Doreen B. Townsend Center for the
Humanities
UC Berkeley
Title:
Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
Author:
Asad, Talal, Brown, Wendy, Butler, Judith, Mahmood, Saba
Publication Date:
11-01-2009
Series:
Townsend Papers in the Humanities
Publication Info:
UC Berkeley, Townsend Papers in the Humanities, Townsend Center for the Humanities
Permalink:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84q9c6ft
Citation:
Asad, Talal, Brown, Wendy, Butler, Judith, & Mahmood, Saba. (2009). Is Critique Secular?
Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. UC Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84q9c6ft
Abstract:
In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending
the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial
Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler,
and Saba Mahmood inquire into the evaluative frameworks at stake in understanding the conflicts
between blasphemy and free speech, between religious taboos and freedoms of thought and
expression, and between secular and religious world views. Is the language of the law an adequate
mechanism for the adjudication of such conflicts? What other modes of discourse are available for
the navigation of such differences in multicultural and multi-religious societies? What is the role of
critique in such an enterprise? These are among the pressing questions this volume addresses.
eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing
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T H E T O W N S E N D PA P E R S I N T H E H U M A N I T I E S No. 2
Is Critique Secular?
Blasphemy, Injury,
and Free Speech
Talal Asad
Wendy Brown
Judith Butler
Saba Mahmood
Is Critique Secular?
Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech
T H E T O W N S E N D PA P E R S I N T H E H U M A N I T I E S No. 2
Is Critique Secular?
Blasphemy, Injury,
and Free Speech
Talal Asad
Wendy Brown
Judith Butler
Saba Mahmood
Published by
he Townsend Center for the Humanities
University of California | Berkeley
Distributed by
University of California Press
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London | 2009
Copyright ©2009 The Regents of the University of California
ISBN 978-0-9823294-1-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Is critique secular? blasphemy, injury, and free speech/Talal Asad...[et al.].
p. cm. — (The Townsend papers in the humanities; no.2)
ISBN 978-0-9823294-1-2
1. Freedom of speech. 2. Blasphemy (Islam) 3. Islam and secularism.
I. Asad, Talal.
JC591.I73 2009
323.44’3091767—dc22
2009033961
Inquiries concerning proposals for the Townsend Papers in the Humanities
from Berkeley faculty and Townsend Center affiliates should be addressed to
The Townsend Papers, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 947202340, or by email to townsend_papers@lists.berkeley.edu
Design and typesetting: Kajun Graphics
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Wendy Brown
7
Free Speech, Blasphemy,
and Secular Criticism
Talal Asad
20
Religious Reason and Secular Affect:
An Incommensurable Divide?
Saba Mahmood
64
The Sensibility of Critique:
Response to Asad and Mahmood
Judith Butler
101
Reply to Judith Butler
Talal Asad
137
Reply to Judith Butler
Saba Mahmood
146
Wendy Brown
Introduction
THE ESSAYS COMPRISING this volume were first presented at a fall 2007
symposium, “Is Critique Secular?” sponsored by the Townsend
Center for the Humanities at the University of California,
Berkeley.1 The symposium was conceived as the inaugural public
event for a new research and teaching program in critical theory
at Berkeley, a program that aims to bridge conventional divides
between modern European critical theory and non-Western and
post-Enlightenment critical theoretical projects. A symposium
probing the presumed secularism of critique seemed an especially
promising way to launch a program with such ambitions.
While the symposium papers addressed a variety of topics, the
publication of those by Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood seemed
useful because their analyses focused on the Danish cartoon
affair—the protests and debates surrounding the 2005 Danish
newspaper publication of a series of cartoons satirizing the
Prophet Muhammad. Insofar as this affair raised a nest of (often
unasked) questions about conventional ordinances of secularity,
religion, insult, injury, blasphemy, free speech, dissent, and criticism, it provided an extraordinary platform for rethinking the
putatively secular foundations and premises of critique.
Is Critique Secular?
7
This introduction commences with the opening remarks I
made at the symposium itself. It then offers a brief orientation to
the essays published here.
Is Critique Secular?
The question, is critique secular? would seem to imitate critique’s direct interrogative modality and secularism’s putative
transparency, conveying as well an expectation of rational consideration conventionally associated with both critique and secularism. The directness and transparency evaporate, of course, the
moment the terms of the title are closely scrutinized. Indeed, the
question invites its own dispersion, dissemination, disorientation.
It invites, in other words, the work of critique. Those who posed
the question, the conference organizers, knew its terms would not
stay still and are among the scholars who have problematized such
terms extensively in their own work. But they knew as well that
the Western academy is governed by the presumptive secularism
of critique, and that it is with this governance that we must begin.
Unseating governance of this sort is the very signature of political,
social, and cultural critique; it targets what is presumptive, sure,
commonsensical, or given in the current order of things.
It may be helpful briefly to query the relation between the patently unfixed quality of the terms of the question, is critique secular? and the historical force of the impulse to fix each and bind
them together. To this end, let us make each term wobble a bit
and then consider what secures them so tightly to one another.
Is . . .
After Bill Clinton’s infamous account of why he had not exactly lied in denying a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky—
“[I]t depends on what the meaning of the word, ‘is’ is”—the sliding
signification of this tiny but potent verb is seared in the popular
imagination and not only the erudite one. And Clinton was on to
something. “Is” can be temporal (setting the present off from past
8
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
and future) or ontological; it can refer to essence or existence; it
can be performative or constative; it can be mobilized to insist,
declare, refute, or simply posit. And placed as an interrogative, it
inverts its power of fixity and certainty; it undoes itself.
Critique . . .
From Reinhart Kosellek’s Critique and Crisis, we learn that
critique emerges in ancient Athens as the jurisprudential term
krisis.2 Nearly untranslatable from the holistic Greek context to our
much more compartmentalized one, krisis integrates polis rupture,
tribunal, knowledge, judgment, and repair at the same time that it
links subject and object in practice. Krisis refers to a specific work
of the polis on itself—a practice of sifting, sorting, judging, and
repairing what has been rent by a citizen violation of polis law or
order. As the term winds its way into Latin and then the vernacular European languages, critique loses this many-faceted holism.
It retreats mainly into medical vocabulary where it signifies the
turning point in an illness, a usage that persists into the present.
However, critique remains distinguished from criticism for much
of modernity and especially for Kant and Marx, who distanced
themselves respectively from “criticasters,” and “critical critics.”3
Apart from the historical shifts, there is, of course, a world
of difference between the meanings of critique thus far identified and those now practiced under the sign of ideology critique,
cultural critique, identity critique, and so on. At times today the
term is taken to convey polemical rejection, at other times to signal immanent or deconstructive analytic practices, and at still
others, to identify the search for a secreted truth within a tissue
of mystifications. In all of its uses, however, critique would seem
to carry a tacit presumption of reason’s capacity to unveil error.
Therein lies part of our problem.
Secular?
This term, which issues etymologically from a certain notion
Is Critique Secular?
9
of time, has come to stand in commonsense fashion for postReformation practices and institutions in the West that formally
separate private religious belief (or nonbelief) from public life. Yet
it is not only Talal Asad who has dislodged this meaning with his
insistence on pluralizing formations of the secular (in his book by
that title) but also Charles Taylor who, in his history of Christian
secularism, backgrounds this meaning to focus on the making
of the secular subject and its unique experience of the world.4
Consider, too, the train of associations with the secular that betray
the commonsensical meaning—“secular” can suggest a condition
of being unreligious or antireligious, but also religiously tolerant,
humanist, Christian, modern, or simply Western. And any effort
at settling the term immediately meets its doom in the conflicts
among these associations, conflicts epitomized by the recent phenomenon of an American neoconservative political agenda that
simultaneously sought to legitimize Christian prayer in American
public schools and to make secularization a central tenet of the regime change project in the Middle East. Indeed, today the secular
derives much of its meaning from an imagined opposite in Islam,
and, as such, veils the religious shape and content of Western
public life and its imperial designs. Yet something named “secular
humanism” is also targeted by the right in domestic American
politics, held responsible by its decriers for destroying the fabrics
of the family, the moral individual, and patriotism.
Uncritical Secularism
If secularism and critique slide in so many directions, and
are so unfixed in their respective meanings and reach, how did
they become thoroughly bound to one another? Indeed, how has
critique come to be defined as secular, and how has secularism
come to be understood as both what animates critique and what
critique yields? Clearly a constellation of Enlightenment conceits
is part of what allows critique to comport so readily with secularism: from Mill to Marx, Diderot to Kant and Hume, we greet
10
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
the Enlightenment presumption that the true, the objective, the
real, the rational, and even the scientific emerge only with the
shedding of religious authority or “prejudice.” This presumption
reaches an apex in the Kantian dictum that everything must submit to critique, even reason itself, and also in Hegel’s attempt to
reveal the rational kernel of Christianity through a critical history
and phenomenology. Hence the conviction that critique displaces
religious and other unfounded authority and prejudice with reason, even as it may leave religion itself standing. Hence too, the
conviction that critique replaces opinion or faith with truth, and
subjectivism with science; that critique is, in short, secular.
But even this story does not quite apprehend the intensity with
which critique attaches itself to secularism, articulates itself as
a secularizing project, and identifies itself with the dethroning
of God. For an appreciation of this intensity, we must consider
Marx’s own development of critique out of what he took to be
the shortcomings of the Young Hegelians’ critical approach to religion. Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and others criticized religion as
illusory consciousness that obscured the real and the true about
human powers and human existence. Initially caught up in this
project, Marx soon turned against it, and did so by distinguishing
criticism, “mere criticism” or “critical criticism,” from critique.
This is the move that really secures the conviction that critique is
secular in the Western critical theory tradition. How does it go?
Marx’s objection to the Young Hegelians was that they regarded criticism of religious illusion as the road to freedom. For them,
if both man and the state shed religious for rational consciousness, both would be freed from error, partiality, and particularity
and hence would be free as such. Marx took a different approach.
Drawing on, yet transforming, Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion, Marx regarded religious consciousness not merely as error
but as existing for a reason and, above all, as the symptom of
unhappy and unfree human existence. The very fact of religious
consciousness was the sign of an unfree world, a world that “reIs Critique Secular?
11
quires illusion.” Thus, God is “the illusory sun about which man
revolves so long as he does not revolve around himself,” something he cannot do until his existence is emancipated.5 For Marx,
then, there was a great difference between criticism of religion as
illusory and a critique of the conditions that produce religious consciousness and that religion can be seen to express. Mere criticism
marks religion as false; critique connects religious illusions, and
the need for them, to the specific reality generating and necessitating religious consciousness. In addition, critique discerns in
religion the desire for a different world, one in which we all are
“equal in the eyes of god,” in which “the meek shall inherit the
earth,” or in which the powers and virtues previously conferred to
a divinity are finally known and lived as human powers. So critique not only links religion to historical conditions of unfreedom
but also reads religion as indirectly harboring the wishes and aspirations of humanity against its suffering in the present. Religion is
both “the expression of … suffering and a protest against it.”6
What has happened here? Marx has founded his distinction
between criticism and critique in the latter’s ability to (1) apprehend the real order of things, (2) explain why this real order is
not manifest but requires critique to be revealed, and (3) explain
what kind of human future is adumbrated in religious illusion.
Critique is premised upon a historically necessary mystification of
reality, a mystification required by the unfree, inegalitarian, and
unhappy nature of existence, and it promises to scientifically decode that mystification. Thus Marx brings together in the notion
of critique a comprehension of the Real identified as the material,
a practice of objectivity identified with science, and the realization of true emancipation of religion, true secularism, in place of
what he decries as “merely theological criticism” (where secularism stands both for the unreligious and also, as Charles Taylor
would have it, the capacity to live to one side of one’s milieu, to
grasp its contingency rather than simply be steeped in it).
It is this particular heritage from Marx, and the way it threads
12
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
through German critical theory right up through Habermas, that
has so overdetermined the imbrication, indeed the identification,
of critique with secularism in the tradition of Western critical
theory. Within this tradition, critique has for more than 150 years
been bound to an apprehension of a set of human arrangements
that generate religious illusion, even when religion is not the express target of critique. Critique in this tradition has prided itself
on explaining both mystifications and human consort with these
mystifications from a place imagined to be their opposite in every
respect. Thus does the rational, material, real, scientific, and human aim both to explain and supplant the religious, the ideal, the
unreal, the speculative, and the divine.
So it is no small thing this symposium does in posing the question, is critique secular? Far more than asking after varieties of
critique or varieties of secularism, this question upends one of
critical theory’s founding planks. Yet it does so in a spirit that
allows for the possibility of other formulations of critique, secularism, and their relation. These formulations might loosen critique’s identity with secularism as well as surrender its reliance
on a notion of secularism itself insulated from critique.
The question, is critique secular? is also posed at a politicalhistorical juncture when intellectuals face something of a choice
between complicity with imperial and unreflexive Western civilizational discourses of rationality and secularism on the one hand,
and with challenging Western presumptions to monopolize the
fact, meaning, and content of secularism, rationalism, freedom,
and even democracy on the other. If, as Talal Asad suggests in this
volume, the Western civilizational identity rooted in a presumed
convergence of Christianity, secularism, liberalism, democracy,
and liberty is opened up, Westerners might begin to think differently about themselves and their imagined global opposites. So
there is both a theoretical and political incitement for the inquiry
this symposium inaugurates, a combination that itself heralds the
work of critique.
Is Critique Secular?
13
“FREE SPEECH, BLASPHEMY, AND SECULAR CRITICISM,” Talal Asad’s erudite
and indirect critique of received Western understandings of critique, performs rhetorically what it calls for explicitly. Rather than
pressing a linear logical analytics, it interrupts at every turn a set
of discursive oppositions between Islam and secular Christianity
on issues of freedom, speech, and blasphemy, and between a political Islam identified with aggression and death and a secular
West identified with rationality and life. Asad has long resisted
attempts to define the secular and the religious and has shown
them rather to be interdependent and fluctuating notions constituting a crucial domain of modern power and governance. Thus
the status of belief and blasphemy alter in relation to the powers
of the modern state and are, among other things, effects of expansions and changes in these powers.
Asad’s starting point is the Danish cartoon controversy, in
which twelve editorial cartoons viciously satirizing the Prophet
Muhammad were published in a Danish newspaper in 2005 and
then republished by several European newspapers in 2008. The
cartoons were greeted by most religious Muslims as insulting,
violent, and/or blasphemous, and the publications incited rage
and protest from Muslims around the world.
Through close consideration of the problematic of blasphemy,
Asad begins undoing the discursive-intellectual binary that lines
up Christianity, secularism, reason, tolerance, free thought and
speech on one side, and Islam, fundamentalism, submission,
intolerance, restricted thought and speech on the other. This in
turn allows him to challenge a more specific antinomy between
secular criticism and religious censure, in which the former is
associated with freedom, truth, and reason and the latter with intolerance, obscurantism, arbitrary dictum, and coercion. Within
these binary orders, the very existence of the crime of blasphemy
in Islamic society suggests to Western ears the absence of free
speech (and by implication the absence of freedom tout court). But
this is only so, Asad argues, because of a Western conceit of the
14
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
self-owning individual presumed free from all forms of coercion,
including those potentially entailed in religion, commerce, love,
belief, and comportment.
Asad contests this conceit as a matter of simple fact—reminding us of the daily coercions exercised by the inarticulate powers
coursing through liberal orders—but also suggests that it meets its
own limits in a variety of express concerns within liberal societies,
including one shared with Islam: the problem of seduction, and its
cousin, moral corruption. It is along this trail that Asad is able to
reveal to liberal subjects that they are not quite so self-owning as
official discourse suggests, and that concerns with “blasphemy” as
a violent breaking of constraints is as present in putatively secular
societies as it is in overtly theocratic ones, even if framed through
a different vocabulary and living below the political surface of
liberal orders. The modern Western opposition between freedom
and blasphemy permits Westerners to believe that they are free
of the restrictions a discourse of blasphemy imposes, while denying the belonging to a particular way of life that secularism must
protect in other, less forthrightly religious terms.
Above all, Asad’s essay reveals how different conceptualizations of belief, freedom, and truth produce different possibilities
for action in the world. If, as in one strand of Christianity, the
“truth shall set you free,” and freedom is understood as the removal of constraints, then freedom of speech is a first principle of
both truth and freedom. But if, as in certain practices of Islam, individual belief is considered inscrutable by any being other than
God, what matters is not individual belief but rather social practices and public behaviors. Within Islam, belief is not a space of
indemnity but is, rather, inscrutable. Belief’s relation to freedom
in Islam is thus very different from that which is featured in a
Christian trajectory of blasphemy and free speech.
Through this framing, Asad can then provide depth and immediacy to two contemporary questions: “Does the modern liberal
aversion to the category of blasphemy derive from a suspicion of
Is Critique Secular?
15
political religion?” and, “Why is it that aggression in the name of
God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the act of killing
in the name of the secular nation, or of democracy, does not?”
While the analysis he has developed to this point identifies the
logical fallacies and hypocrisies of these conundrums, Asad is
uninterested in such analytics. Instead, he leaves us with a devastating open-ended reflection on the investments and affect of
(Western) paranoia.
In “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” Saba Mahmood also
begins with the Danish cartoons but turns from a presumed clash
between blasphemy and free speech probed so productively by Asad
to interrogate a different dimension of the religiously based presumptions and affect of Euro-Atlantic secularism. For Mahmood,
the Christian secular understanding of blasphemy cannot fathom
the violence or moral injury that the cartoons cause to believing
Muslims. This is because of significant differences in what she
calls “reading practices” flowing from Islamic piety (a tradition of
interpretation that is challenged by many Muslims) and secular
Protestantism and, more precisely, different semiotics of iconography and representation especially pertinent to religious deities
and prophets. Importantly, these are semiotic differences—not oppositions and not developmental intervals in which, for example,
Christianity represents a modernist achievement at which Islam
has not yet arrived. In other words, if Protestant Christians know
that religious signs “are not embodiments of the divine but only
stand in for it through an act of human coding and interpretation,” while Islamic pietists experience the negative iconography
in the cartoons as a direct assault, this is not due to a hermeneutic
sophistication of the former over the latter. Rather, it is because
Protestant Christianity figures religious authority as distant and
command-based, while for Islamic pietists one “ingest[s], as it
were, the Prophet’s persona,” emulating “how he dressed…ate…
spoke to his friends and adversaries…slept, walked, and so on.”7
Thus an attack on the Prophet’s persona, such as the satires fea16
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
tured in the cartoons, does not merely defile him but constitutes
a direct assault on his followers.
Mahmood is not arguing that this difference is an inherent one
between Islam and Christianity but, rather, that it pertains to a
particular (and contestable) modality of belief and hermeneutics
in certain traditions within each religion. Without an appreciation of this difference, the offence and injury that the cartoons
caused for many remained unarticulated and unrecognized; the
debates remained locked in an unreflexive and one-sided hermeneutic taken to be the only hermeneutic.
