases about the right to religious freedom in the Middle East are fought, not just in courts, but through public campaigns launched on the cultural-political terrain. People’s sense of what constitutes religious liberty is shaped by how human, civil, and minority rights organizations end up contesting and arguing over it. Part of my fieldwork in Egypt entailed working with human rights practitioners, particularly those who are using international human rights protocols in their legal strategies and public campaigns.

NS: Can you say a bit, in turn, about how Is Critique Secular? came about and the kinds of problems that framed it?

SM: It emerged out of an event organized at UC Berkeley to announce the establishment of a new teaching and research unit on critical theory. This inaugural symposium generated a lot of interesting debate and discussion—not only on the Berkeley campus but here on the Immanent Frame as well. The Townsend Center for the Humanities, where the event was held, approached me and other participants about putting some of the papers together in book form. As we could not pull together all the papers from the symposium, we focused on the ones about the Danish cartoon controversy. Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and I decided that we would try to organize the book around this question while also retaining some of the original impetus for the symposium.

NS: More recently, the cartoon controversy seems to have repeated itself all over again with the Park51 complex in Lower Manhattan, or the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” And long before that, there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses.

SM: Well, I think there are substantial differences among the issues involved in each of these controversies. I think the latter is quite straightforwardly about the right of a much-maligned minority to build a place of worship near a site invested with patriotic-national fervor, while the former controversies centered upon Muslim objections to how the prophet Muhammad was portrayed.

NS: What is wrapped up for people in these portrayals of the prophet?

SM: It’s not an accident that with both the Satantic Verses and the Danish cartoon controversies, what was at stake was the particular kind of affective and religious connection pious Muslims (but certainly not all Muslims) feel to the figure of Muhammad—to his iconicity and his exemplariness. This relationhip forces us to think about religiosity in more complicated ways than as privatized belief, or as a system of rules, regulations, and taboos. Both Muslims and non-Muslims must think critically about whether the sense of injury that derives from this sort of religiosity is translatable into a language of rights, and whether understanding this sense of injury is something worthy for the ethical and political life of a religiously diverse society. I think that there is an increasing tendency within the U.S. and Europe—on the part of the majority and minorities alike—to resort to the law and the state to settle ethical and moral issues. At the time of the Danish cartoon controversy, both sides wanted to defer to the law to settle their claims. But I think that such a turn to the law, or legislation, freezes positions and allows the state to intervene in domains toward which it claims to be neutral. My contribution to Is Critique Secular? lays these issues out in more detail than I can do justice to here. In sum, what I am suggesting is that struggles over religious difference cannot simply be settled by the heavy hand of the law. Insomuch as these struggles entail competing religious sensibilities as well as deep prejudices and intolerances, they must be engaged on other—cultural, ethical, visceral—grounds. This may not yield immediate or definitive results, but it is a necessary and important step in the creation of a multi-religious polity.

NS: So how do you think this plays out in the case of Park51?

SM: There, of course, even though the personage of Muhammad was not involved, the language of injury and offense dominated the debate. If you recall, in the Danish cartoon controversy, the claim was that the right to freedom of expression is also a right to offend anybody and anyone—and that this is a characteristic of an open, pluralistic, and democratic society. Some even argued that the cartoons served as an instrument to create offense, so as to engender a critical dialogue among Muslims about Islam. In contrast, in the Park51 controversy, it was argued that the complex should not be built because, even though Muslims have a right to do so by virtue of the First Amendment, building one so close to the World Trade Center would offend American sensibilities. The claim to offense and injury in each instance was being marshaled for very different purposes.

NS: And the players’ roles have been reversed, haven’t they?

SM: Right. I do think, however, that what is at stake in all these debates is the status of a religious minority within self-avowedly liberal societies, which claim to have in place the most robust mechanisms possible for accommodating the concerns of majority and minority alike. And yet, what we find is that the rights of minorities are actually framed by the norms of the larger community; it’s against those norms that minoritarian claims are judged and contested, and that is where the idea of religious liberty and freedom of expression as an individual right remains inadequate to grasping the situation. We have to start thinking in terms of how groups are weighted both demographically and politically, and how this conditions the context in which certain claims are made or heard. It’s not enough to refer to a right that exists in constitutions—such as the right to free speech or to religious liberty—and to track when it is applied or not. Far tougher questions are at play. One has to think about how the ethical, cultural, and social norms of the majority structure the possibility of the exercise of individual and group liberties differently for minorities. I should make clear that this structural problem characterizes all nation-states (premised as they are on the demographic calculus of minority and majority populations), and is not simply particular to Euro-American societies.

NS: When you approach these issues today, are you still coming to them as an activist as well as a scholar?

SM: No, I would say that I come to them more as a scholar than as an activist. My intellectual work has often led me to challenge and complicate my political stances—to complicate the very ground on which politics can be imagined and conducted. Politics, in my opinion, demands a certain closure of thinking, in order to judge and to act. Intellectual work requires a different kind of labor. In one sense, of course, all arguments are political when you’re thinking about such controversies, but I don’t start with a political position and then see how the argument unfolds. For example, during the Danish cartoon controversy, I was puzzled by the fact that the kind of injury expressed by ordinary pious Muslims did not find any voice in the polemical debates in either the Islamic or the European press. I tried to make sense of this silence, and it led me to suggest that the kind of religiosity expressed by most Muslims in response to the Danish cartoons was incommensurable with the language of rights, litigation, and boycotts that came to dominate the debate. And it was precisely because this religiosity could not be contained within the language of identity politics that it found no expression in the public debate. Needless to say, this argument did not win me friends in either one of the two camps.

NS: Is there something in particular that you think the West needs to know about the Muslim world, or about Islam, or about Muslim minorities? Is there some message that, above all, you think needs to be definitively stated—or is the questioning enough?

SM: I don’t think questioning is enough. But I do think that there is a desperate need to challenge the current way of framing things, as a civilizational stand-off between Islam and the West. This way of thinking is not only dangerous but also unsustainable in the long run. Those of us interested in stepping out of this overheated polemic have a responsibility to make people realize why this framing is inadequate and problematic, even dangerous. Despite important differences among political ideologies and religious traditions, I believe that we have the historical language and analytical skills to think differently, to imagine a future in which Islam and the West are not locked in some zero-sum game. To take a simple example, when I speak of the kind of relationship that many pious Muslims feel toward Muhammad, which was partly at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy, surely it is recognizable to scholars of Christianity (with its long and rich tradition of the Eucharist and Corpus Christi), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and late Antiquity? Surely we can think together about different conceptions of religiosity and what space they have in, and what effects they may have on, our political present without descending into the abyss of civilizational incomprehension and incommensurability?

NS: What about the concerns of Western feminists in particular? There sometimes seems to be especially little hope for common ground on women’s issues.

SM: Once again, feminism has a rich and varied tradition of thought and praxis. The current tilt toward painting an essentialized picture of feminism and Islam—as quintessential opposites—is inadequate to the complexity of both traditions. There are no doubt historical reasons for the great suspicion with which some Islamic symbols are treated in Euro-American societies, but I would hope that thoughtful people would be able to think through this history critically. Take the example of the current obsession with the veil in Europe: colonial discourse had long cast the veil as the essential symbol of the civilizational inferiority of the East, and of Islam in particular. It is not a surprise, therefore, that anti-colonial movements took up this symbol precisely to reverse the colonial judgment while embracing the practice—in the process, reifying the importance of the veil to Muslim identity. The current discourse is, in a sense, a re-enactment of this history. What is new, however, is the way in which the European and Turkish bans on the veil have been held up in the name of secularism, wherein secularism is equated with the principle of gender equality. For example, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that uphold the headscarf ban in Turkey and France rest on two interrelated claims: one, that the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression; and two, that insomuch as secularism is for gender equality France and Turkey, as secular states, cannot condone this practice. But, historically, secularism has hardly been on the side of women’s rights—otherwise French women would have been granted the vote long before 1945, and the separation of church and state would have yielded gender equality in the nineteenth century, when European states adopted this principle. Secularism and women’s rights have always had a troubled relationship, which is important to think about from within the history of feminism. This does not mean, of course, that one has to denounce secularism and embrace religion or vice versa. One has to be able to see the mutual imbrication of religion and secularism to even diagnose the problem correctly. Otherwise, I think we run the risk of dulling the critical edge of feminist thought.

NS: I found your essay about the mobilization of feminists behind the invasion of Afghanistan very powerful. I remember being so struck at that time by how American women were identifying with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which made some eager to support our military adventures over there. But is there a better way to ally ourselves with women in the Muslim world?

SM: The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

*  *  *

NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having a dawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

NS: Do you think something had to change in the minds of people to build this kind of movement? Take the assassination of Anwar Sadat, compared to the uprising against Mubarak. One had machine guns and grenades, and the other had millions out in the street, mostly peacefully. What accounts for the difference?

TA: Well, it isn’t as if the recent events were totally without precedent.

NS: No, there had been decades of organizing—and, of course, there was the example of Tunisia.

TA: There had been strikes and demonstrations for a long time, and there was the Kefaya movement, although it was rather limited and somewhat elitist. But peaceful protests in the past have not attracted much attention from the Western media. I do think things have changed, but I don’t think it was quite like a conversion, so to speak, nor was it all pre-arranged and carefully thought out as a revolution. In some cases, people discover that they’ve got some power they didn’t think they had—even a technique that they don’t intentionally develop, but which they suddenly find themselves with and begin to understand. Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

NS: Does the sense of suspicion that you were talking about fit into those comparisons? Is it like jealousy in love, or doubt in religion? How uniquely Egyptian is it?

TA: I’ve been thinking of it as something intrinsic to revolutionary situations. If you look back even to the French Revolution, and certainly to the Russian Revolution, that’s exactly what always happens. The revolution eats its own children, as the saying goes—partly because there’s so much at stake. There are so many enemies, and you don’t know who they are or who will do what. I see it simply as part of such a situation, which can never be resolved by final answers because it is always generating new questions on one side or another. No revolution is ever finished.

NS: Can you say more about how that suspicion took form in Cairo?

TA: I had a discussion with some friends of mine just before the March 19 referendum, and all the left-wing ones were saying that they’d be voting no. I remember thinking that it doesn’t quite add up. To say no would be to say that there would be no elections in September for the national assembly as originally planned, and that the army would stay on ruling the country for another year and a half. And yet these same people had already said that they didn’t trust the army! “Yes,” they said, “but we want the army to be replaced by a committee of three civilians.” But you know that’s not going to happen, I said. So there seems to be a certain inconsistency here: one becomes so suspicious about some possibilities that where one should be suspicious one isn’t.

NS: Since coming back to the United States, have you noticed a shift in how the West perceives the Muslim world?

TA: Well, I don’t read newspapers regularly—so you might be in a better position to answer that than I.

NS: Really? Why don’t you read newspapers?

TA: It’s not that I have any sound reason for it. I haven’t read newspapers for thirty years because I find that, for some reason, they tend to break up my mind. They write about so many different things, and you’re always going from one thing to another, and then on to another, unrelated to the last. I like to read journals—weeklies. I also watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and some of the news programs on Russia Today. Listening to TV newscasts is less disruptive, strangely. So I’m not sure I can adequately answer your first question as to whether there has been a change in Western depictions of the Muslim world or not.

NS: I suppose I’m thinking about the difference between the images we saw of the “Arab Street” in Tunis and Cairo and, say, those during the Danish cartoon controversy—

TA: Shouting, and the rest.

NS: Yes, shouting, and burning flags, intense violence, people getting killed and killing each other—this sort of self-immolating fury. And then, suddenly, we have this other set of images, where two dictators get knocked off in the space of a few months, in a relatively orderly and impressive way.

