In "Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report", Mahmood challenges liberal conceptions of secularism as religion's opposite as well as celebratory views of secularism as the solution to religious discrimination. Drawing on the intertwined history of secularism in the Middle East and Europe, and extensive fieldwork on the experiences of Copts and Bahais in Egypt, Mahmood explores the conceptual, discursive and lived paradoxes of political secularism. In essence, how can the existing religious inequality in a society be remediated by a state law that disregard difference in religion? Mahmood believed that this paradox caused the debate over deliberate protection for religious minorities in the 1923 Egyptian constitution and again in 2012 after the Egyptian Revolution. Mahmood concludes that "political secularism is the modern state's sovereign power to reorganize substantive features of religious life, stipulating what religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and quotidian practices."