The implications of this difference comprise only one part of
Mahmood’s account of how the Danish cartoon episode was cast
within a European Christian worldview that anoints itself as
secular. Also important is the way this casting at once racialized
Muslims and denied such racialization, a casting that permitted
the insistence that religion rather than race was being satirized in
the cartoons. (Had race been considered to be at issue, various national and European Court hate speech laws would have kicked in
to censor the publication and circulation of the cartoons.) Despite
Europe’s own exceptionally confused and confusing history on
the distinction and fusions of race and religion—a history that
features, inter alia, the racialization of Aryans, Jews, Roma, and
northern Irish Protestants and Catholics—most Europeans engaging the Danish cartoon affair insisted on a pure and purely religious categorization of Islam, casting religion as a “choice” rather
than an ascriptive or biological identity. But the conceit of religion
as a matter of individual choice, Mahmood reminds us, is already
a distinct (and distinctly Protestant) way of conceiving of religion,
one that is woefully inapt for Islam and, I might add, for Judaism,
which is why neither comports easily with the privatized individual religious subject presumed by the formulations of religious
freedom and tolerance governing Euro-Atlantic modernity.
In Judith Butler’s response to the essays by Asad and Mahmood,
she weaves together and extends their critiques of the inherent
Is Critique Secular?
17
secularism imputed to critique in the modern Western tradition.
Butler affirms their challenges to Western representations of blasphemy, injury, and freedom by underscoring the fact that there
is always a normative framework constraining and regulating the
semantic fields in which such terms operate. But not only do normative frameworks constrain the fields, they animate our critical
perspectives too, that is, our critiques of these fields are themselves driven by normative commitments that aim to remake our
affective and moral responses to the world we inhabit. Butler also
returns to the notion of critique itself, not only to reestablish its
distinction from criticism, but also to formulate it as a rich, embodied practice—one that draws the subject and object of critique
into a new relation while avoiding conventional conceits of objectivity. She draws our attention to the ways that both Asad and
Mahmood perform this kind of critique in their analyses of the
responses to the Dutch cartoon affair, and adds to these considerations her own critique of sexual freedom in “secular” Dutch
immigration politics.
If these critiques of secular framings of recent political conflicts in putatively secular polities reveal the limitations of these
framings, then they will also have succeeded in opening the
questions of whether critique itself is or must be secular, and of
whether secularism is the prerequisite of critique. Such openings
comprise the modest ambition of this volume.
18
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
Endnotes
1
The organizers of the symposium were Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood,
and Cristopher Nealon. The other participants included Amy Hollywood
and Colin Jager. For further information on the program, see http://
townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/swg_crittheory.shtml.
2
Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis
of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA, 1988). In Talal Asad’s contribution to
this volume, he offers a somewhat different etymology of “critique” and
“criticism” from that set out here and treats the two terms as French and
English equivalents of each other.
3
Although Paul Krugman once quipped that “any noun can be verbed,” the
contemporary coinage of “critique” as a verb surely signifies the erosion of
its valuable distance from criticism.
4
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto,
2003); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, 2007).
5
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. R. Tucker (New
York, 1978), p. 54.
6
Ibid., p. 54.
7
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An
Incommensurable Divide?” in this volume.
Is Critique Secular?
19
Talal Asad
Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism
FOR MANY YEARS NOW , there has been much talk in Euro-America
about the threat to free speech, particularly whenever its Muslims
have raised the issue of blasphemy in response to some public
criticism of Islam. The most recent crisis was the scandal of the
Danish cartoons.1 A decade and a half after the Rushdie affair,
the old religious denunciation of “blasphemy” had reared its head
again among Muslims in Europe and beyond, seeking to undermine hard-won secular freedoms. Or so we were told. There were
angry protests and some violence on one side, many affirmations
of principle and expressions of outrage on the other.2 The affair
was discussed largely in the context of the problem of integrating
Muslim immigrants into European society and how it related to
the “global menace” of Islamists.3 Coming after the attack on the
World Trade Center and the London bombings, the cartoon scandal was linked to a wider discourse: the West’s “War on Terror,”
a conflict that many see as part of an intrinsic hostility between
two civilizations, Islam and Europe. Thus the Danish press and
many Danish politicians began to criticize Islamic studies scholars of Islam for disregarding this fundamental antagonism. It was
argued that these scholars had intentionally avoided certain civi20
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
lizational topics, such as the ways in which Islam is not only an
obstacle to integration but a potential security threat.4
The attitudes displayed in the cartoon affair by Muslims and
non-Muslims were quite remarkable. However, this essay is neither an apologia for, nor a criticism of, those attitudes; it is an
attempt to think about the place of blasphemy—a religious concept—in secular liberal society. In what follows I want to think
about blasphemy from various angles and treat it as the crystallization of some moral and political problems in liberal Europe. So
I will have less to say about traditions of Islamic thought and behavior than about the modern secular condition we all inhabit.
Blasphemy as a Sign of Civilizational Identity
The conflict that many Euro-Americans saw in the Danish
cartoons scandal was between the West and Islam, each championing opposing values: democracy, secularism, liberty, and reason on one side, and on the other the many opposites—tyranny,
religion, authority, and violence. The idea of blasphemy clearly
belongs to the latter series and is seen by secularists as a constraint on the freedom of speech—on freedom itself—guaranteed
by democratic principles and by the pursuit of reason so central
to Western culture. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg lecture in 2006
emphasized the idea of a civilizational confrontation between
Christianity, which reconciles Greek reason with biblical faith,
and Islam, which encourages violent conversion because it has no
faith in reason.5
Free speech, it is said, is central to democracy. Consistent with
the standpoint of Pope Benedict and many of the defenders of the
Danish cartoons, it is often claimed that democracy is rooted in
Christianity and is therefore alien to Islam. There is a widespread
conviction that Christian doctrine has been receptive to democracy because in Christendom (unlike Islam) church and state began as separate entities. The notion of historical origins is more
problematic than is popularly supposed: when did Christianity
Is Critique Secular?
21
begin? Or Islam? It must not be forgotten that the Byzantine
state-church was the space in which central Christian doctrines
were formulated and fought over, that even in the Middle Ages
and well beyond, the separation between religious and political
authority was far from complete, and that political inequality was
generally regarded as legitimate. This is not to say that all those
who sought to maintain inequality were Christian and that their
opponents were always non-Christian. As all historians of the
subject know, the struggle for equal rights was ideologically and
socially complicated.
Many Euro-Americans, including, most recently, Francis
Fukuyama, have traced “democracy” through “political equality”
to the Christian doctrine of “the universal dignity of man,” in
order to make the claim that it is a unique value of Western civilization.6 In Medieval Latin, however, dignitas was used to refer
to the privilege and distinction of high office, not to the equality
of all human beings. Christianity does have a notion of universal
spiritual worth (as, for that matter, does Islam), but that has been
compatible with great social and political inequality. In the nineteenth century some writers (for example, the very influential
George Grote) began to trace the concept and practice of modern democracy not from Christianity but from classical Greece.7
Pre-Christian Athens certainly had a concept of equal, albeit restricted, citizenship and rudimentary democratic practices, which
included the right to speak freely in the political forum, but it
had no notion of “the universal dignity of man.” In European
Christendom it was only gradually, through continuous conflict,
that many inequalities were eliminated and that secular authority replaced one that was ecclesiastical.
There is a story told by writers of whom Marcel Gauchet is a
much-cited example: 8 Christianity is the seed that flowers into
secular humanism, destroying in the process its own transcendental orientation and making possible the terrestrial autonomy
that now lies at the heart of Western democratic society. (This
22
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
contrasts with Muslim societies, which remain mired in religion.)
Christianity, alone of all “religions,” gives birth to a plural, democratic world; alone of all “religions,” it begets unfettered human
agency. The elemental human dispossession that characterizes all
religion is paradoxically overcome by and through a unique religion: Christianity. This story of “Western Christianity” as a divine
parent metamorphosing into its human offspring (modernity), as
transcendence embodying itself in worldly life (secularity), as the
particular introducing the universal in thought, is remarkable for
the way it mimics the sacred Christian narrative in which Jesus
incarnates the divine principle, dies, and is reborn to take his
place at the right hand of the Father, a narrative whose telos is
the redemption of all humankind. Transcendence thus remains
in our redeemed world, our secular “European civilization,” although now it has a different content as well as a different place.
Santiago Zabala, surveying the postmetaphysical trend in EuroAmerican philosophy, puts it a little differently. Secularization,
he writes, is not merely produced by a Christian past but is also
a testament to the enduring presence of Christianity in its postChristian mode (European civilization).9
How then, given the present political climate, are we to understand stories that recount the flourishing of a distinctive
European civilization, with Christianity as its historical foundation, always in conflict with another called “Islamic”? As part of
a political discourse, these stories assert a European identity. Their
logical implication is that the absence of “democratic traditions”
in Islamic civilization explains Muslim resort to the coercive notion of blasphemy and its inability to grasp the supreme importance of freedom. This appears self-evident. But is it?
From a sociological point of view, populations that belong to
“European civilization” are highly differentiated by class, nationalism, and religious identity. They have often been riven by
internal conflict, in which warring parties have used the same
principle of critical public speech to attack one another, and in
Is Critique Secular?
23
which alliances have sometimes been made with Muslim princes.
There have always been important movements that have sought
to censor public communication in the West, to restrain and control democratic tendencies, in the name of freedom or equality
or a stable order. The entire history of European countries in
the Americas, Asia, and Africa (with its repressions of the indigenous populations they ruled over) has been an integral part of
“European civilization.” Hannah Arendt famously argued that the
racist policies of European imperialism were essential to the development of fascism in Europe. It is not easy, therefore, to understand what exactly is being claimed when “democracy” and “free
speech” are said to be intrinsic to “European civilization,” and inequality and repression are attributed to “Islamic civilization.”
True, “democratic” institutions are now more firmly established within Western states than in Middle Eastern ones,10 and
the legal systems of Muslim-majority countries were not, until
they imported Western law, built around the idea of universal
legal equality. But instead of regarding the concern with the particular as opposed to the universal as a lack, as an absence that
leads to the infliction of social indignities, we might examine
more closely the forms in which the universal drive to freedom
appears in liberal societies. Thus, one form of universalization
central to liberal politics and economics is the substitutability of individuals: in the arithmetic of electoral politics, each voter counts
as one and is the exact equivalent of every other voter—no more,
no less, and no different. Each citizen has the same right to take
part in the political process, and to be heard politically, as every
other. Substitutability is more fundamental to liberal democracy
than electoral consent, from which Western governments are said
to derive their legitimacy, because consent here is dependent on
counting substitutable votes.
Substitutability is more than a principle of electoral politics. It
is also a social technique essential to bureaucratic control and to
market manipulation, both being ways of normalizing (and there24
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
fore constraining) the individual. This is why statistical modes of
thinking and representation—the construction of political and
economic strategies on the basis of proportions, averages, trends,
and so on—are so important to modern capitalist societies. The
fact that individuals have equal value and so may be substituted
for one another is, however, what helps to undermine the liberal
notion of personal dignity, because for the individual to count as
a substitutable unit, his or her uniqueness must be discounted.
Thus, even when we use Western criteria of democratic virtue,
“liberal European civilization” emerges as highly contradictory.
A word on my use of the term “liberal” in this paper: I am
aware that liberalism is a complex historical tradition, that Locke
is not Constant and Constant is not Mill and Mill is not Rawls,
that the history of liberalism in North America is not the same as
that in Europe—or, for that matter, in parts of the global South
where it can be said to have a substantial purchase. Liberalism
isn’t located simply in classical texts, and of course it jostles with
other traditions in the West. In its early stages, liberal politics was
engaged in challenging hegemonic power, it was full of passion.
Now, more often than not, it is the ally of global power: cool,
rational, and imperturbable. As a discursive space, liberalism
provides its advocates with a common political and moral language in which to identify problems and to dispute them. Such
ideas as individual autonomy, freedom of (economic, political,
social) exchange, limitation of state power, rule of law, national
self-determination, and religious toleration belong to that space,
not least when their meanings are debated. Its theorists seek to
present liberalism as consistent and unified, but it is precisely the
contradictions and ambiguities in the language of liberalism that
make the public debates among self-styled liberals and with their
“illiberal” opponents possible. Liberalism thus provides moderns
with a vocabulary that can cover a multitude of sins—and virtues.
The word “liberty” itself has been inserted into a variety of conflicting perspectives—as the political assertions of the American
Is Critique Secular?
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government and that of its critics make evident. I call the society
in which political and moral arguments using this vocabulary
are sited “liberal.” The tradition in which these contradictions are
embedded alerts us to the fact that the conflict is not usefully seen
as one between “liberal” and “illiberal” tendencies in every civilization or country (as several writers have recently proposed).
The conflict is intrinsic to liberalism as an evolving discursive
tradition, and what is plausibly liberatory in one context is clearly
repressive in another.
Democracy and freedom are central to “Western Civilization,”
and the universal right to free speech is central to democracy.
Or is it? How does the idea of cultivating elite sensibilities (quality) implied by “civilization” fit with the idea of mass equality
(quantity) implied by “democracy”? This question was raised
in nineteenth-century Britain when the extension of the suffrage was debated. It was then, for example, that Mill argued for
a system of plural voting that would give greater weight to the
educated (“more civilized”) classes to balance the working-class
majority.11 But the problem has remained unresolved. Answers at
a philosophical level are plentiful, however, according to which
some measure of trust, amicability, and self-reliance are made essential to democracy. For this reason Zabala, whom I cited earlier,
believes that secularity provides the key:
It was Dewey’s merit to have argued that we achieve full
political maturity only at the moment when we succeed in
doing without any metaphysical culture, without the culture of
belief in non-human powers and forces. Only after the French
Revolution did human beings learn to rely increasingly on
their own powers; Dewey called the religion that teaches men
to rely on themselves a “religion of love” (the complete opposite of a “religion of fear”) because it is virtually impossible to
distinguish it from the condition of the citizen who participates
concretely in democracy.12
It is worth stressing, however, that the French Revolution did
26
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
not simply introduce ideas of solidarity, democracy, and freedom
into the modern world. Revolutionary armies sought to promote
liberty, equality, and fraternity by conquest. The revolution inaugurated the age of modern empires, unleashing modern warfare,
nationalism, racism, and genocide around the world. All of this is
certainly part of “Christian” Europe’s history. Of course it would
be absurd to suggest that it is the sum, or the essence, of Western
history, but it is a part. Is it not therefore also part of its inheritance? The distinguished philosopher Richard Rorty has talked
about rehabilitating the idea of “the European mission civilizatrice”
with reference to its democratic values—its unique attachment to
equality and freedom.13 But he does not explain who will decide
what really represents “European values,” how they will be applied, and what they will actually achieve in the world of unequal
power. As recent commentators have pointed out, democratic republics are as capable of legislating repression at home and depriving the liberty of weaker peoples abroad, whether by military
or economic means.
Liberalism and the Shape of Free Speech
The charge of blasphemy is said to be an archaic religious constraint, and free speech a principle essential to modern freedom.
But if the West is a civilization with Christianity as its historical
foundation, does the concept of blasphemy have any place in it
now that the West is secularized? Are there any resemblances between the idea of blasphemy and the prohibitions established by
secular law? Do prohibitions and protections relating to speech
tell us something about the idea of “the human” defined by
them? And how does the idea of the human serve to distinguish
between “the religious” and “the secular”?
If blasphemy indicates a limit transgressed, does secular criticism signify liberation? Modern societies do, of course, have legal
constraints on communication. Thus there are laws of copyright,
patent, and trademark, and laws protecting commercial secrets,
Is Critique Secular?
27
all of which prohibit in different ways the free circulation of expressions and ideas. Are property rights in a work of art infringed
if it is publicly reproduced in a distorted form by someone other
than the original author with the aim of commenting on it? And
if they are infringed, how does the sense of violation differ from
claims about blasphemy? My point here is not that there is no difference, but that there are legal conditions that define what may
be communicated freely, and how, in liberal democratic societies,
and that consequently the flow of public speech has a particular
shape by which its “freedom” is determined.
There are laws that prohibit expression in public and that appear at first sight to have nothing to do with property: for example, indecency laws and laws relating to child pornography, whose
circulation is prohibited even in cyberspace. The first set of laws
(copyright, and so on) you might say has to do with the workings
of a market economy and so with property, whereas the second
(pornography) is quite different because it deals with ethics. But
although it is the laws relating to the latter whose infringement
evokes the greatest passion, both sets of constraint are clues to the
liberal secular ideal of the human, the proper subject of all freedoms and rights. Both sets of limits articulate different ways in
which property and its protection define the person. In a secular
society these laws make it possible to demarcate and defend one’s
self in terms of what one owns, including, above all, one’s body.
Thus our conceptions of “trespassing” on another’s body and of
“exploiting” it are matters of central concern to laws regulating
sexual propriety. They also relate to slavery, a nonliberal form of
property, for modern law holds that one cannot transfer ownership of one’s living body to another person or acquire property
rights in another’s. Freedom is thus regarded as an inalienable
form of property, a capacity that all individual persons possess in
a state of nature, rooted in the living body. There are, of course,
exceptions to this principle of absolute ownership in one’s body,
some old and some new: for example, suicide—destroying one28
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
self—is not only forbidden but also regarded by most people in
liberal countries with horror, even though the person is said to be
the sole owner of the body she inhabits and animates. This exception to self-ownership is often explained by secularists in terms of
the humanist principle of “the dignity of human life,” a principle
that is not seen as conflicting with the brutality of war. Warfare is
presented, regretfully, as a mode of killing and dying in the name
of one’s nation or of universal human redemption.
Apart from this old contradiction there is now a considerable
area of legal and moral confusion regarding the ownership of
donated human organs and human tissue taken as samples for
medical research.14 This confusion adds to the growing sense that
the sacred conception of the self-owning human, the foundation of freedoms in modern society, is under threat. All the more
reason, it would seem, for affirming his proprietary rights with
vehemence.
In theory, the self-owning liberal subject has the ability to
choose freely, a freedom that can be publicly demonstrated. The
reality is more complicated. Famously, there are two subject
positions—one economic and the other political—whose freedom is invested with value in liberal democratic society, both of
which are linked to a conception of the freely choosing self and
the limits that protect it. Thus, as a citizen the subject has the
right to criticize political matters openly and freely and to vote for
whichever political candidate she wishes—but she is obliged to
do so in strictest secrecy. There is a paradox in the fact that the individual choice of candidates must be hidden to be free, while critical speech to be free must be exercised in public. This difference
actually indicates that while the former takes for granted that the
citizen is embedded in particular social relationships, the latter
assumes that he is an abstract individual with universal rights.
As an economic individual, the subject is free to work at, spend,
and purchase whatever she chooses, and has the right to protect
her property legally. Marx was surely right when he pointed out
Is Critique Secular?
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that in modern liberal societies the freedom of the producer is
a precondition for the growth of capital—or, as we might put it
today, unrestricted consumption is a source of corporate power.
What he failed to point out, however, is that that power in turn
may limit the liberty of the citizen. Social constraint (and, as
Freud has made us aware, even psychological constraint) lies at
the heart of individual choice. It seems probable, therefore, that
the intolerable character of blasphemy accusations in this kind
of society derives not so much from their attempt to constrain as
from the theological language in which the constraint is articulated. Theology invokes dependence on a transcendental power,
and secularism has rejected such a power by affirming human
independence. (But let’s note that freedom from transcendence is
secularism’s formal claim. In fact, constraint and dependence are
massively present in our secular world, transcending the individual subject-agent’s ability to know and to act.)
My concern is not to make the banal argument that free speech
is never totally free because in a liberal society freedom is balanced by responsibility. Instead I want to ask what the particular
patterns of liberal restriction can tell us about liberal ideas of the
free human. The self-owning individual is a famous liberal idea,
and, within that conception, although there are limits to what
one may do to oneself, there is greater latitude in relation to one’s
material property. The ownership of property doesn’t only establish immunity in relation to all those who don’t own it. It also
secures one’s right to do with it what one wishes—so long as no
damage is done to the rights of others. The right to choose how to
dispose of what one owns is integral to the liberal subject—and
the subject’s body, affections, and speech are regarded as personal
property because they constitute the person.
