The attribution of violence, misogyny, and queer‐phobia to Muslims as essential elements of Islamic culture is an axial feature of global politics in the early twenty‐first century. Despite ongoing attempts by Muslim, critical race, and anticolonial queer and feminist scholars to contest the racial coloniality underpinning such equations, consensus about the “cultural barbarity” of Islam holds sway within the Western social and political imaginary (Reference MassadMassad 2007; Reference Al‐SajiAl-Saji 2010; Reference AhmedAhmed 2011; Reference Abu‐LughodAbu-Lughod 2013). I have discussed elsewhere how this construct of Islam and Muslims not only fuses race with religion, it also integrates feminist theory and practice to gender the Islamophobia that is now dominant in global politics. Here, I study the practices that negotiate and rework the dominant and counter‐hegemonic narratives of the meanings, histories, and experiences of the “West,” and its interactions with Islam and Muslims, to reassert the power of the politico‐philosophical tradition of the West. To this end, I present a close reading of an exchange among a group of scholars—all public intellectuals—that is entangled within these very issues, practices, and contestations.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech presents essays by Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, and Talal Asad that address the issues named in the title of the text, and more, by way of the Danish cartoon controversy (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009). The publication of these cartoons in 2005, the reader will remember, linked Prophet Muhammad to terrorism and sparked heated, sometimes violent, protests by Muslims across Europe and in other parts of the world. The printing of this incendiary material was defended within Euro‐America as a legitimate expression of free speech that highlighted the dangers of intolerance and violence in Islam. Public and political defense of the cartoons thus tied them to Western values and raised questions about the viability of the Muslim presence in Western societies. The larger context for the cartoon controversy and the scholarly exchange I study, is, of course, the expanding horizon of the “new” invasions, occupations, and wars against Islamist as well as secular democratic movements in the Middle East, North and East Africa, and South and Central Asia.

The concept of the West is contested terrain, as long recognized within critical race, third‐world, Black, Indigenous, and other anticolonial feminist traditions (Reference DavisDavis 1983; Reference LaDukeLaDuke 2003; Reference MohantyMohanty 2003; Reference CollinsCollins 2008). I draw upon these traditions’ conceptualization of the West—including its epistemological tradition—as born of the violence of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. However, my interest here is in mapping the profound shift in the meaning ascribed to the West that is currently underway, for this entity is contested not only by those in search of justice who contest challenge its power and seek to transcend it, but also by those who are orientated around this power and an extension of its reach. As will become clear in what follows, the power to reify the particular experience and perspective of the latter as “the” universal has long been taken as the prerogative of the Western epistemological tradition. This makes philosophy, the heart of this tradition, a crucial site to study the contestation and remaking of significations of the West.

Following Stuart Hall, I impute no fixed essence to the category of the “West” (Reference Hall, Held, Herbert and ThompsonHall et al. 1996). Indeed, I use the term Westernizing to draw attention to the practices entailed in the production of this entity as an ongoing onto‐epistemological project. Part of this production requires responses to radical contestations of its power. Such contestation over the meaning of the West is at work in Is Critique Secular? as its authors address the concepts produced within a global political discourse that considers as stubborn the attachment of Muslims to Islam, seen to have now precipitated a crisis for a secular modern world. As explicated more fully below, it is my contention that the present challenges to the power of the West are being met on philosophical as well as political grounds by centering the politics of gender/sexuality to extend the onto‐epistemological claims to Western civilizational superiority.

In brief, the Western philosophical tradition considers the secular to be the only site for critique, that is, for reasoned philosophical thought, in contrast to “religion,” which it defines as antithetical to the very notion of critique. Although the text I study opens with the question of whether “critique” is “secular,” I show how it simultaneously shuts down this space by orientating the ensuing exchange around this very philosophical tradition itself (Brown's and Butler's contributions). Drawing on Sara Ahmed's rethinking of “orientations” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2006), I show how the very framing of Is Critique Secular?—its centering of particular concepts, experiences, and identities while rejecting others—infuses it with the power of this tradition. This Westernizing orientation in/of the text leads to the overriding of the historically grounded critiques of the violence of this tradition (presented by Asad and Mahmood) by a defense of critique as a uniquely Euro‐American practice. This orientation also enables the linking of the practice of critique to a defense of “freedom” as a value foundational to queer politics. The text thus reveals how such feminist/queer politics—grounded in white identity and experience—function to suppress counter‐histories of Muslim experience and to disappear Muslim queers (and queers of color in general) from the epistemic field.

