First, the exposition. Most importantly, (S) is about religion; it is a “stance towards religion,” as Bilgrami puts it. He wants to narrow the concept in order to give it analytic purchase and clarity, and so he distinguishes it from “secularization” and “the secular.” Others have made similar distinctions, of course, but usually in order to identify a range of discourses and practices that are not obviously about religion but nevertheless central to its historical construction: Charles Taylor’s “secular age,” for example, or Talal Asad’s “anthropology of the secular.” Bilgrami goes in the other direction: he knowingly excludes from (S) a whole range of things that might be said to belong to the secular. Meditating, for example, on why some religious communities tend not to speak out against their more extreme fundamentalist elements, Bilgrami writes that:

In the case of Islam, this defensively uncritical psychology has been bred by years of colonial subjugation, by continuing quasi-colonial economic arrangements with American and European corporate exploitation of energy resources of countries with large Muslin populations, by immoral embargoes imposed on these countries that cause untold suffering to ordinary people, by recent invasions of some of these countries by Western powers, and finally by the racialist attitudes towards migrants from these countries in European nations.

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, economic neo-liberalism, and the presumed cultural superiority of the West do not seem unconnected to the history of secularism. Some might add mass incarceration and other forms of state-sponsored violence to the list, techniques of the body and new sensory repertoires, even capitalism itself.

(S) runs directly counter to this discursive expansion of secularism. We might think, Bilgrami writes, that the “rhetoric of ‘secularism’ … plays a role in the anti-Islamist drumbeat of propaganda that accompanies these other factors,” like neo-liberalism and the legacies of colonialism. But even if that is so, he argues, “the right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined, but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination….” For Bilgrami, to discuss these things under the rubric of secularism is to make a category mistake.

I don’t intend to be making a point of which Bilgrami is unaware. Indeed, the whole goal of his paper is to produce a remarkably modest, minimal account of secularism (a goal not all of the commentators on the paper here on The Immanent Frame seem to have grasped). But it’s important to see what that minimalism entails. Here is Bilgrami’s description of (S):

In a religiously plural society, all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and evenhanded treatment except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve, in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

Importantly, (S) does not stipulate what the polity’s substantive ideals are or ought to be; it says only that those ideals have lexical priority over religious ideals when the two come into conflict. Modern democracies will likely tend toward familiar ideals—freedom of speech and association, for example—but other kinds of societies may well place other ideals first. The point is simply that those ideals, whatever they are, come first.

Bilgrami admits that this picture of secularism is “more adversarial” toward religion than Taylor’s multicultural ideal of neutrality. But it is adversarial in a limited sense: (S) only cares about religion “as it affects the polity. It is not dismayed by or concerned with the presence of religiosity in the society at large or in the personal beliefs of the individual citizens.” For (S), private religion is fine: even public religion is fine. Conflict only arises when religion tries to drive policies that run athwart the polity’s ideals. In that case, and only in that case, the lexical ordering kicks in.

Lest this sound imperious, Bilgrami emphasizes that the only reasons for holding (S) in the first place are “internal reasons” (a concept he adapts from Bernard Williams).

Internal reasons are “reasons we give to another that appeal to some of his own values in order to try and persuade him to change his mind.” We are all internally conflicted in some way. This doesn’t mean blatant contradiction, in the sense of believing both p and not-p; it just means that there are tensions among values that an interlocutor can help bring to the surface. In the same fashion, reasons for holding (S) must be “internal”—that is, those reasons cannot be separated from the values and commitments of the individuals or groups holding (S). They are not universal or context-independent. So internal reasons will persuade some people but not others. However, as with John Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus,” Bilgrami suggests that there are plural reasons for holding (S). In a plural society, it is the consensus that overlaps, not the reasons. In the matter at hand, then, secularism should drop talk of universal rights in favor of seeking “local concepts and commitments within the [religious] community … that might put pressure on the community’s own practices.”

This is not only a matter of reasoning with someone in a cognitivist way. For even agents who hold tightly to an apparently unconflicted set of principles are subject to the changes of history: “internal conflicts may be injected by historical developments into moral psychological economies.” Indeed, most successful activist movements work in exactly this way, by bringing to light or making visible a historical change already underway, thereby forcing majorities to confront the historically-bound nature of their own commitments, which they might otherwise have continued to think of as timeless.

Yet the historical record certainly offers plenty of examples of unchanged minds, or of minds that change and then change back, or of minds that change for the worse rather than the better, becoming more entrenched, more dogmatic, and so on. These possibilities don’t register very strongly in Bilgrami’s paper. This is what I meant when I said above that one tonal register of this paper is hope. For Bilgrami has a humanist confidence that the movement of history will eventually force illiberalism to confront its own internal tensions. Here is where he takes an evaluative stand: he believes this not for metaphysical reasons (some grand Theory of History) but because to believe it is to care about the truth in a certain way. To want to argue with someone and convince them that their own deeply held principles are tension-filled and therefore ought to be modified is to care about truth as you see it in such a way that you want others to see things your way too. This is a sign of respect, and it also fosters an ethical project: generating “empathetic attitudes of engagement with the tradition and mentality of those one opposes.”

I like all this very much. It nicely sidesteps much of what is unpalatable or just plain shallow in some fashionable versions of relativism. It proposes a kind of dialogue that is respectful but also deeply committed to getting things right. And its picture of truth is dialectical and internal: we move toward truth through the hard work of examining internal points of tension within our own substantive commitments and moral/psychological principles. (This is why I think Justin Neuman rather misses the point when he writes in his post that Bilgrami is too ready to generalize about groups of people; as I understand it, one primary purpose of Bilgrami’s emphasis on moral psychology is to make it harder to engage in such generalizations.)

And yet it is clear that (S) depends upon a certain historically-specific definition of religion.  It builds on a picture of “religion” as ideally heading towards post-Westphalian Protestantism—a formation that, several historians have plausibly argued, helped to build the modern nation state as we know it. It seems likely that this hopeful trajectory is in some tension with a different theme that emerges in the middle of the paper. Here Bilgrami notes that secularism as a policy is the result and requirement of a post-Westphalian Western Europe, which strove to develop a “feeling for the nation” by identifying internal others (the Jews, the Irish) and thus “inventing” the problem of minorities. For Charles Taylor, those cases in which majorities and minorities are understood in terms of religion demand secularism in the form of neutrality. Bilgrami is skeptical that secularism as neutrality can actually handle the challenge of majoritarianism. When majorities and minorities are defined in terms of religion, he argues, “there inevitably arises a sense that religion itself is the problem, even though the historical source of the problem lies in majoritarianism.” At this point something stronger than neutrality is needed, namely the lexical ordering.

What I am calling the secondary tonality of tragedy enters here, because Bilgrami is clear that it didn’t have to turn out this way. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, tried hard to prevent the development of a situation in India (of nationalism and majoritarianism) that would in turn require secularism. (This argument isn’t really developed in the present paper, but Bilgrami has written of it elsewhere.) In this example, history is not a progressive force that gradually loosens the hold of illiberalism, but actually creates the conditions in which illiberalism can flourish, which in turn brings forth the need for (S) as our best hope in a situation that hasn’t turned out very well.

And, finally, the third tonality. Whether history is ultimately progressive or tragic, it is at least dynamic. Religion, by contrast, seems quite static. In Bilgrami’s schema, secularism points out to religion (or waits for history to do the pointing out) that its picture of things is full of internal tensions; it thereby hopes to convince religion to sign on to (S)’s lexical ordering for reasons that remain religious (that’s the overlapping consensus part of the argument) but have now been pluralized (that’s the moral psychological part of the argument). I don’t get any sense that for Bilgrami the arrow might sometimes point in the other direction. Like Lars Tønder and a few of the other commentators on the paper, I wonder whether this simply reintroduces the conceits of secularism (its confident sense that it is right, and that history is on its side) in more modest garb. Can we really envision, on Bilgrami’s grounds, an engagement that reveals that secularism, too, has internal tensions that should be confronted—a conversation, that is, that actually changes both participants? This is the possibility that William Connolly gestured toward in a brief reading of Søren Kierkegaard in Why I Am Not a Secularist, and that Tønder develops very nicely out of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “tolerance of the incomplete” in his piece: “rather than beginning with the issue of how to order political ideals,” Tønder writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic begins in the midst of lived experience, where perceptions, judgments, and ideals have not yet reached the threshold of conceptual clarity….” This would lead to epistemic modesty of a different kind—neither a liberal recommendation of tolerance because we might turn out to be wrong, nor the modesty of the overlapping consensus, but a modesty born of the sense that things are still in flux, still in process, and that all of us find ourselves suddenly in the middle of things and without fully secure footing. Elsewhere I’ve suggested that the romantic theory of the fragment offers a useful way to think about this kind of modesty.

I suspect that Bilgrami would say that I’m missing the point here. (S), he insists at the very beginning of his paper, isn’t a good in itself, and so it can’t be internally conflicted, nor can it be anthropomorphized. (S) merely seeks to promote other kinds of goods (to be established by the polity in question) and it is in order to protect those goods that the requirement of lexical ordering comes into play. Yet there is one good that (S) seems to be not simply protecting but also promoting, and that is the good of helping religions pluralize their own self-conceptions. This is where (S) becomes activist in a way that Bilgrami, I think, doesn’t fully admit. If I may introduce a new term here, we could say that (S) is prophetic in its relation to religion.

