Many have since written about this case, including myself. In my work, I’ve detailed how hisba is less a deviation from secularism than an expression of the underlying power that makes secularism possible—including the state’s fundamental right to decide the proper place of religion in social life. Here, however, I focus on something else: how hisba became not only an object of general suspicion, but also a particular modality of suspicion as a result of court litigation and state legislation. This modality of suspicion, exercised by the state, is intimately tied to the defense of religious freedom, and I suspect that it is shared across seemingly very different secular polities. To see this, consider the following passage from the Abu Zayd judgment:

The Court notes that there is a difference between apostasy, which is a material action with its basic elements and conditions….and belief (i`tiqad). Apostasy is necessarily comprised of material acts that have an external being. Such acts must make manifest, in a manner undeniable and without dissent, that one has called God Most High a liar, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, a liar by denying what he has brought to Islam….Belief, however, differs clearly from apostasy. For apostasy is a crime whose basic material elements are presented before a judge to decide whether it exists or not….But belief concerns what is in the interior of a human being’s self, belonging to his domain of secrecy. It is neither a matter of judicial probing, nor of investigation by people, but is to do with the relationship between the human being and his Creator. Apostasy is a breach of the Islamic order, at its highest degree and most valued foundations, through manifest, material actions. In positive law, it comes close to a breach of the order of the state or high treason. Apostasy is investigated by the judge or the mufti. However, the punishment for assaulting religion through [an act of] apostasy does not contradict personal freedom. This is because freedom of belief (`aqida) requires that one be a believer (mu’minan) in his words and acts, and that he possess a sound rationale for his abandonment of belief. But a breach of Islam can only be due to corruption in thought or the lure of material, sexual, or other worldly purposes. To combat this category [of desire] is not considered combat against freedom of belief, but rather the protection of belief from such vain, corrupt passions.

In distinguishing between apostasy as an “outer” material act and belief which occurs in an “interior” forum, the Court defines its jurisdiction over the determination of apostasy and justifies its approach in making that determination. On the basis of this distinction, the Court took only Abu Zayd’s written work into account, without probing into his personal views—his “interior” relationship with his creator. Taking statements from his written work at face-value, the Court compared them with statements designated within the sharia as indicating apostasy; finding them to be similar, it pronounced him an apostate.

Many commentators on the judgment have discussed how it separates private belief from public act/expression. No one, however, has discussed the seeming contradiction it presents just a few lines later, where it reconnects private belief and its public manifestation in the context of a defense of religious freedom. Importantly, the Court does not see religious freedom as simply a right to believe what one wants. It also includes maintaining the conditions under which religious belief can be sustained and cultivated. For the Court, this entails that belief be protected from the motives of worldly power that might corrupt it. This, in turn, requires the Court to pronounce what those motives are—as it did with Abu Zayd. Acts and expressions of belief are therefore objects of especial suspicion, to be put under particular scrutiny, for potentially harboring ulterior, corrupting motives. Such scrutiny might be seen as a kind of vigilance against power and its potential abuse. (Indeed, part of the Court’s concern was that Abu Zayd was also teaching his books to university students.) In other words, outer act and inner belief, though initially divided, come to be reconnected through a suspicion of motives of material interest or worldly power. In the context of the freedom of religious belief, it becomes imperative to determine whether acts or expressions of belief are genuinely religiously motivated. This presumes the power to pronounce upon and, if necessary, probe into the character of one’s private convictions. Here the defense of religious freedom promotes a distinctive form of suspicion.

This suspicion is not exclusive to Egypt. Strikingly similar versions of it are found in seemingly very different secular states.

For example, Winnifred Sullivan has highlighted two central criteria in U.S. jurisprudence on religious freedom. They parallel those of the Abu Zayd case. The first criterion was whether religious acts or expressions were sincerely held to be essential to one’s religion. This conflicted with the second, often prevailing, criterion: whether these acts and expressions were authorized and mandated by orthodox religious texts. In U.S. courts, there seemed to be a disposition to presume the sincerity of litigants’ religious belief—which may be due in part to a traditional American respect for individual belief rooted in a particular Protestant history. Nevertheless, as legal theorist Kent Greenawalt writes, “when the state offers exemptions based on people’s convictions, it cannot avoid all inquiry into sincerity.” The Court thus retains the prerogative to determine and investigate this sincerity in the context of defining and defending religious freedoms—a prerogative it has exercised. More, this determination and investigation purveys a suspicion of motives of material interests or other worldly purposes. To quote Greenawalt again:

Another category of religious claims that should not count as spiritual are schemes cloaked in religious language in which the incentive to participate is financial self-interest and not spiritual development. … A finding that a claimant is sincere should be easy if one cannot discern any secular advantage from a person’s engaging in the behavior she asserts is part of her religious exercise.

But whether it is preferable for the Court to actually investigate sincerity or simply make presumptions about it without an investigation has been historically difficult to decide.

A similar situation is found in France. Anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando describes the dilemma veiled Muslim women faced in opposing the banning of the veil in public schools. If, on the one hand, the veil was deemed an obligation mandated by religious authorities, then it could be construed as potentially coercive and an impingement of religious freedom. The French state was therefore very concerned to ascertain that there was no external coercion or pressure to wear the veil—a concern that entailed knowing about the circumstances of people’s private lives and convictions. But if, on the other hand, the veil was construed as a matter of personal belief—a choice—then it was not mandated by orthodox religious texts and therefore inessential to the practice of one’s religion. Banning it was therefore not necessarily an impingement on religious freedom.

But even as a personal belief and choice, the veil was still construed by the state as an essentially religious, and fundamentally Islamic, sign. For state officials, it indicated a will and a desire to manifest Islam. Some saw it as potentially indexing a rising Islamism, one that degraded women in ways incompatible with the French republic’s fundamental values. It was thus a will and a desire that the state sought not to encourage, lest those values become undermined. Thus, in his analysis of the state’s investigation, Talal Asad notes that,

…not only [do] government officials decide what sartorial signs mean, but …they do so by privileged access to the wearer’s motives and will—to her subjectivity—and this is facilitated by resort to a certain kind of semiotics. A governmental commission of inquiry claims to bring private concerns, commitments and sentiments to the public sphere in order to assess their validity for the secular Republic, but it does much more than that. It constitutes meanings by drawing on internal (psychological) signs or external (social) signs, encourages certain desires and emotions at the expense of others.

So even though the veil was construed as a choice, indeed, precisely because it was, it could be deemed a suspicious and potentially dangerous act.

That the determination of genuine religiosity in terms of ulterior motives is a practice of suspicion becomes fully evident when it comes to Muslims in Europe and the U.S., with the near paranoid quality of the public debates about the building of mosques and minarets, the potential usage of sharia law, the teaching of Arabic in public schools, the donating to Muslim charities, and the wearing of veils. While there are complicated historical and political reasons for this near paranoia, my point here is to emphasize a central element of the structure it takes. And this is the constant attempt to unmask ulterior motives of material interest and worldly power behind a range of otherwise ordinary (in this case, Muslim) practices and expressions of belief, in order to defend those freedoms, including especially religious freedom, that are seen as constitutive of the ways of life the state is supposed to guarantee.

These examples, then, reveal a distinctive structure of legalized suspicion. On the one hand, private belief and public act/expression are made separate, but on the other, they are brought together in order to define and defend religious freedoms. In this case, private belief becomes framed within a complex of motives, will and desire—one that becomes suspect to the extent it expresses material interests or drives towards worldly power. As such, it can become subject to investigation and disciplining, which means probing into the details of private life and conviction. This structure of suspicion, shared by the U.S., France and Egypt, brings together under the pretext of religious freedom two central aspects of liberalism and secularism respectively. The first is a distinctively liberal vigilance against power and its abuse, and the second is a characteristically secular desire to draw a line between religion and material power. What this suggests is that, under a liberal secular legal regime, suspicion of religion is the flip-side of the freedom of religious belief.

The Abu Zayd judgment cited above poignantly highlights this contradictory structure of suspicion. At one level, the Court took Abu Zayd’s written statements at face-value—to say what they mean—and found them to contradict orthodox doctrines literally construed. The Court thus declared him an apostate. But when it came to religious freedom, his words were paid extra attention, meaning more than what they said, as having ulterior worldly motives against which the freedom of belief—to cultivate belief and have it flourish—had to be defended. In this case, the Court simply presumed and pronounced upon Abu Zayd’s motives, without investigation. This shows that the suspicious attribution of motives does not depend on an investigation, even though it enables one to be done at the discretion of the judiciary.

Hisba, through and under the law, has come to embody this structure of suspicion and the discretionary power that comes with it. It therefore enables the assertion of the sovereign power of decision into the intimate domains of everyday life. This becomes clear when we remember that hisba was placed in the hands of the General Prosecutor, with his ambiguous status between judiciary and executive power and his nearly unfettered investigative authority. For now it is the General Prosecutor who is responsible for bringing a hisba case to court. He must therefore conduct an investigation to decide whether a potential case merits further litigation. That means he might have to scrutinize the motives behind statements of religious belief. If, however, such scrutiny seems to intrude too much into a person’s private life or interior forum, the General Prosecutor has another option at his discretion: to take these statements at face-value, as saying what they mean, as the Court did with Abu Zayd. A focus on literal statements, however, may fail to capture the complexity of people’s private religious lives. As with the U.S. and France above, it is unclear here which is preferable: to investigate how genuine one’s religious motives are, or to make presumptions about how genuine they really are.

This tension between intruding into a private, ostensibly protected, domain or taking statements too literally is reminiscent of another tension upon which modern legal legitimacy both rests and continually founders: between the enactment and the appearance of justice. The more zealously an official investigates, the more abusive of justice he might seem to be. If, however, he relies strictly on procedure, this might make a mockery of justice. Hisba now partakes of this dilemma too.

To conclude: I cited the Abu Zayd judgments to show how hisba, in its contemporary legalized form, embodied a distinctive structure of suspicion. Through the judgments, hisba potentially undermined an entire domain of private rights. In restricting hisba’s uses, the state transformed it into a modality of suspicion only it could exercise. This modality of suspicion, enabled to defend religious freedoms, nevertheless undermined the crucial distinctions on which they relied. More, it became ensconced within another dynamic of suspicion, the tension between the enactment and the appearance of justice. This tension is even further compounded because, as I show elsewhere, it remains irresolvably indeterminate whether hisba is still an Islamic and thus primarily religious principle, or, as an expression of public order, it has become an essentially secular principle. The example of hisba therefore not only confirms Winnifred Sullivan’s thesis that religious freedom as a legally enforceable right is impossible to attain. It also shows how such religious freedom will never appear to be fully achieved, being entangled in its entirety within the dynamics of law’s suspicion and secular/religious ambiguity.

