Liberal Secularism Research Articles

Beyond Secular Liberalism

While many scholars have focused on questions of non- or post-secularity vis-à-vis the “modern nation state,” fewer have asked what kind of decolonial redemption is possible under global neoliberal capitalism today. This is precisely the question I seek to address in this article by analyzing the contemporary ideas and practices of the charities affiliated with what is collectively known as the Islamic resistance movement in Lebanon. Based on almost two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon on the charities affiliated with the three main Shi'i activist movements loosely comprising the Islamic resistance movement—Hizbullah, al-Mabarrat Association, and Imam al-Sadr Foundation—I describe how all three are selectively resisting some aspects of secular liberalism while accepting others. However, by employing a decentered approach to my analysis, I also highlight how their negotiation with secular liberalism is on their own terms, thus ultimately presenting a challenge to Western hegemony. These charities employ multiple conceptions of rationality, including religious rationality and a range of liberal and even neoliberal economic principles; but by centering their project on faith, Islam, and resistance, these charities reproduce what I call “resistance subjectivities,” allowing the Islamic resistance movement to present unique challenges to Western secular modernity.

Editorial

This issue of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences features twoimportant articles: Sarah Marusek’s ethnographic study of a grassroots Islamicmovement in Lebanon reconfiguring (even resisting) secularism andneoliberalism, and Madiha Tahseen and Charissa S.L. Cheah’s empiricalstudy of the formation of American Muslim adolescents. Also featured isan extended interview with the renowned anthropologist, Talal Asad.Marusek’s study of the interaction of an Islamic movement withinsecular, liberal, and neoliberal structures and practices is innovative andthought-provoking. It shows how certain Shi‘ite clerics and leaders are ableto adapt but also simultaneously resist neoliberalism while providing servicesto the poor, in particular the downtrodden Shi‘a population of Lebanon.The intellectual posture of these movements, she highlights, seeksto separate the rationalistic procedures and procedures of modernity fromwhat they insist are still religious values. But straddling “forces of materialismand spirituality,” Marusek argues, “need not inevitably yield a gospelof wealth. Indeed, these forces may even coalesce into a decolonial project.”The Lebanese “Shi‘i movements,” she concludes, “are each critically engagingwith secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, inprofoundly interesting, complex, and contradictory ways.” This is an illuminatingstudy which alludes to the contradictions and limits of embeddingreligious values and rationality in neoliberal and secular structures andpractices, which themselves are inevitably instilling their own values andrationality as they must in order to be fully efficient on their own terms. Thestruggle, the author suggests, is ongoing and worthwhile ...

Culture out of attitudes: Relationality, population heterogeneity and attitudes toward science and religion in the U.S.

Attitude data can reveal culture’s secrets, but only if analysts acknowledge and transcend two problematic forms of heterogeneity. The first, relational heterogeneity, reflects the fact that the meaning of a response to a survey attitude question emerges from its relation to other attitudes: considered singly, the same response may mean different things to different respondents, depending upon the meanings with which they associate it. The second, population heterogeneity, a common problem in survey analysis, reflects the fact that attitudes may be related to one another in systematically different ways for different respondent subsamples. To overcome these challenges, we must use analytic methods that (a) focus on relations among attitude responses rather than on single responses and (b) partition survey samples into subsets based on patterns emergent from those relations. We use two such approaches, Latent Class Analysis and Relational Class Analysis, to examine Americans’ attitudes toward science and religion in the late 20th century, at the onset of a period of acute cultural contention between religious conservatives and secular liberals. Employing an unusually rich data set that enables us to take into account spiritualism (supernatural experience not sanctioned by formal religious institutions), as well as science and religion, we find that both LCA and RCA identify large subsets of respondents for whom science and religion are allied, rather than opposed. Moreover, RCA enables us to examine how the determinants of attitudes toward science, religion, and spiritualism are conditioned upon respondents’ construals of the relationships among them. This diversity of opinion among religious Americans and the presence of a previously overlooked religious constituency of science supporters, has important implications for science policy and science advocacy.

