Decolonizing Secularism's "Conceptual Matrix"

Arvind-Pal S. Mandair

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 38,
Number 2, August 2018, pp. 443-451 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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 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
444 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
tered preexisting forms of cultural and religious
difference, resulting in “new forms of communal
polarization” that enhanced the role of religion in
majoritarian and minoritarian identities.1 While
this phenomenon has been observed in mod-
ern Western contexts (a good example being the
Protestant-­C atholic conflict in Northern Ireland,
or the Christian-­Muslim conflict in the Balkans
in the 1990s), in the case of “non-­Western poli-
ties such as Egypt” political scientists and policy
makers have often cited communal polarization
as evidence of the non-­West’s inability to properly
secularize their societies (ibid.). Mahmood sees
this as a “structural paradox that haunts the secu-
lar project” in general, but also as having deter-
mined the “particular form that relations between
Muslims and non-­Muslims have taken in modern
Egypt” (ibid.).
Religious Difference in a Secular Age exposes the
tensions inherent within the “structural paradox”
of political secularism, on the one hand by show-
ing that secular concepts operate in a similar man-
ner in different geographical and cultural con-
texts such as Europe and the Middle East (chaps.
1 through 3), and on the other hand by exposing
the fact that non-­Western contexts are foreclosed
from true secularization. What interests me about
this “structural paradox” (and will be a guiding
thread in this response) is that it opens up ques-
tions about why “non-­Western polities” organized
around majoritarian/minoritarian identities — 
Middle Eastern (Islamic) but also South Asian
(Hindu/Sikh) — deemed to be lacking in whatever
is supposed to constitute proper secularization.
Indeed, if the reason for this lack can in turn be
linked to the failure of the liberal secular model to
resolve or address the problems of religious con-
flict, cultural difference, or diversity in general, it
behooves us to ask about alternatives to the secular
project. Why are alternative concepts to the secu-
lar not permitted outside of its normative theoreti-
cal framework?
I will first focus my discussion on the last
two chapters of Religious Difference in a Secular Age,
where Mahmood comes closest to revealing the
1. Mahmood, Religious Difference, 2. Hereafter
cited in the text.
• 38:2 • 2018
contours of the secular project’s normative theo-
retical framework and questioning its mode of ra-
tionalizing the political, the religious, and cultural
diversity. These two chapters resonate closely with
a growing concern to challenge liberal secular-
ism’s iron grip on the way we think about diver-
sity. In order to unsettle the dominant “image of
thought” underpinning the secular project, I take
my cue from Deleuzian theory by refocusing the
question of diversity around the problematic of en-
counter. The term encounter as I use it here reflects
a recognition that the secular project’s normative
theoretical framework is essentially a plane of con-
sciousness that from the outset converts difference
to identity. Through this conversion process bod-
ies that meet each other (bodies of citizens and
bodies of concepts) are only allowed to stand in
relation to each other, indeed to form relations,
as identities, never in their difference. This is the
neutering effect of the secular project, which re-
mains transparent because it is considered to be
universal. Rethinking this process in terms of en-
counter forces us to consider “playing fields” other
than secularism where cultures, concepts, tradi-
tions, and people are “able to meet as alternative
forms of life.”2
...
