From the editors:

In this issue, we feature an interview with Saba Mahmood, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of a highly influential and much debated book, The Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. The interview was conducted by Dr. Seda Altuğ, of the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University.

On October 19, 2015, Mahmood gave a lecture at Boğaziçi University entitled “Minority Rights, Geopolitics and Secular Governance,” which was based on her most recent book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. The talk could not have been more timely for the Turkish audience: it was becoming all too clear, even for its supporters, that the Turkish government’s policy toward the war in Syria and the broader Middle East was a disaster. Harsh criticisms were being leveled against the Islamist government for the sectarian motives behind its foreign policy making, and the public debate in Turkey ended up being framed, once again, along the axis of secularism vs. Islamism. Mahmood’s talk, however, intended to problematize this very binary and remind the mostly secular-minded audience that secularism, as a major component of liberal political rationality, has its own perils.

The book on which the talk was based fulfills a major and very difficult, indeed daunting, task: that of critiquing secularism amidst the neverending and quite loud talk claiming that “secularism” is the cure for the ills of the Middle East as a region and Islam as a religion. Certainly not wishing to deny or forego the political gains realized by the pratice of secularism, Mahmood nevertheless suggests that this practice needs to be subjected to a critical genealogy in order to see what power structures it enables and what effects it produces. She argues that secularism must be analyzed as part of the global liberal project of governance and, as such, must also be problematized and critiqued together with similar creations of liberal political rationality, such as the concept and practice of sovereignty. Mahmood’s work does not offer easy answers, but therein lies its promise: her work invites and challenges us to re-think the categories with which we think and make sense of the Middle East. Such a challenge is essential for a truly progressive engagement with politics.

In answering Seda Altuğ’s questions, Saba Mahmood elaborates on these points, discusses her most recent book, and connects the arguments in this book to the general line of scholarship that she has produced so far. At a time when the Middle East is yet again in flames and the severity of religious violence has risen to new historical heights, Mahmood’s work is relevant for anyone even remotely interested in the broader Middle East and Islam at large. So this interview, we hope and believe, will be of interest to all of our readers.

As the editorial team, we wish to thank Emine Fişek for helping us arrange the interview with Saba Mahmood, and Seda Altuğ for conducting it.

Seda Altuğ: My first question concerns your intellectual career. As a historian, I find it brilliant that you have worked on and formed a dialogue between two entirely different topics, Islam and the minority question, each having its particular debates, archives, and regimes of truth, as well as almost mutually exclusive historiographical traditions. Could you please tell us about your intellectual journey and how you relate these two projects?

Saba Mahmood: My questions in these two studies are related but also distinct in many ways. In my first book, Politics of Piety,Footnote ¹ I was motivated by a set of theoretical questions about the nature of politics that Islamic movements make possible, and how these movements challenge our assumptions about the relationship between ethics and politics, conceptions of freedom and agency, and feminist politics. In my recently published book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age,Footnote ² I am concerned with questions of state power, nationalism, secularism, and the legacy of Ottoman and colonial rule in the management of religious minorities in the modern period. Despite these differences, in both projects I aim to challenge reigning assumptions in liberal political theory about what constitutes ethical and political struggle in our world today.

SA: You are one of the few scholars to engage with the historical and anthropological particularity of the Middle East while at the same time developing theoretical and conceptual tools to analyze this material. Can you please tell us the ways in which you deal with history?

SM: I think history is very important to think with. I strongly believe that no analytical vocabulary or theory is innocent of history: they are always predicated on certain understandings of human history—or, for that matter, what the human is. Those of us who work in the Middle East have a dual charge: to parochialize the European history that is taken for granted by various theorists and to explore how our theoretical concepts should be developed to analyze developments in the Middle East. So if we’re going to actually work with “theory,” then we have to rethink the historical material and presumptions that are embedded in them from the ground up.

SA: Exactly. Reading about Copts in Religious Difference in a Secular Age made me recall Ussama Makdisi’s work on sectarianism and his argument that sectarianism is actually a question of religion and modernity. He claims that sectarian identities were produced in nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon, in the midst of Ottoman reform and increasing European encroachment, through a reconfigured relationship between religion and politics. In a similar vein, you argue that religious difference is created and produced by the state, which is the regulator and the producer of this religious difference. Can you elaborate on this point?

SM: Obviously Ussama Makdisi’s work is very important in opening up the question of how religious sectarianism came about in Lebanon. I do not use the term sectarianism in my work because I’m not sure if it is very helpful as an analytical tool for thinking about the role modern secularism has played in exacerbating religious conflict. It is also a term that I think fails to illuminate the structural similarities that exist in how minorities are created and treated under the system of modern nation-states across geographical divides; for example, between the Middle East and Euro-America.

SA: Such as?

