Aziz Al-Azmeh

Secularism and its Enemies

Working Paper #15

Working Paper Series of theCentre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CASHSS)“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”
ISSN 2700-5518#15: Aziz Al-Azmeh. “Secularism and its Enemies.” Leipzig University, 2020.
© Aziz Al-Azmeh
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Please cite as:
Al-Azmeh, Aziz. “Secularism and its Enemies.” Working Paper Series of the
CASHSS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 15. Leipzig
University, 2020.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36730/2020.1.msbwbm.15

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Content

1 Sentiment, Pathos, Rhetoric........................................................................4
2 Moods and Keywords.................................................................................11
3 Actually Existing Secularism and the Challenge of Fate........................21
4 One Genealogy of Post-colonialist Eminence.........................................38
5 Bibliography.................................................................................................51

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Secularism and its Enemies1
The following is intended to suggest a fairly simple contention concerninga number of interconnected propositions made in connection with thedebates on modernity and secularism. None of these propositions isparticularly novel, nor is this the first time that they have been put forward.
Yet the issues raised have remained with us and become all the morepressing; I can see that points that were made, against the flow, more than
two decades ago, now stand out more cogently than ever, and are being
revisited, rediscovered or simply discovered by many.2
The simple contention I wish to start with concerns Islamism, often
brought out emblematically when secularism and modernity are discussed.
Like other self-consciously retrogressive identitarian motifs, ideas,sensibilities, moods and inflections of politics that sustain differentialist
culturalism and are sustained by it conceptually, Islamism has come to gain
very considerable political and social traction over the past quarter of acentury. This had until recently reached the extent that it, as a perceptual
grid of social and cultural purchase relating to societies and countries thatmany associate with Islam, has become hegemonic in public discussions
about society and politics and, until recently, hegemonic without serious
challenge. It has also been crucial for triggering the latest round of antisecular discussions and polemics.3
The following discussion will proceed in three stages. First, an overallcharacterisation of anti-secular polemics and motifs in their broader
discursive and other contexts and motifs will be offered, with special
123This is the revised, longer version of a paper delivered to the conference “Critique ofModernity”, Leipzig University, 14–15 June 2018. Parts of this text overlap with theauthor’s ‘Preface to the English Translation’ to: Aziz Al-Azmeh, Secularism in the Arab
World: Contexts, Ideas and Consequences (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020),
a translation of the Arabic book first published in 1992.
See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992); Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonial Theory
and the ‘Post’-Condition,” Socialist Register 33 (1997); Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial
Aura (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities(London: Verso, 2009). In a similar vein but appearing somewhat later: the historicallucidity and cogency of Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge,
History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005) and the politico-conceptual
clarity Vasant Kaiwar, The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project ofProvincialising Europe (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014).
Andrew March, “Political Islam: Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015): 110.
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attention to writings characterised as post-colonialist. Next will beoffered a discussion of some keywords that come up in this context andwhich indicate the conceptual profile in question. The essay will thenmove on to discuss two specific methods of using history in arguments
against secularism. Finally, the essay will concentrate on post-colonialist
discussions of Islam and secularism, exemplified in a particular case.

1 Sentiment, Pathos, Rhetoric
Islamism’s public stance was made possible rhetorically and conceptually bya standard global repertoire of anti-modernist motifs and concepts of late
18th- and 19th-century vintage, motifs and concepts vigorously recovered inrecent decades. I am concerned here specifically with the Euro-American
academy, but the phenomenon is ubiquitous, with both the specialist andthe demotic feeding into each other continually across a political interface.
In a movement broadly comparable across the globe, anti-modernist
tropes, motifs and metaphors in the Arab world migrated, under Cold War
impulse, from social, ideological and political margins toward the centre,
at first incrementally from around 1967, later epidemically from 1979,
before establishing themselves pandemically as an irresistible siren song
since 1989. These tropes have seeped into the interstices of nationalist,
liberal and left-wing discourses and political positions, and have, with
their culturalist and populist templates, effectively blunted political andanalytical capacity, and come to serve as apologetic auxiliaries to an
expanding Islamist ideological template.4
In the Euro-American context, academic as well as more broadly
public apologetics for religious neo-conservatism and, not infrequently, for
obscurantism, have not been the work of conservatives alone, including
Islamists. It has also involved representatives of post-modernist and postcolonialist currents, who generally take themselves, with no evident senseof incongruity or irony, to be avant-garde. What seems to go unnoticed
is that these apologetic revendications of Islamism present mirror-imagesof current right-wing conceptions, and afterlives of more classic ones,4

See Al-Azmeh, “The Nationalist Era and the Future Besieged,” chap. 5, and “Conclusion:
Secularism Today in the Context of its Adversaries,” chap. 6 in Secularism in the Arab
World; ‘Azīz Al-Aẓma, “Bayn at-tārīkh wa’l-istikāna li’l-qadar,” Bidāyāt 14 (2016).
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both conservative and revolutionary, now reconditioned in primarycolours, often with the strident and hectoring tonalities that have marked
anti-modern polemics historically.5 That flirtation with the tropes of thehard political Right that led to untold calamities in the interwar years is
replayed today with cavalier abandon, seems to generate little curiosity or
to occasion any measure of self-reflection. It is this vindication of religious
obscurantism, and specifically of identitarian obscurantism, in times oftenlabelled as post-modern, that I wish to address in the following pages.
Particular reference will be made to one variety of this apologetic discourse,
to recent anti-secularism, with complementary but more narrowly focusedreference to related post-colonialist claims. For illustration of postcolonialist claims, work by and associated with one widely-cited author
will be called upon conveniently.6 Let it be said at the outset that criticism
here is not intended to abandon thematic perspectives opened by earlier
post-colonialist critiques, but to question whether they have been adequate
to the task, given their terms of reference. Nor is it intended to deliver apolemic, but rather to adopt a sense of the critical enterprise whose task isthe elucidation of the general – ideological, conceptual, social and political– conditions of possibility of certain types of statements, much in thesense pioneered by Karl Marx.7 Foucauldian concern with genealogies is adistinct but not unrelated enterprise.
Identity politics brought in its wake the promotion and cultivation of
a sentimentalist nativism. In the universities, this was generally correlatedwith a cognitive relativism, the latter ultimately drifting into cognitive
nihilism associated with the consistently post-modernist and postcolonialist currents. The resultant temper is now firmly established inuniversities and indeed in international organisations and foundations
as well. There it has come to constitute a regnant orthodoxy, associatedwith what has rapidly become an institutionalised establishment. Like
5
6

7

For the rhetoric of vituperation, see especially Antoine Compagnon, “Vitupération,”chap. 6 in Les Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Editions
Gallimard, 2006).
The reference is to Talal Asad, whose views on Islam and secularism have recently beenclearly and comprehensively sketched and respectfully put down: Hadi Enayat, Islam andSecularism in Post-Colonial Thought: A Cartography of Asadian Genealogies (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
See above all Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political
Economy,” Economy and Society 5, no. 3 (1976).
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all establishments, this fosters a conservative, rigid and often formulaic
output, ironically in this case an output with claims to a dragon-slaying
type of critique.
This is a type of critique that rests on an adversarial relationship tothe best part of its objects of study. It has been especially appealing tolatecomer niches of the academy, such as gender studies, cultural studies
and various denominations under which identity is officiated. It petrified
with extraordinary rapidity as it acquired institutional moorings andtheir webs of patronage and vested interest, and as it developed into an
institutional paradigm, with the usual political economy of a regnant
academic orthodoxy.8 This mode of output is all the more constricting
as younger academics are trained to reiterate formulaically vocabularies
of novelty. The shared vocabulary and poetics of post-colonialism andpost-modernism have, in effect, become an academic sociolect which, likesociolects in general, has a communicative purpose defined primarily by
the use of argotic locutions that signal mutual recognition among those
who use this register of language. In this way, the critical stance, salutary in
its initial purpose, was frozen in the moment of polemical inception, andcontinues to subordinate cognitive purpose to apostolic ends.
The lofty appeal often made in this context to the rhetoric of suspicion,with references to Ricœur and to Ricœur’s references to Descartes, would
after consideration appear to have been contrived, and seems in the final
analysis to be superfluous and flashy. The inquisitorial style of the rhetoricof suspicion is related rather to 19th-century phrenological criminology
and the detective novel, all based on reading signs, favouring terms suchas ‘interrogation’ and ‘interpellation’ , rather than Descartes. This forensic
reading is generally performed in an attitude of hermeneutical hubris,
powered by negative energy, employing a number of standard rhetoricaldevices so well brought out recently by Rita Felski.9 The reference toRicœur – or Heidegger, or any of the other patristic figures used in thistype of discourse – seems not to be one of substance primarily, but rather
the solicitation of august authority, what classical rhetoric calls ‘ethos’.
Of especial pertinence to the present purpose, to issues of postcolonialism’s attitude towards secularism, will be reference to the way inwhich subaltern studies veered towards neo-nativism and sentimentalism,8
9

See Michael Billig, “Towards a Critique of the Critical,” Discourse and Society 11, no. 3 (2000).
Rita Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” Poetics Today 32, no. 2 (2011).
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and more broadly, reference to the relationship between the political left
and the critique of secularism. This shift in subaltern studies came with adecidedly anti-modern mood, once Ranajit Guha departed from the helm
and a crop of younger, talented Indian academics at US universities cameto decide its direction, paralleling mutations in other fields,10 and movingfrom anti-colonialism11 to post-colonialism. Post-coloniality and anticolonialism are very distinct politically, socially and intellectually. Postcolonialist discourse is parasitical on anti-colonialism, to which it is related
only rhetorically. It should be remembered that nationalist and socialistanti-colonialism was associated with secularism implicitly or explicitly.
Post-colonialism is associated with anti-secularism and with apologies
for and vindications, in the name of history, of tradition understoodconservatively or at best apologetically, including the atavistic appeal to
tradition.
Two consequences attend the overdetermination of this modeof academic practice by the adversarial mood. One is that, with few
exceptions, the cognitive harvest has been slight, despite the persistentclaim that vitalism, historism and nativism are closer to the ground, and thatadversaries, especially those who might speak for modernity and secularism,are out of touch, and that they are too much given to abstraction. This
position has often been associated with right-wing anti-intellectualism,12
here paraded generally by select intellectuals as left-leaning anti-elitism.
Works written in this spirit that have rested on empirical research tend to
oscillate between elementary empirical description, and meta-theoreticalimperatives: the imperatives of transposing the normative into the cognitive,
such as advocacy for representing ‘voices’ on parity with each other rather
than establishing facts and analytical itineraries by taking these voices forobjects of research and distinguishing research material from the analysis
of such material.13 Overall, the crucial mid-level, sociological or historical
10 Perry Anderson, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony (London: Verso, 2017),
100–02; Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies,” in Mapping
Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000).
11 Exemplarily: Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA: Universityof California Press, 2010).
12 Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2010), 28–29; Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2015 [1957]), 241–44.
13 This feature is palpable in Talal Asad for instance, who will be discussed below, withgeneral pronouncements based on sparse empirical material and on slight reading7