I am mindful that it is a rare occasion when Western feminists engage directly with contesting narratives of the West produced by critical Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color (Reference CollinsCollins 2008). This is particularly so with regard to accounts grounded in the historical experiences of Muslims. Is Critique Secular? therefore provides an exceptional opportunity to study how intellectuals from contesting traditions negotiate established orthodoxies, hegemonies, and hierarchies in a moment of global political upheaval. My reading thus delineates the particular discursive strategies deployed in this exchange that produce the epistemic regime so crucial to contemporary colonizing and imperialist practices. Put differently, this exchange reveals how even those Western feminist/queer theorists who express an interest in engaging critical counter‐narratives seemingly remain unable to shift their orientation away from dominant traditions of the West, violent though these may be.

My analysis of Is Critique Secular? makes three main claims. First, derailing challenges to the power of the Western tradition is accomplished here by the reification and reiteration of its foundational philosophical concepts as the only legitimate means for understanding the experience of Westernizing subjects and of their Other/Enemy, Muslims in this case. Not only is this a colonizing gesture, an assertion of imperialist power, it also reframes the issues at stake in abstract and dehistoricizing fashion such that counter‐hegemonic narratives (centered in Asad's and Mahmood's essays), much like the figure of the Muslim in global politics, invariably fall short.

Second, counter‐hegemonic narratives of the West that foreground its forms of violence—narratives which cannot be left unattended in moments of political crises—are overridden through a turn to queer politics as iteration of the inherently progressive nature of the Western tradition, in philosophical as well as political realms. In other words, queer politics are here constitutive of and constituted as advancement of the epistemological project of the West in a moment of political crises. These gender‐sexual politics thus become the privileged site of authoritative power in philosophical as well as political terms.

Finally, orientating the politics of gender/sexuality around and toward the Western tradition allows the queer subject to be constituted as embodiment of the tradition's highest values, in direct relation to the figure of the Muslim. This queer subject becomes emblematic of the Western epistemological lineage as it heroically confronts the dangers seen to emanate from Islam. In my elaboration of these points in the following sections, I demonstrate that rendering impermissible critiques of the violence of the West is the condition of possibility for claims to its authoritative power.

The Critical Question?

The Introduction to Is Critique Secular? opens with Brown's remarks from the Symposium at the University of California where the essays that comprise this volume were first presented. She also provides what is described as a “brief orientation” to the essays that follow. Asad and Mahmood, the reader is informed, “raised a nest of (often unasked) questions about conventional ordinances of secularity, religion, insult, injury, blasphemy, free speech, dissent, and criticism” and thereby provided “an extraordinary platform for rethinking the putatively secular foundations and premises of critique” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 7). Let me note that this opening stance positions a particular subject of address (“unasked” by whom?). Let me also point out that Asad's and Mahmood's discussion of the cartoon controversy raised a host of other issues, such as racist provocation, hate speech, anti‐immigrant sentiment in Europe, Islamophobia, capitalist property relations, Western imperialism, corporatization of the media, and so on. These are set aside in Brown's delineation of the issues considered most pertinent for the reader's attention.

The Introduction's turning toward—and away from—particular issues in Asad's and Mahmood's essays makes Brown's “brief orientation” a weighted gesture. In order to become properly “oriented,” Sara Ahmed explains, one must first experience a “disorientation.” An orientation helps to register the familiar, to locate where one is and where one is headed, what to watch out for and how to get there; an orientation is about how one experiences the “familiarity of the world,” how one “feel[s] at home” in specific contexts—spatial, sexual, as well as philosophical (Reference AhmedAhmed 2006, 6–7). Orientations are thus about how one comes into relation with particular objects, bodies, ideas (9). I borrow from Ahmed to underscore the point that Brown's orientation equips readers with an entry point into the coming discussion, directing them toward certain issues that require attention (religion, free speech, injury, and so on) and away from those that do not (Islamophobia, racism, violence, and so on). The question thus arises: What is the disorientation that Brown's Introduction intends to help set straight? The relevance of this query becomes clearer as I proceed with my reading of the text.

Each of the terms in the question Is Critique Secular? raises particular problems, Brown explains: post Bill Clinton, the word is can no longer be taken for granted; critique assumes an “interrogative” stance; the meaning of secular is usually treated as self‐evident. The term critique emerged as “krisis” in ancient Athens, Brown elaborates, where it was associated with jurisprudential concerns as it referenced sorting, judging, rupture in politics, and so forth. Critique is a term distinguished from criticism, which references “reason's capacity to unveil error” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 9). Secular, on the other hand, signals temporality, defining as it does “post‐Reformation practices and institutions in the West” (10). In common usage, however, the term implies “religiously tolerant, humanist, Christian, modern or simply Western,” Brown notes, and its use as the opposite of Islam “veils the religious shape and content of Western public life and its imperial designs” (10). Critique and secular/ism are hence associated in the “enlightenment conceits” that considered this tradition to have transcended religion by its commitment to rationality, science, and truth (10).

