Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt

HUSSEIN ALI AGRAMA is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01069-4 (paper)

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Agrama, Hussein Ali.

Questioning secularism : Islam, sovereignty, and the rule of law in modern Egypt / Hussein Ali Agrama.

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ISBN 0-226-01068-6 (cloth : alkaline paper)

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ISBN 978-0-226-01070-0 (e-book)

ISBN 0-226-01070-8 (e-book) 1. Rule of law—Egypt. 2. Islamic law—Egypt. 3. Islam and state—Egypt. 4. Fatwas—Egypt. 5. Abu Zayd, Nasr Hamid—Trials, litigation, etc. I. Title. II. Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning.

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Questioning Secularism

Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt

HUSSEIN ALI AGRAMA

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

CHICAGO STUDIES IN PRACTICES OF MEANING

Edited by Jean Comaroff, Andreas Glaeser, William Sewell, and Lisa Wedeen

Also in the series:

THE GENEALOGICAL SCIENCE: THE SEARCH FOR JEWISH ORIGINS AND THE POLITICS OF EPISTEMOLOGY by Nadia Abu El-Haj

NEOLIBERAL FRONTIERS: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF SOVEREIGNTY IN WEST AFRICA by Brenda Chalfin

ETHNICITY, INC. by John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff

INCLUSION: THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE IN MEDICAL RESEARCH by Steven Epstein

POLITICAL EPISTEMICS: THE SECRET POLICE, THE OPPOSITION, AND THE END OF EAST GERMAN SOCIALISM by Andreas Glaeser

PRODUCING INDIA: FROM COLONIAL ECONOMY TO NATIONAL SPACE by Manu Goswami

THE MORAL NEOLIBERAL: WELFARE AND CITIZENSHIP IN ITALY by Andrea Muehlebach

THE MAKING OF ROMANTIC LOVE: LONGING AND SEXUALITY IN EUROPE, SOUTH ASIA, AND JAPAN, 900–1200 CE by William Reddy

LAUGHING AT LEVIATHAN: SOVEREIGNTY AND AUDIENCE IN WEST PAPUA by Danilyn Rutherford

BENGAL IN GLOBAL CONCEPT HISTORY: CULTURALISM IN THE AGE OF CAPITAL by Andrew Sartori

PARITÉ! SEXUAL EQUALITY AND THE CRISIS OF FRENCH UNIVERSALISM by Joan Wallach Scott

LOGICS OF HISTORY: SOCIAL THEORY AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION by William Sewell

BEWITCHING DEVELOPMENT: WITCHCRAFT AND THE REINVENTION OF DEVELOPMENT IN NEOLIBERAL KENYA by James Howard Smith

THE DEVIL’S HANDWRITING: PRECOLONIALITY AND THE GERMAN COLONIAL STATE IN QINGDAO, SAMOA, AND SOUTHWEST AFRICA by George Steinmetz

PERIPHERAL VISIONS: PUBLICS, POWER, AND PERFORMANCE IN YEMEN by Lisa Wedeen

FOR MY PARENTS

ALI AGRAMA

NADIA ELHAMY

Contents

Preface

Introduction: A Secular or a Religious State?

CHAPTER 1. The Legalization of Hisba in the Case of Nasr Abu Zayd

CHAPTER 2. The Indeterminacies of Secular Power: Sovereignty, Public Order, and Family

CHAPTER 3. A Paradox of Islamic Authority in Modern Egypt

CHAPTER 4. Law’s Suspicion

CHAPTER 5. What Is a Fatwa?: Authority, Tradition, and the Care of the Self

CHAPTER 6. Islamist Lawyers in the Egyptian Emergency State: A Different Language of Justice?

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Preface

I finished the manuscript of this book in the thrall of victory. On February 11, 2011, after massive, patient, resolute, and continual protest by Egyptians in all parts of the country, Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down from his thirty-year reign. Egyptians from all walks of life engaged in massive celebrations, and their jubilation touched the entire world that watched. I heard a story about an Egyptian passing through US Customs and Immigration. When the immigration officer found out he was Egyptian, the officer announced it to the crowds waiting in line; people erupted in applause.

