In my opening post, I suggested that a second assumption underpinning the Chicago Report is that American foreign policy should more effectively engage with and support the “good Muslims.” In this post, I seek once again to consider the coherence and plausibility of this prescription. Is it really true that you can read people’s political behavior from their religion or culture? Again, as Mamdani asks:

Could it be that a person who takes his or her religion literally is a potential terrorist? And only someone who thinks of the text as not literal, but as metaphorical or figurative, is better suited to civic life and the tolerance it calls for? How, one may ask, does the literal reading of religious texts translate into hijacking, murder, and terrorism?

This raises the complex question of what, in the words of Saba Mahmood, “constitutes religion and a proper religious subjectivity in the modern world,” and how such a conception relates to the language and normative structure of religious freedom in international law and politics. It is not possible here to address the details of such a complex set of issues, but let me offer just a couple of observations and lines of inquiry for future thought and discussion.

A useful place to start is Kant’s essay on Toward Perpetual Peace, discussed at the start of these comments. Recall that Kant’s chief complaint with the “sorry comforters”—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—was that their versions of natural law lacked all “legal force” in restraining the belligerence of nation states. For Kant, law is not just a vocabulary of governmental technique or an instrument of governance. It is, rather, a political project to bring about what he enigmatically termed the “Kingdom of Ends.” To end war, one must eradicate the warlike disposition of nations and, indeed, of mankind itself. Perpetual peace can thus only be achieved in the form of a world republican federation governed by a law of global justice, what Kant called “cosmopolitan right.”

Herein lies Kant’s suggested path to Enlightenment—the throwing off of the self-imposed immaturity that comes from alien guidance by, inter alia, religion and recognition of the dormant inner “moral disposition” through which man can “eventually become the master of the evil principle within him.” Koskenniemi describes this idea of freedom as follows:

For Kant, freedom was not the indiscriminate realization of one’s passions or interests—indeed, this was immaturity…. Freedom could exist only as looking beyond such contingencies. To be free was to make one’s will harmonious to universal reason—a reason according to which one should always act in accordance with what one can simultaneously will as universal law. Where enlightenment lay in reliance on reason, freedom consisted in the acceptance of what reason dictated as duty.

It is on account of this uniquely “rational” normative understanding of freedom—“acceptance of what reason dictated as duty”—that Kant criticized the early modern natural lawyers.

As Ian Hunter has argued, Kant’s principles of morality and right are grounded in a comprehensive “Christian-Platonic anthropology deeply embedded in the history of north-German Protestant university metaphysics.” On the basis of this metaphysical view, Kant characterized man as “the empirical harbinger of a pure rational being”—homo noumenon—who, by intelligizing the pure forms of experience and governing the will by thinking the idea, or form, of its law, was “supposed to free himself from the ‘sensuous inclinations’ that otherwise tie the will of empirical man (homo phenomenon) to extrinsic ends or goods.” This metaphysical account of human rationality provides the basis for the two central tenets of Kant’s moral philosophy:

These are his conception of the good will as one that transcends distracting sensuous inclinations by spontaneously conforming itself to pure reason’s intellection of the idea of the law; and his conception of moral community as the ‘kingdom of ends in themselves’ that is formed when the universe of rational beings is joined through transparent reciprocal willing in accordance with this intellection.

There are two points I wish to make here regarding this metaphysical view and its projection into Kant’s notions of an “ideal republic” and the ius gentium. The first concerns the type of constraint that is imposed on religion by Kant’s notion of the good will. This is a recognizably Protestant understanding of religion in terms of interiorized (or “privatized”) and “freely chosen” conscience, or belief. In this particular historically contingent form, we see the unique double-bind that, today, still defines the secular liberal notion of religious freedom as an individual right.

As Saba Mahmood suggests, “contrary to the ideological self-understanding of secularism (as the doctrinal separation of religion and state), secularism has historically entailed the regulation and re-formation of religious beliefs, doctrines and practices to yield a particular normative conception of religion (that is largely Protestant Christian in its contours).” John Locke thus justified his theory of the right to freedom of conscience by the Protestant argument that conscience was directly bound to obey and follow God and not men; a theory of “the free and at the same time unfree conscience.”

Such premises in turn provide the defining ideas of the liberal state: neutrality and a putative public/private divide. Religion is seen as being separated from the state and “privatized,” that is, removed to a private, intimate sphere. This leaves a “neutral” public sphere that seeks to maintain its neutrality through rigorous commitment to a scheme of individual rights. The state may thus have no cultural or religious projects, or, indeed, any collective goals of its own, beyond the protection of the liberty and security of its citizens.

This view of religion and religious freedom imposes significant constraints on both the individual and the state. The individual must restrain her will according to the law of universal reason by transcending any “distracting sensuous inclinations” and by containing her religion to the private sphere of conscience or belief. The state, for its part, must remain “neutral” between all religions and beliefs, and between religion and non-religion, by both rigorously protecting the neutrality of its public sphere and not interfering in the (private) autonomous sphere of conscience and belief.

Again, as Mahmood observes, the secular state in this way has not simply cordoned off religion from its regulatory ambitions, but sought to remake it through the agency of the law—a remaking “shot through with tensions and paradoxes.”  In this respect, the process of democratic self-government and the space of public debate can be seen as a space, not simply of expression and rational deliberation, but of formation, in which “coercive, regulatory, and rhetorical power is necessary in order to produce the right kind of citizen subject who can inhabit the norms of a liberal democratic polity” (my emphasis).

The best extant illustration of this liberal double-bind is, of course, the Religion Clauses in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibit the “establishment” of religion while at the same time protecting its “free exercise.” These two notions are—both normatively and historically—deeply intertwined. The state can only maintain its neutrality and duty of non-interference if the individuals subject to the constitutional order both accept the form of separation mediated by the public/private divide and understand their right to free exercise of religion in the rational, protestant terms (as private belief or conscience) that I have described.