I will return to this point about discourse as property, but first I
want to introduce a concept central to Islamic traditional thought
about free speech but not to liberal thought (or at least not central
in the same way)—seduction.
30
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
In liberal society, rape, the subjection of a person’s body
against his/her wish for the purpose of sexual enjoyment is a serious crime, whereas seduction—the mere manipulation of another person’s desire—is not. The first is a violence; the other
is not. In the latter case, no property right is violated. Compare
this understanding with that in ancient Greece, where seduction
was a more serious crime than rape because it involved the capture of someone’s affection and loyalty away from the man to
whom they properly belonged.15 What this indicates is not only
that the woman’s viewpoint did not matter legally in the ancient
world, but also that in liberal society seduction is not considered
a violation—except where minors are concerned. In liberal society seduction is not merely permitted, it is positively valued as a
sign of individual freedom. Every adult may dispose of his or her
body, affections, and speech at will, so long as no harm is done to
the property of others. That is why the prohibition of seduction
between adults—that is to say, of the public exchange of sexual
signals—is regarded as a constraint on natural liberty itself. Such
a prohibition is normally regarded as of a piece with the curtailment of free speech.
So how clear is the liberal distinction between coercion and
reasoned choice that underlies the notion of free speech? There is,
in fact, a large area between these two opposites in which everyday life is lived. The game of seduction—in which both consent
and coercion are ambiguously present—is played in this area.
And it is in this area, too, that our everyday understanding of
liberty is practiced.
Thus in liberal democracies the individual as consumer and as
voter is subjected to a variety of allurements through appeals to
greed, vanity, envy, revenge, and so on. What in other circumstances may be identified and condemned as moral failings are
here essential to the functioning of a particular kind of economy
and polity. Numerous studies have described how television as
a medium of communication seeks to shape viewers’ choices of
Is Critique Secular?
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commodities and candidates. (Film in general works on seducing
the audience, even where no political or commercial message is
intended.) To seduce is to incite someone to open up his or her innermost self to images, sounds, and words offered by the seducer
and to lead the seduced—complicitly or unwittingly—to an end
first conceived by the former.
Let me take up again the question of copyright that apparently
marks out some of the limits to freedom of speech in liberal society. In a detailed account of the legal disputes over the perpetuity
of copyright in late eighteenth-century England, Mark Rose has
demonstrated how the idea of incorporeal property (the literary
work) emerged through the concept of the author as proprietor.
To begin with, those who argued for perpetual copyright did so
on the understanding that the author had a natural property
right to something he had created. When opponents of unlimited
copyright insisted that ideas as such couldn’t be considered property, and that copyright should therefore be treated as a limited
personal right exactly like a patent, they were countered by the
argument that the property being claimed was neither the physical book that could be purchased, nor the ideas communicated,
but something made up of style and sentiment. “What we here
observe,” Rose writes, “is a twin birth, the simultaneous emergence in the discourse of the law of the proprietary author and
the literary work. The two concepts are bound to each other.”16
It should be clear that the law of copyright is not simply a constraint on free communication but also a way of defining how,
when, and for whom literary communication (one of the most
valued forms of freedom in modern liberal society) can be regarded as free, creative, and inalienable. A person’s freedom to
say whatever he or she wants, how he or she wants, depends in
part on a particular notion of property. It implies a particular
kind of property-owning subject whose freedom of speech rests
on the truth of what is spoken—that is, created and offered to the
public, but never in its essence alienated.
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
Thus, while cultural historians have already written at length
on the Romantic vocabulary of national freedom movements,
historians of literature have now begun to trace the Romantic
roots of the concept of “the literary work” through the mutual
shaping of freedom and constraint.17 It remains to be investigated
to what extent the general idea of “freedom of speech” also has
those roots. Such a genealogy has still to be mapped so that we
can regard it not as the demand of secular reason but as the outcome of a Romantic project aiming at the construction of virtuous human subjects.
What Does the West Understand Blasphemy to Be?
The willful destruction of signs—that is to say, the assault on
images and words that are invested with the power to determine
what counts as truth—has a long history of transcending the distinction between the religious and the secular. Like iconoclasm
and blasphemy, secular critique also seeks to create spaces for
new truth, and, like them, it does so by destroying spaces that
were occupied by other signs.
The French historian Alain Cabantous once noted that when
Jesus claimed for himself a divine nature, his claim was condemned as blasphemy. That blasphemy led to his death, and
the death was followed by resurrection. “In this one respect,”
Cabantous writes, “blasphemy founded Christianity.”18 We might
add here that every new tradition, whether it is called religious
or not, is founded in a discursive rupture—which means through
a kind of violence. Cabantous doesn’t say this but others have
done so. Some have even made the argument that the disruption
of blasphemy may be seen as the attempt by a lesser violence to
overcome a greater.19 This may sometimes be the case, but I will
only say that it does not follow that every blasphemous utterance is therefore a new founding; blasphemy as an act of violence
(whether by the weak or the powerful) may be little more than
an obsession, in which the act serves as the re-instantiation of an
Is Critique Secular?
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established genre, the restoration of a style that itself has no foundation and no content. In other words, blasphemy may simply be
violence masquerading as creative rupture.
Cabantous could have observed that in the foundation of
Christianity the blasphemy was not perceived as such by believers. From a Christian point of view, the charge of blasphemy was
merely an expression of disbelief. And although that disbelief
eventually led to Christ’s death, Christians have historically
held that the violence done to him was part of a divine plan. Did
Christ know his unbelieving listeners would take what he said as
blasphemy because his crucifixion was essential to the project of
human redemption? He was, after all, both man and God. Strictly
speaking, of course, what founded Christianity was not blasphemy itself but a new narrative of sacrifice and redemption—a story
of martyrdom (witnessing) that would be, for believers, the door
to eternal life.
The Truth, said Jesus to his followers, will set you free. The
unredeemed human condition is lack of freedom; free speech—
truthful speech—releases the human subject from his or her
servitude. The truth must be spoken openly even if those who
do not possess it regard speaking it freely as blasphemy. In this
context a modern New Testament scholar writes: “In spite of the
opposition of those who are unbelievers, of those who criticize
the apostle [John], the Christian may speak freely because he
knows Him who conquers all opposition, because he knows that
wonderful communion with God which transcends everything
in the world.”20 Of course the liberal principle of free speech does
not depend on the proviso that speech to be free must be literally
true, but the Christian idea of Truth as applied to speaking and
listening freely helps, I think, to explain why that principle has
come to be thought of as “sacred.”
Blasphemy—a sinful act that is liable to worldly punishment—
has a long history in Christianity. In England it became a crime
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
in common law only in the seventeenth century, at a time when
national courts were taking over from ecclesiastical courts and
the modern state was taking shape. Common law did not distinguish between heresy (the holding of views contrary to church
doctrine) and blasphemy (the utterance of insults against God or
His saints), as medieval canon law had done. So, from the seventeenth century on, the crime of blasphemy was entangled with
the question of political toleration and the formation of the secular modern state. Over the next two centuries, differences of legal
opinion arose as to whether public statements lacking defamatory
intent or expressed in moderate language were liable to criminal prosecution. It was felt that scholarly debate and discussion
needed protection, even if they appeared to be “irreligious.” This
led to increasing legal attention being paid to the language (that
is, style and context) in which “blasphemy” appeared, regardless
of how disruptive of established truth it was.
The tendency to emphasize manner of expression—to see
blasphemy in terms of form rather than content—had, however,
some interesting legal implications: vulgar working-class speech
was less protected than the polite speech of the middle and upper
classes. A scholar who has studied blasphemy trials in nineteenthcentury England calls them “class crimes of language” on account
of the class bias they indicate.21 That an exceptionally large number of them took place during the period when a national state
and a class system began to appear is itself of some significance.
For this reason I am inclined to say that, rather than simply indicating class bias, the identification of blasphemy helped to constitute class difference in which asymmetrical power was repeatedly
inscribed. Therefore I want to suggest that we see blasphemy in
these cases not as a discursive device for suppressing free speech
but as an indicator of the shape that free speech takes at different
times and in different places, reflecting, as it does so, different
structures of power and subjectivity.
Is Critique Secular?
35
How Do Muslims Think of the Limits to Free Speech?
What are Islamic ideas of blasphemy? Obviously not all Muslims
think alike, but questions about Islamic ideas of blasphemy are
aimed at a moral tradition. But even that tradition contains divergences, tensions, and instabilities that cannot be attributed to an
entire “civilizational people.” Nevertheless, I will draw on aspects
of that tradition in order to explore further some liberal ideas
about freedom. One of these is the assumption that the Islamic
tradition is rooted in a more restrictive system of ethics, that it
does not allow the freedom (especially the freedom of speech)
provided and defended by liberal society. Although there is something to this, the simple notion of liberty that is either present or
absent seems to me unsatisfactory here.
It is true that Islamic religious regulation restricts the individual’s right to behave as he or she wishes through public prohibition,
so that the line between morality and manners (a crucial distinction for the worldly critic) is obscured and the space of choice
narrowed. The worldly critic wants to see and hear everything:
nothing is taboo, everything is subject to critical engagement.
If speech and behavior are to be constrained, it is because they
should conform (willingly?) to civility. Good manners take the
place of piety; the private and the public are clearly separated. But
the situation on the ground is more complicated than the simple
binary (the presence or absence of choice) allows. Consider the
following socio-legal situation.
The law in a liberal democracy guarantees the citizen’s right to
privacy, on which her moral and civic freedom rests. But with the
emergence of the welfare state, new tensions arise between the
abstract ideal of equality under the law and the particular ways
in which the law is applied. The idea that morality is properly a
“private” matter and that what is private should not be law’s business has, paradoxically, contributed to the passing of legislation
intended to deal with “private” trouble cases that force themselves
into the legal arena. The legislation has given judges and welfare
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
administrators greater discretion in matters relating to the family (custody, childcare, divorce, alimony, matrimonial property,
and inheritance). The sentiment guiding this move is that a more
humane way of dealing with conflicts is called for, in which different personal beliefs, emotions, and circumstances can be taken
into account. The individuality of the person must be respected,
which means it must be fully identified. So discretion and private hearings are necessary. Displays of sensibility and hysteria
(inscriptions of emotion on the body) must be observed and assessed. Justice, consequently, becomes individualized. Thus the
intervention by social workers into (“private”) family life in cases
of suspected incest or child neglect or spousal abuse is a function
of “public” law authorizing bureaucratic action in “private” domains. In short, although religious morality (piety) is not allowed
to impose norms of proper speech and behavior on the individual
(as would be the case in Muslim ethics), these legal developments
redraw the boundaries of individual freedom. The subject’s right
to relate to her own children is circumscribed by the welfare
agency’s right to inspect and intervene in that relationship. New
sensibilities regarding what is decent—and therefore also what is
outrageous—are created, especially in the domain of sexual relations. The uninvited intrusion into domestic space, the breaching of “private” domains, is disallowed in Islamic law, although
conformity in “public” behavior may be much stricter. Thus, the
limits of freedom are differently articulated in relation to spaces
that may roughly be described as “private” and “public,” and different kinds of discourse are socially available to distance what is
repugnant, whether transcendent or worldly.
This brings me to the Islamic vocabulary that overlaps in some
respects with blasphemy, a category that defines an outrageous
“religious” transgression in the Christian tradition.
Although the Arabic word tajdīf is usually glossed in English as
“blasphemy” and is used by Christian Arabs to identify what in
European religious history is called “blasphemy,” Arabic speakIs Critique Secular?
37
ers, in the case of the Danish cartoons, did not (so far as I am
aware) employ it. The theological term tajdīf has the particular
sense of “scoffing at God’s bounty.”22 Of course, there are other
words that overlap with the English word blasphemy (for example, kufr, “apostasy, blasphemy, infidelity”; ridda, “apostasy”; isq,
“moral depravity”; and ilhād, “heresy, apostasy”), but these were
not, to my knowledge, used in response to the Danish cartoons.
As accusations against non-Muslim journalists, they would, in
any case, be inappropriate. When the World Union of Muslim
Scholars made its statement on the Danish cartoons affair, for
example, it used the word isā’ah, not tajdīf. And isā’ah has a range
of meanings, including “insult, harm, and offense,” that are applied in secular contexts.23 (One of the cartoons, it will be recalled, depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a suicide bomber—a
figure at once absurd and barbaric.) The World Union states that
it has purposely let a long time pass in order to allow the efforts of numerous Islamic and Arab organizations, and several
states, to elicit an appropriate expression of remorse, but the wait
has been to no avail. Therefore “the Union will be obliged to call
upon the millions of Muslims in the world to boycott Danish and
Norwegian products and activities.”24 The freedom to campaign
against particular consumer goods is opposed to the freedom to
criticize beliefs publicly: One social weapon faced another, each
employing a different aspect of the modern idea of freedom. If
physical violence was sometimes used by some of those who advocated a boycott, this should not obscure the fact that a commercial boycott is always a kind of violence, especially if it is infused
with anger, because it attacks people’s livelihood. The European
history of boycotts (the refusal to purchase commodities) and
strikes (the withholding of labor), with all their accompanying
violence, has been a story of the struggle for modern rights. And
yet in the present case European commentators described the two
differently: the one as an expression of freedom, the other as an
attempt at restricting it, and thus as yet another sign of the con38
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flict between two civilizations having opposed political orientations. In liberal democratic thinking the principle of free speech
cannot be curtailed by the offense its exercise may cause—so long
as it is not defamatory or a threat to social order.
More interesting than the political defense of free speech was
the philosophical argument that it was even a good thing that
pious Muslims felt injured, because being hurt by criticism might
provoke people to reexamine their beliefs—something vital both
for democratic debate and for ethical decision making. This point,
in contrast to the first, valorizes the consequence of free speech
rather than the act itself. The criticism of questionable (religious)
beliefs is presented as an obligation of free speech, an act carried
out in the belief that truth is power. Many even in post-Christian Western society agree with the Christian claim that the truth
makes one free (John 8:32).
That this is not an Islamic formulation emerges from an examination of the widely discussed trial of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a
professor at Cairo University, for apostasy (ridda) because he had
advocated a radically new interpretation of the revealed text of
the Qur’an.25 Of course both truth and freedom are greatly valued
in the Islamic tradition, but they are not tied up together quite
as they are in Christianity. (It may be pointed out in passing that
the many cases of apostasy in the contemporary Middle East that
have received so much publicity in the West are actually relatively
recent and closely connected with the formation of the modern
nation-state, a modern judiciary, and the rise of modern politics.
In this context one may recall the burst of blasphemy trials in
nineteenth-century England to which I referred earlier.) A question worth considering, however, is whether these trials should
be seen solely in terms of the suppression of freedom: What do
they tell us about the liberal idea of the human subject?
In a book that deals with the Abu Zayd case,26 Islamist lawyer Muhammad Salīm al-‘Awwa emphasizes that the Sharia (the
“religious law”) guarantees freedom of belief. “Freedom of belief
Is Critique Secular?
39
means the right of every human being to embrace whatever ideas
and doctrines he wishes, even if they conflict with those of the
group in which he lives or to which he belongs, or conflicts with
what the majority of its members regard as true.”27 He goes on to
say that no one may exert pressure to get another to reveal his/
her religious beliefs—that is to say, the Sharia prohibits the use of
inquisitorial methods.28 The right to think whatever one wishes
does not, however, include the right to express one’s religious or
moral beliefs publicly with the intention of converting people to
a false commitment. Such a limitation may seem strange to modern liberals (although it was not strange to Kant),29 for whom the
ability to speak publicly about one’s beliefs is necessary to freedom. It is, after all, one aspect of “the freedom of religion” that is
guaranteed by a secular liberal democracy. Al-‘Awwa is aware of
this, and he cites two Qur’anic verses that seem to guarantee freedom of religion: lā ikrāha i-ddīn, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), and faman shā’a falyu’min wa man shā’a falyakfur, “let
him who wills have faith, and him who wills reject it” (18:29).
But for the community, what matters is the Muslim subject’s
social practices—including verbal publication—not her internal
thoughts, whatever these might be. In contrast, the Christian tradition allows that thoughts can commit the sin of blasphemy and
should therefore be subject to discipline: thoughts are subject to
confession.30
According to al-‘Awwa, publishing one’s thoughts changes
their character, makes them publicly accessible signs: “To publish
something,” he quotes an old saying, “is to lay oneself open to
the public.”31 It is one thing to think whatever one wishes, he
argues, and a different thing to seduce others into accepting commitments that are contrary to the moral order. In a well-known
book published in Lebanon in 1970, responding to the accusation
of apostasy against the Syrian philosopher Jalal Sadiq al-‘Azm
for his famous Naqd al-ikr al-dīnī (The Critique of Religious Thought;
1969), Shaykh ‘Uthman Safi makes a similar distinction but
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without reference to Islamic religious authorities. His approach
instead is to make an explicit distinction between “natural, innate freedom” and freedom as defined and limited by the law. The
individual may give free rein to his thought and imagination, accepting or rejecting as he wishes within the limits of what he contemplates. “When these possibilities of freedom that the human
being enjoys remain within his soul, the law, especially, cannot
interfere with them except when the belief is moved from secrecy
to broad daylight [min as-sirr ila al-jahr].”32 When, in the Abu Zayd
case, the highest court of appeal in Egypt distinguished between
the inviolability enjoyed by private belief and the vulnerability of
published statements to the charge of kufr (“apostasy, blasphemy,
infidelity”), the court was saying that the legal meaning of the latter was not to be decided by its origin in the intention of a particular author but by its function in a social relation. The effect of his
making them public was therefore his responsibility. This position
is close to, but not identical with, a modern liberal view.
The liberal view, in general, assumes that the crucial relationship in this matter is between two things: a person, on the one
hand, and the written or spoken words he or she asserts and believes to be true (assents mentally to) on the other. These statements are—like all empirical statements—subject to criteria of
verification. Belief, however, has an ambiguous status—at once
internal and external. It is the internal sense that most modern
Westerners have taken as being primary, although it is generally
recognized that it is possible to externalize it. Thus, when Kilian
Bälz writes that “belief is a spiritual affair which is not readily
accessible to investigation in the court room,”33 he is restating the
secular idea of “religious belief” understood as a private spiritual
matter. But the statement that “religious belief” is not readily accessible in a courtroom should be understood, I suggest, as a claim
of immunity (the court has no right to intrude) rather than of
principled skepticism about the court’s practical ability to extract
the absolute truth. It is quite different, in other words, from the
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classical Sharia tradition, in which Islamic jurists adopt the principle of epistemological skepticism, insisting that the judge cannot distinguish with absolute certainty a truthful utterance from
a lie when that is unsupported by sensory experience. Although
divine revelation, together with the tradition of the Prophet and
the consensus of jurists, do provide Muslims with “indisputable
and certain knowledge” (‘ilm yaqin), jurists held that this certainty
relates to the legal and ethical rules they establish and not to the
truth of what claimants say are facts in a given case.34 A secular
state, by contrast, has to determine whether a particular doctrine
or practice belongs to a “religion”—a particular “religion”—and
therefore qualifies the believer or practitioner to equal treatment
with members of other “religions.”35 Hence belief must be externalizable as doctrine (“I hold the following things to be true”),
whether voluntarily or by force.