It was my genuine hope, as I finished this book about secularism and religion in Egypt, that it would quickly become a work of historical anthropology, even a period piece of a bygone era, surpassed by a new time of unknown potential and possibility inaugurated by this unprecedented moment in Egyptian history. And yet this was where some of my celebratory sentiments began to wane. For I was addressing one of modern Egypt’s most long-standing questions: whether it is, and is to be, a secular or a religious state. And I was writing about one of its oldest, most durable institutions: its judiciary system. I was also concerned with a paradigm that has touched not only Egypt but has attained a nearly global dominance as well: the national security paradigm, which has increasingly normalized the state of emergency and has made us increasingly disposed toward it. A long-standing and increasingly pronounced question, a durable and entrenched institution, and a globally dominant paradigm: will this book speak to the time before and after the Egyptian uprising?

If not, then let it be one document of the decade that preceded and led up to it. One of the central arguments of the book is that Egypt is not stuck in the past, clamoring for a future that Western democratic states have already attained. Rather, with its deeply entrenched and normalized state of emergency and its decades-old war on terror, the kind of state Egypt has become represents one potential secular future toward which Western democratic states are moving. Whether this book speaks to the now or then of Egypt, I maintain that it speaks to the today and tomorrow of secular democratic states in the West.

Beyond the resignation of Mubarak, I see the uprising in Egypt as animated by and expressing a number of related, fundamental principles. One of them is that no one person or group should have a monopoly on power—neither Christians nor Muslims, neither secular nor religious groups. During the protests, no one person, group, or ideological tendency emerged as the leader; all efforts were deliberately collaborative. Another is that the national security paradigm, which has gripped Egypt for so long and all the more tightly under the pretext of a war on religious terror, must be completely dismantled. It should be remembered that much of the animus of the protesters was aimed at the Ministry of the Interior, which directed the massive state security apparatus that had come to define the state. To put all of this another way, we could say that the protesters decoupled the question of religion and secularity from the question of security. In decoupling these questions from each other, they articulated a space free from the demands of both. But I will say more about this in the epilogue.

During the protests many people asked me what I thought the best outcome for the United States would be. The question, I admit, perplexed me, for it seemed that one ought to wonder about what the best outcome for Egyptians would be. But thinking about the underlying principles that animated the protests, I think I might now have an answer to this question. The best outcome for the United States would be if Americans learned from the Egyptians’ example. The United States, like Egypt, has long been gripped by the national security paradigm; its security apparatuses have grown all the more powerful with the War on Terror, which it conducts both domestically and globally with devastating effect, and political power has been concentrated in the hands of a very few. It may be time in the United States as well to decouple the question of religion/secularity from that of security, and defuse the monopoly on political power that attenuates the possibilities of its democratic ideals. Recent events in Egypt may teach us the possibilities and pitfalls of such an attempt. However things turn out, Egyptians have taught an important but simple lesson that I think is finally starting to dawn upon us everywhere: that our leaders cannot save us from the futures we so fear. Whatever hope there is left, is entirely in our own hands.

The thanks I owe to those who helped me with this book would easily fill the pages of another. The acknowledgments I offer here, being necessarily brief, cannot convey my gratitude for the enormous support given me throughout this project. Here, however, I must pause to express my deepest appreciation to Talal Asad, without whose critical intellectual support this project would have never seen the light of day. I always marvel at my luck to have studied under his guidance. This is not only because of his rigorous erudition, his searing insight, and his sharp eloquence. It is also because of his intellectual courage, a model of scholarship that continues to provide a source of inspiration and emulation for me. His influence suffuses the pages of this book, and I see it to be, first and foremost, an attempt to engage his thought.

Talal was extremely patient with the turtle-pace progression of my thought when this project was in its early stages at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Tanya Baker took a different attitude. When sometimes I was too hesitant to express my fledgling ideas to Talal, Tanya would have me recount them to her. She would listen patiently, attentively, and then ask, Well, why aren’t you done yet? That constant question kept me at my heels, and I eventually ran out of excuses. So I have her to thank too.

I have many to thank who were with me at Johns Hopkins for their engagements and comments during crucial phases of this project. In particular, I’d like to extend my gratitude to Sara Berry, Bill Connolly, Donald Carter, Veena Das, Siba Grovogui, Niloofar Haeri, Gyan Pandey, Debbie Poole, Sonia Ryang, and David Scott.

There are two people to whom I owe special thanks: Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood. They have read the entire manuscript in various phases, and their engagement with it has pushed my thought further and in directions I never expected. My discussions with them both have always imbued my project with renewed energy, especially during those times when it seemed to be sputtering out.