The final two chapters of Religious Difference in a
Secular Age focus on two sites of controversy over
the place of religious minorities in the Egyptian
political system: (1) the legal status of the Bahai
community in the face of the Egyptian state’s re-
fusal to recognize the Bahai faith as a religion, and
(2) Youssef Ziedan’s award-­w inning novel Azazeel,
a work of historical fiction that spawned a series
of fiercely polemical Christian-­Muslim debates. In
chapter 4, “Religious and Civil Inequality,” Mah-
mood skillfully demonstrates how secular concepts
(such as public order and religious liberty) oper-
ate in surprisingly similar ways in contexts that are
culturally and religiously different. By comparing
the legal cases of two different religious minori-
ties — t he Bahais in the secular Egyptian courts
2. See de Roover, Limits of Secularism.
 Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair • Decolonizing Secularism’s “Conceptual Matrix” • Kitabkhana
and Muslims in the European Court of Human
Rights (Switzerland and Italy) — Mahmood shows
that secularism creates a legal-­political framework
authorizing the state to defend and promote ma-
joritarian values in the guise of national identity,
ironically by relying on theological definitions of
religion. Thus in the case of the Bahais, while the
Egyptian national constitution recognized formal
equality between non-­Muslim and Muslim citizens,
it nevertheless deployed secular concepts such as
public order to prohibit the designation of Bahaism
(which would give it parity with the “Religions of
the Book” — Judaism, Christianity, Islam) by up-
holding two parallel arguments. On the one hand,
it stated that “Islamic governments are allowed to
accommodate non-­Muslims,” thereby affirming
the inviolability of their right to religious liberty
based on their internal belief system (forum inter-
num). On the other hand, however, sharia law also
prohibits the public practice of anything but the rec-
ognized religions (Religions of the Book).
Mahmood underscores the problematic na-
ture of this argument by showing that the Egyp-
tian judges did nothing more than invoke a form
of Islamic reasoning (ijtihad), without putting it
into operation. So although “Islamic concepts con-
tinue to permeate court decisions and political de-
bates,” which is not surprising given that the Egyp-
tian state’s form of jurisprudence regards sharia as
a primary source for lawmaking, something rather
different happens when judges pronounce legal
decisions (154). Thus, in the actual interpretations
of judges, Islamic reasoning based on sharia prin-
ciples seems to be translated into and replaced by
secular reasoning in such a way as to maintain the
sovereign state’s ability to make exceptional deci-
sions. Mahmood makes an interesting and astute
observation that
the viability of legislating the shari‘a in contem-
porary Muslim societies is fraught in another im-
portant sense. Scholars of Islamic jurisprudence
argue that the life world that sustained key con-
cepts and practices of the shari‘a no longer exists.
The shari‘a in the modern period has been radi-
cally transformed from what was once a context
bound and flexible tradition into a rigid system
of codified rules largely confined to the domain
of family law and administered by a central state.
(155)
445
If the operation of secular concepts in the
modern Egyptian legal and political system “seem
to violate the norm of secular neutrality” (155),
Mahmood provides a helpful comparison with
the way that these same concepts work in the Eu-
ropean legal system. By way of reference to sev-
eral well-­publicized cases concerning the right
of Muslim women to wear the headscarf in pub-
lic (such as Lautsi versus Italy in 2011 and Dahlab
versus Switzerland in 2001), Mahmood highlights
equally problematic forms of reasoning by the Eu-
ropean Court of Human Rights, which upheld a
ban on wearing the Muslim headscarf in schools
on the grounds that it was a religious item that
violated majoritarian cultural sentiments. At the
same time, it ruled against a ban on crucifixes in
schools on the grounds that the crucifix was a pas-
sive symbol. The legal rulings by the European
courts clearly demonstrated the exceptional role
accorded to Christianity in the West as the “only
religion capable of transcending its own historicity
to spawn a truly universal model of secular gover-
nance” (8).
What is clearly exposed in the workings of
secular concepts in culturally and geographically
different contexts is not only the duplicitous na-
ture of legal reasoning engaged in by both the
Egyptian and European courts, but something
deeper about the origin and form of reasoning itself.
While it appears that legal decision-­m aking in
both the Egyptian court and the European courts
is governed by the “field of political secularism,”
at the same time, the form of this reasoning seems
to be drawn less from Islamic political theology in
the Egyptian context than from Christian politi-
cal theology in the European context. Mahmood
doesn’t state this explicitly. Her discussion remains
on somewhat safer territory by simply juxtaposing
Islamic and Christian political theology. My inter-
est in pursuing the slightly more precarious ter-
ritory in regard to political theology is prompted
partly by Mahmood’s observations about sharia
law in the closely argued section titled “Public
Order” in which she compares the processes of
legal reasoning in the Egyptian and the European
courts, and partly by Roberto Esposito’s recent
work, which presents a cautionary perspective on
the nature of political theology, its relation to secu-
446 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:2 • 2018

lar concepts, and its cultural limitations.3 Let me
address each of these points separately.