We should not, however, take the impossibility of religious freedom to mean the failure of secularism. For that would reduce an analysis of secularism to an assessment of whether it fulfills the promises it makes. Secularism as a historical phenomenon is certainly more than its promises, if only because it so consistently and demonstrably falls short of them. We might consider instead how this sense of a continual failure is built into the historical grammar of secularism, and its consequences. In this case, the constant disjuncture between religious freedom as a secular aspiration and the secular means of achieving it constitutes a space of a continual striving, one which works to expand and entrench the suspicion and potential for intervention that provoked it in the first place. Within this space, religion is given to continual politicization, political theological claims acquire plausibility and force, and critique becomes a seemingly indispensable capacity that one must sustain and tirelessly cultivate. As a result, the question of religious freedom, as a central secular stake, remains poignantly alive, drawn into a seemingly unavoidable and incessant cycle of provocation, critique, and intervention. That is, the modalities and dynamics of suspicion outlined here help sustain the problem-space of secularism, its constitutive questions and stakes, the critical dispositions it induces, and the propensities toward sovereignty it displays. We remain bound to this problem-space through the incessant suspicion it provokes.

It was not until the introduction of democracy in 1994 and the adoption of South Africa’s Constitution that a commitment was made to foster a society that is tolerant of diversity and does not posit one religion above another. This is evident in sections 15 and 31 of the 1996 Constitution: s15(1) protects every individual’s right to freedom of religion; s15(2) allows religious observances to be conducted at state or state-aided institutions; s31(1) protects the collective right of religious communities to practice their religion and to establish and maintain religious associations; s15(3)(a) permits the enactment of legislation to recognize religious marriages or religious personal or family law systems. In fact, s15(2)-(3) enables the establishment of a semi-secular, legally pluralistic society that involves an intersection between religion and the state where government is encouraged to support religion. Yet, in an attempt to ensure that discriminatory religious rules and practices do not permeate the legal framework of South African family laws, an internal limitation was added to s15(3), which provides that any legislation that purports to recognize religious marriages or religious personal or family law systems must be consistent with other constitutional provisions including gender equality. While none of the rights in the Bill of Rights are absolute, the internal limitation on religious freedom appears to subordinate the regulation of religious marriages or religious personal or family law systems to gender equality.

It was within the paradigm of s15(3)(a) that the South African government enacted the 1998 Recognition of Customary Marriages Act to provide full legal recognition to customary marriages. Subsequently, same-sex marriages were also afforded recognition through the 2006 Civil Union Act. The SA government further initiated a process as early as 1994 to ensure legal recognition for Muslim marriages. Given the spatial constraints of this paper, I consider only some of the implications of the process to recognize Muslim marriages in this essay.

After extensive consultations with the South African Muslim community and broader civil society that spanned several years, the South African Law Reform Commission, which was tasked with drafting legislation to recognize Muslim marriages, submitted a Muslim Marriages Bill (MMB) to the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development in 2003. Seven years later, the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DoJ) effected some amendments to the MMB and submitted an amended MMB to Cabinet, which was approved by the latter at the end of 2010. The public were invited to make submissions on the 2010 MMB by 31 May 2011. To date, the DoJ has not yet finalized the processing of those submissions.

Several interesting observations have emerged from the process relating to the recognition of Muslim marriages. For the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on two namely: a) the reasons for the delay in recognizing Muslim marriages; and b) the different responses to the MMB.

To date, no official reason has been given by the DoJ to explain why after 18 years since the advent of democracy, Muslim marriages have not been afforded legal recognition; especially since customary marriages and same-sex marriages have been recognized.

One can only speculate as to why the process for the legal recognition of Muslim marriages appears to be going nowhere slowly. In the first instance, the political imperative to recognize customary marriages was overwhelming since the majority of the South African population comprises black Africans. The same political imperative does not appear to exist for minority religious communities, the largest of which—namely the Muslim community—comprises 1.5% of the population. Secondly, the position of Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development has been occupied by several different politicians since 2003 and the progress or stagnation of the process perhaps depended on their own political inclinations about whether or not the state ought to regulate minority religious marriages. Thirdly, consensus about the MMB is lacking within the Muslim community and broader civil society, and perhaps the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Development is hesitant to move forward with draft legislation that is perceived as contentious. Yet, if the latter reason is the real justification for delaying the process of recognition then it is disingenuous because the national government has enacted several contentious pieces of legislation since it assumed power in 1994, including the 1996 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act.

The only other reason that makes sense for the delay in enacting legislation to recognize Muslim marriages is that government lacks the political will to do so. This clearly means that an entrenchment of fundamental rights in a Bill of Rights does not guarantee their automatic implementation. Instead, a strong and un-apathetic civil society is required to hold government accountable to its constitutional obligations. Therefore, those within the Muslim community and broader civil society who support the enactment of legislation to recognize and regulate Muslim marriages need to provide the political incentive for such enactment to take place. For instance, the Muslim community needs to take the lead in mobilizing and launching a strong and sustainable campaign for the recognition of Muslim marriages, which to date they have not done. Furthermore, civil society should use the courts and launch a civil action against government to encourage enactment. In 2009, the Women’s Legal Centre (WLC), which is a NGO that litigates gender-based precedent setting cases, did just that but launched its action in the Constitutional Court (CC) instead of the High Court (HC). The CC decided that there was no basis for the WLC to have direct access to the CC and directed them to re-launch their action in the appropriate HC. Although no order was made in favor of the WLC, the positive consequence of that action was that it motivated government to apply their minds to the 2003 MMB, which resulted in the submission of the 2010 MMB to Cabinet and its subsequent approval by the latter. Consequently, the WLC saw no need to re-launch its action in the HC. However, that was three years ago. Perhaps it is time for another launch of the action.

The second observation about the process for the recognition of Muslim marriages relates to the different opinions that were formulated in response to the MMB over the past several years. Indeed, there are those who support the MMB and those who oppose it. Yet, the matter is far more complex given that the support for and opposition against the MMB is multi-layered and has exposed interesting bedfellows.

In the camp opposing the MMB, several components are identifiable. The most obvious are the Muslim extremists; some of who oppose any type of state regulation of Muslim family law by a non-Islamic state and prefer that the status quo be maintained, namely, that the ulamā (Muslim clergy) should continue to regulate Muslim family law within the community. Others advocate for the establishment of a separate sharia court that they argue should operate alongside the secular court system and should be presided over by members of the ulamā. There are also those Muslims who feel that their Islamic schools of thought are not catered for in the MMB. The most prominent of the latter dissident voices follow the Shia tradition but comprise a small minority within the South African Muslim community. Within the same opposition camp, secular extremists ironically find themselves locking arms with the Muslim extremists because they too favour a strict separation between religion and state. The final component within the opposition camp is the gender advocates who expect the MMB to be absolutely gender consistent before they will consider bestowing their blessings upon it.

On the other hand, there are those gender activists who, along with progressive Muslims, support the enactment of the MMB. These two groups acknowledge that the MMB is challengeable on the grounds of gender equality, but also realize that if enacted, the MMB promises to provide more protection for women than they currently have. The driving force behind their support is the achievement of substantive equality as opposed to formal equality. They also recognize that there will be opportunities after the MMB is enacted to institute constitutional challenges against the gender-problematic provisions.

A third component, namely moderate members of the ulamā, is further discernible within the camp supporting the enactment of the MMB. This group understands that South African Muslims are a minority operating within a constitutional framework and that any recognition of Muslim family law will need to happen within that framework. They therefore seek to have the Islamic principles governing marriage incorporated into the MMB in a way that produces a balance between constitutional expectations and Islamic prerogatives. For these reasons, the moderate members of the ulamā supported the 2003 MMB because it constituted a reasonable compromise. However, they have expressed dissatisfaction with the 2010 MMB because for their purposes, it departs from the 2003 MMB in two significant ways. Firstly, the 2003 MMB enabled adjudication of disputes arising from the MMB to be presided over by Muslim judges from within the secular judiciary sitting with Islamic law experts as assessors. In contrast, the requirements that the judge must be Muslim and must adjudicate with Islamic law experts have been removed from the 2010 MMB. Secondly, the 2003 MMB required binding arbitration to precede the dispute going to court whereas the 2010 MMB proposes voluntary mediation to enable the parties to settle their dispute prior to adjudication. The latter change is problematic for the ulamā because they envisaged the arbitration process as the medium through which they would play a significant role in the management of disputes relating to Muslim marriages and divorces.

Interestingly, although the aforementioned changes appear to have secularized the 2010 MMB more so than the 2003 MMB, the 2010 MMB has also been Islamized to a greater extent. For instance, a definition for Islamic law is included in the 2010 MMB, which limits the types of Islamic law sources that a judge can rely on to only a few traditional ones. This may constrain the extent to which reform of Muslim family law may be affected through the MMB. Hence, the increased Islamization of the MMB has caused some consternation among Muslim progressives who supported the 2003 MMB. Yet, Muslim progressives and moderate members of the ulamā who supported the 2003 MMB do not reject the 2010 MMB and are willing to negotiate with the DoJ to revisit the problematic provisions of the MMB.

It is unfortunate that the DoJ decided to effect changes to the MMB without consulting with the relevant stakeholders within the Muslim community and broader civil society since there had been a general consensus in favour of the 2003 MMB, which had emanated from a widespread process of consultations. Although not perfect, the 2003 MMB had contained innovative mechanisms for the regulation of minority Muslim marriages within a secular legal framework. Given the disagreement over the 2010 MMB, it may mean that parties will have to retreat to the drawing board, which means more time wasted while the rights of Muslim women continue to be negated.

First, as the entries by Noah Salomon, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Robert Hefner, among others, show, it is useful to step back from the US, and even from Western Europe, to consider alternative ways of organizing diversity. In northwest Madagascar, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork sporadically over a couple of decades, there has been religious freedom in the sense that the boundaries between practicing Christians and Muslims are fairly open and, even more, insofar as it has been perfectly acceptable to be neither Christian nor Muslim, without thereby being designated as immoral or ‘primitive’ or subjected to undue missionary activity. As I’ve written elsewhere, some families might gently direct one of their children toward Islam, another toward Christianity, and a third to ‘ancestral practices,’ which are simply referred to as “non-congregating” (tsy mivavaka) rather than by any substantive definition. Some people engage in combinations of each. Although I would not advocate a causal explanation, the pattern fits nicely with the logic of bilateral kinship and wide exogamy. Most people can recognize at least four grandparents and probably eight great-grandparents (and beyond), each of whom may have a distinctive identity with respect to social, political, religious, and geographical affiliation. From among these senior living or deceased relatives people make choices of stronger or weaker identification, influenced by such factors as which grandparent one is sent to stay with on vacations as a child and ending with in whose tomb and which mode of burial one finds oneself.

