Investigating the Secular Body: The Politics of the Male Circumcision Debate in Germany

Schirin Amir-Moazami Schirin Amir-Moazami

doi:10.13169/reorient.1.2.0147

Abstract

In the fall of 2012, Germany witnessed a heated debate on male circumcision, triggered by a four-year-old Muslim boy who had suffered complications following a circumcision conducted by a doctor in Cologne. Engaging with Charles Hirschkind's posed question “Is there a secular body?” the article uses this controversy as a starting point to push recent critical scholarship on secularism a little further. It argues that in order to understand the powers of secular governmentality, we need to take more seriously the entanglements between modes of power operative by the secular nation-state and the embodied attachments to the secular, as articulated both in social practices and in epistemological underpinnings of knowledge production bound and enabled by modern nation-state structures. Accordingly, the article suggests that the debates on male circumcision reflect a broader discursive framework in which the ongoing division between proper and improper religious practice is part of the (re)production of a secular body politic and embodied forms of secularity. Its genealogy can be traced back to the nineteenth century and has currently gained a reconfigured currency through the Muslim question in Europe.

Highlights

Recent critical investigations on secular power around the scholarship of Talal Asad have started to look at the secular as deeply entangled with affect, emotions, and/or embodiments (e.g., Fadil 2009; Asad 2011; Hirschkind 2011; Mahmood 2013).2 They went far beyond an understanding of the powers of the secular as tied to the modern nation-state and its institutions and looked at the secular practices enabled and enacted by specific arrangements of state, religion, and the nation
While objecting to a legal prohibition as suggested by the court in Cologne, Habermas repeated his argument of the necessity of translation into a commonly comprehensible language and the filter to be established between civil society and political institutions
In light of the analysis of the discursive structures running through the debates on male circumcision in Germany, I find Hirschkind’s question productive

Summary

Introduction

Recent critical investigations on secular power around the scholarship of Talal Asad have started to look at the secular as deeply entangled with affect, emotions, and/or embodiments (e.g., Fadil 2009; Asad 2011; Hirschkind 2011; Mahmood 2013).2 They went far beyond an understanding of the powers of the secular as tied to the modern nation-state and its institutions and looked at the secular practices enabled and enacted by specific arrangements of state, religion, and the nation. Using this as an analytical starting point, I will discuss three interrelated clusters of arguments salient throughout the public controversy on male circumcision: first, the medicalization of the body; second, the notion of bodily integrity; and third, the quest for reasonable justification of religious practices.

Results

Conclusion