TA: I think one should distinguish between the cartoon affair, which mostly involved Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Western media haven’t been interested in the long history of political protests and strikes in Egypt, say, as they have been in the sexy cartoon affair. The significance of the current uprisings is not just that they are peaceful. It’s that they indicate a major unsettling of a region strategically crucial to Western powers.

NS: What do you think made the Danish cartoon incident such a crisis?

TA: I’ve written about this at length in several places a couple of years ago. I think it was partly the continuing obtuseness of liberals, especially in Europe—liberals who are almost never consistently liberal. That particular scandal was unfair to the immigrants, and somewhat hypocritical. Liberals like to say that everything should be up for criticism. But we know it isn’t. And now in the US we have a state that is increasingly invading our privacy, and there seems to be very little resistance to that from liberal intellectuals. Anyway, shouldn’t we be more disturbed by the intellectual undermining of things we think of as eminently rational and decent? We should be ready to ask ourselves whether perhaps they’re not quite as rational or decent as we thought. But instead of learning how to deal with immigrants as part of our society we think of them as invaders.

NS: It sounds like the revolutionary suspicion that you were talking about earlier—seeing enemies everywhere except where it matters most.

TA: Normally, the element of hypocrisy in itself is not terribly interesting. What interests me more is that the cartoon scandal raises questions about how we think of freedom, including religious freedom, and about the language that is used to defend some of the things we think of as most valuable, if not sacred, to us.

NS: In the case of the cartoon controversy, for instance, free speech.

TA: Yes, if you want to put it that way.

NS: What’s being asserted, then, when Western, secular liberals claim that a cartoon about Muhammad is free speech and shouldn’t be apologized for? What is encoded in that claim?

TA: I think one thing that’s encoded there is a certain attitude toward religion in general, toward Islam in particular, and also the attitude that nothing is sacred. But there is also a sense of “these wretched immigrants who don’t understand our culture.” The encoding in this whole cartoon affair was a secularist one, which categorized the cartoons as free speech, even if they were deliberately provocative—not just deliberately provocative, but insulting. Why do it? What’s the motive? I’m talking about speculation and suspicion; what is the motive for wanting to attack Muslims? Why not just say, “If you riot in the streets or kill somebody, I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer the consequences under the law”?

NS: Well, wasn’t there a principle at stake: the right to provoke if one so wishes, and to criticize religious beliefs?

TA: Yes, but why do we want to exercise that right in some cases and not in others? I’m not just after prejudice, but the morphology of our provocative choices. There was much talk, sentimental and romantic, of a duty to fight for the right to free speech. As soon as an incident like this happens, we’re immediately regaled with stories about Bruno at the stake, and the Catholic Church, and so on. One doesn’t quite have to think in these terms. Our problems are not medieval problems. The challenges are not the same. For God’s sake, let’s think clearly! All this complaining about religious dogmatism—we know very well that some of these secular critics are about as closed-minded as you can get on all sorts of issues. Even as eminent a theorist as John Rawls says that certain kinds of reasoning should not be allowed into the domain of politics because all they do is create irresolvable conflict, so that only what liberals deem rational can be allowed to enter public space. Is it the case that religion always produces conflict that can’t be resolved peacefully? Doesn’t secular provocation—“fighting words”—lead to violent conflict? Does every conflict in society have to be “resolvable”? Of course there have to be limits on provocation.

NS: What about the election in the Palestinian territories of Hamas, or even the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood right now in Egypt? There’s this incredible suspicion right now in the West, which views these factions as unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we’ve taken political measures to suppress them. Is that a kind of censorship, too?

TA: Yes, I think you’re right. The need to control and predict non-Western movements is what it’s partly about. But let me give you an example of what I think happens, mistakenly, in the explanations secularists give of the Muslim Brothers. The Brothers’ ideas are really, in many respects, in a state of flux. The younger members often contest or disobey the directives of their leaders. There are different currents within the movement itself. Their present situation is also an expression of the fact that—and most people in the West don’t know this—the Muslim Brotherhood was savagely repressed by past Egyptian governments for 60 years. They have been put in prison, hanged, tortured, exiled. I say this not because I think one should be sympathetic to them because of what they’ve suffered, but because, like so many people who have suffered, they have developed an instinct for mere survival. In my view, having talked to some of them, simply how to survive politically, as an organization, is what their leadership has learnt best over time. Their minds are focused on that aim and have become rigidified. They’re not able to think freely enough yet—about freedom of thought, speech, and action—to take advantage of the new situation.

NS: Perhaps, when repression is involved, suspicion can turn to paranoia.

TA: Yes, for both persecutors and persecuted. Because the Muslim Brothers have contradictory positions and are in many respects confused, my friends in Egypt say, “Ah, you see? They say one thing and mean another! One member says this and another says that!” What could quite reasonably be seen as fluidity, uncertainty, and disagreement on their part gets represented as speaking with a forked tongue. I’ve heard so often the remark: “This is just a game that the Muslim Brothers play.” This makes me wonder whether anybody else in politics plays games! Liberals? Socialists? Conservatives? Don’t they say one thing and then do another, or compromise on their principles for the sake of practical ends? That is, in part, how an obsessive suspicion closes off the mind to any serious attempt at understanding what’s going on. For most of my left-wing friends, the Muslim Brotherhood equals hypocrisy and the hidden determination to establish a totalitarian state. I think this a priori suspicion is wrong. I don’t think, by the way, that there’s even a danger of anything like that happening. In comparison to other groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah—with whom, I should say, I do have sympathies—the Muslim Brothers do not have a militant wing. This hasn’t been sufficiently recognized. In the past they were involved in violence, but for many decades now they’ve moved away from it toward a more or less parliamentary line—like Eurocommunism—rather than a revolutionary one.

NS: But isn’t the concern about what could happen if they were voted into a position of power over the police and the military in Egypt?

TA: Yes, but the point is that they would have to get into that position of power in the first place, and the military isn’t their instrument. There’s always a possibility, of course, that they might become a dominant force in government and that they might use the police repressively, like the Mubarak regime. But would that mean a totalitarian government was imminent? For God’s sake, even in the United States the police are used to harass various kinds of movement—peace movements, ecological movements. The security measures now in place here have deeply invaded our liberties and privacy. Still, the United States is not (yet) a totalitarian state, it’s a secular state and it’s highly unlikely that its secularism will be abandoned anytime soon. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers would have to have a very substantial presence in the national assembly before they could do anything really significant, and I doubt that they will have that. In any case we don’t even know what policies the Muslim Brothers would support as members of a government, because the policies haven’t been sufficiently formulated and agreed upon yet. Let’s bear in mind the difference between the promises made by Obama the candidate and the decisions taken by Obama the president. They tell us that democracy is all about compromise and being realistic.

NS: Consider someone who would oppose a right-wing, religious party in the United States. Is there any difference between opposing such a thing in one’s own country, where one understands what’s at stake and what’s at play, and opposing an ostensibly similar party in a foreign country, just by saying, “I wouldn’t want that myself”?

TA: Yes, I can understand that—

NS: Or is there something different that we have to understand about the other society that makes the two incomparable?

TA: I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

NS: How much does the fact of their being religious fuel the suspicion leveled against them in the West and among liberals generally? Should it?

TA: I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.

NS: How does having grown up and having been educated on both sides of the colonial divide affect how you look at situations like this? You often see colonialism where other people are blind to it, it seems.

TA: Yes, but I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

NS: Is such intervention the same as the old colonialism? Or can it be better than that?

TA: It’s neither better nor worse, but it’s certainly not the same. I recall something Hillary Clinton said, in some conference or other, to the effect that in the end the government is concerned not with promoting democracy, as such, but with promoting America’s national interest. That would have to come first. At the same time, she said she would be the happiest of persons if the two things converged—which of course makes the ideal of democracy into an instrument, not an ideal. But I can understand that. I can see why she would say that, because power is what the modern state is about. I can see why the US would want to have what it calls “stability in the region,” a region in which the US has such immense interests—in its oil, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the confrontation with Iran, and so on. I can see that they would want to have, in every country, some kind of influence, if possible. I might want to attribute everything to colonialism or imperialism, but I think that won’t do. But then nor would I want to say, “Don’t blame imperialism, it’s all your own fault really!” It’s not a question of fault, it’s a question of the way in which various forces collide and intervene and shape what are regarded as national interests.

NS: It’s interesting that you seem so accepting of this interventionist order—

TA: No, I am not accepting of it, certainly not. I’m trying to see things as they really are. But, at the same time, I’m aware that this means not being able to invoke one’s own moral position very easily. Perhaps that’s why I said, early on, that I am a pessimist. I have felt for a long time now that we have gradually—and when I say “we,” I mean everybody in the modern world, and I’ll say more about that—worked ourselves into a situation that is truly tragic, in the Greek sense of having no real resolution. There are the most awful prospects before us, with the kind of technological warfare we now have, with the fantastic extension of consumerism and money, with the consequent growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, with the destruction of the environment, and with the ramifications of climate change and nuclear energy. I really hope that this is simply a sign of my being old. It may well be, because I don’t see things in the way that a younger person would, I’m sure. I see it all as being absolutely disastrous. But people will try to resist, and they should.

NS: How? I think of the Human Terrain Teams that were dispatched in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which anthropologists and other experts in local culture and language would be embedded with military units. Should an anthropologist, someone with a more textured view of what’s happening on the ground, be a part of that process of intervention so as somehow to improve it?

TA: No, certainly not—absolutely not. That’s not resistance, that’s collusion. I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But it doesn’t follow from a pessimistic outlook that one just has to accept things as they are and ask fellow anthropologists to do the same. In any case, I’m very much against the kind of involvement you mention, making things smoother for empire.

NS: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?

TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.

NS: “We’re all in it together.”

TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.

NS: Whose fault is it, then?

TA: Again, it’s not a question of fault. There’s a long history of human choices that is leading us all, unintentionally, to where we shall soon be—at a dead end. Some of these choices were more momentous, affecting far more people, than other choices. Some of us now are in a more powerful position to choose than others are. “Mankind” is not an agent.

Certainly, we must be done with the pieties of secular reason, and with what I’ve called the secular apologetics of many social scientific approaches to religion. There is no doubt that anthropology needs new approaches for understanding dramatic change, a new way of figuring the relationship between structure and subjectivity (often abusively assimilated by anthropologists to consciousness or the individual person), which I take to be part of the gambit of the project of an anthropology of Christianity. There is also a real need for a renewal of critical thought on the problems of exploitation, oppression, injustice—on the devastating ravages of late neoliberal capitalism on the masses of the Global South, which are also the populations most engaged in the new wave of conversions. Nothing testifies to this more dramatically or poignantly than the recent wave of self-immolations that has swept across North Africa in the past weeks, nor, might I add, to the ongoing force of a sacrificial politics. But can we really claim that something called Global Christianity (a shorthand, here, for its Pentecostal or charismatic forms), if not able to provide a model for emancipatory action, might, in dialogue with the atheist, post-foundational left, give us something better to think with?

It is one thing to recognize, with James K.A. Smith, who, citing Saba Mahmood, argues that what “critical reason remains blind to is its own disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness,” that this blindness makes it, like Christianity, a “stand-point project.” But it is another thing to claim, as Smith does, that, “as a standpoint-project, Christianity, then, approaches the world critically. The critique issues from both its ethical and its eschatological vision.”  Surely this is true of any stand-point project? Smith is clearly aware of what this statement implies, because he qualifies his demand for “stretching the category of critique in order to include nontraditional discourses” which are “critical of the status quo and which enact measures to try and effect an ‘alternative social order’” to those discourses concerned with “justice and resistance to oppression.”