It is this deep tension within liberal theory itself that I believe underlies what is arguably the most interesting aspect of the Chicago Report: the unresolved disagreement between members of the Task Force as to whether the Establishment Clause “impose[s] constraints on the means that the United States may choose to pursue” in engaging religious communities abroad. For one group (let’s call them the “Kantians”), the clause “should be understood to constrain the manner in which the United States pursues its foreign policy objectives” in engaging religion and religious communities abroad. For the opposing group (let’s call them the “new natural lawyers”), the primary purpose of American foreign policy is “to defend and pursue the nation’s vital interests abroad.” Thus:

As this report abundantly indicates, ours is a world highly influenced by religious actors and ideas, for good or ill. Accordingly, we believe that in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary … no administration should impose constraints on American foreign policy that are imagined to derive from the Establishment Clause…. Any further interpretation of the Establishment Clause on this issue will inevitably restrict American flexibility in implementing vital programs involving diplomatic counterterrorism and the promotion of democracy and civil society.

This is an impasse which beautifully illustrates several dimensions of Kant’s critique of early modern natural law. For the Kantians, the Establishment Clause is itself a constitutionally entrenched form of universal reason. There are good reasons, therefore, why it should, in principle, constrain all action by the U.S. government, whether at home or abroad. In this respect, Kant was correct—the inner moral law imposes significant constraints on us, on the state, and on the internal and external rights and duties of the state as a member of an international community of states. The difficulty is that, as a matter of socio-political reality, the Kantian view rests on certain contingent presuppositions regarding what constitutes a proper religious subjectivity for autonomous agents in the liberal state. Both within and outside of the United States, there is a widening gap between this normative conception of right and factual reality.

Within the U.S., the increasing presence and influence of the Christian Right and evangelical movements in the public sphere and in policy-making generally, and a corresponding rise in governmental entanglement with domestic religious groups, are radically reconfiguring and putting strain on the historical legal understanding of the public/private divide and the “non-establishment” norm.  At the same time, religious groups are exerting ever increasing influence in U.S. foreign policy-making itself.

Consider, for example, the following instances.

• The impetus behind the enactment of IRFA: it is widely acknowledged that the domestic political pressure to “remoralize” U.S. foreign policy and enact IRFA came from conservative Christian and evangelical groups concerned about the persecution of Christians worldwide.
• The pressure exerted on the Clinton and Bush administrations to take action in Sudan and to term the violence in Darfur as “genocide”: the most observable factor in U.S. engagement in Sudan has been the long-standing pressure by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), a coalition of groups representing fifty-one denominations, 45,000 churches, and a membership of over fifty million people.
• The pressure exerted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to support Israel and Israeli policies in the Middle East, including in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Outside the U.S.—and Euro-Atlantic modernity in general—it is sufficient to note that religion and state have entirely different historical configurations, and that religious identities define differences both between majority and minority groups and between entirely different ways of life. Non-Western religious traditions such as Islam, for one, do not make a distinction between the secular and the sacred, or, as in the case of Hinduism, they might hierarchically subsume the secular under the sacred. As Charles Taylor has observed, viewed from a non-Western perspective, the right to religious freedom in international law therefore appears inextricably linked to distinctly Christian origins—either to a quasi-religious form of post-Enlightenment Deism or to the political rise of Western secularism, and, in either case, as a form of foreign and imperial imposition. Indeed, this problem is more acute in the case of secular liberalism in its “Establishment Clause” form, which, once unmoored from Western secularism and imported into comprehensively religious societies, “understandably comes across as the imposition of one metaphysical view over others, and an alien one at that.”

Given this internal and external socio-political reality, the position of the Kantians seems hopelessly utopian, even dangerously naive. While the liberal wing of the U.S. Supreme Court can try valiantly to hold the line domestically in a still majority protestant—but rapidly changing and diversifying—society, the international situation in the post-September 11 context appears to raise far more urgent and far-reaching problems of political governance. This is the dominant issue for the new natural lawyers. Like the formal notion of sovereignty in international law discussed before, the formal legal constraints imposed by the Establishment Clause seem at once over- and under-restrictive: over-restrictive because they prevent the U.S. from engaging good Muslim communities in the promotion of human rights, democracy, and the values of civil society; and under-restrictive because, while it is “unrealistic and insensitive to insist that our Establishment Clause should be adopted by other countries without regard to their differing political and cultural circumstances … [all the same,] non-establishment norms facilitate a country’s development of religious tolerance, political stability, and other characteristics essential to a well-functioning liberal democracy.”

To summarize the position: we should not be constrained by the Establishment Clause because our vital interests demand smart strategic action and engagement which should be exercised (paradoxically) to encourage them to internalize the normative constraints of non-establishment. Our long-term security can be ensured only if we effectively change the identity of Muslims and Muslim communities by enlightening them as to the nature and demands of modernity. In the face of this imperative, the secular constraints imposed by the Establishment Clause may be, as Winni Sullivan puts it, “good policy at home,” but they should not limit our flexibility of action and engagement abroad as we advance our “more serious and reasoned” efforts to educate Muslim communities regarding the natural causation between non-establishment norms and natural social ends (religious tolerance, political stability, and liberal democracy).

In presuming that the autonomous subject (whether the individual or the state) envisaged by Kant in his Perpetual Peace is the product of, as opposed to a precondition for, secular liberal constitutionalism, the Chicago Report again reveals ignorance not so much of the role of religion in world affairs as of history and, in particular, of liberalism’s emergence from particular, historically contingent conceptions of rationality and religious subjectivity internal to Western Christianity.