Having briefly situated these terms in a limited (Western) genealogy, Brown turns to the Marxist theorization of critique as distinct from the idea of “criticism.” In contrast to the Young Hegelians who criticized religion as a form of “illusionary consciousness,” Marx believed that religious consciousness served a purpose. Religion, as Marx defined it, was symptomatic of the misery of human servitude, and his interest was to examine the actual conditions that gave rise to religious consciousness. This project Marx defined as “critique”: the scientific study of the social and material conditions that became mystified within religious thought. This Marxist definition, Brown states, “secures the conviction that critique is secular in the Western critical theory tradition” (11). “Is critique secular?” is a question that “upends” this critical tradition in Brown's view, but it does so “in a spirit that allows for the possibility of other formulations of critique, secularism, and their relation” (13).

Brown's brief historicization of these terms gives rise to the following questions: What is this “spirit” of the question—Is critique secular?—that would animate an “upending” of the tradition of Western critical theory? What other formulations of the relation between critique and secularism does this “upending” make possible in this text? More important, what particular formulations of critical thought are foreclosed by this “spirit”? I shall return to these questions, for now I turn to the essays that make up the rest of this volume.

Disorientations

In his essay, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” as elsewhere, Asad treats secularism as a doctrine of governance (Reference AsadAsad 2003; Reference Hirschkind and ScottHirschkind and Scott 2006). He also questions essentializing approaches toward the West as democratic and Islam as oppressive. Unearthing the convergences and divergences that have shaped the histories of Christianity and Islam, as well as their relation to the formation of the West as secular, Asad questions claims of Western civilizational superiority and, as Brown recognizes, how “Westerners” think of themselves (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 13). Asad's contribution in the text at hand begins by noting that the problem of “blasphemy” cannot be taken as solely that of Islamic intolerance. Critics of Muslim responses to the Danish cartoons linked Muslims in Europe to larger geopolitical problems, particularly to those described as “the ‘global menace’ of the Islamists” (20). Identifying Muslims in Europe as therefore a problem of global proportions, public debates about the cartoons questioned whether Muslims could ever be integrated into Western society. Asad thus situates the cartoons within the governing ideology of the global war that sees Muslims as a national and international threat, and in the history of anti‐immigrant politics within Europe. Put differently, global war, geopolitics, and imperialism, as well as European racism, are here the context for analyzing the cartoons and Muslim reactions to their publication.

The question for Asad, then, is not whether Muslims have adequate appreciation for the practice of critique. This he clarifies by stating that although his essay seeks “to think about the place of blasphemy—a religious concept—in secular liberal society,” he considers blasphemy to be a “crystallization of some moral and political problems in liberal Europe” (21). He thus shifts the focus from “the” problem of Islam to the place of religious concepts in and for a Europe that considers itself both secular and liberal.

As is well known, public debates about the cartoons pivoted on “free speech” and “democracy” as the secular principles at stake for, and supposedly adhered to by, the West. Asad's analytic frame and discussion debunk this claim. Christianity, that is, “religion,” is the grounds upon which the secularism of the West is constructed, Asad points out; with regard to free speech, he points to the class conflicts invested in the making of this freedom in the historical development of capitalism. Free speech was tied by the bourgeoisie to ownership of property; it was a right this class considered vital to the protection of its interests. Capitalist relations are thus the context for Asad's discussion of this right. Moreover, censorship of radical politics and dissident views remains ongoing in Europe, he reminds the reader. Colonialism and imperialism are also identified as factors crucial to the development of Euro‐American forms of secularism, which shaped the relations of the West to the rest of the world, including Muslim societies. Considered in light of these histories, Asad states “[i]t is not easy, therefore, to understand exactly what is being claimed when ‘democracy’ and ‘free speech’ are said to be intrinsic to ‘European civilization,’ and inequality and repression are attributed to ‘Islamic civilization’” (24).

Questioning further the conflation of human freedom and dignity with liberal democracy, Asad argues that the “substitutability” of citizen‐voters within the liberal political imaginary, like its bureaucratized practices of control and its “statistical modes of thinking and representation” are fundamental to capitalist relations, yet these practices are all implicated in “undermining the liberal notion of individual dignity” (25). Copyright laws, patents, trademarks, and so on are protected by capitalist property relations, but these curtail the “free circulation of expressions and ideas,” as do indecency and child pornography laws (28). As for the idea of individual freedom, Asad notes that suicide, slavery, and the buying and selling of organs all raise questions about the idea of the “self‐owning” human subject that underpins secular liberal democracy. In this way, Asad systematically and substantively supports his contention that it is not the curtailment of free speech by Muslim intolerance that is at stake in the cartoon controversy; rather his explication of the many constraints he outlines calls into question the idea of “free speech” itself.