element, is sacrificed. The perspective of subject-positions, of voice andmeaning, intrudes in such a way as to blunt the basic distinction between
observer and observed, scientific practitioner and her material and objectof study.
Anti-modernism is of course a complex object of study, and has forover two centuries spoken in a variety of tonalities, genres, conceptual
vocabularies and languages. It is often forgotten today, even by sociologists,that anti-modernism has not been primarily a matter of discourses, moods
and motifs, of “interpretative frames” Nor has it been just a phenomenon
that belongs fundamentally to the realm of “meaning”, whatever “meaning”
may mean beyond the evocation of something elemental, profound andrather occult, in default of conveying a more concrete indication.14‘Meaning’ seems generally deployed to advertise a posture of knowingness
and of privileged access to sense that defies further specification, intimating
the inward, perhaps the ineffable. It seems best understood as a means ofconveying pathos rhetorically. The most subtle and accomplished scholar
using this term has needed to admit that the parsing of ‘meaning,’ or whatmight stand for it, cannot involve transforming symbols into propositions,for this is to risk ‘the crimes of exegesis,’ as meaning is a message deeply sunkin its medium, like poetry – in other words, inaccessible to propositional
language, and lodged in images and movements which,15 in their turn,cannot yield anything even vaguely approximating what “meaning” maymean beyond pointing at symbols said to betoken it, whatever it may be
and wherever it may reside.
Recourse to ‘meaning’ betokens anti-modernist polemic, but beyond
the discursive and the symbolic. Anti-modernism has always been asocial, political, and cultural dynamic, reflecting far more than an inertial
overall, the two commensurate with what is evidently an extraordinary economy of effort
and curiosity.
14 See the most incisive comment on the vacuity of ‘meaning’ in Heidegger in the 1928
review of Sein und Zeit by Gilbert Ryle, reproduced in Journal of the British Society of
Phenomenology: Gilbert Ryle, “Martin Heidegger: ‘Sein und Zeit’,” Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 3 (1970).
15 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1980), 103. For more ample indications of the elusivenessof ‘meaning’ as a concept, for all Geertz’s cerebral energy and capacity for precision anddiscrimination, see Geertz, Negara, 102–05, 114 and Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: TwoCountries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995), 115–16, 150.
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energy from the past, and has been asserted with a variety of instruments,
including profuse bloodshed – the Iranian Revolution is a most pertinent
case in point here: it is not only an archaising harking back, but a social
engineering project. For post-colonialists and post-modernists, antimodernism – an historical social, cultural and ideological dynamic – has
supplied nevertheless a number of patristic figures16 regarded as abstract
instances of inspiration unsullied by the contexts of anti-modernism,
and utilised by means of quotations which do not often have determinate
meanings but rather convey a presumption of knowingness. These
include Heidegger, whose tenebrous solemnities, analogies and wordplay with the German language seem to absolve him from needing toconstruct arguments. This also seems to enchant and conduct the willing
beholder, more often than not without an adequate philosophical culture
and vocabulary, to a political and conceptual drift, to the extent, so well
expressed by his erstwhile pupil Karl Löwith, who said that, once one
had heard his famous rector’s speech, one was unsure whether one
should rush to read the pre-Socratics or join the SA.17
With Heidegger as with many patristic figures of both the historical
Right and of the post-modern and post-colonial, pathos is proof and themode of persuasion, all part of the enunciative armature of succeedingwaves of conservative revolutions, one of which coincided with the interwar
period of which Heidegger was a product.18 The classical rhetorical devicesof pathos and ethos are better conducive to understanding anti-modernism
and its associated styles than propositional content.19 Anti-modernism’s
rhetorical medium delivery (pathos and ethos) is inseparable from the
16 For the right-wing, irrationalist inflections in European thought in what might arguably
be represented as mainstream, see for instance Henry Stuart Hughes, Consciousness andSociety: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, NY: Knopf,
1958); Stepan Odouev, Par les sentiers de Zarathoustra: Influence de la pensée de Nietzsche
sur la philosophie bourgeoise allemande, translated by Catherine Emery (Moscow:
Éditions du Progrès, 1980); Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual
Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004).
17 Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger
Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 176.
18 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991); Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hanna Arendt, Karl Löwith,
Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
19 See Richard Shorten, “Reactionary rhetoric reconsidered,” Journal of Political Ideologies
20, no. 2 (2015): 184–85.
9message, as in poetry. The emphasis in this rhetoric is on the resonance ofterms such as authenticity and meaning, on the stress on some ontologicalorder over history, on irrationalist engagement with sentiment over reason
The prefix “post” to the phenomena under discussion is itself one which
carries over the pathos of anti-modern sensibilities into what presents itself
as beyond the time of the past as well as of the present. Impenetrability andintimations of the subterranean and of occult wisdom are consequently notincidental but rather crucial to evocations of Heidegger.
Access to the occult is equally relevant to other patristic figures of thistendency, whose roster includes the laconic Wittgenstein, whose aphoristic
terseness and provincial sageliness, conjoined with personal idiosyncracy,
are taken for evidence of signs, wonders and oracles – but who also speaks
in sinister biologising metaphors of life-worlds, so common among rightwing ideologues: a concept arising, like its ethno-geographical companion
Lebensraum and the associated Weltanschauung, from deterministic 19thcentury German social geography and ethnology. Others include Gadamer’s
appendices to Heidegger. In France Emmanuel Levinas, something of alatecomer to this supra-national status,20 whose recourse to the languageof resonant but indeterminant abstractions of identity and ancestralism isubiquitous, and much favoured. Among other things, Levinas objected to– in one instance, Sartre – “mistaking” Judaism’s historical being for its“metaphysical essence”, and wished to liberate Jews from Enlightenment
ideas of emancipation, to free them of Descartes and Spinoza, and reinstate
the idea, suitably reconditioned and given a positive valency, of the eternal
Jew21 – which had always been grist to the mill of anti-Semitism, as Sartre
indicated. One need of course mention the somewhat incomprehensible
elevation of Carl Schmitt to this patristic conventicle, and of course Michel
Foucault, after the latter’s transit in California which marked his movefrom rigorous cognitive preoccupations to a more self-indulgent agenda.
All these figures are made by many casuistical means to yield a cursory and
20 This status was not achieved by the somewhat older Henri Bergson, so important toFrench thinkers who came to appreciate the irrational, including Levinas, Halbwachs,
Deleuze and Teilhard de Chardin. He was implicated with occultism and revivalist
Catholicism, and was in his own time been regarded to represent the contrary of secularand scientific attitudes of the Republic: see Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy
in France, 1900–1914 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988).
21 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 207–11.
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flat conceptual template for what Eco termed a “neo-Cartesianism of theirrational”, all the more so as these authors are usually approached by thosedrawn to them from the post-colonialist and post-modernist milieu in acondition of eager and impressionable philosophical innocence.

2 Moods and Keywords
As this discussion moves into the medias res, my initial position is that
post-colonialist and post-modernist directions in the social and humansciences can be characterised by a number of features, none of which isnovel or post-anything really. A primary feature is a vitalist and organismic
concept of society, a conception of society expressed in terms of biologicalmetaphors, of homeopathy, organic integrity versus infection, disnaturationand distemper, of autonomy and heteronomy, of roots and parasites and soforth.22 In its earliest, counter-Enlightenment moment, this vitalist conceptof society deployed organism against the mechanism of modern science,a trope that persisted in early anti-capitalist romanticism, practically
expressed in the Luddite destruction of textile machinery in England in
the 19th century, machinery subversive of natural and organic forms of
production.
This is complemented by a constructivist epistemology premised onrelativism, counterposed to scientism, a kind of cognitive Luddism whereknowledge comes to be taken for a form of collective instinct expressedin what are commonly called voices or meanings, and where propositions
and discourses are taken for unmediated and direct redactions of nativist
sentiment, autonomous of exogenous and heteronomous categories orconcepts. This, by necessity, results in a relativistic concept of knowledge, atthe limit, in cognitive nihilism. Knowledge is taken here for an expressionof social instinct, rendered in terms such as incommensurability, or as
Verstehen opposed to conceptualisation, not uncommonly conjoinedwith knowing declamations on knowledge and power. All the while, thisconstructivist position is overdetermined by the terms of a polemic against
positivists and other assorted miscreants, whose positions are generally and
22 See Judith Schlanger, Les métaphores de l´organisme (Paris: Vrin, 1971); Ernst-Wolfgang
Böckenförde, “Organ,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 4, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner
Conze, and Reinhart Kosellek (Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta, 2004), §§ VIII.2–5, IX.1–2.
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in heresiological manner reduced to clichés and schematic representations
with little correspondence to actual positions or practices:23 such, after all,are the methods of polemic, which works with parody.
The other primary feature is a deterministic, historist conceptionof history.24 This is a conception of history as the parallel itineraries,
in time, of generically different stocks, each with predetermined andabiding characteristics; extraneous intrusions such as colonialism
cause derangements of essence, but these are taken for temporary
contaminations, the system coming ultimately to restore its originalbalance homoeopathically and inevitably: hence terms such as Revival,
Risorgimento and their cognates. Altogether, a move is made decisively
from what was once taken to be the naturalness of reason, to the naturalnessof desire, need, locality and of prejudice, which was famously celebrated by
Gadamer – Eco’s Cartesianism of the irrational.25 Altogether, we have herea clear instance romanticism in the theories of history and society, which
aestheticises political ideas and institutions. History and society become
aestheticized; they become sublime, and politics itself becomes a matter for
subjective non-political emotional response.
Such, in fact and in brief, are the strong conceptual and categoricalmodules by which the differentialist politics of identity is transposed into
the academic field. One sees the desiderata of scientific research expressedin terms such as fact, reality and objectivity, together with historicist
notions such as progress and the Enlightenment, consigned to a status
so lowly as to need insistently the stigma of inverted commas. Invertedcommas thus used convey knowing incredulity and disparagement by
a move of elementary irony conveyed to a reading crowd of a shared

23 See, exemplarily still, the early discussion of constructivist sociology of science by Larry
Laudan, “The Pseudo-Science of Science,” Philosophy of Social Science 11 (1981).
24 One of the clearest statements of the entire doctrine is Gadamer’s lecture at the German
Institute in occupied Paris in 1941: Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Herder et ses théories surl’Histoire,” in Regards sur l’histoire: Cahiers de l’Institut Allemand, ed. Karl Epting (Paris:
Sorlot, 1941). A very good synoptic characterisation of historism is by Georg Iggers,“Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56,
no. 1 (1995): 135–36; see also Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 19–24.
25 ‘Azīz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (Londo: Verso, 2009), 19–20.
12sociolect.26 Nevertheless, despite the insistent disparagement of empiricism,post-colonialist and post-modernist scholarship has generally not been
averse to the idea that the criticism of modernity and secularisation
is sustained empirically from the evidence of contemporary religious
movements. Reference is often made to movements that belie ostensibly theclaims of secularism, above all Islamism and Pentecostalism. In the general
historiographic scheme, and post-colonial as well as post-modernist
scholarship rest on robust and consistent if often implicit conceptualassumptions, these are taken for a revival and a return of the suppressed,a restoration of natural homeopathic balance, speaking truth to a lie. With
Casanova, for instance, no post-colonialist but in the flow of a congruent
anti-secular polemic emerging from overall congruent circumstances,evoking Pentecostalism or Islamism involves no mere change of perspective,
but is fully a corrective perceptual shift commensurate with an abiding
reality of the public salience of religion.27 This is in keeping with historist– as distinct from historicist – assumptions of abiding morphologicalelements in any given collectivity – Herder’s Kräfte, national spirit, national
character, culture, civilisation, traditions, values, life-forms and so forth.
With these trans-historical elements in play, the passage of history amounts
to so many conjunctural bumps that leave the underlying essence whole.
Neither conjuncture nor future, in this register, are history; they are rather
redactions of ethnological destiny. Secularisation and modernisation, notto speak of secularism and modernism, are in effect pronounced illusory
because they do not form part of the narrative of destiny.
Before we continue, a clarification of perspective is in order. The
empirical evidence used by anti-secular polemics cannot be taken simply
as a return of religion, or the restoration of an original condition, as would
be required by anti-modernist ideological modules. What needs to beapprehended is that societal recourse to religion is a polemical resource,
congruent with a significant reconfiguration of the religious field, globallyand over the lifetime of the past generation. This is not a return, nor a
26 Not unlike the Lingua Tertii Imperii, there is here a re-enactment of an oratorical occasion
where the inverted comma is expressed by a digital gesture, with the inverted commas
conveying a change of tone: Victor Klemperer, “Punctuation,” chap. 12 in The Languageof the Third Reich: LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, translated byMartin Brady (London: Continuum Books, 2000).
27 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 11.
13