Whence the knotty question of how we might today rethink critique, both as a new mode of engaging and enacting these projects and as a form of ethico-political discernment—a thought that does not merely reflect the world but inflects it. This is precisely what the post-foundational turn in continental political philosophy grapples with, in the face of the withdrawal of all markers of certainty. The Paul books must thus be read as part of a broader project of radically rethinking politics and the political all the way down to a de-essentialized ontology as first philosophy. Yet, despite the talk about radical change, revolution, and empire, there is in this dialogue a curious lack of attention to these political questions, or to the recognition that, as Anidjar has recently argued, Christianity is a “polemical concept.” Robbins says explicitly that he has preferred not to dwell on the question of Pentecostalism and the political, which he refers to as a “level of debate, ” but rather seeks to make a case for the possibility of understanding change as evental. This is an important move, and I endorse the fertility of the thought of the event for social scientific analysis. But surely the central question, if we’re going to dialogue with Badiou, Žižek, or Deleuze, and employ terms like critique, empire, and revolution, is that of the political import of a project of fidelity to the event of Pentecost, in either its Biblical form or its current global manifestations. Indeed, beyond a celebration of the “event” and “evental change,” it’s unclear what the authors mean precisely by “event” in the context of Pentecostalism and what its relation to the current “state of the situation” might be. For the proposed dialogue to bear any significant fruit, we need to recognize that, far from being merely a “level of debate,” the political, or the ethico-political, is really the only register in which to read Badiou, Žižek, and Agamben’s Paul with any consistency.

As part of this exercise of “stretching,” some of the papers advocate an affirmation of the affective, the embodied, and the sensual, so central to charismatic forms of religiosity, thus emphasizing the subaltern term—in Gayatri Spivak’s sense of the subaltern as “the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic”—in a secular dialectics of progress and history. Pamela Klassen challenges this approach in her excellent post. I’d merely add that the new anthropological focus on affect, sensuality, and the body might be simply a reversal of the old dialectic, complete with its Christian overtones. As Nancy and Derrida argue, phenomenology has never been free from a certain Christian thought of the flesh, the suffering body, and the overbid of hoc est enim meum corpus. For the theologians in the volume, particularly Pickstock, these are not simply overtones. But surely the lyrical celebration of communion in the “body of Christ” can’t be what the anthropologists have in mind when thinking about the “coming community”? In any case, as Derrida and Spivak show us, it is not simply a matter of dialectically reaffirming the subaltern. What I want from the anthropologists in the volume who speak about “revolutionary change” and Pentecostalism as “fertile ground for thinking through what Deleuze and Badiou offer us when confronting empire today” is to critically engage with the “stand-points,” not only of their Pentecostal subjects, but also those of Pickstock and Smith, for instance, when the latter claims that “the Pentecostal vision of a coming kingdom that can both contest and loosen up the petrified imagination of a world culture bent on consumption, violence, and the pursuit of power and exploitation.” As Elizabeth Castelli warns in her paper, “the pneumatic is something to think with, perhaps, but poses a critical danger at the level of the political.”

Not all projects speaking in the name of justice and resistance to oppression are actually borne out as such, and not all “stand-point projects” are equal from a political and ethical point of view. Social change doesn’t imply emancipation; “revival” and “church” don’t map onto political mobilization and articulation; and spiritual community, or, in Pickstock’s words, Christian communion, shouldn’t stand in for political community. In fact, for post-foundational philosophers such as Badiou, Žižek, Agamben, Nancy, and Laclau, nothing could be more opposed to a thought of communism or community than “communion” and the Christic body. As Nancy argues, “both the theory and the practice of critique demonstrate that, from now on, critique absolutely needs to rest on some principle other than that of the ontology of the Other and the Same: it needs an ontology of being-with-one-another.” Or, as Laclau says, “So forget Hegel!” And forget theology, which Badiou calls the ontology of the One. For the “new Paulines,” then, it is not simply a matter of thinking about religion, or with religion, as the editors say in their introduction, but also, and perhaps above all, thinking in a new way against religion, or at least all the old figures of the onto-theological and the theologico-political. The engagement with the “resources of Christianity” is part of this project; hence the antinomian Paul as a resource in Agamben’s project for a political theory freed from the theologico-political aporias of sovereignty; Badiou’s attempt to extract from Paul “a formal, wholly secularized conception of grace from the mythical core”; or Nancy’s thought of the body beyond all figures of incarnation, in Corpus, and his discussion of James on faith, in Disenclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity.

Robbins may be correct when he notes that the vogue enjoyed by the new Paulines today relates to a current loss of faith “in the present to beget the future” and the difficulty for many, especially on the left, “to imagine that the natural development of tendencies evident in the present will issue in a radically new and better kind of future.” But finishing with Hegelian and Marxian dialectics and their attendant eschatologies, whether Reason in History or an ultimate crisis of capitalism that will engender the revolution, and, as in 1 Corinthians 15:24, announcing the end of politics as such, isn’t such a bad thing either. It entails recognizing the aporetic, as opposed to contradictory, nature of the various oppositions—transcendence/immanence, noumenal/phenomenal, inside/outside, essence/appearance, base/superstructure—that uphold a dialectical mode of critique: a new version of Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill.” It is the sustained attention to this abyssal founding moment in which the political emerges that explains the new philosophical interest in the event and the decision. As concerns critique, recognizing the failure or impossibility of any stable “criteriology” upon which one might base ethical and political distinctions or decisions by no means exonerates us from distinguishing and deciding. On the contrary, as Derrida argues, the impossibility of a just decision about justice is the very beginning of ethico-political responsibility.

The central objection to the most radical thinkers of the event is that, despite their radical militancy, they cannot give a concrete answer to the question “What is to be done?” But can rereading them in the light of the “real-life events” of Pentecostal conversion really “polish off the patina of unreality” or “wishful thinking” from these philosophies of the event that the left “has pinned their hopes on”? I, for one, remain entirely unconvinced. Not because, as Milbank somewhat cynically suggests in his post, Pentecostalism succeeds because it focuses on “cultural” aspects of people’s lives, which they can actually change, where Liberation Theology failed because it was based on a demand to change underlying conditions that ordinary people could do nothing about. If that’s the real explanation, then nothing revolutionary has ever happened or can ever happen in history! Pentecostals certainly wouldn’t agree, believing as they do in the possibility of the impossible. It’s not because I remain politically suspicious of any theologico-political configuration, even one which takes the form, as I’ve argued Pentecostalism does today, of a negative political theology similar in many regards to the one Taubes associates with Paul. In fact, if I can put it in these terms, my problem isn’t with the fact that Pentecostalism focuses on a “world beyond this world,” but rather with the specific form of its worldliness. I think Pentecostalism in its present–day, globalized manifestations is rather a failed foundationalism, or a failed transcendence—perhaps even a new sort of quasi-religious post-foundationalism. We must not confuse Pentecostalism’s capacity to assist in breaking down the old hierarchies and social structures, modes of subjectivation, forms of thinking and being in post-colonial societies of the Global South, and in liberating people from their constraints, with a revolutionary form of socio-political action directed against the violence of late neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, in this regard, Pentecostalism rather appears as the handmaiden of Capital and Empire, a possibility Bialecki admits of at the very end of his paper. All good Marxists remember Marx’s enthusiasm for capitalism’s capacity to destroy the old hierarchies, ushering in the possibility of modern politics and its principle of equality. As Badiou says, “It is obviously the only thing we can and must welcome within Capital . . . . That this destitution operates in the most complete barbarity must not conceal its properly ontological virtue.”  So, for many subalterns among the subaltern, the “destitution” that accompanies Pentecostalism’s “new life”—“making a complete break with the past”—also informs what I have called the prophetic, “quasi-democratic” figure of Pentecostalism’s ambivalent political theology and is, perhaps, its onto(theo)logical virtue. The deployment of this figure in Nigeria accounted in no small measure for its dramatic success.

I have argued for the failure of the “Pentecostal revolution” in Nigeria, drawing attention to the ways in which Pentecostalism is a religion of the subject rather than the Law. The messianism and interiority of Pentecostal practices of faith, the centrality of grace and miracles, all perform an ongoing interruption of processes of institutionalization that might ground both sovereignty and community, and secure the connection between a new mode of self-government and the government of others, a new ontology or “ethology” of being-together. From its local parishes to its global mega-churches, there is a growing imaginary of charismatic unity in Christ—but this virtualized, spectacularized, globalized “church” has no unity, no orthodoxy, no proper place; its voices are closer to Babel than Pentecost. My colleague Nimi Wariboko, a theologian at Andover-Newton, puts it elucidates theologically what I call Pentecostalism’s post-foundationalism in his forthcoming work on the Pentecostal Principle—a rigorous engagement with the same post-foundational left, which I encourage all those interested in this dialogue to read when it appears. He makes a fascinating case for a Pentecostal principle that would deny any form of closure to becoming and counter any claim that a finite or conditioned reality can ever have reached its destiny: Pentecostalism as “dialectics at a standstill.” He argues that its attitude to miraculous, divine grace is that of a child at play, which allows grace to float between the serious matter of saving the soul and ordinary, ephemeral, bodily, existential matters, relieving it of the weight of the ends of eternal life. Divine grace as pure means, means without ends. You will recognize Agamben here, and, as his careful reader Wariboko points out, the “bad news” is that the spirit of Pentecostalism today might be nothing more than the spirit of the latest phase of capitalism. He cites Agamben’s observation that late capitalism converts every object into pure means, in which spectacle and consumption are “two sides of a single impossibility of using,” amply demonstrated in the case of Pentecostalism by the prosperity gospel and its flamboyant spectacle, lifestyles of conspicuous consumption—and, like late capitalism, a power of profanation and violent forms of reterritorialization. He offers good news, too, and the thrust of his text is compelling. From my less pneumatically inspired viewpoint, however, what Pentecostalism’s current globalized, teletechnologized manifestations most reveal is its potentially violent auto-immunity. This understanding of grace may be what saves Pentecostalism from its other figure, the evangelical, exclusionary, and apocalyptic “global spiritual warfare,” a figure of what Derrida calls “the worst.” Nonetheless, the internal instability of its political theology may also give the evangelical and apocalyptic an unprecedented force, as in Uganda today, where “God’s will” translates into projects of legislation and acts of mob violence for the murder of homosexuals. In the words of Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity, James Nsaba Buturo, a committed and vocal born-again Christian, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”

From the project of an anthropology of Christianity I want more than just the necessary critique of the discipline’s Christian genealogy and the vestiges of its ontology of stasis. But I wonder just what such a project might look like. An anthropology of “Global Christianity” must develop an acutely critical, but perhaps ultimately impossible, position with respect to its “object,” especially in this time of globalization—a time, Derrida tells us, “when Christian discourse confusedly but surely informs this doxa and all that it carries with it, beginning with the world and the names for its ‘mundiality,’ and its vague equivalents globe, universe, earth, or cosmos (in its Pauline usage).” Nancy argues that “Christianity or the Christian is the thing itself that has to be thought,” in order for some other possibility to emerge. I am not sure that the new anthropology of Christianity is up to this. Maybe it’s as Derrida the spoilsport whispers back to Nancy: such a project may be “as necessary and fatal as it is impossible . . . .” “Only Christianity can do this work, that is, undo it while doing it. Dechristianization will be a Christian victory.” Christianity “will still make the sacrifice of its own self-deconstruction.” Perhaps Pentecostalism (and a certain thought of it) is the latest manifestation of Luther’s destructio—Christianity falling on the Sword of the Pentecostal Spirit? In our careful consideration of the crisis of critique, can we avoid sacrificing what is still worth saving of it?