SM: Well, for instance, the treatment of blacks and Native Americans in the United States, the Jews in twentieth-century Europe, or Muslims today. So, while I think that sectarianism may be a helpful term in describing a particular kind of consocial model for the distribution of political power in Lebanon, I’m not sure it is useful in a lot of other contexts that I was trying to think about in Religious Difference in a Secular Age. In this book, I was interested in thinking about how minorities, especially religious minorities, were historically created under the system of modern nation-states, and how secularism ends up working against the very ideal of religious equality that it has popularized, for the first time in human history, at a mass scale. I wanted to understand how religious difference has been historically managed under different political systems, and the unique contradictions and paradoxes that haunt the secular liberal management of religious difference in the modern period.

SA: In the introduction of Religious Difference in a Secular Age, you talk about the differences between the imperial mode of the management of religious difference and the liberal notion of plurality. Can you please elaborate on this point? In particular, the differences between the ways in which the politics of religious difference was dealt with in the Ottoman Empire and the modern nation-state. The liberal model justifies communal autonomy in terms of groups versus individual rights, whereas in the Ottoman Empire—and not only the Ottomans, but in classical empires in general—communal autonomy was justified in terms of a political order in which difference was paramount, and the Ottomans did not wish to transform this difference into sameness. What would you say about this?

SM: I agree with the picture you have just given. But it is important to clarify why I engage certain aspects of Ottoman history in Religious Difference in a Secular Age. First, I wanted to track two different political rationalities, each with its own characteristic forms of violence and inequality, so as to make legible two different ways of handling religious difference within a polity. Second, I was interested in how certain aspects of the Ottoman management of religious difference persist into the present, albeit in highly transmogrified form; the chapter on religion-based family law is, for example, an elaboration on this theme. Third, late Ottoman history helped me elaborate how geopolitical inequality—between Europe and what is now called the Middle East—has structured the emergence and development of secularism in the region. So certain aspects of Ottoman history were interesting for me to think with in order to understand the theoretical character of modern secularism in the Middle East.

SA: You have argued that the modern nation-state is different from the imperial one. And yet, in the literature, there is also a differentiation between liberal Western European nation-states and non-Western authoritarian states in terms of the way in which they manage religious difference. You argue against this differentiation. Why and how?

SM: Yes, I believe that the hard distinction drawn between liberal and authoritarian states is unhelpful because it does not adequately address the modality of political rule that is shared globally across the geographical divide between Western and non-Western states.

Think, for example, about what is happening under the national security state in North America or parts of Europe, where all kinds of civil liberties and constitutional rights have been violated and mass surveillance has made a mockery of the right to privacy. Would you therefore say that these states are not really liberal, or is it rather the case that the usual hard-line distinction we make between liberal and authoritarian forms of rule is in fact far more porous? The use of sovereign power to suspend the law is an intrinsic part of the normative structure of liberal legality, as Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben have argued. So I am interested in exploring the political rationality shared across Middle Eastern and Euro-American states. This does not mean that the differences are not important, but these differences need to be thought through a model of governance that is also globally shared.

Secondly, I would say that this distinction between authoritarian and liberal states frames the history of an entire region of the world, as an exception to the unfolding of liberalism, which is understood to be largely a Euro-American project. Consequently, many liberal concepts, institutions, and political rationalities that have transformed the Middle East are seldom analyzed as part of the history of liberalism. For example, let’s take the secular liberal ideal of religious equality. In the modern period, it is both an aspiration and a legal concept that informs various laws and constitutions in Middle Eastern states. Even the most authoritarian states—like Baathist Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Israel—purport to uphold it in some form or another. And when they do not, they are subjected to critique by activists nationally and internationally. In other words, the legal concept of religious equality, as a civil right, has been profoundly transformative of how religious inequality is conceived of and contested in the Middle East. This transformation and contestation needs to be understood as part of the history of liberal secularism in the Middle East.

Samera Esmeir’s book Juridical Humanity Footnote ³ is a very interesting attempt to think about this issue. Her argument is that you have to go to the colonies, and particularly the adoption of positive law in colonial Egypt, to actually think about what constitutes the human in liberal law. Rather than treat colonial law as an aberration of liberal legality, she instead analyzes the colonial archive in order to ask what it teaches us about the nature of liberal legality.

SA: Now I want to move to the meaning of religious liberty. As you argue in your book, religious liberty is not a stable signifier: it means different things to different people. Moreover, the promotion of religious liberty has been on the agenda of nation-states as well as the colonial state. So religious liberty is not only a judicial category, but also a technique of national and international governance. As such, in what ways do you think it may or may not provide protection to minorities?