resurrection, for religion never disappeared, but a recasting, because ofhistory and not in spite of history. Recall of history here is not an appeal
to supposedly enchanted depths imagined to be captive to permanencesthat historism would wish to see, to what some call, imprecisely andinappropriately, path dependency. History refers rather to conjuncturaltransformations in the past quarter of a century. If one insisted on the
mystical vocabularies of inwardness and abidance championed in postcolonialist discourses, transfiguration would serve better than resurrection.
Religion was never absent, and never inactive, and it is worth noting thepoint made by Casanova, quite correctly, that the thesis of the absence or
waning of religion has no necessary analytical connection to the standard
secularisation thesis,28 despite claims to the contrary by anti-secularpolemics.
Empirical inaptitude is also the case with another feature continuously
ascribed to the secularisation thesis by its critics, that it is teleological.
With some exceptions of hard teleology, including Auguste Comte andideological statements of secularism, predestinarian teleology does not
figure in the secularisation thesis and, when it does occur, it does so as
a hope, not as a constitutive conceptual feature of the thesis. Even when
historicist conclusions of the inevitable waning of religion are drawn wheninterpreting patterns and forms of change over time, and when trends
are discerned, including secularisation and functional differentiation
correlated with modernity, there is no structural implication of a telos.
Correlatively, what is commonly seen as the return to prominence ofreligion, with spectacular and sanguine force since the end of the Cold
War,29 has had a cyclical history connecting its various moments incomplex ways,30 and is in phase with developments beyond the world of
the mind, to which discussions of secularism rarely attend. The renewedsignificance of religion is in this respect part of a global anti-modernist,anti-Enlightenment counter-revolution repeating previous performances.
These had involved nationalism, relativism, anti-rationalism, and have
28 José Casanova, “Reply to Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his
Interlocutors, ed. Charles Hirschkind and David Scott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2006), 16.
29 See Al-Azmeh, “The Discourse of Cultural Authenticity: Islamist Revivalism andEnlightenment Universalism,” chap. 2 in Islams and Modernities; Aziz Al-Azmeh,“Civilisation as a Political Disposition,” Economy and Society 41, no. 4 (2012).
30 Shorten, “Reactionary rhetoric,” 188–96.
14been accompanied by brooding meditations on decadence, degeneration,and the twilight of nations and communities, together with a cult of the
popular soul.
The present phase of globalisation is the last in a series to date. The
first run of this constellation of topoi and sentiments crystallised following
the collapse of an old world in 1789 (leading lights: Herder, de Maistre,
Burke). The second followed 1848 and 1870 (leading lights: Gobineau,
Carlyle, Savigny, von Stein, Le Bon, Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors of1864) with the second eruption of ‘the people’. Such moods continued invarious forms to shape the malaise of the fin-de-siècle, consolidated in thethird phase following 1917 and 1918, feeding upon fear of and disgust withthe proletariat. It crystallised ultimately in various forms of fascism (someleading lights: Maurras, Spengler, Schmitt, Heidegger, Hasan al-Banna,
Golwalkar, and of course Mussolini, Hitler and Rosenberg).
The fourth, following 1989 but with elements in place before, ischaracterised by identity politics and its various corollaries, such as
the polemics against modernity and Enlightenment. These have beencorrelative to the recession of programmes of progress and development,
and also the loss not only of socialism, but also of Keynesianism and otherprogrammes of social solidarity and prophylaxis against socio-political
disaggregation. This phase built upon the ideological mobilisation ofreligion during the Cold War (especially in and by Saudi Arabia, in Poland,in Italy, in the East Indies), and later followed up on the consequences of
the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It also built upon a right-wing liberalism
nurtured by the anti-Communism of the Cold War, then represented bypersons such as Isaiah Berlin, and upon an impasse in political thinking,accompanied later, however briefly, by triumphalist declamations of
the end of history. It also mobilised revisionist historiographies of all
movements that had previously been considered to have held historicalpromise, such as the French Revolution, and by a Wilsonian perspective inwhich a liberal conception of freedom foreclosed the necessity of a politicaltheory of freedom.31
As suggested, the older romantic conceptions of history and society
were ones that had marked the right in Western Europe from the time of
31 See ‘Abdallāh Al-‘Arwī, Mafhūm al-Ḥurrīya, (Casablanca: Al-Markaz al-Thaqāfi al-‘Arabī,2008), 71, 90. This had been noted relatively early in the Cold War, before hindsightbecame a guide: Shklar, After Utopia, 235–39.
15

the French Revolution. These had appeared later among Slavophils andother laggard nationalisms, including in Japan (where Heidegger had aconspicuous presence, and still does), in India, and South-East Asia and the
Middle East from the late 19th century. These crystallised more integrally
in the interwar period in movements such as fascism in the variety of its
forms, the Muslim Brothers and the Indian Rashtria Swayamsevak Sanghand radical strands of Romantic Arab, Turkish and Iranian nationalism.32
One crucial difference between political Romanticism in its first post-1789
phase, and in the present one, is according to Shklar that in the earlier one,the defeat of Zeus betokened the triumph of Prometheus, of hope, whilefrom the middle of the 20th century, the death of God meant the defeat ofman as well.33
The overarching topos for the pattern of global cycles just outlined in its
present phase is culture, with culturalism being the meta-social and metahistorical template that has been adopted as the carrier of anti-modernism.34
It would be pertinent to sketch briefly the elements that shaped today’s
culturalism, in which the concept of culture has come to play the role thatrace had played previously in the analysis and social and political treatmentof collectivities. Culturalism is, contrary to what its polemics might imply,
very strongly foundationalist, and stands on a grand romantic narrative of
the singular, the subject, the self-identical substance, the pre-colonial andpre-modern, the prelapsarian, with stoutly held conceptual assumptions.
It assumes that society is characterised by homogeneity and homeopathyof essence; and that the passage of time is best described in terms ofabidance and continuity, which in fact extrude from history that which is
historical.35 At the close of the 20th century, these modules had become thecommon sense of the post Cold-War era, listlessly taken for self-evident,
well-worn, familiar, predictable, formulaic and effortlessly repeatable. The
broader phenomenon is ideological. When theorised, it has been inspired
32 Further traction to this point that I argued over two decades ago in Islams and Modernities
has been added in recent work: Georges Corm, Pour une lecture profane des conflits: Sur
le retour du religieux dans les conflits du Moyen-Orient (Paris: La Découverte, 2015),
51–57; Sternhell, Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, 14–17; for right-liberal Cold War antiEnlightenment declamations see Sternhell, “The Anti-Enlightenment of the Cold War,”chap. 8 in Anti-Enlightenment Tradition.
33 See Shklar, After Utopia, 111, 114–20.
34 Al-Azmeh, “Islamism and the Arabs,” chap. 1 in Islams and Modernities.
35 Al-Azmeh, 25–26, 30–31.
16

by echoes of Herder and Fichte, by Treitschke, Gobineau and Maurras, its
broader and to us more proximate elaborations owe much to Nietzsche andKlages. The impact that this very broad movement of moods, modules andmotifs has had on one mainspring of postism in its present form, Critical
Theory, has gone unnoticed generally.
This is particularly the case with the variant of irrationalism represented
by the Frankfurt School’s aversion to the Enlightenment, complemented
by Benjamin’s partiality to mystical concepts and vocabularies, much of it
inspired by the then strongly felt but not readily perceptible penumbra ofKlages’ Magical Philosophy and Stefan George’s Denkbilder. The impact ofboth has been underestimated, or indeed gone unnoticed, not least as there
seems to have been an anthropological congruence between irrationalist
Lebensphilosophie associated with Klages, and that implicit in the Dialectic of
the Enlightenment’s critique of the Enlightenment. The same congruence ispertinent to Benjamin’s positions, far nearer to Nietzsche than to Marxism;
Benjamin’s flirtation with the latter has been vastly overinterpreted. He
had, after all, “transformed the counter-Enlightenment critique workedout by magicians into the proper business of a philosopher”.36
Alongside this, much of the present moment of post-modernism andpost-colonialism is owed directly to American cultural anthropology,
which has been important for the shaping of culturalism. This is a cultural
anthropology decisively inseminated by Franz Boas, directly and through
Ruth Benedict’s allegedly stable ethnological “patterns” that are said tocharacterise societies fully, and according to a stable morphology, as
well as through Margaret Mead, the latter’s student and colleague. This
conceptual fare consisted of 19th-century German Romantic nationalist
Völkerpsychologie and Völkerkunde, the Brothers Grimm, folklore studies
and ideas of nativism against civilisation. All the while, the ethnographer,
36 Jason Josephson-Storm, “Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical
Theory,” chap. 8 in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the
Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 236, 238. See Axel
Honneth, “Anthropologische Berührungspunkte zwischen der lebensphilosophischen
Kulturkritik und ‘Der Dialektik der Aufklärung’,“ in 21. Deutscher Soziologentag 1982:
Beiträge der Sektions- und ad hoc Gruppen, ed. Friedrich Heckmann and Peter Winter(Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1983), 786–89; Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner,“Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) and the Origins of Critical Theory,” Theory, Culture andSociety 9, no. 3 (1992): 45. For American versions of ‘continental philosophy’ in this respect,
see Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization: A
Review Essay,” The American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (2003): 1065–66.
17

often acting as the natives’ tribune, received dutifully from native
informants what the latter thought she might like to hear.37
All of these anti-modernist, culturalist and nativist directions of thought
concur that there is an esoteric, perhaps even occult core, that is lost tomodernity, and that this is revived when trans-historical essences return– recall what has been said above about the term ‘meaning’. The corollary
has often been, since Herder, that there are prelapsarian uncorrupted
conditions which the time of modernity had soiled. Anti-modernists seek
to evoke the concept of meaning, which figures as a social version of the
innate ideas concept, of a knowledge bounded by life and indistinct fromlife, being life’s poetry to modernity’s prose, a condition of authenticity, aculture of Volksgeist, a psychologistic metaphor taken for a fact.38
Ostensible meaning and the various topoi and figures that stand for it are
the equivalent of what in the first, romantic phase of anti-modernism was
known as the sublime, das Erhabene, which Edmund Burke saw as a figureof dread that lay at the heart of all religion, but which is not confined tothis particular semantic field, but is shared with other definitions that makerecourse to affections and romantic sensibilities and aesthetise society andhistory. And indeed, in any generic characterisation of anti-modernism asthat most perceptive one offered by Compagnon,39 the sublime represents
the aesthetic figure, alongside other component figures and topoi of antimodernist discourses that this author identifies most usefully. Of these I
would mention the historical figure, which I would prefer to designate as
the political figure of counter-revolution (the post-1989 instantations arerevenant political religion and forms of fascism). Equally important is thephilosophical figure of anti-Enlightenment, which I would call culturalism,
comprehending both historism and vitalism. The moral or existential figure,which I would designate as the sentimentalist figure of pessimism, to which
I would add historical nostalgia. The religious figure indicates an idea
of of original sin, which I would reformulate as a fall from a prelapsarian
condition, now identified as a pre-colonial and pre-modern state of grace.
37 See especially Tessel Pollmann, “Margaret Mead’s Balinese: The Fitting Symbols of theAmerican Dream,” Indonesia 49 (1990); Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and the Heretic:
The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1996); Adam Kuper, “The Boasians and the critique of evolutionism,” chap. 7 in The
Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion (London: Routledge, 1988).
38 Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 28–31.
39 Compagnon, Les Antimodernes, 17.
18

Finally, there is a stylistic figure of tone, voice and accent, with an stress on
imprecation and vituperation, and ultimately with dependence on the use ofethos and pathos articulated by tonality, as we have seen.
In all this, historism is a major player, and Heidegger might well be
brought up as an exemplary topos and a flag to wave. It is difficult to
identify conceptual as distinct from tonal influence from Heidegger,conveyed by fascination with the name. Mystification by both sender andreceiver is a crucial feature here, and obscurity is not a technical flaw
liable to correction by proper exegesis. To be under Heidegger’s influence
is to be ensnared by the possibilities afforded by his example for dropping
the discipline of thought and surrendering to the play of pathos using
analogies, sentiments, metaphors and associations. It is these drifts ofan almost erotic fascination, often allied to contempt for democracy,that drew high-grade intellectuals with Olympian aspirations to various
manifestations of fascism or romantic conservatism – one might mention
the Eranos Group, including Henri Corbin, or various members of the
Collège de Sociologie, including Bataille and Caillois.40 Indeed, there wasmuch hype about the hyper-modernism – aesthetic no less than political –of fascism and national socialism that had a very strong appeal to theintellectuals.41
This fascination with the pathos of resonant meaninglessness is notconfined to Europe; the anti-modernism of the Iranian Ahmad Fardid,
and the concept of Westoxification or Occidentosis, was officiated undera Heideggerian signature.42 Note that Heidegger has had hardly any
resonance in Arabic thinking that has been of a similar nativist cast, using
a congruent vocabulary to that of Fardid:43 this fact gives sustenance to the
40 Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, andHenri Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Stephan
Moebius, Die Zauberlehrlinge: Sozialgeschichte des Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939)(Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2006); Frank Pearce, ed., “The Collège deSociologie,” special issue, Economy and Society 32, no. 1 (2003).
41 See, in general, Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning underMussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
42 Ali Mirsepassi, Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Times of
Ahmad Fardid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
43 On which: Mouchir Basile Aoun, Heidegger et la pensée arabe (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2011). More important in the Arab World among some nationalists (including the
Baath), and fulfilling a similar role of creating mystification and pathos, was Bergson,conveying an appreciation of instinct (here: national instinct) as opposed to reason, thespirit as opposed to mere matter, duration as opposed to change as opposed to reason,
19

view proposed here, that it is more the tonal aura of transfixed fascination,and rhetorical topoi, that are at play in the connection with Heidegger,rather than any conceptual goods. There is here little that is distinctively
Heideggerian in conceptual terms as distinct from what is genericallyirrationalist, romantic and historist.
Today, this fascination with Heidegger, as with other patristic figures ofpost-modernism, signals a certain tribal affiliation in the academic world.
In rhetorical terms, it manifests ethos, tokens of authority and emblems ofcommonality, an irresistible fascination binding a group to an aura expressed,
as best as possible, in a sociolect. Heidegger’s ‘alienation’ is well suited toa hermeneutic of suspicion where there is also an assumption of durable
substance that might be reclaimed and saved. Like aesthicising romanticism
overall, Heidegger operates by hypostatising specific historical conditionsof human existence into ontological and metaphysical conditions,44 and bycollapsing the distinction between cognition and being, as in the Heideggerian
notion of meaning. It is eminently serviceable to musings about loss anddestiny,45 which can only be engaged effectively by a political decisionism,
where the Dasein moves and creates its enemy in its own self-affirmation andthe manifestation of will, in the manner of Carl Schmitt. This is accomplished
not by universal reason or the faculty of the understanding, but by knowing
resolve, wissende Entschlossenheit.46 My reference to Heidegger in these terms isvery much in the spirit of what Kant had to say about Herder: that he had spuna fabric of bold metaphors, poetic images and mythological allusions that serveto obscure, wondering whether “the poetic spirit which enlivens the author’s
expression has not also at times done violence to his philosophy; whether
synonyms on occasion act as substitutes for explanations, and allegories fortruths”.47 Whether one considers Heidegger’s manner of expression to beinspiring is a matter of taste.