Sharia law: As noted above, prior to Egypt’s
transformation into a nation-­state, sharia law it-
self was part of a heterogeneous, context-­bound,
and flexible “life world” that was “radically trans-
formed” in the modern period “into a rigid system
of codified rules . . . administered by a centralized
state” (154 – 55). Moreover, the Egyptian courts had
a much harder time trying to align sharia law with
secular state law. To make this alignment the Egyp-
tian court had to create an equivalence between
public order and sharia principles in view of the
fact that in Islamic jurisprudence the notions of
divine will and public welfare (maslaha) are not
compatible with the modern secular concept of
public order; these concepts “belong to two dis-
tinct epistemologies” (165). If one were to push the
implication of different epistemologies a little fur-
ther, these concepts belong to two different forms
of sovereignty: the autonomic sovereignty of the
modern state and what might be called the het-
eronomic sovereignty pertaining to maslaha and
divine will.4
Mahmood’s acknowledgment of different
epistemologies is an important observation. But her
argument (if I’m reading it correctly) leaves open
another possibility, namely, that the operation of
Islamic concepts (which Mahmood refers to as “Is-
lamic political theology”) doesn’t actually come into
play in the Egyptian system. In other words, sharia is
certainly invoked, but at the moment of its invoca-
tion it is interdicted through a form of generalized
translation that creates an equivalency between the
Islamic concept and the secular concept of pub-
lic order. As Mahmood notes, such translation/
interdiction is “not simply a misuse or misunder-
standing of the foundational aims of public order
but is constitutive of its conceptual matrix” (165).
Which of course begs additional questions. What
is this “conceptual matrix”? In what sense is this
“conceptual matrix” linked to the secular state’s
sovereign prerogative? If there is an epistemo-
logical difference in the nature of conceptual
processes (forms of reasoning) at work in secular
and Islamic contexts, and if modern secularism is
epistemologically aligned with Christian conceptu-
ality (rather than being opposed to it as the con-
ventional wisdom suggests), then is it far-­fetched to
suggest not only that the “conceptual matrix” un-
derlying secular concepts is derived from Christian
political theology, but also that political theology
as such is Christian in essence?
(Delimiting) Political Theology
In his recent work Two: The Machine of Political Theol-
ogy and the Place of Thought, Esposito signals caution
toward a facile generalized translation of political
theology into non-­Western cultures. Esposito’s the-
sis is that the “entire linguistic tissue that inner-
vates our conceptual categories is [already] deeply
imbued with political theological undertones.” Be-
cause of this our secular concepts “do not allow a
critical position on political theology to be opened
up.”5 Central to the operations of (especially mod-
ern) Western language and thought is a meta-
physical apparatus whose key task is to organize
difference (among persons, cultures, concepts) by
reducing it to structures of identity (for example,
noncontradictory unity, analogy, individuality, per-
sonhood). Significantly, one of the first people to
explicitly identify and challenge this machine of
political theology was the Arab philosopher Abu l-­
Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd (known
in the West as Averroes). Ibn Rushd’s disruptive
challenge to political theology in his commentary
on Aristotle’s de Anima inspired a fierce backlash
by Western philosophers and theologians, which
led to its being “attacked, abused, and literally
banned” from the philosophical tradition.6 For
what the Arab philosopher had managed to do
was to use the altogether different epistemology

3. Esposito, Two.
4. I’m reminded here of the Sikh concept of
hukam which can roughly be translated as di-
vine order or divine will, but with the proviso
that the connotation of divinity has nothing to
do with a personal god or deity but rather with
the occurrence of ego-­l oss or self-­humbling
(that is, hukam can only be realized or actual-
ized through self-­loss that occurs in this world,
not by resort to anything that transcends time).
