Samir Obaido Global Issues July 9th, 2018

Secularism and Politics of Piety

Introduction:

Globalization is a tremendous phenomenon. From an economic standpoint, everything

is almost immediately affected due to a global market that is linked to many parts of the world.

However, that kind of directness that one finds in an economic context is not as noticeable in

the social scheme of things. The global social effects are the result of an invisible structure that

is determined within a hierarchy of administrative and academic bodies, which is mostly

established by respective economic and ‘imperialist’ powers and is further determined by

discourses regarding morality, culture, law, politics etc.

“Said repeatedly, oppositionally, pointed to the significance of a ruling elite, which

employed or made use of an intellectual elite––seldom unwilling executioners––who

together massively created, expanded, sustained, and legitimized a vast structure of

political, economic, and cultural domination over the Orient and ultimately over most

of the world.”1

At a non-academic level, this gave rise to more activist renditions of these discourses through

what turned out to be collectivist ideologies, e.g. feminism. Having said that, the speed at which

social change is enacted is slow and implicit, which is seen by some thinkers like Saba Mahmood

as a danger, something into which I will attempt to delve.

The attitude of western feminist scholars is largely influenced by secularism, which is a

field of studies that Gil Anidjar views as parochial. This is due to the fact that it develops from

a discourse that’s mainly ingrained in Christian religion and criticism of Christianity. The

developments in secular thought were translated into a universal comportment, something

1
Anidjar, Gil. “Secularism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, no. 1. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. p. 63-
64.

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that disregards the equally rich histories and cultures of other societies and religions. A victim

of this globalized secularism is Islam, which is considered an Abrahamic religion by definition,

a category in which Christianity and Judaism also fall.

On Secularism:

I started my essay in a quasi-Foucauldian language that focuses on the dynamic of the

existing power structures, albeit in far more simplistic terms. I am inclined to provide such an

account because Orientalism and postcolonial studies lie at the heart of the two subjects that I

will be discussing throughout the essay, using texts from Gil Anidjar, Saba Mahmood, and

naturally, Edward Said. Not only is Orientalism a stereotypical and observational field of studies,

but it is highly motivated. Essentialism, an essential feature of Orientalism, is a common

practice, and much of the time it establishes necessary hierarchies of information and

knowledge. However, a distinction is made when essentialism is given impulse through a

certain agenda which enforces a certain power structure. The result is a stronger rendition of

imperialism and colonialism, and that is mainly because the colonizing power carries within its

collective subjectivity knowledge that validates its sense of superiority, and justifies its

missionary attitude, not to mention the use of hard power, as predominant in advanced military

technology.

When people conceive of secularism, they automatically link it to religion, and it implies

a separation of a set of beliefs and values from administrative bodies and all aspects of living.

This encourages an engagement in either censuring religion or upholding certain values that

one fears to be fleeting away. In Secularism, Gil Anidjar calls this an act of cathecting (to invest

oneself emotionally in something) religion as the result of bending our wills to secularism as an

undisputed point of discursive power. Christianity created a distinction between the religious

and the secular, which happened to be when religion as a pejorative concept was born. Anidjar

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argues that by creating this distinction, Christianity made religion the problem rather than

itself. In other (and mostly Anidjar’s) words, secularism became a veil for Christianity to forget

and forgive itself. Secularism also established stronger grounds due to its virtuous opposition

to ‘irrational, undeveloped, and superstitious’ religion, which are characterizations that carry

Orientalist overtones.

Anidjar provides a fantastic reading of Edward Said’s ‘idiosyncratic’ use of the word

secularism in his book, Orientialism. Anidjar suggests that religion and the Orient are

synonymous in Said’s critique of Orientalism, a field of studies that reduces the East to a set of

characteristics that are inferior to the West (similar to how religion is portrayed in secular eyes).

Anidjar’s formulation also suggests that Orientalism is secularism, and that the formations of

both fields are very similar and carry insinuations to each other.

He proceeds from critiques on Said’s Orientalism, ranging from an argument that

portrays Said as Orientalizing “religion the moment he rescues Islam from Orientalism”2, to

others that emphasize Said’s lack of contribution to understanding religion as a phenomenon

of significance. Anidjar doesn’t find these arguments compelling because they––and they make

Said seem to––forget an important lesson that Orientalism teaches us, which is that Orientalism

is the restatement of secularism. Anidjar takes Hart’s criticism into consideration (that Said is

Orientalizing religion), but from an interesting point of departure which characterizes Said’s

Orientalism of religion as a “fit of personal inconsistency or creative idiosyncrasy that managed,

intentionally or not, to put religion where Orientalists had put the Orient”.3

As I have mentioned in my introduction, secularism is, and should be seen as, parochial

due to its western and Christian origins, which then makes its status as a universal phenomenon

2
Hart, William D. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
p. 86.
3
Anidjar, “Secularism”, p. 58.

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quite irrelevant. As a result––and this is where a connection between religion and secularism

also exists––the values which secularism upholds are a development from its counterpart in

Christianity (e.g. progress as an ideal and virtue, and missionary instincts in Christianity,

secularism, and imperialism). Along the text, Anidjar rightly asks whether Islam is a religion.