44
45
46
47

and deploying a variety of poetical trope which absolve him of the necessity to offer
arguments: see the ironical exposition of Bertrand Russell, “The philosophy of Bergson,”
The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 323–27, 332–33.
Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8, no. 3 (1948): 311.
Hans Blumenberg, “Progress Exposed as Fate,” pt. 1, chap. 3, “Political Theology I andII,” pt. 1, chap. 8, “The Rhetoric of Secularizations,” pt. 1, chap. 9 in The Legitimacy of theModern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” 177.
Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 215–16.
20

3 Actually Existing Secularism and the Challenge of Fate
There has been a gentler way with decisionism and wissende Entschlossenheit
in academic work which decided to transpose what it sees as moral orpolitical imperatives into cognitive ones, and thus to privilege the notionof identity understood in terms of culturalist differentialism as a categoryof analysis. So also the notion of voice, whose very alleged irreducibility
makes it definitive and irrefutable. The sociological redactions of destiny
that we find in work on anti-secularism and Islamism are of this type,their anti-secular polemics officiated under assumptions of the essential
impossibility and illusory character of secularism. Nevertheless, works bysociologists of different stripes pertinent to the context of this discussion,
are ones to which sociology is the least of inputs. In these discussions ofsecularism, meta-sociological categories are in the ascendant, as different
variations on “culture”, arising from organismic and vitalist historism, towhich the idea of the irreducible individuality of cultures and peoples iscentral. Islamism and secularism appear here as a mutually determinant
contrastive pair.
It is now time briefly to offer a general characterisation of the sociologicalredaction of destiny upon which anti-secular polemics rest. This redaction
is in fact the outcrop of a doctrine that has a specific name and a global
history, as suggested already. It is called historist vitalism: the idea thatsocieties are held together by trans-historical dispositions (such as tradition
or national spirit, Islam or Christianity, all grossly defined) which, despite
historical change, always come to constitute an abiding initial condition
which trumps change and renders it inconsequential except in so far as it
causes derangement, and is ultimately reasserted. The historist discourse
here operates with biologistic metaphors. It involves, typically, topics ofdecline, often conflated with change overall, and regarded as estrangementof essence, disnaturation (a word often used by Shakespeare), Entartung,de-specification, quite common from the 19th century in psychiatry,criminology and social criticism. Both words had been used commonly
for deviance, disease and monstrosity, exemplarily so by Max Nordau, thesecond president of the World Zionist Congress who took great exception
to decadent art and letters (Baudelaire, Wagner and many others), and by
Josef Goebbels, who did likewise, more famously. The concordances may
not be political, but they are conceptual, shared by the classic Right and21today’s identitarian reclamations of whatever political orientation. In allcases, the result of such diremptions of essence will be inevitably, according
to this perspective, a grotesque, what Spengler termed a Pseudomorph.
Note that the vocabulary expressing biologistic metaphors is metaphysical,
and more specifically Neo-Platonic, one of substance, plenitude of being,
privation of being.
Homeostatically-conceived human collectivities might rebalance
natural and constitutive tempers and humours, generally called roots or
traditions or heritages or indeed values, or in different types of discourse,
culture or civilisation.48 These are not subject to transformation inreal ways. Change is always externally induced, and takes the form ofadulteration, soiling and indeed, defilement. It is a derangement of properorder which causes diminishing vitality, the effects of heteronomous forces– like those brought about by modernity or secularisation upon societies
often called Islamic. One might well note the tonal colours of all these andrelated terms, and the way in which organismic metaphors lend themselves
to pathetic sonority. This condition pathology (modernity, secularism) is
treatable homoeopathically, with the restoration of tradition, by returning
to roots, carried by nostalgia and identitarian reaffirmation. Thus, the ideathat Arab societies, being in essence on this reading Islamic societies rather
than societies that contain Muslims, need inevitably to return to an initialcondition of purity, following confrontations, challenges and periods ofcontamination by extraneous agents that had acted as debilitating anddisnaturing conditions in the body politic and the body social, but did notmetastasise uncontrollably or sully the fastness of origins. Such exogenous
agents can be specified as colonialism and secularising elites for the
purposes of this discussion.
A brief digression can identify elements that are obscured in thisculturalism. First, in any given social unit, and all the more so in larger
and more complex ones, traditions and social practices are plural. They
are arranged in a system of internal differentiation and distribution, andenter into relations domination and hierarchy. Moreover, judgements
upon the analytical utility of culture is dependent on the precise object ofanalysis, not least when culture is taken for a causative element – the ideathat culture is an overarching causal and structural element in any given
48 Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Typological Time, Patterning and the Past Appropriated,” chap. 2 in
The Times of History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007).
22

large-scale social unit is vacuous. Tradition and the appeal to tradition
under the aspect of culture is rather, as in atavism and primitivism, more apolitico-discursive resource for those who invoke it, than an active entity,
and when an entity, it can be made into an object of anthropological study
in so far as it is a hypothesis put forward to account for observed repetition
in social practices and representations (rather than, as with Edward Shils,
itself to be this repetition).49 In contrast to culturalist claims, and withparticular reference to the relationship between the sociological and metasociological, Clifford Geertz, often referred to as a patriarch of culturalism,
was far from being a cultural determinist. Unlike many post-colonial
anthropologists averse to analysing their objects of study, he always
remained an anthropologists’ anthropologist, producing ethnographic
work of the highest possible order in which culture has a place, but within
a broader system of relations. This impelled him to consider very seriously
the analytical value and operationalist use of the notion of culture: withreference to Bali, he highlighted “the tendency for the divisive effect ofsocial institutions to predominate over the unifying power of culturalones”, and affirmed that “few political elites can have as intensely sought
loyalty by means so ingeniously designed to produce treachery as did theBalinese”.50
The sociological redaction of destiny, the destiny of human collectivities
conceived by means of vitalist, biologistic metaphors, would have thingsotherwise. Arab societies, and Iranian society as well, being, in this register,congenitally predisposed to an ethnological destiny expressed in what is
generally known as Islamic culture or Islamic civilisation, are captive to acultural incapacity for change of real consequence. Post-colonial and postmodernist discourses describe this in terms of resistance and authenticity.
The changes undergone by these societies over more than a century had
been heteronomous, it is claimed, and in the final analysis a charade.
Abidance of essence is captive to the parameters of origin, of the initial
49 As in conservative discourse generally, classically expressed by Edward Shils, “Tradition,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. 2 (1971). Also see Al-Azmeh, Islams
and Modernities, 32–34; Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2–4, 32–37, 79–86; Marc Augé, Le sens des autres (Paris:
Fayard, 1994), 28–29; Adam Kuper, “Culture, Difference, Identity,” chap. 7 in Culture: The
Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
50 Geertz, Negara, 45.
23

condition.51 We have here a notion of culture as a prison of social instinct
rather than as a field of human action, including individual and societal
improvement, culture being regarded as a thing rather than a property,52
overdetermining society and trumping history. Vitalist culturalism is acrude form of social Darwinism in that it regards social collectivities as
analogous to animal species. Culturalism, like racism and ethnocentrism,
is a sublimated redaction of political communalism which, like othercommunalisms, operates by the indication of emblems and stigmata that
ensure the maintenance and reiteration of boundaries. Islamist vitalism
becomes recognisable in a global setting where identity is being taken forcommon sense.
All culturalist historism today invokes native voice. It proffers a
programme of what Taylor called, famously, politely and distantly, a politics
of recognition. This is a politics which is redacted at the points of concrete
application on the ground, in actual fact, a politics of bluster and special
pleading, generally unmannerly to the degree that must surely challenge
Taylor’s advocacy of and capacity for recognition. Taylor’s is a communalist
template premised on the self-enclosure of human collectivities, andtheir cultivation of origins as expressed in ostensible traditions that yield
particularistic values, ethics and politics. Culture comes to be regarded as
irreducible and sui generis, an independent variable, and therefore beyond
the reach of sociological and historical analysis. Often counterposed tothat which is taken for a teleology of the Enlightenment, this is a reverse
teleology which works backwards, paradoxically but unsurprisingly, as the
future can be no other than the past in its perpetual initial condition.
Among other things, this perspective of generically distinct voices yields
pluralisation and multiplication, seemingly without end. If underdeveloped
countries, including those identified as Islamic, cannot in this perspective
really be said to have modernised or secularised except inadequately or
bizarrely, or to be incapable congenitally of this type of improvement, they
can nevertheless be included politely in the conversation and be said tohave modernised or secularised multiply, each according to their own
way, all seemingly innocent and straightforward, and quite ingenuous
51 Well described by Sudipta Kaviraj, “Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,”
European Journal of Sociology 46, no. 3 (2005).
52 Nicolas Claidière and Dan Sperber, “Defining and explaining culture (comments on
Richerson and Boyd, Not by genes alone),” Biology and Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2008): 291–92.
24

conceptually, in fact. I have personally used the term Islams, and this hasoften been misread, stripped of implied irony, and placed in the flow ofreclamations of voice and the cognitive Saturnalia of difference and soforth. Yet this usage had in fact sought to reinstate and encourage a critical,
properly historical analysis of the themes treated, not to dissolve a category– here, Islam – into senseless plurality, nor to dissolve the categories ofIslam and of modernity into skittish revelry, or to announce a solemn
redemption of authenticity.53 My Islams and Modernities was intended, in
contrast, to reaffirm the purely nominal character of the category “Islam”,
and to argue against its use as a classificatory category or an analytical or
causal concept.
What was most explicitly and clearly intended was not the effacementof general analytical concepts, but the reinstatement of history against
culturalist claims for abidance. Multiplying ‘secularities’ (more on thisterm below) or modernities, and other targets of this rhetoric of categoricaldeflation, cannot free historical reality from secularism and modernity.54
Such multiplications are motivated, one presumes, by the empiricalcomplexity of social transformations. But situationally and contextually,in the final analysis, they seem impelled more by culturalist agendas
inimical to secularism, for the accent is placed on representations rather
than processes. Thus seeking complexity by telescoping secularisation in“the longue durée of civilizational history”, thinking of secularism in termsof “cultural diversity”, appealing to “spiritual ontologies” and searchingfor “cultural meanings”, and claiming that this would yield a “culturalsociology of secular modernities”:55 all this together will have a scattering
effect depriving the concepts of secularism and modernity of analyticalutility.56 This perspective takes every particular, however its boundaries
may have been defined, to stand for the concept, and to relate it to otherparticulars that are identified by this term, not by concordance under
the canopy of the concept, but by sheer difference, with a happy unionappearing as an asymptotic horizon. By collapsing the concept into its
53 Compare the historiographic multiplication of the Enlightenment in the most perceptive
analysis of Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1066–
69, 1075–76.
54 Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, xiii–xiv.
55 Marian Burchardt and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, “Multiple Secularities: Religion andModernity in the Global Age,” International Sociology 28, no. 6 (2013): 605–07.
56 See Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1075.
25

instances, the effect is that of effacement of the concept, its transposition
to a realm that is not conceptual, and operates no distinction between
concept and instantiation. This seems to be the half-intended intention
in this template which reserves ‘secularism’ for the ideological object ofpolemic rather than addressing practices.
The premise as well as the consequence will be to reduce society andhistory to culture, at the very least to see culture as the overdetermining
instance in social and historical dynamics. Thus the assumption that one
cannot see secularisation as occurring “outside culture”,57 whatever themetaphor of inside and out might mean or imply, and however culture
may be defined and identified empirically. Needless to say, the present
argument is not suggesting that culture understood ethnographically aswell as historically is of no consequence, or that social representations
are sheer epiphenomena of structures. What is being suggested is thata given society knows no top or bottom; but it does have a hierarchy offunctions definable in terms of differential impact on the reproduction ofsociety or of its transformation. If a certain conjuncture be governed byan overdetermination by certain identifiable cultural elements in termsof a broader economy of instances – political, social, ideological and soforth – this will need to be described concretely, rather than taken for a
fundamental feature of social life.58
These terms of the discussion perforce carry the semantic energy of
the terms as used today politically, and gravitate towards a Spenglerian/
Huntingtonian orientation, judging matters in terms of predeterminative
origins rather than process, in terms of an ethnological destiny, rather
than by empirical considerations. This applies irrespective of politicalorientation in a conceptual regime where xenophobia and xenophilia
mirror each other; political distinctiveness here is trumped cognitively
by conceptual concordance. Scholars partial to multiculturalist practices
will deny having common ground with conservative or reactionary
traditionalists and other nativist identitarians. But this denial will standprecisely on cognitive decisionism, the effacement of the distinction
between the ethico-political and the cognitive, and the desire that theformer be the latter: this effacement is a function of desire, not knowledge.
57 Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Multiple Secularities,” 606.
58 See especially Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the Material, translated by Martin
Thom (London, Verso, 2011), 128–29.
26