There are good reasons to think that religion is more dynamic than Bilgrami’s picture of it allows. Indeed, it seems to me that religion has often been prophetic in its relation to the state—even, perhaps, to the point of convincing it to change its lexical ordering. But that is a topic for another day.

—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

*   *   *

I have no doubt that freedom of religion or belief is attaining a prominence in international affairs unforeseen and unforeseeable even five, let alone ten years ago. The reasons are distressingly negative—based as it is on increasing levels of repression and violence against believers of many faiths.

—Malcolm Evans

The category of belief is not so easily transferred from one society to another, and…those who seek to do so are subject to the consequences of their deed.

—Donald Lopez, Jr.

Like a good movie, the story of international religious freedom offers something for everyone. It pits cowardly oppressors against heroic saviors. It is a story of the triumph of international law over those who fail to adhere to global norms and standards. It is a story of secular tolerance versus violent religion. And today especially, it is a story of the need for the U.S. government and its friends to “convince” others—particularly Muslims—that they should endorse a particular model of religious liberty as a template for organizing and democratizing their politics and societies. It is a story of human progress and emancipation, of transforming conditions of religious oppression to liberate individuals—particularly women—from their primitive, pre-modern, discriminatory ways. Working alone and in tandem, these narratives justify intervention to save, define, shape, and sanctify parts of people’s (religious and non-religious) individual and collective lives. The projects with which they are associated are diverse yet intertwined, at times supporting and at times vying with one another. It is a mixed bag.

One common feature of these accounts is the notion that belief is the defining feature of religion. Although occasionally paying respect to other aspects of religious life and belonging, belief as the core of religiosity is a powerful unifying trope to which religious freedom advocates return again and again. Rallying around religion as belief, and the assumption that there can be no religion without belief, plays a central role in international religious freedom campaigns. This post asks whether it would be possible to continue promoting religious freedom as a universalizable construct if this modern construct of belief were seen as a political discourse situated in history, rather than as the mark of the sacred. And if it isn’t possible, then what is religious freedom advocacy actually promoting?

In his contribution to the new Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Talal Asad questions the universality of the liberal democratic requirement that belief or conscience is what properly defines the individual and, for many liberals in particular, represents the essence of religiosity. His argument helps cast in a new light the position that belief is the defining moment of religion, underwriting protection of religious freedom as the right to believe by states as well as by various transnational actors and authorities.

Asad dates the requirement that belief be taken as the essence of religiosity to the religious psychology of seventeenth-century Europe. At that time belief came to be regarded as a privilege (a subject’s ability to choose her belief), a danger (belief’s likelihood of inciting violence), and something that cannot be coerced because it is located in the private space of the mind. Don Lopez has described this seventeenth-century notion as “an ideology of belief, that is, an assumption deriving from the history of Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths.” This discourse of belief was accompanied by a particular understanding of the secular state. “Although the insistence that beliefs cannot be changed from outside appeared to be saying something empirical about ‘personal belief’ (its singular, autonomous and inaccessible-to-others location), it was really part of a political discourse about ‘privacy,’” Asad explains, “a claim to civil immunity with regard to religious faith that reinforced the idea of a secular state and a particular conception of religion.”

Asad draws attention to the shifting and lived (rather than theorized) orientations through which belief has been experienced historically. Words translated as ‘belief’ are always embedded in concrete and distinctive social relationships and sensibilities, he suggests, as illustrated by Dorothea Weltecke’s description of a young peasant woman named Aude Fauré, who was brought before the Inquisition:

She was unable, she said, to credere in Deum. What she meant by this, Weltecke points out, emerges from the detailed context: She took the existence of a God for granted. It was because, in her desperation, she couldn’t see in the Eucharist anything but bread, and because she found herself struggling with disturbing thoughts about incarnation, that she had no hope of God’s mercy. It is not clear that the doctrine of God’s body appearing in the form of bread is being challenged here; what is certainly being expressed is her anguished relationship to him as a consequence of her own incapacity to see anything but bread. In short, it is not that our present concept of belief (that something is true) was absent in pre-modern society but that the words translated as such were usually embedded in distinctive social and political relationships, articulated distinctive sensibilities; they were first of all lived and only secondarily theorized.

If international religious freedom advocacy projects claim as their object the need to secure freedom to believe, Asad’s argument points to some of the complications attending these efforts. Inasmuch as the protection and enforcement of religious freedom hinges upon, and even sanctifies, a religious psychology that relies on the notion of an autonomous subject who chooses beliefs, and then enacts them, such projects privilege particular kinds of religious subjectivity while disabling others. They contribute to the normalization of (religious) subjects for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad, is taken as the universal defining characteristic of what it means to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free, excluding other modes of living in the world, as bodies in communities to which they are obliged, without attention to individual “belief.”

Recent arguments by Malcolm Evans in favor of strengthening the framework of international legal protections for religious freedom illustrate the extent to which belief is taken as the essence of religiosity. Evans argues that legal protection for religious freedom should be seen no longer as “only an option, but it is fast becoming a necessity in order to prevent the further erosion of the position of religious believers in many countries.” The international community should start “developing a more precise understanding of what the freedom of religion as a human right actually entails, and … do so in a coherent and transparent fashion to which all interested parties can contribute” so that “we might then be better placed to develop the means by which it can be realised.” The idea is to settle on the norm, agree on a definition, and fix it in an international convention to move one step closer to ending violence. Such a convention would provide “a more detailed, comprehensive and rounded source of legal obligation concerning the freedom of religion or belief.” This reference to religion or belief explicitly includes non-religious belief as well. It is not only religionists but also non-religionists that are defined by belief. It is everyone. A convention would breathe new life into an anemic global consensus that to date has not offered the protection we all deserve, having “done little to combat the rising tide of restriction, hostility and violence experienced by many religious believers” by tackling “the overriding problem, which is how to hold States to account for their own failure to respect and protect the rights of all believers.”

This argument resonates powerfully in international legal and public policy circles.

Yet the historical particularities of the rise of a particular economy of belief and its close ties, and even constitutive relationship, to the modern notion of religion itself calls for a different reading of Evans’ ambitions. Perhaps contemporary international religious freedom projects should be seen as themselves engendering the formation of individual subjects and “faith communities” for whom believing, in the sense historicized by Asad and lionized by Evans, is seen as the universal defining characteristic of what it is to be religious, and the right to believe as the essence of what it means to be free. To achieve this unity in freedom of belief, belief in belief, as it were, across communities of belief (and non-belief), is what it means to have achieved religious freedom. As Evans testifies, “Faith communities must reject the superficial attractions of claiming or accepting such freedoms for themselves alone, and unhesitatingly support the freedom of religion or belief for all. Unless or until religious communities are prepared to champion for everyone the freedoms that they wish their own followers to enjoy, there is likely to be little opportunity for seriously furthering the freedom of religion or belief at all.”

This identification of religion and religious communities primarily with belief and believers writes out of the picture alternative spaces and practices, such as those described in a recent post by Simon During, in which religion is lived as ethics, culture, and even politics, but without, necessarily, belief. Questioning the presupposition that religion implies belief, During calls for atheists to take over Church institutions from the inside, replicating what he describes as “older conditions and styles of at least Christian ecclesiastical practice, in which belief was not a prerequisite for episcopal ordination.”

The foreclosure on religion without belief also leaves little room for dissenters and doubters on the margins of or just outside those ‘faith communities’ described by Evans, whose voices tend to be subsumed or submerged by the institutions and authorities that speak in their name. 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. Asad remarks on the instability of the notion of religious belief that underlies Charles Taylor’s vindication of the promise of religion:

The difficulty is this: What are to count as religious beliefs? Should beliefs denounced by the medieval Latin church as superstitio (wrongheadedness) therefore be regarded as secular beliefs? Or should they be pronounced religious on the criteria provided by those Enlightenment critics for whom all religion was superstition? Is the intention to carry out a particular act crucial to its religiosity? If so, how and by whom is that to be judged? Clearly how the phenomenon of belief that historians write about should be understood is a complicated question.

It may be worth inquiring into the extent to which a particular secularized Christian notion of the believing or non-believing human is being disseminated through international institutions and practices associated with the promotion of religious freedom “so that it is, to some extent, everywhere—translated, resisted, vernacularized, invoked in political struggles, and made the standard language enforced by power.” To what extent is the autonomous subject defined by his or her belief (or non-belief) normalized not only by secular states and (their) religious freedom activists, but now, also, through a rapidly proliferating series of transnational legal regimes and administrative initiatives that have eagerly adopted this template and have as their objective to protect and enforce the right to religious freedom?