The point that I’m trying to make here is that
hukam is used in Sikh lived experience, and it is
foundational to Sikh conceptuality but belongs
to a completely different epistemology, one
that is incompatible with secular humanist no-
tions of public order and consequently incom-
patible with the modern category of religion,
which itself is secular humanist construction.
In short, I am wondering whether Islamic con-
cepts work in the same way?
5. Esposito, Two, 23.
6. Ibid., 150.
 Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair • Decolonizing Secularism’s “Conceptual Matrix” • Kitabkhana
of Islamic concepts to mediate a conceptual inter-
action between East and West — one that was able
to displace the effects of political theology — and
to relocate the thinking process connected with
the faculty of the intellect in a place devoid of ego
structures (individuality, personality). In short,
Ibn Rushd was able to “dismantle the political-­
theological horizon that hinges on the semantics
of the person.”7
The lesson of Ibn Rushd as narrated by Es-
posito is relevant to the problem that Mahmood
analyzes in chapter 4, namely, the secular state’s
mechanism for managing difference, diversity, and
conflict, which it does by interdicting epistemolo-
gies deemed incompatible with the values of the
majoritarian community. If Islamic and Christian
concepts operate according to different epistemol-
ogies (as Mahmood’s case study suggests), and if
the operations of intellectual reasoning performed
by the “field of political secularism” are performed
less by Islamic concepts than by Christian political
theology (which constitutes the conceptual matrix
of political secularism), is it not plausible that the
interdiction is also the cause of the secular state’s
ambiguous policy toward recognition of minority
identities such as Bahai? In other words, the secu-
lar state can only manage diversity by identifying
difference in terms of identity —  in this case re-
ligious identity, which itself is constructed by the
state. To clarify an important point here, I am not
questioning Mahmood’s central claim about po-
litical secularism in this chapter. I’m simply trying
to visualize some wider ramifications of the rea-
soning (the “image of thought” cultivated by the
“field of political secularism”) whereby the state is
able to claim neutrality in the work of mediating
the difference among incommensurable parties,
different concepts, and different cultures that are
brought into encounter with each other. If, as ar-
gued above, the “field of political secularism” is in-
nervated by Christian political theology, then the
application of the category of religion and there-
fore the notion of a religious identity to encounter-
ing parties in a dispute or conflict is problematic
at the very least. Mahmood is reluctant to ques-
tion the category of religion, as it is central to her
7. Ibid.
4 47
book. But if the genuine insights attained through
her critique of the secular project are to cross into
regions and cultures beyond her case studies, it is
necessary to find a way to look at the problem of
difference other than through the category of re-
ligion, especially the way that political secularism
connects religion to identity and vice versa.
Rather than pursue the problematic nature
of the relationship between religion as a category
and identity as a concept (which has been exam-
ined by others elsewhere), I want to look more
closely at the “image of thought” corresponding
to the state-­form’s mediation of differences among
incommensurable parties, concepts, persons, texts,
and cultures. This is an “image of thought” that
mediates encounters among different parties by
turning difference into identity, thereby constrain-
ing the relations they are either allowed or forbid-
den from forming with each other. Regarding
mediation performed by political secularism or
by secular concepts it is possible to say that (1) the
encounter never occurs on neutral ground; (2) it
is always taking place on a field of consciousness
that creates relations of interiority; and (3) con-
sequently, secularism always presents a playing
field not only skewed toward, but underpinned by,
Christian political theology, no matter how much
we may wish to reform or improve the processes
involved.
