Wrestling with the Violence and Paradoxes of Secular Power:

A Forum on Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular

Age: A Minority Report

SherAli Tareen

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 38,
Number 2, August 2018, pp. 441-443 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706685

Access provided at 16 Sep 2019 23:34 GMT from UNISINOS-Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos
 K I T A B K H A N A

Kitabkhana

A Discussion with SherAli Tareen, Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair, Nermeen Mouftah, and John Modern

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report

By Saba Mahmood
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015
242 pp., $80.00; $24.95

WRESTLING WITH THE VIOLENCE AND PARADOXES OF SECULAR POWER

A Forum on Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
SherAli Tareen

In the last couple of decades or so, among the central arguments that have occupied the problem space of
the study of religion is that the religious and the secular cannot be approached as opposites. Rather than
the inverse of religion, the secular represents a form of discursive and institutional power that constantly
manages and regulates what does and does not count as religion. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood is
among the pioneering scholars of critical secularism studies whose work has shaped the contours of this
argument in singularly novel and complex ways. Her most recent book Religious Difference in a Secular Age:
A Minority Report is the subject of this book forum. It brings together three scholars of varied disciplinary
persuasions and regions of specialization, Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair, Nermeen Mouftah, and John Modern,
who explore and wrestle with different aspects of Mahmood’s interventions. This introductory essay pre­
sents a brief overview of the central themes and arguments at the heart of Religious Difference in a Secular
Age as a way to prepare the ground for the more specific questions engaged and analyses conducted in
the individual commentaries that follow.
Religious Difference in a Secular Age is a study of the structural paradoxes of political secularism. The
central theme of this book is the intimacy of religious inequality and modern state power. By tracking the
permeation in Egypt of signature precepts of secularism such as public order, minority rights, religious
liberty, the legal distinction between the public and the private, and the emergence of history as the
sovereign decider of moral argument, this book seeks to disrupt the binary of Western and non-­Western
secularism. It argues that while the precise trajectory of religious inequality is historically specific to each
context, the inextricability of secularism to liberal political rule is derived from analogous conundrums
and paradoxes involved in the modern state’s management of religious difference. The underlying con-
tradiction that haunts political secularism is this: “secularism as a statist project aims to make religious
difference inconsequential to politics while at the same time embedding majoritarian religious norms in
state institutions, laws, and practices” (206).
With its focus on Egypt, this book seeks to puncture the commonly held assumption that sectari-
anism and interreligious tensions and violence in the Middle East are products of the lack of secular-

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 4 41

Vol. 38, No. 2, 2018 • © 2018 by Duke University Press
442 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
ism and untamed religiosity in the region. Turn-
ing this assumption on its head, Mahmood argues
that religious inequality is enshrined in the very
organizing logic and structure of political secular-
ism. For all its claims to religious neutrality, the po-
litical and legal structuration of the modern state
necessitates its involvement in and production of
religious difference. While engaging a number of
varied themes and settings, the conceptual glue
that binds this book has to do with an irresolvable
contradiction inseparable to the operation of the
modern secular state: namely (1) the seeming dis-
avowal of religion from the sphere of politics, and
(2) the simultaneous reliance on religious catego-
ries to regulate social life and norms. These two
opposing dimensions of political secularism, what
Mahmood calls its “regulatory impulse” and its
“promise of freedom,” are at once intertwined and
codependent. Most important, the irresolvable
contradiction inherent in this dual impulse is not
simply a matter of theoretical abstraction. Rather,
this inescapable contradiction of political secu-
larism is crucial to how the modern state orders
and generates the contours of religious life and its
corresponding forms of exclusion, violence, and
hierarchies.
Mahmood assembles this broader concep-
tual argument by focusing on two categories that
she sees as symptomatic of the contradictory char-
acter of political secularism: the categories of re-
ligious liberty and minority rights. Much of this
book is occupied with tracing the intellectual and
political careers of these concepts in Egypt, with a
constant gaze on how those careers were shaped by
the enveloping shadow of modern colonial power.
Mahmood also charts the transformation of reli-
gious communities in Egypt such as the Coptic Or-
thodox Christians into minoritized and distinctly
enumerated political groups. In doing so, she
argues that “rather than see minority rights and
religious liberty as universally applicable moral
principles, they are best understood as strategies
of liberal secular governance aimed at regulating
and managing difference (religious, racial, ethnic,
and cultural), in a national polity” (60). Instead
• 38:2 • 2018
of overcoming religious inequality, Mahmood ar-
gues, the discourse of minority rights and religious
liberty only exacerbates sectarian and communal
conflict. This tension is poignantly captured by the
following question: “how to banish religion from
politics while at the same time devise laws to ame-
liorate religious inequality?” (68).
The most profound outcome of looking to
the state for rights and liberty is the magnification
of the state’s sovereign agency, while individual
citizens, marked as belonging to either the ma-
jority or minority population, are tied to the state
through a system of rights and obligations. There-
fore, Mahmood concludes, it is not the failure of
secularism but precisely the opposite, the cen-
trality of a secular political rationality that has in
large part intensified majority/minority tensions
and violence in Egypt. As she puts her main argu-
ment, “the process of secularization in the Middle
East, far from eliminating religious difference, has
subjected it to a new grid of intelligibility that is
compatible with the rationality of modern political
rule” (62).
So, in its broadest sense, Religious Difference in
a Secular Age can be read as an invitation to imag-
ine a horizon of the political that is more suspi-
cious of conceding the problem of religious differ-
ence to the sovereign agency of the state and that
is less enthusiastic about presenting secularism as
the solution to religious inequality and minority
suffering. Indeed, the minority report contained
in this book reads more like an autopsy report of
political secularism that brings its celebratory nar-
rative of having overcome religious difference into
fatal doubt.1
In their responses to this book, Mandair,
Mouftah, and Modern meditate on its implications
and reflect on the avenues it opens up for further
intellectual and political work in both the global
north and the non-­Atlantic world. Mandair inter-
rogates the possibility of curating a decolonial
understanding of religion and secularism. Such a
labor, he suggests, requires that one take seriously
the entrenched grip of Christian political theology
on liberal secular conceptual frameworks and also
1. For a fuller analysis of this book, see my “Dis-
rupting Secular Power and the Study of Reli-
gion: Saba Mahmood.”
 Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair • Decolonizing Secularism’s “Conceptual Matrix” • Kitabkhana 443

