Saba Mahmood's Ethnography of the State

John Modern

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 38,
Number 2, August 2018, pp. 457-460 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706688

Access provided at 16 Sep 2019 23:54 GMT from UNISINOS-Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos
 John Modern • Saba Mahmood’s Ethnography of the State • Kitabkhana
SABA MAHMOOD’S ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE STATE
John Modern
Despite decades of withering academic critique,
the secularization thesis — its categorical tenden-
cies and conceptual constellations — still perme-
ates the political air. When there is too much re-
ligion or when religion exceeds its place or when
bad religion triumphs as true, secularization is
judged not to have taken hold. Familiar laments
issue forth. Secularization has yet to assume domi-
nance in particular parts of the world (despite our
best efforts). We have yet to adequately persuade
others of the ideals of secularity. Or god forbid,
we have not lived up to the promise of our secular
subjectivity.
In other words, the secularization thesis does
not so much go unquestioned as it has become
common sense, the background to policy direc-
tives, editorials, the quantifications of political
scientists and pundits on CNN. What role, then,
does all the hand-­w ringing over the forces of fun-
damentalism and intemperate political speech
achieve? All the perfectly pitched anxieties and
performances of self-­doubt that the fate of civiliza-
tion hangs in the balance?
The failure of secularization is about incom-
pleteness, disappointment, and often castigation
in its call to return to the original promise — t he
dream of a world without religion, in general, and
religious difference, in particular. It is a lament
with a particular brand of hope, often vaguely
technological: “Angry mobs of Islamists battled
secular protesters with fists, rocks and firebombs
in the streets. . . . Many in both camps brandished
makeshift clubs, and on the secular side, a few car-
ried knives.”1 It is precisely such blithe invocations
and loaded categorical divisions that so often pro-
pel the secularization narrative forward — the pres-
ent failures of the secular covenant redeemed by
recommitment (and perhaps the knives).
The very same shuffle (one step back, two
steps forward) may be seen in the jeremiad, a ser-
monic genre popular with American Puritans.
1. Kirkpatrick, “Blood Is Shed.” 3. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular
Age. Hereafter cited in the text.
2. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 62.
457
Indeed, the jeremiadic form was perfected by Pu-
ritan divines in the seventeenth-­century Massachu-
setts Bay Colony and bound up with the telos of
an American secular in its attitude toward history,
temporality, and scripture. As chronicled by Sac-
van Bercovitch’s now classic The American Jeremiad
(1978), this particular form of castigation was a
ritual of assent, a rhetoric of social control that in-
dividualized sin and deflected attention away from
institutional contradictions. The effect of calling
out present sin, in other words, served to call indi-
viduals back to the covenant (and this is an impor-
tant part of Bercovitch’s glimpse into the making
of an American biopolitics). There is a tremendous
acrobatics involved in this kind of lament, for here
is a plea that transforms what begins as a valua-
tion of particularist reflexivity into unreflective
consent: present sins redeemed by future aspirations
inducing recommitment.
As Bercovitch writes, the jeremiadic form was
“born in an effort to impose metaphor upon real-
ity.”2 This is a long way of suggesting that the saga
of Puritan orthodoxy — in its categorical imposi-
tion upon the real — may be as good a place as any
to begin thinking about the mechanics of secular-
ism. For it begs the question of how to analyze the
flow of categories in the process of being deployed,
disseminated, and diffused, generating a host of
other and often mutually reinforcing categories to
be deployed, disseminated, and diffused. How can
we account for definitional forces becoming the
stuff of life itself?
In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Mi-
nority Report,3 Saba Mahmood offers an impressive
case for the covenantal coercions of secularism, its
“inescapable quality,” and its limitations.4 What is
the source of secularism’s sway, the slow sucking
sound of its future ever making its way in? How
does religion — as legal concept, as word and deed,
as an object of critique or scientific explanation or
manifesto — serve to consolidate a political order?
Do secular orders of governance depend upon the
violation of their first principles to maintain their
authority? Do concepts such as religious liberty
4. Mahmood, “Religious Difference in a Secular
Age: A Minority Report — An Introduction.”
458 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
and minority rights more often than not serve the
interests of the state rather than the individual who
supposedly possesses some version of them? These
are but a few of the questions that Mahmood en-
tertains in Religious Difference, her persuasive and
exacting investigation of the powerful resonance
between secular concepts such as religious liberty
and minority rights. In a series of tightly argued
chapters, Mahmood charts their generative rela-
tionality on the national stage of modern Egypt.
According to Mahmood, religious difference
is entangled in the making and maintenance of
the nation-­state — a new kind of political rational-
ity that differs from the pluralistic calculus of em-
pires. Underlying Mahmood’s analysis is a sense of
increasing precarity of religious minorities in gen-
eral, but particularly those like Bahais in Egypt or,
to a lesser extent, Coptic Christians. This political
rationality involves “the reordering and remaking
of religious life and interconfessional relations in
accord with specific norms, themselves foreign to
the life of the religions and peoples it organizes”
(21). Mahmood’s focus, then, is on “life worlds”
that such activity “creates, the forms of exclusion
and violence it entails, the kinds of hierarchies it
generates and those it seeks to undermine” (ibid.).
To cut to the chase, Mahmood’s argument —  exclusions and distinctions are essential to the
based in ethnographic and archival work in con-
temporary Egypt — demands nothing less than a
rethinking of what constitutes the authority of the
modern state: “the modern state’s disavowal of re-
ligion in its political calculus and its simultaneous
reliance on religious categories to structure and
regulate social life” (25).
In the maneuvers of the contemporary Egyp-
tian state Mahmood rightly detects the scent of
Protestant interiority, wafting, historically speak-
ing, from colonial administrators and missionar-
ies (44) who had earlier used concepts such as re-
ligious liberty to secure their own political status
and cast suspicion upon communities and tradi-
tions that they found threatening. “In reflecting on
this global campaign that Euro-­A merican mission-
aries, educators, and colonial officials launched, it
is hard to separate the religious elements from the
secular ones. Indeed, it is difficult to even imagine
how one would secure such a separation episte-