I am also grateful for my colleagues at the University of Chicago. I am especially indebted to Jean and John Comaroff and Lisa Wedeen for their continued support and enthusiasm for the completion of this project. Lisa’s pointed questions helped me sharpen and refine many of my positions. I am also thankful for all the discussions with fellow faculty in the anthropology department, on the way to and from campus, in the corridors and stairways of Haskell Hall, and during Monday lunches or dinners. This includes Jessica Cattelino, Julie Chu, Shannon Dawdy, Judy Farquhar, Kesha Fikes, Ray Fogelson, Susan Gal, John Kelly, Joe Masco, William Mazzarella, Stephan Palmie, François Richard, Danilyn Rutherford, and Michael Silverstein. Although these were often chance discussions, they have, in various ways, made a deep impression on this book. I was also lucky to be part of an incredibly supportive and intellectually discerning writing group, and I extend my gratitude to its members: Amahl Bishara, Summerson Carr, and Robin Shoaps.

I thank Jon Wilson at the King’s College London for inviting me to join the series of workshops and conferences titled Tradition in the Present. It gave me the opportunity to think through questions of tradition, temporality, and authority in relation to legal and religious practices. I benefited enormously from my discussions with him. A series of conferences titled Redescribing the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Legal Story, was organized by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Robert Yelle; I thank them for inviting me and giving me a wonderful opportunity for cross-disciplinary engagement. I am particularly grateful to Winnifred for her engagement with aspects of my work.

I would also like to acknowledge here a number of friends and colleagues who have provided me with their support and their intellectual generosity over the years: Hossam Bahgat, Richard Baxtrom, Roger Begrich, Jesse Bump, Alexandre Caiero, Anila Daulatzai, Samera Esmeir, Khaled Fahmy, Mayanthi Fernando, Thomas Blum Hansen, Elizabeth Hurd, Naveeda Khan, Brinkley Messick, Amira Mittermaier, Tamir Moustafa, Sameena Mulla, Nadine Naber, Bettina Ng’weno, Boris Nikolov, Sylvain Perdigon, Hanan Sabea, Adam Sabra, Atef Said, Don Selby, Mulki al-Sharmani, Tarek el-Shimi, Noah Solomon, Kristin Stilt, and Malika Zeghal. Hind Fouad and Nermeen Mohamed provided me with crucial research assistance. Baudouin Dupret’s intellectual generosity was indispensible for facilitating my research in Egypt. I also benefited much from those long shīsha evenings in Cairo where we discussed everything under the Egyptian sun.

To Raghda Hafez: your laughter kept me sane throughout those longest stretches of gray. You are no longer with us, and your absence remains deeply felt. To Mario Bonilla: you shared nothing of the academic world I live in, but you would’ve been the first to call and congratulate me on this book. The way you lived your life in the face of its frightening finitude taught me a lesson I’ll take to the end of my days; you were the best of teachers. Rest, now, chico.

Suad Joseph and Smadar Lavie persuaded me to return to university study when I had sworn never to go back to school again. For that they have my continuing gratitude.

I also wish to express my appreciation for David Brent and Priya Nelson of the University of Chicago Press, who have made the process of this book’s publication smoother than I could have imagined. I am also lucky to have benefited from Dawn Hall’s kind and careful editing of the manuscript.

The research for this book was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright Program, and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Studies in Power, Culture, and History. Crucial follow-up research and time off to write the book were made possible by the Lichtstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago and the generous funding of the Carnegie Scholars Program.

The book was also made possible by the incredible friendship and open generosity of the Egyptians I met in Cairo, as well as my family there, who helped me with my research at every turn. I am especially indebted to the lawyers, judges, and Azhari sheikhs—for reasons of confidentiality I cannot name them here—who patiently guided me through the complexity of their worlds. I am also thankful to the Egyptian people more generally, for their amazing effort during those eighteen days, and for their ongoing attempts to extend the ideals of that revolutionary moment into the future. I’d also like to mention two Egyptians for their amazing efforts: Nadia Elhamy and Ali Agrama, my parents. Every word in this book is dedicated to them.

Maria Eugenia Bonilla-Chacin’s love, companionship, and unfailing support have been an anchor in my life, and have made it worth living. Without them, I’d be lost at sea.