This leads to my second observation on Kant’s cosmopolitanism and his derivation of a pure norm of right from man’s “rational being.” Given the regional character of Kant’s view—not only to but within Europe, and to a local branch of Protestant German metaphysical philosophy at that—it is difficult to see how this account of universal reason could form the basis of a global normative order, able to harmonize rival European and non-European cultural and political metaphysics.

As Ian Hunter has observed, unlike the sorry comforters who acted as juris consults to historical states, the Kantian political adviser (or “moral politician”), who “oversees the transformation of the maxim’s of state prudence into the cosmopolitan principle of justice,” could not in fact engage the interests of the territorial prince. This was because “the advice he had to offer—‘Convert your own state into a rational republican community and then amalgamate it with a world republic or federation of republics’—was not given in a political capacity or persona; neither was it addressed to a political personage: the Prussian prince or political class.”

Hunter proceeds to note that, by comparison with the “territorial construction of jurisdiction and the European localization of the law of nations” found in Pufendorf and Vattel, the “global spatialisation of justice in Kantian philosophical international law initially had no direct anchorage in a concrete political and juridical order.” But today, two centuries later, that has changed. Kant’s regional political metaphysics is now “tied to the interests of a different national philosophical clerisy … [and today has] a de facto anchorage: namely, in the global projection of United States power and culture.” On this premise, an outlaw state (e.g., Iraq) as much as rogue individuals (e.g., radical extremists) are unjust by definition in relation to the universal conception of justice constituting international law, and may thus be subject to military sanction in the name of the universal community.

In this move, the moral politician becomes himself a sorry comforter, a political moralist now acting as juris consult to a “global hegemon intent on projecting its own politics and culture as ‘universal’” in a way that turns Kant’s theory of cosmopolitan law into an instrumental project of technical governance and control. If correct, the real challenge that confronts us is whether it may be possible to recover the non-instrumental dimensions of Kant’s project of freedom without necessarily adopting the historically and culturally contingent aspects of his metaphysical philosophy.

In this respect, the significance of Kant’s ideal of the moral politician lies in the notion that principles of right (the communal will of a rational community) are necessary conditions for a political project which seeks to reconcile national self-interest with a pacific cosmopolitan legal order. Such a project requires both political contestation and the use of critical judgment, which are incapable of being derived from instrumental reason, and which each must encompass the perspective of the whole (the ideal of the Kingdom of Ends). For Koskenniemi, this constitutes a project of freedom in two distinct senses:

First, it holds political judgement open to different, even opposing, alternatives, highlighting the (legal) accountability of the one who makes the judgement. Second, its concept of legal expertise is not that of instrumental skill but a mindset—a ‘constitutional mindset’—that is constantly measuring any judgement or institutional alternative against the ideal of universality embedded in the very idea of the rule of law (instead of by expert decision).

On this view, the significance of autonomy is not on account of a particular conception of the good (e.g., that personal autonomy is a precondition for the good or just life), but rather on account of a moral/political notion of the person as a “reason-giving” and “reason-receiving” being with a right to justification. Further, the significance of critical judgment lies in the notion that human reason must recognize its own boundaries and finitude, and—with full knowledge, not of ends, but of indeterminacy and contingency—accept the unavoidability of conflicts between plural values.

In contradistinction to the approach adopted by the Chicago Report, to engage seriously in such a project would require a “comparative dialogue across the putative divide between Western and non-Western traditions of critique and practice.” For Saba Mahmood, a dialogue of this kind in turn depends on “making a distinction between the labor entailed in the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own beliefs in certain secular conceptions of liberty and attachment. The tension between the two is a productive one for the exercise of critique insomuch as it suspends the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways.”

It was a project of engagement along these lines that I believe Barack Obama intended to invoke with his speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009. Indicating both that the U.S. was “respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law” and that “[n]o system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on another,” his notion of a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” was premised on “mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” Obama appeared to understand that, while rationality is a shared human faculty, there are in fact no uncontested external or a priori universal reasons, and that all reasons appeal, at some level of justification, to substantive value commitments which may or may not be shared by persons from divergent religious and cultural backgrounds. (“We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.”) In such a situation, one may maintain good reasons to regard one’s own faith or religious tradition as true, while at the same time recognizing that the primary duty of reason is one of mutual justification.

The duty of mutual justification necessarily gives rise to a need to listen and to seek to understand the situatedness and subjectivity of others. As Beth Hurd puts it, “one of the great challenges of our time is to engage with and listen to those who enact religious agency and live religious freedom in ways that may not conform to these protestant secular understandings of religion and religious freedom.” This in turn requires a degree of openness to the possibility, if persuaded by convincing arguments, to change one’s own positions and the effort to “suspend the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways,” while seeking new forms of coexistence, reconciliation, and compromise. It is disappointing that the members of the Chicago Council Task Force failed to listen and reflect critically upon even this basic premise in the President’s call for a new beginning:

I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things that we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us, ‘Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.’

My first thought upon reading the Chicago Council’s report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy” is that the title is misleading. This report is not about engaging religious communities abroad—one hears little if at all from such communities—nor does it say anything particularly new. There is, however, an imperative. This report is an attempt to create a particular kind of world, one defined by the projection of American power—a certain kind of religious power.  The report, as Winni Sullivan observes in her companion piece, endorses an establishmentarian position in American foreign policy, meaning that American policy could discriminate among religions, and fund and promote religious activities that meet with U.S. government approval. This is a different kind of religious power than what Sullivan describes as the “periodic and not altogether successful efforts” at disestablishment that we have undertaken at home. Assuming that we agree with Sullivan, as I do, that “established religion is by definition not accepting of ‘pluralism, freedom, and democracy,’” it becomes clear that this report is not about engaging religious communities to promote either religious freedom or democracy. It is about the projection of American power through the securitization of religion. Perhaps a more apt title, borrowing in part from the language of the report itself, would have been “‘Savvy, selective, strategic, and targeted’: the projection of American religious power and the global securitization of religion.”