This enables an open society with a good deal of mutual understanding and respect, in which no single identification or institution behind it is absolutized. In some respects one could say the individual has a good deal of freedom of choice. However many Malagasy do not experience things in quite this way. In explaining why they live in one place rather than another or carry out a particular set of ‘religious’ or ‘ancestral’ practices they would say they had been called to it by a particular ancestor, who by showing them signs, notably manifest as illness or troubling dreams, subjects them to prohibitions which align them more firmly with that ancestor rather than others. Servants at the ancestral shrines were forced some generations ago to work there. Today those who remain as their successors cite the wrath of their own ancestors as the reasons for staying on.

In all this there is also a logic of the negative. People are defined and define themselves in the first instance by what they don’t practice, by the kinds of praying they don’t do, the foods they cannot eat, the days they cannot work, or the kinds of work or acts of deference they cannot perform, rather than by positive attributions. This is a kind of freedom by restriction; in clarifying the boundaries of what you cannot do, it leaves wide open what you can do.

My second general comment is that however we want to define religion (and perhaps we could take a leaf from northern Madagascar and leave it open, specifying only what it is not), one of the general features, as the Malagasy ethnography also suggests, is a kind of submission to something conceived as larger, higher, or more powerful than oneself. Durkheim called it society; Maurice Bloch calls it deference to authority or to other persons; Roy Rappaport describes it as one of the entailments of engaging in ritual performance. In participating in a ritual, whatever one’s state of mind or ‘belief’ at the time, and irrespective of the semiotic ideology that Webb Keane rightly and compellingly points to, one is accepting the outcome (assuming that the felicity conditions of the performative event are met) and moreover accepting the meta-performativity, i.e. that acts and utterances of this kind, felicitously produced, have the consequences that they do. To perform a ritual is, in the end, to accept a certain liturgical order of which it is part (irrespective of whether this also entails deference to specific officials, like priests). In other words, the freedom to carry out certain kinds of acts is premised on subjection to an order that defines what such acts are, that puts things under a definition and regulates the changes in definition. As I elaborate elsewhere, the process is one of the instauration of ethical criteria and it is intrinsic to human speech acts. Insofar as what we refer to as specifically ‘religious’ includes the most formal and consequential kinds of performative acts (baptized or not, etc.) one might say that what religion is not is freedom.

Hence the very idea of freedom of religion is paradoxical; it is the freedom to be unfree in a particular kind of way. Judicial and legislative bodies need to take this point, call it the relativity of freedom or unfreedom, or the deconstruction of freedom, into account. They need to notice Sullivan when she points to “the reinstatement of the rights of religious authority by political authority—in the name of religious freedom.” They then need to make informed decisions about which versions of unfreedom to support—and we should all, as Saba Mahmood emphasizes, pay attention to the politics and ideologies that underpin such decisions (a skepticism I share with Lori Beaman, concerning federal government initiatives at the present time in, of all places, Canada). If Muslims were the ones taking the lead in the US courts asking for certain rights and freedoms, surely the self-same justices would have argued another way.

This is certainly not to say let everyone be free to do as they please. Not only is such freedom impossible in the human condition, but there is the matter of whether my freedom impinges on yours. To emphasize a point in Mahmood’s account and mentioned in some of the other posts, the freedom of religion we demand elsewhere (though the point applies internally as well) too often means the freedom to missionize other people. The freedom to practice my religion impinges on the freedom to practice yours in peace.

We need to be careful here. I am not a historian but I imagine that religious freedom once meant freedom from oppression by the proponents of a stronger religion rather than freedom from interference by the state or the right given by the state for specific religions to interfere in other peoples’ business. Certain proponents of religious freedom in the US now seem to want to have it both ways: the state is criticized both for being secular and for promoting a ‘religion’ of its own. What is missing in such arguments is attention not to one’s own rights or freedoms but the obligation to enable the rights and freedoms of others.

We’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on the increasing influence of anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas and parties across Europe and to offer their thoughts on how best to accommodate minority claims (especially those involving Islam) in a democratic and liberal Europe.

Our respondents are:

Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University; Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

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Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

The breaking down of the cordon sanitaire surrounding right-wing populism is in fact not as recent a phenomenon as we like to think in Europe.  The political impulse to declare multiculturalism a dead letter—even where it never existed—seem to relate to the fallacious understandings of what multiculturalism might conceivably have meant prevailing among many European politicians. Critiques of multiculturalism are, these days, often used as rhetorical proxy for critiques of Islam and Muslims in Europe.  Anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiments need to be unpacked, analyzed, and responded to primarily at the level of particular nation-state histories and imaginaries. There is also an unprecedented level of co-ordination between various populist right-wing movements and activists across Europe. So much so that rhetorical tropes concerning Islam and Muslims travel seamlessly across the continent.  Right-wing populism in contemporary Europe also feeds on a liberal-secular nationalism of sorts, on anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and legitimate concerns over the future sustainability of European welfare states. Under the sign of democratic technocracy, across Europe we are witnessing a failure of political leadership and of intellectual vision, articulated in a conception of politics in which poll ratings and pandering to the shifting popular sentiment have become more important than the ideals and principles one espouses. This is a failure of both the mainstream political Left and Right. It requires a monumental intellectual effort by mainstream political parties to formulate more positive and less defensive narratives about the increasingly multicultural societies in which we happen to live; it is an effort still to be pursued in any systematic manner. Muslim minority claims are not necessarily the ‘special cases’ they are often made out to be; pragmatic approaches offer the best way forward.

Europe has a particularly dark history regarding its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and with that follows a burden of moral responsibility. It is a burden that must be shouldered even in the bleak and challenging times we are living in at present.

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Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University

Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

In interpreting contemporary debates about multiculturalism in Europe, it is critical to distinguish between political discourse and government policies. At the level of discourse, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ and that governments that once embraced a multicultural approach to diversity are turning away, adopting a strong emphasis on civic integration. This reaction, we are told, “reflects a seismic shift not just in the Netherlands, but in other European societies as well.” However, focusing on the level of government programs brings a very different pattern into view. New evidence from our Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP Index) tracks the strength of multicultural policies for European countries and several traditional countries of immigration at three points in time (1980, 2000, and 2010). The results—available here—paint a different picture of contemporary Europe. While a small number of countries, including most notably the Netherlands, have weakened established multicultural policies during the 2000s, such a shift is the exception. Most countries that adopted multicultural approaches in the later part of the twentieth century have maintained their programs; and several countries have added new ones. Indeed, for Europe as a whole, the average score on the MCP Index went up, not down, between 2000 and 2010. This suggests that civic integration initiatives are often being layered on top of existing multicultural programs, leading to a blended approach to diversity. Moreover, as we argue elsewhere, more liberal forms of civic integration can certainly be combined with multiculturalism. It is the more illiberal or coercive forms that are incompatible with a robust multicultural approach.

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Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Securing individual freedoms has been a strong point of Europe; handling diversity has not.

As is well known, the process of confessionalization in the early 16th century created religiously homogenized political units. Confessional dissenters were exterminated or expelled. A large majority of Jews were forced to immigrate to Poland. There were virtually no resident Muslims left in any part of Europe. This has changed in the 20th century. Cultural and religious diversity is precisely what characterizes Europe now.

Writing in the sixties, when Christianity was adapting to the intellectual hegemony of a scientific rationality, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote that the challenge posed to Christianity by science would be a cake-walk compared to the challenge of emerging religious diversity. Years later, writing specifically about Islam, Smith warned that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades. More than a millennia of animosity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not everywhere, not in everyone, but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

In order to accommodate minority claims involving Islam, these virtually invisible background conditions need to be altered. The collective memory of mutual hatred has to be addressed head on. The European Left needs to see multiculturalism or religious pluralism as an integral part of its ideology, not as an enemy or a conservative ideology merely to be tolerated. Religious diversity must be rescued from the conservatives.

It will help if liberals and democrats shed their individualist bias and learn to make a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and what we in India call ‘communal’—between those who see themselves as belonging to a community and those who view their communal affiliation as necessarily antagonistic towards other communities. Such a distinction exists at least implicitly in the European constitution. Therefore, the salvation of every single European country lies in a proper European union. The ills of Europe can be rid only by more of Europe.

Finally, it would not do right-thinking people any harm if they introduced a mixture of prudence and ancient wisdom into their universe of moral principles. Without all this, minority claims do not have much chance of being met in Europe. And this failure would be a big disaster for the entire world.

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Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

The recent victory of socialist François Hollande in France’s 2012 presidential election was certainly a turning point for the social and economic politics of France. Unfortunately, this is less true when it comes to immigration, race, and culture, evidenced by Hollande saying he would firmly support France’s ban on niqabs, or face-covering Islamic veils, and his stance against Turkish accession to the EU.

François Hollande has made clear that he will address the material conditions and worries of French citizens. But he has been quite silent on questions pertaining to cultural diversity and social cohesion, for the simple reason that he shares with Sarkozy the same conception of French national identity, defined as an abstract community of citizens bound together by principles of equality and liberty. In these conditions, the cultural and religious background of citizens is not part and should not interfere with civic solidarity and public life.

However, such an ideal has been increasingly difficult to uphold when Muslims, among other cultural and regional groups, are claiming their right to express their specificity in public space, which has in turn raised the anxiety and fears of a lot of French citizens. These fears have been the main reason for the long-standing political success of the National Front, from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine, the current leader of the party . At the same time, Muslims of all colors and stripes keep asserting that there is no contradiction between being French and being a Muslim.

Nations or groups need to exist in opposition to an ‘Other,’ and in today’s national imagination, Islam plays that role. It may be impossible for societies to completely rid themselves of this polarizing rhetoric.

That said, societies differ in how much their political imaginations are subjected to open critical discussion. Accordingly, it is necessary for French politicians across the political spectrum to explicitly reject economic and social issues being linked to cultural issues or the ‘Islamization’ of Europe. It is also imperative for policymakers to change the dominant narrative of French national identity by including Islamic culture and history.

Such a change would involve a new education project where, from history to arts and culture, Muslims are not described as the Other. It means acknowledging the cross pollination of philosophical and scientific ideas as well as the multiple encounters of artists, merchants, clerics, and migrants from medieval times to the immigration waves after WWII. Most Muslims already acknowledge France as their home and have made numerous artistic and cultural contributions to the French ‘patrimoine.’ The challenge is to reshape French imagination so Muslims can be seen as legitimate fellow citizens.