For the past eight years, I have been studying the emergence of what might be referred to as “post-secular development” in Southeast Asia. I have documented initiatives in contemporary Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore that have formulated a mode of Islamic practice conducive to corporate success and transnational competitiveness. In documenting this phenomenon, I have argued that, whereas much of the post-colonial history of what were formerly called “developing nations” was characterized by what the anthropologist James Ferguson has referred to as “faith in development,” recent efforts to merge Islamic practice with scientific and technical knowledge instead represent efforts to develop faith. On the one hand, faith in development refers to the nationalist projects of facilitating economic growth through state-led industrial modernization that occurred in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the postwar period. In this configuration, the nation-state was to bring prosperity to its population through massive investment in industrial technology and production. On the other hand, developing faith refers to concrete initiatives designed to intensify religious practice under the presumption that so doing would bring the work practices of corporate employees into line with global business norms and effect greater productivity and transparency. Developing faith is not a complete break with faith in development, however, because both share the similar conviction that worldly problems can be solved through the proper application of technical and scientific knowledge.

The shift from faith in development to developing faith in contemporary Indonesia was particularly notable at state-owned Krakatau Steel, a massive steelworks in western Java where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2003 and 2005. Historically, Krakatau Steel was absolutely central to the developmentalist ambitions harbored by Indonesia’s former authoritarian president, Suharto. The company was a focal point in the nationalist project of modernization. According to the prevailing developmentalist logic purveyed in blueprints for modernization like Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, Krakatau Steel was part of a complex of institutions that would deliver progress, in the form of industrialization, economic growth, and increased living standards, to Indonesia.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis, the end of the Suharto regime, and the increasing integration of Indonesia into wider global economic circuits have called faith in development into question. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, Krakatau Steel had been the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in state development funds. For years state investment guaranteed the company’s viability, as it was able to keep up to date with advances in steel production technology. However, such investment was brought to an end in 1998, after the near bankruptcy of the Indonesian government. Tariffs on imported steel that had long protected the company from international competition were fully eliminated in April 2004. Finally, and perhaps most ominously for some employees, the Indonesian government has proposed privatizing Krakatau Steel, which could trigger sweeping job losses for members of a workforce that had previously been able to count on lifetime employment.

Given the wide-ranging changes taking place, the company’s existence could no longer be justified according to its status as a symbol of modernization, development, and industrialization. One foreman in the slab steel plant explained to me that, prior to the late-1990s, the “the social was the most important and profit was secondary,” but “now profit is number one and the social mission [misi sosial] is number two.” He said that this “social mission” was premised upon “padat karya,” which literally translates as “dense work” and refers to the practice of hiring more workers than necessary to operate businesses. The tension between the company’s social mission and its business mission was becoming increasingly acute. One general manager told me that a Booz, Allen, and Hamilton management-consulting audit of the company advocated releasing one-quarter of the company’s total workforce, corresponding to at least 1500 (out of roughly 6000) permanent, full-time positions. Some Krakatau Steel employees suspected that privatization would lead to the elimination of a substantial number of jobs. Managers often cited the practice of work spreading as the underlying reason for poor job performance at the company, claiming that employees at the company lacked motivation because they knew that they were superfluous.

To address the problem of employee motivation and prepare for privatization, Krakatau Steel managers sought to (in their words) “develop” the Islamic faith of employees by contracting a Jakarta-based company, the ESQ Leadership Center, to implement Emotional and Spiritual Quotient training at the company. The brainchild of the charismatic businessman Ary Ginanjar, ESQ asserts that a work ethic conducive to business success is present in the five pillars of Islam and the six pillars of Muslim faith (iman). He has drawn other ideas for the program from business management and life coaching sessions, like “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” that have greatly expanded in North America, Europe, and Asia in recent years. Through the multi-day training sessions that his company offers, Ginanjar stresses that Islamic piety should not only be restricted to religious worship. Rather, Islamic faith should animate all of one’s worldly activity, from interactions with one’s family to everyday work in the world.

At Krakatau Steel, ESQ training sessions were held once or twice per month. They were most often held in the large multipurpose room of the factory’s education and training center. The sessions usually ran from Friday through Sunday. The first two days started at 7:00 a.m. and lasted until just before the maghrib prayers, which usually begin around 6:00 in Indonesia. The third day included the program’s dénouement, which consisted of a simulation of three of the events that take place during the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca: tawaf, the circumambulation of the kaaba; the sa’i, a ritual that consists of running seven times back and forth between the hills of Safa and Marwah in Mecca; and finally the stoning of jamrat al-aqabah, in which pilgrims hurl rocks at three representations of the devil, symbolizing the rebuking of demonic temptation.

The training was structured through a sophisticated Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, consisting not only of graphs, charts, tables, and a litany of bullet points, but also with spliced film clips, colorful photographs, and popular music. The information conveyed was culled from a variety of web sites, including that of Harvard Business School. The training was delivered primarily as an interactive lecture in which the main trainer would alternate between engaging with the audience in the familiar style of a television talk show host and proceeding to deliver fiery and profoundly emotive lectures asking for collective redemption from Allah.

Ary Ginanjar draws evidence for the commensurability of Islam and what might be called the ethics of globalization by instructing participants in these programs that the five pillars contain lessons for business success. Thus, the fourth pillar of Islam, the duty to fast during Ramadan, is reinterpreted as a model for “self-control.” Based on this principle, ESQ seeks to inculcate the duty to constrain this-worldly desires in order to ensure other-worldly salvation. Corruption was a chronic problem at SOEs and was attributed to an uncontrolled desire for material wealth. ESQ sought to represent self-management as a divine injunction to remedy this rampant corruption. The third pillar, the duty to give alms (zakat), was taken as divine sanction for “strategic collaboration” and exercising a “win-win” approach in both business transactions and relations with co-workers. This principle was illustrated with an interactive exercise in which each participant paired up with another, shined his or her shoes, and then reciprocally paid the other for the service. A common critique of employees of state-owned enterprises was their poor customer relations. The exercise was intended to illustrate the importance of serving, rather than being served, for employees of a modern corporation.

In just seven years, ESQ grew spectacularly: by the end of 2010, over one million people had participated in the program. Although Krakatau Steel was one of the first companies to embrace it, the program has now spread across Indonesia to some of the country’s most prominent governmental institutions and state-owned firms, including Pertamina (the national oil company), Telkom (the country’s largest telephone company), and Garuda (the nation’s flag air carrier). Current and former military generals also are avid participants in ESQ, and several sessions have been held at the Army’s officer candidate training school in Bandung (SESKOAD). Recently, ESQ met its goal of becoming a national movement, having established branch offices in 30 out of 33 Indonesian provinces. In late 2005, the ESQ Leadership Center broke ground for a 25-story office tower and convention center in south Jakarta, funded in part through investment shares sold to past participants. When I returned to Indonesia in December 2008, large-scale spiritual training programs were being conducted in the already completed conference center portion of the building. Finally, ESQ has also “gone global”: the first overseas ESQ training was held in April 2006 in Kuala Lumpur, and, in 2007, regularly scheduled ESQ trainings were being delivered in Malaysia on a bimonthly basis. Mahatir Mohamed, the former Malaysian Prime Minister, recently endorsed the program. In addition, ESQ programs have been held in Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, Brunei, and in 2008 Ginanjar brought the program to Houston and Washington, DC.

The spiritual training program was extremely popular at Krakatau Steel. According to one human resources manager, Sukrono, efforts to develop faith were the result of an updated reading of the Qur’an. He explained:

When we were a small developing country in the 1970s we thought that worship (ibadah) meant praying, giving alms (zakat), or going on the hajj, but this is not true. Now from studying the Qur’an we know that passages dealing with these things are only about 20 percent of the content, the rest of the Qur’an is about human relations. The crucial thing is that in everyday activity—waking up and going to work, doing family errands, and so forth—one’s intentions (niat) are toward worship.

Here Sukrono illustrates how the faith in development that had guided Indonesian modernization during the New Order had proceeded under the secularist presumption of the separation of religion from work and commerce. In contrast, after the end of the Suharto regime, managers like Sukrono have recast the Qur’an as a human resources management manual and seek to develop faith. In so doing, he echoed how Ary Ginanjar had transformed the five pillars of Islam into recipes for corporate success—for example, by rebranding zakat as “strategic collaboration.”

In response to what was conceived of as a “moral crisis,” spiritual reform reconfigured the relationship between faith and development in Indonesia so that faith itself became development’s object. During the New Order, development was the raison d’être of government policy and practice. However, after Suharto’s spectacular collapse, the logic of enhancement and growth that underlay the project of modernization was applied to the religious practices of industrial employees who were supposed to be the purveyors of development. Islamic practice, previously relegated to the background in Indonesia, was seen both as a means to revive economic growth and as something to be developed and enhanced.

Developing faith did not represent the end of faith in development, but rather a reconfiguration of its rationality, creating what I refer to as post-secular development. The same modernist logic that had guided the project of Indonesian development was still at work. Implicit was the assumption that worldly problems could be addressed through technical intervention and the application of human knowledge. Thus, faith was not viewed as a mystical or irrational practice, but as something that could be instilled through design. Developing faith and, in so doing, creating new patterns of human life, was executed according to the same logic that earlier guided building bridges, toll roads, and factories. Religious practice was something to be enhanced through a series of technical interventions. For many citizens in contemporary Indonesia who had come of age during the heyday of faith in development, Islamic spiritual reform appeared to resolve a number of oppositions that had plagued the project of modernization. ESQ spiritual training offered a recipe for living that was simultaneously Muslim and modern. Thus, post-secular development enabled one to be both an engineer and a devout adherent of Islam.

Global Christianity, Global Critique

James K. A. Smith, seeking to trouble what he calls the “tidy and triumphalistic divide between secular critique and religious irrationality,” cites Saba Mahmood’s argument that what secular “critical reason remains blind to is its own disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness.” In a more broadly sensual register, C.J.C. Pickstock suggests that “liberal theologians,” exemplified by Karen Armstrong, end up unwittingly underwriting a desensitized “modernism [that] denies the cognitive relevance of emotions, desire, commitment, and ritual performance.” And in an argument with very different—and not expressly theological—goals, Birgit Meyer names a “Protestant lens,” shaped by liberal Protestant thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Max Weber, that misreads Pentecostalism because it is “blind to the importance of sensation.” There are many good reasons to critique liberalism in its various guises, but anthropologists of Christianity should be particularly wary of too easily assuming that theological critiques of liberal Christianity—whether from the perspective of Radical Orthodoxy or from that of Pentecostalism­—are the same as anthropological or historical analyses of liberal Christianity, or that liberal Protestants and Catholics have not had their own robust, if imperfect, traditions of global critique.

That the metaphor of blindness should come so easily to scholars writing in relation to contemporary theorizing about the apostle Paul, himself traditionally portrayed as having been struck blind on the road to Damascus, might be understood as the latent effect of a powerful story. But in these scholarly narratives, the blindness of Protestants, of adherents to secular reason, and of liberal theologians is not redeemed by a visionary encounter—instead, their blindness persists as a position of handicap or ignorance, diagnosed by those critics who have the eyes to see.

For Pickstock, this means writing, not in the ethnographic present, but in the theological present, to effect a “recovery of the Christian liturgical tradition.” She seeks to demonstrate at once the uniqueness and the universality of Christianity and its ongoing liturgical blend of the senses and reason. Beginning with a seemingly offhand description of Christianity as a “great religion,” Pickstock does not catalogue any other religions among this group. In a meditation that is largely theologically declarative within a Christian scope, one of Pickstock’s few comparative statements contends that the “principle of solidarity” effected by Christian ecclesia disturbs worldly hierarchy and maintains a balanced tension between individual and tradition: “The spiritual does not obliterate the political, as for Hindu caste hierarchy, nor does the loyalty to the sovereign political center obliterate the dignity of the person, as for modern secular post-Hobbesian politics.”