INTRODUCTION

A Secular or a Religious State?

There is a famous lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. It shows a paradox, of two hands mutually drawing each other into existence. I have always thought this to be an apt metaphor for our most recent understandings of secularism. We no longer see the domains of the religious and the secular as given, but rather, as mutually constitutive of each other in often tense and contradictory ways. Our newfound awareness of these co-constitutive antinomies, however, has brought as much anxiety as it has understanding. On the one hand, it seems to suggest a capacity to transform secularism into something more generously responsive to the irreducible pluralism of present times. On the other, it throws into question those secular conceptions of human agency upon which such a transformative capacity presumably rests. As a result, much of the literature on secularism exhibits a self-confounding tendency, where the commitments that animate it and the critiques that it conducts undermine each other—two hands mutually erasing each other out of existence. Like Escher’s lithograph, the literature on secularism gives the impression of an intractable paradox.

Such paradox is not entirely accidental. It is bound to arise anytime we probe the deeper premises of our ways of thought and life. It is also intrinsic to the tensions between the often-immediate demands of our political commitments and the necessarily open, frequently tentative character of social inquiry. Yet the sense of paradox that secularism poses seems to go beyond these facts, to present an intractability of a distinctive kind. Indeed, I suspect that it expresses something central about secularism as a form of power. One of the aims of this book is to investigate how this is so.

To begin to get a better handle on this paradoxical quality, we can turn to Talal Asad’s inaugural explorations of secularism. As part of those explorations, he draws an important distinction, between the secular as a domain of historically constituted and variably related behaviors, sensibilities, and ways of knowing, and secularism as a doctrine and political arrangement within the modern state. Although he never sees the two as ever fully separable, he takes the secular as conceptually prior, and asks how its concepts, assumptions, sensibilities, and practices work to support or undermine secularism as a modern political arrangement. In asking this question, he aims to draw critical attention to some of the visceral registers that secularism relies upon, and which had until then been largely ignored.

In taking up this distinction, however, some have seemed to imply that the one can be studied without the other and suggested that while we now know much about secularism in various places, an understanding of the secular continues to elude us. I, however, am not so sure. It is not just that such a claim is self-refuting—after all, how much can we really know about secularism if an understanding of its underlying secular domain continues to elude us? It is also that this claim belies how deeply interdependent the two are. We can accept the conceptual priority of the secular while nevertheless turning Asad’s question around, to ask: how does secularism work to support or undermine the concepts, sensibilities, assumptions, and behaviors of the secular that it draws and depends upon? That this question has not been asked should be a sign of how little we still know about both, about how interdependent they might be. To extend further the metaphor with which I began, we might see secularism and the secular as constantly drawing each other into existence, and ask how this mutually constitutive character is part of the paradoxical quality of secularism’s power.

How then does secularism, as a form of power, work? And what work does it do upon the behaviors, attitudes, and ways of knowing that constitute our ways of life? These questions, and the ways their answers elude us, are at the center of this book. I explore them through a consideration of state law, politics, and religion in contemporary Egypt.

Egypt seems hardly the place for theorizing about modern secularity. As a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together and give rise to continual conflict, it leads many to question whether it is a secular or a religious state. Its constitution, for example, names Islamic law (the Shari‘a) as the principal source of law in the country.¹ But its legal system is based on largely European, and mostly French, law. As a result, many fundamental provisions of the Shari‘a are patently ignored and unimplemented. And while its personal status law—which deals with the private affairs of family—is based on codes derived from religious law, the state has continually tried to reform it in a liberal direction. Although the constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief and worship, the courts have banned some forms of women’s head scarf in public schools and professions.² But at the same time they have upheld the use of un-codified Islamic religious principles for litigation, which have allowed for apostasy and censorship trials against public intellectuals. Some religious institutions, like Al-Azhar Mosque and its Fatwa Council, are officially under the state; their role in state policy formation, however, remains highly circumscribed. The state has also prohibited official status to any explicitly religious party and has (until recently) severely repressed such unofficial party formations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, even though they had long renounced violence. At the same time however, it allowed brotherhood members to run and win in parliamentary elections as independent candidates.

