In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity. For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together, giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt's religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.

On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, connected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predicated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life.

In an article published posthumously, in the Revue de la Méditerranée in 1951, Augustin Berque, the intellectually accomplished but professionally somewhat unrecognized former Director of Native Affairs at the Government-General of Algeria, examined difficulties in the public management of religious affairs, and the failures of policy toward successive, competing spokesmen for Islam in France's colonial possessions. In concluding his assessment of this thorny question, Berque addressed his reader as in an imaginary dialogue: “And so? Oh, I quite agree with you! The one great remedy is our laïcité, which would leave to the Faith its secret oratory, intimate and inviolable. But [what are we to do] in the meantime?” There remained at the time a tenacious assumption that the empire, at least in Africa, might still endure into the unforeseeable future and that institution of a rational, public secularism as a lasting benefit of France's rayonnement civilisationnel could still be anticipated as an ultimate goal. But, of course, “the meantime” was in fact all the time that Berque and his colleagues had, and it was running out much faster than they imagined. That as late as 1951 the well-informed, scholarly, and policymaking readers of the Revue could still be expected to imagine the relationship between imperial and Islamic authority in these terms suggests an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion, or a remarkable intractability in the terms of a debate that had been near the top of the colonial policy agenda for almost half a century.

In this article I engage the work of three scholars, each of whom speaks to reactions to Muslims or interventions in their lives in the United States and Europe. Each is critical of these reactions and interventions, and traces them to inconsistencies in liberal thought and practice. My purpose is to interrogate their theorizing by applying it to the interface of liberalism with another religious Other, one that tends to generate far less sympathy in the predominantly secular and liberal academy: religiously motivated Jewish settlers in Israeli-occupied territories. The first scholar is Saba Mahmood, who recently argued against U.S. involvement in trying to alter the theology and practices of Muslims in the Middle East. The second is Judith Butler, who in a 2008 article addressed Muslims in the Netherlands, the problems of citizenship, and the right to religious freedom. Finally, Talal Asad has spoken to issues of violence, arguing that suicide bombing is really not so different from state violences perpetrated by the United States and Israel. Each of their arguments contains critiques of secular liberalism and the contradictory ethics and inconsistencies within liberal thought and practice, and each carries different but related implications. My intent is to begin to explore the possibilities of applying the analyses of these writers to the case of conflict between religiously motivated settlers in Israeli-occupied territories and left-wing, secular, and liberal Israeli Jews. Although this case mirrors broader representations of “Islam and the West,” it is rarely considered in comparison when such representations are deconstructed. The questions raised through this uncomfortable comparison will, I hope, contribute to broader conversations about the challenges and complexities of living together with differences that may be threatening if not altogether incommensurable.

Whether observed in French laïcité, Kemalist Turkey, Kantian political theory, Western Christian theology, or North Indian classical music, the presence of modern secularity has been demonstrably complex (Asad 2003; Bakhle 2008; Blumenberg 1985; Connolly 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002). My purpose in this essay is to further examine the intricacies of the modern secular, specifically its relation with what it deems “religious.” My focus will be Edward Said, whose paradigmatic engagement in secular, critical, and comparative inquiry makes his work an ideal place to investigate the modern apparition of the secular. It is widely acknowledged that Orientalism (1979) led to a profound transformation of entire fields of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences, and even the creation of new ones. Said's work as a practice of criticism has been instrumental in addressing the affinities between forms of knowledge and domination, especially in their colonial variety. However, studies of his writings have only recently begun to address the topic of modern secularism in his work, which will be at the center of this paper (e.g., Mufti 2004; Hart 2000; Anidjar 2006; Apter 2004; Robbins 1994; Gourgouris 2004).

It has become a nearly universal reflex to think about the contemporary Middle East as a region in which secularism is in decline. This is particularly true in countries like Egypt, where the modernist imagination of independence-era socialism seems to have been eclipsed by a grassroots vision of the future as a thoroughly Islamic place, and where the nature of the government's stance with regard to secularism and religion has long been an important question (Winegar 2009; Agrama, this CSSH issue). Since the late 1970s, a decade which saw the Iranian Revolution, the rise of televangelism in the United States, and the beginnings of an extraordinary wave of Protestant conversion in Latin America, it has become popular to produce histories of secularism that will help explain the failure of “the secularization thesis,” the idea that with economic development, the spread of education, and the advancement of Science, religion was a doomed commodity like pounce pots and butter churns. The moral vision of the popular long-running Star Trek mythology, in which humans as a species have given up religion altogether, seems ever more remote the closer its technological vision becomes. Surprisingly durable, religion refuses to wait quietly in the churchyard for people to visit. Instead, it stands on the street corner denouncing bad behavior and calling the world to salvation. But now the street corner is a television broadcasting satellite (or a cassette tape, or a website), and religion's call has succeeded in ways that no Cold War sociologist or political scientist could have imagined.

Efforts to theorize pluralism have often explored the challenges posed by the public visibility of ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian differences to modernist imaginaries of a homogeneous national body. In this essay, I examine a context in which public expressions of communal differences re-inscribe the categories of the nation they were meant to contest. The situation reveals what I call a paradox of pluralism.

If we step back and consider the words around which critiques and debates have crystallized in recent years, some have been relatively clear, while others have been constantly in need of disambiguation. Even during the most drawn-out of debates over “nationalism” or “revolution,” and despite the arguments over definitions and typologies, we had the sense that we were all talking about the same thing—that is why the debates could move along, adding new perspectives, disputing whether this or that author had placed enough stress on class position, or industrialization, or ideas.