Mahmood. Can Secularism Be Otherwise
Mahmood. Can Secularism Be Otherwise
Mahmood. Can Secularism Be Otherwise
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I would like to thank Charles Hirschkind and Judith Butler for their comments on this essay. R
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1 See, for example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
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1993); Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress,
R 1991).
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2 One of the many examples Taylor provides of this transmutation of Christian ethos to nonthe-
istic contexts is in post-Romantic poetics. It expresses, he argues, both a subjectivist and an experien-
tial account of what it means to be human, while retaining a recognition of the importance and place
for the action of God, otherwise captured in a theological language and honed by tradition (SA,
757). Also see chap. 10.
3 Here Taylors debt to the Romantic tradition is clear, inasmuch as romanticism provides both a
descriptive and a normative account of the role that culture, community, language, and tradition play
in the constitution of the modern subject. (See Colin Jaegers chapter in this volume.) The idea of
culture as a web of meaning was popularized by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a notion in-
debted to the work of Talcott Parsons, on which Geertz expanded. For a critical analysis of the career
of this notion of culture in the human sciences, see David Scott, Culture in Political Theory, Politi-
cal Theory 31, 1 (2003): 92115. S
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What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost ev-
eryone would agree that in some sense we do: I mean the we
who live in the West, or perhaps North Atlantic West, or other-
wise put, the North Atlantic worldalthough secularity extends
also practically, and in different ways, beyond this world. And the
judgment of secularity seems hard to resist when we compare
these societies with anything else in human history: that is, al-
most all other contemporary societies (e.g., Islamic countries, In-
dia, Africa), on one hand; and with the rest of human history, At-
lantic or otherwise, on the other. (SA, 1)
4 Both Wendy Brown and Jos Casanova make this point in passing in their contributions to this
S volume.
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5 Or, for that matter, how would one account for the indebtedness of someone like Thomas
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Aquinas to a series of Islamic philosophers whose ideas and contributions were incorporated into and
imbibed by mainstream Christianity? R
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7 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1989). Viswanathan shows that secular utilitarians (such as Thomas Macaulay)
and Christian evangelicals were united in their support for the Anglicization of the public school cur-
riculum in India, against Orientalists, who supported the teaching of indigenous languages (Sanskrit,
Persian, etc.).
8 See chapter 4 of Peter van der Veers Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
9 Neill notes that by the early twentieth century, women in foreign missions outnumbered men
(A History of Christian Missions, 218). On this point, for a discussion of Protestant missions sent from
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England, see Rhonda Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism, and the Victorian Idea of Chris-
tian Missions (Rochester: Boydell, 2003). R
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Christianitys Universalism
To ask A Secular Age to take account of the various ways in which Western
Christianity is linked with its non-Western others is not simply to make Tay-
lors narrative more inclusive, more copious, but to question if indeed Taylor
misidentiies the very object of which he speaks. It might be argued in re-
sponse that no book can possibly do justice to such a complicated history.
Taylor is, after all, a scholar of Euro-Atlantic and Christianity history, not of
European colonialism. If one desires to tell such a story, it would have to be
undertaken by someone who commands this archive and inhabits its particu-
lar set of problematizations. Such a response, however, ignores how the con-
stitution of an empirical object is itself constituted by a prior conceptual and
ideological delimitation and not simply a given that a scholar discovers. Given
the historical developments I have traced, to represent Latin Christendom as
simply an empirical ield is to fail to acknowledge the immense ideological
force the empirical history of Christianity commands in securing what con-
stitutes as the properly religious and the secular in the analytical domain.
To secure secularism as a uniquely Christian (or, for that matter, Western)
10 See Neill, A History of Christian Missions, chap. 11, and Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals
in Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 2.
11 The development of liberation theology in Latin America through the 1960s and 1970s is a
more recent example in this vein: a movement that built on and extended various aspects of Jesuit
theology and practice, challenging the Vatican to rethink its position on poverty and social justice.
Similarly, the current rebellion of Anglican bishops in Africa to the position of the Archbishop of
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Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on ordaining gay ministers is illustrative of the fact that it is impossible
R to treat Western Christianity as if it is autonomous of developments in other parts of the world.
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12 See David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Dialogues and Natural History of Natu-
ral Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 134196. Also see John Locke,
The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Marcel Gauchets book The Disechantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1997) represents a contemporary secularized version of this argument.