The issue in the Abu Zayd case is not the correctness or otherwise of “belief” in this sense, but the legal and social consequences
of a Muslim professor’s teaching a doctrine that was said to be
contrary to Islamic commitment.36 (The Arabic word imān is often translated into English as “belief”—as in the frequently used
Qur’anic phrase ayyuhal-mu’minīn, “O Believers!”—but is better
rendered as “faith,” as in “I shall be faithful to you.” Another
word commonly glossed as “belief,” i‘tiqād, derives from the root
‘aqada, “to put together.” This root gives the word ‘aqd, “contract,”
and its many cognates, and thus carries a sense of social relationship. Its primary sense in classical Arabic is the bond that
commits the believer to God.)37 In the classic Sharia position, the
strength of personal conviction is said to be a matter between the
individual and his God (baynahu wa bayna rabbih). Belief in this
context is understood as a continuum rather than as a binary (belief/disbelief or certainty/doubt) so that it is possible to describe
someone as “weakly believing.”
Disbelief incurs no legal punishment; even the Qur’an stipulates no worldly punishment for disbelief. In the classical law,
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punishment for apostasy is justified on the grounds of its political
and social consequences, not of entertaining false doctrine itself.
Put another way, insofar as the law concerns itself with disbelief,
it is not as a matter of its propositional untruth but of a solemn
social relationship being openly repudiated (“being unfaithful”).
Legally, apostasy (ridda, kufr) can therefore be established only
on the basis of the functioning of external signs (including public
speech or writing, publicly visible behavior), never on the basis of
inferred or forcibly extracted internal belief.38
In contemporary Egypt, conviction of a Muslim for apostasy in
a court of law has consequences for civil status because the Sharia
is the law of personal status there. One consequence is the automatic dissolution of an apostate’s marriage if it was contracted according to the Sharia. There are also social consequences, among
them the concern that an apostate who is responsible for teaching
Islamic thought may suppress the truth through the unrestrained
publications of spoken and written signs. (This point should not
be confused with the judgment of the Court of Appeal in the Abu
Zayd case when it declared that an attack on Islam is an attack on
the foundations of Egypt as a Muslim state. That consequentialist argument—as well as claims that the feelings of Muslims are
offended—is quite different.)
The crucial distinction made in liberal thought between seduction and forcible subjection to which I referred earlier, in which
the former is legally permitted and the latter penalized, is here
absent—at least in al-‘Awwa’s argument. To seduce someone
is to connive at rendering him or her unfaithful, to make the
other break an existing social commitment. Even in medieval
Christendom, the term infidelitas could be used not only in relation to personal departures from authorized doctrine but also, in
a secular sense, to breaking a contract.39 “Unfaithfulness” in this
worldly sense now has a quaint ring about it in modern liberal
society and relates only to sexual seduction.
In Islamic theology, seduction is a matter of great concern—and
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not merely in the sexual sense. The Qur’an contains numerous
words that can be glossed as “seducing” and “deluding”—among
them the verbal roots fatana, rāwada, gharra. Fatana (from which
comes the familiar noun fitna) always has the sense of “temptation
and affliction as a testing,” of “persecution, treachery, or social
strife.” 40 But the temptation referred to by this term in the Qur’an
is not sexual. (Even in modern Arabic, itna is not used exclusively
in a sexual sense; it can also mean enchantment and fascination
generally.) It is the word rāwada that is used in the Qur’an to refer
explicitly to sexual seduction. Gharra refers to delusion through
attachment to fancies, to the act of deceiving oneself. The nominal form ighrā’ can be glossed as “excessive attachment, self-love,
desire, incitement,” but it also connotes social unrest and instability. Muslim theologians and jurists assumed that seduction in
all its forms was necessarily dangerous not only for the individual
(because it indicated a loss of self-control) but for the social order
too (it could lead to violence and civil discord). They were wrong,
of course, because they didn’t know about market democracy, a
system that thrives on the consumer’s loss of self-control and one
in which politicians have learned to seduce their audiences while
maintaining overall political stability.
So under what circumstances can one say that one is choosing
what one truly believes—or that one’s true beliefs are expressed
only when one chooses freely? On the other hand, when can one
say that it is in expressing one’s beliefs because one must that one
provides evidence of what one’s true beliefs are?
According to Susan Mendus,41 John Locke propounded his
theory of political toleration on the basis of the psychological
principle that belief can never be determined by the will. This
principle rests on a new psychology of the will that was beginning to emerge in seventeenth-century Europe, as well as a new
understanding of “belief.” In the Middle Ages a contrary doctrine
prevailed. Thomas Aquinas, for example, took it for granted that
belief (a commitment, a holding dear) could indeed be willed. It
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was this modern psychology that allowed Locke to insist that the
Prince’s attempt to coerce religious belief—including belief in the
salvational implications of religious practices—was irrational. All
that force could secure was an insincere profession of faith. Of
course, the Prince might have other reasons for imposing conformity on his subjects than their salvation—such as upholding law
and order—that would not render his coercive efforts necessarily
irrational. The presumption that political attempts to coerce belief are irrational because they are impossible has been the focus
of much debate summarized by Mendus. The Muslim position,
as expounded by al-‘Awwa, is different from Locke’s. Since, according to the latter, it is impossible to coerce belief, the mind
becomes the site of true religious belonging, and physical force
as the arm of civil government should therefore confine itself to
civil interests—the protection of life, limb, and property—only.
According to the former, religious belonging, as distinct from religious belief, can be forced, or seduced, but it is illegitimate to do
so. (This accords, incidentally, with the central Islamic tradition
about Christians and Jews, whose understanding of divine revelation is considered to be distorted—the Qur’an is perfect—but
who are not therefore required to abjure their error.) What matters,
finally, is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person
does not own himself.
Mendus’s view is that Locke was right to make the presumption
about the impossibility of coercing religious belief, and she defends
him against his critics on this point by making what she regards
a critical distinction within the individual’s consciousness—a
difference between sincere and authentic belief—that she borrows
from Bernard Williams. This allows her to argue that a forcible
conversion (brainwashing) may at most obtain a sincere belief, not
an authentic one. But the conditions cited by Mendus—beginning
with the so-called acceptance condition—are, I think, questionable. Thus her claim that the alternatives of deliberate reticence
(not saying what one really believes) and insincerity (affirming
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what one doesn’t believe) must always exist as possibilities in order to determine whether a belief is really authentic or genuine
seems to me unconvincing. The alternatives at issue must surely
signify something more than abstract possibilities; they must be to
the person concerned real options, within a given socio-psychological situation, from among which he can actually choose. But
if that is so, then certain kinds of religious acts are ruled out a
priori: “bearing witness” in public where one feels one has no choice
but to speak the truth—in anger, say, or in compassion—would
have to be identified as “inauthentic.” 42 Should the impossibility
of remaining silent about what one believes to be morally right in
such situations—or the impossibility of saying what one does not
believe—be taken to mean that the belief is inauthentic?
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this talk of philosophical criteria determining “authentic belief” is little more than a
way of devaluing moral passion, of disregarding the way passion
constitutes moral actions so as to render the language of choice
irrelevant. One consequence of that devaluation is that it becomes
difficult for the secular liberal to understand the passion that informs those for whom, rightly or wrongly, it is impossible to remain
silent when confronted with blasphemy, those for whom blasphemy is
neither “freedom of speech” nor the challenge of a new truth but
something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.
It is important to note that passionate reaction to “blasphemers” is typically directed not at the latter’s disbelief but at their
alleged violence. I stress that I make no claim to know the real
motives of all those who protest against blasphemy. My argument
is that we will not understand “blasphemy” if all we see in it is a
threat to freedom—even though it is true that, historically, powerful punitive apparatuses have usually accompanied the charge
of “blasphemy.”
Historical Notes on the Idea of Secular Criticism
In an essay entitled “Secular Criticism,” the noted literary
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
critic Edward Said wrote that “[c]riticism… is always situated,
it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings.”43 To
this I would merely add three questions: First, what work does
the notion “secular” do here? Does it refer to an authority or a
sensibility? Second, since criticism employs judgment, since it
seeks conviction—of oneself and others—to what extent does it
therefore seek to overcome skepticism? Finally, if secular criticism regards itself as confronting the powerful forces of repression, finds itself open to all “failings,” can we say that secular
criticism aspires to be heroic?
So: what is critique?
This, of course, is the title of a well-known late essay by
Michel Foucault, which began as a lecture originally given at
the Sorbonne on 27 May 1978.44 In the essay Foucault seeks to
equate critique with the Kantian notion of Enlightenment and
thus to present critique as the singular characteristic of the modern West: “[It] seems that between the lofty Kantian enterprise
and the small polemico-professional activities that bear the name
‘critique,’ there was in the modern West (dating, roughly, from
the fifteenth to the sixteenth century) a certain manner of thinking, of speaking, likewise of acting, and a certain relation to what
exists, to what one knows, to what one does, as well as a relation
to society, to culture, to others, and all this one might name ‘the
critical attitude’” (p. 382). It is not clear whether Foucault wishes
us to understand that “the critical attitude” is a characteristic
only of the modern West, or that “the critical attitude” distinctive of the modern West is quite different from what is found
elsewhere—an attitude that enables it to think for the first time
of “the transcendent” in a way that permits humanity to make
its own future. At any rate, it is clear that in Foucault’s view to
be enlightened is to adopt a critical attitude, and to engage in
critique, as the West has done for several centuries, is equivalent
to living in Enlightenment: living heroically, as Kant put it at the
beginning of that venture. This seems to me somewhat surprisIs Critique Secular?
47
ing coming from a genealogist, because it sets aside the need to
think through the various historical determinants whose effect—
in different circumstances—has been a diversity of “critiques,” a
diversity of styles, uses, and objectives. Neither the concept nor
the practice of critique has a simple history, and that genealogy
has yet to be written. What follows is simply a set of disparate
historical notes (in which I do not, incidentally, offer any fixed
definition of critique, and therefore do not follow any strict distinction between criticism and critique).
The word criticism has its origin in the Greek verb krino, meaning “to separate,” “to decide,” “to judge,” “to fight,” “to accuse.” It
seems to have been first used in the juridical sphere, where both
the act of accusing and the giving of a verdict were called krino,
and thus referred to the ability to differentiate, to ask probing
questions, and to judge. In this worldly arena the semantic beginnings of what we now call “critique” did not aspire to conquer
universal truth but to resolve particular crises justly and to correct particular virtues within a particular way of life.45
Criticism could also take the form of “free and open speech
[parrhesia]” in the political forum. Critical preaching, especially
associated with the Cynic philosophers of the fourth century BC,
was directed at everyone, and its aim was to teach people how
to assess their own personal mode of life.46 Christianity drew on
this tradition of free and open speech, transforming the word parrhesia in the process to its own end. Criticism and the open call
to Truth have remained an important part of popular preaching
throughout the Christian era.
In the late medieval period, friars preached in public places,
censuring particular ways of living and advocating the Truth. At
an academic level, the idea of critique was employed in a number
of university disciplines, but not until the theological disputes
of the Reformation did it denote the same notion regardless of
whether it was applied to classical texts, the Bible, or social life.
So to the question, what is critique? the answer would then more
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often than not have been: The evaluation and interpretation of
the truth of scripture.
At first, criticism aimed only at the production of an authentic
text and at its meaning, but eventually, as it began to be concerned with the reality represented in the texts, it became what
would be called historical criticism—of the newly recovered
Greek texts as well as of the scriptures themselves. Pierre Bayle,
the seventeenth-century skeptic, exemplifies this development.47
For him, critique was the activity that separated reason from revelation by the systematic exposure of errors and by the rhetoric of
ridicule. In effect, Bayle tried to analyze and dissolve each theory
by a continuous demand for reasons, and so to demonstrate that
everything confidently accepted on the grounds of reason could
be undone by critical reasoning. The use of critique here turned
out to be as much an argument for the necessity of faith as it was
an attack on the absolute reliability of reason. This was not the
old theological use of reason to underwrite revelation, but a new,
secular demonstration that if critique is pushed far enough it collapses under its own weight. Politically, Bayle’s extreme skepticism was premised on the notion of an egalitarian “republic of
letters,” in which one could engage equally with others instead of
submitting to authority. In the newly emerging discipline of experimental philosophy, criticism took a prudent middle position
between skepticism and credulity. In this seventeenth-century
culture of knowledge production, social trust and gentlemanly
authority became—as Steven Shapin has shown—the basis of reliable testimony and restrained criticism.48
At the end of the eighteenth century, Kantianism dominated
philosophical discourse. Of course philosophy was not the only
mode in which criticism was publicly conducted. A variety of
representational forms, unconnected with philosophy, drew on
the rich tradition of literary and rhetorical devices to attack social pretensions and political corruption. But the downgrading
of rhetoric in nineteenth-century language theories reinforced
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the claims of philosophy to a unique conceptual domain within
which rational critique could be properly defined and practiced.
For Kantians, political revolution thus appeared as the alternative to philosophical criticism; freedom for philosophical critique
even became a condition of forestalling political revolution. It was
Kant who replaced the model of the “republic of letters” with another model: the “court of reason.” This followed not only from
his direct philosophical concern with judgment but also indirectly
from his view that truth was guaranteed not by freedom from political and ecclesiastical constraint but by the progress of rational
science. To the “court of reason” was given the important task
of imposing peace on the apparently unending war of doctrines.
For Enlightenment philosophers prior to Kant, critique had been
rooted in a secularized metaphysics (in the idea of human reason)
and directed against ecclesiastical and state pretensions. For Kant,
critique became the process of epistemological self-correction by
strict reference to established rational limits and the fixed boundary between private faith and public reason. But his formula for
critique as an inquiry into the preconditions of scientific truths
cut it off from politics as well as from faith. In Kant’s political
philosophy it is law, not critique, that ends the chaos of metaphysics and holds the corrosive effects of skepticism in check. And its
concern is no longer with mundane life but with epistemology.
Only when the Romantics returned to problems of aesthetics
was the dominance of Kantian discourse challenged in philosophy. The most prominent figure here is Hegel, who took critique
to be immanent in history: transcendental reason and phenomenal object (thought and reality) should not be separated, as Kant
had separated them. They are both, Hegel maintained, dialectical
constituents of the real—contradictory parts of a developing self
and of a world in the process of becoming. In this way, Hegelians
set aside the Kantian discipline of epistemology. From this move
emerged the famous Marxian dictum that critical theory—the
activity of criticizing publicly—is itself a part of social reality.
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Marx’s Hegelian premise that the existing world is characterized
by contradictions led him, however, to the anti-Hegelian conclusion that their removal depended not on new philosophical interpretations but on the practical transformation of reality itself. The
reality to be transformed was politico-economic, not moral. In a
rapidly industrializing world, critique and revolutionary violence
thus no longer appeared as alternatives but as complementary
forms of class struggle, and the critical politics this called for was
the politics of organized working-class movements.49
In the twentieth century, neo-Kantians again limited the concept of critique to epistemology, with the intention of opposing
Hegelianism and Marxism. Critique then became a weapon directed at ideological politics and radical intellectuals. Among this
group of philosophers, criticism again became the criterion of universal reason, a principle held to be crucial for the natural and the
human sciences. They defined a scientific fact as one that can be
criticized—and that can therefore be falsified. Because religious
values are immune to rational critique, because they are based
on faith, they are neither neutral nor objective, and they cannot
therefore have the authority of scientific facts. To the extent that
a “belief” is presented as a candidate for truth, it must be held
provisionally—that is to say, it must not be taken too seriously.
Falsificationists like Popper reaffirmed a more direct connection
between epistemology (what are the criteria for valid knowledge
about the world) and politics (how can one legitimately use power
to make or remake the social world). Because our scientific
knowledge of the world is inevitably limited, so they argued, only
piecemeal criticism and reform of the social world was rational.50
My final example is of secular critique as modern theology.
Theology has never been without criticism, and, especially since
the beginning of the nineteenth century, theology has absorbed
secular criticism. The example I now cite deals with metacriticism: the Regensburg lecture by Pope Benedict XVI in 2006,
whose opening salvo against Islam evoked predictable anger from
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Muslims across the world.51 What he believed he was doing in
this lecture is not of concern to me here. What is interesting is
the way he links his discursive attack on Islam to his critique of
European reason. According to Benedict, Islamic theology separates the concept of God from reason (making God utterly unpredictable, therefore irrational), whereas Christianity maintains
their inseparability in its harmonization of Hellenic rationality
with the status of the divine: “In the beginning was the logos,
and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.” According to Benedict,
this fusion explains why Christianity seeks to lead the individual
to the Truth through reasoned persuasion, and why Islam, in
contrast, uses force to convert non-Muslims and to punish people for holding false beliefs. The inner rapprochement between
biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry that constituted
Christianity “was an event of decisive importance not only from
the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of
world history—it is an event that concerns us even today.” Hence,
Benedict’s critique of the successive waves of de-Hellenization in
European thought—from the Reformation via Kant and liberal
theology to scientific positivism—by which, he claims, the inner
bond between faith and reason is ruptured. In spite of his polemic against what he takes to be Islamic doctrine (and therefore,
arguably, against Muslim immigrants in Europe) and in spite of
his assertion that Europe is fundamentally Christian, Benedict’s
critique is not merely political: it is aimed, in a very secular way,
at reaffirming the identification of reason with divinity. His critique of de-Hellenization deals with what he regards as a dangerous restriction of reason’s scope—and he calls, therefore, for an
unrestricted pursuit and enunciation of the truth. The truth must
be presented publicly even if those not possessing it regard the
presentation as outrageous—as blasphemy. This is how Benedict
concludes his university lecture: “This attempt… at a critique of
modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the
clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting
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the insights of the modern age… The scientific ethos, moreover,
is—as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector—the will to be
obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which
belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit.” Thus,
while for Kant critical reason appeals to transcendental law
(while paradoxically insisting on the autonomy of the individual
subject), Benedict gestures to a Christian life of obedience that
accepts logos as at once persuasive reason and divine authority. The
Christian obeys not simply because she thinks it reasonable to do
so but also because the authority of the truth compels her to obey.
This Christian critique thus offers to accommodate the “insights”
of the scientific ethos but also claims to found itself in the authority of the church.
The modern philosophers I’ve mentioned—Kant, Hegel,
Popper—were all attached to universities, and it is in universities that critique of one kind or another has become essential to
useful knowledge production. Professional critique, however, has
less to do with the right of free speech than with the reproduction of intellectual disciplines and the culture of belief that goes
with them. Jon Roberts and James Turner, in The Sacred and
Secular University, have described the emergence of the modern
university in the United States, together with its secular culture,
starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They recount how the marginalization or exclusion of formal “religion”
in the American university was accompanied by an emphasis on
research, professionalization, and specialization, and how these
things, in turn, led to a fragmentation of the traditional map of
knowledge, which had until then been articulated in a theological
language. It was in this situation that the humanities eventually
emerged out of the traditions of moral philosophy and philology,
and restored coherence to knowledge while according it a distinctive “religious” aura. One consequence was that a less sectarian,
less doctrinal idea of religion became part of a liberal culture and
therefore part of its understanding of criticism. “This new edition
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of liberal education had two key elements,” they write. “The first
was to acquaint students with beauty, especially as manifest in
‘poetry’ broadly conceived.… A second element thus entered the
humanities: a stress on continuities linking the ‘poetry’ of one
era to that of succeeding periods and ultimately our own.” Hence,
there developed a sharper sense of imparting the moral essence
of European civilization to students in higher education through
the study of great literature and the conviction that literary criticism was the disciplined means to that end. This is one aspect of
criticism that has religious roots without being religious, with its
emphasis not on doubt but on a particular kind of cultivation of
the self. But there is another.