I want to point to a few moments at which the report works especially hard to achieve these objectives. The first is in its definition of “religious freedom,” understood as the right to, “advance values publicly in civil society and political life.”  Religious freedom is to be articulated “in a way not viewed as imperialism, but as a means to support religious agency to undermine religion-based terrorism and promote stable democracy.” Yet one of the great challenges of our time is to engage with and listen to those who enact religious agency and live religious freedom in ways that may not conform to these protestant-secular understandings of religion and religious freedom. In focusing exclusively on “values and beliefs,” the report not only fails to engage with, or allow spaces for, religious practice, habits, and ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to values and beliefs, but actively closes down such “religious agencies,” save those that are deemed to be “undermining religion-based terrorism” in the eyes of the National Security Council (NSC). In tacitly sanctioning a protestant understanding of religion as the (only) legitimate way to be religious and modern, it forecloses upon a range of understandings of religion and arrogates to the NSC the authority to decide who is “civil” enough to be allowed into the public sphere, and who isn’t. As Saba Mahmood has observed of the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) itself, the report illustrates, “how the exercise of sovereign power tends to subsume the secular principle of religious freedom.”

This rather astonishing exercise of sovereign theopolitical authority brings me to a second point involving the government regulation of religion. The report states: “We know that government regulation of religion can lead to increased persecution and religious violence, forces that increasingly escape confinement within national borders.” This is a striking statement. What is the Task Force calling for, if not increased government regulation through the securitization of religion? In recommending that the NSC direct, not only governmental, but also nongovernmental engagement with religious actors and communities overseas, it vests in the government the authority and institutional capacity to regulate religion both directly and through nongovernmental proxies, calling explicitly for “practical religious literacy” on the part of governmental and nongovernmental offices and institutions. Will this lead to increased persecution and religious violence?

It won’t, according to the logic of the report, because the secular state in general, and the United States in particular, is ontologically incapable of particular kinds of violence, “religious” violence, in particular. Violence undertaken by the American state is by definition not religious. So, religious violence is something undertaken by others, while secular violence disappears from the picture altogether, or is quietly subsumed and legitimized under the rubric of “marginalizing extremists.” Yet, is it not the case that, like the errant “religious actors” described in the report, the United States also, at some times and in some places, “inspire(s) or legitimate(s) violent conflict by framing it as an act of justice”?  How is it that the United States manages to exempt itself from the critical scrutiny that it so avidly prescribes for its (religious) others? Could it be the case that American exceptionalism and a particular notion of American religious freedom and American power are sacralized in this report, such that they are, in the words of the report, lending “a sacred aura and intensity to disputes and campaigns that also have significant secular dimensions”? As religion is increasingly nationalized through this heady cocktail of religious freedom and American exceptionalism, should we now brace ourselves for “calls to defend that which is held sacred […] increasingly employed as a conflict escalator”? Should we not at least consider the possibility that the United States, in its new role as self-appointed theologian, might “invoke the sacred to sow violence and confusion”?  It is in closing down the possibility of this kind of self-scrutiny that the report moves in dangerous directions.

In another example of the inherent goodness of American power, failed states, in the eyes of the Task Force, are responsible for terrorism, and never the international actions of the United States (such as in the invasion of Iraq) or other actors.  The United States floats above and outside the world, guided expertly by the NSC through the rocky shoals of political theology and toward safer shores, in a carefully navigated approach, “tailored so as not to overstep the bounds by intervening unwisely in theological disputes or, worse still, seeking to manipulate religion.”

I agree with the Task Force that the United States should not shy away from engaging the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, although the project of “discerning which elements of the Muslim Brotherhood are interested in moving away from extremism” is not an approach I would advocate. Is this process of “discernment” constitutional? Or is it an attempt on the part of the American government to assume the mantle of the global theologian of reform, separating the wheat from the chaff—turning water to wine?—as it acts “ in a way that is both decisive and prudent, developing the means to assist those whose ideas it supports without tainting them by association”? Is this an appropriate role for the United States government? Is it the role of the government to determine “which elements” of which religious groups or parties abroad “are interested in moving away from extremism”?  Or might we see this as part of what Mahmood has described as an “ambitious theological campaign” undertaken by the U.S. government in which, “secularism reveals itself in its civilizing and disciplinary aspects, rather than as a circumscription of religion or a prophylaxis that immunizes politics from religion within the context of the nation-state”?

I also agree with the report’s recommendation, in the section on international organizations, that “the United States also stands to learn from the experience of international organizations and their interactions with faith-based institutions in numerous fields.” The United States stands to learn from the experience of these, and many, many other actors—both “faith-based” and not.  We stand to learn from doing more listening and less promoting of “the message,”  not to mention “spearheading a new reformation,” in Sullivan’s words. The real challenge, understanding and engaging multiple modalities of being “religious” and being “free” in a globalizing world, still lies ahead.

Saba Mahmood’s riposte is exemplary of this baffled disavowal. Certainly, the focus of “De-transcendentalizing the secular” was not on Mahmood’s work, and my critical comments pertaining to her, like comments made about others (Anidjar, Asad, Brown, Connolly, During), were signposts on the way to a much broader argument. This does not mean that Mahmood does not have the impetus to defend herself, and opposing my argument may be one way to conduct such a defense, except that this opposition is built on some conspicuous misreadings. I will begin by briefly pointing these out. More important, and in order to rectify her charge that my criticism of her is unfounded, I will look more closely at the argument in her Public Culture article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire“—always in the spirit of elaborating on the broader argument I have initiated and not under the imperative of tête-à-tête polemics.