Islamic, Greek, and early Christian traditions had shared understandings of the idea of free speech, as they had about faithfulness, manners, and belief, Asad explains as he questions conventional thinking about religion and the secular. These similarities unsettle the dominant binaries between the “West” and “Islam,” the “secular” and the “religious.” Drawing attention to the contradictory practices that link “secular‐critique” with “democracy‐freedom,” and both with Euro‐American capitalist societies, Asad points to the violence of the claim that “the critical attitude” distinguishes what it means to be “human,” that “moderns” can be distinguished by this “critical attitude” which they see as absent among their “others.” Within such polarizing designations, Muslims are invariably produced as “not yet morally autonomous and politically disciplined,” he concludes (56).

This privileging of the critical attitude as the grounds for the “modern” is to be found also in Foucault's work, Asad argues, which “seeks to equate critique with the Kantian notion of Enlightenment and thus to present critique as the singular characteristic of the modern West” (46). Foucault considers this “critical attitude” as enabling life to be lived “heroically,” a perspective that takes the critical attitude to be “equivalent to living in Enlightenment” (47). In this view, the heroic life is available only to the Enlightenment subject, and Asad's analysis underscores how that which is defined as heroic in the Western tradition becomes a particular kind of violence for Others, such as Muslims. Such heroism is, of course, repeatedly linked to those who published and defended the Danish cartoons, the reader will remember. These publications, and the massive demonstrations across Euro‐America in support of them (“We are all Charlie Hebdo”), were widely commended as heroic commitments to “freedom” in the face of Muslim fanaticism.

The broad survey Asad provides of the varied historical forms and uses of “criticism” and “critique,” including theological, leads him to the position that “Neither the concept nor the practice of critique has a simple history, and that genealogy has yet to be written” (48). Critique and criticism are thus shown to be enmeshed in far more complex histories than suggested in Brown's Introduction, or in the more generally self‐interested self‐presentation of the Western tradition.

Asad's essay is a compelling invitation to rethink the dominant claims made in the name of the secular, of critique, and of their internal relation to “democracy” by providing a devastating analysis of what is actually accomplished by the secular/capitalist conception of the individual as “free” and “self‐owning.” The reader is also invited to consider how the meaning of being “human” is being reconstituted in the era of global war and the consequences for the denial of this status to Muslims. It is worth noting here that although Brown explicitly acknowledges the import of Asad's critique, she turns away from taking this up substantively, that is, in a manner that may have shifted her analytic frame as presented in the Introduction. Unfortunately, the orientation she provides renders the issues discussed above secondary at best, irrelevant at worst.

Saba Mahmood's essay, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” likewise unpacks the popular dichotomy posited between religion and secularism. These concepts, she argues, were intertwined in the making of modern societies wherein secularist governance practices transformed the very meaning of “religion.” Situating the cartoon controversy in the context of an Islamic hermeneutics of iconography, she argues this is unlike the Protestant hermeneutics whose meanings are shared with secular European discourses. Unfortunately, I cannot go into the richness of her discussion here; suffice it for me to note that Mahmood makes a strong case for interrogation of the overlaps in the secularist and Protestant approaches toward iconography, and of how these work to the detriment of Muslims in Europe by reinforcing their Otherness.

Significant to the discussion at hand is Mahmood's identification of race and racism as key factors in the public and political reactions to the cartoons and to Muslim responses to these. The public reactions revealed the ways in which Muslims are presently racialized in Europe, but race was made insignificant by the single‐minded focus on the religious dimension of the controversy in the ensuing discussion. Had racism been included in the frame depicting the attacks on Muslims in these debates, Mahmood argues, European hate‐crime laws could have weighed in against the publication of the cartoons. Instead, the expulsion from the political discussion of racism as a factor made race an irrelevant issue, allowing questions of blasphemy, Islam, and Muslim intolerance to dominate the public discussion.

The injury done to Muslims by the publication of the cartoons, Mahmood believes, cannot be assuaged in the sphere of law. Attempts by Muslims to get legal redress are informed by “identity politics” that “privilege[s] the state and the law as the ultimate adjudicator of religious difference” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 68). Arguing against such reliance on the law, she defines the harm suffered by Muslims as primarily “moral,” and as such, a deeper change is required in European sensibilities if Muslims are to be afforded protection. In Mahmood's assessment, their status as minorities in Europe institutes serious limitations on Muslims’ access to legal protection, as this status is always weighted in relation to the interests and rights of majority populations. What is necessary then, Mahmood argues, is “a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the Judeo‐Christian population that undergird the cultural practices of secular‐liberal law” (89). Mahmood's essay thus centers the commonality in European/Protestant/secular hermeneutical traditions, racism, the limits of liberal‐secular law, and the Judeo‐Christian values that underpin European society in general.