Although not immediately obvious, chapter
5, “Secularity, History, Literature,” further probes
the neutrality claims of the secular project by shift-
ing the focus from the politics of legal discourse
(in the case of the Bahai community) toward secu-
larity, which for Mahmood represents the shared
epistemological or “background assumptions, at-
titudes, and dispositions that imbue secular society
and subjectivity . . . whose predicates are found . . .
in culture at large” (181). Grounded in a case study
of Coptic Christians in Muslim-­majority Egypt, this
final chapter looks at how secularity operated in
the controversy over the publication of Azazeel, an
Arabic novel that dramatizes the ancient doctrinal
dispute between Arians and Nestorians about the
nature of Christ. Mahmood shows how the ancient
dispute was reincarnated in the polemical debate
448 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
between the novel’s author, Youssef Ziedan (who
provides a secular humanist reading of the Chris-
tological controversy), and his main detractor (the
Coptic cleric, Bishop Bishoy) who accused Ziedan
of distorting the historical facts of the doctrinal
debates in order to stir up anti-­Christian sentiment
in Egypt and elsewhere.
Despite their contradictory approaches to re-
ligion (literary humanism versus theological reflec-
tion), Mahmood shows that both Ziedan and his
clerical critics are in fact caught up within the very
same epistemological framework — the framework
of secularity, which locates all events in homog-
enous historical time. Anyone who assents to this
framework is seduced into recognizing secularity
as a universal experience of time in which “we” all
experience and participate. In order to assent to
this form of calendrical time the participants inad-
vertently posit a metaphysical distinction between
immanence and transcendence, that is to say, be-
tween the immanent reality of actual events in this
world and their referential meaning (located in a
transcendental realm). This metaphysical distinc-
tion effectively creates a “secularized concept of
religion” (205). It is this very metaphysics that un-
derpins Ziedan’s claims to neutrality by relying on
a concept of history that places past events, con-
cepts, persons, and cultures on a blank canvas and
presumes to be able to make neutral comparisons.
The metaphysical underpinnings of secu-
larity are highlighted most clearly in the way that
Ziedan interprets the Christological debate to bol-
ster his claim that “religion is a human creation”
(200). Whereas in the Christological debates the
Arian and Nestorian positions, though opposed,
are nevertheless fundamentally connected by
their concern for the logos (or word) as necessary
for achieving salvation, in Azazeel the question
concerning Christ’s humanity is relocated within
the domain of ontotheology. Ontotheology is that
domain where the being of God is reduced to a
function of human logic, which demands proof of
God’s existence. Even though God continues to be
eulogized as the highest being, this relocation of
God into the order of mundane existence merely
reverses religious epistemology (such that the
• 38:2 • 2018
human replaces God as the creative force). It is this
reversal of epistemologies — human logic replacing
and redefining divine existence — t hat allows the
“secularized concept of religion” to “cause offence
across the Muslim-­Christian divide,” as Mahmood
demonstrates (205).
If I read her correctly, however, the real force
of secularity does not lie in merely reversing reli-
gious epistemology. It lies in secularity’s ability, on
the one hand, to present the order of mundane
existence as a neutral playing field, a kind of blank
universal canvas on which events can happen in
historical time, and, on the other hand, to per-
suade representatives from different cultural tra-
ditions to willingly place themselves, their events,
memories, and concepts into a comparative rela-
tionship whose ground is linear chronological time
(history), which in turn gives the impression of
neutrality because history is supposedly common
to us all, something we all participate in. Closely
scrutinized, however, this seemingly blank canvas
of history works through a form of representation
that beguiles the person into misperceiving the
difference of one’s tradition, and concepts as an
identity — a n identity that is usually modeled on
the majority cultural tradition. Furthermore, this
entirely modern conception of history as a blank
canvas corresponds to the “image of thought” as
secular consciousness: the commonsensical no-
tion that thought is secular.8 It is this particular
“image” of thinking that induces recognition, but
recognition only of what thought has first identi-
fied in the form of identity — permanence and ho-
mogeneity. On the canvas of secular history we are
all induced to believe that the ground or frame of
consciousness we’re located on corresponds to the
truth of the world.