I responded unequivocally to the question “Is critique secular?” in order precisely to raise the stakes of the question. Anything else, I’m afraid, compromises the secular from the start, and, with the pretext of sustaining ambiguity, renders it a mere concept among many, as if in a streamlined and neutralized array of equivalent objects. (One wonders what epistemology authorizes ambiguity outside the realm of critique, but that’s another matter.) My response does not leave any room for the secular to cruise, as it were, on its own epistemological assumptions. Insofar as critique can never be anything less than self-critique, the certainty of weighing the secular with the critical is precisely to plunge the domain of the secular to the uncertainty of its own interrogation. Whether we like it or not, this, itself, is the domain of the dialectic of Enlightenment.

For this reason, I made it repeatedly explicit that the secular was a non-substantive, conditional, and differential domain, therefore—speaking precisely—worldly. By contradistinction, I identified secularism as an institutional term that represents a historical range of projects, and thereby often tends to certain a priori and dogmatic assumptions, which I identified as secularist metaphysics. Though I advocate the emancipatory potentialities of the secular—indeed, with the aspiration of reconceptualizing and enriching the emancipatory domain of the secular—I explicitly criticize the metaphysics of secularism, in fact from within the domain and as work of the secular, as an act of secular criticism. (This is why it is crucial that the metaphysics of secularism not be equated with theological metaphysics, and secularism not be considered another sort of religion; this latter claim is one of the most politically reactionary positions of anti-secularist thinking.)

Mahmood either does not see or does not want to see this explicit and repeated distinction. In her words, I offer “moral platitudes about the goods secularism offers to humanity”; I opt “for the moral superiority of secularism through recourse to the familiar Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom, human creativity, and autonomy as well as an impoverished materialist conception of history”; my “rhetorical defense of secularism devolves upon a kind of liberal romantic imaginary…[of] commitment to autonomy, creativity, imagination, and freedom”, etc.

Never mind here that a proper and rigorous response would require that Mahmood produce a framework of thought that would advocate a politics against autonomy, imagination, freedom, and human creativity, since apparently these are just reprehensible objects of desire. Never mind her derisory insinuations that I am ignorant of “all the recent work on the modern emergence of the categories of secularism and religion.” Never mind that I’m an impoverished materialist thinker, or in turn, a liberal romantic who spouts moral platitudes—although I must say, for the record, that I don’t mind being called a romantic, but everyone knows (insofar as my work stands for it in public view) that liberalism makes me angry and morality makes me cringe. Never mind all that. What remains puzzling is how an entire argument against the transcendentalist metaphysics of secularism can be rehashed and served as a secularist love fest.

Puzzled though I am, I will wager an answer. My understanding of the task of secular criticism is to oppose any sort of heteronomous politics; because theological politics is heteronomous by definition, Mahmood finds it easiest to declare me an avid defender of secularism. Even if I also identify secularism’s transcendentalist politics as heteronomous politics—its technological rationalism, the cultural Ego Ideal, the imperialist mission civilisatrice, the instrumentalist appropriation of the other, etc.—she, nonetheless, bristles at my “visceral attachment” to secularism. She goes so far as to spin my critique of secularism’s rationalist metaphysics against me, leveling the charge of infusing my argument with a certain “structure of affect.” This latter charge, of course, I would hardly disavow, since it’s precisely the rationalist impartiality of secularist thinking (which is, of course, neither rational nor impartial) that I put into question. One wonders how she might account for her own structure of affect, if this, like autonomy, imagination, freedom, etc., is such a reprehensible thing. Does she mean to suggest that anti-secularism is “rational” and “impartial”—even if (or especially when) it is conducted by (presumably) secular academics?

Mahmood’s misreading becomes comprehensible if one looks closely at her own assumptions in the article that served as focus for our initial discussions at SSRC and to which I had referred in passing. I hereby isolate four points.

1. Mahmood predicates her entire argument on an uninterrogated identification of secularism with liberalism. Never mind that secularism does just as well with non-liberal ideologies and institutions, whether the colonialist apparatus of the British Empire, twentieth-century’s fascist or communist states, or non-liberal postcolonial regimes of all kinds. One is puzzled as to why her political critique is not addressed to liberalism as such. Or, more precisely, why, in her political critique, is the ideology of liberalism reduced to a problem of the secular vs. the non-secular? Let us say that, although her target seems to be (by virtue of the argument) the normativity of liberal institutions, her desired enemy is not liberalism but secularism. However, because she doesn’t even raise the question of their equivalence as a preliminary self-critical step in her argument, she confounds the terrain, possibly hoping she can hit both targets at once. But this way she misses the fact that you cannot conduct an anti-secularist argument simply by attacking liberalism without falling into the same path of argumentation that behooves the anti-liberal agendas of US Christian Republicanism. This is one of the ways in which Mahmood’s argument is conservative, whether she intends it or not.

Needless to say, I hardly care to defend liberalism. On the contrary, my attempt to reconfigure the domain of the secular against secularism’s own statist metaphysics is also a critique of the metaphysics of liberalism as such—both its statist and its market metaphysics. But it is so by implication. My impetus is not to critique liberalism—not here, anyway—but to critique heteronomous politics in whatever form this takes, liberal or non-liberal, secularist or religious. The imaginary investment of certain Western (largely Christian) societies in secular institutions—usually (but uncritically) associated with liberal institutions—cannot be the exclusive ground of defining and debating the secular. I understand how it is convenient, because this way the anti-secularist argument draws strength from the condemnation of the US imperialist machinery. But, again, this raises the question as to why a critique of ‘Western’ imperialism, generally speaking, has to be conducted as critique of secularism. Why does it have to be? I raised this question in my initial piece, and I raise it again, since Mahmood does not seem to consider it worth addressing.