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Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Two things are happening at once in European societies. On one hand the process of secularization continues, at times remorselessly; on the other religion has returned to the public sphere. The combination is difficult to handle. Continuing secularization has led, amongst other things, to a marked decline in religious literacy. At the same time complex religious questions make new demands on the knowledge and sensitivities of the actors involved. Hence an uncomfortable paradox: at precisely the moment European populations need them most, they are losing the vocabulary, concepts, and narratives that are necessary to take part in serious conversation about religion. The result, all too often, is a debate that is ill-mannered and ill-informed.

A debate that is ill-mannered denotes a lack of respect for both people and issues. Even more serious is the lack of regard for religion as such. Those for whom religion means little are unable to imagine the damage that is done by the public denigration of faith, be it Christian or other. Legitimate claims, frequently those of minority faiths (such as Islam), are lost in the confusion.

A debate that is ill-informed means that European populations are increasingly susceptible to error and exaggeration. An excellent example can be found in the wildly exaggerated statistics concerning immigration in general and Islam in particular. Astute politicians know this and—at times—overstep the mark. Unfortunately, acute economic uncertainty will make matters worse.

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Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Over the past two decades, surveys have consistently noted a clear message: European citizens are anxious about immigration and its impact on society. Throughout this time, mainstream political parties and European political elites have attempted to respond to these trends: demonstrating the economic and demographic benefits of immigration; encouraging and promoting multicultural initiatives; consolidating and institutionalizing an anti-discrimination framework through EU directives, regulations, and national legislation; and adopting an inclusive discourse promoting the value of diversity, cultural exchange, toleration, and pluralism. They have also become increasingly detached from their base through the professionalization of politics. Throughout this same period, populist and extremist parties have done precisely the opposite. Positioning themselves as representatives of the ‘simple, average citizen’ they have been speaking out about the ‘real and everyday’ threats posed by ‘uncontrolled,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘massive’ immigration and of the ‘incapacity’ or ‘unwillingness’ of Muslim communities to integrate. They have gradually moved from underdog parties on the fringes to actually framing and conditioning pre-election debates and changes in citizenship and migration policies. Moreover, they have built an active presence at the neighborhood and local levels. The lower middle classes, skilled and unskilled working class citizens who increasingly find themselves in conditions of economic insecurity—whether due to the pressures of globalization, the eurozone crisis, or economic recession—have been identifying with the latter’s discourse, finding resonance and comfort in the statements of right-wing populists. Economic grievances, induced by insecure job prospects and shrinking wages and the perception of unfair competition over increasingly scarce social goods such as social housing, health, and pension coverage, are being coupled with strong feelings of cultural threat and the opinion that Muslim migrant communities pose an evident threat to national identity, civic values, and the country’s overall way of life. What is even more disconcerting is that this is taking place against a wider backdrop of dissatisfaction with the functioning of the country’s democratic governance and with falling trust in the mainstream political parties, exacerbated in many cases by corruption and mismanagement scandals.

It is urgent that mainstream political parties re-engage with the local level. There has been a growing gap between governing parties and their constituencies. In order to counter the influence of populist extremists, mainstream parties need to engage once again with voters who feel alienated and become once again integral parts of the communities they represent. At the same time, activities that encourage sustainable and meaningful interaction between different communities at the neighborhood, at the city, and at the regional levels must be intensified. Bringing together members of different groups has always increased understanding, countered perceptions of threat, and created ties that are much needed today to maintain the civic and social cohesion of European societies.

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Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

The success of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi), a fascist party that secured 21 seats in the Greek parliament on the strength of 7 percent of the popular vote, mirrors the alarming consolidation of far-right political parties and social movements underway across the Continent since the end of the last decade.

The Golden Dawn leadership drew directly from the toolbox of the New European Right—by mixing fascistic symbols, ethno-nationalist discourse, an anti-immigrant platform, and the use of street violence—to critique the colossal governance failures of Greece’s traditional political parties (left-of-center PASOK and right-of-center New Democracy). Golden Dawn spun standard, if extremist, Euro-populist discourse to excoriate mainstream PASOK and New Democracy leaders for bankrupting Greece, and this narrative resonated with the country’s shell-shocked middle- and working-classes voters. Similarly, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos echoed the xenophobic chauvinism of European rightists, such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Umberto Bossi, in linking Greece’s economic travails to immigration patterns that have produced one of the most accelerated demographic pluralizations in post-Cold War Europe.

Golden Dawn, then, is not a tale of putative Greek exceptionalism vis-à-vis a norm of EU modernity, but instead points to socio-political diffusion from ‘center’ to ‘periphery’ in Europe.

At the same time, Golden Dawn diverges notably from its far-right cohort in other EU member-states. For starters, the Golden Dawn qua party is likely to be an ephemeral force in politics. Most polls predict a decline in electoral support for Golden Dawn in the upcoming national elections in June, as protest-voters turn away from the party as a credible governing option.

More significantly, there is a specificity to the extreme Right’s message in Greece, which stands apart from the Islamophobic essentialism that has come to define the New European Right in other EU member-states. Chrysi Avgi blames clandestine, external forces as the cause for Greece’s economic travails; given the likelihood that the country’s economic implosion will continue apace in the near term, the search for ‘foreign’ culprits will maintain purchase in Greek society. But anti-immigrant intolerance, as well as some racist sloganeering and violent hooliganism, in Greece have been absent the deliberately, explicitly religious—read: anti-Muslim—vector of discrimination and prejudice that orients the New Right in the aforementioned European cases. Instead, Greece’s right-wing ideologues have deployed the broad rubric ‘foreign’—immigrants, Great Powers, and historical foes in the region—in a manner designed to evoke and to amplify a historical record marked by chronic linkages between the loss of economic sovereignty, on the one hand, and conditionalized political sovereignty and territorial loss, on the other. The origins and evolution of this distinction in Greece’s version of the New European Right bears additional study and attention, as part of any efficacious response by liberal democratic forces to reinforce tolerance, civility, and pluralism in EU politics and society.

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Bangladesh is often lauded as the poster child of third-world development: the birthplace of microcredit, the harbinger of religious tolerance, and exemplar of a transition from turbulent politics to persistent democracy in the developing world. Different from its neighbors on the basis of varying post-colonial experiences and development trajectories, the religion question came to be written on the nation through a particular “secular” construction, referred to in the vernacular as dhormoniropekkhota, or “religiously neutral.” This construction initially argued for an absence of religious political parties and for equal treatment of religions by the state so that all citizens may enjoy “equal” opportunity. While the ban on religious political parties has subsequently been lifted, and greater allowances made to Islam in the constitution, these are widely considered by liberal-secular defenders of the original constitution as intrusions that have defiled the sanctity of secularism. Restoring the original secular constitution, with all its constitutive elements is, as many argue, essential for socio-economic development, successful indicators of which, such as decreased maternal and infant mortality, increased literacy amongst the poor, and innovative ideas such as credit for the poor, have garnered Bangladesh a certain degree of global visibility. These advances, many argue, have been made possible only because the language of development has steered clear of religion in an attempt to construct the ideal secular nation. In other words, pro-secular development advocates argue that development successes have occurred in spite of, rather than (in collusion) with religion and religious beliefs, practices, and sensibilities.

Parallel to the achievement of the state, donors, and NGOs in the field of socio-economic development, much of which has furthered the status women, are legal triumphs through which, unlike in the Pakistani case, the Islamist call to declare Ahmediyas apostates has not been vindicated. Thus, the state’s secular mandate NOT to define the content of Islamic belief and practice is seemingly preserved. However, this “secular” prerogative does not find equal resonance when it comes to minority populations, for whom struggles over property and other rights seldom even make it to the courts. The “triumph” of secularism thus manifests itself in keeping alive a “liberal” notion of life for the majority population. An example of this is the recent victory in which the High Court directed the Ministry of Education to take immediate steps to implement the Guidelines on Sexual Harassment and to ensure that no woman working in any educational institution, public or private, is forced to wear a veil or cover her head, and may exercise her personal choice whether or not to do so.

The privileging of a liberal notion of Islam was the raison d’etre of the secular construct whose original clause that no political party can operate in the name of religion was borne directly out of the independence struggle. The Pakistani state had asserted its hegemony on the pretext that Bengali cultural markers, on the basis of their similitude with (Hindu) West Bengal, were inadequate expressions of the “Islamic nation” that Pakistan felt it had to project itself as. The birth of Bangladesh was seen, by the ruling elite of the time, as an opportunity to construct a new national character where a monolithic notion of Islam that required purging Bengalis of their linguistic and cultural affinities would not prevail. The state, although certainly not neutral vis-à-vis Islam, thus created particular Muslim citizen-subjects, who, in order to be nationalistic, had to refrain from a public/political position on Islam. However, in the course of development and modernization, the citizen’s engagement with Islam could not be contained to rituals that linked one’s inner self to the supernatural world via pirs, mystics, sufi saints that serve as spiritual leaders in praying for and guiding one’s worldly problems, and the darga sharif, or shrine of a dead pir where prayers are believed to be better heard. Given the tensions around public expressions of religion and their presumed anti-Bengali, “anti-nationalist” affinities, how would a more “modern” engagement with Islam express itself in Bangladesh? The Islamist platform brings with it all the pent-up negativity of aggression and anti-nationalism. Other more “neutral” platforms such as the Tabligh Jama’at are just too “neutral”—almost ineffective if Islam is to deliver us from bad governance, corruption, and personal, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy.

Other “creative” and evolving ways are on the horizon. I encountered some of these modalities while conducting fieldwork in women’s taleem, or Quranic discussion circles, in Dhaka. While such circles are not entirely new to the cultural, religious, and political landscape of Bangladesh, the ones in which I participated, along with many others in the city, are somewhat different in their pursuit of “modern religious” engagements that refrain from affiliating with existing religious groups and political parties. While the women are conservative vis-à-vis gender and sexuality issues, they appear more open in their thoughts about the political import of their public actions.

The first explanation offered by secular liberals of this modality of mobilizing—which calls itself “a-political” in its refusal to stand on an Islamist platform while at the same time distancing itself from a Tablighi kind of personal piety—is that it is strategic, aimed at keeping at bay the anti-nationalist stigma attached to the Jama’at-e-Islami. Framing the women’s religious engagement as strategic is consonant with the secularized normative religious subject for whom religion and the public sphere do not and must not mix. Thus, it is convenient to see the desire to mix the two as an aberration, as the intransigence of secularism’s defiling elements, and therefore to predict that this must result in the women ultimately embracing Islamism. This argument, which retains for the liberal advocates of secularism their position of authority as creators and drivers of secular modernity, stems from a misunderstood notion that the secular and the religious represent distinct domains of national life, leading to distinct subjectivities. This view has been complicated through the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Wendy Brown, as well as in recent collective publications such as Rethinking Secularism.