Over the last few centuries, modern powers have encouraged
and used the developing sciences to normalize and regulate social
life—and therefore have legitimized a particular kind of disciplinary criticism. That is why, perhaps, critique that is integral to the
growth of useful knowledge—and therefore of modern power—is
part of a process whose major lineaments have not been effectively reduced to skepticism, a process that is rarely itself the object
of effective public critique. Thus, while the freedom to criticize
is represented as being at once a right and a duty of the modern
individual, its truth-producing capacity remains subject to disciplinary criteria, while its material conditions of existence (laboratories, buildings, research funds, publishing houses, personal
computers, etc.) are provided and watched over by corporate and
state power to ensure that citizens can be useful.
IN PRESENTING THESE NOTES on thoughts about critique, I have tried
to underline the very different understandings people have had
of it in Western history, understandings that can’t be reduced to
the simple distinction between secular criticism (freedom and
reason) and religious criticism (intolerance and obscurantism).
The practice of secular criticism is now a sign of the modern, of
the modern subject’s relentless pursuit of truth and freedom, of
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his or her political agency. It has almost become a duty, closely
connected to the right to free expression and communication.
But every critical discourse has institutional conditions that
define what it is, what it recognizes, what it aims at, what it is
destroying—and why. Neither philosophical nor literary criticism
can successfully claim to be the privileged site of reason. It matters whether the criticism/critique in question is conducted in the
form of parody and satire, confession of sins, political autocritique, professional criticism, or speech under analysis. One might
say that if these are all possible instances of critique/criticism,
then what we have here is a family concept for which it is not
possible to provide a single theory because the practices that constitute them differ radically.
And yet there is, perhaps, something distinctive after all about
the historical concept of “critique” that Foucault wanted to identify, something other than the varieties of critical practice to which
I have pointed: In some areas of our modern life, there is the insistent demand that reasons be given for almost everything. The
relation to knowledge, to action, and to other persons that results
when this demand is taken as the foundation of all understanding is perhaps what Foucault had in mind when he spoke of critique.
“The critical attitude” is the essence of secular heroism.
Blasphemy as the Breaking of Taboo
The recent European discourse on blasphemy as applied to the
behavior of Muslim immigrants in Europe serves, paradoxically, at
once to confirm and to deny difference. Angry Muslim responses
to the publication of the Danish cartoons are seen by secularists
as attempting to reintroduce a category that was once a means of
oppression in Europe, while they see themselves critiquing, in the
name of freedom, the power to suppress human freedom. For the
worldly critic, there can be no acceptable taboos. When limits are
critiqued, taboos disappear and freedom is expanded. This critiIs Critique Secular?
55
cism doesn‘t merely liberate ideas from taboos, however; it also
reinforces the existing distinction between the paradigmatically
human and candidates for inclusion in true humanity who do not
as yet own their bodies, emotions, and thoughts. It reinforces, in
other words, the ideological status of European Muslims as not
fully human because they are not yet morally autonomous and
politically disciplined.
The modern problem of blasphemy, one might say, is a European
invention. For a secular society that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a thing as blasphemy, it is quite remarkable how
much public discourse there is about it—and about those who
complain of it or claim to be affronted by it. Quite remarkable,
too, is the obsessive need to repeat again and again the words and
images that secularists know will be regarded by the pious with
horror. Who, one might wonder, are these defenders of worldly
criticism trying to convince? It is too simple, I think, to claim—as
some Danish commentators have done—that the publication of
the cartoons merely sought to overcome the crippling fear that
Europeans had of criticizing Muslims.52 But there is certainly
something complicated going on beyond the rational defense of
political freedom, something that may have to do with reassuring
the limitless self by making a distinction between good and bad
violence, with a desire that is impossible.
The limits to possible forms of action are articulated by social
values. And of course all such limits are invested with potential violence, even (especially) the value of limitless self-creation.
Certainly the violent language and the riots that greeted the
Danish cartoons are evidence of one kind of concern about limits.
But so too are the modern wars (preemptive and humanitarian)
that seek to establish a particular moral order in the world or to
make liberal democracy safe within its own bounded spaces—in
“Fortress Europe.”
Here is a final thought: What would happen if religious language were to be taken more seriously in secular Europe and the
56
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preventable deaths in the global South of millions from hunger
and war was to be denounced as “blasphemy,” as the flouting of
ethical limits for the sake of what is claimed to be freedom? What
if this were to be done without any declarations of “belief,” and
yet done in all seriousness as a way of rejecting passionately the
aspiration to totalized global control? Of course Europe’s proscription of theological language in the political domain makes
such a use of the word “blasphemy” inconceivable. But does this
impossibility merely signal a secular reluctance to politicize “religion,” or is it the symptom of an incapacity?
This question is not intended as a moral reproof but as an
invitation to look again at an empirical feature of modernity,
especially the notion of secular criticism.
Is Critique Secular?
57
An earlier version of this essay was published as “Reflections on
Blasphemy and Secular Criticism,” in Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond
a Concept (New York, 2007).
Endnotes
58
1
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a
number of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, an act seen as insulting
to him by many Muslims. The result was widespread protest and
controversy in Europe and elsewhere.
2
The Western press has made much of the irrational violence of Muslims
responding to the publication of the cartoons, but it has rarely noted the
political atmosphere in which Muslims live in Europe generally and in
Denmark particularly. According to a Danish researcher, respectable
members of parliament from a variety of Danish parties made the
following statements to the national press in the 2001 elections: “Muslims
are just waiting for the right moment to kill us” (Mogens Camre, Progress
Party); “Certain people pose a security risk solely because of their religion,
which means that they have to be placed in internment camps” (Inge
Dahl Sorensen, Liberal Party); “If you try to legislate your way out of
these problems [concerning Muslim organizations], it is a historical
rule that rats always find new holes if you cover up the old ones” (Poul
Nyrup Rasmussen, Social Democratic Party). Quoted in P. Hervik,
“The Emergence of Neo-Nationalism in Denmark, 1992–2001,” in NeoNationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, ed.
Marcus Banks and Andre Gingrich (Oxford, 2006).
3
“The prolonged and violent demonstrations against the Danish cartoons,”
wrote George Packer, New Yorker staff writer, “were a staged attempt by
Islamists to intimidate their enemies in their own countries and in the
West”; “Fighting Faiths: Can liberal internationalism be saved?” New
Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, pp. 95–96.
4
“For example, parts of the Danish press as well as Danish politicians have
recently argued that Islamic Studies scholars are acting as political agents
because they intentionally choose to disregard certain topics, such as
social processes in which Islam can be seen as an obstacle to integration
and/or a potential security threat”; from Research on Islam Repositioned,
theme statement for seminar sponsored by Danish research network
Forum for the Research on Islam (FIFO), University of Copenhagen, May
14–15, 2007. And yet, according to the first Europol report on terrorism
published in 2007, it appears that of 498 acts of terrorism that took place
in the European Union during 2006, Islamists were responsible for only
one. The largest number was carried out by Basque separatists, and only
one of these Basque attacks resulted in loss of life. Yet more than half
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of those arrested on suspicion of terrorism were Muslim. Almost all the
media in Europe have ignored these figures while playing up “the threat
of Islam.” What, one wonders, accounts for this curious voluble silence?
5
Lecture of the Holy Father, “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories
and Reflections,” September 2006, University of Regensberg, Germany:
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/
september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_
en.html. In contrast, the distinguished Catholic philosopher Charles
Taylor speaks of “the unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek
philosophy.” See the introduction to his The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA,
2007).
6
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, afterword to the
reprint edition (New York, 2006). See also the dialogue between an
American nonreligious postmodern philosopher and an Italian Christian
postmodern theologian, in which both agree on the fundamental link
between Christianity and democracy: Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo,
The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York, 2005).
7
George Grote, History of Greece (London, 2001).
8
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of
Religion, foreword by Charles Taylor (Princeton, 1997).
9
See Santiago Zabala’s essay “A Religion Without Theists or Atheists,”
which introduces Rorty and Vattimo, Future of Religion, p. 2.
10
The Middle East is not, of course, equivalent to “the world of Islam”—or
even to “Muslim-majority countries,” since most Muslims live outside the
Middle East. And yet in the Western imaginary Muslim countries of the
Middle East are seen as “the central lands of Islam,” just as “Christianity”
is usually taken to mean Latin Christianity and does not refer to the
important (and continuous) Christian communities in Muslim-majority
countries.
11
See John Stuart Mill’s “Representative Government,” esp. chap. 8 (1861),
in Three Essays (London, 1973).
12
Zabala, “A Religion Without Theists or Atheists,” p. 6.
13
Rorty and Vattimo, Future of Religion, p. 72.
14
R. Alta Charo, J.D., “Body of Research—Ownership and Use of Human
Tissue,” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (October 12, 2006).
15
16
K. J. Dover, “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour,” in Mark
Golden and Peter Toohey, eds., Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome
(Edinburgh, 2003), pp. 117–18.
Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the
Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (Summer 1988).
Is Critique Secular?
59
60
17
See Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and the Copyright: Economic and
Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’” Eighteenth-Century
Studies 17, no. 4 (1984).
18
Alain Cabantous, Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the Seventeenth
to the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2002), p. 5.
19
Hent de Vries has made precisely this argument by drawing on Derrida as
well as Benjamin in his excellent Religion and Violence (Baltimore, 2002).
20
W. C. Van Unnik, “The Christian’s Freedom of Speech in the New
Testament,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 (1962): p. 487.
21
See Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in NineteenthCentury England (Chicago, 1998). Marsh deals with more than two
hundred blasphemy trials, all of which had a strong class component.
22
See Edward William Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon (London, 1863). See also
A. de Biberstein Kazimirski’s Dictionnaire Arabe-Français (Cairo, 1875),
which gives “Blasphémer Dieu, et faire nargue de ses bienfaits.”
23
In this respect it overlaps with such words as shatīma, sabb, istihāna.
24
Bayān al-ittihād hawl nashr suwar masī’a li-rrasūl (Statement of the [World]
Union [of Islamic Scholars] About the Publication of Images Insulting to
the Prophet), Cairo, January 23, 2006: www.qaradawi.net/site/topics/
article.asp?cu_no=4143&version=1&template_id=116&parent_id=114.
25
The book that got Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd declared an apostate (and hence
no longer legally married to his wife) was Mahūm al-nass: Dirāsah i ‘ulūm
al-Qur’ān (Understanding the [sacred] text: A study of the sciences of the
Qur’an) (Beirut, 1990). Two interesting articles on Abu Zayd’s methodology
should be noted: Charles Hirschkind, “Heresy or Hermeneutics: The Case of
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd,” Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1996), and Saba
Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic
Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006). Mahmood deals with Abu
Zayd among other liberal Islamic reformers.
26
A detailed account of the case is given in Kilian Bälz, “Submitting Faith
to Judicial Scrutiny Through the Family Trial: The ‘Abu Zayd Case,’” Die
Welt des Islams, New Series 37, no. 2 (1997). A more interesting account
is provided in chap. 1 (“The Legalization of Hisba in the Case of Nasr
Abu Zayd”) of Hussein Agrama’s PhD dissertation Law Courts and Fatwa
Councils in Modern Egypt: An Ethnography of Islamic Legal Practice, The Johns
Hopkins University, 2005. Extended extracts from the judgments in the
court of first instance, the court of appeals, and the court of cassation,
are given (in French translation) in “Jurisprudence Abu Zayd,” Egypte/
Monde Arabe, no. 34 (1998). The original Arabic judgments are contained
in Muhammad Salim al-‘Awwa, al-haq i al-ta‘bīr (The right to free speech),
(Cairo, 1998).
27
Al-‘Awwa, al-haq i al-ta‘bīr, p. 23. See also Ahmad Rashad Tahun, Hurriyat al-
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
‘aqīda i-shsharī‘a al-islāmiyya (Cairo, 1998), who is more concerned with the
political issues—especially with the unity of the umma—than al-‘Awwa is.
28
In a recent article Baber Johansen has traced Ibn Taymiyya’s position on
the question of coerced confession. “Whereas the torture of witnesses
played an important role in Roman law and in late medieval judicial
practice of Europe,” Johansen observes, “it is unknown in Muslim legal
doctrine.” But Ibn Taymiyya took an unusually political view of the law’s
role, and in so doing advocated the legal admissibility of coerced evidence.
See “Signs as Evidence: The Doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) and
Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (D. 1351) on Proof,” Islamic Law and Society 9, no.
2 (2002): citation on p. 171.
29
In “What Is Enlightenment” Kant makes what may appear to be a similar
distinction when he speaks about “public” and “private” reason. The latter,
however, depends on the concept of the state in relation to which an
arena for the conduct of public debate is circumscribed. Al-‘Awwa has no
such argument. His concern is simply with the representability of personal
belief as an inner condition.
30
“It is to be noted that according to the definition (1) blasphemy is set
down as a word, for ordinarily it is expressed in speech, though it may
be committed in thought or in act. Being primarily a sin of the tongue, it
will be seen to be opposed directly to the religious act of praising God. (2)
It is said to be against God, though this may be only mediately, as when
the contumelious word is spoken of the saints or of sacred things, because
of the relationship they sustain to God and His service”; The Catholic
Encyclopedia (New York, 1907), 2:595.
31
Al-‘Awwa, al-haq i al-ta‘bīr, p.13.
32
Al-Shaykh ‘Uthman Safi, ‘Ala Hāmish “Naqd al-ikr ad-dīnī” (A Footnote to
“The Critique of Religious Thought”) (Beirut, 1970), p. 87.
33
Bälz, “Submitting Faith,” p. 143.
34
Johansen, “Signs as Evidence.”
35
See the excellent ethnographic study by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The
Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005).
36
Ibid., pp. 12–13.
37
This is not unlike the premodern meaning of the word “belief” in English
and its equivalents in other European languages. See chap. 6 of Wilfred
Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Oxford, 1998), for an interesting
etymology of the word.
38
There has been considerable disagreement in modern Islamic history over
the criteria for determining apostasy, as well as whether, and if so how,
it should be punished. Thus one of the medieval collections of hadith, by
Bukhari, records a statement by the Prophet Muhammad that apostates
must be killed; but another canonical collection, that by Muslim, declares
Is Critique Secular?
61
this statement to be inauthentic. The debate has continued in modern
times.
62
39
See the sensitive analysis in Dorothea Weltecke, “Beyond Religion: On
the Lack of Belief During the Central and Late Middle Ages,” in Religion
and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction, ed. Jörg
Feuchter, Michi Knecht, and Heike Bock (Chicago, 2008).
40
A typical sentence: wa-l-fitnatu ashaddu min al-qatli (2:191), “persecution is
worse than killing.”
41
Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ, 1989).
42
“Here I stand: I can do no other,” the words attributed to Luther, were
probably never uttered, although they express very well the sentiment
of his actual statement at the Diet of Worms. See O. Chadwick, The
Reformation (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 56. At any rate, what he said
on that famous occasion would have to be described as sincere but
inauthentic. This doesn’t seem right, however.
43
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Boston, 1983), p. 26.
44
Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique,” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in James
Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and
Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, 1996).
45
See Reinhart Koselleck, Crisis and Critique (Cambridge, MA, 1988), p. 103
n. 15. My colleague John Wallach informs me: “The verb is krino, which
could signify ‘to separate, to discern, to judge.’ Related nouns are krisis
(turning point—potentially between life and death) and kriterion, i.e.,
means for judging, as well as the designation for a ‘judge.’ Courts were
known as Dikasteriai, places where judgments of justice were laid down.
Judges on Greek juries were called dikastai. The Greek goddess of Justice
was Dike. Dike derives from the verb dikazo, which signified ‘to judge, to
decide, to establish as a penalty or judgment.’ Some relate it to the verb
deiknumi, which signifies ‘to show, make manifest, prove,’ etc. There was
no verb equivalent of what English speakers have recently made into a
verb (from its origins as a noun), viz. ‘critique’”; personal communication.
A useful account of the history of the term is available in the entries
“Krisis” and “Kritik” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner,
Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972–).
46
See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles, 2001), pp. 119–33.
47
See Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism, revised and expanded ed.
(New York, 2003), esp. chap. 18.
48
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago, 1994).
49
Later, however, the Communist Party would take up the practice of auto-
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
critique. The most moving example of this that I know in literature is
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (London, 1940).
50
Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, 1959) is the famous
statement of his falsification theory. His The Poverty of Historicism (London,
1957) was an influential critique directed at the scientific claims of
Marxian historicism.
51
See note 5.
52
A mere two weeks before the publication of the cartoons, the Danish
newspaper Politiken printed an article titled “A profound fear of criticizing
Islam,” which suggests that white majorities in Europe felt beleaguered
by the presence of Muslim minorities. See Randall Hansen, “The Danish
Cartoon Controversy: A Defence of Liberal Freedom,” International
Migration 44, no. 5 (2006): p. 8.
Is Critique Secular?
63
Saba Mahmood
Religious Reason and Secular Affect:
An Incommensurable Divide?
ANY ACADEMIC DISCUSSION of religion in the present moment must
countenance the shrill polemics that have become the hallmark
of the subject today. The events of the past decade (including 9/11,
the subsequent war on terror, and the rise of religious politics
globally) have intensified what was at one point a latent schism
between religious and secular worldviews. Writers and scholars
from both sides of this schism now posit an incommensurable divide between strong religious beliefs and secular values. Indeed,
a series of international events, particularly around Islam, are
often seen as further evidence of this incommensurability.
Despite this polarization, more reflective voices in the current
debate have tried to show how the religious and the secular are
not so much immutable essences or opposed ideologies as they
are concepts that gain a particular salience with the emergence of
the modern state and attendant politics—concepts that are, furthermore, interdependent and necessarily linked in their mutual
transformation and historical emergence. Viewed from this perspective, as a secular rationality has come to define law, statecraft,
knowledge production, and economic relations in the modern
world, it has also simultaneously transformed the conceptions,
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ideals, practices, and institutions of religious life. Secularism here
is understood not simply as the doctrinal separation of church
from state but also as the rearticulation of religion in a manner
that is commensurate with modern sensibilities and modes of
governance. To rethink the religious is also to rethink the secular
and its truth claims, its promise of internal and external goods.
While these analytical reflections have complicated the state
of academic debate about the religious and the secular, they are
often challenged by scholars who fear that this manner of thinking forestalls effective action against the threat of “religious extremism” that haunts our world today. By historicizing the truth
of secular reason and questioning its normative claims, one paves
the way for religious fanaticism to take hold of our institutions
and society. One finds oneself on a slippery slope of the everpresent dangers of “relativism.” Our temporal frame of action
requires certainty and judgment rather than critical rethinking
of secular goods. This was evident in the debate that unfolded
around the banning of the veil in France in 2004, just as it was
evident in the justifications surrounding the publication of the
Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad in 2005 and 2008:1 if we
do not defend secular values and lifestyles, it is argued, “they”
(often Islamic extremists), will take over our liberal freedoms and
institutions. In this formulation, the choice is clear: either one is
against secular values or for them. A moral impasse, it is asserted,
is not resolved through reflection but through a vigorous defense
of norms and moral standards that are necessary to secular ways
of life and conduct.
