Is secularism history?

Abstract

In recent years, the intellectual tide has moved strongly against the kind of secular thinking that characterized Gellner’s work. Whether couched in terms of postcolonialism, multiculturalism, genealogy, global understanding, political theology, or the revival of normative, metaphysical and openly religious perspectives, today’s postsecular and even anti-secular mood in social theory seems to consign Gellner’s project to the dustbin of history: a stern but doomed attempt to shore up western liberal rationalism. Under some revisionary lights, it has even become pointless to distinguish flexible secular thinking which still retains some firm ‘bottom lines’ from what is routinely portrayed as rampant ideological secularism. Unconvinced by key assumptions and motivations on this terrain, I reactivate Gellner’s essential concerns and propositions around secularity and secularism, feeding these into the current debates. Whilst Gellner’s stringent, unrivalled exposure of intellectual cant continues to be hugely valuable, and his sense of the utter historicity of social life and thought indispensable, Gellner’s critical positivism could not, by his own admission, produce a coherent cultural politics.

Emancipating ethics: an autonomist reading of Islamic forms of life in Russia

“…Given its elusiveness and associations with theoretical controversies that this article seeks to transcend, in what follows I explore a different take on the ‘form of life’ concept. There is yet another fundamental reason to do so: the Wittgensteinian commandment to ‘leave the world as it is’, and its latent conservativism, are hardly compatible with the aspirations of an engaged social analysis (McLennan 2015) capable of foregrounding the liberative and prefigurative dimensions of religious piety. To that end, a militant epistemology of ethical intensities is required.…”

“…The Asadian 'revolution' in the anthropology of religion (Ahmad 2017;Mahmood 2005;Tayob 2017), intellectually indebted to MacIntyrean philosophical genealogies (Asad 2009(Asad [1986), 4 has generated a sensitive fault line in social theory by enabling a critique of Enlightened secular modernity as a space of ethical crisis (Ahmad 2017;Asad 2020;Hallaq 2012). Such a move provides a foil for the morally integrated social pockets whose inner workings anthropologists seek to understand (McLennan 2015). Behind this picture, however, one might discern an often implicitly hierarchical contrast between the sympathetically depicted traditional virtuous subjects and ethically stunted -if hardly differentiated in their 'liberal' , 'secular' , 'feminist' , or 'leftist' versions -post-Enlightenment subjectivities.…”

“…However, the traditionist/communitarian school's critical framing of modernity as ethically sterile, and its latent antipathy for secular humanism, have disquieting echoes – Irfan Ahmad's failure to take a stance vis‐à‐vis the reactionary and authoritarian elements of Abul A'la Maududi's work, in his otherwise thought‐provoking monograph (Ahmad 2017), being an example of these dangers. From this perspective, a traditionist orientation is vulnerable to charges of political irresponsibility analogous to those that have been levelled against the Wittgensteinian fideists (McLennan 2015; Nielsen & Phillips 2005).…”