mologically, politically, and historically” (46 – 47).
With the continuing impact of American evangeli-
• 38:2 • 2018
cals, proponents of neoliberalism, and the politics
of human rights and the US government’s passage
of IRFA (the International Religious Freedom
Act) in 1998, Egypt remains central to a global
secular imaginary, not to mention its being a site
of secularism’s categorical reach and categorical
confusions.
A central argument of Religious Difference is
this — in its claims to promote equality at the level
of the individual, secular governance produces all
manner of new exclusions and distinctions. For
example, given “the pernicious symbiosis created
between religion and sexuality under modern
secularism” (114), women bear the brunt of the
regulatory power, their bodies overly invested with
moral claims and disproportionately subject to the
rule of law. In Egypt, the imagination of secular
order hinges upon maintaining the public-­private
divide and increasingly upon the dictates of “fam-
ily law.” Religious minorities, too — B ahais and
Copts to a lesser degree — b ear a sacrificial bur-
den when it comes to maintaining secular modes
of governance. For both women and Bahais, these
hierarchies are not merely epiphenomenal, unfor-
tunate and unforeseen consequences of any good
faith effort of global governance. On the contrary,
state’s perpetuation — a ssuring its authority over
religion by generating the inequalities that de-
mand its intervention and arbitration. And so on
and so forth.
Mahmood does not rest satisfied with ex-
posing the contradictions of secular governance.
Structural paradoxes haunt the secular project.
But such paradoxes, in turn, beget contradictions
that are, and this is a significant contribution of
Religious Difference, “generative.” These contradic-
tions, in other words, not only constitute the norm.
They normalize the norm by way of its transgres-
sion. So, for example, the relegation of the reli-
gious to the private sphere (as a matter of belief
and conscience) happens in a kind of two-­step ma-
neuver (4). The secular state violates its own norms
in order to reinforce them:
On the one hand, the liberal state claims to main-
tain a separation between church and state by
relegating religion to the private sphere, that sac-
rosanct domain of religious belief and individual
liberty. On the other hand, modern governmen-
 John Modern • Saba Mahmood’s Ethnography of the State • Kitabkhana
tality involves the state’s intervention and regula-
tion of many aspects of socioreligious life, dissolv-
ing the distinction between public and private
and thereby contravening its first claim. This does
not mean that the liberal state’s ideological com-
mitment to keep church and state apart is false
or specious, or that secularism constrains religion
rather than setting it free. Rather, the two pro-
pensities internal to secularism — t he regulation
of religious life and the construction of religion
as a space free from state intervention — account
for its phenomenal power to regenerate itself: any
incursion of the state into religious life often en-
genders the demand for keeping church and state
separate, thereby replenishing secularism’s nor-
mative premise and promise. (4)
The insight here is both profound and disturbing,
namely, that the promise of secular order is sus-
tained because of its inherent limitations — its ma-
terial failure guaranteeing its ideological success.
In pointing out this loop Mahmood suggests that
there may be nothing behind the mask of secular
governance save for its capacity to perpetuate it-
self. It is, as they say, a theory of information. But it
can still fuck your shit up.
A secular state, then, is something like a
wrathful god in its legal and affective sustain. It
is perhaps even an agency of its own. And this is
the brilliance of Mahmood’s ethnography of the
state — her attention to its lifeways, the decisions it
makes in order to survive, the different opinions
and debates that it generates. Here is a posthuman
political critique of a self-­organizing system. For
rather than focus on the creativity of individuals
within the secular age, Mahmood’s interest lies in
the creative qualities of secularism, that is, secu-
larism as a discursive formation that performs an
amazing trick of making individuals meaningful
to themselves.
If critique that privileges a concept of the
human as creative and creatively flawed does not
sufficiently appreciate that human action adds up
to more than the sum of its parts, how, then, to tell
a story that appeals to that excess, to those non-
human elements, or perhaps the inhumanity of
the collective, or at least elements that are neither
mathematical nor within one’s immediate grasp?
Mahmood theorizes the closures of secular gover-
nance not to revel in the disciplinary excess of our
secular age (although there is pleasure to be had
459
in such masochistic embrace) but to offer a new
ground of analysis on which the closures of secu-
larism are integral to its dynamism. It is on this
point that Mahmood accounts for the generative
force of secularism, approaching it as not simply
self-­regulating — in the sense that mere ideology
conserves its power — but rather as self-­organizing
in that its generative force arises in those points
and moments of boundary maintenance, where
and when an outside is necessarily maintained.
Take for instance one of Mahmood’s set
pieces — the introduction of digital systematicity as
the arbiter of Egyptian national identity (157 – 63).
In 1998 the Ministry of Interior built a Civil Status
Organization ID card factory in order to produce
the first national identity card that conformed to
international ISO standards and security mea-
sures. In 2004 computers were introduced in order
to streamline the issuance of national identity
cards, to standardize further their necessity, and,
in effect, to leverage their functionality against a
Bahai religious minority. Each card possessed a
unique national number (raqam qawmi). At this
time Bahais were legally forbidden to list their re-
ligion on their identity cards. Before the introduc-
tion of computers Bahais were often permitted by
local officials to list Bahai on their cards. Conse-
quently, before the introduction of computers this
paralegal maneuver was not much of an issue, as
identity cards were not tracked systematically nor
were they often called for in public.
Identity cards were used for such things as
opening or closing a bank account, applying for a
driver’s license or passport, and registering to vote
or registering a mobile phone number. Identity
cards were made of pure polycarbonate material
and had 2-­D encrypted barcode. They also had
an ICI (short for invisible constant image) that re-
tained hidden information on the card owner and
could only be read with the use of specialized opti-
cal technology.
As Nayer Nabil of Cairo reported in 2007, the
material effects of the algorithmic abstraction was
systematic discrimination:
I tried to obtain the national ID card. In the ap-
plication, I wrote that my religion was Baha’i.
The officer refused to accept the application and
asked me to present my birth certificate. I showed
it to him. It stated that I was Baha’i and so were
460 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:2 • 2018