In this essay, I would like to question this manner of conceptualizing the conflict between secular necessity and religious threat.
To begin with, this dichotomous characterization depends upon
a certain definition of “religious extremism,” often amassing together a series of practices and images that are said to threaten a
secular liberal worldview: from suicide bombers, to veiled women, to angry mobs burning books, to preachers pushing “intelliIs Critique Secular?
65
gent design” in schools. Needless to say, this diverse set of images
and practices neither emanates from a singular religious logic nor
belongs sociologically to a unified political formation. The point
I want to stress is that these supposed descriptions of “religious
extremism” enfold a set of judgments and evaluations such that to
abide by a certain description is also to uphold these judgments.
Descriptions of events deemed extremist or politically dangerous
are often not only reductive of the events they purport to describe
but, more importantly, also premised on normative conceptions of
the subject, religion, language, and law that are far more fraught
than the call for decisive political action allows.
In what follows I would like to consider these issues through
the lens of the Danish cartoon controversy. Public reaction on
the part of both Muslims and non-Muslims to the publication of
Danish cartoons of Muhammad (initially in 2005 and republished
in 2008) is exemplary of the standoff between religious and secular worldviews today—particularly in liberal democratic societies.
Following the initial publication of the cartoons, while shrill and
incendiary polemics were common to both sides, even the calmer
commentators seemed to concur that this was an impasse between
the liberal value of freedom of speech and a religious taboo. For
some, to accommodate the latter would be to compromise the
former, and for others, an accommodation of both was necessary
for the preservation of a multicultural and multireligious Europe.
Both judgments assume that what is at stake is a moral impasse
between what the Muslim minority community considers an act
of blasphemy and the non-Muslim majority regards as an exercise of freedom of expression, especially satirical expression, so
essential to a liberal society. It is this consensus across opposed
camps that I want to unsettle in this essay, calling our attention
to normative conceptions enfolded within this assessment about
what constitutes religion and proper religious subjectivity in the
modern world. I hope to show that to abide by the description
that the Danish cartoon controversy exemplified a clash between
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the principles of blasphemy and freedom of speech is to accept a
set of prior judgments about what kind of injury or offence the
cartoons caused and how such an injury might be addressed in
a liberal democratic society. In part I felt compelled to write this
essay because of the immediate resort to juridical language as
much by those who opposed the cartoons as by those who sought
to justify them across the European and Middle Eastern press.
Despite polemical differences, both positions remain rooted in an
identity politics (Western versus Islamic) that privileges the state
and the law as the ultimate adjudicator of religious difference. In
the pages that follow I want to question this assessment and force
us to think critically about the ethical and political questions
elided in the immediate resort to the law to settle such disputes.
In conclusion, I will link my argument to a broader discussion of
how we might reflect on the presumed secularity of critique in
the academy today.
Blasphemy or Free Speech?
The Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons depicting the
Prophet Muhammad, particularly following the first publication,2
shook the world. This was in part because of the large demonstrations held in a range of Muslim countries, some of which turned
violent, and in part due to the vitriolic reaction Muslim objections to the cartoons provoked among Europeans, many of whom
resorted to blatant acts of racism and Islamophobia targeted at
European Muslims. Given the passions involved on both sides, it
is clear that something quite crucial was at stake in this controversy that invites reflection far deeper than simple claims of civilizational difference and calls for decisive action would allow.
Despite the volume of commentary on the subject, there were
two stable poles around which much of the debate over the cartoons coalesced. On the one hand were those who claimed that
Muslim outcry had to be disciplined and subjected to protocols
of freedom of speech characteristic of liberal democratic societIs Critique Secular?
67
ies in which no figure or object, no matter how sacred, might be
depicted, caricatured, or satirized. Critics of this position on the
other hand claimed that freedom of speech has never simply been
a matter of the exercise of rights, but entails civic responsibility so as not to provoke religious or cultural sensitivities, especially in hybrid multicultural societies.3 These critics charged that
European governments employ a double standard when it comes
to the treatment of Muslims, since, not only is the desecration of
Christian symbols regulated by blasphemy laws in countries like
Britain, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany,4 but the media also
often makes allowances to accommodate Judeo-Christian sensitivities.5 Given that most Muslims regard the pictorial depiction
of the Prophet as either taboo or blasphemous, these critics attributed the gleeful display and circulation of the cartoons to the
Islamophobia sweeping North America and Europe following the
events of 9/11.6 For some, this was reminiscent of the anti-Semitic
propaganda leveled at another minority in European history that
was also at one time portrayed as a drain on Europe’s land and
resources.7
For many liberals and progressives critical of the Islamophobia
sweeping contemporary Europe, Muslim furor over the cartoons
posed particular problems. While some of them could see the
lurking racism behind the cartoons, it was the religious dimension
of the Muslim protest that remained troubling. Thus, even when
there was recognition that Muslim religious sensibilities were
not properly accommodated in Europe, there was nonetheless an
inability to understand the sense of injury expressed by so many
Muslims. The British political critic Tariq Ali exemplified this position in a column he wrote for the London Review of Books. Ali
frames his remarks by dismissing the claim that Muhammad’s
pictorial depiction constitutes blasphemy in Islam, since countless images of Muhammad can be found in Islamic manuscripts
and on coins across Muslim history. He then goes on to ridicule
the anguish expressed by many Muslims on seeing or hearing
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about these images: “As for religious ‘pain,’ this is, mercifully,
an experience denied unbelievers like myself and felt only by divines from various faiths, who transmit it to their followers, or by
politicians in direct contact with the Holy Spirit: Bush, Blair, and
Ahmedinejad and, of course, the pope and the grand ayatollah.
There are many believers, probably a majority, who remain unaffected by insults from a right-wing Danish paper.”8 In Ali’s view,
Muslims who express pain upon seeing the Prophet depicted as a
terrorist (or hearing about such depictions) are nothing but pawns
in the hands of religious and political leaders.
Art Spiegelman expressed a similar bewilderment when he
wrote in Harper’s magazine: “[T]he most baffling aspect of this
whole affair is why all the violent demonstrations focused on the
dopey cartoons rather than on the truly horrifying torture photos seen regularly on Al Jazeera, on European television, everywhere but in the mainstream media of the United States. Maybe
it’s because those photos of actual violation don’t have the magical aura of things unseen, like the damn cartoons.”9 Such views
crystallized the sense that it was a clash between secular liberal
values and an irascible religiosity that was at stake in the Danish
cartoon controversy. Stanley Fish, in an op-ed for the New York
Times, echoes this view even as he reverses the judgment. For him,
the entire controversy is best understood in terms of a contrast
between “their” strongly held religious beliefs and “our” anemic
liberal morality, one that requires no strong allegiance beyond
the assertion of abstract principles (such as free speech).10
I want to argue that framing the issue in this manner must
be rethought both for its blindness to the strong moral claims
enfolded within the principle of free speech (and its concomitant
indifference to blasphemy) as well as the normative model of religion it encodes. To understand the affront the cartoons caused
within terms of racism alone, or for that matter in terms of Western
irreligiosity, is to circumscribe our vocabulary to the limited conceptions of blasphemy and freedom of speech—the two poles that
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dominated the debate. Both these notions—grounded in juridical
notions of rights and state sanction—presuppose a semiotic ideology in which signifiers are arbitrarily linked to concepts, their
meaning open to people’s reading in accord with a particular
code shared between them. What might appear to be a symbol of
mirth and merrymaking to some may well be interpreted as blasphemous by others. In what follows, I will suggest that this rather
impoverished understanding of images, icons, and signs not only
naturalizes a certain concept of a religious subject ensconced in a
world of encoded meanings but also fails to attend to the affective
and embodied practices through which a subject comes to relate
to a particular sign—a relation founded not only on representation but also on what I will call attachment and cohabitation. It is
striking that the largely silent but peaceful and emphatic rejection
of these images among millions of Muslims around the world was
so easily assimilated to the language of identity politics, religious
fanaticism, and cultural/civilizational difference. Little attention
has been paid to how one might reflect on the kind of offence the
cartoons caused and what ethical, communicative, and political
practices are necessary to make this kind of injury intelligible.
The lacuna is all the more puzzling given how complex notions of
psychic, bodily, and historical injury now permeate legal and popular discourse in Western liberal societies; consider, for example,
the transformations that concepts of property, personal injury,
and reparations have undergone in the last century alone.
I want to clarify at the outset (lest I be misunderstood) that
my goal here is not to provide a more authoritative model for
understanding Muslim anger over the cartoons: indeed, the motivations for the international protests were notoriously heterogeneous, and it is impossible to explain them through a single
causal narrative.11 Instead, my aim in pursuing this line of thinking is to push us to consider why such little thought has been
given in academic and public debate to what constitutes moral
injury in our secular world today? What are the conditions of
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intelligibility that render certain moral claims legible and others
mute, where the language of street violence can be mapped onto
the matrix of racism, blasphemy, and free speech, but the claim to
what Tariq Ali pejoratively calls “religious pain” remains elusive,
if not incomprehensible? What are the costs entailed in turning
to the law or the state to settle such a controversy? How might we
draw on the recent scholarship on secularism to complicate what
is otherwise a polemical and shrill debate about the proper place
of religious symbols in a secular democratic society?
Religion, Image, Language
W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects but also as animated beings that exert
a certain force in this world. Mitchell emphasizes that this force
should not be reduced to “interpretation” but taken up as a relationship that binds the image to the spectator, object to subject, in
a relationship that is transformative of the social context in which
it unfolds. He argues: “[T]he complex field of visual reciprocity is
not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive
of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, or sign, or to discourse.
Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into
language.”12
Mitchell’s insistence that the analysis of images not be modeled
on a theory of language or signs is instructive, in that it reminds
us that not all semiotic forms follow the logics of meaning, communication, or representation.13 Yet the idea that the primary
function of images, icons, and signs is to communicate meaning
(regardless of the structure of relationality in which the object
and subject reside) is widely held and was certainly regnant in
much of the discourse about the Danish cartoons.14 Webb Keane,
in his recent book Christian Moderns, traces the imbricated genealogy of this understanding of semiotic forms and the modern
concept of religion.15 He follows a number of other scholars in
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pointing out that the modern concept of religion—as a set of
propositions in a set of beliefs to which the individual gives assent—owes its emergence to the rise of Protestant Christianity
and its subsequent globalization. Whereas colonial missionary
movements were the carriers for many of the practical and doctrinal elements of Protestant Christianity to various parts of the
world, aspects of Protestant semiotic ideology became embedded
in more secular ideas of what it means to be modern. One crucial
aspect of this semiotic ideology is the distinction between object and subject, between substance and meaning, signifiers and
signified, form and essence.16 Unglued from its initial moorings
in doctrinal and theological concerns, these sets of distinctions
have become a part of modern folk understandings of how images
and words operate in the world. One version of this is evident
in Ferdinand de Saussure’s model of language, which posits an
immutable distinction between the realm of language and the
realm of things (material or conceptual), between the sign and
the world, between speech and linguistic system. One finds in
Saussure, argues Keane, a preoccupation not entirely different
from that which agitated Calvin and other Protestant reformers:
how best to institute the distinction between the transcendent
world of abstract concepts and ideas and the material reality of
this world.
Historical anthropologists have drawn attention to the shock
experienced by proselytizing missionaries when they first encountered non-Christian natives who attributed divine agency
to material signs, often regarded material objects (and their exchange) as an ontological extension of themselves (thereby dissolving the distinction between persons and things), and for
whom linguistic practices did not simply denote reality but also
helped create it (as in the use of ritual speech to invoke ancestral
spirits or divine presence).17 The dismay that Protestant Christian
missionaries felt at the moral consequences that followed from
native epistemological assumptions, I want to suggest, has reso72
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nances with the bafflement many liberals and progressives express at the scope and depth of Muslim reaction over the cartoons
today.18 One source of bafflement emanates from the semiotic
ideology that underpins their sense that religious symbols and
icons are one thing, and sacred figures, with all the devotional
respect they might evoke, another. To confuse one with the other
is to commit a category mistake and to fail to realize that signs
and symbols are only arbitrarily linked to the abstractions that
humans have come to revere and regard as sacred. As any modern
sensible human being must understand, religious signs—such as
the cross—are not embodiments of the divine but only stand in
for the divine through an act of human encoding and interpretation. On this reading, Muslims agitated by the cartoons exhibit
an improper reading practice, collapsing the necessary distinction
between the subject (the divine status attributed to Muhammad)
and the object (pictorial depictions of Muhammad). Their agitation, in other words, is a product of a fundamental confusion
about the materiality of a particular semiotic form that is only
arbitrarily, not necessarily, linked to the abstract character of their
religious beliefs.
A critical piece of this semiotic ideology entails the notion that
insomuch as religion is primarily about belief in a set of propositions to which one lends one’s assent, it is fundamentally a matter of choice. Once the truth of such a conception of religion,
and concomitant subjectivity, is conceded, it follows that wrongheaded natives and Muslims can perhaps be persuaded to adopt a
different reading practice, one in which images, icons, and signs
do not have any spiritual consequences in and of themselves but
are only ascribed such a status through a set of human conventions. The transformative power of this vision was precisely what
motivated the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionaries
to undertake the pedagogical project of teaching native subjects
to distinguish properly between inanimate objects, humans, and
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meaning pleas circulating in Europe today for Muslims to stop
taking the Danish cartoons so seriously, to realize that the image (of Muhammad) can produce no real injury given that its
true locus is in the interiority of the individual believer and not
in the fickle world of material symbols and signs. The hope that
a correct reading practice can yield compliant subjects crucially
depends, in other words, upon a prior agreement about what religion should be in the modern world. It is this normative understanding of religion internal to liberalism that is often missed
and glossed over by commentators such as Stanley Fish (as in the
quote earlier) when they claim that liberalism is anemic in its
moral and religious commitments.
Relationality, Subject, and Icon
I want to turn now to a different understanding of icons that
not only was operative among Muslims who felt offended by the
cartoons but also has a long and rich history within different
traditions, including Christianity and ancient Greek thought. A
quick word on my use of the term icon: it refers not simply to an
image but to a cluster of meanings that might suggest a persona,
an authoritative presence, or even a shared imagination. In this
view, the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find oneself in a structure that influences how one conducts oneself in this world. The term icon in my
discussion therefore pertains not just to images but to a form of
relationality that binds the subject to an object or imaginary.
At the time of their initial publication, I was struck by the
sense of personal loss expressed by many devout Muslims on
hearing about or seeing the cartoons. While many of those I interviewed condemned the violent demonstrations, they nonetheless expressed a sense of grief and sorrow.19 As one young British
Muslim put it:
I did not like what those raging crowds did in burning down
buildings and cars in places like Nigeria and Gaza. But what
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really upset me was the absolute lack of understanding on the
part of my secular friends (who are by the way not all White,
many are from Pakistan and Bangladesh) at how upset people
like myself felt on seeing the Prophet insulted in this way. It
felt like it was a personal insult! The idea that we should just
get over this hurt makes me so mad: if they don’t feel offended
by how Jesus is presented (and some do of course), why do
they expect that all of us should feel the same? The Prophet is
not after all Mel Gibson or Brad Pitt, he is the Prophet!
When the cartoons were republished in seventeen Danish and
a handful of European and American newspapers in February
2008, I was conducting field research in Cairo, Egypt. While the
demonstrations were muted this time, I heard similar expressions
of hurt, loss, and injury expressed by a variety of people. An older
man, in his sixties, said to me: “I would have felt less wounded if
the object of ridicule were my own parents. And you know how
hard it is to have bad things said about your parents, especially
when they are deceased. But to have the Prophet scorned and
abused this way, that was too much to bear!”
The relationship of intimacy with the Prophet expressed
here has been the subject of many studies by scholars of Islam
and is explicitly thematized in Islamic devotional literature on
Muhammad and his immediate family (ahl al-bayt).20 In this literature, Muhammad is regarded as a moral exemplar whose words
and deeds are understood not so much as commandments but
as ways of inhabiting the world, bodily and ethically. Those who
profess love for the Prophet do not simply follow his advice and
admonitions to the umma (that exist in the form of the hadith), but
also try to emulate how he dressed; what he ate; how he spoke
to his friends and adversaries; how he slept, walked, and so on.
These mimetic ways of realizing the Prophet’s behavior are lived
not as commandments but as virtues where one wants to ingest,
as it were, the Prophet’s persona into oneself.21 It needs to be acknowledged of course that insomuch as Muhammad is a human
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figure in Islamic doctrine who does not share in divine essence,
he is more an object of veneration than of worship.22
The point I wish to emphasize is that, within traditions of
Muslim piety, a devout Muslim’s relationship to Muhammad
is predicated not so much upon a communicative or representational model as on an assimilative one. Muhammad, in this
understanding, is not simply a proper noun referring to a particular historical figure, but the mark of a relation of similitude.
In this economy of signification, he is a figure of immanence in
his constant exemplariness, and is therefore not a referential sign
that stands apart from an essence that it denotes. The modality of
attachment that I am describing here (between a devout Muslim
and the exemplary figure of Muhammad) is perhaps best captured in Aristotle’s notion of schesis, which he used to describe
different kinds of relations in Categories, a concept that was later
elaborated by the Neoplatonists (such as Porphyry, Ammonius,
and Elias).23 The Oxford English Dictionary defines schesis as “the
manner in which a thing is related to something else.” Scholars
commenting on Aristotle’s use of schesis distinguish it from his
use of the term pros ti in that schesis captures a sense of embodied
habitation and intimate proximity that imbues such a relation. Its
closest cognate in Greek is hexis and in Latin habitus, both suggesting a bodily condition or temperament that undergirds a particular modality of relation.
Particularly relevant to my argument here is the meaning schesis was given during the second iconoclastic controversy (circa
787) when, perhaps not surprisingly, it was the iconophiles who
used it to respond against charges of idolatry and to defend their
doctrine of consubstantiality. Kenneth Parry, in his book on
Byzantine iconophile thought, shows that Aristotle’s concept of
relationality became crucial to the defense of the holy image by
the two great iconophiles, Theodore of Studite and the Patriarch
Nikephoros.24 As Parry shows, what the image and the prototype
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share in their discourse is not an essence (human or divine) but
the relationship between them. This relationship is based in homonymy and hypostasis: the image and deity are two in nature and
essence but identical in name. It is the imaginal structure shared
between them that gives form to this relationship. In the words
of the historian Marie-José Mondzain, “to be the ‘image of’ is to
be in a living relation to.”25 The Aristotelian term schesis captures
this living relation because of its heightened psychophysiological
and emotional connotations and its emphasis on familiarity and
intimacy as a necessary aspect of the relation.
What interests me in this iconophile tradition is not so much
the image as the concept of relationality that binds the subject to
the object of veneration. This modality of relationship is operative in a number of traditions of worship and often coexists in
some tension with other dominant ideologies of perception and
religious practice.26 The three Abrahamic faiths adopted a range
of key Aristotelian and Platonic concepts and practices that were
often historically modified to fit the theological and doctrinal
requirements of each tradition.27 In contemporary Islam, these
ideas and practices, far from becoming extinct, have been reconfigured under conditions of new perceptual regimes and modes of
governance—a reconfiguration that requires serious engagement
with the historical relevance of these practices in the present.28
Schesis aptly captures not only how a devout Muslim’s relationship to Muhammed is described in Islamic devotional literature but also how it is lived and practiced in various parts of
the Muslim world. Even the thoroughly standardized canon of
the Sunna (an authoritative record of the Prophet’s actions and
speech) vacillates between what read like straightforward commands, on the one hand, and descriptions of the Prophet’s behavior, on the other, his persona and habits understood as exemplars
for the constitution of one’s own ethical and affective equipment.
