Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation

Saba Mahmood

Since the events of September 11, 2001, against the backdrop of two decades of the ascendance of global religious politics, urgent calls for the reinstatement of secularism have reached a crescendo that cannot be ignored. The most obvious target of these strident calls is Islam, particularly those practices and discourses within Islam that are suspected of fostering fundamentalism and militancy. It has become de rigueur for leftists and liberals alike to link the fate of democracy in the Muslim world with the institutionalization of secularism — both as a political doctrine and as a political ethic. This coupling is now broadly echoed within the discourse emanating from the U.S. State Department, particularly in its programmatic efforts to reshape and transform “Islam from within.” In this essay, I will examine both the particular conception of secularism that underlies the current consensus that Islam needs to be reformed — that its secularization is a necessary step in bringing “democracy” to the Muslim world — and the strategic means by which this programmatic vision is being instituted today. Insomuch as secularism is a historically shifting category with a variegated genealogy, my aim is not to secure an authoritative definition of secularism or to trace its historical transformation within the United States or the Muslim world. My goal here is more limited: I want to sketch out the particular understanding of secularism underlying contemporary American discourses on Islam, an understanding that is deeply shaped by U.S. security and foreign policy concerns in the Muslim world.

A number of origin stories can be told about the modern phenomenon of secularism. One that commands considerable weight today is rooted in the doctrine of religious tolerance. In this account, modern secularism emerged in the seventeenth century as a political solution intended to end the European Wars of Religion by establishing a lowest common denominator among the doctrines of conflicting Christian sects and by defining a political ethic altogether independent of religious doctrines.1 The realization of these goals was dependent, of course, upon the centralization of state authority and a concomitant demarcation of society into political, economic, religious, and familial domains whose contours could then be mapped and subjected to the calculus of state rule. In this narrative, both the ethics of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience are considered to be goods internal to the doctrinal separation that secularism institutes between operations of the state and church, between politics and religion. The assumption is that the state, by virtue of its declared neutrality toward specific religious truth claims, makes religious goals indifferent to the exercise of politics and, in doing so, ensures that religion is practiced without coercion, out of individual choice and personal assent.

Insomuch as liberalism is about the regulation of individual and collective liberties, it is the principle of freedom of conscience that makes secularism central to liberal political philosophy in this account. Note, for example, that even though a number of contemporary totalitarian regimes abide by the doctrinal separation of religion and state, they also routinely intervene to restrict people’s ability to practice their faith (for example, China, Syria, or even the former Soviet Union). Such a violation of people’s right to religious freedom contradicts a core commitment at the center of liberal democratic governance. This does not, of course, mean that there is a singular model according to which the principle of religious freedom is instituted, practiced, and regulated in liberal democracies. But it does mean that public debate in liberal societies about how the boundary between religion and the state is to be established and managed is counterbalanced with concerns for maintaining the right to practice one’s religion freely without coercion and state intervention.2 This particular linkage between the doctrinal separation of church and state and the secular principle of freedom of conscience, while foundational to liberal political rule, is also shot through with tensions and generates its own peculiar set of problems. Nonetheless, secularism is upheld these days by American liberals and progressives alike on the assumption that this particular sociopolitical arrangement is the best way to ward off the dangers of religious strife.

Recent scholarship offers some interesting challenges to the idea that liberal secularism primarily consists in securing a form of governance orchestrated around these two principles of freedom and restraint. Some scholars suggest that the so-called firewall separation between church and state does not adequately describe how religion and modern governance are constitutively intertwined. This intertwining prevails not only in non-Western societies, it is argued, but also in those that are upheld as exemplary models of what a secular polity should be, such as the United States, France, and Britain. Apart from the constitutive role religious movements and institutions have played in crafting the political culture of these nations,3 scholars argue, the ongoing regulation of religious life through juridical and legislative means suggests a far more porous relationship than the doctrine of secularism suggests. In the United States, for example, recent American scholarship points to the phenomenon of both lower and higher courts having to constantly regulate when and how religion is practiced and expressed in public life.4 Similarly, the recent French law banning the display of religious symbols (particularly the veil) in public schools may be taken as another example of how a self-avowed secular state has come to define what religious and nonreligious attire is in the public domain (something normatively considered a matter of personal choice within liberalism).