SM: My argument about the right to religious liberty is part of a larger examination of the modern career of political secularism in Egypt through the institutionalization of five of its signature ideas: political and civil rights, religious liberty, minority rights, public order, and the legal distinction between public and private. As I argue in the book, the inescapable quality of secularism emanates in part from the structure of the modern liberal state, which promises to demolish premodern forms of hierarchy in order to create a polity where all citizens are supposed to be formally equal in the eyes of the law. This promise, we might recall, was linked to a foundational critique of ascriptive inequality and a recalibration of particularistic forms of belonging. The modern political subject had to subordinate fealty to his religion, locale, and clan to loyalty to the nation-state. In the nineteenth century, the liberatory promise of political and civil equality transformed how non-Muslim subjects of Islamic empires came to understand themselves in relation to the state. They were no longer destined to remain unequal by virtue of their faith, as membership in the modern polity promised to allow them to stand as equals with Muslims. A key dimension of this transformation was the legal and political elaboration of the public-private divide, a duality crucial to the development of other modern distinctions, such as secular/religious, political/civil, and universal/parochial. When Coptic Christians, at the turn of the twentieth century, tried to find themselves in this abstract language of citizenship, their Christianity posed fundamental, if familiar, problems. Their enfranchisement was predicated upon their willingness to privatize their Christianity, precisely because their religious difference was deemed to be inconsequential to their public, political, and legal status. This circumscription of Coptic Christianity within the private domain went hand in hand with the enshrinement of Islam as the collective identity of the nation.

A close reading of the minutes of the committee charged with drafting the first constitution of Egypt in 1923 reveals the impossible challenge faced by all the protagonists—Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and secularist. Given the religious inequality that permeated Egyptian society and the majoritarian thrust of the parliament, some drafters had proposed that minorities be granted proportionate representation, as a means to secure their voice in the government. Such a solution, however, seemed to lodge religious difference into the very heart of a political system that eschewed religious distinctions. On the one hand, civil and political equality in the eyes of the law meant that the state had to be indifferent to the religious affiliation of its citizens; on the other hand, because religious inequalities and differences characterized the society, state law was being called upon to manage and redress them. How could a state that sought to eliminate religious inequality do so without making religious difference part of its political vocabulary? A second dilemma emanated from the circular relationship between the nation and the state. Was the state transcendent above the nation, or was it rather constituted by it? If the state was constituted by the nation, then shouldn’t its laws reflect its cultural, religious, and ethnic particularity? The seemingly technical issue of proportionate minority representation in fact encompassed the far deeper question of how religious inequality could be redressed in a polity whose laws were supposed to be indifferent to religion. Faced with these dilemmas, all proposals to secure special rights and protections for minorities were rejected by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, in favor of the abstract language of equality in the 1923 constitution. Strikingly, after the popular overthrow of the Mubarak regime, when Egyptians once again debated the question of proportionate minority representation in 2012, similar questions dominated the debate—a resonance that attests to the structural paradoxes that continue to haunt the secular promise of religious equality today.

It is tempting to view the difficulties Egyptians have encountered in instituting minority rights as a parochial story specific to Islamic societies. Yet it behooves us to think critically about the structural challenges most religious minorities face within the framework of the nation-state, not only in the Middle East, but also in Western European societies regarded as paradigms of secular liberalism.

SA: Now I would like to move on to your groundbreaking work Politics of Piety and connect it with your new work. You argue that secularism and religion are intertwined and that one implicates the other. Could you please elaborate on the ways in which modern secularism transforms religious identity and inter-faith relations?

SM: There are various changes involved in the transformation of religion from the pre-modern to the modern period. One of these that I’ve been interested in tracking in my new book is to try to think of how religious identity came to be mapped onto national identity, and how this in itself transformed inter-religious relations across communities.

SA: That was exactly what I was going to ask you to delve into.

SM: I think that once this happens, you’re in a very different world than before. So, for example, in the Ottoman period, being a Muslim or a Christian did not map onto a territorially defined nation-state. You could be Greek Orthodox without being a “Greek national” in the modern sense of the term. So the coming together of the Greek Orthodox Church with the Greek nation is a suturing together of two very different formations.

SA: My point actually concerned the relation between religious and secular allegiances and how one’s religious identity made sense only in the presence of other secular belongings.

SM: Well, I wouldn’t say that in the modern period religion becomes the only axis of identity, because of course you have hyphenated identities that suture different attributes together, such as, for example, Turkish-Kurd or Algerian-Berber.

However, what is unique in the modern period is the way that religion or ethnicity come to be mapped onto national identity. And this is not only the case in the Middle East, but in Europe as well. For instance, European secular identity does not transcend Christianity: on the contrary, it presumes Christianity as the ground from which secular European identity emanates. Many key theorists—such as Charles Taylor, Marcel Gauchet, and Jürgen Habermas—take Europe’s Christian heritage to be crucial to the birth of secularism as such. This is in part because secularism is part and parcel of the consolidation of the nation-state as the primary political form in the modern period: all claims of popular sovereignty need to be grounded in a shared language, history, culture, and religion that are congruent with territorial borders.