The lived religion approach in the sociology of religion and its implications for secular feminist analyses of religion

The sociological ‘lived religion’ approach focuses on the experiences of religious individuals in everyday life, whilst also considering the institutional aspects of religion that they may engage with. It emphasizes that individuals do not simply ‘copy’ institutional religious prescriptions; instead, it posits that people have an active and reflexive role in shaping, negotiating and changing their own beliefs and practices. This article examines the implications of the ‘lived religion’ approach for secular feminist analyses of religion in Western contexts. It starts out by proposing three different secular feminist positions on religion: a hard, a mixed hard and soft, and a soft position. The article then examines the views on women and religion forwarded by some high-profile feminist organisations in Europe, and how these relate to the three proposed secular feminist positions on religion. Finally, the article assesses which secular feminist position is most compatible with a ‘lived religion’ approach.

Albanian women’s interpretations of Islam enlarge the space of women

Even though rarely acknowledged, approximately one fourth of all European Muslims live in the Balkans. These Muslims, as well as women of the Balkans, are seldom in the focus of scientific research on Islam and Europe. This article discusses themes related to the women’s movement and feminism in the Balkans and within Islamic framework from women’s point of view. The research context is located in the Republic of Macedonia and ethnographic material builds on thematic interviews with Albanian Muslim women. Four generally recognized orientations are distinguished (1) atheist or antireligious feminism, (2) secular feminism, (3) gender complementarity as an ideal and (4) Islamic/Muslim feminism(s), and used as analytical tools while ethnographic interview material is tackled. Article sheds light on Albanian-speaking women’s thoughts concerning Islam in the contemporary context, and tendencies of these thoughts to enlarge space that women occupy through personal interpretations of Islamic tradition.

“Not Left-Wing, Just Human”: The Integration of Personal Morality and Structural Critique in Progressive Religious Talk

AbstractResearchers have posited a bifurcated discursive field with regard to United States politics, with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other. This division is typically understood to be both ideological and stylistic, with secular liberals possessing a robust language for speaking about structural inequality but lacking transcendent rhetoric about morality, and conservatives having the opposite discourses available to them. Yet this view steers us away from groups that complicate this picture, such as progressive religious communities. This article uses qualitative data collected among progressive religious groups to demonstrate that, through their ability to integrate discussions of structural inequality and personal morality, these communities create a rhetorical style that blends critical discourses with calls for righteousness. To understand different rhetorical positions, we have to examine the on-the-ground meaning making represented by politicized talk within communities that provide actors with the categories of identification which make social action possible.

Whither feminist alliance? Secular feminists and Islamist women in Turkey

ABSTRACTThe women’s movement has become increasingly entangled with the “secularism versus Islamism” debate in today’s Turkey. While secular feminists believe that escalating authoritarianism and Islamic revivalism threaten gender equality and the gains of the women’s rights movement, Islamist women contest the “western/secular” ideal of gender equality on account of its being antithetical to the Islamic canon. The mutual marginalization by feminists and Islamists, mainly fueled by partisan politics, harms the much needed solidarity among women’s groups to solve the problems women face in Turkey, such as violence and unequal political participation. Moreover, this polarization has the harmful effect of reinforcing patriarchy: men, therefore face no challenges and simply continue to remain the sole producers and controllers of socio-political policies and epistemic resources. Hence, there seems to be a pressing need for secular feminists and Islamists to start a dialogue and focus on problems and issues they share in common, so as to seek urgent solutions to them. This article inquires into the viability of such an alliance through the proliferation of deliberative platforms where civil society organizations can meet at a safe distance from partisan politics and enter productive dialogue and generate policies to resolve the crucial problems women are facing in Turkey.

(Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

If Liberals Knew Themselves Better, Conservatives Might Like Them Better

The standard liberal positions on free speech, religious neutrality, and atheism all reflect their religious origins. Because American secular liberalism and American religious conservatism have a common ancestor, it is possible for liberals to describe aspirations that have more in common with the religious, and thus more rhetorical power, than the arguments that they now tend to offer.