For many pious Muslims, these embodied practices and virtues
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provide the substrate through which one comes to acquire a devoted and pious disposition. Such an inhabitation of the model
(as the term schesis suggests) is the result of a labor of love in
which one is bound to the authorial figure through a sense of
intimacy and desire. It is not due to the compulsion of “the law”
that one emulates the Prophet’s conduct, therefore, but because
of the ethical capacities one has developed that incline one to
behave in a certain way.
The sense of moral injury that emanates from such a relationship between the ethical subject and the figure of exemplarity
(such as Muhammad) is quite distinct from one that the notion
of blasphemy encodes. The notion of moral injury I am describing no doubt entails a sense of violation, but this violation emanates not from the judgment that “the law” has been transgressed
but from the perception that one’s being, grounded as it is in a
relationship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken.
For many Muslims, the offense the cartoons committed was not
against a moral interdiction (“Thou shalt not make images of
Muhammad”), but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that
feels wounded. This wound requires moral action, but its language is neither juridical nor that of street protest, because it does
not belong to an economy of blame, accountability, and reparations. The action that it requires is internal to the structure of
affect, relations, and virtues that predisposes one to experience
an act as a violation in the first place.
One might ask what happens to this mode of injury when it is
subject to the language of law, politics, and street protest? What
are its conditions of intelligibility in a world where identity politics reign and the juridical language of rights dominates? Does it
remain mute and unintelligible or does its logic undergo a transformation? How does this kind of religious offence complicate
principles of free speech and freedom of religion espoused by liberal democratic societies?
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Religion, Race, and Hate Speech
An unfortunate consequence of assessing the cartoon controversy in terms of blasphemy and freedom of speech was the immediate resort to juridical language by participants on both sides.
In what follows, I want to examine two distinct arguments mobilized by European Muslims in order to seek protection from what
they regard as increasing attacks on their religious and cultural
identity: first, the use of European hate speech laws and, second,
the legal precedents set by the European Court of Human Rights
(ECtHR) to limit free speech in the interest of maintaining social
order. These attempts, as I will show, encounter strong challenges
not simply because of the European majority’s prejudice against
Muslims but because of structural constraints internal to secular
liberal law, its definition of what religion is, and its ineluctable
sensitivity to majoritarian cultural sensibilities.
According to many European Muslims, the cartoons are a particularly vicious example of the racism they have come to experience from their compatriots in Europe. As Tariq Modood put
it: “The cartoons are not just about one individual Muslim per
se—just as a cartoon about Moses as a crooked financier would
not be about one man but a comment on Jews. And just as the
latter would be racist, so are the cartoons in question.”29 Modood
mobilizes this provocative, if somewhat simplified, comparison
with European Jews to challenge the idea regnant among many
Europeans—progressives and conservatives alike—that Muslims
cannot be subjected to racism because they are a religious, not a
racial, group. Modood argues that racism is not simply about biology but can also be directed at culturally and religiously marked
groups. Once we move away from a biological notion of race, it
is possible to see that “Muslims can [also] be the victims of racism qua Muslims as well as qua Asians or Arabs or Bosnians.
Indeed…these different kinds of racisms can interact…and so can
mutate and new forms of racism can emerge. This is…to recog-
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nize that a form of racism has emerged which connects with but
goes beyond a critique of Islam as a religion.”30 While Modood
does not adequately address the distinct histories of racialization
of European Jews and Muslims, his viewpoint nonetheless enjoys
wide support among many people.
Arguments about the racialization of Muslims provoke the fear
among some Europeans that if this premise is conceded or accorded legal recognition then it will open the door for Muslims
to use European hate speech laws to unduly regulate forms of
speech that they think are injurious to their religious sensibilities.31 Ardent champions of free speech often reject the claim
that the Danish cartoons have anything to do with racism or
Islamophobia, arguing instead that Muslim extremists are using this language for their own nefarious purposes. A number
of legal critics, for example, charge that Muslim use of European
hate speech laws is a ruse by “opponents of liberal values” who
understand that “in order to be admitted into the democratic debate, they [have] to use a rhetoric that hides the conflict between
their ideas and the basic tenets of open societies.”32 These voices
caution softhearted liberals and multiculturalists not to fall for
such an opportunistic misuse of antidiscrimination and human
rights discourse because, they warn ominously, it will lead to the
enforcement of “Islamic values” and the ultimate destruction of
the “Europe of the Enlightenment.”33
This rejection of Muslim invocations of hate speech laws turns
upon two arguments: (a) religious identity is categorically different from racial identity, and (b) evidence of racial discrimination
against Muslims in European societies is lacking. In regard to the
former, these critics argue that race is an immutable biological characteristic, whereas religion is a matter of choice. One can change
one’s religion but not one’s skin color. The Danish cartoons, on the
other hand, merely offended “religious belief.”34 According to the
legal critic Guy Haarscher, insomuch as racist behavior refuses to
grant equal status to Jews and blacks “because of their [perceived]
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biologically ‘inferior’ character,” it violates the liberal principle of
equality. “Blasphemy,” on the other hand, he asserts “is normal—
and maybe a cathartic value—in open societies.”35
What I want to problematize here is the presumption that religion is ultimately a matter of choice: such a judgment is predicated on a prior notion, one I mentioned earlier, that religion is
ultimately about belief in a set of propositions to which one gives
one’s assent. Once this premise is granted, it is easy to assert that
one can change one’s beliefs just as easily as one might change
one’s dietary preferences or one’s name. While the problematic
conception of race as a biological attribute might be apparent to
the reader, the normative conception of religion offered here encounters few challenges.36 Earlier I explicated the concomitant
semiotic ideology this conception encodes; here I want to draw
out the implications of this concept when it is encoded within
secular liberal understandings of injurious speech and the right
to freedom of expression. The legal critics I cite do not simply misrecognize the kind of religiosity at stake in Muslim reactions to
Danish cartoons: they also echo the presumptions of the civil law
tradition in which the epistemological status of religious belief
has come to be cast as speculative and therefore less “real” than
the materiality of race and biology. Notably, in the arguments I
cited earlier, the normative conception of religion as belief facilitates other claims about what counts as evidence, materiality, and
real versus psychic or imagined harm.
In a thoughtful article entitled “The Limits of Toleration”
Kirstie McClure shows how the idea that religion is primarily
about private belief is closely tied to the historical emergence of
the notion of “worldly harm” in the eighteenth century when
the modern state came to extend its jurisdiction over a range of
bodily practices (both religious and nonreligious) deemed pertinent to the smooth functioning of the newly emergent civic domain. As a result, a variety of religious rituals and practices (such
as animal sacrifice) had to be made inconsequential to religious
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doctrine in order to bring them under the purview of civil law.
This in turn depended upon securing a new epistemological basis
for religion and its various doctrinal claims on subjects, space,
and time. McClure shows, for example, that the argument for religious toleration in John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration is
grounded in an empiricist epistemology that empowers the state
“as the sole legitimate adjudicator of worldly practice. The boundaries of toleration… [come] to be civilly defined...by the empirical
determination of whether particular acts and practices are demonstrably injurious to the safety and security of the state or the civil
interests of its citizens, with these latter defined in equally empirical
terms.”37 There is little doubt that since the time of Locke the notion of harm has been considerably expanded beyond the narrow
confines of this empiricist conception, but the idea that religion is
about matters less material (and therefore less pressing) continues
to hold sway in liberal societies. This claim paradoxically provokes
contemporary defenders of religion to try to ground its truth in
empirical proofs, thereby constantly reinscribing the empiricist
epistemology that was germane to Locke’s regime of civic order.
McClure’s argument draws attention to the ways in which the
emergence of the modern concept of religion is intrinsically tied
to the problem of governance and statecraft. In the debate about
the Danish cartoons, the limits of toleration were quickly set by
concerns for “the safety and security of the state.” The Muslim
charge that the cartoons were racist was often dismissed as nothing but an expression of “fundamentalist Islam,” and it was not
long before Muslim criticisms of the cartoons came to be regarded
as a threat not simply to the civilizational essence of Europe but
also to European state security and public order. Legal critics like
András Sajó insist, for example, that to accept the charge that the
Danish cartoons are racist is to ignore the real danger of Islamic
terrorism that the cartoons highlight: “[T]he cartoons indicate a
truly unpleasant factual connection…between terrorism and one
very successful version of Islam….If every critical expression be82
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comes suspicious of the danger of generalization…, [then] this
will lead to self-censure….If the criticism of religion is successfully recategorized as racism, then that means. . . that you cannot
criticize religious terrorism, even though religion really does have
its finger in the terrorism pie.”38
It is striking that in casting the matter as a choice between
Islamic terrorism and open debate, Sajó, like many others, portrays the cartoons as statements of facts that are necessary to the
security and well-being of liberal democracies.39 The performative aspect of the Danish cartoons is ceded in favor of their informational content, reducing them to little more than referential
discourse. Not only does this view naturalize a language ideology
in which the primary task of signs is the communication of referential meaning but it also construes all those who would question
such an understanding as religious extremists or, at the very least,
as soft multiculturalists who do not fully comprehend the threat
posed to liberal democracy by Islam. Furthermore, insomuch as
this juridical logic requires clear and distinct categories (such as
religion versus race), it leaves little room for understanding ways
of being and acting that cut across such distinctions. When concern for state security is coupled with this propensity of positive
law, it is not surprising that Muslim recourse to European hate
speech laws is judged as spurious.
Religion, Law, and Public Order
For European Muslims, a second plausible legal option to
pursue is the precedent set by the ECtHR when it upheld two
state bans on films deemed offensive to Christian sensibilities.
The European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights
(ECHR) is modeled after the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, but, unlike the latter, it has the power to implement decisions on member states of the Council of Europe. Two recent decisions of ECtHR are of relevance here: the Otto-Preminger-Institut
v. Austria ruling in 1994 and the Wingrove v. United Kingdom judgIs Critique Secular?
83
ment in 1997, both of which banned the display and circulation
of films for offending devout Christians. It is important to point
out that these decisions were grounded not in European blasphemy laws but in article 10 of the convention, which ensures
the right to freedom of expression. Notably, while article 10(1) of
the ECHR holds “freedom of expression” to be an absolute right,
article 10(2) allows for the exercise of this right to be limited if
the restrictions are prescribed by law and are understood to be
necessary to the functioning of a democratic society.40 It is important to note that this regulated conception of freedom of expression in Europe stands in sharp contrast with the more libertarian
conception of free speech in the United States. Most European
countries, coming out of the experience of the Holocaust and the
Second World War, place strong restrictions on forms of speech
that might foster racial hatred and lead to violence.
At stake in the Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria case was a film
produced by the nonprofit Otto Preminger Institute that portrayed
God, Jesus, and Mary in ways that were offensive to Christian
sensibilities.41 Under section 188 of the Austrian Penal Code, the
film was seized and confiscated before it could be shown.42 The
filmmaker appealed the case to the ECtHR, which ruled in favor
of the Austrian government and did not find the government in
violation of ECHR article 10. The Austrian government had defended the seizure of the film “in view of its character as an attack on the Christian religion, especially Roman Catholicism.…
Furthermore, they [the Austrian government] stressed the role of
religion in the everyday life of the people of Tyrol [the town where
the film was to be shown]. The proportion of Roman Catholic
believers among the Austrian population as a whole was already
considerable—78%—among Tyroleans it was as high as 87%.
Consequently…there was a pressing social need for the preservation of religious peace; it had been necessary to protect public order against the film.”43 The ECtHR concurred with this judgment
and argued: “The Court cannot disregard the fact that the Roman
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Catholic religion is the religion of the overwhelming majority of
the Tyroleans. In seizing the film, the Austrian authorities acted
to ensure religious peace in that region and to prevent that some
people should feel the object of attacks on their religious beliefs in
an unwarranted and offensive manner.”44
A similar regard for Christian sensibilities informed the ECtHR’s
decision in the Wingrove v. United Kingdom case when the court
upheld the British government’s refusal to permit circulation of a
film found to be offensive to devout Christians. The ECtHR made
clear that, while it found the British blasphemy laws objectionable, it supported the decision of the government in this instance
on the basis of the state’s margin of appreciation for permissible
restrictions operative in article 10 of the ECHR. The court upheld
the government’s decision to withhold circulation of the film because it had a legitimate aim to “protect the right of others” and
to protect “against seriously offensive attacks on matters regarded
as sacred by Christians.”45
While these decisions of the European Court have been criticized for accommodating religious feelings at the cost of free
speech, I would like to draw attention to a different issue, namely,
the margin of appreciation accorded to the state in determining
when and how free speech may be limited. The second clause of
article 10 of the ECHR on free speech gives the state a wide margin of appreciation to limit free speech if the state deems it a threat
to “national security, territorial integrity, public safety, health and
morals of a society, or reputations and rights of others.” In commenting upon the centrality of the concept of “public order” undergirding this legal tradition, Hussein Agrama argues that it is
part of a broader semantic and conceptual field in which notions
of public health and morals and national security are interlinked,
and the referent almost always seems to be the majority religious
culture.46 A fundamental contradiction haunts liberal democratic
legal traditions, he argues; on the one hand everyone is “equal
before the law,” and, on the other, the aim of the law is to create
Is Critique Secular?
85
and maintain public order—an aim that necessarily turns upon
the concerns and attitudes of its majority population.47
While some European Muslims see ECtHR judgments as blatantly hypocritical (they accommodate Christian sensitivities but
ignore Muslims ones), I would like to point out that regardless
of the social context when this legal reasoning is used, it tends
to privilege the cultural and religious beliefs of the majority
population. A number of observers of the ECtHR have noted, for
example, that “there appears to be a bias in the jurisprudence
of the Court…toward protecting traditional and established religions and a corresponding insensitivity towards the rights of minority, nontraditional, or unpopular religious groups….[T]hose
religions established within a state, either because they are an
official religion or have a large number of adherents, are more
likely to have their core doctrines recognized as manifestations
of religious belief.”48 It is not surprising, therefore, that when the
majority religion was Islam, as in the I. A. v. Turkey (2005) case,
the ECtHR ruling was consistent with the reasoning used in the
Otto-Preminger-Institut and the Wingrove decisions. The ECtHR upheld the Turkish government’s ban on a book deemed offensive
to the majority Muslim population on the basis that it violated the
rights of others who were offended by its profaneness; as such, the
Turkish government’s decision had met a “pressing social need”
and was not in violation of article 10 of the ECtHR.
The ECtHR is not the only legal institution where state concern for security and public and moral order leads to the accommodation of majority religious traditions. Consider, for example,
the much publicized apostasy trial of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd in
Egypt.49 Abu Zayd was tried for the crime of apostasy on the basis
of his published academic writings. The case was introduced and
tried based on a religious principle called hisba that did not exist
in modern Egyptian legal codes before 1980 but was adopted in
the litigation process expressly to declare Abu Zayd an apostate.
Agrama, in his incisive analysis of this trial, shows that while the
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principle of hisba existed historically in classical Sharia, the form
it took in the Abu Zayd case differed dramatically in that it came
to be articulated with the concept of public order and the state’s
duty to uphold the morals of the society in congruence with the
Islamic tradition of the majority. The language Agrama analyzes
from the Abu Zayd case bears striking similarities with invocations of public order in the ECtHR decisions cited earlier. Despite
the different sociopolitical contexts, what is shared between the
Egyptian legal arguments and those of the ECtHR is the French
legal tradition’s concern for public order and, by extension, the
law’s privileging of majority religious sensibilities.
It might be argued that the Otto-Preminger-Insitut and the Abu
Zayd cases abrogate the secular liberal principle of state neutrality
by accommodating the sensitivities of a religious tradition.50 But
such an objection, I would suggest, is based on an erroneous understanding of liberal secularism as abstaining from the domain
of religious life. As much of recent scholarship suggests, contrary
to the ideological self-understanding of secularism (as the doctrinal separation of religion and state), secularism has historically
entailed the regulation and reformation of religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices to yield a particular normative conception
of religion (that is largely Protestant Christian in its contours).
Historically speaking, the secular state has not simply cordoned
off religion from its regulatory ambitions but sought to remake
it through the agency of the law. This remaking is shot through
with tensions and paradoxes that cannot simply be attributed to
the intransigency of religionists (Muslims or Christians). One
particular tension is manifest in how freedom of religion often
conflicts with the principle of freedom of speech, both of which
are upheld by secular liberal democratic societies.51 As might be
clear to the reader, the contradictions I have discussed here are
not simply the result of the machinations of opportunistic religious extremists or an ineffective secular state but are at the heart
of the legal and cultural organization of secular societies. To atIs Critique Secular?
87
tend to these contradictions is to admit to the shifting nature of
secularism itself and the problems it historically manifests.
Moral Injury and Requirements of the Law
In light of my argument in the first part of this essay, it is important to note how far this juridical language of hate speech
and religious freedom has come from the kind of moral injury I
discussed under the concept of schesis. Muslims who want to turn
this form of injury into a litigable crime must reckon with the
performative character of the law. To subject an injury predicated
upon distinctly different conceptions of the subject, religiosity,
harm, and semiosis to the logic of civil law is to promulgate its
demise (rather than to protect it). Mechanisms of the law are not
neutral but are encoded with an entire set of cultural and epistemological presuppositions that are not indifferent to how religion is practiced and experienced in different traditions. Muslims
committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to
the prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation must contend
with the transformative power of the law and disciplines of subjectivity on which the law rests.
What I want to emphasize here is that European Muslims who
want to lay claim to the language of public order (enshrined in
the recent ECtHR decisions) remain blind to this normative disposition of secular-liberal law to majority culture. In its concern
for public order and safety, the sensitivities and traditions of a
religious minority are deemed necessarily less weighty than those
of the majority, even in matters of religious freedoms. This is not
simply an expression of cultural prejudice; it is constitutive of the
jurisprudential tradition in which the right to free speech and
religious liberty is located (and to which European Muslims are
now increasingly turning for protection). Furthermore, insomuch
as Muslims have come to be perceived as a threat to state security,
their religious traditions and practices are necessarily subject to
the surveillance and regulatory ambitions of the state in which
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
the language of public order reigns supreme.
For anyone interested in fostering greater understanding across
lines of religious difference it would be important to turn not so
much to the law as to the thick texture and traditions of ethical
and intersubjective norms that provide the substrate for legal arguments (enshrined in the language of public order). In this essay,
I have suggested several reasons why the concept of moral injury
I have analyzed here remained unintelligible in the public debate
over the Danish cartoons, particularly the difficulties entailed in
translating across different semiotic and ethical norms. The future of the Muslim minority in Euro-American societies is often
posed as a choice between assimilation and marginalization. In
this matrix of choice, the question of translatability of practices
and norms across semiotic and ethical differences is seldom raised.
I read this elision not as an epistemological problem but in terms
of the differential of power characteristic of minority-majority relations within the context of nation-states. It might well be that,
given this differential, the Muslim minority in Europe will have
no choice but to assimilate. For those who are interested in other
ways of dealing with this problem, however, it may behoove us to
avoid the rush to judgment so as to begin to unravel the different
stakes in such stand-offs. Ultimately, the future of the Muslim
minority in Europe depends not so much on how secular-liberal
protocols of free speech might be expanded to accommodate its
concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical
sensibilities of the Judeo-Christian population that undergird the
cultural practices of secular-liberal law.52 For a variety of historical and sociological reasons, I am not sure if either the Muslim
immigrant community or the European majority is prepared for
such an undertaking.