It is not often remembered how enthusiastically Huntington was received
in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and how the idea of a dialogue of civilisations
rests precisely on assumptions of incommensurable difference.
The terms of reference of the discussions under review have theeffect of inflecting towards historism and romanticism, the attempt toaccommodate the undeniable empirical variety which the concept ismeant to organise, and to cause this variety to drift semantically to themultiplicity of sui generis ontologies, cultures and so forth. For quite apartfrom empirical concerns, it seems incontestable that much of the intent
propelling multiplicationism might be understood in terms of a protocolof intercultural courtesy, and as a token of adherence to the celebrationof diversity and the irreducibility of voices engaged in a conversation –a manifest case in point of transposing normative interest into cognitive
propositions, the ‘ought’ transmuting into an ‘is’. Regarded rhetoricallyand performatively, the very attribute of multiplicity is the performanceof an ethos, of belonging to a particular politico-cultural place rather
than another, supporting particular constituencies against others in anenvironment of violent contestation.
Ultimately, we have with multiplication a mincing of words, like saying
gosh and golly, darn and sugar; we have euphemistic usage,59 a sociolinguistic phenomenon of evasion and circumvention. Concepts andcategories, and these include modernity and secularism, are by definition
general, pertaining to the whole class of phenomena that are boundedby them, and cannot, as is sometimes charged, be “monolithic”: they can
become monolithic only when devoid of conceptual sense and rendered
into fetishes, like the notion of identity. Concepts deployed comparatively
cannot be held captive to nominal multiplication, each a multiple sui generis,but must rest on generic commonality: comparison indicates an analyticalgrid of variations in which differences and similarities are regarded as
variations, not as sui generis individuals. Similarities and differences arevariations rather than signals of the generic specificity of each term ofcomparison when these are taken to be a row of adjacent singularities.
In conceptual terms, variations indicate particular instances that mediate
59 On which see especially Emile Benveniste, “Euphémismes anciens et modernes,”
in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); Günter Kehrer,“Euphemismus,” in Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, ed. Hubert
Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow and Karl-Heinz Kohl (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993).
27

the general and the individual. Regarded thus, multiplicationism is avariant of nativism and identitarianism, multiple nativisms and multiple
identities. One had better either use a concept in its general sense, or dropit. Multiplication collapses concepts into the empirical manifold, rather
than treating them for the second-order representations which they are.
Another aspect of the polemical effacement of secularism as anhistorical, social and cognitive fact, is the erasure of the word. In many
recent contexts, the word secularism has been reserved for militant antireligious and anti-clerical secularist ideologies of the sort that animatedthe French, Turkish and Mexican states, that is, to the obvious and facile
object of polemic. Instead, ‘secularity’ has been introduced as a substitutefor other areas covered by secularism as the condition arising fromsecularisation, for which one would normally and quite straightforwardly
use ‘secular’ as an attribute: of social arrangements, of legal arrangements
for the church in a secular order, and much else. Secularity cannot standalone as a substantive. It seems as if things were to be described in terms ofsecularity rather than of secularism, a more adequate description of seculararrangements might be reached without naming or designating them assecular. This seems to my mind to be an uneconomical and evasive term.
There is clearly in these discussions a fundamental confusion between,on the one hand, modernity and secularism as a related pair of analyticalcategories, both incontestable objective processes, and on the other
hand, normative recognitions, misrecognitions, or denials of these sameprocesses, even by many of those undergoing them or participating andliving in them. Modernity and secularism as objective structural processes
are in many very significant ways intertwined, globally, their instantiations
related to each other as members of two intersecting classes of phenomena
by a process of combined and uneven development. As long as thediscussion is pitched at the level of normative perception by actors or
victims, and the actual process described in terms of these representations,the chances of a productive discussion are reduced very considerably.
Such a pitch has become normal, with secularism in India, for instance,
reduced by one scholar to ‘a credo’,60 ignoring actual social and politicaltransformation, or, with reference to the German Democratic Republic
60 Triloki Nath Madan, “Secularism and the Intellectuals,” Economic and Political Weekly 29,
no. 18 (1994): 1095.
28

defined simply as ‘an interpretative frame’,61 with a similar abatement of
the sociological gaze which seems little interested in that which is being
interpreted and by whom. Or again, as with Asad, sweepingly pronounced
part of a ‘regime of truth’,62 truth being used in a relativistic sense devoid ofwhat one would regard as cognitively normative and with no reference toany regime of verifiability, thus used indifferently for any sort of opinion,
however absurd. What is forgotten in this type of conceptualisation is thatsecularism is itself a major actor in the cognitive, normative, and socialtransformation of societies, which together make possible analyticalconcepts that render secularism an object of scientific apprehension andelaboration.
Being general by definition, concepts are quite naturally applicableoutside the immediate circumstances which made their naming,delimitation and elaboration possible, and this is pertinent to two conceptsof relevance to this discussion, secularisation and religion. One is surprisedthat few have had qualms about using the concepts of the economy andof society, made possible and developed in Europe in the 18th and 19th
centuries, outside of Europe, yet declare reserve when the discussion
pertains to the concepts of secularisation and religion.63 Similarly, one
finds that Weber is decried as foreign to the phenomena of religion andsecularism outside Europe, while Foucault or Wittgenstein pass muster
without comment. In the same vein, one might look at the way in which
the secularisation thesis is considered in vitalist terms, affirmed in historist
terms as post-Christian, a sort of “Christianity in sheep’s clothing”,64 anddenied in other settings, at best relegated to one among many multiple andincommensurably sui generis secularities.
Correlatively, the applicability of the notion of religion to Islam isdenied. Denials of the applicability of the concept, and even of the very
existence of the phenomenon of religion, are more frequent today than in
61 Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Thomas Schmidt-Lux, and Uta Karstein, “Secularization as
Conflict,” Social Compass 55, no. 2 (2008).
62 Enayat, “Secularism, Christianity and Imperialism,” chap. 2 in Islam and Secularism.
63 For the economy: Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumphof Economic Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977); for society: Wolf
Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
64 Jonathan Sheehan, “Thomas Hobbes, D.D.: Theology, Orthodoxy, and History,” The
Journal of Modern History 88, no. 2 (2016): 251.
29

the recent past, and the discussion have an air of disputes over the numberof angels that might stand at the head of a pin. One reason frequently
invoked is that the concept of religion emerged only in post-Reformation
Europe. This is a curious and common contention adopted by Asad, curious
not only because the Islam to which Asad refers and the one he takes tobe a normative discursive tradition is the one that has been thoroughly
Protestantised, in the same way as were modern varieties of Hinduism andBuddhism, as we shall see, but also of course because the Qur’anic text
itself has available a clear and distinct notion of religion that corresponds
to the one that Asad and many others attribute to the Reformation.65
More important than the Qur’an is of course the history of the
distinction of religion as a domain in political and institutional practices
that might be termed Islamic, including the notion of siyāsa sharʿīya,
which is politics and law more religio, much vaunted by fundamentalists.66
Even if siyāsa, Arabic for politics as the husbandry of humans (and indeed
for animal husbandry as well), were to be regulated by the strictures ofMuslim jurisprudence, the analytical difference between worldly politics
and the concerns of religion, and the distinctiveness of practices in eachof these domains, was always maintained in Muslim political practices andtraditions, including the bifurcation of the classical system of justice. Thisdistinction, both in theory and in practice, is ubiquitous; it is not confined
to Islam, nor was it an invention of modernity, of the polemical needs ofsecularism, or of the Reformation. One may cite dharma and artha ordaṇḍá in classic Indic polities, or the distinction between lokottara andlaukika, the religious and the worldly, or indeed the concept of agāma as
religion, in Sri Lanka.67
65 For the Qur’an, a start might be made with Q 5:3, 2:132, 3:19, 85, and see David Marshall,
God, Muhammad and the Unbelievers (London: Curzon, 1999); for Asad and his Islamic
discursive traditions, Enayat, “Secularization Theory and its Discontents,” chap. 4 inIslam and Secularism; for comment on Asad’s acquaintance with these traditions: Enayat,
Islam and Secularism, 50. Reference to the Qur’an is pertinent here as it is a text that
Asad would have been well advised to have read as he wrote about Muslim discursive
traditions. For broader comment of Asad in relation to what is known from the historyof religion, ‘Azmī Bishāra, Ad-Dīn wa’l-‘Almāniyya fī Siyāq Tārīkhī, vol 2. (Doha: ArabCenter for Research and Policy Studies, 2012–2015), 2: 804.
66 Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan
Polities (London, I. B. Tauris, 1997), 118–19, 163–88.
67 Martin Southwold, “Buddhism and the Definition of Religion,” Man, New Series 13, no. 3(1978): 263. It being noted that the author is not entirely in agreement with the meaning
30More generally, a concept need not be native or emic in order for it tobe applicable analytically to a specific setting. Being exogenous in generic,geographical terms is no reason why a concept – such as the economy, or
religion – should be abandoned. The concept of religion is by no means
one that was concocted by secularists in the age of the Enlightenment. Thisview is false empirically, on both historical and contemporary evidence.
Religion, like society and the economy, designates a polythetic class ofphenomena. Among other places, it was clearly perceptible in 16th-century
Japan, both by Buddhist priests and Catholic, non-Protestant Christian
missionaries, where the distinction and interdependence between ōbō/rājādharma and buppō/Buddha dharma,68 occurred in a way reminiscent ofclassical Muslim political works. A recent special number of Japan Review
dedicated to ‘formations of the secular in Japan,’ was motivated by the claimthat ‘the secular’ was uniquely Western, and proceeded to produce a seriesof articles based upon both historical and empirical social research thatshowed that the distinction between the secular and the religious (sezoku/shūkyō) was central to state formation, and that this was just as native toJapan, which had not at the time been colonised, as social realities, and not
only as post-Reformation abstractions, like anywhere else – it seems to bean historically preponderant situation. Even Casanova, in an article flirtingwith post-colonial terminology, felt moved to admit that conditions inJapan prior to modernity provided evidence for secular arrangements
independent of Western developments, and ascribed “proto-secularity”,
somewhat half-heartedly and as if giving way too much to an undeserving
quarter, to the Chinese imperial state also.69
In all, studies that have just been cited, and other studies based on
intensive fieldwork seeking to describe and analyse social processes,
here indicated for agāma. See now Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religion and Political
Change in World History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019), 71–74
68 See especially Christoph Kleine, “Religion and the Secular in Premodern Japan from theViewpoint of Systems Theory,” Journal of Religion in Japan 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–8, 19–21;
Brian C. Wilson, “From the Lexical to the Polythetic: A Brief History of the Definition
of Religion,” in What is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, ed. Thomas A.
Idinopoulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For more general orientation:
Rodney Needham, “Polythetic Classification: Convergence and Consequences,” Man,
New Series 10, no. 3 (1975).
69 José Casanova, “Asian Catholicism, Interreligious Colonial Encounters and Dynamics ofSecularism in Asia,” in The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia, ed. Kenneth Dean
and Peter van der Veer (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 26, 32.
31