Mahmood’s analysis of secularity is helpful
in a number of ways, and its conclusions echo the
earlier analysis of political secularism. The differ-
ence here is that she exposes historicism as the
invisible epistemology/ideology underpinning the
secular project, an ideology that is centered on the
primacy of a very particular form of human logic.
It deftly illustrates how secularity-­cum-­historicism
has exerted similar effects on traditions beyond
8. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 50.
 Arvind-­Pal S. Mandair • Decolonizing Secularism’s “Conceptual Matrix” • Kitabkhana
the religions of the book, primarily by replacing
indigenous epistemologies and modes of time with
the frame of historicism. As expected, the trans-
lation of indigenous modes of time and ontology
into historicism has caused not only offense, but
also a great deal of confusion for those trapped in
its framework.
To take a relatively simple example from the
South Asian context, consider for example the
modern nationalized forms of Sikhism and Hin-
duism. Since the late nineteenth century modern
Sikh elites have been locked into a political strug-
gle against the rising tide of majoritarian Hindu
nationalism (which evolved into Hindutva during
the twentieth century). In order to gain recogni-
tion for Sikhism as a separate religious tradition,
modernist Sikh elites developed a dual discourse
that borrowed strongly from Protestant models
of theology and history, constructing Sikhism as
a so-­called revealed religion distinct from Hindu-
ism and Islam. To achieve this, however, modernist
discourse needed to sublate an important aspect
of early Sikh practice that fostered the ability to
enable incommensurate traditions/concepts/
languages to coexist in close proximity without
the need for conflict. This aspect was inspired by
statements such as na koi hindu, na koi mussalman
(No Hindu, No Muslim), an utterance often at-
tributed to Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism,
which indicated Nanak’s desire to associate dis-
junctive religious ideologies, practices, and logics
(Hinduism and Islam). The tenor of this disjunc-
tive affirmation suggests that the two traditions/
ideologies could coexist without one replacing or
dominating other, or needing to be replaced by a
third tradition.9
However, the insistence by modern Sikh
elites on locating the events of Nanak’s life and
utterances (such as “No Hindu, No Muslim”) in
calendrical linear history ended up reducing na
koi hindu, na koi mussalman to a statement of iden-
tity politics, effectively allowing Sikhism to be
presented as a third (“revealed”) religion. The ul-
timate aim, of course, was to distinguish it from
9. The disjunctive affirmation in turn derived or self-­surrender, as the only act or perspective
from the idea that the only standpoint from that could open the portal to the multiplicity of
which one could make disjunctive connections divine Names.
was that of haumai marnaa, killing of the ego
4 49
pantheistic ahistorical Hinduism, thereby provid-
ing ideological protection from a majoritarian
Hinduism in its secularized and religious national-
ist incarnations. The challenge, however, came not
from proponents of Hinduism but from Marxist
Sikhs and Western historians of Sikhism, who es-
poused a notion of history in which Sikh concepts
were reformulated as secular concepts. As a result
the events of Nanak’s life and his utterances be-
come a matter of proving the correctness of his-
torical facts.
The influence of secularity and historical
consciousness on modernist Sikhism has become
evident in its trenchant resistance to moves that
threaten to undermine its dual positioning, where
it can claim to be located in realist linear history
yet also claim that its central teaching is essentially
theological. This is best illustrated by recent de-
bates in which some scholars have shown that the
concept of “Word” (shabad) can easily be shorn
of its colonial (Christian secular) consciousness
and interpreted in a manner that is closer to the
form it takes in Sikh lived experience and prac-
tice (sikhi or gurmat). This is an understanding of
shabad that harnesses a logic intrinsic to gurmat
(Sikh thought or what might be called Sikh politi-
cal theology) that is firmly resistant to the religion-­
secular binary and is able to dislodge it from the
epistemological plane of secularity. The logic of
gurmat — which revolves around the notion of ego
loss (or rather a psychic structure in which ego
and ego loss constitute a One-­A ll) — is worldly in
every sense, but at the same time resists subsump-
tion under homogenous time of secular history.