In their different ways, then, Asad and Mahmood contest the conflation of “critique” with the “secular,” and of both with “freedom” and “democracy.” Asad's essay highlights the internal contradictions and incoherence of the dominant narratives that Westerners tell about, and to, themselves regarding the Western self's autonomy by highlighting the coercions that run so deep throughout the liberal‐democratic order that shapes this self. Mahmood highlights the shared Protestant/secular values that produce Muslims as alien, and to the racism that informs the status and treatment of Muslims in Europe. Mahmood's essay ends with the optimistic view that notwithstanding the virulent polemics that inform contemporary political debate, the academy “remains one of the few places where such tensions can still be explored” (92). The extent to which this may actually be the case can be seen in Judith Butler's “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood,” to which I now turn.

Reorientations

Butler's response to Asad's and Mahmood's essays begins by noting that a refusal to engage Muslim perspectives on the Danish cartoons would be tantamount to an “anti‐intellectualism that characterizes forms of moral dogmatism, whether secular or religious” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 117–18). Although one can certainly agree with this view, the more pertinent question is: What is the actual manner in which the critical intellectual attends to these perspectives? This question guides my reading of Butler's contribution to the discussion at hand.

Asad's and Mahmood's essays, Butler tells the reader, “petition us to approach the question of blasphemy and injury in another way” (102). Her engagement thus begins by situating these essays—and their authors—in the position of supplicants; after all, it is supplicants who “petition” those in positions of power. Thus Butler's alignment is with authoritative power, with the community that does not make, but receives, petitions.

Comparative work is important for fostering critical perspectives, Butler explains, and in her view, the “competing” frameworks provided by Asad and Mahmood are primarily cultural and moral. Noting that Asad and Mahmood present different meanings of the cartoon controversy, Butler asks whether in so doing they are not themselves “suspending judgment” about the events they analyze. It is not enough to provide different frameworks, she chides, because to her, “it seems most important to ask, what would judgment look like that took place” not “‘within’ one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping” (104). Asad's and Mahmood's essays are here represented as working within “one” framework, not as engaged in advancing critique at the interstices of a number of contending frameworks.

Cultural translation is certainly necessary, Butler acknowledges, as she credits Asad and Mahmood for providing this. However, she reminds them that the “descriptive” is tied to the “evaluative,” and in her view, what is required is “also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation” (104–105). Turning to Asad, she states that he does not seem to her to want to own up to his “normative commitments” (106). Butler thus seems to want Asad to specify clearly: On which side does he stand? Judgments have to be made, sides have to be chosen, and Butler certainly leaves no doubt about her own location, as amply demonstrated in the constant references to the community of the authoritative “we” that punctuate her essay.

Thus questioning Asad's “normative commitments,” Butler makes a comment that jars: “These two anthropologists are trying to get us to expand our understanding of what was at stake, but I gather they are doing this because they think not just that we should all become more knowledgeable … but also that the secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts” (105). Asad and Mahmood have certainly questioned this privileging of the secular, but two interesting moves take place here: first, Asad's and Mahmood's work is relegated to the anthropological—not politico‐philosophical—field; and second, the binary between secularism and religion that both have previously substantively—and successfully—destabilized is reinstated. This double move, I argue, creates a position of interpretive privilege for the philosopher/critical theorist over the “anthropological” work presented to her. It should be noted that even as Butler reframes the content of the two essays as “anthropological,” her own disciplinary affiliation goes unmentioned in the text, as does that of Brown. Later in the essay, Butler will identify her location through particular dis/affiliations; for now, let me stay with this surprising relegation of Asad's and Mahmood's essays to a narrowly construed disciplinarity.

What is to be made of such pointed confinement of Asad's and Mahmood's work to the field of anthropology in the context of this particular discussion? What does such a gesture enable? Let me offer one reading from an anticolonial and critical race theory perspective. Anthropology, as has been much discussed by scholars in the field, and by Asad himself, emerged as a scholarly discipline steeped in the colonial project. Indispensable to the task of colonial administration, anthropology's techniques of knowledge‐production relied upon the native informant's disclosure of precious “cultural” knowledge. In light of this history of anthropology as a vital site for the constitution and codification of difference by conflating culture with race, and both with the status of the (non)human, Butler's treatment of the two essays as anthropological‐cum‐cultural establishes asymmetrical relations among these scholars and the knowledge they produce. I cannot go into philosophy's relation to, and treatment of the “anthropological” here (Reference HanHan 2002), nor can I attend more fully to how Asad and Mahmood are here tied to the field of representation, but it ought to be noted that disciplinary relationships are not the only ones being organized here. Suffice it for now that I describe this gesture, even if somewhat indelicately, as presenting Asad and Mahmood as engaged in “culture work”—that is, production of data that is primarily cultural—while the critical, evaluative, that is, “theoretical/philosophical” work is claimed as the purview of the critical theorist/political philosopher. It is surely no coincidence that the epistemic hierarchies being set up here, significant as they are, also signify the racial politics of knowledge‐production that underpin the development of the Western philosophical tradition. It is the political philosopher who is represented here as equipped with the evaluative capacity and clarity to theorize a world of complex cultural difference.