my parents. He still refused to accept the applica- References

tion and asked me to apply in Cairo. When I went Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: Uni-
to Cairo, I met an officer called Wa’il who opened versity of Wisconsin Press, 1980.
a drawer in his desk and pulled out a big pile of “Egypt: Allow Citizens to List Actual Religion on ID
documents and said, “You see, all these applica- Cards.” Human Rights Watch, November 11, 2007.
tions are from Baha’i who want IDs. You will never www.hrw.org/news/2007/11/11/egypt-­allow-­citizens
ever get them.”5 -­list-­actual-­religion-­id-­cards.
Here was a personal play of a nonhuman power Kirkpatrick, David D. “Blood Is Shed as Egyptian President
that “authorize[d] the state to pronounce on sub- Backers and Rivals Battle in Cairo.” New York Times,
December 5, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06
stantive religious content, and promot[ed] majori-
/world/middleeast/islamists-­and-­secular-­protesters
tarian values and sensibilities at the expense of
-­clash-­v iolently-­in-­cairo.html?_r=0.
minority beliefs and practices.”6
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A
In 2008, the Administrative Court of Justice
Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
ruled that Bahais should have national political
Press, 2015.
identity cards to ensure their civic equality. The
——— . “Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Re-
judgment was poignant in highlighting the dev-
port — A n Introduction.” Immanent Frame, February 9,
astating emptiness of categories (so as to be as 2016. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2016/02/09/religious
f lexible and fungible as strategically possible): -­d ifference-­i n-­a -­secular-­a ge-­a -­m inority-­report-­a n
they were to leave the space for religion blank (so -­introduction/.
as not to challenge the state’s sole recognition of
“the religions of the book” and not to compel any doi 10.1215/1089201x-6982213
individual to bear false testimony to the state — a
win-­w in for the state!). “Because no other state has
this distinction,” Mahmood writes, “their identity
cards clearly mark them as Bahais; the empty slot
is an indication of their deviation from the Muslim
norm and, for some, a sign of their apostasy from
Islam” (163).
The computers installed to systematize issues
of Egyptian national identity bear an uncanny re-
semblance to the powers of secular governance,
in general — purporting to go inside in the name
of protecting it, crunching the data of the pri-
vate, systematizing it and making it make sense,
making it public for the sake of private freedom
and political security. Lines of code becoming lines of
force — creating absolutely new conditions of possibility
while simultaneously drawing from an epistemological
fundament of Western liberal conceptions and deploy-
ments of the secular. A standardized national identity
card for every Egyptian citizen, a technique by which in-
dividuals can be made known to themselves and others
without remainder.

5. Cited in “Egypt: Allow Citizens to List Actual 6. Mahmood, Religious Difference, 151.
Religion on ID Cards.”