Part 3: Postsecular, Postcolonial, Postliberal: Making Connections
The remainder of this essay extends some of these more recent efforts to consider how paying attention to the secular can help make more visible mechanisms of exclusion, again with the hope of imagining other forms of social connection. In considering alliances between Jews and Muslims, I draw on the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood on Muslims and secularization. From a different angle, Mahmood helps open up these seemingly otherwise invisible mechanisms of exclusion and what is at stake in articulating a postsecular criticism.
Writing about the modern phenomenon of secularism and the idea of religious tolerance in her essay “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Mahmood explains:
In this account, modern secularism emerges in the seventeenth century as a political solution intended to end the European Wars of Religion by establishing a lowest common denominator among the doctrines of conflicting Christian sects and by defining a political ethic altogether independent of religious doctrines. The realization of these goals was dependent, of course, upon the centralization of state authority and a concomitant demarcation of society into political, economic, religious, and familial domains whose contours could then be mapped and subjected to the calculus of state rule. In this narrative, both the ethics of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience are considered to be goods internal to the doctrinal separation that secularism institutes between operations of the state and church, between politics and religion. The assumption is that the state, by virtue of its declared neutrality towards specific religious truth claims, makes religious goals indifferent to the exercise of politics, and, in so doing, ensures that religion is practiced without coercion, out of individual choice and personal assent. In so much as liberalism is about the regulation of individual and collective liberties, it is the principle of freedom of conscience that makes secularism central to liberal political philosophy in this account. 1
This is Mahmood’s starting point. It is a succinct encapsulation of the broader contours of liberalism’s historical relationship to religion and its efforts to both separate from religion and to tolerate religious difference. It also prefigures many of the problems I have already discussed. Before challenging the deeply troubling implications of U.S. attempts to reform Islam in the name of religious tolerance, Mahmood goes on to argue:
Recent scholarship offers some interesting challenges to the idea that liberal secularism primarily consists in securing a form of governance orchestrated around these two principles of freedom and restraint. Some scholars suggest that the so-called firewall separation between church and state does not adequately describe how religion and modern governance are constitutively intertwined …. 2
Challenging further this claim of separation, Mahmood goes on to show how this imbrication continues to pose problems. American efforts to promote religious pluralism remain fraught. What I find most compelling in Mahmood’s analysis is the ways she argues that liberal discourse itself produces acceptable forms of religious subjectivity in the name of tolerance. As she explains:
The political solution secularism proffers, I am arguing, lies not so much in tolerating difference and diversity but in remaking certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use of violence) so as to render them compliant with liberal political rules. Critics who want to make secularism’s claim to tolerance more robust must deal with this normative impetus internal to secularism, an impetus that reorganizes subjectivities in accord with a modality of political rule that is itself retrospectively called “a religiously neutral political ethic.” 3
This dynamic reorganization of subjectivity echoes political theorist Wendy Brown’s account of the legacy of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe. As Brown explains:
To be brought into the nation, Jews had to be made to fit, and for that they needed to be transformed, cleaned-up and normalized, even as they were still marked as Jews. These triple forces of recognition, remaking, and marking—of emancipation, assimilation, and identification as different—are what characterize the relation of the state to Jews in nineteenth-century Europe and constitute the tacit regime of tolerance governing Jewish emancipation. 4
As I have argued elsewhere, these efforts to reform Jews to remake them into acceptable others within liberal nation-states, challenges the very terms of Jewish difference and who gets to define what it means to claim a Jewish position. In fact, I used this passage from Brown to frame my account of the demise of secular Yiddish forms of Jewish expression in twentieth century America. 5 As I noted then, the problems Brown raises are very much the concerns that the last generation of Jewish secularists confronted as they tried to imagine a future for their communities. Returning to these issues in light of Mahmood’s essay, I am struck by the connections. These critiques resonate with the account of Hebert Parzen, one of the last of the secular Yiddishists I wrote about. As Parzen explained:
The Jewish communities, during the stormy struggle for emancipation and enlightenment in the nineteenth century, achieved adjustment to the general social order on the primary basis of religious tolerance. […] The Synagogue was, accordingly, the primary instrument of adjustment to modern life, and acknowledged as the center of Jewish loyalty and identification. 6
For Parzen, such adjustment required that his Jewishness be remade in order for him to fit in as a recognizable and acceptable Jew in the United States. There was no room for a Jewish subjectivity that was not already figured in religious terms, even in the secular American state. For me these accounts make clear how in the name of inclusion and an appreciation of difference, others—in this case Jews and Muslims—are strangely forced to contort themselves into an acceptable and contained form of their Jewish or Muslim identities. This contortion makes explicit how much pressure is placed on others to reform themselves within a liberal pluralist vision of inclusion. This is the shared price of acceptance that perhaps we might begin to draw on together in order to imagine a different future.