Letter to the Editors

Letter to the Editors Margot Badran (bio) December 1, 2016 Asma Barlas, in her roundtable essay, “Secular and Feminist Critiques of the Qur’an: Anti-Hermeneutics as Liberation?” published in the fall 2016 issue of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR) makes erroneous and misleading comments concerning my work as a historian of Islamic feminism.1 Moreover, she recycles a narrative whereby I have concocted the term Islamic feminism and trapped her in its web. In the 1990s—a good decade before Barlas appeared on the scene—some Muslim women in Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa—including, for example, Iranian legal anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini, who went on to become a leading scholar of Islamic feminism—observed an emergent phenomenon they simultaneously and spontaneously called “Islamic feminism.” I was eager to know more. As a historian, I had previously researched early twentieth-century feminism in Egypt that Muslim and Christian women had jointly created. It was often referred to in Egypt as “secular feminism,” indicating its nationalist frame. This feminism was informed by religious ideals, especially as enunciated by Islamic modernism, and affirmed the equality of all citizens (whatever their religious identity). The Muslim women in the late twentieth century who first drew attention to emergent Islamic feminism were liberals, progressives, and feminists; they were known as “secular” because they did not employ religious language in their public discourse. The label “secular” did not imply being anti-Islam or deficiently Muslim. Islamic feminism articulated a gender-egalitarian Islam based on rereadings of the Qur’an and other religious sources. It sparked considerable attention from day one and was both enthusiastically welcomed and defiantly contested. As a label of identity, “Islamic feminist” was especially contentious, and for many years, women who produced what was seen as Islamic feminist discourse [End Page 5] firmly rejected the label. In time, however, many came to accept it, such as African American theologian and author of the groundbreaking Qur’an and Woman, amina wadud.2 Thus, only after I had found the term Islamic feminism in circulation by Muslim women did I start to use it myself. Moreover, I have written and spoken repeatedly on the controversy surrounding the use of the term Islamic feminism and especially Islamic feminist as an identity label. I have been scrupulous, as those attentive to my work know, about not calling anyone an Islamic feminist who rejects the label.3 In 2002, when her book first appeared, Barlas (we did not know each other at the time) emailed me to share the news. Why me? In 2003, when the Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto invited me to form a panel of two on Islamic feminism, I asked Barlas to join me and she readily accepted. I spoke about Islamic feminism and Barlas spoke about her book. In 2006, she invited me to Ithaca College to present my work on Islamic feminism, as one of a small series of guests to speak on various subjects. In 2007, when I was invited as one of two senior scholars to give a keynote at a conference on Islamic feminism at Tampere, I suggested that Barlas be the other keynote speaker. She used the occasion at Tampere to repudiate the label “Islamic feminism” and to accuse me of wantonly imposing this label on her and thereby hijacking her agency.4 [End Page 6] Barlas casts “feminism” as a “master narrative” born and bred in the West. She ignores that “feminism” was born in “the West” and “the East” simultaneously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that anticolonial nationalist discourses were integral to the feminisms in the East, which Muslims, together with other compatriots, constructed.5 Nonetheless, having made her disaffection with the idea of Islamic feminism emphatically known, Barlas could have simply turned her back on the idea of Islamic feminism, avoided future association with it, and looked for more agreeable contexts in which to present her work. She did not do this, but rather used (and continues to use) the platform “Islamic feminism” provided. In her JFSR roundtable essay, Barlas repeats the claim that I imposed the label “Islamic feminism” on...