2. Mahmood’s central thesis is that secularism “proffers remaking certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use of violence)” according to a “normative impetus internal” to it. “Normativity” is indeed her favorite word, and here it flags the American imperialist agenda of forcefully shaping subjectivities in the Islamic world. About the latter, there can be no argument. But whether this is the outcome of a “secularist” agenda is a matter of debate. I suppose that to the degree that we are talking about practices of the US institutional apparatus, this could be called secularist (among various other names). But I don’t think these practices can be so easily considered “secular” as Mahmood’s own phrasing—“the United States has embarked upon an ambitious theological campaign”—explicitly admits. This conceptual difference is not so fine as to be imperceptible, whether by Mahmood or anybody else. The difference between institutional secularism and the secular as a conditional domain of interrogation is marked by an epistemological chasm.

Then there is the issue of secularism’s shaping of subjectivities as such, its “attendant anthropology of the subject.” Taking as basis the enormous critique of theories of the subject in the last 40some years—which is, let us not forget, a matter of self-critique to the degree that it has all been conducted (including the postcolonial perspective) within the terms of a dialectic of Enlightenment—there is not much here to contend regarding the enforced subjectification that colonialist/imperialist states have perpetrated on conquered peoples all over the globe (but also—and it is equally important—on their own societies). The problem lies in the argument’s framing.

There is, at best, something naïve in setting the foundations of one’s argument about the ills of the secular imagination on the inarguable fact of colonialist/ imperialist politics, especially when one dares not even pose the question of what is normative in non-secular modes of rule. On what basis is there no ground for critique of non-secular modalities of political rule seeking to transform religious subjectivities (not to mention non-religious subjectivities) so they conform to a certain politics? Shall we not speak of the “attendant anthropology of the subject” that Mahmood’s own ethnographic argument proposes? What agenda authorizes us to remain uncritical of it?

3. Mahmood chronicles the ‘findings’ of the Rand Corporation regarding the inner workings of Islamic societies as exemplary of American imperialist practices in the Islamic world. Exemplary, indeed, they are—although to give such scholarly credence to Rand’s account of the social imagination is really to give them too much credit. They are not scholars but ideologues, ideological bureaucrats. It is especially alarming, however, to equate the Rand rhetoric with the view of certain prominent Muslim reformist thinkers—Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Hasan Hanafi, and Abdul Karim Soroush. Even more so when the argument is constructed with such phrasing as: “Echoing the Rand report’s contention that the Quran is a human rather than a divine text, Abu Zayd argues that the Quran… entered history… [etc.].” This is startling. Do we really need the Rand Corporation to tell us that the Quran is a human rather than a divine text? What is a divine text, but what certain humans, in certain conditions (which are always historical, even when expressed in the most profound spiritual terms), convene, name, and occasionally worship, as divine?

It’s one thing if Mahmood were to argue that the Quran is divine, pure and simple—to argue from the standpoint of a believer. (But there is no pure and simple: are we to assume that communities of believers are so consistently uniform that the precise nature of the divinity they worship—and all its objects—is beyond discussion?) Yet, if she argues that for some people the Quran is divine (as, for others, are the Vedas, the Torah, the Gospel, or the Book of Mormon), she engages in a historical argument about a historical process that institutes a text as divine and, insofar as we are speaking of social-imaginary institution, continuously reinstitutes a text as divine, as long as required by a certain society or societies, a certain community or communities, in order to safeguard and reanimate their identity. In this latter case, what the Rand Corporation has to say is of little importance—except as analysis of how the enemy thinks—but what certain intellectuals, within this social imaginary, say about the varied permutations of this imaginary is of enormous importance, and to belittle it by dubbing it an echo of the enemy think tank is an act of extraordinary arrogance.

This is not the place to conduct the full argument about what sort of textuality—and consequently what sort of social and political imaginary—characterizes a sacred text. Walter Benjamin’s insights to this regard would be essential. I do want to clarify, however, that I would never discount the enormous political power—whether subjugating or (more interesting from my perspective) insurgent power—of a sacred text. That this power derives from its being sacred does not mean that it is sacred. Or, that a text derives its political power from being claimed as sacred by a certain society does not mean that it is sacred by divine decree. In other words, the point is not to dispute the sacredness of the text, but to raise questions about how this sacredness is authorized.

This is also the case with politics based on transcendental religious commands. I am talking specifically of how such commands pertain nominally to emancipatory politics. I would never doubt, for instance, the great revolutionary inspiration that liberation theology once held for certain oppressed societies in Central America or, for that matter, the inarguable power that Islam holds for certain of the insurgent communities in Iraq today. But as I have said several times, this does not mean that, come post-insurgency time, the time of self-determination, a politics based on religious command can produce an autonomous society—at least, history has never shown any such cases. There is a foundational reason why this has not happened: a politics based on religious command bars, by definition, the last instance of any given society’s self-interrogation as to who authorizes its self-determination. Not only does it take for granted an external, ahistorical, heteronomous authorization; it forbids the very question.

4. Mahmood’s dismissal of any argumentative basis for the Quran as a historical text belies her dismissal that neither Quranic scripture nor Islamic ritual can be treated as semiotic or symbolic significations. What is operative in both dismissals is contempt toward the literary domain as a proper epistemological framework, or indeed, contempt toward the poetic as such: “The fact that this understanding of religion and scripture as a system of signs and symbols, ready for a cultured individual to interpret according to her poetic resources, enjoys such broad appeal is in part what the term normative secularity captures” (her italics). How the poetic becomes normative is one of the most mysterious epistemological steps in her entire argument. Not to mention—again keeping Benjamin in mind—that dismissing the poetic in such thoughtless fashion dismisses the opportunity to radically theorize the political power of a sacred text.