So is Egypt a secular or a religious state? This question has long been asked both within and outside of Egypt. But it has become even more pressing today. That is because Egypt is one important center in the Muslim world, which is, as we know, under tremendous transformative pressure. And this, in turn, has placed the Muslim world at the center of some of the fundamental questions of contemporary liberal political thought: tolerance, sovereignty, democratization, security, the proper uses of violence, and the limits of freedom of religion and expression. All of these have become wrapped up in the question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state, of what kind of state it actually is and what it might potentially become. Notably, however, this is no longer a question asked only of Egypt; it is also now increasingly asked of many states, including those considered to be paradigmatically secular. It therefore indexes deeper anxieties about our contemporary secularity and our abilities to define and secure it.

It is in order to explore the roots of these deeper anxieties that this book takes up the question of whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state. The aim, however, is not to provide an answer either way, secular or religious. Neither is it just to describe some of the complicated relationships between religion and politics in Egypt. It is rather to question the very question. Not to say, however, that it is somehow wrong, false, inappropriate, or fictional. Rather, the goal is to elicit a different understanding of this question, its presuppositions, the forms it takes, the affects that infuse it, its conditions of felicity and its resilient force—an understanding that I hope will arise in the course of this study. An understanding, it is also hoped, that will give us a strikingly different picture of secular power than is commonly supposed and of how it works in social life.

The study offered here, based on over two years of fieldwork in Cairo, is rooted in an ethnographic exploration of Egyptian legal practices.³ I focus on law because, as I show in the book, it is indispensible to the exercise of secular power, and at the center of its paradoxical quality. The ethnography revolves around a comparison of the Egyptian personal status courts and the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar Mosque. Personal status law, which concerns the private affairs of family, is the only domain of law left in Egypt that is explicitly regulated by rules of the Shari‘a, even though the Egyptian constitution states Islam as the country’s principal source of law and legislation. Personal status law has long been, and remains, an intensely contested domain of reform in a society as highly litigious as the United States. The personal status courts, attended by Egyptians of all backgrounds, are always busy, packed, and the backlog of cases is huge, creating particular pressures on the course of litigation and reform.

Equally busy are the sessions of the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar. Fatwas are religious responses issued by learned sheikhs to questions asked of them about certain aspects or affairs of life; Al-Azhar is one of the oldest and most highly respected centers of Islamic authority in the world. Seeking fatwas is a popular practice in Egypt, and the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar is a central fatwa-giving institution, always full of questioners from all walks of life. The Fatwa Council, like the personal status courts, is the product of a long process of reform, one whereby fatwa practices were reorganized as they were separated out from those practices thought to be appropriate solely to a rule of law and the courts. While much has been written about fatwas, and though it is well recognized that they are a central means of exercising Islamic authority, very little is known about how they actually work within the everyday lives of Muslims. This is because most of the scholarly literature on fatwas treats them primarily as doctrinal or theological statements, disembodied from the situated social relations of which they are a part. As a result, the crucial practices through which the fatwa acquires its specific authority remain unaddressed. In giving us a window on the role of fatwas in Egyptian daily life, the Fatwa Council offers us insights into the complex quotidian workings of Islamic authority.

Both the personal status courts and the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar base their decisions on the Shari‘a, and both address a similar or at least highly overlapping set of issues. Both arise out of distinctly modern transformations and both are institutions of the Egyptian state. To study them is to study how the Shari‘a is elaborated and practiced within everyday life under the conditions of secular power and possibility established by a modern state.

Or should I say modernizing state? Indeed, might it not be argued that Egypt is still on the precarious path toward modernization, democratization, and secularization, suffering understandable setbacks along the way, but that its course is still in danger of being reversed or permanently stalled, a mark of incomplete or failed modernity? Might it not be argued that this is also why it remains ambiguous as to whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state—namely, that it is still on the way from being mostly religious to being largely secular?

This view of Egypt as an incompletely or precariously secular state, prone to serious setback at any time, is unhelpful, if only because it is circular. That is, Egypt is still incompletely secular, which is why it has religious-secular conflict, and Egypt has secular-religious conflict, which is evidence of its being incompletely secular. Circular reasoning like this provides little insight on the conditions of such conflict and ambiguity in Egypt. It doesn’t tell us how we define and distinguish fully secular states from incomplete ones; it doesn’t tell us about the processes by which secularism is implemented; it doesn’t tell us how practices of defining full from incomplete secularity might be an integral part of these very processes. Such reasoning therefore begs the question not only of Egypt’s secularity or religiosity but also of secularity and religiosity more generally.