The reason that this other notion of time (akal)
remains invisible is that in the Anglophone con-
sciousness it is translated into secular historical
time (and thereby interdicted).
In other words, there are models and prac-
tices of time and temporality that are worldly in
every sense of the word and are part of lived ex-
perience and practice, but they remain invisible
and privatized because they are interdicted by the
secularizing force of historical consciousness (or
450 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
the historicizing force of secular consciousness),
which in turn is underpinned by the sovereignty
of the modern nation-­state. Thus when modern
nationalist Sikh elites recently threatened violence
and excommunication against those scholars who
have tried to dislodge Sikh concepts from the epis-
temological plane of secularity (ironically accus-
ing these scholars of subverting gurmat with secu-
lar Marxist ideology), it shows the extent to which
modernist elites have become trapped within the
consciousness they believe they are combating.
This brings us to what I think is the central
question that Religious Difference in a Secular Age
raises. Given that secularity and political secular-
ism are actually responsible for generating inter­
religious (intercultural) conflict by setting reli-
gions against each other, is there a more productive
way of negotiating difference as such? Could we improve
the current discourse on secularism by reforming
it? Or try to move beyond secularism, as postmod-
ernists might suggest? Should we look for “alterna-
tive secularisms”?10
None of these possibilities hold much appeal
for Mahmood, and her rejection of multiple secu-
larisms early in the book’s introduction is a move
that I’m broadly in agreement with. Instead, her
approach is to track the way in which secularity
and secular concepts have transformed the self-­
understanding of peoples in the Middle East, both
opening and closing certain modes of action (11).
Insofar as she is able to demonstrate that such a
“transformation of self-­u nderstanding” occurs,
and to some extent how it occurs, the book suc-
ceeds admirably. However, this is also the point at
which the argument reaches a limit. Although it
highlights how the internalization of secular con-
cepts in the Middle Eastern postcolony produced
transformative effects, which then fed into the
structures of majoritarianism that have proved to
be oppressive for minorities, it stops short of sug-
gesting concrete solutions for dealing with the
main effect of secularity, namely, its homogeniza-
tion of difference. Having said that, the book is
genuinely helpful in at least two ways: (1) it helps
readers recognize secularity and political secular-
10. See Abeysekara, Politics of Postsecular
Religion.
• 38:2 • 2018
ism as forms of colonial consciousness, and (2) it
prepares the ground for those who are more ac-
tively engaged in experimenting with alternative
ways of conceptualizing difference in order to
bring about a more rigorous decolonization of the
structures of secularity.
By way of conclusion, I would like to throw
out a few suggestions for decolonizing the norma-
tive framework of secularity. First, it is necessary to
understand why secularity seems to exert an iron
grip, inducing us to believe that no reasonable al-
ternative to it could exist or that any opposition
can only be permitted from within its theoretical
constraints.11 Second, it needs to be recognized
that secularity and the secular project revolve
around (indeed are reducible to) a very particular
“image of thought.” Secularity is a form of think-
ing whose operative mechanism consists in a logic
of representation (or noncontradiction) whose
purpose is to manage difference by reducing its
object to an identity, which can then be perma-
nently identified in any repetition of the encoun-
ter with another body. Gilles Deleuze refers to this
form of thought as completely “dogmatic” in the
sense that in any encounter between two concepts,
religious traditions, persons, or texts, it forces the
difference of an encountering body into a media-
tion in which the foreign concept is “subordinated
to identity, reduced to the negative, incarcerated
within analogy.”12 Third, the key to developing
frameworks for peaceful coexistence between re-
ligions, concepts, texts, and persons is to develop
new models of encounter that refuse the grip of this
dogmatic image of thought, refuse recognition,
and reverse the effects of negativity secreted by
the fields of secularity and political secularism.