underline the wealth of the empirical manifold and the variety ofdevelopments related by both unevenness and systemic connection. Once
one decides to focus on reality as distinct from polemical representationof reality, one can conduct research and cogent ethnographic as well as
political analysis without needing recourse to the vocabularies of evasion,
with minimal conceptual distraction or waste of analytical energy.70
In yet another historist and vitalist move, anti-secular polemics havegenerally construed secularism as a movement inside religion (one notesthat culture and religion are often used interchangeably in this type of
discourse, especially with regard to Islam). This is in contrast to what
actually existing secularism has been historically: a constituent element
in a broader process of societal differentiation in modern global history,
one to which teleologies attributed to modernisation theory by its critics
are irrelevant.71 Secularism was a product of the rise of novel institutions,social structures of authority, and cognitive facilities and institutions,functionally autonomous from religion and its institutions, responding to
new social needs rather than usurping those hitherto fulfilled by religion
and its institutions. The contrast between the two was generated as thelatter sought polemically to resist the expansion of the new. Indeed,
the conflation of two distinct matters is most common: between thesociological concept of functional differentiation, and the normative
understanding of secularism, the last in turn conflating secularism as an
objective development and as a political ideology of state.
In all cases, there is in this perspective on things a presumption not onlyof the constitutive primacy of religion, but also a fantasmatic assumptionof societal homogeneity under the canopy of an order termed Christian.
Religion appears here as an overdetermining factor, an independent
variable, which is in actual fact an idea inimical to the spirit of inquiry,
leaving a blank on the very topic that needs explanation.72 Correlatively, it isnoteworthy that the grafting of secularism onto the history of Christianity
70 See the outstanding collection of studies of India, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, Indonesia
in: Nils Bubandt and Martjin van Beek, eds., Varieties of Secularism in Asia. Anthropological
Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual (London: Routledge, 2012).
71 Among others: Casanova, Public Religions, 18–19; David Yamane, “Secularization on
Trial: In Defence of a Neosecularization Paradigm,” Journal for the Scientific Study ofReligion 36, no. 1 (1997); David N. Gellner, “Studying Secularism, Practising Secularism.
Anthropological Perspectives,” Social Anthropology 9, no. 3 (2001).
72 See Mary Douglas, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers
32has for some time now been very much in vogue, primarily in arguments
against Islam’s receptivity to secularism. Asad concurs entirely, like thevast majority of secularism’s Islamist and post-colonialist critics.73 This is avariation on an older trope of denigration directed at the Enlightenment,
later at Marxism, and now at secularism, when considered as both pseudoreligious and para-religious movements. This is an old trope, used by
Herder and de Maistre, persisting most famously with Carl Schmitt, sharedby Heidegger’s ambivalent acolyte Karl Löwith, and leaving an imprint
on the Frankfurt School. This trope continued to flourish in Cold War
polemics that continues to thrive today. It rests on superficial associations,
including those between psychological states that characterise revolutions
and messianic stirrings.74
In this historist and vitalist regard, secularisation is seen in a rather
cavalier manner as the subtraction of religion, curiously with its continued
existence under another, spuriously secular signature, as Enlightenment orCommunism. This is lazy thinking, formulaic and effortlessly repeatable.
Subtraction in these discussions often refers to institutional transformations
undergone by organs of religion, but such transformation within were slightin historical fact, and the locations of secularism have been in new structures.
Ultimately, the argument is anchored more firmly in the anti-modern figuresof nostalgia and of the sublime. These two melancholy matters are brought
together by the notion of secularisation (and modernisation: the two areoften interchangeable in some discussions) as a form of loss,75 of alienation,
what Taylor regretted poignantly and eloquently as ‘excarnation’, of ‘buffeted’
selves, in the secular ‘wasteland’,76 resulting from immanence that had set

73

74

75
76

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 51, who finds in this the fundamental weaknessof Weber’s theory of religion.
Asad’s ideas in this respect and in many others are stated with greater explicitness,
contextualisation and penetration, and sustained by broader reading in Arabic by, forinstance, the late ex-Marxist cultural Islamist ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Masīrī in ʿAbd alWahhāb al-Masīrī and ʿAzīz Al-ʿAẓma, Al-ʿIlmānīya taḥt al-mijhar (Damascus: Dār alThaqāfa, 1990).
Richard Shorten, “The Enlightenment, Communism and Political Religion: Reflections
on a Misleading Trajectory,” Journal of Political Ideologies 8, no. 1 (2003); Sternhell, “AntiEnlightenment of the Cold War;” see Judith Shklar, “The Political Theory of Utopia:
From Melancholy to Nostalgia,” Daedalus 94, no. 2 (1965): 373, 375.
This point is stressed by Blumenberg with regard to modernity: Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy, 116–20, 533.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 37–42,
138, 307–21, 448–90, 613–14, 770, 772.
33

aside transcendence with its sense of ‘fullness’,77 a usurpation of the authentic,
a privation of essence, a state of unwholesomeness, a disnature, in counterpart
to which reaffirmation and, often enough, restoration, including that of an
Islamic prelapsarian utopia or life taken for an Islamic discursive tradition,is the active mystique: all of these poetical terms, reminiscent of classicalromanticism, and now redolent of the occult, after one had subtracted away
the pop-psychological considerations and vocabularies one encounters often
in these types of analyses.78
In the final analysis, the specious character of the subtraction modelis that it posits a morphological continuity between historical formations
which does not in fact obtain. The model extrudes all consideration ofhistorical breaks and social transformations that came with modernity,
including the rise of new social, political and cultural forces, institutions,dynamics and arrangements to which secularism is related. Modernity is
the overarching concept in this discussion, and encompasses the novel
and autonomous emergence of institutional, political and cognitive
secularism and systemic processes of secularisation.79 The fact is thatthe anachronism of the subtraction thesis is based on a prior, underlying
analytical premise. This is a prior assertion of the organic and seamless
relation between secularism and Christianity. This will bring us backto historism, culturalism and traditionalism, and their joint rhetoricaltrope, that of the return of religion as to an initial condition of purity
unadulterated by history, that is, unadulterated and uncomplicated by thehistory of secularism and modernity. The return here figures as a momentof awakening and clarity which removes the illusions of change.
There are two volleys to this prior analytical premise of morphologicalcontinuity. One is broadly historicising in spirit, albeit conducted in theform of an historist narrative of essential continuity. This is represented
by Casanova and Taylor, in two significant books, the former sociological,
77 See especially the comment of Craig Calhoun, “Review of Taylor, A Secular Age,” inEuropean Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (2008).
78 This tragic sentimentalism is shared by Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics
and Modernity’s Moral Predicament (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013).
79 Specifically with regard to the Arab World: Al-Azmeh, Secularism; in shorter compass:
Gudrun Krämer, “Secularity Contested: Religion, Identity and the Public Order in the
Arab Middle East,” in Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the
Global Age, ed. Marian Burchardt, Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, and Matthias Middell (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2015).
34

the latter a psycho-conceptual history. The other volley maintains a
distance from history by a distrust, which is expressed in the name given
to the undertaking, that is ‘genealogical’, and has a somewhat remoteclaim to anthropology. It is represented here by various widely-quoted
essays by Talal Asad. Claiming to be an insider’s – ‘emic’ is a common
term – recasting of the past in light of the present, genealogists compose
pedigrees, virtual histories of ethos. Taylor’s and Casanova’s are wellintegrated comprehensive studies; Asad’s, in contrast, seems truncated bya rather fragmentary acquaintance with the subject, but no less influential
for being so.
In the spirit of morphological continuity, we are told that secularisation
is “identified with a particular civilizational trajectory”,80 one which is
described by Taylor at length with reference to the North Atlantic
region, to which he adds psycho-historical factors of the embedding anddisembedding of individuals, in what amounts to a comprehensive attack on
modernity, reflecting an almost brooding Roman Catholic position.81
Reference to criticisms of capitalism by Marx, when speaking of fetishismof the commodities, of alienation, and of religion, in ways much morenuanced and complex than is usually admitted,82 would have enriched andnuanced considerably this attitude of discontent and disenchantment withcivilisation.
Yet for all the high-grade philosophical skills one would expect from
Taylor, discussion of separate civilisational trajectories is still guided by
the conflation of historical dynamics with an essentialist ethnology of theWest. The West is seen to have been grounded essentially in Christiantraditions, understood monolithically and monocausally, and in a view ofprogress and of the Enlightenment beclouded by distaste and distrust. The
unstated postulate is that his North Atlantic domains had been ‘societies offaith’, a cliché which recent historical research has dented considerably andnuanced beyond the proportions that would make this idea serviceable forthe sort of argument discussed here. But in this type of argument, empiricalmaterial cannot vitiate the scheme.
80 Taylor, A Secular Age, 36.
81 On which see especially Matthew Rose, “Tayloring Christianity: Charles Taylor is a
Theologian of the Secular Status Quo,” December 2014, https://www.firstthings.com/
article/2014/12/tayloring-christianity.
82 See Alberto Toscano, “The Clash of Abstractions: Revisiting Marx on Religion,” chap. 5
in Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010).
35

Casanova, some of whose arguments also stand on this silent postulate,is enough of a robust sociologist to state that the assumption that premodern Europeans were more religious than today is one “in need ofconfirmation”83 – the same can be said about over-islamising Muslims ofboth today and yesterday. Yet Casanova makes the same sort of conflation
nevertheless, one that is widely disseminated by the Catholic church, when
he claims that secularism is the product of a specifically Western modernity,
specifically Western meaning continuous with its past essentially, and that
it is therefore “fundamentally and inevitably post-Christian”84. We havehere a postist location with the discursive effect of extruding history andeliminating the weight of systemic and morphological historical breaks
that came with modernity. I shall come to this particular posture of
postism in a moment. Casanova, robustly sociological in outlook, insiststhat the multiplication of secularism, like that of modernity, should “openthe possibility that other religions may also play a role in institutionalizing
their own patterns of secularization”.85 He thus locates these processes,
multiplied by the factor of civilisation and tradition in the manner thathas already been encountered, within religion. The unspoken assumption
is that religion, presumably taken for a culture in the sense of historist
culturalism, is the determinant instance in the development of a particular
historical formation, and is an independent variable.
Casanova claims further that secularism first arose as a Western
theological category:86 this conveys a close fit with the traditionalist andcivilisational – culturalist – discourse here proffered, but its meaning is, oncloser examination, uncertain. I am not aware of secularism as a Christiantheological category as such. Secularisation as a dispensation for thosewith monastic vows to live outside their cloisters has a place in canon law.
The secularisation of Church properties by the state is not a theologicalconcept. Reference might be made to Augustine’s notion of the two cities
in support of claiming that secularism be a theological category. But thiswould require a proper argument from Augustine’s theology of history,
which is only tangentially theological. If such a claim were to be made,83 Casanova, Public Religions, 16.
84 José Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularism,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed.
Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan van Antwerpen (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 63.
85 Casanova, Public Religions, 234.
86 Casanova, 61.
36

it needs to be properly argued. More generally, it would be helpful if one
resisted the very common temptation to dub whatever is related to religion
or the church as ‘theological’. What we are left with is a drift that we cansee more clearly when we speak of Islam, namely, the drift, presented as
self-evident common sense, towards identifying past with future, andidentifying culture, civilisation and religion without stating that one isdoing so. This is a drift towards rendering religion the defining element of
culture, of civilisation, of history, and indeed of secularism.
In this way, the idea that secularism, the autonomous institutional,social and cognitive line of development in the context of social
differentiation occurring within and alongside global modernity, might
involve a common trans-geographical social dynamic, however uneven andvaried, is made to devolve to an illusion or a conceit, at best to a colonial
or elitist imposition. There is, with Casanova, and as a clear consequenceof historism rather than of history, a meta-historical assumption ofincommensurable historical itineraries, which some call civilisations,yielding incommensurable multiple modernities, denominated by him as
post-Hindu, post-Confucian and post-Muslim.87 Post-Muslim modernity
in this register would be vulnerable to the argument now commonly taken
for granted by many, and emerging from the comparable assumptions, that
Islam – without qualification – is necessarily at odds with modernity, whichis incompatible with Islam’s “ontological and theological commitments”.88
This is a specious and often contra-factual type of historical argument
which is anti-sociological. But it is one that Casanova shares neverthelesswith very many others – including Hindu and Muslim culturalists ofvarious hues, cultural nationalists, fundamentalists and civilisation andidentity warriors of all stripes.
Patronising multiculturalist impulses to postulate a multiplicity ofincommensurables in the spirit of a polite conversation aside, there is anobjective global dynamic that vitiates this vitalist historism and renders
culturalism and its narratives more like fables eagerly believed thanverifiable facts. This dynamic is of European origin and impulse, but isalso one whose cognitive, social and cultural goods were internalised andmade local everywhere, in a variety of forms and to varying extents. The
87 Casanova, 64.
88 Michael Alan Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 292.
37

polemics against Eurocentrism are often incoherent in that they use thevarious possible senses of the term interchangeably, often assuming allEuro-centred historical analyses to be Eurocentric ideologically. This is
why ideas about provincialising Europe are so manifestly delusional, forEurocentrism in regarding modern history has solid empirical foundations,and is surely more than just an ideological gloss – had it not been so, thefuss? There may well be ethical or political motivations for such posturesof denial, but it is clearly illegitimate to transpose these into imperative
cognitive and historical propositions, and to correct political asymmetries
by a cognitive decisionism and appeal to nativism.