Mahmood continues in this vein to reiterate her argument from Politics of Piety that “Muslim women’s consensual adoption of the veil” is belittled when subjected to analyses that determine it according to its symbolic indications, its semiotic meaning, its significations of identity, or even its social instrumentality in regard to sexuality and gender roles. Instead, she argues that the veil claims “a religious obligation,” as “part of a religious doctrine, a divine edict, or a form of ethical practice, and that it therefore has nothing to do with ‘identity’.” I understand (and I agree) in what terms she objects to secularist assessments of wearing a veil – whether oppositional (feminist or otherwise) or supportive (as indicative of the woman’s right to choose how to identify herself) – as imposing on the gesture of the veil a framework of meaning derived from external reasoning and thus disregarding the gesture’s own self-determination of meaning.

But I am amazed at the inability or unwillingness to press the critical question in both directions. Is the veil not a sign for the devout Muslim? What is it? An empty signifier? And as sign, how can it not be activated but in an identity-formation—which, incidentally, by virtue of the elementary dialectics of institution in any society, can never be conducted entirely within an internal signifying framework? That is, one’s identity—even under conditions of perfect self-determination (which, of course, never exist in history, but for the sake of argument)—can never be formed without, simultaneously, forming the identity of the other against whom (or in contradistinction from whom, in difference from whom) one defines oneself.

To argue further: Why is utter and unquestionable obedience to divine/doctrinal edict not an identitary mechanism? This question is never answered by Saba Mahmood because it is not even asked, as if obedience to divine doctrine is different substantially from obedience to non-divine doctrine. (I am not speaking here of negotiation with authority, whether secular or non-secular, but of strict obedience to doctrine—because these are the terms of Mahmood’s argument about the significance of the gesture of the veil.) If one were to seriously argue that religious obedience is radically different from any other kind of doctrinal obedience, so that it lies beyond the world of symbols, signs, social and communal mechanisms, or principles of identity-formation, then there are only two options: 1) the religious experience is totally unworldly, therefore asocial and ahistorical, and in this respect, one can never claim that it bear a politics—of piety, or any other politics for that matter; 2) the religious experience is utterly irrelevant to any discourse or meditation on society, and can only be conducted in terms of the self-enclosed hermeneutic universe of mystical thinking, and for this we have, say, the extraordinary texts of Rumi, the Kabbalah, or St. Teresa de Avila—texts that do not require the authorization of the sacred to yield their poetic splendor.

In other words, if non-secular gestures are to bear a certain politics, they cannot be determined as idiosyncratic or idiomatic gestures; they pertain to an imagined community of some kind and are therefore implicated in an identity-formation of some kind. It is precisely Mahmood’s inability or unwillingness to even entertain the notion that these gestures are themselves identitary gestures—no doubt, in their own way, and here the difference between identitary frameworks would be indeed a worthy theoretical pursuit—that anchors her anti-secularist politics to the stealth dogmatism of nativist identity politics. One yearns here for a little intellectual daring, perhaps the kind that Frantz Fanon showed in the midst of a real revolutionary situation, when he warned us of the pitfalls of national consciousness, equally unafraid to dismantle colonialist and postcolonial—and we might add, ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, secular and non-secular—essentialisms alike.

Let me begin with Saba Mahmood’s paper, which I think is important, and talk about the idea of the “normative impetus internal to secularism,” as she puts it. Instead of seeing secularism as the solution to entrenched religious conflicts, instead of focusing on the notion of religious neutrality, say, she wants, in this paper and elsewhere in her work, to look at the way in which secularism informs foreign policy.

As those of you who have already read her paper will know, it deals with the International Religious Freedom Act that was passed by the U.S. Congress, something that has consequently become a mandatory element in American foreign policy. She looks at that policy as it relates to Islamic reform along liberal lines, at the programmatic statements about the necessity for such reform made by U.S. policy advisors and also at the material and moral encouragement given by American institutions and government officials to a number of Muslim reformers or would‐be reformers.

Now, I happened to be talking about this paper with a friend recently, who felt that criticisms of the kind Saba had offered might serve to delegitimize the reformers, an undesirable consequence from his point of view. And in any case, he continued, it over‐generalized the religious landscape that actually exists in the so‐called Islamic world. I didn’t agree (don’t agree) with either of these points, and it might be worth our talking about them. As I see it, her concern is not to generalize about the state of Islamic reform but to examine the “normative impetus” that underlies the secular worldview, in this case as it informs U.S. foreign policy. That policy seeks to encourage a place for a secular religion in the Islamic world on the grounds that Islam would then be safer for democracy (i.e., Western countries). Religion is okay, according to this worldview, but only if it recognizes its limits and adapts itself to liberal values. Saba’s concern, as I understand it, is to examine the way U.S. power enters into this project of reformation, not to question the motives of the reformers.

This would not be of any interest if we accepted that a more liberal, a more free approach to religious interpretation—and indeed, to religious belief—is simply an extension of freedom. Saba thinks, on the contrary, that it is important to analyze the way power shapes freedom. I understand her to be saying that it is necessary to examine the intrinsic limits to the freedom being offered by the reform. And I agree. Liberal freedom that seeks autonomy for the individual is notoriously imprecise. The older notion of negative freedom has been shown to be theoretically inadequate, but the idea of positive freedom has produced its own problems. (Incidentally, Charles Taylor wrote illuminatingly on this subject a long time ago.) If the idea of positive freedom requires that we take into account our dependence on institutions, social forces and other people, what limitations does “secular religion” impose on our ability and desire to negotiate that freedom?

