Normative Secularity

“[T]he notion of fundamentalism collapses a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions, linking them together as aspects of a singular socio-religious formation. Moreover, in their long-standing representation of Islam as violent spectacle (like a 1400-year-old train wreck), CNN and their competitors have managed to endow each one of these images with the power to immediately animate all of the others, each one a falling stone capable of bringing the avalanche of Islamic global terror down on the US. What allows this reduction is the idea that all of these phenomena are expressions of Islam in its dangerous and regressive form, its fundamentalist form.” (Mahmood and Hirschkind, 2002, 346)   

My blog today is inspired by the simple fact that I just finished re-reading an article by Saba Mahmood as part of preparing my final research proposal (2008a). Reading it led me to sift through a number of other articles by her that deal with secularism and Middle East scholarship.

In the above-noted article, Mahmood mounts a highly historicized critique of Western secularism. In particular, she takes issue with what she terms the normative secularity underpinning liberal discourses; and also many critical and progressive ones. “Insofar as the tradition of critical theory is infused with a suspicion, if not a dismissal, of religion’s metaphysical and epistemological commitments,” she explains, “we wanted to think ‘critically’ about this dismissal” (Ibid, 447). Mahmood notes that, in secular discourse, the secular state is presented as neutral, and as indifferent to religious goals in its exercise of power. It is alleged that this neutrality is what makes possible the free, un-coerced practice of religion as an individual choice. Like others, Mahmood insists that secularism is neither diametrically opposed to religion, nor is a secular worldview/epistemology in irreconcilable opposition to a religious one. Rather, secularism and religion are inseparable, and mutually constitutive.

Instead of viewing liberal secularism as the banishment or abandonment of religion, one may view it as an ongoing process of consuming, regulating and reshaping religion through a variety of institutions and mechanisms. This process, in turn, shapes secularism. Mahmood convincingly argues that these narratives are historically inaccurate, as they fail to acknowledge or even consider the ways in which all manifestations of secularism have internal to them a drive to reform and reshape religion, in order to cultivate a secular ethos (2008b, 462). While secularism is touted as the European-invented and all-time solution to religious strife in its alleged firewall separation between church (or religion broadly) and state, the solution it pre-offers “lies not so much in tolerating difference and diversity but in remaking certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use of violence) so as to render them compliant with liberal political rule.” (2006, 328). Hence, secularism is better understood as an ongoing process of shaping the forms religion takes so that religion is made commensurate with modern governance, and sensibilities.

Mahmood’s historical exploration of the secular project in Europe, and its myriad extensions from Europe to non-European territories and societies, provides a counter to simplistic notions of secularism. It is a helpful attempt to explore the possibilities of developing a more robust approach to the study of social phenomena in non-secular societies and contexts.  Indeed, these questions were central in the Arab literary movement which I hope to study.

References

Mahmood, Saba and Hirschkind, Charles. (2002). Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter

Insurgency. Anthropological Quarterly, 75:2: 339-354.

Mahmood, Saba. (Spring 2006). Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic

Reformation. Public Culture, 18:2: 323-347.

Mahmood, Saba. (Fall 2008). Is Critique Secular?. Public Culture, 20:3: 447-452.

Mahmood, Saba. (Fall 2008). Secular Imperatives?. Public Culture, 20:3: 461-465.