Consider the crisis in Syria. Calls for the protection of persecuted Christians in Syria and neighboring countries are a cornerstone of religious freedom advocacy in the wake of the uprisings. Joe Eibner of Christian Solidarity International has lobbied President Obama to urge UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to declare a genocide warning for Christians across the Middle East. Howard Berman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has stated that the future of minorities is “on our agenda as we figure out how to help these countries” and their treatment of Christians and other minorities is a “‘red line’ that will affect future aid.” Habib Malik of Lebanese American University calls for Western nations to stand up for the rights of Christians, who he says may be cleansed from lands where democratic elections are used to oppress minorities rather than empower them. While this must be done “in a way that is not misperceived on the other end,” Malik concludes, “the West should not be cowed.” USA Today reports that “Christians in Syria, where Muslims have risen up against President Bashar Assad, have been subjected to murder, rape and kidnappings in Damascus and rebellious towns, according to Christian rights groups, including Open Doors, which helps Christians facing persecution.”

The momentum builds, as persecution of Christians takes on a life of its own and may, in some cases, come to define the conflict on the ground. The logic of the story is clear: when “Muslims rise up against Assad,” the result is Christian persecution. Yet the Syrian protests are not captured by the notion of “Muslims rising up against Assad.” This is the regime’s narrative. For decades the Assad family has relied upon the purported threat of sectarian anarchy lurking just below the surface of society and politics to justify autocratic rule. Defining the revolt “less as a popular uprising against a secular autocracy and more as an armed sectarian conflict pitting Sunnis against Alawites and their Shiite allies: Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah” hardens lines of religious difference and makes sectarian violence more likely. In this case, advocacy in the name of protecting Christians’ freedom of belief is adding fuel to the fire of the very religious and sectarian conflict that religious freedom claims to be uniquely equipped to transcend. In Evans’ words, the conflict is understood as directly resulting from a refusal to acknowledge the rights of “believers,” concealing the ways in which divisions cut across sectarian divides and the ways forward that emerge when the focus is not on beliefs but on shared needs and visions. The crisis in Syria calls for an approach to protecting human life and dignity that goes beyond these calls for ‘freedom of belief,’ and that loosens the grip of this construct on the political imaginary of the conflict.

Asad concludes his chapter by observing that “the modern idea of religious belief (protected as an individual right) is a function of the secular state but not of democratic sensibility.” In its strongest forms, the story of international religious freedom globalizes the secular state’s power over the individual. Appearing as a guarantee of the worth of the individual’s own desires, it is actually a story of telling people who they are, what to do and how to be. It privileges particular ways of doing and being as deserving special protection by the state or associations thereof, leaving others behind. Like other categories, it singles out authorized representatives of believers (and less frequently non-believers) for legal protection, reinforcing divisions and hierarchies within and between communities. And in its most insistent moments, it is a story of the costs in human dignity and diversity associated with the attempt to make “belief the measure of what religion is understood to be,” and the freedom to believe the measure of what it means to be free. Aude Fauré was brought before the Inquisition at the beginning of this modern attempt at mind control. Today it has become a global enterprise.

Following a critical analysis of different theoretical approaches to the question of secularism in current scholarship, and a critique of the underlying concepts of religion and the secular and the way they are interrelated, we argue for what we call a post-religio-secular perspective. This notion aims at an understanding that conceives of the public roles of religion not as explainable, and preliminary, phenomena (as the evolutionist paradigm of modernism would hold) or as regrettable aberrations that ought to be fought (as the liberal bias dictates). Rather, the post-secular-religious turn in the study of religion can be described as a scholarly attitude that not only is critically engaged with the assumptions and politics of the religio-secularist paradigm but seeks to open up new spaces for the study of religion by self-consciously taking into account the historicity and thus perspectivity that such study necessarily entails. The post-secular-religious stance opens perspectives that allow for new epistemologies and methodologies with regard to the religious and the secular—freed from the monofocal, evolutionist, and Eurocentric assumptions of the modernist framework that links religion and politics as a binary pair and to that extent remains attached to organicist perceptions of division (between the religious and the secular/politics) or integrality (as evidenced in the discourse of the theologico-political).

Politics of Religion-Making

The realities of global and local early-twenty-first-century politics put scholars critical of the religio-secular paradigm in a challenging position. While most of us engage in theoretical projects that take for granted the failure of secularism—indeed, many of us would question or reject most if not all of the premises of secularization theory—it has to be acknowledged that on the level of politics the religio-secular discourse has, especially in times of a perceived “return of religion,” not lost its pervasiveness (as, for example, Charles Taylor’s designation for our “secular age” [secularity 3] indicates). To the contrary, this “return” has reinvigorated secularist forces, which often respond with interpretations of the role of religion in political conflicts invoking pictures of a cultural if not civilizational clash. The political reality forces us, paraphrasing Talal Asad, to think about the conditions in which the dichotomies between “the religious” and “the secular” do (still) seem to make sense in so many public discourses. Such inquiry needs to ask questions about political and epistemological hegemony: “How, when, and by whom are the categories of religion and the secular defined? What assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them?” In different ways, the chapters constituting this volumecontributors to Secularism and Religion-Making tackle these programmatic questions. They analyze cases where religion does seem to make sense and investigate how notions of religion and the secular are reified within specific, local and transnational, competitions for intellectual, material, and political resources.

The key concept or “critical term” that has guided the work of the contributors to the volume is religion-making. Broadly conceived the term religion-making refers to the ways in which religion(s) is conceptualized and institutionalized within the matrix of a globalized world-religions discourse in which ideas, social formations, and social/cultural practices are discursively reified as “religious” ones. Religion-making works, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, by means of normalizing and often functionalist discourses centered around certain taken-for-granted notions, such as the religion/secular binary, as well as binaries subordinated to it (such as sacred/profane, this-worldly/otherworldly, etc.). We see the notion of religion-making not as a homogeneous analytical concept, but, rather, we see it as a heuristic device that allows us to bring into conversation a wide range of perspectives on practices and discourses that reify religion (as well as its various subcategories and associated others, such as, most prominently, the secular). Religion-making is thus a heuristic tool for analysis and deconstruction, and does not have any aspirations of reinstating notions of authenticity and essence through the backdoor by comparing different religion-making projects. The critical work done by the term religion-making is not concerned with the evaluation of authorizing and legitimating claims of any particular religion-making politics in a normative or normalizing sense. Far from aiming to endorse any particular religion-making processes, we rather want to foster perspectives through which these processes are contextualized and historicized within the frameworks of particular epistemes of religion and the secular, respectively.

The chapters of this volume incorporate and combine theoretical (philosophical/theologico-political) with descriptive-analytical (historical/sociological/anthropological) modes of critique. In this way the volume seeks to avoid the impasse between theory and empiricism that continues to be a hallmark of many books with a focus on the politics of religion and secularism. Without losing sight of the theoretical issues that are constitutive of this volume, in regard to the politics that we put under the critical lens, it is useful to distinguish the ideal-typically among three different levels and discourses of religion-making, as well as the linkages between them: (1) religion-making from above, that is, as a strategy from a position of power, where religion becomes an instrument of governmentality, a means to legitimize certain politics and positions of power; (2) religion-making from below, that is, as a politics where particular social groups in a subordinate position draw on a religionist discourse to reestablish their identities as legitimate social formations distinguishable from other social formations through tropes of religious difference and/or claims for certain rights; and (3) religion-making from (a pretended) outside, that is, scholarly discourses on religion that provide legitimacy to the first two processes of religion-making by systematizing and thus normalizing the religious/secular binary and its derivates.

What we term religion-making from above refers to authoritative discourses and practices that define and confine things (symbols, languages, practices) as “religious” and “secular” through the disciplining means of the modern state and its institutions (such as lawmaking, the judiciary, state bureaucracies, state media, and the public education system). While state institutions represent dominant positions of power within public discourse, other non-state actors in the public sphere might also sometimes assume positions of normative efficacy, be it certain media (mainly print and television, possibly also the Internet), influential public personalities (opposition politicians, public intellectuals, showbiz and media stars), or corporate enterprises. The example of neoliberal U.S. pundits arguing for a remaking of Islam may serve as an example to illustrate the often unabashedly political nature of such religion-making, revealing itself in very Foucauldian ways as an act of governmentality aimed at creating liberal-secular subjects. In a 2003 report published by the RAND Corporation, a conservative U.S. think tank, the “Islamic world” is depicted as in a severe crisis of identity posing a major threat to the “rest of the World.” Islam needed to be brought in line with Western/American interests. It is a difficult operation, as is frankly admitted: “It is no easy matter to transform a major world religion. If ‘nation-building’ is a daunting task, ‘religion-building’ is immeasurably more perilous and complex.” One of the heralds of neocon U.S. American dreams of civilizing Islam, Daniel Pipes, drove this language one step further. In 2004 he remarked that the “ultimate goal” of the “war on terrorism” was “religion-building” in the sense of a modernization of Islam. In his view, “only when Muslims turn to secularism will this terrible era of their history come to an end.” The imperialist tone of such statements is part of the rhetoric of the “new world order” and the “Middle East Project” envisioned by the conservative U.S. political circles that had been related closely to the Bush administration. To sum up the hardly concealed concern behind the arguments of the cited U.S. neocon pundits, the West/United States has to engage in a remaking of Islam, analogous to nation-building referred to as religion-building, with the goal to create a modern, that is, secular, Islam in line with American interests and a neoliberal, modernist frame for religion as secured by the doctrine of secularism (see Saba Mahmood’s sharp criticism of the liberal biases underlying secularist rhetoric and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s critique of the recent Chicago Council report on religious freedom). The examples point not only to imperialist ambitions within U.S. politics, but more broadly exemplify drastically how political religion-making discourses can be. In line with the U.S. American tradition of liberal secularism, U.S. religion-builders are less concerned with keeping religion out of politics than with regulating its political manifestations (such reformist politics directed toward Islam are also present in Europe).