The major criticism Butler then makes of Asad's essay is what she takes to be his inadequate comprehension of the distinction between critique and criticism, that foundational move of Western modernity's intellectual project. The conventional Western view, as mentioned earlier, is that criticism refers to the evaluation and judgment of representation in the realm of representation, whereas critique entails investigation of the conditions of representation itself (Reference HanHan 2002). In Butler's view, Asad appears mistaken in his assumption that critique and criticism both connote judgmental aspects.

It is worth taking the time here to follow this criticism of Asad, given his explicit—and substantive—rejection of the very distinction that Butler believes he has failed to grasp. Although critique “seems like a Kantian definition,” Butler argues that this has been “rewrought several times in the last few centuries with consequences for global politics within and outside the Euro‐Atlantic” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 100). Asad, the reader should remember, has argued that “critique” has a far longer history than “the last few centuries” acknowledged within the Western tradition; he has also defined Foucault's treatment of critique to be in continuity with the Kantian tradition. Butler defends Foucault as having “rewrought” the Kantian formulation—that is, critique as Enlightenment‐as‐progress—by stating that Foucault redefined critique from a constraining feature of the “regime of reason” to an “attitude” of the modern subject (113). Her claim that this reworked tradition is relevant for “outside the Euro‐Atlantic” neglects to explain the nature of this relevance; it also sets aside the substantial body of anticolonial and antiracist critique of the Western philosophical tradition, especially its tendency to the particular, as a vital feature of coloniality and raciality. Where Asad defines as self‐serving the equation of critique with Western modernity and heroic subjectivity, Butler's criticism attempts to reinstate the authoritative power of this tradition and extend its reach by claiming its (abstract) relevance for “outside the Euro‐Atlantic.”

My point is that Butler's response to Asad's critique of the Kantian tradition does not engage—but overshadows—his historically grounded analysis of the similarities to be found in formulations of critical thought among particular Christian, Islamic, and secular practices. In this light, her defense of Foucault can be read as an attempt to uphold the proprietorship claimed by the Western tradition—and its subject—over critical thought, and thereby override Asad's critique of the violence this entails. Butler's closing down of the space that Asad has opened up for thinking about the histories of critical thought can be read as suturing the ruptures in the narrative of Western exceptionalism that his critique accomplishes. Indeed, her focus on the ‘correctness’ of Asad's use of critique detracts attention from, even as it reframes, his critique of liberalism's individualizing governing practices as underwritten by the Enlightenment tradition.

With regard to Mahmood's essay, Butler's comments focus largely on Mahmood's discussion of the limitations of the law in affording protection to Muslims in Europe. As discussed earlier, Mahmood questions the workings of European secular law as well as its robust commitment to majoritarianism, a factor particularly relevant to the present treatment of Muslims as minorities in Europe. In response to Mahmood's advocacy for a transformation of European cultural sensibilities away from the prevailing Judeo‐Christian tradition, Butler questions Mahmood on the likelihood of such a change and criticizes her for not specifying how this transformation is to be accomplished. Furthermore, Butler asks whether Mahmood's suggestion for “comparative dialogue” and new ways of “thinking” might not to be taken as political strategies in themselves (124). Finally, asking whether Mahmood really believes that cultural dialogue could ever be devoid of politics (remember, it is Butler who has described Mahmood's framework as “cultural”), Butler turns away from Mahmood's hopeful view that academia could be a place where informed dialogue may yet be possible.

Summing up her assessment of both essays, Butler states that “one sometimes wonders whether the problem is not the ‘reputation’ of critique as negative, suspicious, taking religion as its object, differentiating itself from dogma, where dogma is understood to be the presumptive characteristic of religion but not of secularism” (126). Should this be the case, she clarifies the matter, “let us be clear that critique is not the same as judgment” (126). Positioning herself yet again as the authoritative voice on how “critique” is to be “really” distinguished from “criticism” and “judgment,” Butler reiterates the dominant equation of critique with Western secularism. She then delivers a coup de grace in a defense of that other binary destabilized by Asad and Mahmood, that between the Western subject as “freedom”‐orientated and the Muslim as orientated toward oppression. She does this by calling on “progressives” to support the doctrine of freedom of speech, which she presents as absolutely vital to protection of the rights of sexual/gender minorities (127). It should be remembered that freedom of speech was the lynchpin for the various arguments proffered in support of the publication of the Danish cartoons. Butler deploys these same arguments, but on the grounds of gender/sexuality, to supplant the trenchant critiques of Europe's violence against Muslims, as I discuss in the final section.

