Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?

Abstract

Any academic discussion of religion in the present moment must countenance the shrill polemics that have followed from the events of the past decade-including 9/11, the subsequent war on terror, and the rise of religious politics globally. What was once a latent schism between religious and secular worldviews has now become an incommensurable divide, and protagonists from both sides posit an ominous standoff between strong religious beliefs and secular values. Indeed, a series of international events, particularly around Islam, are often seen as further evidence of this incommensurability. Despite this polarization, more reflective voices in the current debate have tried to show how the religious and the secular are not so much immutable essences or opposed ideologies as they are concepts that gain a particular salience with the emergence of the modern state and attendant politics-concepts that are, furthermore, interdependent and necessarily linked in their mutual transformation and historical emergence. Viewed from this perspective, as a secular rationality has come to define law, statecraft, knowledge production, and economic relations in the modern world, it has also simultaneously transformed the conceptions, ideals, practices, and institutions of religious life. Secularism here is understood I would like to thank Charles Hirschkind, Hussein Agrama, Talal Asad, and Michael Allan for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. I am particularly indebted to Amy Russel for guiding me through Greek sources on schesis and relationality. I am grateful to Mark McGrath for providing research assistance. I have presented this essay to audiences at the

On secularity: Marxism, reality, and the Messiah in Brazil

“…My description of secularity certainly draws inspiration from Asad's Formations of the secular (2003), though he has rarely used the term 'secularity' . Yet as I discuss further in the second section of this article, my reading of his work challenges readings that currently dominate the scholarship on secularism (Agrama 2012;Mahmood 2015) as well as allied fields (e.g. ).…”

“…When employed as a concept by anthropologists, secularity is usually used to describe life under secularism, the state doctrine governing the relations between religion and politics (Agrama 2015;Mahmood 2015). I conceive of secularity differently and at some remove from the state: as the more immediate condition of how people live with secularization.…”

“…Keane 2007; Klassen 2011), which have mostly distanced themselves from the secularization hypothesis rather than rethink the concept or engage with debates about secular/ism. However, as I noted above, even anthropologists who have led secular studies after Asad have privileged 'secularism' and minimized reference to 'secularization' , and generally reduce it to secularism in any case (Agrama 2012;Mahmood 2015). This is understandable in light of scholarly priorities (e.g.…”

There is a Sexular Body: Introducing a Material Approach to the Secular

“…Second, and I consider this of major importance, a material approach to the secular urges us to face that certain objects, acts, bodies or other forms frequently considered neutral or value free, are definitely not experienced as such by others (see also Mahmood 2009). As long as we do not sufficiently investigate how the secular is understood and ' done' in society, some taken-for-granted material forms might be harmful for some, not necessarily religious, people in society (see Butler 2008).…”

Debating Shirk in Keralam, South India: Monotheism between Tradition, Text and Performance

“…In the 20 years between Katherine Ewing's careful disavowal of the ethnographer's "temptation to believe" (1994) and Meneses, et al's daring proposal for an anthropological "epistemology of witness," grounded in evangelical Christian readings of good and evil (2014), lie (on the one hand) Simon Coleman's sensitive discussion of the dangers of exposing oneself as an insufficiently distanced "abomination" (2008) and (on the other) a bold exposure effected by Saba Mahmood and others of the partiality of the secular world-view and its claims to neutrality (Mahmood, 2006(Mahmood, , 2008(Mahmood, , 2009Zine, 2004). Inspired by this trajectory and as much by interfaith dialogue as by ethnographic discussions of intersubjectivity, it is in a spirit of feeling that the time is (finally) right that I set aside criticisms of projects of comparative religion, draw some very narrow debates within Indian Islam outside of their customary analytic framework and into a wider one, and offer some thoughts on two vexed questions dear to the heart of Muslims: authority of interpretation; and the matter of shirk or devia- pathways: reformists deplore tombs, saints, shrine festivals, intercessionary prayer, zikr (remembrance chants), moulud (celebrating the prophet's birthday) and so on;…”