What are the women’s perspectives? The women believe that they are engaging in da’wa, or proselytizing, and use the same term to refer to their modus operandi. Their methods of shaping and changing the self as well as taking those selves to the public space rests in reading and following other, often competing interpretations of the Quran and Hadith along with other exegetical material and constantly bringing the ensuing understandings to bear upon current-day realities and requirements. Through such methods, the women seek to inculcate in themselves and their families deeper faith and practice, such as wearing the hijab and being meticulous in the daily prayers, as well as to create “responsible and productive” citizens. They refer to many of their outreach initiatives as “secular operations with religious undertones” and argue that the ultimate objective of living in the world is not only piety “which has its ebbs and flows,” but responsibility and accountability in creating a productive society. This phrasing reflects the attempt to make a religious agenda appear secondary to others—an effective way to draw in many (young) people towards productive community work and to disarm potential critics.

In making Islam relevant to the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the country, the women must contend with what is out there—the achievements of the development sector, the failures of twenty years of democracy, a political system that has seemingly placed religion on the backburner, and a displacement of the enchanted from “God to Bollywood.” The women, and many of their male peers, are knee-deep in thinking through how to put religion back on the table. What would be the best possible routes to achieve this task? In “effectively and productively” putting Islam back on the table, how does one stay true to God, self, and society? Thus, while the “secular-liberal” suspicion that these newly religious men and women have an agenda is not completely unfounded, their plan also consists of positing religion as a choice, albeit a very desirable and beneficial one. Such desirability of religious engagement may not keep religion in the private sphere, but it also does not approach the formal political space of the public sphere. These engagements thus not only strive to create new intersections of the religious and the secular, but also redefine and alter religious belief and rituals through dialogues, debates, and adjustments to perceived requirements of the day.

By drawing attention to the similarities in the presupposed subject of the newly religious and the secular Bangladeshis’ worldviews, I do not intend to blur distinctions and subject these women’s initiatives to either pseudo-Islamist or secular readings. What I would like to draw the reader to is the particular ways in which worlds are created through exchange and sharing and the particular language and attachments that allow them to arrive at their goals. To think about religious engagement in light of embodied practices through different modes of engagement within and outside the religious repertoire is an important exercise not only for an understanding of how religion advances in the world, but also for insights into whether, to what extent, and how all that is apparently secular delivers upon its promises.

The stakes of this conversation, especially for the field of development, in contexts such as Bangladesh and other parts of the developing world are high. The development paradigm promoted by state, donor, and NGO partnerships, which has presupposed a universal citizen subject has long kept the question of religious identity at bay. Advocates of liberal development models stand vindicated when Bangladesh does not come up on the World Economic Forum’s list of the top-ten countries ranked by the Global Gender Gap (GGG) index. Since the development process had ensured that women in Bangladesh fare better than those in India, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, and Egypt, amongst others, to bring to the surface how the religion question has been subsumed under and shaped by development initiatives, thus, seems not only unnecessary, but even dangerous. “Why spoil a good thing?” secular, pro-development advocates ask. But would such an insight necessarily be spoiling a good thing? Instead of preserving certain existing notions, would not a critical examination of the development process and its handling of and negotiations around religious identities open possibilities for a deeper understanding of how transformations actually occur? After all, religious identities, especially in the context of South Asia, have long been a part of one’s political and everyday existence. Religion, as far as I am concerned, has always been on the table.

I understand that if such an exercise reveals that the shaping and mediating mechanisms of the development process have stifled religious life, then secular advocates will fear sharp critiques by religious quarters, as experienced in 2003-2004 through Islamist attacks on BRAC schools. Since these events took place, several development organizations have kept as far away as possible from dealing with issues around religion. This distancing has neither silenced radical, Islamist voices, nor has it enabled a greater understanding of the dynamics of the development process or the growing appeal of faith-based development organizations. What is “Islamic” about Islamic microfinance and why is it on the rise? As a development model, does it operate on similar principles and presuppose the same normative subject as secular microfinance? These are important questions—not only because they allow us to better understand new trends, but also because they may lead to greater clarity on the effects of institutional arrangements that work upon religious ideas and practices to produce certain tangible outcomes. Exploring these questions will take away the monopoly of those who think that their (religious or secular) approaches offer the only solution. Coming at the issue without presumed distinctions between the religious and the secular, and the animosity often bred by that distinction, can lead to a better understanding of the development process, and to qualify how and why, for example, Bangladesh has managed to stay out of the list of the ten worst countries to live in for Muslim women. This research is crucial to lifting blinders that have historically been placed on groups that advocate both religion and secularism in dire opposition to one another. The gains of such an exercise would be invaluable to thinking about secularism, its limits and dispensations, and about religion as an ever-changing component of a secularizing, modern world.

1. In 2001, the imam of a small town in Ajara, a predominantly Muslim region of Georgia, told me: “During Communism we had more freedom; we still had our own lives. Now, we are losing everything.”
2. In 2004, I talked with a Pentecostal pastor in Kyrgyzstan about the history of his church, including the forms of opposition his church encountered in this Muslim-majority context. He remarked: “We pray for [local government] officials to stop hindering us. But this may not be God’s way. Our faith thrives when it is being repressed.”

These two examples reveal a rather odd nostalgia for religious repression, but they do so in quite distinct ways. The imam’s intimation, that the new era of “religious freedom” was less free than the era of repression, points to tensions that have accompanied the post-Soviet de-privatization of religion, which can render certain religious tenets more vulnerable or disadvantaged than they previously had been. By contrast, the Pentecostal pastor did not so much call “freedom” into question as suggest that freedom is not necessarily beneficial to a church like his own. The unstated logic was that “passionate religious movements” can only remain passionate as long as they provide their member with a sense of exclusivity. Neither the imam’s nor the pastor’s comments should be accepted at face value, but they do require a re-evaluation of what is meant by “religious repression” and “religious freedom.” Indirectly they draw attention to the role of the law, and here it is useful to provide two further examples.

1. In 2004, a functionary of the state committee of religious affairs in Kyrgyzstan lamented to me: “[These evangelical missionaries] only want to talk about rights, rights, rights! For them it is easy. After a few years they leave again, having no idea about the mess they leave behind.”
2. Studying the Tablighi Jamaat (an Islamic piety movement) in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, I asked how the 2009 law prohibiting proselytizing activities had impacted them. They were untroubled, in the words of one: “People have gotten used to our approach. This law is only intended for Jehovah Witnesses.”

The quotations both point to the role of the law, but do so in different ways. The functionary’s complaint about foreign religious groups “abusing” the law suggests that state laws are, at least in the case of Kyrgyzstan, not solely owned by the state. The notable point in the Tablighi example is that some groups are more vulnerable to the law than others. The first example suggests that the law can become a tool to advance the interests of some religious groups, and in the second example we see a glimpse of the uneven application of the law by power holders. In both cases we need to focus on the interplay between the law and the social field in which it operates.

In short, the quotations raise at least four important questions:

1. What forms or “freedom” does religious repression produce?
2. What constraints and inequalities are produced through religious freedom?
3. Who owns religious freedom laws?
4. How can religion laws be variously employed?

In this contribution I comment on each of these questions, using empirical material from Georgia and Kyrgyzstan to illuminate the contradictions of religious freedom and repression.

Freedom in repression and repression in freedom in Georgia

What was the nostalgia for religious repression expressed by the imam quoted in the introduction all about? The short answer is that repression and freedom imply each other in unexpected ways.

Importantly, the imam was not referring to the violent repressions of the 1930s but talked instead about the 1970s and 1980s, when religion was banned from much of public life, but a relatively stable status quo existed. During this period, Moscow’s anti-religious line did not always travel intact to local contexts. As has also been documented for Soviet Central Asia, local officials would sometimes participate in religious events such as circumcision feasts and Islamic funerals. The popular Soviet joke “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” could with some justification be translated into “they pretend to eradicate religion, and we pretend not to practice religion.”

Moreover, there is “freedom” in being able to affiliate oneself with a religion without having to conform to doctrinal demands. During Soviet times religious affiliation did not always have to be accompanied with other displays of commitment such as fasting, regular prayer, or abstaining from alcohol because the ban on religion made this either impossible or provided good excuses not to be bothered. The possibilities were convenient to those who were “not very religious,” but what about those who cared a great deal about their faith? The Pentecostal pastor quoted in the introduction alluded to the possibility that the intensity of faith-based communal life may depend on repression. Similar suggestions emerged from the stories of devout elderly men about life in the Soviet region of Ajara. The danger of being reported, restrictions on conducting religious rituals, and bans on religious literature produced an intensification of ties between committed members of a religious community.

None of this denies the horrific fate of the ten-thousands of clergy, the desperation of those who sent off their deceased in unholy manners, the countless people who lost their position because their relatives were linked to religious institutions. But it is nevertheless important to highlight some of the counterintuitive effects of religious repression: that repression creates opportunities (and some liberties), several of which were lost when the ban on religion was lifted.

The above does not yet clarify the imam’s implied indictment of post-Soviet religious “freedom.” The points to be stressed are that “freedom” may produce new inequalities and may reduce rather than boost commitment to religious communities.

This point was particularly sensitive for the imam, who struggled to persuade people to attend the Friday prayers and had been witnessing a steady process of conversion to Orthodox Christianity. It is important to mention that the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries and that the local population had converted to Islam during that time. When the region became part of Soviet Georgia (as an Autonomous Republic) its Georgian-speaking inhabitants were classified as Georgians even though their religious affiliation set them apart from other Georgians. The Soviet domestication of religion proved useful in the sense that it allowed Ajarans to continue to be Muslim at home while increasingly becoming secular (Soviet) Georgians in public. This fragile balance was disrupted when in the 1990s Georgian nationality was framed in Orthodox Christian terms. It is within this context that the imam’s nostalgia for religious repression makes perfect sense. Despite the specificities, the mentioned complications are instructive for other contexts as well, especially those in which notions of ethnicity and religion are closely entwined.

First, religious freedom changed expectations concerning religious affiliation. During Soviet times, identifying as a Muslim was often a matter of background. If you were Kyrgyz, Uzbek, or Ajaran, you were Muslim by default, irrespective of your knowledge of Islam and your conduct. But “nominal” dispositions became less acceptable when religious affiliation obtained more content. For significant groups of people this created problems. Can a Georgian be Muslim? Is it possible to be a divorced Muslim woman? Can you consider yourself Muslim when you drink alcohol or eat pork?

Second, “religious freedom” is more free for some than for others. In Ajara, Islam had to compete against a well-funded Orthodox Christian church, which was backed by a powerful national discourse according to which Georgians ought to be Christian. Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, many of the “traditional religions” felt that they were up against unfair competition of rich evangelical denominations with their basis in Western Europe or North America.