While scholars of postcolonial studies have discussed the role of religious and secular discourses in the legitimation and administration of the nation-state, less attention has been directed to cases in which marginalized sociocultural communities have adopted the language of religion as a means of empowerment vis-à-vis assimilationist politics directed against them. Such religion-making from below forms a dialectical relationship with religion-making from above, implicitly accepting the latter’s hegemony, to the language and semantics of which it responds. Whether perceived as acts of emancipation, appropriation, or subversion against hegemonic religious and secular knowledge regimes, religion-making from below has played important roles in local discourses of religion and secularism.

Religion-making from below operates via processes of cultural translation. Translation here needs to be understood as a two-way relationship. Translation of the language of the religio-secular construct into new territories can be forceful and violent, as evidenced amply in postcolonial studies. But one should not understand the appropriation of religio-secularist discourses as necessarily resulting from coercion. Credit needs to be given to the more complex dynamics of agency in the adaptation of these discourses in non-Western vernacular languages. Charles Hallisey has discussed this dynamic as “intercultural mimesis—a phrase denoting the cultural interchange that occurs between the native and the Orientalist in the construction of Western knowledge about ‘the Orient.’” In other words, while it is indisputable that the politics of translation of the concept of religion beyond the Christian West were molded by the power imbalance that is characteristic of Orientalist scholarship and its objects of study, analysis of this translation process has to provide sufficient space for the agency of local appropriations of elements of this discourse. We need to think the appropriation of the Western discourses of religion and the secular in a manner that does not reduce local actors to the role of passive objects but instead focuses on “local productions of meaning,” that is, the agency of locals in the encounter with Orientalist knowledge.

Triggered by the emerging field of postcolonial studies following Edward Said’s Orientalism, awareness of academia’s complicity in the essentialization of particular others has increased considerably. The work of Said and those who followed in his footsteps has forced self-proclaimed or thusly institutionalized “Orientalists” to reflect on the history of Orientalist disciplines and their role within imperialist projects. The multifold implications of scholars in imperialist projects unmasks pretensions of objectivity and reveals that religion-making from the pretended outside is often closely linked with more politically motivated religion-making from above. The academic study of religion in particular has been implicated in imperialist projects and Eurocentric discourses more generally, and it still plays, especially in the United States, where its institutional position is much stronger than in Western Europe and despite an admitted increase in self-critical reflection to this extent, an important role in the objectification of religion(s). Unraveling such entanglements, as an inquiry into the politics of religion-making brings along, is therefore a challenging project particularly for the discipline of religious studies, since it entails the theoretical and methodological deconstruction of the very concept (“religion”) through which this discipline is legitimated. World-religion courses are flourishing, and classes of this or similar kind belong to the bread-and-butter courses of many religious studies departments. It will be interesting to see in which ways the academic discipline of religious studies can respond to the challenges that it will have to face once it recognizes and positions itself more deliberately toward the historical biases that contributed to its creation, as well as the religion politics in which it is still involved. The problem of course is not new, and many readers will be familiar with J. Z. Smith’s controversial dictum “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.” Tomoko Masuzawa’s recent work on the Invention of World Religions has further increased awareness of the urgency to raise critical self-reflection on the involvement of the academic study of religion in the making and re-making of the concept of religion. Beyond the very existential problem that this constitutes for institutions organized around religious studies as an academic discipline, the relationship between this discipline and the genealogy of the religion and world-religion concepts is itself an interesting and most important field of inquiry. In this context Peterson and Walhof have rightly asked about “what is the proper agenda for religious studies in a context in which the object of study, religion, has been invented or worked over by powerful economic, social, and political forces.”  Such questions need to be addressed in order to understand better the role of both academic and political elites and institutions in the making and remaking of “religion” and the “secular”.

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NS: Can you say a bit about what you’re hoping to tell us with Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: The purpose of the book is to show how deeply historical—beyond what we normally think of as history, or even prehistory—and how biological human religion is. We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and “history” took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

NS: Reaching so far back in time, how did you go about marking your story’s beginning?

RB: The advent of helpless infants who require intensive, long-term parental care as long as 200 million years ago is an absolutely critical first step. I don’t say that religion appears there, but without it the religious culture that appears much later just isn’t possible. Think about it. The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past. For much of evolutionary history, the period of helplessness was very brief. Most animals become autonomous and able to fend for themselves very quickly. Reproduction comes in a matter of months for many mammals. In larger and more complex mammals, the period of parental care grew longer and longer. There was a quantum leap among the great apes, and with us it became really long. Imagine, an animal that can’t take care of itself until age 21! It’s a weird thing, biologically. But it allows for the development of what the ethologist Gordon Burghardt calls the “relaxed field”; relieving the more brutal pressures of the struggle for existence and opening the possibility for a great deal of experimentation, creativity, and innovation.

NS: And what about the story’s end?

RB: The book actually ends two thousand years ago, and some people may wonder why I would do that. Christianity and Islam aren’t even in it. Between you and me, I’m so glad they’re not, because I don’t have to fight any stupid battles of the culture wars. But the real reason it ends there is that life is finite. I just couldn’t get through the last two thousand years without writing two volumes, and that was more than I could imagine, but I hope to write a smaller book dealing with the recent past.

NS: Still, you insist, almost as a refrain, that “nothing is ever lost.” What does that mean about the connection between this distant past and the present?

RB: “Nothing is ever lost” means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are. We’re running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can’t adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn’t a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

NS: How would you characterize the progress of your own thinking between the 1964 “Religious Evolution” paper and Religion in Human Evolution?

RB: Well, that paper was one of the first things I ever wrote. Actually, the first draft of it was written when I was a postdoctoral student at McGill around 1955. In the back of my mind, religious evolution was the thing I cared about most. It always structured my most frequently-given and most well-received undergraduate course on the sociology of religion. I referred to evolution from time to time, but between that 1964 essay and this book, although I was thinking and learning about religious evolution, other things became more urgent. I finally retired at 70 in 1997, and for the first time in my life I could devote myself to this book as I have for the last thirteen years.

NS: How did those other more urgent concerns present themselves?

RB: I was pulled by external forces. The whole preoccupation with America was particularly ironic because it was the one society I didn’t want to study. I chose to be a Japan specialist in graduate school to get as far away as I could! But once the “Civil Religion in America” paper came out in 1967, all kinds of nonacademic groups wanted to hear from me. I thought, well, this crazy country is all mixed up, and if I can help clarify things I should respond. That led to The Broken Covenant, and then the Ford Foundation asked to fund Habits of the Heart. They were worried about what was happening to the American middle class. I didn’t ask for money for Habits; they pushed it on me. I found four really amazing younger colleagues who did most of the fieldwork. In that way, I got distracted by various things that were intrinsically important—so important that I gave them high priority—but that kept me from doing what my life’s work was meant to be.

NS: What has occupied you most during the last thirteen years that you’ve been working on this book?

RB: I was learning an enormous amount. All my life I have been deeply interested in ancient Israel and ancient Greece, and my graduate degree was in sociology and Far Eastern languages, so I knew a lot about ancient China. Back then I read Confucius and Mencius in their original classical Chinese. Since, I’ve had to catch up with current research in each of those fields. India, though, was the one place where I really started almost from scratch, like an undergraduate. That turned out to be utterly fascinating. I knew a lot about Buddhism because Buddhism is important in East Asia, particularly in Japan, but I didn’t know early Buddhism, and I didn’t know much about what we call Hinduism. Then I discovered the cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s notion that human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic—that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing. So it’s a deeply interdisciplinary study. I’m drawing on biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and child-development researchers all in order to understand the deep roots of what would ultimately become religion. I’ve learned so much. It has been a deep pleasure to write this book.

NS: What about Jaspers’ notion of the “axial age,” that crucial period in the first millennium BCE when each of these civilizations flowered? Has it been framing your thinking since the beginning?

RB: It’s already there in the 1964 article. Benjamin Schwartz, a leading scholar of ancient China, organized the first discussion of the axial age in American academic life, I think, in an issue of Deadalus quite early on. Ben was my teacher and my colleague, and I was very influenced by his reading of Jaspers. So Jaspers goes all the way back, but of course I never really applied his insights in detail until I wrote this book. More recently, there was a conference in 2008 at the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt in Germany, for which my axial age chapters were provided as a base for discussion.

NS: Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation has recently helped renew public interest in the axial age concept too. What do you think of that book?

RB: I’ve been with her up on the platform, and I know she’s a very intelligent person. But she doesn’t know much about the axial age. For her, it’s all about compassion. Compassion is a great thing, but that just won’t do! When she ends up excluding Greece from the axial age because there was no compassion there, I thought I would pull my hair out. It’s so simple-minded. In terms of the big picture, I don’t see any other book that does anything like what I’m trying to do.

NS: Comparisons like axial theories can allow differences between cultures to be obscured by ostensible similarity. How do you address the danger of such universalism?