Obliteration—the blotting out, rendering invisible, or annihilation of something—is a strong word to encapsulate both Hinduism and the modern secular in opposition to (an idealized) Christian solidarity. Obliteration, however, is not a word or image that fits well with what anthropologists such as Nicholas Dirks have shown to be the highly articulated and visible historical relationship among caste, the modern secular, and Christianity. Can the categories of spiritual, political, sovereignty, and person really obliterate one another, or are we ourselves responsible for what we see and the practices of recognition and illumination that we cultivate in conversation with a diversity of others?

With a focus on Pentecostal challenges to the “self-congratulatory,” “cool rationality of secular criticism,” Smith also argues with ritual to hand. Smith contends that paying attention specifically to Pentecostal worship, in which “bodies matter,” illustrates the hopeful and prophetic critique implicit in Pentecostal social imaginaries, compared to the rest of the world: “In many ways, the broader culture lacks the imagination to imagine the world otherwise, and it is the Pentecostal vision of a coming kingdom that can both contest and loosen up the petrified imagination of a world culture bent on consumption, violence, and the pursuit of power and exploitation.”

It seems that not only secular liberals are living with blinkers on—indeed, the entire world culture, Pentecostalism excluded, suffers a fate worse than physical blindness in its inability to see with its mind’s eye anything other than rampant greed and destruction. Working with rather tightly bounded categories—in which, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., can only be understood as theological, and not as secular—Smith’s goal is not to think through an “anthropology of the secular” but to use the liberal secular as a container for all that is not prophetic, not sensual, and “unquestioned.”

In stark contrast to the varieties of Christian universalism offered by Pickstock and Smith, Birgit Meyer suggests her concept of “sensational forms” as a path to understand how all “politico-religious formations,” and not just Christianity, are processes of mediation. This, too, one could argue, is a kind of universalism, working with (anxious) commitments to the categories of politics and religion, instead of dogmatic commitments to Eucharistic rites or Pentecostal eschatologies. But, with my admittedly disciplinarily focused eyes, Meyer’s is the universalism I best recognize as my own, even if I do not entirely agree with her account of what she calls the “Protestant lens” (largely because much early liberal Protestant “Religionswissenschaft” was obsessed with feelings, emotions, and bodily tremors, even if the desire to evaluate “good” and “bad” religion was not one in which Catholic pieties or newer Protestant “enthusiasms” fared well).

As Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest, the scholarly “lexicon” for analyzing Christianity has been profoundly shaped by “dominant strands of Protestantism”—a legacy of categorization with which all scholars of religion must contend, as Meyer shows. A diagnosis of liberal, secular blindness does not countenance the ways that anthropologists and religious studies scholars—some Protestant, some Catholic, some Jewish, some Muslim, some “secular,” etc.—have long been pointing to the historical and political situatedness of such intellectual categories as religion, magic, Christianity, and the senses in the course of acknowledging the limits of any attempt to categorize human commonality and diversity. Scholars with such different disciplinary formations and agendas as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Stanley Tambiah, Robert Bellah, Jonathan Z. Smith, Talal Asad, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have undertaken this task under various rubrics and influences, including secular reason, anthropology, and liberal Protestantism. As Simon Coleman contends in his contribution to the volume, the Christian underpinning of anthropological discourse, while formative, “is not the only possible genealogy to trace.”

Anthropologists, dedicated as they are to a project of thinking about local knowledge and cultural difference undergirded by a commitment (again, an anxious one) to a notion of a “universal” human being, should be immediately suspicious of concepts such as “world culture,” or of any wholesale dismissal of a group—including liberal theologians and liberal secularists—as blind or otherwise sensationally challenged. Quite apart from how such generalizations and dismissals ignore the multiplicity of what blindness can mean in the sensorial life of an individual, the rhetoric of blindness seems too easy—and too categorical.

In this regard, Goldstone and Hauerwas’s argument about “disciplined seeing” might offer a more helpful perspective. Clearly rooted in a theological commitment to “the Church,” Goldstone and Hauerwas offer the proposition that “aspect-blindness,” what Wittgenstein called the condition of “human beings lacking in the capacity to see something as something,” is a kind of partial seeing with potentially devastating consequences. In the case of the rationality of the modern bureaucratic state, they argue, “aspect-blindness turns out to encompass more than a debased ethical disposition; it turns out to name an indispensable modality of effective governance.”

In the close reading of Luke-Acts (largely contra Badiou’s Paul) that follows, Goldstone and Hauerwas propose that aspect-blindness might prevent anthropologists who are not themselves Christian from being able to adequately narrate Christianity in a manner that Christians themselves could recognize. Quoting the work of Kavin Rowe, they concur: “The resurrection of Jesus actually creates a new mode of seeing—‘light.’ To miss the resurrection of Jesus, therefore, is to forfeit the ability to see.” In their conclusion, however, Goldstone and Hauerwas suggest that despite its damaging and obscuring effects, “aspect-blindness might well be our normal condition.” Though Goldstone and Hauerwas may not agree, I contend that in a world in which Christianity is one way (really, multiple ways) of seeing and sensing amidst many others, the task of the anthropologist is not only to “faithfully” recast that vision but to place it in global, local, and temporally comparative perspective.

Being aware that we all have elements of aspect-blindness, but also that through the responsible exercise of disciplined seeing we have something worth saying—or worth exposing to the critique of others—is a starting point that anthropologists have long endorsed, if only imperfectly practiced.  In this regard, anthropology as an academic discipline shares a common disposition with the “critical liberalism” described by political theorist Courtney Jung: “The intuition that lies at the core of critical liberalism is that blindness to injustices, in which even people fighting to right wrongs fail to recognize patterns of unfairness all around them, is a permanent feature of social and political life.” The temptation to return to Paul being too great, I close with a reference to one of Paul’s letters that has been of profound importance to Pentecostalism, which, while acknowledging aspect-blindness, promises, as I cannot, that such impaired vision will be overcome: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Clearly, they have been learned in a secular institution (i.e., a secular university). Would we say, therefore, that I am displaying the embodied aptitudes and habits of a secular person, and that a study of the educational techniques employed at the university would tells us how secular subjects are formed? If that were the case, then why, despite the plethora of studies on the education system in the U.S., do we not feel quite comfortable when asked to describe the embodied aptitudes of a secular subject? I should clarify before I go further that the notion of “secular” I employ here does not stand in opposition to “religious”; rather, informed by the path-breaking inquiries of the two scholars whose work I want to engage here, the anthropologist Talal Asad and the political theorist William Connolly, I understand the secular as a concept that articulates a constellation of institutions, ideas, and affective orientations that constitute an important dimension of what we call modernity and its defining forms of knowledge and practice—both religious and non-religious. The secular is, in Asad’s words, “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism,” and it is therefore part of the background presupposed by our routine ways of distinguishing secular from religious in law, politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

But let me return to the reflection I had going. I had suggested a little unease with the idea of sending a student off to the university classroom as a site in which to study the formation of the embodied capacities of secular subjects. What about the psychoanalyst’s couch? Or the gym at the YMCA? Or a training seminar for advertising executives? Clearly some of the habits and attitudes honed within such sites of modern self-fashioning must qualify as “secular.” But again the question is begged: what are we implying—conceptually, historically, institutionally—when we designate such affects and attitudes (I am using a copious vocabulary of embodiment) as secular, as opposed to, say, “modern, or “liberal,” perhaps”? I don’t think an answer to this question is readily forthcoming, and the problem is not simply one of an adequate definition.

One reason for our hesitation and uncertainty around this question undoubtedly owes to the difficulty of establishing an analytical distance from what is clearly a foundational dimension of modern life. The secular is the water we swim in. It is for this reason that Talal Asad, in the “Introduction” to his Formations of the Secular, cautions us against approaching it directly, suggesting instead that  “it is best pursued through its shadows.” In this regard, my starting question—What is a secular body?—is blindingly direct, and therefore a rather blunt analytical instrument. That said, I still think it may have its use, less in terms of the answers we are able to give to it than by the kinds of resistance we encounter when we try. That is, to follow where this question runs aground, where it is deflected, postponed, perhaps where it becomes obtuse, uninteresting, may help us to elucidate some of the contours of the concept we are concerned with. Is it the wrong question to ask? Does it force us to rethink our models of embodiment, habitus, sensibility? An answer to these questions could be very useful for getting a better grasp of the secular.

I have chosen to focus on the works of Talal Asad and Bill Connolly because of the impact these works have had on how we have come to pose questions about the secular and secularism. Moreover, within the respective analytical frameworks they have developed, they have strongly foregrounded issues of embodiment—Asad privileging notions of sensibility and attitude, Connolly building a rich and heterogeneous philosophical vocabulary of the passions from such sources as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, among others. In what follows, I want to explore the question I raised above by means of the analyses put forward by these scholars concerning the embodied character of the secular.  In this regard, my goal here is very modest. I ask: What kind of answers do we find in the work of these two scholars to the question, “What is a secular body”? And what might these answers—or refusals to answer—tell us about the practical and conceptual contours of the secular and secularism?

II

Let me start by noting that, while the secular body may remain something of an enigma, we do know quite a lot about the techniques that different religious traditions have developed in order to hone a pious sensorium, i.e., the embodied aptitudes and affects necessary for the achievement of a virtuous life as defined by those traditions. One of the richest and most influential examples of such scholarship is Asad’s own pioneering work on techniques of the body practiced by medieval Christian monks. Extending insights from Marcel Mauss’s writings on body techniques and Foucault’s inquiries into Greek and Christian arts of self-cultivation, Asad examined a variety of disciplinary exercises and techniques of self-cultivation (in short, ritual practices) by which medieval Christians sought to reshape their wills, desires, and emotions in accord with authoritative standards of virtue. I mention this work here because it provides an extremely useful model for thinking about the interrelation of knowledge, practice, and embodiment within a tradition, directing us to forms of collective and individual discipline and to the concepts of self and body that inform them. It is interesting, therefore to note at the outset that, despite an emphasis on embodied modes of appraisal in both Asad’s Formations and Connolly’s Why I am not a Secularist, descriptions of self-cultivation or practices of self-discipline are largely (though not entirely, as I note below) absent from both texts. That is, we find very little in these works in regard, not only to how the sensibilities and visceral modes of judgment of secular subjects are cultivated, but to how they give shape to and find expression in a secular life? Admittedly, a cautious approach to this issue is entirely warranted in light of how new and unfamiliar the secular is as a research problem. Nonetheless, I want to look at certain points in these texts where this question is most directly addressed. One word of warning: the few comments I will make on Asad’s and Connolly’s writings barely scratch the surface of these immensely rich books.

Why I am not a Secularist combines an analysis of secular discourses on ethics, politics, and language with an attempt to show how an engagement with traditions that incorporate an appreciation for affective and visceral registers of existence can be used to generate resources for a productive and necessary revision of secular thinking. Not surprisingly, most of Connolly’s exploration of the embodied character of political judgment is focused on thinkers who stand at some remove from the dominant currents of secular thought, while his treatment of secular arguments tends overall to emphasize the dangers and limitations of their failing to thematize the visceral register. There are, however, certain points in his discussion where the question of a secular bodily ethics comes up. Informed in part by Asad’s account of monastic disciplinary techniques, Connolly writes: “it may be important to understand how representational discourse itself, including the public expression and defense of fundamental beliefs, affects and is affected by the visceral register of intersubjectivity. Public discourses do operate within dense linguistic fields that specify how beliefs are to be articulated and tested and how ethical claims are to be redeemed. But repetitions and defenses of these articulations also write scripts upon prerepresentational sites of appraisal.” The practice of articulating and defending secular political claims, he suggests here, serves to mold and deepen the affective attachments that passionally bind one to the secular form of life those claims uphold. This is one of the few locations where Connolly connects his conceptual analysis of the secular with a kind of institutional practice, albeit a highly discourse-centered one. The question to ask, it seems to me, is: Why, in a book so centered around the task of rethinking secular politics, is there so little attention to the affective attachments that secure the authority of secular political judgments? I will come back to this later.