Waking the Living Dead-Man: The Biopolitics of Early Modern Sleep

This essay argues that the early modern fascination with the sleeping body—a fascination attested to in the many accounts of extraordinary sleeping in the period—is tied to anxieties about social and political transformation, namely, the transformation of sovereign rule to secular liberalism. Sleeper narratives share formal similarities with visionary literature and medical case histories, but they cannot be reduced to either: the uncanny presence of the sleeping body at the center of these strange texts engages key biopolitical discourses by challenging the philosophical hegemony of consciousness and the political imbrication of identity, labor, and property. After linking the extraordinary sleeper genre to the problem of "soul sleep" in both theological and epistemological contexts, this essay works through the specifically biopolitical dimension of these texts by examining the changing conceptions of life and subjectivity at this crucial juncture. Finally, this essay shows how the unsettling attempt to employ torture in order to awaken the comatose sleeper, represented frequently in the archive, is an explicit form of biopolitical violence that bespeaks a particular concept of liberal agency. The essay concludes by comparing the way pain empathy works in sleeper narratives to the deployment of sentimental affect in the eighteenth-century novel.

Kant’s Critique of Religion: Epistemic Sources of Secularism

The secular interpretation of Kant is widespread and Kant is viewed as the most prestigious founding father of liberal secularism. At the same time, however, commentators note that Kant’s position on secularism is in fact much more complex, and some go as far as to talk about an ambiguous secularism in his work. This paper defends a refined version of the secular interpretation. According to this refined version, Kant can offer a limited, political secularism on the basis of a simple argument which focuses on the distinct epistemic statuses of political and religious claims; however, the paper argues, a more general secularism is unwarranted on the basis of the same argument. If my argument is correct, then it will account at least in part for the plurality of interpretations. Moreover, any further attempt to show that Kant’s relation to secularism is ambiguous or dismissive should take into consideration the argument from epistemic grounds presented here.

Islamism, Secularism and the Woman Question in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring: Evidence from the Arab Barometer

The uprisings that led to regime change during the early period of the Arab Spring were initially inclusive and pluralistic in nature, with men and women from every political and religious orientation engaging actively in political activities on the street and in virtual spaces. While there was an opening of political space for women and the inclusion of demands of marginalized groups in the activists’ agenda, the struggle to reimagine national identities that balance Islamic roots and secular yearnings is still ongoing in many countries in the region. This paper seeks to deepen understanding of the extent to which the pluralistic sentiments and openness to accepting the rights women have persisted following the uprising. We aim to examine changes in attitudes towards women’s equality in countries that underwent regime change through popular uprisings during revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring and in countries where regimes have remained unchanged. Using available data from consecutive rounds of the Arab Barometer survey, we examine changes in attitudes in nine countries with two rounds of Arab Barometer during and post Arab Spring (Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine). We find that support for “Muslim feminism” (an interpretation of gender equality grounded in Islam) has increased over the period and particularly in Arab Spring countries, while support for “secular feminism” has declined. In most countries examined, relatively high degrees of support for gender equality co-exist with a preference for Islamic interpretations of personal status codes pertaining to women. We discuss the implications of these findings for academics and activists concerned with women’s rights in the Middle East North Africa (MENA).

On the Genealogy and Legitimacy of the Politically Liberal Secular Polity: Bockenforde and the Asadians

My article compares and contrasts two critical approaches to the politically liberal, politically secular modern state: the historicist approach of Bockenforde and the Foucault inspired post-colonial, genealogical approach of theorists such as Asad, Cavanaugh, Danchin, Hurd, and Mahmood. For Bockenforde, political liberalism and political secularism are freedom-guaranteeing achievements that every religion must come to terms with. Nevertheless he saw liberal political secularism as self-eviscerating because without religious support, the motivations and solidarity needed by the modern state won’t be forthcoming. To the post-secular, post-colonial genealogists, liberalism and political secularism are modes of governmentality that restrict freedom, create and discriminate against religious minorities and generate grave conflict within and across borders. They locate the internal paradox of liberal political secularism in its claim to be separate from and neutral towards religion(s), while assuming the prerogative to intrusively regulate and define religion, and to draw the boundaries between the religious and the political. While they differ in their diagnoses and commitments, the two approaches a. have much to learn from each other and b. share some central, and in my view, flawed political theological assumptions. I make these assumptions explicit, challenge the explicit and covert political theology informing them, and present alternative that defends the legitimacy, basic principles, and core achievements of liberal, democratic (and social-democratic) constitutionalism and political secularism.

Defending Political Augustinianism: Brague and Taubes on the “Divine” as a Common Conceptual Space

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (ho theos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos).

Contested Feminisms: Women’s Religious Leadership and the Politics of Contemporary Western Feminism

Feminism is a relatively recent social movement of radical reform, emerging from the mass political movements of democratisation, secularisation and liberalism that swept across the western world from the 17th century onwards. The first wave of organised feminist political action was articulated in the abolitionist, temperance and suffrage movements in America and Europe in the mid 19th century and culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 in New York State where the women’s rights movement was born. Religion was a crucial influence in the work of first wave feminists enjoying close ties to the liberal movements of Protestantism, particularly the Quaker movement. However, as modernity progressed into the twentieth century and secularism became incorporated into statecraft, the influence of religion in the public sphere waned and humanist ethics came to the fore in political life. So, although Christianity had been a primary part of first wave feminism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the 1960s second wave feminism embraced secularism and situated religion as an inherently patriarchal institution, incapable of social change and has yet to acknowledge the pivotal part that women’s religious leadership played in establishing the grounds for contemporary feminist politics. Recently, a third phase of religious feminism, defined as post-secular feminism, shifts the ground yet again to open up new possibilities of engagement between religious and non-religious feminisms. Following on from the first two waves of religious feminism, this third phase holds potential for counter hegemonic action in transforming gender conservative religious institutions, theologies and social practices towards more inclusive, potentially transformative, religious cultures. It also provides space for a new articulation of religious and secular feminist politics.

Reconciliation Through Narrative: Toward a Theology of Spiritual Care in Public Health Care

In the West, chaplains are often employed by state mandated and state funded health care institutions. Because such western institutions are predicated upon the principles of secular liberalism, understanding the work of chaplains within such contexts is an urgent intellectual need. This paper seeks to describe such work through a Christian theological lens, arguing chaplaincy work can counter balance frequent experiences of alienation when people encounter health care systems as patients. Drawing upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, Rowan Williams, and Mieke Bal, this paper describes spiritual care as being a specific kind of narrative practice that can prompt the work of reconciliation in chaplaincy clients themselves, in the clients’ lived experience, and in their experience of health care systems.

Shepherding Public Discourse Practices: Homiletic Form Aligned to the Logic Operative in Racial Rhetoric and Public Theological Discourse for Secular Liberal Democracies

Shepherding Public Discourse Practices: Homiletic Form Aligned to the Logic Operative in Racial Rhetoric and Public Theological Discourse for Secular Liberal Democracies

Gender and Politics in Kuwait: Women and Political Participation in the Gulf

Gender and Politics in Kuwait: Women and Political Participation in the Gulf

Exorcising Communist Specters and Witch Philosophers: The Struggle for Academic Freedom of 1961

In re-discovering the scholars who pioneered in the practice and teaching of Philosophy in the Philippines, this paper unravels the story and character of UP Philosophy professor Ricardo Pascual in the context of the witch hunts of 1961. While indicted for his alleged communism, the real issues that led to Pascual’s trial were his professed agnosticism and his advocacy of secular liberalism, which was a response to the sectarian aggression threatening academic freedom in the 1930s, and again, in the 1950s. Pascual was, however, not the only one at that time to have fallen prey to this insidious tactic of misrecognition. The anonymous 1946 manuscript entitled The Peasant War in the Philippines, which sought reparations for a group of peasant rebels woefully defamed as “bandits and communists,” also found itself ironically condemned of treason, providing, as this paper explores, important resonances to and intersections with Pascual’s case. While Communism had conjured an image of itself as a specter, the fear and paranoia which it effectively produced was used not only to misrecognize every form of resistance as an assault against the State, but to suppress hauntings of other kinds. In Pascual’s case, it was in conjuring the spirit of Logical Positivism and the memory of the Filipino hero, Jose Rizal that he asserted the importance of a philosophy that was constantly and consciously critical of the constraints and obscurantist tendencies of religion and its institutions.