RB: The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand. But if you read my four axial chapters you would never think that these cultures are all the same. They are very, very different. I never want to talk theory without giving really detailed ethnographic examples. Here, I learned from my friendship with Clifford Geertz. From our graduate school days on, I always admired Cliff as an ethnographer. Do you know Talal Asad’s essay about Cliff?

NS: The one in the Genealogies of Religion volume?

RB: It’s full of things that are just plain false. It attacks Cliff as an Orientalist and cites Edward Said. I went back and looked carefully at Orientalism. Cliff Geertz is one of the few people whom Said completely exonerates, but you wouldn’t dream that this was the case by reading Asad. I’ve actually been warned by former students not to make Geertz so important in my preface because Geertz is in the doghouse now. Well, I want to bring him out of the doghouse! Cliff always insisted on the really deep detail—the “thick description”—and there’s a hell of a lot of that in this book. I had to educate myself on every one of these societies, both theoretically and in terms of ethnographic details.

NS: Religion in Human Evolution is an incredibly broad and ambitious work, so unlike much of the scholarship being done right now. Do you think there is too much pressure to narrowly specialize in the academy today?

RB: Tell me about it. The pressure to have articles in the primary reviewed journals of your profession in order to get tenure is really awful. The economics of the academic world today makes it all the worse. Who can take thirteen years to write a book like this? Fortunately, I’ve been in good health. But Cliff died at 80. I was very angry at him for that—I wanted him to read this book!

NS: I wonder if you have an opinion of journalist Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, which offers, in some ways, a comparable story about the development of religion in evolutionary perspective.

RB: I think Wright is a very bright guy, and he has some interesting things to say. But he’s very hung up on the notion of gods and, particularly, God. His book overwhelmingly focuses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. You would hardly know that half the world is not there. Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren’t monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism—either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture—and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing. But it’s clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary. I’m not saying that you can’t learn something from Wright and other journalists like him—Nicholas Wade, for instance.

NS: Yes, Wade’s latest book is The Faith Instinct. You’ve read it?

RB: I read that in advance for Penguin. I told the editor that I admire a lot in the book, but there’s so much I can’t agree with. Wade says at some point that Christianity is the first universal religion. Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it’s not a universal religion I don’t know what a universal religion is. There’s also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It’s not so simple. One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate—obviously you couldn’t be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it’s not always there in the foreground. If you don’t understand that, you’re missing a lot.

NS: As someone trained in the social sciences, how did you go about engaging with scientific material? How did you weed through the current research and find insights that could help your project?

RB: In part it goes back to the fact that I became a major in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations in the second year of its existence. My whole undergraduate and graduate training brought me into clinical and social psychology, and anthropology. I’ve never been one of these boundary-guarding sociologists who thinks that if something isn’t sociology I can ignore it. This is also very much the spirit of Talcott Parsons; he was the quintessential sociologist, but he never drew any boundaries. Jerome Bruner, a developmental psychologist, was an important early influence. More recently, I did it just by finding who the best people are and reading their books. I’ve had colleagues who helped steer me, but it has really been self-help all the way.

NS: It is rare to see someone lately so informed by both the humanities and scientific research. You seem to be doing very much what Barbara Herrnstein Smith is calling for in her Natural Reflections.

RB: It’s a wonderful book that came just at the right moment for me.

NS: Say more about how it impacted you.

RB: Well, she makes the strong case that an explanatory science and an interpretive science are not incompatible, that they’re working at different levels, that they are revealing different kinds of truths, and that we can learn a lot from each. I wouldn’t say that this was totally new to me. Again, this was very much a part of Cliff Geertz’s thinking too. He wrote an early essay on the evolution of culture and the brain in the 1960s, before most people were talking about it. But Smith writes so eloquently. It’s really more the way she said it. She isn’t interested in bitter diatribe or polemic, and of course neither am I.

NS: Over the course of your career you’ve been able to do a unique kind of public theology within social science. Do you think that that kind of role is still open to younger sociologists?

RB: Christian Smith is an example of a younger person doing that. At one point I very much wanted to bring him to Berkeley, but it was precisely that side of him that my colleagues didn’t like, and he wasn’t brought. Nonetheless, he’s certainly one of the two or three most influential sociologists of religion today, so he hasn’t been excluded from the discussion by any means. Even Bob Wuthnow—though you could hardly call him a public theologian—has a very sensitive ear for religious reality, and his writings are always full of sympathetic understanding of the things he’s writing about. I think it’s possible. But whether I should have included three sermons in The Robert Bellah Reader is still an open question, because I think it did foster a degree of prejudice against a book that has a lot of other things in it. I did that partly deliberately.

NS: To what do you attribute that prejudice?

RB: The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we’re politically correct on everything, but it’s still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong. It’s astounding to me to hear what some people can say with the assumption that everyone would agree with them, based on nothing whatsoever.

NS: An important part of your message has been the famous concern expressed in Habits of the Heart about “Sheilaism”—the kind of individualistic spirituality that you and your colleagues saw at work in the United States. Some have suggested recently, including your former student Harvey Cox, that some of these nontraditional spiritualities are finding a place in social and political life in a way that wasn’t quite recognized before. Is the way you think about new kinds of spiritualities evolving?

RB: I certainly think that so-called spirituality can have social and even political consequences. I’ve seen this among environmental activists, who often have some kind of eco-spirituality and who are very organizationally loose. They switch from one group to another, and if one group isn’t pure enough they go to another. And yet they spend a long period of their lives doing good work in a cause. In the end what I feel is most problematic about “I’m spiritual but not religious” is: what the hell are you going to tell your children? I’m allergic to the notion that so-called institutional religion—by which people mean organizations such as churches and synagogues—is bad. Institutions are very important and if you think you can get along without them, you’re putting yourself on the wrong line; you can’t.

NS: So your conclusions in Habits of the Heart stand?

RB: If you think about what has happened in American society, or even just today with what is going on with the Tea Party movement, Habits of the Heart was so right on. Radical individualism is even more evident today than when Habits was published twenty-five years ago. It describes the default mode of this deeply misguided society beautifully—horribly, but beautifully.

But it behooves us to think more deeply about what this regional stability is understood to consist in. It is clearly understood to include the maintenance of existing treaties and strategic military arrangements with Israel. And this is interesting, because Israel defines itself as a religious state. So, we have a situation in which Egypt’s becoming a secular democracy is thought to assure its continued diplomatic and military commitments to a religious state. One might object here that Israel is not a religious state and that it does not define itself in that way. This objection would be partly correct: Israel’s secular and religious identity constitutes a continual ambiguity, one with which it continues to struggle internally. Thus, although much of the population defines itself as secular, explicitly self-identified religious groups exert enormous power in government and society, well out of proportion to their actual numbers. This creates enormous controversy over central issues, such as the accepted criteria for deciding whether or not one is Jewish. Moreover, like Egypt, Israel’s personal status law is heavily rooted in religious law. Israeli religious authorities have so far successfully resisted the institution of civil marriage—a situation that forces non-religious couples in the country to choose options that provide them with fewer rights and guarantees. Unlike Egypt, however, Israel’s profound secular-religious ambiguities are not seen to threaten the existing treaties and security arrangements upon which regional stability is thought to rest. We might ask why this is so.

It is also unclear why it is assumed that if Egypt becomes a secular democratic state, it would be necessarily sympathetic to Israel. Egypt’s commitment to secular democratic ideals might well lead Egypt to distance itself from Israel on account of Israel’s ambiguous religious-secular character. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia maintain strategic relationships with Israel, but while Turkey is a country that imposes a particular brand of secularism on its people, Saudi Arabia is one in which a narrow version of Islam is imposed on the population. Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s Islamic character is not seen as a threat to the region’s stability, even though its Wahhabism has been cast by some (largely lay) commentators as an ideological source of terror.

These are some of the ways in which our discourses on the secular and the religious so often twist and turn, get entangled in, and finally confound, each other. What gets lost, however, in all of the talk of regional stability and of secularity and religiosity is the crucial issue of Palestine. Few have emphasized this link in the regional chain, with the exception of Rashid Khalidi, who, thankfully, continues to remind us of it. What matters here is not whether Egypt, or even Israel, is a secular or a religious state. What matters is how Israel treats—or continually mistreats—the Palestinians, denying them their internationally agreed upon rights, and whether Egypt will continue to support this ongoing mistreatment. Here, it is important to note that the repression of the last thirty years in Egypt has been allowed to grow unhindered—both tolerated and supported—by the U.S., precisely because of its interest in maintaining those political and strategic arrangements with Israel that enable the continual and increasing violation of Palestinian rights. And it is this repression that Egyptians have so powerfully protested against.

In the end, it may be doubted whether the regional stability that so many are concerned about, and which Egypt is hoped to help sustain, can really be counted as stability. After all, this “stability” has allowed both Israel and the U.S. to conduct a number of aggressive wars throughout the region, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq. If commentators are genuinely concerned with democracy in Egypt and stability in the Middle East, they should fear less the Muslim Brothers and more the U.S. funding and regional alliances that aim to enact American foreign policy in the region, and which have choked off democratic possibilities for so long.

Having made these points, important for our considerations of the present moment, I would like now to turn to some more broadly theoretical reflections concerning what the events in Egypt might teach us about questions of secularity and religiosity more generally.