Perhaps the most visceral element of the secular discourses identified by Connolly is their rejection of the visceral dimension itself. Kantian and neo-Kantian political philosophies devalue forms of life that give priority to their own sensory dimensions, a standpoint that secures the possibility of regulating the place of religion in public life insomuch as religion is understood to privilege this passional, sensual register. Indeed, for Connolly the value of religious traditions for political thought today lies precisely in the resources such traditions offer for thinking about the contribution of affective experience to shaping our practices of political judgment and reason. Secularism suffers, in his view, from its failure to thematize the place of what he calls the infrasensible register—affects and dispositions operating below the threshold of consciousness—within its own style of reasoning.

Kant’s marginalization of Christian theology in favor of a “rational religion” grounded in moral reasoning is a key moment, in Connolly’s account, in the philosophical development of this moral repulsion for the visceral. As he notes, Kant “degrades ritual and arts of the self without eliminating them altogether, for these arts work on the ‘sensibility’ rather than drawing moral obligation from the supersensible realm as practical reason does. The point is to deploy them just enough to render crude sensibilities better equipped to accept the moral law drawn from practical reason. Secularists later carry this Kantian project of diminishment a step or two further.”

I want to pause on this point to ask where it might lead us in thinking about a secular sensorium, or about the sensibilities that give shape to a secular life. Kant’s treatment of the question of sensibility is guided and limited by his primary aim of securing the purity of the moral will, its protection from what are seen to be the contaminating effects of sensible desire. This is achieved through his positing of a two-world metaphysic that ensures the autonomy of the moral will by assigning it to the domain of the supersensible while circumscribing the role of the passions and habits to the sphere of sensible life. Honed sensibilities and practices of self-cultivation do have a positive function in disciplining the cruder drives within the self, but they never directly contribute to moral reasoning. As Kant notes, in a comment cited by Connolly: “Ethical gymnastics, therefore, consists only in combating natural impulses sufficiently to be able to master them when a situation comes up in which they threaten morality; hence it makes one valiant and cheerful in the consciousness of one’s restored freedom.”

One place where we do find in Kant a discussion of sensibilities, and hence a text that might point us toward a conception of a secular sensorium, is in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. While the question of sensibilities is discussed in many parts of that text, here I will simply mention one particular, and highly ritualistic, moment, the dinner party scene, in which Kant lays out a set of guidelines for the dinner host to follow in order to engender the sort of civilized sociability that befits Kantian rational beings: topics that may engender more violent passions among the guests must be avoided at all costs (as must music!); the thread of a conversation must not be interrupted until it has reached its natural conclusion; “deadly silence” must be strictly avoided. Overall, the goal is to maintain a conversational tone that befits a “well-bred, partly sensuous and partly ethicointellectual, human being,” so as to harmonize the inclination to good living with the inclination to virtue and the moral law such that the former does not hinder the latter.

Following Connolly, I would read Kant’s dinner party rules as a pedagogical device geared to disciplining the emotions and attitudes of a secular subject. Why secular (again, as opposed to, say, modern)? If I understand Connolly correctly, it is because the style of restrained emotional expression that Kant encourages provides a normative image of public reason against which the more passional forms of sociability and knowledge associated with religious sects are found to be inadequate, and thus subject to regulation in accord with the doctrine of political secularism. We might say, the secular subject—the Kantian dinner host—is one whose speech and comportment incorporates a recognition of the distinctions authorized by the twin categories of religious and secular. Put differently, a secular person is someone whose affective-gestural repertoires express a negative relation to forms of embodiment historically associated with (but not limited to) theistic religion.

I am trying here to delineate a path that Connolly’s work opens up for asking about what I first called the secular body. While the path seemed clear at the outset, it now appears far less so, for the following reason. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a variety of social transformations took place that are key to our understanding of the emergence of the modern subject, among them, the desensualization of knowledge as described by Ong, the stilling of passionate expression within courtly society that Elias has examined, and, more generally, the increasing internalization of psychic and emotional life within bourgeois society, the transfer of vast realms of experience from the surface of public life into the invisible depths of the lonely individual. These conceptual and social transformations, to which Kant contributed, were not the result of a single overarching process, but were propelled by different, if sometimes interlinking, historical trajectories, circumstances, and problems. In light of this, and recognizing the indebtedness of Kant’s own viewpoints on reason and the senses to these prior developments, should we say that these transformations are part of the genealogy of the secular? To say so, it seems, would entail losing a great deal of the specificity and historical locatedness of that term. So, what aspects of the modern soul are properly secular, and to which history of the body should they be ascribed?

Let me see if I can develop this line of inquiry further by drawing on some of the arguments put forward by Talal Asad in Formations of the Secular. Let me start by saying a little about what I take Asad to mean be the “the secular.” In his chapter on an “Anthropology of Secularism,” which I will focus on here, he states: “I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.” To explore these dimensions of the secular, he examines shifts in the grammar of a number of concepts—myth, the sacred, pain, the human—concepts that articulate practices we have come to identify as secular. The practices that he takes as secular, in other words, are so, not simply because they are non-religious, but because they have been discursively identified and valorized through the discourse of secularism (as distinct from the political doctrine). For Asad, a practice is not secular because it stands in a particular relation to the political doctrine of secularism. Rather, the historical discourse of the secular, as predicated on the opposition religious/secular, is integral to the grammar of the concepts he examines.

Let me draw on two examples from this first chapter in order to pursue the question of secular embodiment. In one section, Asad explores how shifts in the grammar of the concept of myth contributed to the development of the secular tradition of Romantic poetry. For poets such as Blake and Coleridge, the “mythic method,” as Asad refers to it, provided a secular means by which spiritual truths could be accessed and given expression. Instead of the virtue of faith, such poetic geniuses needed only to tune into their deep inner feelings and express these sincerely. Elaborating on these Romantic notions, Asad notes, “This may help to explain the prevalence among Victorian unbelievers of what Stefan Collini calls ‘a rhetoric of sincerity.’ For not only was the idea of being true to oneself conceived of as a moral duty, it also presupposed the existence of a secular self whose sovereignty had to be demonstrated through acts of sincerity. The self’s secularity consisted in the fact that it was the precondition of transcendent (poetic or religious) experience and not its product.” I call attention to this section because it provides an example of what might be called a practice of secular self-fashioning: the honing of a rhetoric of sincerity as necessary to the cultivation of the secular subject. Moreover, there are interesting parallels to be drawn between the romantic emphasis on sincerity and the Protestant concern for the sincerity of speech within ritual professions of faith. But why does Asad not develop this line of inquiry, especially in light of how important such question were within his work on medieval monasticism? Why, I ask, are there so few descriptions of practices in a book explicitly focused on the sensory and embodied dimensions of the secular?

A number of the chapters in Formations explore different aspects of the changing grammar of pain. One element of this change concerns a turning away from a Christian discourse on sin and punishment in ministering to pain and the development, in contrast, of a scientific vocabulary and experimental methods for addressing pain.  “In this example,” Asad writes, referring to Rosalind Rey’s discussion of pain during the Enlightenment, “the secularization of pain signals not merely the abandonment of a transcendental language (“religious obsessions”) but the shift to a new preoccupation—from the personal attempt at consoling and curing (that is, inhabiting a social relationship) to a distanced attempt at investigating the functions and sensations of the living body.”  As Asad emphasizes, the new practices surrounding pain and suffering are not adequately grasped in terms of the notion of “disenchantment”—as a secularist narrative asserts—“when what is at stake are different patterns of sensibility about pain, and different ways of objectifying it.” Asad pursues this inquiry into the secularization of pain and the shifting attitudes, sensibilities, and knowledges that have propelled it from a variety of different angles, as it bears, for example, on the practice of human rights, on the conduct of war, on childbirth, on sadomasochism. Given my limited space here, let me stay with his discussion of the emergence of an experimental science of pain. We recognize in Asad’s account of the secularization of pain, with its new sensibilities, styles of objectification, mechanistic concepts of the body and its processes, the basis for contemporary biomedical practice. As we know, biomedical models and forms of reasoning play an immense and growing role in modern society, in terms of both the institutions that regulate the many facets of our lives that fall under the rubric of “health” as well as concepts and practices through which we understand and respond to many dimensions of our experience. In this light, would it be correct to state that the regime of knowledge and power that we call “biomedical” plays a significant role in constituting the secular, and that the disciplinary exercises and institutions put into play by this regime shape us—our attitudes, our visceral reasoning, our patterned hierarchies of the senses—as secular people? In putting forward this suggestion, I am undoubtedly pushing Asad’s cautious and careful inquiry well beyond the kinds of claim he would embrace—but I am interested in trying to ascertain why such an expansion of what we refer to as “secular” strikes us as unjustified or wrong (if indeed it does).

One reason for resisting the equation of biomedicine with the secular would be that we lose a grasp of what is unique to secularity, that the genealogy of the secular becomes fused with and indistinguishable from the genealogy of the modern. We lose an understanding of the way the practice of distinguishing religious from secular gives impetus to the set of shifts that constitute the secular—and hence we lose a sense of precisely what is secular about our contemporary biomedical practices. In other words, the secular dimension of them, the way that they embed a form of reasoning that has its historical basis in the production and mobilization of the religious/secular opposition escapes us. From this perspective, we are right to call our regime of health “secular” but we are not in a position to understand what this entails, lacking as we do, an adequate analysis of how we got here.

In this light, my original question—Is there a secular body?—appears not wrong but premature. We could now understand what I have traced as a certain hesitation and reluctance to give flesh to a secular subject within Asad’s and Connolly’s writing as being founded in a recognition of the danger entailed in posing this question too quickly.

My sense in reading these two subtle inquiries into the secular, however, is that the authors’ reticence to speak about the embodied capacities and dispositions of a secular subject is not just the result of scholarly prudence, but that it reflects, rather, something about the concept of the secular. What we have seen is that, each time we attempt to characterize a secular subject in terms of a determinant set of embodied dispositions, we lose a sense of what “secular” refers to. Note as well that, while the statement, “He lives a very religious life” gives us some sense of the shape of a life, “He lives a very secular life” tells us almost nothing (except, negatively, that the person does not engage in practices of worship). In contrast, when we speak about secular history, or secular time, or secular literature, or even a secular discourse on pain, we seem to know our way about—in a Wittgensteinian sense of having a feel for the use of our term within certain language games.

To this point, I have attempted to trace out some of the various ways that our attempts to speak about, or theorize, a secular body encounter resistance. What might this resistance tell us about our category of the secular? In the space that remains, I want to explore one possible direction toward an answer to this question.

In both Asad’s and Connolly’s writings, the secular identity of a practice is not simply due to its philosophical foundations—its grounding in a rationalist, empiricist, or materialist perspective, for example. Rather, the practices they explore under the rubric of the secular are those that have emerged through a process of differentiation structured by the binaries of religion/secular, belief/knowledge, sacred/profane, and so on. This is not simply to say that the categories of religious and secular are historically entwined, or that they are reciprocally defining (like man and woman, for example), but that the secular marks a relational dynamic more than an identity. We might restate this argument to say that, at least in many cases, a practice or a sensibility that we designate “secular” is one that depends upon, one that cannot be abstracted from, the secularist narrative of the progressive replacement of religious error by secular reason—what Asad calls the “triumphalist narrative of secularism.” Or, again, in a slightly different formulation, a secular sensibility is one considered from the standpoint of its contribution to that progressivist narrative.