Fourth, contrary to what many pundits of politi-
cal theory tell us, models of encounter that might
be conducive to thinking cultural difference posi-
tively can be derived as much from non-­Western
as from Western cultural and intellectual sources
(for example, the practice-­concepts such as akal
or hukam mentioned above). More important, far
from being utopian ideas or wishful thinking, as
these pundits imagine, such models of encounter
11. See de Roover, Limits of Secularism, 10.
12. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 50.
 Nermeen Mouftah • History and Fiction in Secular Time • Kitabkhana
are already at work in the lived experiences of mi-
norities who negotiate difference positively on a
daily basis.
References
Abeysekara, Ananda. Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourn-
ing Secular Futures. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by
Paul Patton. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Esposito, Roberto. Two: The Machine of Political Theology
and the Place of Thought. Fordham, NY: Fordham Uni-
versity Press, 2016.
Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A
Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2016.
Roover, Jakob de. Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Ziedan, Youssef. Azazeel. London: Atlantic Books, 2013.
doi 10.1215/1089201x-6982191
HISTORY AND FICTION IN SECULAR TIME
Nermeen Mouftah
In Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Saba Mah-
mood calls into question one of secularism’s great-
est boasts — that it makes possible pluralistic socie­
ties that protect the rights of religious minorities.
Rather than bolstering neutrality toward religion,
she demonstrates how secularism instead creates
and exacerbates interreligious conflicts. To accom-
plish this, she investigates reckonings with and
representations of history. Indeed, history is the
scaffolding for two distinct forms of the secular in
the book. First, her discussion of political secular-
ism, “the modern state’s relationship to, and reg-
ulation of, religion,”1 which occupies most of the
book, tracks how relations between Muslims and
minority religions historically transformed under
colonial rule. Second, to understand secularity,
“the set of concepts, norms, sensibilities, and dis-
positions that characterize secular societies and
subjectivities” (ibid.), she depicts how a secular ide-
1. Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular
Age, 3. Hereafter cited in the text.
451
ology of homogenous time requires an exclusively
empirical history.
In the first part of the book, Mahmood ex-
amines political secularism by detailing the mate-
rialization of the concepts of religious liberty and
minority rights. She explains that she is interested
less in a chronological history than an overlap-
ping genealogy: tacking between Europe and the
Middle East, she traces how religious liberty and
minority rights redirect attachments away from
religion, thereby securing the nation-­state. While
other scholars have shown how French and British
powers used religious identity to divide and rule,
Mahmood instead exposes secularism’s central
paradox: although the state made religion a pri-
vate matter, it did so in such a way that structured
society around religious identity and so generated
new frictions of its own.
In a final chapter that examines secularity
rather than political secularism, Mahmood in-
vestigates two views of religion as they collide in
a polemic over a work of historical fiction: Youssef
Ziedan’s Azazeel (2012). She depicts the conflict be-
tween a secular (Muslim) author and his (mostly)
Coptic clergy critics by drawing out the secu-
lar underpinnings of the dispute. At stake is the
novel’s depiction of a fourth-­century Christologi-
cal debate over whether Jesus was a man, as the
novel ultimately posits, or divine, as the novel’s
Coptic critics maintain. For Mahmood, the ana-
lytical purchase of the debate lies not in showing
an opposition between some moderns who inhabit
calendrical time and others who dwell in sacral
time; rather, she demonstrates the presumptions
of secular, homogenous time that saturate their
mutual terms of engagement. For Mahmood, what
exacerbates religious difference in the Azazeel dis-
pute is the shared conception of empirical history
around which the debate takes place. Here, I re-
flect on how ideas of history and literature framed
the debate. The Azazeel dispute crystallizes dif-
ferent sensibilities about history, differences over
what narrative forms (including historical fiction)
can relay the past, and who is best suited to tell
that past.
Rather than thinking of ethnography as the