Reiterations

Taking up the politics of gender/sexuality, Butler explains that the issue of freedom of speech has divided the left. The quandary in which gays and lesbians now find themselves has been particularly painful to her, as free speech and opposition to censorship “have clearly been cornerstones of the movement for decades” (127). “So,” she continues, “it is quite understandable that there might be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as a guiding value and norm” (127). It is notable that Butler's explication of queer identity politics sets these as oppositional to, not in affiliation with, the Muslims who are under attack across Euro‐America on this issue. Implicit in this treatment of the politics of gender/sexuality is the assumption that Muslim queers either do not exist, or if they do, warrant no particular attention here.

The principle of free speech, Butler acknowledges, “does not answer the questions of whether and how that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us precisely what is meant by ‘freedom’” (127). Yet she advocates a defense of this “freedom,” even if its meaning remains unclear to the subject being thus interpellated—in a relation of antagonism to the figure of the Muslim. Presumably, then, this “freedom” is to be defended even if it functions as an organizing principle for the forms of catastrophic violence experienced by Muslims. Butler's reiteration of this principle as sacrosanct and by no means up for re‐examination does not engage, but overrides, Asad's discussion of such violence. It is here that the full ramifications of the Eurocentric and liberal political leanings of the philosophical position Butler advances become clear. Even if the queer subject remains ambivalent about the meaning of what her “freedom” means, and even if the violence entailed in this principle can no longer be disregarded, the principle itself, in its liberal‐Western formulation, is to be defended by progressives as vital to the interests of queer communities. The discursive move here is the insertion of sexuality/gender as signifier of legitimate vulnerability, unlike the racial violence directed toward Muslims. Can this gesture be read as anything other than reiteration of the coloniality of the global war, an imperialist practice articulated in the register of gender/sexuality?

Freedom is “socially conditioned and socially shared,” Butler notes in this call for a coming together of left forces to defend it (129). “The queer movement,” she states, “conceived transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination of all kinds” (122). Such representation of “the” queer movement as having been “conceived transnationally” in a fight against racism is a purely white fantasy, a romanticized whitewashing of the Eurocentrism of the queer politics whose racial/imperial investments continue to be contested by queers of color, including Muslims. In this notion of a supposedly harmonious rainbow past, Butler engages in what Jin Haritaworn have astutely dubbed “queer nostalgia,” the supposition that a unitary gay/queer politics prevailed in a mythic golden past (Reference HaritawornHaritaworn 2015). As Haritaworn argue such nostalgia enables the suppression of the antiracist and anti‐imperialist queer politics of queers of color in the present.

Clarifying her relation to this transnational queer politics, Butler explains, “Of course there is also a now entrenched tension between identity‐based and alliance‐based sexual minority politics, and my affiliation with ‘queer’ is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference” (Reference Mahmood, Butler, Brown and AsadMahmood et al. 2009, 128). The distinguishing of identity‐based from alliance‐based queer politics, with its elevation of alliance over identity, is a strategy that has effectively undermined antiracist politics for the past several decades, for it is antiracist activists who are everywhere charged with the retrograde essentialization of identity. Hence even as Butler draws upon her own identity and experience as member of an activist queer community, she declares herself above such identity politics.

The particular formulation of queer politics presented here (which overlooks the politics of Muslim and other queers of color) and the linkage with the defense of “critique” and “freedom of speech” as Western secular values, I argue, functions to displace Asad's and Mahmood's analysis of the violence done to Muslims in the name of these very values. Such a defense of free speech displaces the figure of the Muslim (assumed to be heteronormative and queer‐unfriendly) with the insertion of the figure of the queer (assumed to be Euro‐American) as emblematic of the vulnerable yet heroic subject. It is this situating of the queer subject at the forefront of the politico‐philosophical tradition on the grounds of progressive queer politics that enables this subject's representation as the embodiment of the Western tradition's highest commitments. The Western tradition is here advanced by a double move: first is the overriding of the critique of liberal‐capitalist freedoms arising from the historical and contemporary experience of Muslims and exploited Others, which reveals the violence of this liberal order; second is the collapsing of this critique with the threat to the “freedom” of the Westernizing queer subject.

In the robust defense of “freedom” as conceived of in liberal‐capitalist egalitarian formulations, Butler states that “Some crucial part of freedom of speech involves ‘speaking out,’ which means, invariably, speaking out within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization” (134). But this “rethinking of the processes of minoritization” is articulated to the majoritarian politics of Euro‐America vis à vis Muslim minorities; this “speaking out” is harnessed to the heroic speaking subject as Western and white, albeit queer. Left uninterrogated are the asymmetrical relations of power within and between those constituted as minorities. The racial majoritarian perspective (white) is used here—even if presented as minoritarian (queer)—to render unintelligible the critiques arising from the experience of Muslims‐as‐minorities in Euro‐America, and the critiques of the colonial/racial politics of liberal egalitarianism that have been “spoken” by Asad and Mahmood. The political space for the “speaking” of the subject is thus harnessed to a liberal individualism that becomes the condition that makes her speech audible. This Westernizing subject's “speaking” functions to obscure the violent “silencing,” for lack of a better word, of Muslims‐as‐minorities.