4 One Genealogy of Post-colonialist Eminence
The above lines of argument with what appear to be appeals to thedefinitive wisdom and finality of native voice is complemented by the
positions on Asad in various essays. His is an apology for nativism andrelativism, despite a “cosmopolitan impulse”,89 not untypical of expatriate
post-colonialists living in North America.
This apology is grounded in a rhetoric of attachment, investment andreverie, consistently transposing what are perceived to be ethical andsentimental imperatives to the cognitive domain. Such apology tends toveer thereby from the sociology of politics to a sentimentalist and often selfindulgent psychopolitics of advocacy, with a few sparse footnotes added,
implying the sort of cognitive decisionism evoked above. It comes from aside of the multicultural spectrum, in which disenchantment with Europe
upon discovering that it is imperfect, slips into a mournful judgment ofhistorical invalidation, the ultimate spiritual provincialisation.
Asad’s evident disenchantment is reminiscent of that of the AustroHungarian born Leopold Weiss who, upon conversion to Islam in the
1920s, took the name Muhammad Asad, in ways that bring up interesting
commonalities and illustrate well the continuities in anti-modernism
between its various epochs, here the continuities between the interwar
period and that in recent decades. A comparison such as this is not as
vicarious as it may appear, for it illustrates well the retrogressive relations
89 Enayat, Islam and Secularism, 90.
38

between post-colonialist moods of this, post-modernist fin-de-siècle
and the previous, anti-modernist fin-de-siècle, animated by a sense of
disenchantment along with a resort to romanticism, espousing organismic
notions of society and polity. This stood uneasily in relation to a haughty
discontent with and distaste for what had been regarded by many as a humancondition inevitably wedded to conditions of vitalism and organism.90
There are fundamental concordances between the views of the two.
They shared a discontent with what both regarded as the fundamentally
lasting foundational imprint of Christianity on the contemporary West,as Muhammad Asad put it, coexisting paradoxically with the West’s lossof “organic coherence of mind”. This diagnosis bears comparison with thecondition of discontent described by Taylor, with a not too dissimilar profile,sharing a set of shared anti-modernist and anti-secular motifs. In contrast,
Islam offered Muhammad Asad a wholesome option, one that suffered noneof the alienation and disincarnation of which Taylor spoke. He perceived
Islam in the Arabian Peninsula of the 1920s, as a total form of life adopted
by people who had kept their soul together, bound together by a kinship ofcommon outlook - a total and organic condition contrasted to diremption,
alienation and incompleteness. Such sentiments of dissatisfaction – theaesthetic, moral, and theological figures sketched by Compagnon – lend
credibility and allocate primacy, in a mood of contrastive ressentiment,
to what is perceived as Europe’s utter other. T. Asad was disenchanted by
Europe and disabused of her in 1967 and 1991.91 One might suggest a temperof disenchantment correlated with sympathy for nativism arising from thisdisenchantment, if one wished to ponder and understand support for themob baying for Salman Rushdie’s blood.
T. Asad calls his chosen procedure of understanding “genealogy”
rather than history, maintaining that one should break with what hetakes to be the coercive constraints of sociological truth. These are, ofcourse, constraints on politico-aesthetic indulgence, and are imperativesof socio-historical rationality; they are not a flag-waving celebration of
abstract reason, but the practice of reason’s analytical capacities. Thisepistemological position, again, bespeaks an attitude congruent with that
represented a generation earlier by M. Asad, who stated categorically that
90 See Griffin, Modernism and Fascism.
91 Talal Asad, “Muhammad Asad between Religion and Politics,” Insan ve Toplum Dergisi 1(2011): 165.
39

Muslim matters cannot be approached with Western concepts or from
Western historical experiences,92 thereby collapsing cognition into life in
the manner discussed above. Genealogy according to Foucault, who is
generally regarded as the alpha and omega of the matter, is a procedurethat rejects metahistorical deployment of ideal meanings and teleologies,
and is thus, in principle, opposed to the search for origins. Both authors
discussed here are after origins perpetually and wholesomely present,that is, the abidance of supposed initial conditions as required by theoverarching essentialism of such vitalist and historist thinking.
Not unexpectedly, T. Asad suggests that one should learn to treat
Enlightenment assumptions as belonging to “specific kinds of reasoning”,
and therefore, from the perspective of relativism and of the vitalist, socialinstinct mode of cognition. Assumptions made by turns of mind informedby the Enlightenment are not valid grounds from which the understandingof the non-Enlightenment traditions must begin -– note the automatic drift
from actually existing realities, and appeal to traditions. Much concernedwith the operations of power and ideology in anthropology and in culturaltranslation, what Asad does here is appeal to the notion of Verstehen,wielded in such a way as to result in patterning, sympathy and antipathy,
but little analytical understanding. Witness, for instance, Asad’s disciple,
one might say his late ethnographer persona, the late Saba Mahmood’s pleathat hyper-pietist practices by some Egyptian women should be seen as
technologies of the self.93 The term ‘technologies of the self ’ is not native
or emic, having been coined by Michel Foucault. But it is nevertheless apt,
if used in a cursory way to convey pathos, but to deliver little determinate
sense or analytical understanding. However, despite the pathos it conveys,
and its association with the empowerment of self-fashioning, the term is
so abstract as to be inappropriate and misleading. For the hyper-pietist
conversions of women studied by Mahmoud involve, structurally, thereconstitution of selves by means of compliance to norms propagated, notalways pacifically, by Islamist political organisms, the whole process staged
in the name of authentic tradition.

92 Muhammad Asad, The Principles of State and Government in Islam (Kuala Lumpur:
Islamic Book Trust, 1980 [1961]), 18.
93 Saba Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplinesof ṣalāt,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 4 (2001).
40

Translated from the post-colonialist sociolect, which aims to amplify
sentiment, to social science terminology, which seeks an analyticalunderstanding, such conversions would qualify as procedures of resocialisation and the inculcation of a habitus by an authority. The
procedure described is a re-socialisation of such wrenching violence as to
involve the induction of fear, weeping and elation, to which Mahmood’s
objects of study (pietist women) admit truly and straightforwardly94 – inanthropological terms, it is best described as a dysphoric ritual of initiation
and rite of passage. The Salafist, pietistic juridification of individual subjects,
and especially of women, flattens subjectivity and selfhood by reducing
them to legal instances of compliance. Demystified, this technology of theself turns out to have little to do with self-empowerment, construction of
personal capacity or the exercise of personal freedom, and turns out rather
to be self-truncation and the excision of the will and self-subjugation. The
law, and self-fashioning according to the exacting requirements of the law,sustains the persona, not the person, for the refashioned subject, now reallya virtual subject, is deprived of interiority as it wills itself to be reduced tolegal facts and acts – apt performance driven to the edge of self-parody. In
broader terms, one might think of the spread of feminine pietism (and its
male counterpart) historically in terms comparable to the spread of moral
panic elsewhere, and related to fits of collective hysteria and collective
fainting reported among adolescent and young adult women in Egypt,
Palestine and Indonesia in the past two decades. None of this has anything
to do with the recovery of tradition.
Ultimately, genealogy becomes a speech act of historical reparation forwrongs conjectured by the author, and for the reaffirmation of the self,
both being the advocacy counterpart to apology. In such circumstances,
the work of the anthropologist is confined to apologetic portrayal weighted
by a culture held to be sui generis, with analytical discourse, necessarily etic,branded as intrusive. What is taken for culture – or tradition or any of its
associated terms – figures as an all-explanatory inertial energy, ultimately
94 Mahmood, “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual,” 839–45. One
might usefully consult Lamis Al-Solaim and Kate Loewenthal, “Religion and ObsessiveCompulsive Disorder among Young Muslim Women in Saudi Arabia,” Mental Health,Religion and Culture 14, no. 2 (2011); and Maja Nedeljkoic et al., “Cultural Issues inUnderstanding and Treating Obsessive Compulsive and Spectrum Disorders,” in Oxford
Handbook of Obsessive-Complusive and Spectrum Disorders, ed. Gail Steketee (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2011), 496–519, 501–02.
41

a cliché, bereft of anthropological analysis and indeed with social and otherexplanatory context missing. This is very much in keeping with what has
been suggested as being a juxtaposition of raw empirical data and metasociological purpose.
Now for more specific comment, through the byways of Asad’s sinuous
reservations, nuances and caveats, whose overall economy often escapessome of his readers as it beguiles them, or which might be irrelevant tothose who turn to him for Solomonic guidance. Asad questions the notionof the secular and the related notion of religion.95 He proposes that theidea of religion is one that is irretrievably manacled to its European
conditions of emergence, in the way discussed above. Like other concepts
subject to operational reluctance on the grounds of origin and of nativist
arguments for cognition, this position is open to criticism as a fallacy ofpartial description, that since concepts may emerge from social activity,
they are reducible to them – quite apart from the formulaic simplificationof Foucault’s pronouncements on knowledge and power.
This is a persistent drift in post-modernist and post-colonialist writing,where operations of causality are displaced, and the very notion of causality,
when used at all, is taken in the constructivist manner for the attributionof causality only, vaguely Humean but with little of Hume’s subtlety. Thus
Bruno Latour, for instance, commenting on the death from tuberculosis ofRamses II more than 3,000 years ago, as shown by the results of an autopsyof his mummified remains. Latour asserted that this Pharaoh could not
possibly have died of tuberculosis, whose bacillus was not known at thetime of Ramses’ death, concluding that this attribution of the cause ofdeath was anachronistic, retrospective causality, and, as such, illegitimate96– let it be noted that the emphasis is on legitimacy, not on cogency orvalidity. Geertz wondered how one would be able to proceed with (in hiscase) anthropological work without needing to assert that anthropology
is actually possible, given persistent post-colonialist and post-modernist
anxieties of this kind.97
This endless Pyrrhonism, an ancient form of cognitive filibuster, is one
eddy flowing into the constructivist view of religion of concern here. It is
95 On Asad’s views of secularisation overall, see Enayat, “The Body, Pain and Agency,” chap.
5 in Islam and Secularism.
96 Bruno Latour, “Ramsès II est-il mort de la tuberculose?,” La Recherche 307 (1998): 84–85.
97 Geertz, After the Fact, 128–30.
42

incontestable that new religions have been constructed to suit conditions
emerging from the colonial order and from modern state systems
emerging from the overthrow of the colonial order. In Bali, for instance, aclichéd canonical Hinduism was fashioned suitable for integration into theinstitutes of the Indonesian state. Colonial New Zealand provides anotherinstance.98 Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism were also in many crucial respects
brought into the ambit of modernity according to the global template forreligion provided by Protestantism.99 But this is something quite distinct
from an ostensible dead weight of origin rendering the analytical categoryof religion itself irrelevant. As Casanova rightly maintains, to dissolve
religion and secularism into genealogy and archaeology – another term
used by Foucault, subsequently used for ethos and pathos – would leave us
analytically impoverished and without adequate conceptual tools.100 One
wishes that he himself had resisted this drift with consequent thoroughness.
This is all culturalist solipsism par excellence. Building upon thisposition, Asad proposes a nativist rhetoric of attachment. The Islamic
religion, he declares solemnly, was the result of a discursive process,101
apparently without roots in a general historical and anthropologicalcategory of religion, or in its own complex actual history. An anthropologyof Islam should begin where Muslims are said to begin, with the discursive
tradition relating to the Muslim canon, and the practice of what he calls,
quite aptly, “apt performance” driven by the canon,102 which others,
wishing to restore its amplitude, might call psychodrama. Islam is not, as
98 Michel Picard, “What’s in a Name? Agama Hindu Bali in the Making,” in Hinduism inModern Indonesia, ed. Martin Ramstedt (London: Routledge, 2004); Jonathan Z. Smith,“The Unknown God: Myth in History,” chap. 5 in Imagining Religion (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).
99 ‘Azīz ʿAl-Aẓma, “Al-Iṣlāḥīyūn al-nahḍawīyūn wa fikrat al-iṣlāḥ,” Al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabī
455 (2017); Reinhard Schulze, “Islam und Judentum im Angesicht der Protestantisierung
der Religionen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Course of
History: Exchange and Conflicts, ed. Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit (Munich:Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2011); Richard Gombrich, “Protestant Buddhism,”
chap. 7 in Theravada Bhuddism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988).
100 Casanova, “A Reply,” 15.
101 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), 29.
102 Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary
Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986), 14–15. Curiously, the discursive traditions
seem to correspond to what M. Asad would have described as Pharisaic self-righteousness:
Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1980 [1954]), 161, 175.
43