This view also assumes too much about modernity. For the standards by which states are assessed in terms of a full, failed, or incomplete modernity have proven to be complex, vague, shifting, and fraught with unacknowledged values. For example, the ambiguities and problems of racial, nationalist, ethnic, and religious conflict are ones that all countries share to varying degrees. But in some they are seen as signs of failed or incomplete modernity and in others not. Consider two countries. First, South Africa. During apartheid, it received worldwide condemnation. But its problems were never largely seen as symptoms of a failed or incomplete modernity. On the contrary, its racism has been assessed as distinctively modern, and thus a mark of its modernity. Next, consider Israel, riven as it is by nationalist, ethnic, racial, and religious strife. More, Israel exhibits secular-religious ambiguities just as much as Egypt. Yet despite worldwide consternation over its policies, it is not seen as incompletely modern. Indeed, even despite its secular-religious ambiguities, it is often seen as the only truly modern state in the Middle East.

My point here is neither to praise nor condemn. It is only to highlight how vague and shifting the standards for assessing a state’s modernity are. Many of the problems that plague Israel and South Africa are shared by the countries neighboring them. Why, then, are the problems of the neighboring countries seen in terms of failure or incompleteness, while this is not the case with Israel and South Africa? Two factors unite Israel and South Africa during apartheid. First, they are—or were—colonial regimes. Second, the colonists are—or were—mostly European. But is being European and colonial enough to qualify them as modern as opposed to their neighbors? Such a standard is certainly inadequate to the range of experiences, forms of historicity, and durable structures of power featured in what we call modernity.

Perhaps South Africa and Israel are anomalies in this regard. Consider, then, the states of Western Europe: even after World War II, when their economies and industrial capacities had been utterly devastated, they were not seen as having become any less modern because of this. Consider also a paradigmatic modern state: the United States. For some time now, it has displayed tremendous—and growing—income inequality,⁴ a dwindling middle class, a weakened and continually eroding industrial base, steadily worsening health and education statistics, continued racial discrimination, a national deficit and foreign debt of proportions that would force any third world country into a severe structural adjustment program, and a marked religiosity that is seen to be of increasingly political significance.⁵ And yet few would characterize the United States as any less modern than it was a decade before, when most of these figures were much less pronounced. Egypt has been involved in a modernizing project since 1800, almost as long as the United States has been in existence. And yet, the United States is seen as always already modern while Egypt is always still precariously modernizing, despite all the declining figures and ambiguities exhibited by the former.

To this it might be objected that the United States is a liberal democracy, while Egypt is not. However, liberal democracy as a criterion for determining a full or failed modernity does not hold up to scrutiny. After all, both liberalism and democracy in the United States were highly qualified until relatively recently, with the implementation of civil rights legislation. Yet it was not considered any less modern before the passage of civil rights. Similarly, the French declared colonial Algeria to be a part of France; Algerians, however, were not allowed to vote, while the pieds-noirs could. France was not thought any less modern because of this. Nor could apartheid South Africa have been considered a liberal democracy, and yet this lack did not seem to qualify its modernity.

My point here is not to distinguish modernity from liberalism, to say that some states can be modern without being liberal. That would not be accurate to the complex history of liberalism itself, which, as a number of studies have now well established, has been as supportive of imperial and colonial enterprises as it was critical of them.⁶ Liberal ideas and ideals have been historically integral to the modern project, providing the basis upon which its distinctive social transformations are directed, described, assessed, and debated. They cannot be so easily separated from that project.

Neither is this an argument for alternative modernities, premised on cultural differences. While enacting a modernizing project undoubtedly involves the adoption of standards, concepts, forms, and structures identified with Western European states, it has never involved adopting the cultures of these states wholesale. The modern project, as Talal Asad notes, "requires not the production of a uniform culture throughout the world, but certain shared modalities of legal-moral behaviour, forms of national-political structuration, and rhythms of progressive historicity."⁷ And it is with some of these shared modalities, forms of structuration, and temporal rhythms that I am concerned about with respect to Egypt.