The privileging of the identity, experience, and perspective of the white queer self as the singular model of queer, left, and progressive politics, and the defense of “freedom of speech” as the sole paradigm for such politics, presents liberal Westernity as the only desired political horizon. The subject with the power to “speak out,” notwithstanding her “vulnerability,” indeed whose “vulnerability” makes her the subject worthy of protection in her encounter with “the” Muslim, reinscribes the racial, colonial, and gender/sexual politics of the West in the register of a white, queer, liberal politics of progress. Butler's defense of freedom of speech raises the question: What are the “specific scenes of address” in which the hated and disenfranchised Muslim can actually “speak out”?

The realignment of the historical entanglement of gender‐sexual politics with race and imperialism is taken up in insightful ways by critical and queer scholars of color who rethink these politics through the lens of the imperialism of global war (Reference MassadMassad 2007; Reference PuarPuar 2007; Reference HaritawornHaritaworn 2015). In Terrorist Assemblages, Puar argues that US liberal exceptionalism expanded during the war to incorporate homosexuality as part of its national exceptionalism (Reference PuarPuar 2007). Tracking how constructs of homosexuality and nation are redefined within political and media discourses, Puar shows how a normative white queerness is enfolded into the nation to advance its imperialism abroad, a phenomenon she names homonationalism. Haritaworn unpacks how “hate”—the hegemonic paradigm for queer activism—produces “queer lovers” in opposition to “hateful Others,” particularly Muslims (Reference HaritawornHaritaworn 2015). Demonstrating how the charge of “hate” sticks to the racialized Muslim body, Haritaworn argue this paradigm condemns Muslims and other racial minorities to the death‐worlds expanded by contemporary imperialist militarization. Butler's presentation of queer politics as devoid of such antiracist and anticolonial politics deepens the sexual imperialism of the former.

The reworking in Butler's essay of the Western tradition to advance the status of the white sexual subject is reliant upon the treatment of this subject as truly receptive to the promise of freedom. In contrast to this deserving subject, the Muslim becomes the one who threatens the former's freedom. It is in defense of this heroic queer subject that a vindication of liberal principles is articulated, a subject presented here as capable of teaching Muslims a thing or two about the value of “freedom.” That this iteration of liberal freedom comes in response to Asad's theoretical demolishing of its notions of autonomy—and dignity—is surely not insignificant.

Upending Westernity?

Antiracist and anticolonial politics and knowledge‐production, including those arising from the experiences of Muslims, are contesting and unsettling dominant narratives of the onto‐epistemological tradition that underwrites the idea of Western superiority. In this article, I have undertaken a close reading of Is Critique Secular?, which features the work of a number of prominent critical scholars/public intellectuals who address issues crucial to the present reformation of global politics. The exchange among them provides an exceptional opportunity for exploring the workings of epistemic power, privilege, and authority, and for studying how hegemonic and counter‐hegemonic narratives and theoretical traditions are negotiated and reworked. My reading delineates a number of discursive strategies that serve to Westernize feminist‐queer scholars/hip and activism as these enact the very relations of power they set out to question and possibly undo.

The analysis I have presented delineates specific practices in the field of the politico‐philosophical tradition of the West that work to suppress historically grounded counter‐hegemonic narratives that challenge its claim to superiority. These practices, which I define as Westernizing, include reiteration of the binary between religion and secularism, and the West and Islam, to eject from the epistemic field the critiques that contest these binaries and the violence they organize. I have also discussed how the deployment of gender‐sexual politics extends the Western project to constitute the subject of this West as white and queer. Asad and Mahmood, who debunk essentialist definitions of the West by deconstructing its concepts and practices, expand the dialogical space in presenting contesting narratives of liberal democracy and its particular forms of violence in the context of Muslim experiences, perspectives, and interpretive traditions. These critiques disorient and destabilize the idea of Western exceptionalism.

I have argued that the Westernizing subject responds to such contestations by reorientating herself toward the Western tradition to expel from the analytic frame Other narratives, thus redefining and extending the reach of this tradition, in this case, through the politics of sexuality/gender. As the gender/sexual subject stabilizes this politico‐philosophical tradition by claiming its authoritative power, she becomes situated at its forefront. Putting aside a valuable opportunity to engage the transformative potential of counter‐narratives that foreground anti‐imperialist and antiracist critiques, this Westernizing subject instead reiterates an alliance with the liberal paradigm while reframing “transnational” queer activism to recenter Westernity. So much for the “spirit” of upending the Western tradition.