Asad maintains rightly, a distinctive social structure. Yet in making thisassertion, Asad causes sociological and anthropological scrutiny of social
structure and process appear irrelevant to the anthropologist working inthis register of essence.
Islam is thus liberated from the social moorings of its practices, andbecomes mystified as tradition, that is, discourses appealing to a historist
ideal that give correct form to given practices precisely because they had been
established by history.103 Asad’s Islam is a mentalist construct with associatedperformances, albeit shod of its status as an anthropological category, yetcreating the same problems that Asad sees in his criticism of Geertz – it mustbe said, in fairness and contrary to what is asserted, that Geertz does takereligion for ‘an essence’.104 What is it, one wonders, that impels Asad to describe
these ostensible traditions which he sees as defining the Muslim religion as
being “strongly held”,105 without indications of who it is who holds to what
traditions strongly, and when and under what circumstances, and with what
sense given to strength here? This kind of impressionistic statement is ascommon in popular journalism as in scholarship. Clearly, what Asad andMahmood describe as the norm are not normal Muslims, whatever these
may be; they are Muslim beings who are “pre-eminently and determinatively
religious”,106 in fact, super-Muslims, virtually performed by the scholar. And
these, consumed by piety or fanaticism or both, clearly do not exist, andnever did, except as anomalies to the eyes of Muslims themselves, as fringes
that have recently, however, asserted themselves politically and visually insalafi and jihadist groups.
We are back to homeostatic, incommensurable traditions, engaged in
the polite protocol of recognition (Asad is pessimistic overall) between
untranslatable registers, expressing themselves in indigenous voices,which are ultimately affective, aesthetic, and political choices, unrelated tocognitive categories. Native voice is irreducible, and therefore not open to
analytical reason, resting upon assertion without recall or recourse. Being
103 Asad, The Idea, 14.
104 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 115–16; Talal Asad, “Responses,” in Powers of the SecularModern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. Charles Hirschkind and David Scott(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 210. See Steven Caton, “What is an‘Authorizing Discourse’?,” in Powers, ed. Charles Hirschkind and David Scott (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 45.
105 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 267.
106 Enayat, Islam and Secularism, 92.
44

matters of political, ethical, or traditionalist choice, all voices but the native
are liable to corrosion, including the voice of scientific reason that expresses
itself in terms of categories of the social and human sciences, and nothingremains admissible but to take discourses on the terms of the research
object herself. Thus, for instance, Saba Mahmood, building upon Asad’s
scepticism about the notion of religion, studied networks of feminine piety
in Egypt minutely and illuminatingly, with its rituals, reflections, habit
formations and corporeal discipline. As she did so, she insisted with selfeffacing modesty that, rather than conceptualise her material and turn her
subjects into objects, as a researcher would be required to do, her work
should lead to parochialising the researcher’s assumptions.107 One always
welcomes calls to self-reflexivity. But this would need to be a conceptual
self-reflexivity, rather than an ethical discipline of self-fashioning
counterposed to cognitive purpose, or a form of contrition, penance andconfession, reminiscent of the medieval Latin Christianity that had elicited
Asad’s curiosity some decades before.
Self-patterning clichés, including self-parodic ones, recognised andrepresented but not interpreted, come to have greater salience thansociological reason. We are, after all, in the domain of figures of theorganism. Similarly, in a long discussion of Saudi nasiha, texts of advice
offered to royal Saudi authorities by younger Wahhabi ‘ulama whose
conservatism is inflected by political vocabularies derived from standard
tropes of the Muslim Brother movement, Asad reiterates the point thatany assumptions of a singular rationality that might be used to judge thematter need to be regarded as an imposition. He interprets limitations of
nasiha materials and attitudes to be due, not to incapacity to countenancechange, nor to an intrinsic contradiction between reason and religion,
but to a “particular discursive tradition” and its associated disciplines.108
Nasiha is therefore not related to clerical or national politics, nor toideologies, social change and inter-generational relations, and is not simply
repressive and patrimonial. Primarily, Asad believes that it stands on theassumption of a moral order of virtuous individuals partly responsible for
one another’s moral condition,109 a form of peaceable mutual vigilantism.
107 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 36.
108 Asad, Genealogies, 232.
109 Asad, 233.
45

The interpretation and analysis of the documents discussed are of the sameorder as the document, at best giving voice to what Asad would regard as
a self-exegetical effort of the document by the document and its authors.
With neither qualification nor analysis in terms of political and institutional
anthropology, or thinking about what it might be that empowers one toclaim the prerogative of a busy-body in a domain deliberately voided ofpolitics, Asad’s account seems noticeably unsatisfying. The line between,on the one hand, the anthropology of modernity, as Asad calls it, wheremodernity is for once an actual object of analysis, and which is in fact
an anti-modernist pseudo-historical polemic, and, on the other hand,advocacy of tradition, is nowhere apparent.
Asad’s tonalities are noticeably calm, even placid, at once composedand quizzical, and tend to convey a discontented and somewhat vexed,arguably aggrieved, antipathy to many of the conditions he describes.
Saba Mahmood was a rather more muscular tribune for her charges thanAsad, and is almost emblematic of the overdetermination of academic
practice by the adversarial mood and by a sense of indignation, inculcatedas an institutional habitus and as a constituent element to the sociolectmentioned already. She took this pathway of Asad much further, in a patentvindication of obscurantism.110 Speaking, like Asad, against the secular
notion of religion, which, she claims, is “abstract”,111 whatever this dismissal
implies or means, she takes to task certain advocates of Muslim reform(Abu Zayd, Hanafi, and others) for pleading for the historicity of Qur’anicinterpretation, on the grounds that this procedure “disenfranchises”
traditional modes of interpretation.
I will not go into the historical facts of the matter, including who it is infact who disenfranchises whom, and whether what she terms traditional isin fact traditional by any proper historical description, and how. Historicalfact will not be relevant to Mahmood’s argument, which is rounded off
politically by suggesting that these Muslim reformists were just tailoring
their work to an imperialist agenda, implying in effect that they worked to an
agenda set by the CIA: figures “demonised” by Mahmood for undermining
what she liked to suppose were authentic inherited narratives.112 It seemed
110 Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic
Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006).
111 Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire,” 324.
112 Ebrahim Moosa and Sher Ali Tareen, “Revival and Reform,” The Princeton Enyclopedia
46

unnecessary to either Asad or Mahmood to check whether what they had
been told were matters of tradition were in fact any more than very recent
and group-specific, sub-cultural reconstitutions of the Muslim religion,
along lines quite precisely analogous to those of exigent Calvinism andmore radical forms of Protestantism.
The irrationalist doctrine, attendant upon vitalism and discussed
throughout this essay, is in this case tailored to an apology for contemporary
identitarian Islamism, and its more traditionalist expressions apparently
favoured by Asad and Mahmood. This preference worked to elevate thisinflection of Islam, pars pro toto, to stand for Islam in general, past andpresent. In order to accomplish this, Asad used the very conception ofreligion he decries so much to speak of the Super-Muslims of Europe
and of their strong attachments to their discursive traditions or, rather,to reconstitute them as such. He advocates in effect a political societyof Stände (Estates), conceived as religious denominations, somewhat
analogous to a confederation of Millets living in contiguity, but, unlike theclassical Ottoman system, without relations dominance. This is in effecta social model for a polity without politics, a geographical contiguity ofminorities, informed by a notion of religion and denomination which
is not only that of the Reformation, but is also Qur’anic.113 For, Asadmaintains, Muslim immigrants (he still calls them immigrants rather thancitizens, irrespective of generation), cannot be satisfactorily represented inEurope, given Europe’s ostensible ideological construction.114 That they are
represented as citizens like other citizens, however humanly imperfect thesystem, and without special pleading, seems to be uninteresting.
What is in fact at issue is not representation, which all citizens have, but
citizenship, which is nowhere addressed. Asad seeks to represent Muslims
as Muslims,115 that is, as a minority defined not so much sociologically,
as characterised in the historist mode by historical narratives which still
remain to be identified, by allegedly embodied memories, feelings andof Islamic Political Thought, ed. Gerhard Boewering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press 2013), 468. See the further comments of Ebrahim Moosa, “Disruptions andReconnections: Re-Discovering and Re-Making Muslim Tradition in Late Modernity,”in The Idea of Tradition in Late Modernity, ed. Albert Howard (forthcoming), 88–91.
113 Talal Asad, “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe,” chap. in Formations of theSecular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
114 Asad, 159.
115 Asad, 173.
47

desires which he ascribed to them as a group. In this, Muslims are described
as if they were a homogeneous group,116 to which one needs to add the very
considerable amount of politically-induced false memories that come into
the conjuring of memories which are ostensibly shared and alive, but infact virtual. Upon these Muslims, Asad grafts ways of life and practices
articulated by bookish traditions, which he deems to be “deeply held”: it isthese, rather than actually existing Muslims, that need political institutions
to represent them, an image harking back to medieval casts of mind.117
It is manifestly clear that this whole argumentative edifice is geared
towards traditionalist forms of identitarianism: the deliberate constructionof minorities, and specifically of Muslim minorities in Europe andelsewhere. This is a politics of recognition which operates more withcategorisation and stereotypification than with apprehension of reality. Its
implementation calls less for retrieval than for a considerable degree of resocialisation according to institutes allegedly traditional but in fact within
the domain of neo-traditionalist forces of today. This is much like thefashioning of pietist women in Egypt. That Asad, with his subtleties andcaveats, ultimately holds that identity is always made, is only one of manyideas that seem lost on some of his more challenged readers. However, thisis not what, in actual fact, the reader gets cumulatively, the finer pointsof Asad’s judgement being often incompatible with his political advocacy.
What Asad takes for Muslim identity, and what Casanova or Taylor
take for civilisational paths, are not forces of nature that predestinehuman collectivities to specific outcomes or to restricted horizons ofpossibility. British and Egyptian Muslims cannot summarily be reduced
to a homogeneous community. Local voice, be it in Riyadh or in London,
is not a voice of nature. It is a habitus of affectation and contrivance,
elaborated by apt performance, however ingenuous and seemingly
spontaneous, and however sincerely performed or meretriciously selfparodic. In both Jakarta and Cairo, what is regarded as local Muslim
voice is the result of a recent historical development deploying muchpolitical and social engineering. Asad never extended his line of thought
to propose that his own advocacy of tradition might be apt performanceof anti-modern ideology. One interesting thing here is that with the use of
apt performance as an interpretative device, Asad is conceiving religious
116 Asad, 174.
117 Asad, 178.
48

practice as a psychodrama, which is really a view of religion which is not
only particularly marked by the Reformation, but is equally marked by
the re-socialising modes of politico-religious activism associated with the
Muslim Brothers.
So too are social and cultural Islamisation, and salafication in
the Arab World in recent decades. With exceptions, these are not in
substantive continuity with the past, and this applies most specifically tofundamentalism and stringent pietism or social salafication. Identity, it
must be stressed, is less an indicative concept than a performative one,118
and hence a contextual political designation. In the context discussed here,
and to return to the discussion of modernisation and social differentiation,
the identitarian conception of Islam as a total socio-political and ethicalsuperstructure corresponding to the nature of society makes perfect sense. It
is, after all, the secularisation thesis, with its stress on social differentiation,that is able to account for the emergence of religion as an independent
instance which then comes to make total claims on representing society.
Secularism is not a phenomenon that defines the relation between Islamand the West or that can be defined by this relation; it is in actual fact a
struggle within Muslim majority countries themselves.

118 Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Identity in the Arab World,” in Keywords: Identity, ed. Nadia Tazi (NewYork, NY: The Other Press, 2004).
49

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