Let me try to clarify this point through an example. Take the tradition of Romantic poetry discussed by Asad. Asad’s account of the emergence of this tradition focuses on a number of early nineteenth-century developments in aesthetic, religious, and scientific practice, including the development of a secular discourse on the meaning of inspiration, and new uses of the idea of myth within both historical and fictional genres of writing. Why is the history of Romantic poetry a starting point for Asad in his attempt to develop an anthropology of the secular? On one hand, this tradition allows Asad to challenge accounts of a necessary or natural superseding of the religious by the secular, by exploring some of the historical contingencies that together enabled a new, so-called secular practice to emerge. More importantly, it is a tradition that owes its aesthetic values to a particular authorizing narrative, one highlighting the movement from religious to secular (from the prophet to the poet; from divine inspiration to creative genius). The sensibilities that the romantic poet’s work gave expression to, and which shaped his audience’s cultivated response, I want to suggest, depended on the rhetoric of secularization (the forward movement from error to truth) as a condition of their exercise. (It is worth noting here that many modern practices, be they aesthetic or social or political, are not subject to the play of the secular/religious opposition, and are not validated by reference to this binarism.)

How does the account of the secular I am suggesting here bear on the problem of the secular sensorium, or what I called the secular body? Let me try to answer this by reference to one particular tradition for thinking embodiment, that afforded by the Aristotelian notions of habitus and virtue. In my earlier book, The Ethical Soundscape, I explored how this tradition had contributed to shaping an Islamic practice of listening to sermons in contemporary Egypt, both in the ritual context of Friday worship and outside the mosque through the audition of cassette recorded sermons. As I described in that book, many people listen to sermons as a means of ethical self-improvement, a way to reinforce and deepen not only their knowledge of Islamic doctrines but also the ethical emotions and attitudes they understand as enabling correct styles of speech, comportment, and moral judgment. Coupled with the proliferation of new listening practices among ordinary Egyptians, sermon tapes provided one of the means by which Islamic ethical traditions were recalibrated to a new political and technological order, to its rhythms, noise, its forms of pleasure and boredom, but also to its political incitements, its call to citizenly participation. In contrast to a space for the formation of political opinion through intersubjective reason, the discursive arena wherein cassette sermons circulate, I argued, is geared to the deployment of the disciplining power of ethical speech, a goal, however, that takes public deliberation as one of its modalities. Within this context, public speech results not in policy, but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of Islamic virtues and, therefore, of Islamic ethical comportment. The cassette-listeners I worked with sought to forge a habitus—in their terms, such virtues of modesty, humility, and fear of God—that would allow them to achieve excellence in the practices that they saw as essential to Islamic traditions of ethical reasoning, and thus to the revitalization and maintenance of an Islamic society.

Romantic poets, of course, also sought to hone skills that would allow them to achieve excellence in the aesthetic practices they undertook. What distinguishes these two contexts? Sermon listening takes place in and contributes to a tradition of moral reasoning, with its internal notions of the good and a changing repertoire of practices by which the good is to be achieved. The honed sensibilities of the Romantic poet, on the other hand, contribute to the project of the secular only insomuch as they are grasped as part of the movement of negation and overcoming by which the secular emerges from the religious. We might say that the poetic sensibilities themselves are not secular (nor religious, for that matter), but they can be encompassed and appropriated within the narrative of the secular emancipation from religion. They are sensibilities that fit into the game of secularism.

III

The secularist movement as it developed in the mid-nineteenth century encompassed both positive and negative impulses. Its founders, most importantly Robert Owen and G. J. Holyoake, sought, on the positive side, to uncover a new system of moral truth, founded on rationalist, utilitarian, and materialist principles. As Holyoake wrote in 1853: “Secularism is the province of the real, the known, the useful, and the affirmative. It is the practical side of skepticism.” Its negative side lay in its relentless attack on what early secularists called the “speculative error” of religion. The career of our concept of the secular has been shaped by this double vocation, one in which the positive attempt to ground an ethical and epistemological foundation remains dependent on a negative gesture whereby the forms of knowledge and practice posited as religious are continuously overcome. While these twin movements have played an immense role in shaping what we recognize and valorize as the secular-modern, they also account for a kind of instability at the heart of the secular, one evident in the difficulties we encounter when asking about the secular body.

IV

Let me conclude these rather tentative and exploratory reflections by suggesting why such an inquiry is important, particularly for scholars of Islam. It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that any study of contemporary religious traditions necessitates some engagement with religion’s dialectical partner, the secular, understood as a key dimension of the moral, social, and political transformations that have shaped global modernity. Yet, while we have a good understanding of how the doctrine of political secularism—the state-imposed legal separation of religion and politics—has impacted the conceptual and practical development of religious life in many contexts, including Islamic ones, such as in Turkey, Egypt, or Indonesia, we have little sense of the social ontology of the secular, and the kinds of practices, sensibilities, and knowledges that it opens up. Moreover, and as I hope I have made clear, to assimilate the secular to the modern, as has often been the scholarly approach, tells us very little about a key constitutive dimension of modernity.

In preparing for this conversation, we did not set the task of doing justice to the scope and subtlety of these texts but aimed instead to use them as a starting point for taking stock of and thinking about the ground that has been covered in the critical study of secularism since their original publication. What follows here are five questions that emerged for me in re-reading Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular. They aim to draw together common themes, underline divergences, and generally open Asad’s and Connolly’s texts again for discussion.

First question: What is secularism?

It sounds naive, but disagreement about the basic significance of “secularism” is a recurrent problem in today’s discussions. There may, however, be important reasons for the muddle that besets critical literatures on “the secular,” “secularity,” “secularism,” and “secularization,” sending them around this question again and again.

Why I Am Not a Secularist and Formations of the Secular, at any rate, remain two of the most striking, ambitious, and important restatements of the problem of secularism. To be sure, they acknowledge and grapple with the persistence of familiar and, in some sense, indispensable answers: That secularism is simply the separation of church and state. That it is, more specifically, a form of separation that makes religion private while making power and reason public. That secularism is an ideology. That it is an institutional formation that governs the conduct of individuals and communities. Yet they also show how such answers are insufficiently accurate, woefully unhistorical, and incomplete in more fundamental ways.

In reframing the question, Formations argues not about secularism per se but about “the secular,” and, in Asad’s words, “it is a major premise of this study that ‘the secular’ is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of ‘secularism,’ that over time a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form ‘the secular.’” In Formations, the secular is substantial and concrete. It is a possible object of anthropological analysis. It has a discernible grammar, but it is also historically layered, at times contradictory, quite complex, and best approached indirectly. By way of comparison with “the secular,” secularism is relatively easy to locate as a “concept” and a “doctrine” bound together with, or “centrally located within,” a concept of “modernity” that has recently “become hegemonic as a political goal,” however unequally it is attained in practice around the globe. But “the secular” is not reducible to secularism, and it bears upon rudimentary attitudes toward the human body, contributes to specific ways of training, cultivating, and structuring the senses, and grounds operative conceptions of the human. These formations of the secular enter into complex and at times even contradictory relations with the world’s institutional varieties of secularism, but also with its religious traditions.

In turn, Why I Am Not a Secularist argues neither about secularism per se nor about “the secular,” but instead about the “conceits of secularism” harbored within the intellectual, spiritual, and political configurations of today’s secularists. Secularists prefer to connect secularism to the European experience of toleration among diverse forms of Christianity, “because it paints the picture of a self-sufficient public realm fostering freedom and governance without recourse to a specific religious faith.” And the idea of “secularism” emerges from secularists’ self-presentations as partisans of freedom within the bounds of public reason. Perhaps more precisely, wherever secularism comes from, it can be engaged as a particular political ideal, voiced in a certain way, by an identifiable constituency. As a preliminary definition, secularism is an idealized vision of political life that “strains metaphysics out of politics” and “dredges out of public life as much cultural density and depth as possible” in order to secure the authority of public reason and a rational morality, and the legitimacy of both to govern within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state until such a time as they can govern universally.

Formations and Not a Secularist both approach secularism indirectly by sounding out the oblique tendencies, layered sensibilities, and obscured histories that together incline discourses, communities, and individuals toward or away from certain forms of secularism, which in turn appears as an unstable and mutable formation. To draw questions from this: To what extent is secularism itself an essentially contested concept that is constantly open to reconfiguration? In what ways has the operative significance of secularism shifted in the last ten years? To what extent has it become important to contest or defend new aspects of the secular and new turns of secularism in line with these changes?

Second question: How is secularism related to Christianity?

Charles Taylor, in his recent book A Secular Age, makes a subtle argument about the emergence of a secular age that inherits and perfects the Christian, though Hegel seems to have put a similar thesis in bolder form in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, which conclude with the following formulations: “the last stage in History, our world, our own time,” is one in which “Secular life is the positive and definite embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom,” such that “what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not ‘without God,’ but is essentially His Work.” The roughly two hundred years between Hegel and Taylor have seen an almost endless variety of attempts to capture the connections between Christendom and Europe or Euro-America. In more and less sophisticated registers, and in a number of important contexts, secularism’s relation to Christianity, the West, and modernity remain live questions.

If Not a Secularist brilliantly diagnoses modern secularism as a distinctly Kantian arrangement, marked by a particular kind of emphasis on the authority and self-sufficiency of public reason, I would like to suggest that what could be called a “Hegelian secularism” has been gaining ground recently. Where Kantian secularists emphasize the detachment of secular reason from religious tradition, Hegelian secularists emphasize the work done by a specifically Christian religious tradition in preparing secular reason, and thus the continuity between this tradition and modern secularism. Secularist discourses today tend to flicker between Hegelian and Kantian modes, pitching secularism at times as an extension of Christianity and at times as a rebuke to Christianity, though these two modes do not seem to be mutually exclusive.

When Formations of the Secular approaches the intersection of secularism (conceived as a modern pattern of organizing public life) with religion (conceived as part of an older tradition), it draws attention to the ways in which a historically specific concept of “the secular” places religions in a hierarchical order. It brings to light, in other words, how some kinds of religion are determined to be compatible with liberal, democratic modernity, while others are not. To quote, “when it is proposed that religion can play a positive ethical role in modern society, it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever, but only to those religions that are able and willing to enter the public sphere for the purpose of rational debate with opponents who are to be persuaded rather than coerced.” The question here is not as much, “How is secularism connected to Christianity?” but more, “How does secularism’s connection with modern Christianity shape its interactions with other religious traditions?”

Not a Secularist broaches the same problem in two key ways: in thinking about a specifically Christian form of nationalism particular to American politics, and through its engagement with Immanuel Kant. To quickly follow this second thread, a significant measure of Kantian moral and political thought inherits the concepts and commitments of the Judaic and Christian traditions, as well as their confusions—problems, in particular, with the fundamental conceptions of freedom, responsibility, and will. To quote, “The priority of the will today points to metaphysical continuity between the old regime of Christendom and the secular modus vivendi fashioned out of that regime.” Not a Secularist identifies parts of the Christian tradition that remain active within the dense philosophical, cultural, and political background of modern secularism. Rather than arguing that a generic Christianity—or, slightly more specifically, Protestant Christianity—set the conditions for modern secularity, it seems to suggest that Kantian secularism and, for example, Augustinian Christianity emerge as responses to the human predicament, each with possibilities and limitations, some of which are shared.