While liberals and progressives often regard state regulation of religious practices with approval because it circumscribes religion to its proper place, this approval often stands in tension with the liberal anxiety that the state, in performing this regulatory function, might come to espouse a particular religious position. This anxiety is apparent in the critiques leveled against the current Bush administration for actively promoting the far-right Christian agenda, thereby threatening to dissolve the state’s claim to religious neutrality. Similarly, for many American critics, the French laïque state overstepped its boundaries when it legislated the recent ban on the display of religious attire in public schools. In these objections, both instances are interpreted as a threat to the principle of state neutrality and its ability to ensure freedom of conscience for all of its citizens. The fear is that what was often considered to be a marker of “Third World exceptionalism” — the state’s interference in the religious domain5 — is also becoming the norm in liberal democratic societies of the West. Prescriptions aimed at fixing this tendency vary. Some urge self-avowed secular states to follow the central tenets of secularism more assiduously and judiciously by granting religious freedom to all, and not just some, religious groups within liberal societies; others call for the annulment of any judicial or legislative interference within the religious domain; and still others recommend that the state withdraw its financial support for all religious institutions.

However well intentioned these prescriptions are, I want to suggest that they are premised on an understanding of secularism that concedes at once too much and too little to its normative claims. They concede too much in accepting at face value the claim that secularism is about the banishment of religiosity from the public domain, and they concede too little by failing to interrogate secularism’s contention that it is the most effective political solution to warding off religious strife. In regard to the former concession, as the above examples suggest, secularism has sought not so much to banish religion from the public domain but to reshape the form it takes, the subjectivities it endorses, and the epistemological claims it can make. The effectiveness of such a totalizing project necessarily depends upon transforming the religious domain through a variety of reforms and state injunctions. This has often meant that nation-states have had to act as de facto theologians, rendering certain practices and beliefs indifferent to religious doctrine precisely so that these practices can be brought under the domain of civil law.6 Talal Asad, in his recent interrogation of French secularism, suggests that the secular liberal state’s ongoing regulation of religious life should be understood not so much as an exception to the norm of liberal rule, but rather as an exception in the Schmittian sense: as an exercise of sovereign power.7 Asad argues that even though secularism presupposes the mutual independence of political power and religious life, nonetheless it is the state that has the power to make certain decisions that affect religious practices and doctrines, but not the obverse. This asymmetry, argues Asad, is a measure of sovereign power, as the state retains the exclusive authority to define the exception.

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Notes

I would like to thank Talal Asad, Charles Hirschkind, Claudio Lomnitz, and Elizabeth Povinelli for their comments on this essay. My gratitude also extends to Michael Allan and Cindy Huang for the research assistance they provided.

1. This is a fairly common historical account. For a recent and eloquent presentation of it, see Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 31 – 53.
2. The legal scholar Noah Feldman’s recent analysis of, and solution to, America’s “culture wars” centers precisely around these two principles of liberal secularism. He argues that the root of the conflict between “value evangelicals” and “legal secularists” lies in the fact that the former want to use state funding for religious projects, and the latter want to limit the display of religious symbols in public places (usually through legal means). Feldman suggests that the best way to resolve this impasse is for the evangelicals to forego state funding for their religious programs in exchange for greater tolerance on the part of the secularists for “governmental manifestation of religion” in civic spaces. While the former would preserve the formal separation between religion and state, the latter would ensure that everyone feels free to express their religious affiliation openly in public life. See Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem — and What We Should Do About It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).
3. On the United States, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), and James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). On Britain, see Peter Harrison, “Religion” and Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). On France, see Jean Bauberot’s “The Two Thresholds of Laicization” in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, 94 – 136.
4. See Winnifred Sullivan’s Paying the Words Extra (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) and The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
5. The phrase was coined by Partha Chatterjee, who uses it to describe the top-down model of state secularism adopted in India, in which certain transformations were brought about in the doctrines and practices of Hinduism and Islam so as to facilitate liberal political rule in the colonial and postcolonial period. See Chatterjee, “Secularism and Tolerance,” in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, 345 – 79.
6. For this argument, see Kirstie McClure’s “Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (1990): 361 – 91. On developments in India along these lines, see Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Tolerance”; on similar transformations in Egypt, see Talal Asad’s “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial Egypt,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 181 – 204.
7. Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming).