Critique Secular Research Articles

Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility: Understanding Injury and the Body of Nation in Censored Literature in South Asia

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Angarey, a collection of nine short stories and one play by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmuduzzafar, first published in December 1932. Considered a foundational work in Urdu literature which supported the Progressive Writer’s Association in South Asia during the pre-partition era and hailed as an act of literary resistance – especially in the context of the nationalist movements for freedom in India – the stories offer a succinct critique of social and religious practices. Because they exposed the oppression against Muslim women and promoted resistance against the colonial state, the text was banned in March 1933 by the British government. The historical account of its censorship characterizes the British colonial state as the rational and neutral arbiter of its presumed emotionally excitable colonial subjects. In observance of the relationship between affective politics of colonial empire and religion in late colonial India, I critically examine not just the text but also the contextual background of its censorship to explore the link between the colonial ideas about Muslim sensibilities and colonial regulations. In this respect, relying on Asad Ali Ahmed’s critique of the colonial genesis of censorship [“Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, The Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament.” In Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur, and William Mazzarella, 172–205. Bloomington, 2009], Talal Asad’s insights on the complicated relation between injury and the discourse of blasphemy [Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, and Ann Laura Stoler’s argument about the Enlightenment’s relationship to empire “Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford University Press, 2013], this study attempts to understand how the embodied representation of the Muslim self figures in Angarey as an affective attachment, following the context of literary censorship in late colonial South Asia.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By TalalAsad, WendyBrown, JudithButler, and SabaMahmood, with a new preface by the authors. Pp. xxii, 154, NY, Fordham University Press, 2013, £12.99.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By TalalAsad, WendyBrown, JudithButler, and SabaMahmood, with a new preface by the authors. Pp. xxii, 154, NY, Fordham University Press, 2013, £12.99.

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace

The Secularity of Empire, the Violence of Critique: Muslims, Race, and Sexuality in the Politics of Knowledge‐Production

In the volatile conflicts that inaugurated the twenty‐first century, secularism, democracy, and freedom were identified by Western nation‐states as symbolizing their civilizational values, in contrast to the fanaticism, misogyny, and homophobia they attributed to “Islam.” The figure of the Muslim was thus transformed into an existential threat. This paper analyzes an exchange among scholars—Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech—that engages these highly contested issues. As such, the text provides a rare opportunity to study how particular significations of the West, its epistemological tradition, and its relation with Islam are contested and negotiated in a critically engaged site during a moment of global crisis. My reading of the text leads me to argue that the stabilization of the epistemic power of the West is presently reliant on a new iteration of its foundational philosophical concepts to suppress counter‐hegemonic narratives that foreground its forms of violence. Further, the terrain for this reshaping of the dominance of this tradition is gender/sexuality, such that queer politics are located at the forefront of the Western politico‐philosophical project. As such, the advancement of this tradition is co‐constitutive with that of the gendered‐sexual subject as emblematic of its highest civilizational values.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By TalalAsad, WendyBrown, JudithButler, andSabaMahmood, with a new preface by the authors. Pp. xxii, 154, New York, Fordham University Press, 2013, £12.99.

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By TalalAsad, WendyBrown, JudithButler, andSabaMahmood, with a new preface by the authors. Pp. xxii, 154, New York, Fordham University Press, 2013, £12.99.

Islamic Political Identity in Turkey by M. Hakan Yavuz, and: Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt by Hussein Ali Agrama, and: Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity by Talal Asad, and: Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech by Talal Asad et al.

Reviewed by: Islamic Political Identity in Turkeyby M. Hakan Yavuz, and: Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egyptby Hussein Ali Agrama, and: Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernityby Talal Asad, and: Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speechby Talal Asad et al. Zouhair Ghazzal Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. By m. hakan yavuz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 342 pp. $32.11 (paper). Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. By hussein ali agrama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 288 pp. $27.50 (paper). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. By talal asad. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. 280 pp. $18.92 (paper). Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. By talal asad, wendy brown, judith butler, and saba mahmood. New York: Fordham University Press, 2ndrevised edition, 2013. 176 pp. $16.20 (paper). How relevant is secularism for the modern Middle East? The problem is that many studies take it for granted that secularism, simply defined as the separation of religion from state and politics, is a key component for the success and well-being of the modern nation-state. It is as if without the state openly declaring itself secular, as the Turkish Republic did in its formative period in 1923–1927, the nation and its institutions would be faced with relentless religious struggles. Education, law, and even the economy would share the burden of a society with core religious values, with the state itself being enmeshed in the struggle. For other scholars, the borderline between the religious and the secular is [End Page 691]fairly flexible, lacking the clear distinctions that the secularists would like us to believe exist. And for yet other scholars, religion cannot be contained through an open declaration of the secular nature of the state: Even Turkey, which for over a decade has been under the guidance of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), is “going back” to its Islamic roots. In sum, the importance of religion cannot be denied. Notwithstanding such diversity of opinions, studies on religion and secularism share common shortcomings—namely, that secularism tends to be isolated on its own as either a sign of modernity and progress or a lack thereof. When we think, for example, of Turkey as the prime example of state secularism being constitutionally adopted, the conditions that made such declaration possible tend to be overlooked—most especially the fact that there was in the 1920s and later a class configuration that was “hegemonic” in its structure. That is, within the heterogeneous class structure, that of landowners, industrialists, politicians, and army and civilian officers, a certain configuration predominates all others by ascertaining a political mission to the newly formed “nation.” Most countries in the Middle East, beginning with influential players like Iran and Egypt, came to modernity with a large class of big landowners, which was immensely influential in politics and the economy. By contrast Turkey’s élite class structure was polyvalent, composed in large part of military and civilian officers that had to be repatriated “home” from the Arab provinces and elsewhere when the Ottoman Empire was in full decline. Consequently, in the top echelons of society, Turkey had an intelligentsia, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (who would become Turkey’s first president and founding figure), with enough expertise to develop solutions to the formation of the new republic. The heterogeneous nature of these groups pushed for the creation of a political space that was portrayed as “secular,” in the precise sense that state and politics should be set free from religious discourse. In practice, however, secularism was no more than a secularization of Sunni Islam, whereby minorities were brutally marginalized in a process that began with the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916 and the relentless bloody attempts to integrate Kurdish nationalism within the framework of Turkish nationalism. According to M. Hakan Yavuz, a key factor in the “return” of political Islam is the solidification of class structure around the bourgeoisie. Initially, the predominantly one-party system of the 1930s and 1940s fostered the creation of an entrepreneurial bourgeois class that was acting...

Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech

Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech

In the letter of mere reason: Rethinking the universal secular intellectual with Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This article reconsiders a question, ‘Is Critique Secular?’, which ostensibly polarised Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris in the 2008 exchange forum of Public Culture. After positing that Mahmood and Gourgouris are mutually invested in challenging and overcoming the intransigence of epistemic secularism, the article canvasses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's deconstruction of the Kantian ‘universal secular intellectual’. The article suggests that Spivak's reading of Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone constitutes a vital exercise in democratic criticism that sets into relief an important convergence between Mahmood and Gourgouris as interlocutors. Delineating imbrications among Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the article synthesises Jacques Derrida's work on Kantian aesthetics and Spivak's recalibration of the Kantian intellectual as a means to unsettle the recalcitrance of epistemic secularism in academic debate and public culture.

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (The Townsend papers in the Humanities; No.2)

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (The Townsend papers in the Humanities; No.2)

Out of Time: The Limits of Secular Critique

A review of Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech and Michael Warner, Jonathan Vanantwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (eds), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age.