Having established that religion was created the moment Christianity created a distinction

between secularism and religion, it is important to ask to what religion this applies. Along the

centuries, and while secularism was less prevalent, Islam was analyzed as nonreligious, a

political instrument, and “a failed Oriental attempt to employ Greek philosophy” (Edward Said

on Carl Becker in Orientalism, p. 104).4 Islam then, somehow, underwent a metamorphosis to

become religious and backwards under secularist reductionism. To simplify, Islam’s image was

under every circumstance misrepresented and, in many ways, tarnished. The answer to the

question of Islam’s status as a religion is nevertheless unclear. “History, politics, and economics

do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient”, says Said in Orientalism, giving

significance to a tautological approach when viewing Islam and the Orient.

On Politics of Piety:

Feminism, an activist collectivist ideology, has done much to establish women’s rights

in the West. But that’s only the West. Academic feminist discourse is still ongoing regarding

women all around the world, as this is one of few cases where the oppressed are a factual

majority. However, since the discourse is Western-centric, we encounter the same issue that

we had discussed earlier in regards to secularism. Saba Mahmood poses a question in the

opening lines of her first chapter in Politics of Piety:

“Over the last two decades, a key question has occupied many feminist theorists: how

should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and the

4
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books, 1979. p. 104.

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politics of any feminist project? While this question has led to serious attempts at

integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory,

questions regarding religious difference have remained relatively unexplored. The

vexing relationship between feminism and religion is perhaps most manifest in

discussions of Islam.”5

Mahmood’s focus is on women’s participation in Islam and the kind of responses it provokes

from feminists and secularists. The latter would dismiss religion altogether. The former would

present a false-consciousness theorem that assumes women’s instinctual affinity to freedom

and an abhorrence of traditions and religion that led them astray from liberal salvation.

Mahmood doesn’t grant validity to these views because they neglect the significance of a

historical understanding of this particular case. Thus, Mahmood seeks to avoid the common

reductionism that is inflicted by western feminist scholars upon Muslim women. She also does

not cater to liberal sensibilities by justifying Islam through digging in for “liberatory potentials”.

The analysis is partially emphasizing Muslim women’s experiences as self-referential and rich,

something that Muslim women are denied in feminist criticism.

Mahmood achieves this through conducting fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt with Muslim

women from different socioeconomic backgrounds that engage in an Islamist movement that

seeks to reconstruct Egyptian society according to teachings from the Quran and Hadith. It is

intriguing that the discursive mediums these women engage in are traditionally male-

dominated, and the principles, that they are supporting, are largely sustaining their

subordination to the Muslim male. Mahmood points to the fact that many feminist scholars try

to articulate some sort of feminist agency and resistance to patriarchal norms and traditions in

individual or collective cases of women in the Middle East––while many of these women don’t

5
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005. p. 1.

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necessarily identify with “feminist consciousness”. She then mentions Lila Abu-Lughod who

elaborates on this phenomenon in feminist scholarship by describing it as romanticizing

resistance and compromising a clear understanding of the workings of power. The example we

receive is of Bedouin women who wear sexy lingerie, assuming that it would challenge parental,

but are instead self-inflicting different forms of power that are present in “capitalist

consumerism and urban bourgeois values and aesthetics”.6

Finding these moments of resistance within power structures alludes to a feminist

tendency of using a binary model of subordination/subversion, which also alludes to expressing

one’s agency through an autonomous will that aims for self-realization. Mahmood, on the other

hand, seeks to uncouple autonomous will from self-realization, emphasizing that one is not

contingent on the other. The reason is that liberal thought posits a universality of innate desire

for freedom, which is an entirely inconsistent position to have simply due to the variety of

individual cases that have achieved self-realization without necessarily aligning themselves with

liberatory inclinations. Eventually, agency is explored not only in moments of resistance, but in

exploring a great deal of an individual’s lived experience. Now a complication that appears is

the fact that much of individual and societal desire in the Middle East is “discursively

organized”, meaning that much of it stems from Orientalist and imperialist influence. This in

turn demands more attention to the emergence of differing desires that, for example, might

express comfort in a position of submission.

What Saba Mahmood, Gil Anidjar, Edward Said, and (most probably) Friedrich Nietzsche

are articulating to me is the ethical necessity of self-reference, meaning an appreciation, and a

profound one at that, of one’s own lived experience. The Muslim women––that go to the

mosque to share their knowledge and teachings on piety and Islamic principles––are no

6
Saba Mahmood. Politics of Piety. p. 9.

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exception. The kind of self-infliction that one experiences due to self-Orientalism or other

manners of submitting to external (to one’s own cultural and historical background) structures

is the worst I could imagine. To achieve fullness, self-realization, fulfillment, or whatever one

calls it, it requires a pensiveness and self-reflection that goes far beyond any kind of academic

discourse. These ideals notwithstanding, we are faced with a question that Hamid Dabashi

poses in his book, Can Non-Europeans Think?, which is whether non-Europeans can refer to an

experiential and intellectual basis that is void of European influence. To leave on an optimistic

tone, the answer is obviously yes, but it implies that it is an actual difficulty that many non-

Europeans face due to the fact that so much of European thought and ideals are rooted in many

cultures around the world.

Bibliography:

- Anidjar, Gil. “Secularism.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, no. 1, 2006, pp. 52–77. JSTOR, JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/509746.

- Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

- Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York, Vintage Books, 1979.

- Dabashi, Hamid. Can Non-Europeans Think? London, Zed Books, 2015.