To draw this into a question, in revisiting Formations and Not a Secularist today, it seems important to ask: Are Euro-American secular discourses becoming more Hegelian and less Kantian, meaning that they increasingly tie secularism strongly to Christianity and to a story about western civilization, rather than to the exclusion of metaphysics and the purity of reason? If so, what new problems does such a reorientation present?

Third question: When are pain and suffering a part of the secular?

Meditations on pain and suffering are central to the arguments of Not a Secularist and Formations, and both books characterize secularism in relation to pain and suffering almost independently of secularism’s commonplace foil and complement, namely, religion. Not a Secularist and Formations agree that a key motivation for secularism is the perceived need to manage and potentially eliminate pain and suffering. Not a Secularist argues that secularists often blind themselves to certain forms of pain and suffering, and Formations adds that secular liberal democracies harbor profound contradictions with respect to pain, which appear when they inflict unavowable suffering, for example, through torture. These books differ, however, insofar as Formations attributes the imperative to master and eliminate pain to a highly specific formation of the secular, while Not a Secularist frames the response to suffering as part of the human predicament. To quote the latter, “People suffer. We suffer from illness, disease, unemployment, dead-end jobs, bad marriages, the loss of loved ones, social relocation, tyranny, police brutality, street violence, existential anxiety, guilt, envy, resentment, depression, stigmatization, rapid social change, sexual harassment, child abuse, poverty, medical malpractice, alienation, political defeat, toothaches, the loss of self-esteem, identity-panic, torture, and fuzzy categories.”

As this catalog suggests, the management of pain and suffering is an extraordinary focal point that draws together a wide range of tendencies generally taken to characterize the modern condition. For example: The biopolitical problem of governing populations through the management of bodies depends in significant part on producing, measuring, and medicalizing pain. Utilitarian or economic calculuses take pleasure and pain as the basis for public policy. After theodicy, modernity faces a new existential problem of interpreting and justifying life’s painful experiences in the perceived absence of transcendent explanations. More examples are possible.

This leads me to ask: In what sense are the responses to pain (and certain failures to respond to pain) “secular” or “secularist,” rather than, say, modern, liberal, American, capitalist, technological, medical, or simply Kantian? In other words, can something like “the secular” be reliably identified in the absence of a precise relation to “religion,” such as in the case of secular attitudes toward pain? It may be that “the secular” is approximately coextensive with “the modern” as the site and condition of almost everything in the world today, but something seems to be lost in extending the category in this way, in much the same way that something is lost through the inflation and over-extension of once precise categories of analysis, such as “Capitalism” and “Neo-liberalism,” or through the scholarly deployment of the concept of “religion,” which, as Talal Asad’s work has done so much to show, was never as accurate as it should have been. A more general way of putting this is to ask: are there identifiable conceptual and practical limits to the secular?

Fourth question: If it is not secularism, is a deep multidimensional pluralism still secular?

Not a Secularist responds to a contemporary crisis of secularism, but its argument is presented as a “cautious reconfiguration,” rather than a wholesale rejection. It suggests that authoritative images of public reason be downgraded, along with the fiction of a “post-metaphysical” political discourse and the paradigm of secularism as the strict separation of politics from religion. But to what extent is the openness to engagement with others that characterizes critical responsiveness related to “the secular,” and what connections might therefore be made between a possible deep pluralism and a non-Kantian secularism? Formations argues that “what modernity [. . .] bring[s] in is a new kind of subjectivity, one that is appropriate to ethical autonomy and aesthetic self-invention—a concept of ‘the subject’ that has a new grammar.” One can imagine that the new grammar of the subject is in important ways a secular grammar.

To put this more directly, if we’re not secularists, are we still secular? If one declines to participate in Kantian secularism—which would chiefly mean that one resists the inclination to project one’s own conceptions of public reason and morality as the sole authoritative and universally binding possibilities—and if one promotes instead a project of deep multidimensional pluralism and critical responsiveness, to what extent and in what ways does one remain secular, if not a secularist? Leaving Kantian secularists aside for the moment, is pluralism nonetheless connected to “the secular” in the sense given to this term in Formations of the Secular? Is it one distinctive possibility opened by and for the secular? And if secularism is being reconstituted today as a more explicitly and self-consciously Euro-American-Christian formation (in the Hegelian, rather than the Kantian, fashion), can this formation still be pressed toward a deep multi-dimensional pluralism?

My fifth and final question goes like this: Nation, State, Capital, Secularism?

Not a Secularist is in many ways a book about nationalism as much as it is about secularism, and it holds in focus the constant political danger that a single constituency will claim to embody and represent the nation. It argues that secularist discourse is insufficient to hold such constituencies in check, and it suggests that an ethos of multi-dimensional pluralism and egalitarianism might fare better against the dangers of nationalism. Formations analyzes similar dynamics in the context of recent European politics. Citing Jean Le Pen rather than Bill Bennett, its analysis of “Muslims as a ‘religious minority’ in Europe” discloses the ways in which European political discourses project universalism (through human rights for example) while they more quietly populate the universal with particular types of people (frenchmen, for example). In line with Bill Connolly’s longstanding project of re-articulating political pluralism, both books focus on the possibility of fostering a democratic ethos that is not premised  on a homogenous nation, nor dependent on securing the state as the key site of citizens’ allegiance, nor committed to a renewed secularization of the world. And while both texts remain guarded about the likelihood of establishing such an ethos, they strongly argue for its political necessity.

One of the points at which they differ is in their assessment of the power and durability of modern secularism. In short, Formations attributes enormous power to secularism, while Not a Secularist suggests that it is faltering. To return to my first question, part of this variance may be definitional, but part of it is related to the different connections traced between secularism, nationalism, capitalism, and the state. Both texts do extraordinary work in mapping these connections; rather than rehearsing their arguments, however, I’d like to conclude with the following questions: What are the most salient connections between secularism, global capital, nationalism and the state today? Is it any more or less possible now to articulate the relations between secularism and these other key world shaping forces than it was when these books were written? Is it important to trace them differently today? In order to contest the forms of violence and injustice particular to modern secularism, is it necessary to place secularism in connection with these other formations? How are we to think about the challenges and possibilities of doing so?

While I am sympathetic to this project, I pursue another aspect of global Christianity in my contribution to the issue. The salience of ideas and practices that emphasize rupture from previous social settings and modes of thought should not blind us to the fact that Pentecostalism arises as a new social-aesthetic formation. Next to the indeed remarkable emphasis placed on rupture and newness, as well as on the possibility of miraculous divine intervention in Pentecostal accounts, we should not overlook that Pentecostal religiosity also entails authorized and socially shared practices and techniques that are required for the event of divine intervention to occur. In other words, the call for a “break with the past,”  deliverance from “evil spirits,” taking “Christ as personal savior,” being “born again”  and “filled with the Holy Spirit,” all of which emphasize newness, rupture, and an immediate encounter with the divine, is voiced—over and over again—in an established manner that is characteristic of Pentecostal religiosity.

What struck me most in my research on Pentecostal-Charismatic churches in Africa is their sensational appeal, often operating via music and powerful oratory, through which born again Christians are enabled to sense the presence of the Holy Spirit with and in their bodies wherever they are and to act upon this sensation. This is typical of Pentecostals, not only in Africa and the Global South, but also in Europe and the United States (which is reason enough to doubt Philip Jenkins’s proposition of a newly emergent Christendom specific to the Global South). While for born again Christians the experience of the Holy Spirit is immediate and authentic—a truth event in Badiou’s sense—it is clear all the same that sensations of the divine do not happen out of the blue but require the existence of a particular shared religious aesthetic through which the Holy Spirit becomes accessible and “sense-able.”  Thus, the eventful embodiment of the Holy Spirit necessarily requires the existence of certain authorized structures of repetition, or what I call “sensational forms,” that tune the senses and allow for personal religious experience to occur.

In the study of religion (in particular, the study of Protestant Christianity), form is usually regarded as something “outward” that distracts from and is—at best—a necessary vehicle for content. We encounter an explicit dismissal of form in, for instance, the work of Max Weber, arguably one of the most path-breaking scholars in the study of Protestantism, whose ideas still shape the “lens” through which the rise of Pentecostalism is often analyzed.  Mentioning key dimensions of religion—artifacts, music, dance, buildings—in his essay “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” Weber stressed the initial synthesis of religion and art, suggesting that the former was the cradle of the latter. This synthesis brought about the development of particular religious “styles” that ensured the fixing of traditions that would convey particular magical-religious effects. Weber regarded this “stereotyped” religiosity with its outward forms geared towards “magical efficacy” as lower than the religiosity of “salvation religions” that is severed from art and induces a “religious ethic of brotherliness.” The denigration of form, art, and aesthetics in Weber’s narrative occurs in favor of the appraisal of pure meaning and, ultimately, the genesis of a more rational attitude that transcends feeling. While this devaluation of form may resonate with internal perspectives—certainly within Protestant theology, or in believers’ accounts of their conversion from indigenous traditional religion to Christianity—it is misleading in a theoretical sense (as pointed out by Talal Asad in his critique of meaning-centered approaches of religion) and unsuited for analyzing Pentecostalism’s current growth. Indeed, this growth challenges us to critique the ‘Protestant lens’ that still seems to shape the analysis of Pentecostalism, and to develop a new vocabulary.

In my view, one of the main concerns in the study of modern religion—and Pentecostalism in particular—today should be the reappraisal of form (and of related terms, such as style) in shaping and addressing the sensing body. Therefore, I have coined the notion of “sensational form.” In recent work I have laid out this notion in some detail, explaining that it is based on my understanding of religion as a practice of mediation between the levels of humans and God (or, more broadly, some transcendental realm or force). The notion of mediation posits the existence of a distance between these levels that is bridged by sensational forms. I circumscribe sensational forms as authorized modes for invoking and organizing access to the transcendental, which shape both religious content (beliefs, doctrines, sets of symbols) and norms. Involving religious practitioners in particular practices of worship and patterns of feeling, these forms play a central role in modulating them as religious subjects. Thus, sensational forms are part and parcel of a particular religious aesthetic (understood as the field of the sensing body), which governs a sensory engagement with the divine and among humans, and which generates particular sensibilities, such as feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit.

There are intriguing resonances between these ideas and the article by C.J.C. Pickstock on liturgy and the senses in this issue of SAQ, the point being that Christianity offers particular, established sensorial practices for approaching, and being approached by, God that are never just outward and symbolic, but “contain a surplus that thought can never fully fathom.” Like Pickstock, I contend that Pentecostalism is “not a straightforwardly Protestant phenomenon,” and that it calls us to retrieve alternative (Catholic or post-Protestant) theologies—or, to invoke Webb Keane, “semiotic ideologies”—that attribute value to religious forms such as sacraments, liturgy, and that appeal to the body and the senses. Here I envision the possibility of a stimulating interdisciplinary debate between anthropologists of Christianity and theologians, the point being to better understand how religion conveys particular modes of sensing and feeling that, in turn, contribute to its aura of truth and credibility.

To conclude, the disavowal of structure and form at the expense of event and content, which we encounter both in Protestant (especially Calvinist) theology and philosophers such as Badiou, expresses a questionable “fantasy of immediacy” (as Matthew Engelke puts it in his contribution to the special issue of SAQ) that requires our scholarly attention, but should not be taken at face value. Instead, we need to ask, as suggested in recent work on religion and media, how practices of religious mediation evoke experiences which believers qualify as “immediate” (often by rendering invisible the very media employed in mediation).  The re-appreciation of form, not just as a mere “outward” expression, but as necessary for enabling sublime experience entails moving beyond such oppositions as structure and event, form and content, or mediation and immediacy. While these oppositions are often mobilized within religious traditions, as well as in secular modes of thought, we are well advised not to succumb to them in our analysis.