The question of whether Egypt is or will be a secular or a religious state has been asked for a long time, because of both the country’s strategic geopolitical location and the genuine religious-political ambiguities that it exhibits. It is therefore a question that I have not been able to avoid in my own research. However, I have tried to approach it not by looking at the norms that secularism imposes but rather the questions that it obliges us to ask and answer. That is, I do not assess the norms found in Egypt by judging whether or not they conform to secular standards, because those standards are seldom clear, highly contested, and often changing anyway. What I explore instead are the underlying, longstanding questions against which those norms are continually adduced, established, contested, and transformed as answers. I see secularism as a problem-space—a historical ensemble of questions and attached stakes; the question that anchors this historical ensemble is where to draw the line between religion and politics and what the limits of religion in society ought to be; the attached stakes are those rights and liberties typically identified with liberalism—such as equality, tolerance, and freedom of belief. That these questions and stakes are longstanding is evident; that the answers to them have been changing and contested is equally clear. What is important to note, however, is that though the problem-space of secularism is relatively recent historically (in medieval Christian and Muslim times, for example, a principled distinction between religion and politics was not typically seen to be connected to a range of fundamental rights and liberties)—it has now become indispensable to the practical intelligibility of our ways of life and to many of the ethical positions we take. It is difficult to remain indifferent to it.

It has been historically, and remains today, the case that the state has the right to ultimately decide the central questions that constitute the problem-space of secularism. This right of decision is, and has been, an expression of the principle and practice of the state’s sovereign power. We can therefore say that the power of secularism is not the power of the norm but of the question and of the sovereignty that decides it. The question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state is but one manifestation of this power; that it has been continually asked both in and outside of Egypt is just one indication that the country is fully subsumed within the problem-space of secularism, as are Israel, the United States, England, France, Germany, and many other states that continue to exhibit secular-religious ambiguities and that stake fundamental freedoms upon their clarification. And this will remain the case until the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics is no longer deemed necessary to ask in relation to the range and distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. (I have discussed these points in greater detail here.)

The approach to secularism as a historical problem-space, and the central role of the state’s sovereign power within it, has consequences for some of the critical claims of political theology. It may also help to frame the recent events in Egypt in a particularly revealing light. The fact that it is state sovereignty that ultimately decides where to draw a line between religion and politics means that it is a power that stands, importantly, prior to religion and politics. Since it stands prior to both, it cannot be pinned down to either. In other words, pace Carl Schmitt, some significant political concepts are not secularized theological concepts. This is especially the case with state sovereignty, because it stands prior to religion and politics and decides the distinction between them. Importantly, however, while state sovereign power stands prior to religion and politics, it is not indifferent to the question of how to distinguish and separate them.

This conception of state sovereignty contrasts with the manifestation of sovereignty that we saw in the protests. From the vantage point of the tradition of democratic legitimacy, the protests were a manifestation of pure popular sovereignty. I will contrast this to state sovereignty by calling it “bare sovereignty.” Like state sovereignty, bare sovereignty stands prior to religion and politics. Unlike state sovereignty, however, this bare sovereignty is utterly indifferent to the question of where to draw a line between them. It stands apart from the modern game of defining and distinguishing religion and politics, and does not partake of it. Not surprisingly, the protests expressed every potential language of justice, secular or religious, but embraced none. In the sense that it stands prior to religion and politics, and that it is indifferent to the question of their distinction, the bare sovereignty manifested by the protest movement stands outside the problem-space of secularism. In that sense, it represents a genuinely asecular power.

(Bare sovereignty is therefore much more than, and significantly different from, the principle of “we the people” that is formally used to justify state sovereignty within the democratic tradition. That principle has been frequently used by the state to justify various impositions and exceptions upon the population it governs. Bare sovereignty, however, breaks through this principle of justification; indeed, bare sovereignty is not a principle at all, but an exceptional existential moment, an expression of power that arises from the potentialities intrinsic to a given mode of life. For more on this point, see the remarks of legal and political theorist Samera Esmeir.)

Why have I chosen the term “asecular,” and not, say, “non-secular” or “post-secular,” to describe the power manifested by these protests? The term “non-secular” is too easily confused with the notion of the religious. And unlike post-secularity, asecularity is not a temporal marker. It allows for the possibility that asecularity has, in different forms, always been with us, even from within the traditions from which state secularity arises. Explorations of post-secularity typically try to identify the emergence of new norms. Such attempts fail to recognize that the process of identifying and distinguishing secular from non-secular norms is part of what secularism is, and that this process is integral to its power. In contrast, the term asecularity specifies a situation not where norms are no longer secular, but where the questions against which such norms are adduced and contested as answers are no longer seen as necessary. It is a situation where we can be genuinely indifferent to those questions, the ways that particular stakes are attached to them, and their seeming indispensability to our ways of life.  As a result, such moments open up spaces for us to think beyond our current predicaments. Here, it is worth noting that the condition of asecularity manifested by these protests was also associated with a genuine ethos of democratic sensibility.

In regard to this connection, Talal Asad makes some important remarks, with which I would like to end. In an article entitled “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics” (forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Robert Orsi, ed.), he distinguishes between “democratic sensibility as an ethos” and “democracy as the political system of the state,” and goes on to say that:

the former . . . involves the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity. The latter is jealous of its sovereignty, defines and protects the subjective rights of its citizens (including their right to ‘religious freedom’), infuses them with nationalist fervor, invokes bureaucratic rationality in governing them justly; it is fundamentally exclusive. My point is not to make an invidious comparison between sensibility and politics, not to argue that the two are necessarily incompatible. I simply ask whether the latter undermines the former—and if it does, to what extent.

Following Asad, we might say that the problem-space of secularism falls within the purview of the state, its sovereignty, and its expanding regulatory capacities. But what this manifestation of asecular, bare sovereignty shows us is that it may not be necessary to have a principled distinction between religion and politics to express an ethos of democratic sensibility. Or, to put it more precisely, one may not be obliged to ask and answer the question of where to draw the line between religion and politics in order to foster the mutual care, attunement to pain and distress, concern for truth, non-judgmental disposition, and tendency toward inclusion by which Asad characterizes this ethos. Indeed, the only way to obtain it might be to be indifferent to the question of their distinction and the set of stakes historically attached to it. This might be one way to construe Asad’s statement at the end of the essay, where he writes: “One might suggest, finally, that the modern idea of religious belief (protected as a right in the individual and regulated institutionally) is a critical function of the liberal democratic nation-state but not of democratic sensibility.”

I thank Samera Esmeir and Saba Mahmood for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece. I also thank Talal Asad, especially for his help in clarifying my ideas on bare sovereignty.

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

IV

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

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

First question: What is secularism?

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

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

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

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

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

Second question: How is secularism related to Christianity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to many liberal theories, expressions of religious citizens are acceptable in the public sphere so long as they do not influence formal law-making and are expressed in an appropriate public venue. But the political reality is actually more complex and reveals a narrowing or even complete disappearance of public spaces in which religious expression is possible. Talal Asad explains this contradiction by engaging in a Foucauldian deconstruction of public space. Asad’s approach to secularism is particularly helpful for explaining the current debate on Islam in Europe, though it nonetheless requires some additional nuance and further contextualization.

Unlike the liberal theoreticians John Rawls and Charles Taylor, Asad does not see the secular public sphere as a neutral, shared space composed of different voices that accept and abide by the same principles or ethics of citizenship. Instead, he defines the private/public divide as embedded in a heterogeneous landscape of power. From the beginning, in Asad’s view, the “liberal public sphere” has excluded certain kinds of people: women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the poor classes, immigrants, religious groups, and others.

In the same vein, Dominique Colas analyzes the fight between Iconoclasts and the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century and observes elements relevant to the concerns raised by Asad: the power of the state is employed to violently crush movements that refused to accept the limitations placed upon their religious claims in the broader public realm. Colas clearly illustrates that the concept of tolerance in the “civil society” of the sixteenth century was not a neutral force. Those who refused to accept the limitations for social behavior and expression were labeled “fanatics” and harshly punished. “Fanaticism,” as defined by Colas, is precisely this refusal to accept the duality of the public and private realms of the social order.

The tension between civil authority and the particular cultural and religious norms of minority communities is the crucial issue in the debate over the definition of “secularism.” In twenty-first century Europe, it is important to understand the public sphere as, not only a disembodied voice, but also a product of the media as well as state-mediated discourses. During the cartoon crisis, for example, alongside Muslims protesting expressly against blasphemy, several made use of secular arguments that could, in principle, have been received in the public sphere, but were rejected because of the asymmetrical balance of power between European establishments and the growing—and increasingly assertive—Muslim minority. Some, for example, utilized arguments similar to those concerning the prevention of hate speech (as it is guaranteed by most European states), holocaust denial, and incitement to violence. Regardless, unconsidered perceptions of Muslims based on a stigma of extremism often prevent rational consideration of expressions that are legitimate within European legal systems.