search for alternatives to the colonizing grammar critique.” Collectively, these responses to Religious
of such a political theology. He argues that Mah- Difference in a Secular Age testify to the significance
mood’s analysis of the structural contradictions of of this work across disciplines and regions while
political secularism offers us the opportunity to also highlighting the political stakes and urgency
think through and disrupt the normative theoreti- of wrestling with the violence and paradoxes of
cal framework of political theology that constantly secular power.
reduces difference to identity, and thus universal-
izes the liberal secular project. For Mandair, such References
a disruptive exercise holds important implications Tareen, SherAli. “Disrupting Secular Power and the Study
for conceptualizing the encounter of Western and of Religion: Saba Mahmood.” In Cultural Approaches
to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and
non-­Western histories and ideas not only in the
Methods, edited by Sarah Bloesch and Meredith Min-
Arab Middle East but also in other contexts such
ister. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
as modern South Asia. In her response, Mouftah
sets her gaze on the last chapter of Mahmood’s
doi 10.1215/1089201x-6982180
book, which deals with the controversy that
erupted in Egypt over the publication of the his-
torical fiction novel Azazeel. Mouftah interrogates
conceptual pathways through which Mahmood’s
DECOLONIZING SECULARISM’S
reading of the Azazeel controversy might help us
“CONCEPTUAL MATRIX”
complicate the binary of literature and history. By
Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair
situating the novel in a longer intellectual geneal-
ogy of Egyptian historical fiction, she pushes for
The rise of the modern liberal state was supposed
closer attention to ways in which such texts gen-
to herald an end to the internecine conf licts
erate and are implicated in modernist projects of
among different religious groups and replace
nation building. Moreover, by highlighting pos-
social hierarchies with equality for all people in
sible points of synergy between Mahmood’s inter-
the eyes of the law. But as the dominance of the
rogation of Azazeel’s reception in Egypt and Talal
secularist paradigm has come under scrutiny by
Asad’s memorable study of the Salman Rushdie
scholars and activists during the last two decades
affair in his classic Genealogies of Religion, Mouftah
or so, it has become increasingly apparent that
illumines the political aspirations and anxieties
modern secular statecraft, far from arbitrating
populating the genre of historical fiction. Finally,
tensions and disputes between culturally different
Modern sketches and excavates the disturbing yet
communities or between majorities and minori-
profound, powerful yet precarious image of the
ties, has produced precisely the opposite effect.
state that emerges in what he calls Mahmood’s
Indeed governance based on the deployment of
“ethnography of the state.” Modern particularly
secular concepts has been instrumental in generat-
devotes his attention to forms of nonhuman power,
ing communal discord especially in the non-­West,
such as digital technologies nourishing the Egyp-
where related categories produced through the
tian ID Card factory, that not only constitute the
emergence of secularism (such as religion) have
excess of secular power, but also bear uncanny re-
been exported and transplanted.
semblance to the paradoxical structures and oper-
In Religious Difference in a Secular Age Saba
ations of power underlying the promise of secular
Mahmood shows how this foundational promise of
governance. Among the most critical interventions
liberal secularism remains as idealistic as it was in
marking Mahmood’s work, Modern argues, is her
the seventeenth century. One of the central argu-
unmasking of the creative qualities of secularism
ments in this book is that the political rationality
as a self-­organizing system, an unmasking that in
characteristic of modern secular governance al-
his view represents a work of “posthuman political

I want to thank SherAli Tareen and the Ameri- Mahmood’s important new book Religious Dif-
can Academy of Religion’s Secularism and Secu- ference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report.
larity group for inviting me to respond to Saba