Of course, the clearest example of this is the state of Israel. There were two very different kinds of movements among European Jews prior to the Holocaust. One argued that the only way forward for the Jews was to secure a Jewish nation-state that would ensure the security of the Jewish people; this was the Zionist argument. The other argument was that the Jewish people were a diaspora whose survival depended on improving European social, political, and economic conditions for European Jews and integrating them into mainstream European society. As we know, this second vision basically failed to prevail, in large part because, by that time, the idea that a people could only survive if they had their own nation-state had become hegemonic. As Hannah Arendt remarks, at this point the concepts of the nation—that is, a people—and the state had become sutured together to such an extent that popular sovereignty became the only means by which a people could imagine realizing themselves. This argument, by the way, was also crucial in the emergence and eventually the success of anti-colonial movements.

SA: Continuing with Politics of Piety, one of the criticisms that has been brought against the book is that it resists a universalization of freedom, disassociates the politics of feminism from progressive politics, and claims that there should be a radical change in the feminist understanding of agency. Could you briefly respond to such criticisms of cultural relativism and the change in the feminist understanding of agency and feminist politics?

SM: I think there’s been a misreading of the book. One of the misreadings is that what I’m saying is that feminist politics should be unhinged from progressive politics. I never argued that. I think it would be absurd to argue that. I myself do not practice a feminist politics that is unmoored from progressive politics, so why would I prescribe this to others? What I argued in the book was that feminism is not only a political but also an analytical project, and there is a distinction between the two. That doesn’t mean that one is good and the other is bad, or that one is more important than the other. But it does mean that there’s a tension between feminism as a political project and feminism as an analytical project, because the goals and the labor involved in each are different. The goal of feminist politics is to create a better world for women, one that is more equitable for women. The goal of feminist analytics is to try to understand how subordination is reproduced. Now, in order to understand this, we actually have to ask a set of questions that might unsettle the telos of freedom that feminist politics presumes. So the book tries to actually enact this tension in order to show, via a study of the Egyptian women’s dawa (piety) movement, that many of the presumptions that are central to feminist politics are actually not at play in or are challenged by these reform movements. So the question I posed was this: how is women’s subordination reproduced when the very analytical structure that we presume to follow from feminist politics does not actually hold? How do we understand this form of domination, submission, agency? Now, to ask such questions is not to say that feminist politics should be abandoned. But it is to say that, if we’re interested in changing women’s lives in relation to how Islam is being lived, we actually have to deal with the terms on the basis of which that domination is reproduced. We have to engage these terms seriously from within, and not simply call them false ideology. We have to take these concepts seriously and ask what challenges these concepts pose to what we presume are universally valid concepts and desires, such as freedom and the desire to speak truth to power or to maximize one’s individual autonomy.

SA: You have already reflected on this point, but would you like to elaborate on the continuities between your earlier work and your most recent book, as well as the broader intellectual project into which you see yourself fitting? The last answer you gave concerning secularism and the need to deeply analyze the analytics of power in different local contexts, is very important—but I was wondering if you could more specifically reflect on your work and tell us about what continuities you see and what you want to pursue, perhaps in the future, in your upcoming projects?

SM: It’s always hard to characterize one’s own work. But I think that my work is driven by the contemporary political landscape that we confront as post-colonial subjects. I feel like we have reached an impasse wherein two very powerful political imaginaries that used to be able to serve us have come under increasing strain. The first of these is the anti-colonial, post-colonial nationalist vision that promised to deliver us from subjection both to Western power and to national elites, in order to create a more just, democratic, and equitable society. The second is the secular vision that religion would eventually become less important to our societies, that we would overcome the inequalities that religion had spawned and create a society without trenchant religious hierarchies. These two political imaginaries have not been realized, and they no longer characterize our horizon of expectation.

My attempt is to understand how we got here and what the way forward is. I think the way forward cannot be built on the same set of assumptions that got us here. So, I would say, my first and most important challenge to myself is that all that which I hold dear—secular politics, progressive politics, revolutionary politics, feminist politics—be critically reexamined and reassessed so as to disentangle what in these visions was profoundly compromised, and the role they played in creating the current impasse we are in, rather than simply blame it on a single external causality like patriarchy, colonialism, jihadism, or capitalism. Now, it’s important to stress that I’m not saying that we should abandon these political projects simply because they are in distress. My hope is that by understanding the imbrication of liberatory projects with those we consider to be their opposites, perhaps we can get a better sense of what got us here, so that we may move forward without repeating our mistakes.

SA: Thank you very much.

SM: Thank you.