In the same vein, the rallying of European Muslims who wanted to ban The Satanic Verses and murder its author, Salman Rushdie, has been seen by some prominent advocates of minority rights as an important example of a religious and cultural minority attempting to introduce restrictions that are unacceptable, given that they undermine individual autonomy. Charles Taylor, for instance, considered the demand that The Satanic Verses be banned to be illegitimate. Michael Walzer, well known for his relativist approach to values, took a hard-line liberal position to defend Rushdie against his detractors, arguing that immigrants, by their very choice of immigrating to Europe, have chosen to adopt the tenets of Western liberalism and should therefore conform to them.

On the other hand, many of those in Europe who champion multiculturalism, such as Tariq Modood and Bhikku Parekh, have criticized such positions, explaining that it is a mistake to see the fight against apostasy as British Muslims’ key motivation. Instead, they explain the protests of Muslim leaders as evidence simply of their desire to include Islam under the British Blasphemy Law that, before its repeal in 2008, was strictly limited to Anglicanism. These examples of the divergent ways in which Muslims make claims on and in the secular public sphere highlight the limits of the “overlapping consensus” view and suggest an imbalanced relationship of power between a specific religious group and the representatives of civil authority.

An important question raised by the Muslim presence in Europe is how the protection of specific subcultures can promote, rather than stifle, individual emancipation. Will Kymlicka offers one possible way to reconcile the two conflicting demands: “If we simplify to an extreme, we can state that minority rights are compatible with cultural liberalism when a) individual freedom is protected within the group, and b) they promote equality, and not domination, between groups within the different European societies.” Sometimes, however, Islamic groups collectively appeal for rights that would, in effect, limit individual freedom. The Rushdie Affair and the call to ban The Satanic Verses are illustrative of such dilemmas.

A different—and contradictory—example of the tension between civic order and the Islamic community, on which the rest of this article will focus, concerns the recognition of Islamic Law within existing legal systems. In order to bring nuance to Asad’s interpretation of secular space as simply a hegemonic regime, the examples that follow will show that representatives of civil authority do, in fact, try to foster equality and tolerance among European citizens of different cultures.

Contrary to the widespread belief that Muslims in the West seek the inclusion of shari’a statutes in the constitutions of European countries, most surveys show that Muslims are quite satisfied with the secular nature of European societies. When Muslims agitate for change, they engage in the democratic process, utilizing mainstream parties and institutions. At the same time, their acceptance of secular practices does not mean that they renounce the use of Islamic principles and legal rules to guide or structure their daily lives. In a study funded by the Sixth European Union Framework Programme, which convened 50 focus groups of Muslims in London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam, I clearly observed this tendency: for example, many Muslims expressed a strong attachment to religious, rather than civil, marriage and divorce.

We examined the literature and jurisprudence of several key European countries in order to ascertain the arguments used by the courts and by Muslims respectively when conflicts arise. The plethora of national laws in Europe and the diversity among Muslim groups makes comparison difficult, but we found a general trend of European countries recognizing foreign civil law. In countries like France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain, the law distinguishes between national and foreign jurisprudence, allowing residents to act in accordance with their own national laws. In these cases, the country of residence may apply a discriminatory foreign law. For Muslims, Islamic laws on marriage, divorce, and custody may differ according to their school of thought (Hanafi, Shafi‘i, Maliki, Hanbali, etc.) or country of origin (Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco, etc.). Furthermore, in some countries—like Tunisia, Turkey, and Morocco—the family law has been secularized and respects, in theory, the principle of equality between men and women. However, these reforms do not always prevent the continuance of customs that can be discriminatory toward women and that can often be presented as “Islamic.” One example is the recent divorce case of a Moroccan couple, brought before the French courts, in which the husband appealed for divorce on the grounds that his wife was not a virgin at the time of their marriage.

Similarly, participants in the focus groups highlighted the difficulty they faced in trying to express their indignation during the Danish cartoon affair. They were bothered less by the representation of the Prophet Muhammad itself than by the fact that he was depicted as the quintessential figure of violence. The participants felt that their disapproval of the cartoon was interpreted by their fellow citizens as unpatriotic, while they themselves did not consider such opinions to be incompatible with their European citizenship. The same discrepancy emerged in some groups with regard to issues of dress code and, specifically, the hijab, the wearing of which is considered unpatriotic in some European places, while it obviously has a very different meaning for many Muslim women. We see a further manifestation of this issue in the recent case of a fully veiled Moroccan woman who was denied French citizenship in 2008 on the grounds that wearing the niqab was incompatible with French values. And the same suspicion of anti-civicism or anti-patriotism can be discerned in the debate on the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

When we turn to the shari’a debate, Kymlicka’s two conditions come under intense scrutiny. Our research corroborates the Gallup polls’ findings showing the acceptance of secular orders by the majority of Muslims in Europe. In fact, not one of the focus group participants expressly rejected European secular principles. Nevertheless, such acceptance does not preclude tension between, for instance, Islamic practices of marriage, divorce, and child custody and the principle of individual freedom under secular civil law. In legal practice, the question of whether to take Muslim family law into account in the regulation of daily life is bound to the condition that these laws meet the criteria prescribed by human rights and fundamental liberties. Therefore, due to inequality between men and women, acknowledgment of Family Law codes imported from some Muslim countries appears as a hindrance to the process of integrating Muslims, to the point that some compare the situation to a conflict of civilizations. There do exist fringes of the Muslim population across Europe that reject the paradigm of secular civil law and act violently in ways that strongly prejudice Europeans’ perceptions of Islam and Muslims. However, the silent majority of European Muslims already accept Islam’s compatibility with the basic precepts of human rights.

The second condition advanced by Kymlicka, promoting the equality of cultures, is also problematic, since Islam as a religion and culture is still perceived as alien to Europe. Promoting equality between cultures involves redefining public culture and the status of Islam within the public space at the level of both nation-states and the European Union. However, some claims on behalf of Islamic culture in fact champion the European conception of human rights, by arguing, for example, that laws banning religious symbols from French public schools are contradictory to the European notion of fundamental rights.

Because of these complex circumstances, we find different and sometimes contradictory attitudes among Muslims toward European secular laws. As mentioned previously, complete rejection of secular law is rare; more commonly, objections are targeted specifically at elements of French secularism. But complete acceptance of European civil law is also rare. Among focus group participants, a preference for Islamic prescriptions for family organization was clearly expressed, especially in the European context. However, the extent to which these prescriptions are taken to heart varies greatly according to gender, age, and education. For example, educated Muslim women tend to adopt a more individualized attitude toward family law, requesting greater equality between men and women. On the other hand, less educated men tend to remain closer to some cultural traditions inherited from their countries of origin.

In short, the majority of European Muslims acknowledge the compatibility of Islam with the basic tenets of human rights, although there are still parts of the Muslim population in Europe who reject this paradigm. For example, a group called Islam4UK, which emerged in autumn 2009 in Great Britain, demands the enforcement of shari’a. It is also significant that Islamic parties have recently emerged on the political scene in Germany and the Netherlands.

Surprisingly, this reconciliation between Islamic principles and secular regimes has often been conducted in an indirect way through decisions by European judges rather than Islamic legal experts or Muslim theologians. Consequently, a slow and “invisible” form of personal Islamic law is being constructed and adapted to Western secular laws. Of course, European judges do not claim Islamic authority, but the fact that Muslim theologians do not contest their decisions, and sometimes even endorse them, illustrates the law’s adaptation. The contours of this evolution remain to be defined, depending on the country and the Islamic group concerned.

These results, derived from survey research of European Muslims, clearly demonstrate the core deficiency of Asad’s view of secularism: it fails to adequately recognize the complexities of political interactions that occur between disparate stakeholder communities. Craig Brittain correctly states, “It is one thing to argue for the legitimacy of religious adherents to publicly voice their particular worldviews; it is quite another matter to suggest that such voices be granted equal argumentative weight, without mediation, in public debate.”

SECULARISM AS A TRAGIC CATEGORY

Interestingly, Talal Asad has perceived the tragic character of secularism, especially in his interpretation of Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Incidentally, it may contradict his tendency to reject the category of secularism as an instrument of power and domination: “This world is ‘secular’ not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the ‘real’ has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainty, without fixed moorings even for the believer, a world in which the real and the imaginary mirror each other. In this world, the politics of certainty is clearly impossible.”

Such a perception of secularism can help religious theorists address Asad’s principal concern that the concept functions with an overly Westernized bias against non-Western religions. It echoes at the level of what Charles Taylor calls “the third meaning” of secularism, namely, the fact that believers exist in a world in which their beliefs are continuously challenged by other values. The challenge of being able to believe without feeling threatened by others’ beliefs came across very strongly in the focus groups when participants were asked about relationships with non-Muslims and tolerance vis-à-vis apostasy. No real consensus emerged on these issues, but the discussion highlighted a clear divide between the perception of the virtuous Muslim as one who values the moral commitment of the Ummah above all others versus one who lives according to Muslim principles but maintains a certain sense of relativism. This question forms the core of a book by Chief Rabbi of England Jonathan Sacks that led to an intense and controversial debate in the UK six years ago, and represents the most salient challenge to the status of Muslims in Europe or the United States: how can one maintain one’s sense of the Islamic truth and simultaneously acknowledge the truth of others?

The following is a short excerpt of the conversation, which is available for download in its entirety here (pdf). You can see video from the event at here & there.