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13 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
2005). R
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15 It is worth pointing out that in his diagnosis of what ails North Atlantic Christianity and in his
prescriptions to solve the problem, Taylor draws on an older vocabulary from the anthropology of
religion that has deep roots in the emergence of the discourse of world religions. In the mid-nine-
teenth century, when the study of primitive and prehistoric religions was assigned to the discipline
of anthropology, it was the discipline of comparative religion (and later religious studies) that took
upon itself the task of studying the great historical religions of the world (which included Christi-
anity, Buddhism, Islam). This division of labor was accompanied by a typology of religion (primi-
tive versus axial/historical religions, great versus little traditions, and so on) and attendant ana-
lytical paraphernalia that have been largely discarded in anthropology but continue to hold sway in
the disciplines of comparative religion and religious studies. Anthropologists Victor Turner and Stan-
ley Tambiah, whose work Taylor draws on, belong to this older tradition within anthropology. For
two different moments in anthropological critiques of how the disciplines conceptual apparatus fa-
cilitated colonial projects, see Talal Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Pro-
metheus, 1973), and George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
16 I want to be clear that I am quite sympathetic to exploring conceptual and historical distinc-
tions that might exist across time, space, and social formations. These differences, however, are no
more civilizational for me than they are cultural. These are ideological terms that neither de- S
scribe nor analyze the formations of which they speak. Furthermore, the modern condition links
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us and them through a variety of global structures of governance, capital, and law that cannot be
accounted for by familiar tropes of civilizational and cultural distinction. L
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Political Secularism
I would like to push Taylors argument in a direction that might open up ways
of addressing these questions. Secularism until recently was primarily under-
stood as a political doctrine of state neutrality toward religion (encapsulated
in the principle of Church and state separation). Yet recent scholarship has
come to analyze secularism as a formation that exceeds this rather limited
understanding and focuses on transformations wrought in the domain of
ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. It is important to point out that these
transformations are not neutral in relation to the exercise of politics but are
transformative of this domain, the very ground on the basis of which mod-
ern politics is conducted. While Taylors book provides a culturalist and phe-
nomenological account of the subjectivity characteristic of modern liberal
secularism, it remains indifferent to questions of political secularism. By po-
litical secularism, following Talal Asad, I do not simply mean the principle of
state neutrality toward religion but the sovereign prerogative of the state to
regulate religious life through a variety of disciplinary practices that are po-
litical as well as ethical.17 Importantly, these disciplines of subjectivity are un-
dertaken not simply by state but also by nonstate (civic and cultural) institu-
tions that authorize normative models of practice, behavior, and religiosity.
Notably, these models are often unstable and mutually contradictory; the en-
forcement of one over the other is an exercise of power rather than simply
cultural assimilation. Taylors important articulation of the buffered self be-
longs to this ield of contestation and power, an account of which seems to
be crucially missing from A Secular Age.
To provide such an account is consequential for how one might think an-
alytically and critically about the normative thrust of modern political secu-
larism (and its cultural entailments).18 Taylors argument, for example, that
17 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
S 18 Taylor has written about the question of political secularism in The Secular Imperative, in
Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3153. In this
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article, insomuch as Taylor analyzes the necessary relationship between secularism and democracy,
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19 One cannot inhabit the label nonsecular indifferently in our age but must bear the conse-
quences of such an inhabitation. On this point, see my Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire, Public
Culture 18, 2 (2006): 323347.
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20 To acknowledge the Western origin of such conceptions is not to concede the claim of Eu-
ropes civlizational superiority but to recognize the transformative role that European capitalism and R
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colonialism played in non-European societies. For example, many aspects of Taylors buffered self can
be found in non-Western societies, carried historically through a complex movement not only of
ideas but, more importantly, of law, political structures, and capital.
21 Taylor himself recognizes this in an earlier article: The inescapability of secularism lows
from the nature of the modern state. The Secular Imperative, 38. In other words, he recognizes
the necessarily secular character of the modern nation-state. Also see the chapter Modern Social
Imaginary in SA.
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22 Here Taylor agrees with Ivan Illichs diagnosis of the fall of Christianity but amends it with
R his own prescriptions of what should be done to make Christianity whole again (742ff ).
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23 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Keynote address, Yale University,
April 5, 2008, transcript, 8.
24 The mandate of the commission was to ind ways of identifying and combating practices of
discrimination that might result from widely practiced cultural norms across lines of ethnic, racial,
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or religious difference. For a full explanation of this mandate, see www.accommodements.qc.ca/
R commission/mandat-en.html.
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25 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2006). R
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