What comes out of Saba’s paper for me—and indeed also out of Gil Anidjar’s paper, which I will talk about in a moment—is secularism as a mode of international hegemony. I think that this is a very important and interesting topic, which is not to say that what many of us recognize as secularism is uniquely hegemonic and that religion is not. It is rather a matter of looking at what the differences might be.

Gil’s paper as I read it is a very ingenious and sophisticated deconstruction/construction of a position that I hadn’t thought of in relation to Edward Said, and certainly it has prompted me to rethink what the implications of his arguments are for understanding Orientalism.

The one thing that I am not entirely convinced of is the formula: “Orientalism (the object of Said’s book) is Christianity and Christianity is secularism.” Gil seems to me to make a too‐quick move from one term to another. Although there are connections among them, I am not sure I would make the argument in quite the way Gil does in his paper.

His argument reminded me, in a way, of Marcel Gauchet’s thesis about Christianity and the secular, that Christianity is the unique religion that has given rise to the necessity of secularism. Fundamentally I find Gauchet’s book—The Disenchantment of the World—unpersuasive, for reasons we can talk about. Gil has a more subtle, deconstructive approach, and his main interest is in 19th- and 20th‐century Christianity, the period when Christianity in various forms was part of global expansion. But precisely because it sometimes conflicted with secular colonial authority—and even adapted to it in an exploitative manner—Christian missionizing cannot, I think, be regarded as identical with it. There are connections between Christian movements, values, etc. on the one hand and secular European imperialism on the other, but they are not identical.

I have read the introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and I am eager to read the other chapters. I am very struck by Charles’ attempt to argue that what is unique about the secular age, one of the unique, central things about it, is that belief in God and the idea of transcendence aren’t simply disabused by scientific thought; they are transformed. What is crucial about the age of secularity is that belief becomes one option among many. I think this is a very important argument, although I have several thoughts about that.

I wonder how—and I was thinking about this when Beth [Hurd] talked a moment ago about the People of the Book (Jews, Christians, Muslims) and how the classical Islamic conception of the People of the Book compares with this modern state of affairs. As many of you know, Judaism and Christianity are recognized in Islamic thought as having a measure of validity together with Islam, although of course Islam retains for itself a hegemonic position as the final and complete truth. What is interesting, theologically, is that what is considered to be the incompleteness and even the distorted character of the divine message possessed by Judaism and Christianity does not constitute grounds for eliminating the latter. Certain kinds of incomplete and distorted truth have a validity of sorts. Their difference is recognized and preserved. Of course Jews and Christians suffered socially from various disadvantages in medieval Muslim societies; there’s no doubt about that. My point is simply that ideologically and conceptually you do have societies prior to the age of secularity recognizing the existence of other beliefs. One wants to know then what the difference is in this case. I am not saying that what we have in this case is the same situation as the one described by Charles for the age of secularity, but clearly it seems that there is more at stake here than simply saying one is aware of the fact that one has to recognize the coexistence of a plurality of beliefs, of several religions.

The other thought I had reading Charles Taylor is this: How important are beliefs in the age of secularity, in modern society? I remember many years ago being very struck by an argument by Alasdair MacIntyre to the effect that in modern society it makes no difference what beliefs people subscribe to, because if you are a Jew or a Christian, a Protestant or a Catholic, in modern society your religious beliefs make very little difference to the kind of life you live, the kind of life you are constrained to live in modernity. In other words, there is little to distinguish the way most Christians, Jews, atheists, and so forth, live in modern society, whatever their beliefs, primarily because religion has been (or is required to be) privatized. So what emerges from this is that we are talking about something rather subjective. Indeed, this subjectivism is the focus of Charles’ book.

The third thought that I had is this: What are the stakes in wanting a fixed definition of religion, whether in terms of “a sense of fullness,” as Taylor suggests, or of “transcendence,” or of “something beyond what has yet been achieved, or will ever be achieved”—and so on? What is at stake here? Why are we so concerned to establish a category that encompasses a number of very different kinds of experience, experiences that for some religious people don’t belong together at all?

I think we should return again to the question of the modes of public and private life, the structure of the lives that we are all constrained to live in modern society. It seems to me important to take this question as a central one rather than to focus on something that has to do with an ineffable experience. It’s not that I want to dismiss concern with the subjective, the experiential. I don’t mean to suggest that conditions of experience aren’t important. I think they are important, though we need to know more about exactly how and why they are important. It seems to me that perhaps in our contradictory societies, very contradictory experiences and sensibilities must mediate in complicated ways the spaces and processes in which political actions are supported or obstructed, claims to knowledge validated or dismissed. I would be more interested in a discussion of that kind, in asking “In what way do these experiences mediate different areas and processes?” rather than identifying something that can be called modern religion or modern religiosity. I am myself rather skeptical about this latter enterprise.

Finally, one of the things I was struck by in Jürgen Habermas’ essay is an idea that has been around for some time that I find unpersuasive. This is the idea that secularism is in some ways compatible only with a fully modern society in which there is prosperity and political stability, and therefore a greater sense of security and certainty. Conversely, it is only in societies undergoing uncontrolled change during modernization that we get uncertainty, and therefore an opening to fundamentalist religiosity. As we were saying, the remarkable thing about that argument is that, of course, one thinks about the United States, a highly modern society, which has always contained strong currents of fundamentalist religion. What is the reason for that? People who believe in secularism tend to produce particular reasons to explain that fact away. I am not persuaded by the old explanation that secularism is based on a society characterized by stability, certainty and prosperity. We tend to forget that secularism developed most vigorously at precisely the time in the 19th century when there was the greatest amount of change, uncertainty and so on. That kind of psychologism I find unpersuasive.