The end of Communism undeniably widened the scope for religious activity, but the return of religion to the public sphere also produced new tensions and new constraints. These ran from social pressure to participate in religious activities to new dynamics of exclusion that accompany the politicization of religion: the entanglement of religious and national identities, the sacralization of secular power, and the reverberations of the global discourse of terrorism. These ironies of Soviet and post-Soviet times warn against making simple assumptions about either “repression” or “freedom.”

Religious liberalization and its discontents in Kyrgyzstan

The case of Kyrgyzstan is instructive because of the speed with which the country lifted restrictions on religious activity after 1990. Forum 18, a Scandinavia-based religious rights NGO, mentioned that in Kyrgyzstan “both registered and unregistered religious communities were able to function freely” between the early 1990s and 2005. The deputy director of the State Agency for Religious Affairs pointed out to me in 2004: “Our laws on religion are far more liberal than those held by European countries.”  He was not boasting of the democratic credentials of his country, but rather bemoaning what he saw as a chaotic situation. The implied rift between the state and its laws prompt the question: Who owns the law? And related: What possibilities exist for using and manipulating the law?

The Kyrgyz government’s embrace of religious freedom was part of a larger foreign-designed “shock therapy” package that was accepted by the Kyrgyz government in the early 1990s. These reforms had unforeseen and often undesired effects. Contradicting all expert knowledge, the dismantling of the planned economy failed to attract the hoped-for foreign direct investment. In the religious sphere, by contrast, the government had assumed that “traditional religions” would resume their activities, but above and beyond that, liberalization triggered massive religious “foreign direct investment,” of which evangelical missions and Islamic piety movements such as the Tablighi Jamaat were the most visible and successful. The data suggest that in Kyrgyzstan, liberalization was particularly beneficial to religious groups with transnational (financial) connections, which had a strong mission component, focused on the individual, and stressed that faith and culture should be disentangled. Kyrgyz politicians perceived these developments as a threat to the collective good, and after several failed attempts to amend existing law, in 2009 a new Religion Law was adopted which outlawed proselytizing and prohibited religious activities that undermined national integrity.

The 2009 Religion Law threatened to severely restrict the activities of “non-traditional” religions, triggering the protests from religious rights movements and representatives of evangelical churches. Apart from several raids on Jehovah Witnesses and some closures of evangelical Churches, the full effects of the Religion Law are not yet clear because in 2010 the government was ousted from power and replaced with a potentially more liberal but weak temporary government. Still, it is useful to refer back to the Tablighi quoted in the introduction, who were unperturbed by the adoption of the new Religion Law, despite officially rendering illegal their central practice of davit (proselytizing tours).

This untroubled attitude indicated a realistic view of the fragility of the law, combined with a conviction that God’s plan cannot be known. I already alluded to the idea that repression may positively contribute to the intensity of religious experience. This idea resonated in the Tablighi’s heroic stories about the suspicion they encountered in the 1990s. These stories also revealed that the liberal laws of the 1990s were more useful to religious groups who fit the “freedom image” than those who were easily associated with danger (such as the Tablighi). The implementation of the repressive 2009 Religion Law was equally partial. During the preceding decade the Tablighi had strengthened their links to the Muftiate of Kyrgyzstan while their activities had gained (reluctant) acceptance among the population and secular authorities. The Tablighi were untroubled by the legal changes because their integration in a number of informal orders had made them less vulnerable to the letter of the law. However, groups that had not been able to secure such a position—because they were disconnected or because they were disliked—found themselves in an increasingly vulnerable position.

Final note

One point of this paper has been to illuminate the uneven effects of freedom and repression on different religious groups, depending on the position they occupy in society. Another point has been to stress that “freedom” and “repression” do not exist as absolutes and might imply each other in a number of ways. Both points suggest that the “religious freedom” rhetoric should not be taken for granted. But the conclusion should certainly not be that there is little difference between “freedom” and “repression.” I agree with Sullivan that liberal laws are not able to protect religious freedom, maybe especially when the law itself is fragile. But even if it cannot guarantee rights, this does not indicate irrelevance. Its relevance need not be about the protection that is offered, but about the ways in which the law can be used and manipulated.

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.

And the possibilities, at least in those first days, were seemingly endless. Some stressed continuity with the past, riffing off the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM, the former southern rebel movement, then political party, and the current government of South Sudan) secretary general Pagan Amum’s comments at the independence ceremony when he lowered the old Sudanese flag for the last time—in preparation for the raising of the South Sudanese flag—telling the crowd that he would not be handing it over to Khartoum in a gesture of good riddance, but rather would hold on to it in the soon to be formed national archive, in memory of the shared history, the shared struggle, and indeed the shared future that northerners and southerners have and would continue to experience together. Others imagined a cleaner break. One bilingual sign held high at the independence ceremonies read, “From this day our identity is southern and African and not Arab and Islamic. We are not the worst of Arabs, but rather the best of Africans” (the sign was, I should note, in both Arabic, from which I translate, and choppy English, held up at an ceremony largely conducted in Arabic, still the de facto lingua franca of South Sudan despite official efforts to switch to English, and thus belying the difficulties inherent in making such a clean break overnight). The discursive historical reality of independence, of sharp bold-lines on the map, was matched in intensity by the sociological reality of entanglement (by choice and by force), of blurry lines. North and South could not be so easily disaggregated.

The tension between a model that stressed continuity with the past and one that proposed a break with what was certainly a painful history plagued Muslim South Sudanese perhaps most of all. Muslim South Sudanese, who make up a significant portion of the population, are individuals whose very identity challenges the distinct categories for which “clean break” models of partition strive. Islam came primarily from the North (from which the South was now separating), tying together families, trade routes, and pilgrimage networks, despite aggressive British colonial efforts to stop its spread. These links were not so easily sundered. While many non-Muslim South Sudanese had assumed that Islam was a political identity, somehow tied to the North, and imagined mass-apostasy coinciding with southern independence, South Sudanese Muslims insisted that to be southern and Muslim was not a contradiction in terms. Continuity with a past in which southern Muslims suffered discrimination in the North for being southerners and in the South for being Muslims at a time of rebellion against (at least in part) state-driven Islamization, did not seem like a good option. (I should note, though, that this latter discrimination was by no means universal: Muslims were part and parcel of the SPLM throughout the war.) Though the sentiment certainly was not universal, the vast majority of Muslims with whom I spoke in the summer of 2011 favored southern independence, a clean break from the North, and were actively debating how Muslim identity had changed under the new political arrangements they’d entered (South Sudanese Muslims had gone from being part of what demographers call a national majority, to being a “minority group” literally over night, and without traveling anywhere). The nature of “South Sudanese Islam” was being renegotiated, but most seemed to agree that the particular cultural stamp of the North would have to be transcended if the name of Islam was to wash out the stain of its bad reputation acquired during the war and flourish in the new state.

On the other hand, the notion of a clean break that sought to define South Sudan as explicitly non-Muslim (whether or not it was thereby “Christian” was a topic of debate, to which I will return below) and non-Arab made South Sudanese Muslims worry that the “New Sudan” imagined by John Garang, which was to embrace Sudanese of all religions and ethnicities, was quickly taking on an ethnically and religiously exclusive color. Muslim communities feared persecution in the new state after decades of civil war in which Islamization, if not Islam, was portrayed as a prime adversary to southern flourishing. The uneven (but active) banning of headscarfs in southern public schools after the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, which reverted control of the South to southerners, led to protests in at least one major Muslim center I visited (the city of Malakal) and the founding of a Muslim girls school there. The banning of religious political organizations forwarded by the new Advisor to the Presidency on Religious Affairs was taken by many Muslims to be directed at Islam, as Christian majority parties (under secular names) were certainly plentiful. Such incidents further raised suspicion that the equality and secularism that the new government was promising was a coded way of promoting “tyranny of the majority” and a state from which Muslim communities would be marginalized. The southern state’s resistance to a quota system (in which a certain amount of ministries or parliamentary seats would be given to Muslims qua Muslims), under the logic of blindness to religious identity, led to a short-lived but significant armed rebellion in Northern Bahr al-Ghazzal—active during the time I was in South Sudan, but now quelled—demanding 30 percent representation for Muslims in the new government.

The desire to “politically transform difference into sameness,” as Saba Mahmood has put it, has certainly been at the top of the state’s agenda in its quest to establish something called a South Sudanese citizen out of the dizzyingly diverse cultures, languages, and religions that make up the demographic landscape. What that “sameness” was to consist in, and what degree of diversity was still possible in spite of it, was a primary object of debate. My recent research—part of a multi-site project on religious minorities in Sudan and South Sudan following partition, conducted by Centre d’Ètudes et de Documentation Èconomique, Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) and the University of Khartoum—explores the mechanics of nation-building in South Sudan with particular attention to the fate of Muslim minorities following independence. Through field research in the national capital of Juba and the northern (South Sudanese) city of Malakal, I hope to understand what it means to be constituted as a religious minority under the regime of international religious freedom at the very moment in which this resignification—from “southerners” practicing Islam to a South Sudanese minority community of believers with a specific retinue of national rights and duties—takes place.

In a nation where neither tribes, nor regions, nor even individual families are traditionally divided on the basis of religion, how will South Sudan’s adoption of internationalist languages of religious freedom, and the concomitant constituting of Muslims as a distinct demographic, affect the existing social fabric in which it is easy to find households containing Muslims, Christians, and adherents of local traditions under the same roof? While there certainly have been Muslim communities across the South for some time, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of Muslim leaders did not emerge from those communities but were converts. Why have these “new Muslims” taken on such a prominent role in the organizational structures of the emergent Muslim minority? What makes them, rather than the entrenched Muslim communities, so much more suitable for the formation of a Muslim civil society that the state seems to both fear and demand?

Such individuals live in households that are extremely diverse (a father who follows the Prophet Ngundeng, a Christian Mother, and Muslim son is not at all uncommon) and one wonders how (or perhaps if) this status quo will be interrupted by the emergent notion of confessional community that is being forwarded by Muslim organizations and state demographers alike. I came to recognize early in my research that, though old established Muslim neighborhoods existed, the bulk of my work was being done not with Muslim communities, but rather with Muslim individuals and the associations they had joined. Most of these Muslims seemed to experience religion as a mode of being that did not necessitate the discarding of other modes of belonging (tribe, family, social class, etc.). Indeed, even the associational spaces themselves (Muslim councils and organizations, mosques, etc.) were not as restricted as one might assume. For example, at the Islamic Council for South Sudan office in Malakal, a good portion of the young men hanging out in the inner courtyard were in fact Christians and followers of traditional faiths: this space was by no means restricted as a Muslim gathering place. The modern state’s voracious appetite for categorization, and that of those who have been stamped by its logic, may have trouble coming to terms with the lack of neat lines demanded by international regimes of religious freedom in order to dole out their goods (protection from persecution, the development of networks with global “communities of faith,” etc.), neat lines drawn on a map wherein what constitutes religion and religious belonging are far more settled than they are on the ground.