As is clear from all of this, I do not accept the proposition that Egypt is not fully modern. On the contrary, the chapters of this book will show how Egypt has adopted those distinctly modern structures and powers by which secularism is enabled and implemented. I will argue that the unsettled question as to whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state arises precisely because it partakes of the structures of liberal modernity, and that the question would not arise otherwise. The question of Egypt, I will argue, is but an expression of an increasingly intractable question at the heart of secularity itself, an index of its paradoxical quality, and rooted in its tensions and distinctive modalities of power. These tensions and modalities of power are not peculiar to Egypt; they are also characteristic of many states considered to be paradigms of liberal secularity, such as France, Germany, and Britain. No doubt Egypt’s peculiarities make it seem vastly different from these paradigmatic states. But my aim here is to show how in its very difference it registers a deeper similarity that should provoke us into thinking about modern secularism differently, and how Islamic practices have been shaped under it.

When I lived in New York I would go out to the park each weekend to hear the rumbero drummers play. In the midst of their smooth, tightly interlocking rhythm, one drummer would strike a seemingly discordant, almost halting beat. But what sounded like a stutter at first was soon realized as part of the rhythm itself, rooted in its foundations, and part of its potential. By actualizing that potential the drummer would get us to hear the rhythm differently, and understand better its range of possibility. In Egypt one finds a number of disquieting features about religious practice that seem to strike directly against secular expectations and sensibilities. This book aims to show how some of these disquieting features are best understood not as instances of modern reform gone wrong, nor as aberrations from secularism, but as actualizations of potentialities within secularism itself, and integral to its very foundation.

The Theoretical Problem of Islamism

At the start of this project, I wasn’t interested in the question of secularism. Yet I found myself inexorably drawn into it in the course of this study. Throughout my fieldwork and in further reflections upon it, my inquiries took quite unexpected turns and led in unforeseen directions. Early on I had to revise my project in a major way. I had to drop assumptions and totally rethink others, a process that sometimes sent me scrambling and often left me bewildered. Each of the chapters here represents a stage of this exploration. The conclusions of each open up the questions that are taken up in the next. Together, they build an argument about secularism, law, the Shari‘a, and the modern spaces of power and possibility of which they partake.

So by way of introduction I would like to briefly tell the story of how these chapters came together, of the motivations of the initial project, the assumptions that had to be dropped or revised, and how all of this led to an exploration and rethinking of secularism. This will allow me to lay out the arguments of the chapters and articulate some of the critical conceptual orientations that implicitly guide them.

Let me start, then, with my initial motivation. It arose out of an ongoing dissatisfaction with how the social theory literature has typically treated contemporary Islamic religiosity, thought, and activity. A heterogeneous collection of activities revolving around Islam—widespread veiling, growing numbers of people praying in mosques, the spread of children’s Qur’anic reading schools, the establishment of women’s Islamic study groups, the creation of Islamic banks, the emergence of popular preachers, the sales of cassettes and CDs featuring sermons and Qur’anic recitations, and the activities of explicitly political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood—have all been typically theorized by social theorists as part of a single, underlying phenomenon. Theorists have, however, had much difficulty in finding an adequate designation for it. Terms such as the Islamic Awakening (Al-Ṣaḥwa Al-Islamiyya), fundamentalism, the Islamic resurgence, political Islam, Islamism, and public Islam have all been used and all been deemed unsatisfactory for different reasons. The difficulty encountered in finding satisfactory categories raises the question of whether in fact there is a single phenomenon to speak of. But the difficulty also indexes the underlying significance of social theorists’ ongoing attempts to do so: an acute awareness of and concern over the growing numbers of Muslims who seem to be adopting ways of life that are in accord with their Islamic precepts. Consequently, this emergent religiosity is typically seen within social theory as a problem to be explained. In other words, the overriding concern that motivates much of this social theorizing is to explain why people today would adopt and why they have adopted such ways of life.

That contemporary Islamic religiosity is seen as a problem within social theory is a curious fact. Why are some ways of life, or attempts to live ways of life, seen to be problems for explanation while others are not?

For example, modern ways of life evoke different questions, ones that are mostly about what is involved in, what is the experience of, and what are the different ways of being or becoming modern. Consider the words of sociologist of modernity Anthony Giddens:

A feature of modernity is that distant events and actions have a constant effect on our lives, and a constantly increasing one too. That is what I mean by disembedding, the lifting out of forms of life, their recombination across time and space, but also the reconstitution of the contexts from which they came . . . economic exchange becomes more and more lifted out of the local community and recombined across time and space. The local reflects much