* * *

An-Na’im: If I may, on the universality question: there is no such thing as a universal human. Being human is being specific, it is belonging to a location, a context, a gender, a class; there are all sorts of specifics about the human. So it is not what Talal called imperialist universalism, which projects its relativity into the global sphere in order to apply, for example, American law or the American institution of religious freedom throughout the world under the so-called “US International Religious Freedom Act,” which is an exclusively American project. How can this initiative be both international and American, such that Americans define what freedom of religion is for everybody else, and go out and impose sanctions, unless the President exempts a country like Saudi Arabia from the sanctions for other reasons. So the hypocrisy and double standards are very serious, but that is what we need to expose and American citizens need to confront.

Now, the idea of universality is not something to proclaim. It is not something to discover. It is something to construct; that is, I believe in constructing a universal consensus, using Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus. Every human being is relativist by virtue of being human. She or he is of a place, a time, a culture, a set of values, and so on.  But can we come to a shared understanding of what human rights are, despite our differences as to why we come to make that commitment? So it is not a notion of the universal being already made and either brought down from natural law or proclaimed by the State Department, but it is about joining hands, joining struggles in actual solidarity. And yes, as Talal mentioned last night, it’s true that solidarity can be very dangerous, very seductive, opportunistic, and all of that. That is what the human is. We are all sorts of things—not always good, not always bad—but we have somehow to make sense of that. Solidarity, as an idea, can be hijacked, can be co-opted, yes. Human rights, as an idea, can be hijacked, can be co-opted, yes. But that is not good enough reason to give up on it. In fact, the very hijacking of the idea is a testimony to its power; as Louis Henkin says, the double standards and the hypocrisy about human rights “is the tribute of vice to virtue.” It is because the idea of human rights is attractive and because it is powerful that corporations would like to use it, governments or states would like to use it; but we need it more and we cannot give up on it because others abuse it.

Asad: Again, I am not sure that there is too much disagreement. Perhaps I am a little worried about too much confidence in human rights—that’s the main thing.

An-Na’im: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Asad: However, I want to ask you a question and also to make one comment. First of all, it’s not just the noble idea—this is my comment—of human rights, as I see it. There is an increasing material body of legal decisions and cases. So when corporations use human rights, they don’t take human rights as an idea, you know—there are particular rules and regulations, principles of interpretation and so on that they can go in and out of—that’s why they need lawyers for all this, because ordinary people wouldn’t be able to understand all the legal ramifications of human rights as a regime, why certain kinds of cases can have this or that outcome. So we already have an increasing body of law through which we decide—the courts decide—what is compatible with human rights and what is not. And then you also have this distinction, you know, between soft law and hard law, where hard law is backed by sanctions and soft law is more a matter of influence, of trying to get people to be a little more responsible towards human rights principles essentially by resorting to moral suasion. There is now an enormous legal structure of human rights, and I am not an expert on it at all and don’t want to use up the remaining years of my life trying to understand that part of it. But I think it isn’t good enough just to keep waving the flag and saying we need human rights. Yeah, okay, different things are possible in different situations—that’s fine—but there seems to me a kind of excessive, I might almost say religious, excitement about a solution which is believed to be special. I know you’ve said it is not appropriate in every way, but you do believe that it is in some sense special with regard to the transformation of the world. That leads me to my question. And it’s a real question that’s not intended to be a trap. You say you have to construct universality. What is the universe that you want to construct? Don’t say a human world because that is circular. In fact, the human has very gradually been transformed, as I suggested very briefly yesterday, its content has been historically changed and can be changed again given the technological developments and genetic engineering developments that are now available to us. The human can be almost anything. This is something we should at least think about. So what is it to construct the universe, the universal for you? What is the universe, logically speaking? What is the universe to be constructed politically?

Read a full transcript of this conversation here (pdf).

In the late 1970s, coming out as a gay person was indistinguishable—for me—from the arduous project of developing a secular self-understanding.  Since I wish to understand the relation of sex and secularity, what is important for the purpose of this discussion is just how arduous this development of a secular self-understanding was.  The difficulty of this process is something that people routinely forget about secularism, especially when terms like “secular rationality” come into play.

I had come from that wing of American Protestantism that had only learned in the 1970s to mobilize itself.  After a long history of isolation through fundamentalist self-understanding, the Protestants of my milieu had shifted to a more evangelical political style.   The elements of this style lay deep in American history, but this was the first time that a movement context not only united charismatics such as Pat Robertson with fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell, but created a pan-Christian alliance—that is, Protestant and Catholic activists working together.  Interestingly enough, all the issues that enabled the creation of this alliance had to do with sexuality in one way or another: the ERA, Roe v. Wade, gay rights, teen pregnancy, the pill, and so on.  These Christians needed sex in order to exist as a movement.  They also needed a narrative, and the main storyline was that they were fighting a hegemonic force.  In the 1970s, they learned to call that force “secular humanism.”

As I was coming out of this evangelical fundamentalist self-understanding toward something that would afford more scope for coming out, I looked around for that secular humanism that I’d heard so much about.  Imagine my surprise and disappointment—despair, nearly—when I discovered that it didn’t exist.

Most of the movements that these religious mobilizers were fighting—that is, the social movements of the ’60s—had not been organized around an idea of secular humanism.  Instead, many of them were anti-humanist.  Many of them didn’t really think about whether they were secularist or not.  Many of them, in fact, had a lot of play for religious activists, including gay liberation, which, as we’re now discovering, had a large role for various church organizations and religiously-minded folk.  So the story of secular humanism was, in large part, a kind of ruse, one that seems to have been developed by Francis Schaeffer and then picked up by others.  But learning that it was a ruse was a key insight for me in choosing to research the history of the secular.

The development of my secularity was more than the intimate pain of sacrificing family membership, of being thought to be a backsliding sinner.   There was also the sense—whenever I looked at the situation with my old eyes—that in going secular, as it were, I was joining the enemy that was “secular humanism,” that great and powerful antagonist that had given such heroic significance, in this world and the next, to the pious struggles of my family and the network of churches that was our world.

Not only that, the transition was difficult because the language of normativity seemed to be only on the side I was leaving.   The conflict between evangelical Christians and secular humanism was imagined—and here the evangelical apologists were greatly abetted by the liberal proceduralism in which American secularists usually justify themselves—as a conflict between norms and license, values and no values, ethical purpose and appetitive dissolution (one finds this same antinomy, upended, in such queer theories of sexuality as Leo Bersani’s influential notion of “shattering”).

What, then, could motivate this transition?  What could carry one through the struggles and conflicts of dissolving one familial and social world in search of another?  And how could that other world be imagined, since it seemed so averse to avowing itself?

There are of course many answers to these questions, but all leave something to be desired as an articulation of that affective/corporeal struggle.  An ethical language of autonomy was something, to be sure, though it didn’t explain much about sexuality, since monkish abstinence can just as easily be autonomy, and (as Bersani reminds us) self-shattering in sexuality isn’t fully in line with norms of autonomy, either.

My situation was admittedly unusual.  Most people, in America or elsewhere, do not encounter religion and secularism as such mutually exclusive worlds as they were for me in the moment of coming out, and even in my own situation I now recognize that the evangelical mobilization from which I emerged was in many ways already a profoundly secular one.  My point here is that the main paradigms for understanding the secular still leave us with little to say about the corporeal, affective, and ethical reeducation through which I, like many others, had to plunge.

Talal Asad, in a very important essay called “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?”, calls people to think of the secular not just as a legal or governmental ideology of neutrality or distance, not just as an institutional framework for coordinating private religiosity, but as a culture that has its own practices, its own sensorium, its own hierarchy of faculties, its own habits of being.  It’s not clear to me that one can, in fact, identify something like a secular subject with quite the confidence that he seems to believe (one reason being that modern secular societies, in the sense expounded by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, include quite religious subjects; one cannot locate the difference between the religious and the secular simply at the level of “the subject”).  But Asad rightly shows that it is important to understand the secular as something having a lot more thickness and inhabitable subjectivities.  What is the lived and embodied dimension of the secular?  In what ways does secular culture exceed the governmental-legal framework?   And how is this bodily secularity related to the thin accounts of “secular rationality,” “Enlightenment rationalism,” or the other trends generally invoked to describe the rise of the secular?

It would be vain to try to associate sexuality as closely with the secular as the anti-secularists would like to believe.  It is not the case—as I was led to believe by all the rhetoric in my family—that there is a real unity between a secular humanist philosophy and the process of secularization that culminated in the sexuality movements of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.  But the sexual body has long been the scene of barely articulate struggles to imagine a post-Christian order—as for example in the seventeenth century appearance of libertinism, which was very often associated with atheism by its detractors; or in the development of what Taylor calls an immanent counter-enlightenment.   These struggles mark both the internal histories of the West and its relation to the rest of the world.  In another post, Elizabeth Povinelli asks us to remember that the very idea of sexuality carves up the space of carnality so as to make the antinomies of Christianity (and the inversions of those antinomies in late Christian culture) seem natural.   Neither secularity nor sexuality quite makes sense without this history.

At present we are again seeing a rise in anti-secular rhetoric in which sexuality is taken to be indicative of the secular order.  But that rhetoric is now globalizing; it is no longer the idiom of American evangelicals alone.  These struggles, and the need to understand them, are likely to deepen.

[See also: Michael Warner's "Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood."]