One wonders what particular iteration “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. The Transitional Constitution of South Sudan nowhere mentions “Freedom of Religion” but rather offers a very specific retinue of “religious rights” (Article 23). On the ground, the new government has not been shy about managing and taxonomizing religions, minority and majority—policing the line that divides religion and state, and even religious orthodoxy itself. Government offices registered “Faith Based Organizations” and often rejected applications of, for example, “Christian” organizations “if the constitution of a particular group is not lining up with the Biblical chapters or verses,” as one Inspector in the Bureau of Religious Affairs put it to me. This effort formed part of a program to protect the nation from what he called “cults,” although which groups would qualify as Christian and Muslim and which as “cults” was still in flux during the time I was there. One wonders if these inspectors’ interest in doctrinal purity might indeed be a coming to life of Beth Hurd’s notion that the prevailing “foreclosure on religion without belief” by international regimes of religious freedom “leave little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside…‘faith communities’….[for] it endows hierarchical authorities with the power to represent and pronounce on what is or is not religious belief deserving of special protection or sanction.”

I do not wish to come to premature conclusions about what form “religious freedom” will take in South Sudan. I was there in the early days of the formation of this new state and the situation was still very much in flux. The intelligence and good will of the government servants I met—who had often left comfortable lives abroad to suffer much risk and hardship in service of building a new Sudan—suggests to me that a bright future is certainly not out of reach. The new state of South Sudan promised (and in its early days certainly has achieved) a very different approach to the relationship between religion and politics from that of the Sudan southerners had lived under until July 9, in which the central government in Khartoum had attempted to craft an “Islamic state.” However, the variety of secularism to be instantiated in the new state, particularly in a context in which voices calling for a Christian nation were still very loud, was still up in the air. As I walked the streets of Juba, listening to the new national anthem played over and over (“Oh God, we praise and glorify you, for your grace on South Sudan”), I wondered not only where Muslims would figure into the imaginings of this new nation, but where all the “African traditional religions” (or “ATRs,” as government officials called the variety of ancestor veneration, spirit, and divination practices extent in South Sudan) would figure into the national image. While there was an explicit attempt to give time to Muslim and Christian prayer in official fora, such as at the independence ceremony when a Christian benediction as well as verses from the Qur’an were recited, symbols of these traditional practices were not present at the podium. The official party line seems to be that ATRs should be represented within the state, constituted as distinct faith communities (“diin”s, as expressed in my Arabic-language interviews with government officials), minorities on the same footing as Islam and under the shadow of the dominant Christian faith. However, scholars of South Sudan (affirmed by a personal communication with Dr. Cherry Leonardi) point out that to think of such “traditional” practices as distinct confessions does not represent the reality of South Sudanese who may identify as Christians and at the same time see no contradiction in maintaining these rites and rituals. One wonders, then, what the state’s attempt to constitute such practices as discrete “religions” (and distinctly not part of what it means to be Christian) will have on those engaged in such practices, and whether it will make this kind of lived hybridity between Christianity and other modes of approaching the divine less sustainable, thus rendering Christianity and ATRs as much more polar forms of identity than they are currently. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether an official Council of Traditional Religions, constructed to represent ATRs, will indeed be forthcoming, as some officials promised me it would, for indeed others assured me that traditional religions had no place in South Sudan’s future, being relics of a past that Christianity had superseded.

The seal of the new Bureau of Religious Affairs (at right) expresses graphically what the national ideal may come to be: a large cross at the center, with a smaller hilaal (representing Islam) and a spear (representing “traditional religions”) at either side, indicating, it seems, a Christian-majority state in which other “religions,” safely construed and confined as minorities, would be protected. What exactly will have been freed through this arrangement, and what this freedom will entail for the newfound minorities and majorities, is yet to be determined.

I teach The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my introduction to religion class because it juxtaposes the racial exclusivity of the Nation of Islam—an exclusivity that the students judge as spiritually bankrupt—with the inclusivity Malcolm X claimed for Islam after his pilgrimage to Mecca—an inclusivity that is regularly hailed as the mark of genuine spirituality. Malcolm’s story is, in other words, a great way to start conversations about how we judge religion and how assumptions about spirituality affect those judgments. What did (and do) “real” Muslims think about the Nation of Islam, students often ask. There are many ways to answer that question. But none better than a story like this one. Listen to this, I say. The hat that Elijah Muhammad wore, with the symbols that defined the distinctively African-American spirituality cultivated by the Nation of Islam, was made by a doctor from Pakistan. Or by a seamstress in Lahore, as my friend pointed out last night.

Shakeela Hassan’s story is then also a story about Frequencies. Not (or not yet) a genealogy as much as a story about juxtapositions and materiality, or the juxtapositions that constitute the materiality of spirituality. It is in this form that spirituality gains contour and some specificity in 100 entries, each announced by titles that give little away, proclaiming the impossibility of containing the subject by opting for the elliptical, the obscure, the unusual, the surprising. The governing order is alphabetical; the encyclopedic logic turned inside out with series of entries that make no claim to totalizing knowledge.

Are you being ironic? A friend of mine, a musician and a funny man, is often asked because all his stories are true, and unbelievable. Are you being ironic? There’s no irony here, or there. No distance between what appears, and what is true. In Frequencies, spirituality is brought to the surface. It is all there to be seen. Described in the project statement as a digital compendium, Frequencies demonstrates the irrelevance of the weighty Latin etymology (com-pendere: to weigh together). By the same token, Frequencies rejects the linked metaphors of depth and transcendence that are conventionally understood to define spirituality. It instead presents spirituality as planar relations, a network of terms linked to one another by their coincident appearance on a screen and to other terms and images by whatever links the readers choose to follow and create.

As Jonathan Schorsch observes of the sexy angels in “The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” often enough “the visual metaphor of the spiritual subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures.” If this is true, Schorsch says, the joke is on high art. This could just as well mean that the joke is on religion. Teresa of Avila, designated a doctor of the Catholic Church, describes being pierced by an angel. But the marble statue by Bernini depicts an orgasmic woman. Émile Durkheim says that the totem is the sacred itself. This means the sacred is the fat of a kangaroo or the tail of an opossum. Religion doesn’t get the joke, though, because in religion the subversion often works the other way. Incarnations of Vishnu, like the discovery of a dead lama reincarnated in a ten-year-old-boy or the teaching that Christ was fully human and fully divine, are held up as fundamentals by religions that affirm that the profane subverts itself by revealing the sacred.

In Frequencies, however, spirituality is not rooted in a claim about the relationship between carnal and spiritual, or sacred and profane. Spirituality is not religion. As Kerry Mitchell says in his entry on “Paradox,” citing Niklas Luhmann, “In the realm of the observable (where else?), the difference between the observable and the non-observable must be made observable. [Religion] does not deal with the one or the other side of this distinction but with their form: with the distinction as such.” Religion is all about the distinctions that clarify relations.

By contrast, the spirituality we encounter in Frequencies leaves aside distinctions in favor of examples.

There is more than one kind of example. We could—as early modern Europeans loved to do—view examples as exemplary: understood in this way, the example is the fulfillment of what it represents. But it is now more common to understand example as exemplar: as one of many, demonstrative but not sufficient. The examples in Frequencies are of the latter sort. Avowedly idiosyncratic, these entries are presented as part of a proliferating series, requiring readers to do the all-important work of comparison to move beyond the singularity that might otherwise seem to be the only claim made on behalf of stories like Shakeela Hassan’s and the 99 others in Frequencies.

If each example is one of many, how do we understand the spirituality they are presented as examples of? Here I take my cue from Eve Sedgwick, the pioneering queer theorist whose last book, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performance, explored an alternative to the critical practices her own earlier work had championed. Much of her own literary analysis (think here of her famous article “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”) was dedicated to exposing the hidden, the unseen, the unsuspected. Wearying of this endless cycle of exposure and wanting to find some way around the “topos of depth or hiddenness,” she focused instead on the “spatial positionality of beside.” This, I believe, is what the entries in Frequencies instantiate: the besideness of spirituality. Juxtapositions instead of depth, visibility instead of transcendence, and examples instead of distinctions. It is all on the surface, but it is not self-evident. Just as the seamstress in Lahore escaped my gaze—and my telling—so too spirituality itself as a concept might well escape the gaze of those caught in the rhythm of unexpected frequencies. The work is just beginning.

My own interest in the relationship between the religious and the secular centers less around the way the former gave way to the latter than on how the latter has often been created in no small measure out of elements of the religious, elements that emerge as much from a relaxation of its constraints as from an outright repudiation of them. Thus what to other specialists may appear in actual processes of secularization to be a dismissal or negation of the religious often presents itself to cultural historians and theorists to be more than not a reconstruction of the world out of some of those same interpretive and imaginative activities that religion itself set free and that must now be brought into play if some alternative vision of life, experience, or the really real is to take its place.

Robert Bellah has articulated what I mean to identify about this process in his magisterial new book Religion in Human Evolution, where he insists repeatedly that the history of this process, both from one human stage to another—the mimetic, to the mythic, to the theoretic—and from one religious formation to another—the archaic, to the tribal, to the axial—reveals that each stage or phase succeeds what proceeded it not by supplanting or superseding it but by reorganizing and readapting it in new ways. Axial religion does not destroy tribal or archaic religion but makes itself out of elements of the former two that it reconfigures for its own purposes. Hence the emergence of new forms does not require, and cannot take place, by their simple disembedding from older ones. Earlier stages of religious development, as in all evolutionary schemes, are “not lost,” as Bellah argues with the assistance of Merlin Donald, “but only restructured under new conditions.”

This has inevitably drawn me to think again about the argument that Charles Taylor has made in his own magisterial A Secular Age and then restated in the volume in his essay on “Western Secularity.” His is an argument of immense sophistication and complexity that is not insensible of the way the secular is made out of components of the religious, and particularly its interpretive and imaginative energies when they are released from their embeddedness in theological structures, but I am persuaded that his way of modeling this process has cultural and historical problems that Peter Katzenstein’s essay from the same volume on “Civilizational States, Secularism, and Religion” conceptually and historically avoids.

Taylor is clearly aware that the terms “secular” and “religious” have very different meanings in different traditions, which is precisely Talal Asad’s point in his discussion on blasphemy in Rethinking Secularism, but Taylor’s essential proposition that from the seventeenth century onward in the West the secular became a domain understood to be inhospitable to any claim made in the name of transcendence, “that the lower, immanent or secular, order is all that there is and that the higher, or transcendent, is a human invention,” is, at least from a cultural and historical perspective, seriously problematic, if not misleading. Yet before turning to what I find troubling about Taylor’s account of the relation between the religious and the secular in Western spirituality, let me say something first about the narrative Taylor is trying in important ways to correct.

That narrative is a coming-of-age story which has most recently been expressed in one of two ways. In the first, which is found in the work of the late American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, the secular is the result of a process of de-divinization that began, initially, with metaphysical idealism’s attempt to relocate the sphere of ultimate reality not beyond but within human experience; then led to Romanticism’s claim that if ultimate reality is now immanent rather than transcendent, its meanings can be described in more than one vocabulary; and eventually wound up with pragmatism’s assertion that these different vocabularies are ultimately no more than different ways of expressing what we need but only sometimes get. In the second narrative, really genealogy, of the secular, this sequence of historical transformations follows a course charted by Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, where the love of God gave way, first, in the seventeenth century, to the love of truth, until the love of truth gave way, by the end of the eighteenth century, to the quasi-divinity of the self, and the idealist or Romantic love of the self succumbed, toward the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, to the realization, variously phrased by Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that now nothing can be worshipped as divine, since everything, in effect, is a product of contingencies. In short, the world has not only lost all its transcendent reference but has been emptied of intrinsic significance.

Taylor’s object is to challenge this narrative by complicating it, and he complicates it by showing that the move from a transcendentalist spiritual perspective associated with Late Medieval Latin Christianity to an immanentist spiritual perspective by the seventeenth century was made possible because of the adaptation of religious ideas about the porous character of selfhood to a to a more buffered sense of the self. Here a new religious perspective is being partially remade out of components of the old, but for Taylor the process is one of irremediable loss rather than gain. The modern self is not only dissociated from the realm of transcendence associated with the Late Middle Ages but is now disposed to view religion itself as but one choice among others in the new wholly immanent sphere where, at least for many evangelicals in America, as Alan Wolfe and others have argued, the spiritual challenge is not to get right with God but to get God right with, or for, the self.

While I lack the space to do justice to Taylor’s many-layered explanation of this process, its difficulties become clear in his discussion of the notion of “enchantment,” which he, with Max Weber, takes to be the differentiating essence of Western Christian spirituality before it began what he describes as its “long march to secularism.” The problem with Taylor’s treatment of enchantment is that it is exceptionalist and, at least in the metaphor he uses here, too unidirectional, homogenous, and degenerative. By exceptionalist I mean that Taylor treats enchantment, or the experience of living in what he calls a “magical universe,” as something limited primarily to Christians alone and dependent on the kind of theological transcendentalism that Taylor posits as its precondition. But it is comparatively easy to argue, as Bellah has, for example, that if the experience of enchantment can be said to have been definitively expressed in a well known passage about the fullness of Being from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative,” it has also been expressed in virtually the same terms by former Czech President Vaclav Havel in one of his remarkable letters from prison before he became the leader of the Velvet Revolution. Enchantment in response to a universe experienced as suffused with a sense of divine presence can as easily be evoked, some might argue, by the most abstract natural landscapes of the great nineteenth-century English painter John Constable as by some of the Southwestern canvases of Georgia O’Keefe. The sense of living as a porous self open to the infinite above is, by personal testimony, as easily accessible to astro-physicists (or anyone else capable of reckoning on this scale) who can contemplate a universe composed of up to five hundred billion galaxies like our own Milky Way, which is itself composed of hundreds of billions of stars such as our own Sun, as it can be by ancient Christians, Zoroastrians, or other cosmologists. Taylor might reply that these representations and experiences of enchantment are, at best, intermittent and do not derive from habitation in a spirit or Being-filled world, but surely no one, including saints in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, lived in a continuously enchanted world open to the fullness of Being except in moments, and they needed all the trappings of ritual, symbols, music, and the visual to do so.

Indeed, in the late Middle Ages one of the explicit purposes of Christian art was to assist communicants in developing and preserving a religious sense they were always in danger, even the most pious, of losing. Take, for example, the relationship between Quattrocento painting and Early Modern Roman Catholicism in fifteenth-century Italy. Such painting existed not only, or even mainly, to reflect spiritual concerns but also, as Michael Baxendall has demonstrated, to enrich and augment, and thus change, them however subtly. The artist was interested in doing more than depicting religious material on canvas; he was even more eager to invite the beholder to reflect on it in a specifically religious manner. In other words, the artist’s aim was not merely illustrative or even exegetical but evocative. His public did not need what it already possessed; what it needed, in Clifford Geertz’s words, “was an object rich enough to see it in, rich enough, even, in seeking it, to deepen it.”

Geertz is here drawing on a view of culture, and particularly of the role of the imagination in culture, which assumes that culture in its more creative dimensions is not additive but generative, not merely transcriptive but provocative, that it changes the thing it engages and in ways that are very difficult to map or narrate in linear or sequential form. Despite Taylor’s abundant qualifications, his account of the transformations in the relations between religion and the secular is too episodic and successive, as if the break between the transcendental and immanental was sharp, successive, and final. Taylor would—and does—reply that German and English Romantics were among those who attempted to recover a sense of unmediated Being, but he believes they were doomed from the start because they were already working within what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.” But just how immanent was the frame assumed by Romantics in the West if it deserves the description M.H. Abrams definitively gave it as “natural supernaturalism?” In any case, this is a cosmology that has lived a vigorous afterlife in the modern poetry of everyone from Rainer Marie Rilke to Paul Verlaine, and Wallace Stevens to A.R. Ammons.

Second, his presentation of Latin Christianity is too uniform and, for want of a better term, sanitary. What of the masses of people who lived on the edges of this system, often in utterly wretched conditions, or perhaps within its center, but clung to earlier forms of archaic, tribal, and clanish religion that were vernacular, profane, folk, or improvised? I can remember my former colleague at the University of Chicago, the great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, continually complaining to a faculty that made much of its own intellectual strength in the history of Christianity that there was too little history in it. What was being left out of most traditional accounts of Christianity, despite Peter Brown, were the irregular metaphysics, the disruptive logics, the unruly heterodoxies, and the powerful paganisms of people who may have been subjected to the theological and institutional governance of Latin Christendom but who at the same time worshipped their own, as the Anglican prayer refers to them, “ghoulies, ghosties and goblins.” Even more likely, as well as distracting and clearly divisive, was the presence of the carnivalesque, the parodistic, the perverse, the subversive, the sacrilegious, the scatological, the entire realm of Gargantua and Pantagruel, of Rabelaisian, Bakhtian excess that was always threatening to disturb the noise of solemn assemblies and crack the dome of the sacred canopy.

Third and finally, Taylor’s argument conforms to the subtraction theory even as it disavows it—secularism is not only different from religion but less. Where secularism emerges in Taylor’s narrative, religion not only changes but is fatefully, or at least emotionally and existentially, diminished. But that, I would suggest, is not exactly how it happened. The religious and the secular have not only coexisted in their modern formations—Taylor wouldn’t disagree—but actually adjusted to, and profited from, the rearrangements and adjustments required for co-existence with the other. Such was clearly the case with the United States, which is why so many religious scholars consider America to have been the one Western exception to the rule that secularism displaces religion rather than the exception that proves the rule that, as Peter Katzenstein argues, “secularization and religion…were deeply entangled at the outset of the modern state system and have remained so ever since…and the sociological turn in international-relations theory makes it possible to deploy now commonly accepted categories of analysis—culture, identity, norm, idea, ideology—to probe once more the connections between secularism and religion in international politics.”

Katzenstein’s thesis is that we will not fully understand how secularisms and religions intermingle in global politics—and I would add global social life—until we revise our understanding of how such matters are determined culturally in considerable part by civilizational, and not merely by religious or secular, processes. Here he turns to Randall Collins’s notion of civilizations as zones of prestige which radiate outward to create networks of attraction and repulsion. Rather than viewing civilizations and their components as cultural codes to be deciphered, Collins construes them as sets of relationships and activities that exert magnetism because of the dialogues, debates, and disagreements at their center, thus attracting admirers, challenging uniformity, and stimulating creativity and change. Hence the differences and conflicts around which they organize collective life can become at least as determinative and influential as the structures of assent and consent by which they govern their relations. Emulation and rejection of particular zones of prestige—religion, science, the public sphere, aesthetics—within or between civilizational systems can be deeply entwined, which creates the possibility of cultural commensurabilities being created across civilizational formations that are otherwise quite different. This creates what Katzenstein calls a “polymorphic globalism” in which “various intersections of secularisms and religions are created through never-ending processes of mutual cooperation, adaptation, coordination, and conflict.”

Does this mean that this globalism will be more secular than religious? Hardly. Think merely of the liberal, democratic sentiments that organized political resistance in Tahrir Square (along with a good deal of collective feeling about just being fed up) and the Islamist politics that have replaced it. Or, the possibility of a Rick Santorum Presidency in the United States. Or, better, the reason why the civilization of Latin Christendom was first able to unite, according to Karl Deutsch, and then fated to split. His argument that the spiritual, political, and cultural unity of medieval Christendom—defined by a common Latin language, the legal and spiritual authority of the Pope, the governance structures of the Holy Roman Empire, the military and missionary adventures of the Crusades, the styles of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture—was a transitory rather than seminal stage in history, and was destroyed by the very forces that gave rise to it, couldn’t be further from Taylor’s explanation. Drawing on a model of cultural commensurabilities and overlaps that function as networks of prestige, attraction, and coordination, Deutsch asserts that the economic foundation of the international civilization of Latin Christendom was based on a scarcity of goods, services, and personnel that enabled the growth of a thin web of supranational trading companies sharing language, customs, laws, traditions, family connections, and religion. Capable of traveling over long distances, these trading companies eventually created a superficial internationalism knit together by commerce, intellectual life, politics, and faith. Initially involving three civilizations and two trading peoples, Latin Christianity by the thirteenth century had prevailed over the challenges of Byzantine civilization, Islam on the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere, the Jewish diaspora, and Viking conquests, but was then compelled to face its own demise as increasing contacts among village, manor, town, and sect enabled the rate of sectarian division and then regional migration to outpace the rate of international assimilation. What followed was the loss of the thin internationalism provided by Latin Christianity in favor of a more polymorphous regional and creedal differentiation to which modern nationalism subsequently gave rise, but only because the nation and its imperial aspirations could as easily become a vessel for religious enchantments and control as the seemingly more religion-based and ecclesiastically-centered civilization it replaced.

This brings me back to some of the ideas with which I started where, from a cultural perspective, it would appear that the transition from the religious to the secular is less accurately described or modeled as a structure of displacement and substitution than of recovery and adaptation. There is and has been marked change, to be sure, but to go back to Bellah’s discussion of the evolution of religion itself, it is not most accurately figured as a sharp break with the past so much as a repossession and rearrangement of it under new circumstances.