Conclusion
Rather than reiterate my main arguments, I would like to close
by offering some thoughts on how my analysis bears upon the
Is Critique Secular?
89
exercise of critique—a rubric under which this essay might be
located and that characterizes what most academic work labors to
achieve. It is customary these days to tout critique as an achievement of secular culture and thought. Key to this coupling is the
sense that unlike religious belief, critique is predicated upon a
necessary distantiation between the subject and object and some
form of reasoned deliberation. This understanding of critique is
often counterposed to religious reading practices where the subject is understood to be so mired in the object that she cannot
achieve the distance necessary for the practice of critique. In a
provocative essay, Michael Warner argues that such a conception
of critique not only caricatures the religious Other but also, more
importantly, remains blind to its own disciplines of subjectivity,
affective attachments, and subject-object relationality.53 He tracks
some of the historical transformations (in practices of reading,
exegesis, entexualization, and codex formation) that constitute
the backdrop for the emergence of this regnant conception of
critique. Warner urges readers to recognize and appreciate the
disciplinary labor that goes into the production of a historically
peculiar subjectivity entailed in this conception of critique.
In this essay, I have tried to pull apart some of the assumptions
that secure the polarization between religious extremism and
secular freedom wherein the former is judged to be uncritical,
violent, and tyrannical and the latter tolerant, satirical, and democratic. My attempt is to show that to subscribe to such a description of events is also simultaneously to underwrite a problematic
set of notions about religion, perception, language, and, perhaps
more importantly, in an increasingly litigious world, what law’s
proper role should be in securing religious freedom. I hope it is
clear from my arguments that the secular liberal principles of
freedom of religion and speech are not neutral mechanisms for
the negotiation of religious difference and that they remain quite
partial to certain normative conceptions of religion, subject, language, and injury. This is not due to a secular malfeasance but to
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a necessary effect that follows from the layers of epistemological,
religious, and linguistic commitments built into the matrix of the
civil law tradition. Our ability to think outside this set of limitations necessarily requires the labor of critique, a labor that rests
not on its putative claims to moral or epistemological superiority
but in its ability to recognize and parochialize its own affective
commitments that contribute to the problem in various ways.
Insomuch as the tradition of critical theory is infused with a
suspicion, if not dismissal, of religion’s metaphysical and epistemological commitments, it would behoove us to think “critically”
about this dismissal: how are epistemology and critique related
within this tradition? Do distinct traditions of critique require
a particular epistemology and ontological presuppositions of
the subject? How might we rethink the dominant conception of
time—as empty, homogenous, and unbounded, one so germane
to our conception of history—in light of other ways of relating to
and experiencing time that also suffuse modern life? What are
some of the practices of self-cultivation—including practices of
reading, contemplation, engagement, and sociality—internal to
secular conceptions of critique? What is the morphology of these
practices and how do these sit with (or differ from) other practices
of ethical self-cultivation that might uphold contrastive notions of
critique and criticism?
The kind of labor involved in answering these questions requires not simply posing a “yes” or a “no” answer to the query
“Is Critique Secular?” To do so would be to foreclose thought and
to fail to engage a rich set of questions, answers to which remain
unclear, not because of some intellectual confusion or incomplete
evidence, but because these questions require a comparative dialogue across the putative divide between “Western” and “nonWestern” traditions of critique and practice. This dialogue in turn
depends on making a distinction between the labor entailed in
the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own beliefs in
certain secular conceptions of liberty and attachment. The tenIs Critique Secular?
91
sion between the two is a productive one for the exercise of critique insomuch as it suspends the closure necessary to political
action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways.
The academy, I believe, remains one of the few places where such
tensions can still be explored.
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THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Critical Inquiry 35 no.
4 (2009). I would like to thank the University of Chicago Press for their
permission to reprint the article. I am grateful to Charles Hirschkind,
Hussein Agrama, Talal Asad, and Michael Allan for their comments. I am
particularly indebted to Amy Russel for guiding me through Greek sources
on schesis and relationality, and I am grateful to Mark McGrath for providing research assistance beyond the call of duty. The essay was presented
at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University,
and the Social Science Research Council’s forum on secularism, whose
audiences I thank for their comments and provocations.
Endnotes
1
The French government banned the veil as well as the display of other
“conspicuous” religious symbols from state schools in 2004. For historical
background and debates about this decision, see Joan Scott, The Politics of
the Veil (Princeton, NJ, 2007). For the Danish cartoons, see note 2.
2
The cartoons were initially published in Jyllands-Posten in September
2005. Large protests within the Muslim world broke out in 2006. The
reasons for these protests were diverse, and many critics claimed they
were opportunistically exploited by Muslim governments for their own
ends. On February 13, 2008, Jyllands-Posten and many other Danish
newspapers, including Politiken and Berlingske Tidende, reprinted the
infamous Bomb in the Turban cartoon as a statement of “commitment
to freedom of speech.” Several newspapers in Europe and the U.S.
followed suit, some of which had initially refused to publish them. The
newspapers claimed this was in reaction to the reported arrest of three
men of North African descent who were allegedly plotting to kill the
cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. One of the two was released for lack of
evidence and the other two, nonresidents of Denmark, were deported to
Tunisia. The reaction to the republication of the cartoons among Muslims
was muted this time, according to reports, and most demonstrations
remained peaceful.
3
For two different examples of this position, see Jospeh Carens’s
essay “Free Speech and Democratic Norms in the Danish Cartoon
Controversy” in the special issue of International Migration, “The Danish
Cartoon Affair: Free Speech, Racism, Islamism, and Integration,” 44,
no. 5 (2006): pp. 33–42; and Tariq Ramadan, “Cartoon Controversy
Is Not a Matter of Freedom of Speech, but Civic Responsibility,” New
Perspectives Quarterly, February 2, 2006, http://www.digitalnpq.org/
articles/global/56/02-02-2006/tariq_ramadan. Also see Tariq Ramadan,
“Cartoon Conflicts,” Guardian, February 6, 2006, http://www.guardian.
Is Critique Secular?
93
co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1703496,00.html.
94
4
Among the European countries in which blasphemy laws still exist on
the books (even if they are infrequently used) are Austria, Denmark,
Germany, Greece, Iceland, Finland, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy,
Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
5
For example, shortly after the protests erupted over the Danish cartoons,
the British Guardian reported that Jyllands-Posten (the same newspaper
that had solicited the Muhammad cartoons) had refused to publish
drawings mocking Jesus Christ for fear of provoking “an outcry” among
Danish Christians; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/feb/06/
pressandpublishing.politics.
6
See, for example, Tariq Modood’s essays in the special issue of
International Migration, “The Danish Cartoon Affair: Free Speech, Racism,
Islamism, and Integration”: “The Liberal Dilemma: Integration or
Vilification?” pp. 4–7, and “Obstacles to Multicultural Integration,” pp.
51–61.
7
As one British Muslim critic put it, there are strong parallels between
how Muslims are characterized in Europe today and how the Jews were
characterized in the 1930s: as religious bigots, aliens, and a blight on
European civilization. See Maleiha Malik, “Muslims Are Getting the
Same Treatment Jews Had a Century Ago,” Guardian, February 2, 2007.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2004258,00.
html.
8
Tariq Ali, “LRB Diary,” London Review of Books 28, no. 5 (March 9, 2006).
See http://www.tariqali.org/LRBdiary.html.
9
Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of
Courage,” Harper’s 312, no. 1873 (June 2006): p. 47.
10
According to Fish, liberal morality “consists in a withdrawal from
morality in any strong, insistent form,” such that liberals do not
care whether their beliefs prevail or not. Muslims, on the other
hand, have strong beliefs (however misguided they may be) whose
implementation they regard crucial. Stanley Fish, “Our Faith
in Letting It All Hang Out” New York Times, February 12, 2006;
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12fish.html?_
r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin. Fish’s view is problematic on a
number of accounts. First, liberalism enfolds a conception of religiosity
that is not simply negative in its formulation but has a robust sense and
feel that is manifest in the place accorded to religious myths, texts, icons,
and symbols in the cultural and literary resources of liberal societies.
Charles Taylor’s recent book A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007)
provides a rich account of this form of religiosity, one to which Fish
remains blind. Second, Fish characterizes both free speech and religion
as belief systems, with one difference: the former is weak whereas the
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
latter is passionately embraced. It is important to note that neither the
liberal nor the Islamic tradition is merely about belief: each is about
practices, how subjects come to be attached to authoritative ideas,
images, icons, and sensibilities. It is because of this rather impoverished
view of liberal ideology that Fish does not appreciate the strong and
visceral reactions among secular liberal Europeans against Muslim
protests.
11
For a critical review of the contrasting motivations behind the protests
staged in a number of Muslim countries, see Mahmood Mamdani, “The
Political Uses of Free Speech,” Daily Times (Lahore), Feburary 17, 2006,
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C02%5C17%5
Cstory_17-2-2006_pg3_3.
12
W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images
(Chicago, 2005), p. 47.
13
Mitchell devotes an entire chapter to the analysis of “offending images”
that have been desecrated by spectators, such as Chris Ofili’s painting
The Holy Virgin Mary, which was displayed in the Brooklyn Museum
of Art. Mitchell argues that such images are distinct in that they are
“transparently and immediately linked to what [they] represent…
[S]econd…the image possesses a kind of vital, living character
that makes it capable of feeling what is done to it. It is not merely a
transparent medium for communicating a message but something like
an animated, living thing, an object with feelings, intentions, desires
and agency. Indeed images are sometimes treated as pseudopersons—not
merely as sentient creatures that can feel pain and pleasure but as
responsible and responsive social beings. Images of this sort seem to
look back at us, to speak to us, even to be capable of suffering harm or
of magically transmitting harm when violence is done to them”; ibid., p.
127.
14
Needless to say that such an understanding of language has been
challenged and complicated by a number of linguists and philosophers.
For an insightful discussion, see Benjamin Lee, Talking Heads: Language,
Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity (Durham, NC, 1997).
15
Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter
(Berkeley, CA, 2007).
16
These sets of distinctions are predicated on a distantiation between the
perceiving subject and the world of objects, a distantiation that many
scholars consider a distinguishing feature of modernity. Keane draws
upon the work of Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, CA,
1991), and Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA,
2007) to make this point.
17
See Keane’s discussion of this point in chap. 8 of Christian Moderns; also
see Webb Keane, “Freedom and Blasphemy: On Indonesian Press Bans
Is Critique Secular?
95
and Danish Cartoons,” Public Culture 21, no. 1 (2009): pp. 47–76. For
earlier debates, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and
Revolution (Chicago, 1991); Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for
Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York, 2008); Peter Pels, Politics of Presence
(New York, 1998).
96
18
The moral outrage expressed by Muslims was not that dissimilar to the
anger and passion defenders of free speech exhibited; the appellation
“fundamentalists” for the Muslim protesters encodes the judgment that
the protestors are backward and regressive demagogues distinct from
principled supporters of freedom of speech.
19
While violent demonstrations and the boycott of Danish products
caught the attention of the world, a far more widespread form of Muslim
dissent was hardly mentioned. In Egypt, for example, this consisted of
long evenings of worship dedicated to the memory of Muhammad in
mosques, and the widespread use of the slogan “Ihna fidak ya rasul allah!”
meaning “We would die for you O prophet of God!” The expression
“fidak” is often used to express feelings of ardor and love toward one’s
beloved and in Sufi discourse also expresses one’s adoration of God. This
particular phrase was popularized by an Egyptian soccer player, pride
of the national team, when, during a soccer match, he bared his t-shirt
imprinted with this phrase unexpectedly to the media. Henceforth,
it caught on like wildfire and was reportedly displayed in offices; on
vehicles, computer screens, and t-shirts; and adapted as a ring tone for
mobile phones. Many of those who adopted this form of “silent protest,”
when interviewed, strongly rejected the violence of demonstrations in
Nigeria, Pakistan, and Gaza—but nonetheless expressed pain, hurt, and
anger at the images.
20
For an examination of both historical and contemporary relevance of this
relation to popular culture, see Ali Asaani, Celebrating Muhammad: Images
of the Prophet in Popular Muslim Poetry (Columbia, SC, 1995).
21
The tradition of virtue ethics, which draws on key Aristotelian
conceptions, forms part of the discourse of piety in contemporary Islam.
This tradition has been resuscitated by the Islamic revival in a variety
of contexts—including the media but also in practices of the self. On
this, see my Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
(Princeton, NJ, 2005).
22
Within Christianity, the way Mary is venerated marks the distinction
between the divinity of Jesus and the humanness of Mary.
23
In his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, Ammonius distinguishes
between four types of schesis: relationship between master and disciple;
between master and slave; between parent and child; and between
lovers. The term is also relevant to the Stoic concept and practice of
“cultivation of character.” See Marie-José Mondzain, “Voir L’invisible,”
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Critique 42, no. 589–90 (June/July 1996).
24
Parry identifies Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge—neither
of which were used before in defense of the holy image—as crucial to
the arguments of later iconophiles. Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word:
Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden,
1996); see esp. chap. 6, “Aristotelianism.”
25
Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: Byzantine Origins of the
Contemporary Image (Stanford, CA, 2004). Mondzain quotes the patriarch
Nikephoros’s defense against the charge of consubstantiality through his
recourse to arguments about art: “Art imitates nature without the former
being identical with the latter. On the contrary, having taken the natural
visible form as a model and as a prototype, art makes something similar
and alike.… It would be necessary then, according to this argument, that
the man and his icon share the same definition and be related to each
other as consubstantial things” (p. 77).
26
Christopher Pinney’s work on the political effects of the all-pervasive
presence of the images of Hindu icons, gods, and deities in India is an
instructive place to think through some of these issues. See Christopher
Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India
(New York, 2004).
27
The historical trajectory of these ideas is interesting to trace in this
regard. Notably, it was the school at Alexandria that proved to be the
most important transmitter of Aristotle’s works to the Byzantines. When
the school at Athens was closed under Justinian in the sixth century,
it was the Alexandria school that continued to flourish first under
Christian and then Islamic influence up until the eighth century. Many
of the inheritors of this school of commentators ended up in Baghdad,
which became a center of Neoplatonist thought in the ninth century.
See Parry, Depicting the Word, p. 53; and Richard Sorabji, “Aristotle
Commentators,” http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ip/rep/A021.htm.
28
On this point, see Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (New York,
2006); particularly the discussion about subterranean perceptual regimes
and modern conditions of politics and media.
29
Modood, “The Liberal Dilemma,” p. 4.
30
Modood, “Obstacles to Multicultural Integration,” p. 57.
31
For example, Muslim associations in France unsuccessfully sought to use
antihate speech legislation against the French newspaper France-Soir that
republished the cartoons in support of Jyllands-Posten.
32
Guy Haarscher “Free Speech, Religion, and the Right to Caricature,” in
Censorial Sensitivities: Free Speech and Religion in a Fundamentalist World, ed.
A. Sajó (Utrecht, 2007), p. 313.
33
András Sajó, “Countervailing Duties as Applied to Danish Cheese and
Is Critique Secular?
97
Danish Cartoons,” in Sajó, Censorial Sensitivities, p. 299.
98
34
Sajó argues, “Undoubtedly, the negative stereotyping of group members
plays an important role in racist parlance. The Danish cartoons,
however, addressed a religious belief. On what ground can you equate
unchangeable race (skin color) and religion, if religion is a matter of
choice?” ibid., p. 286.
35
Haarscher, “Free Speech,” p. 323.
36
The strict distinction drawn here between religious and racial identity
is put into question by the gradual shift in the European understanding
of Jews from a religious group to a racial people over the course of
the twentieth century. For an interesting argument about how the
“racialization of Jews” in Europe came to be historically linked with
the construction of Arabs as quintessentially religious/Muslim, see Gil
Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA, 2008).
37
Kirstie McClure, “Limits to Toleration,” Political Theory 18 no. 3 (1990): p.
380–81 (emphasis added).
38
Sajó, Censorial Sensitivities, p. 288 (emphasis added).
39
American legal critic Robert Post expresses a similar view when he
argues: “Some of the cartoons do invoke stereotypic criticisms of Islam.
They comment on Islamic repression of women; on the use of Islamic
fundamentalist doctrines to foster violence; on the fear of violent reprisal
for publishing criticism of Islam. These are ideas that have been and
will be used by those who would discriminate against Muslims…. But
they are also ideas about real and pressing issues. The relationship between
Islam and gender is a lively and controversial question. Fundamental
Islamic violence is a public worry throughout Europe. Fear of reprisal for
crossing Islamic taboos is omnipresent…. To cut off all public discussion of
real and pressing public issues would be unthinkable. And if such issues are to
be discussed, the expression of all relevant views must be protected,” in
“Religion and Freedom of Speech: Portraits of Muhammad,” Constellations
14 no. 1 (2007): pp. 83–84 (emphasis added). This article was
republished in Sajó, Censorial Sensitivities. For my response to this piece,
see http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/pubs/post_mahmood.pdf.
40
Article 10(1) states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.
This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and
impart information and ideas without interference by public authority
and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States
from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema
enterprises.” Article 10(2) allows for permissible limits in the following
manner: “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties
and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions,
restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in
a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the
protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or
rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received
in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the
judiciary.” See, http://www.hrcr.org/docs/Eur_Convention/euroconv3.
html.
41
Not unlike the publishers of the Danish cartoons, the filmmaker argued
that it was doubtful that “a work of art dealing in a satirical way with
persons or objects of religious venerations could ever be regarded as
‘disparaging or insulting,’” Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria Judgment, Eur.
H. R. Rep. 19 (1994) §44.
42
The Austrian government maintained that the seizure and confiscation
of the film was aimed at the “protection of the rights of others,”
particularly the right to respect for one’s religious feelings, and at
the “prevention of disorder”; ibid., §46. Also see Peter Edge, “The
European Court of Human Rights and Religious Rights,” International and
Comparative Law Quarterly 47 no. 3 (July 1998): pp. 680–87; and Javier
Martinez-Torrón and Rafael Navarro-Valls, “The Protection of Religious
Freedom in the System of the European Convention on Human Rights,”
Helsinki Monitor no. 3 (1998): pp. 25–37.
43
Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria Judgment §52.
44
Ibid. §56.
45
Wingrove v. United Kingdom Judgment, Eur. H. R. Rep. 19 (1996) §57.
46
See Hussein Agrama, “Egypt: A Secular or a Religious State?” (PhD diss.,
Johns Hopkins University, 2005).
47
Hussein Agrama, “Is Egypt a Religious or a Secular State? Reflections on
Islam, Secularism, and Conflict,” manuscript, forthcoming in Comparative
Studies in Society and History (2009): p. 15.
48
Peter Danchin, “Of Prophets and Proselytes: Freedom of Religion and
the Conflict of Rights in International Law,” Harvard International Law
Journal 49 no. 2 (Summer 2008): p. 275. Danchin cites a number of
critics of ECtHR judgments who hold this view, including Jeremy
Gunn, “Adjudicating Rights of Conscience Under European Convention
on Human Rights,” Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Legal
Perspectives, ed. J. van der Vyver and J. Witte (The Hague, 1996).
49
It is important to note that while the category of apostasy was used
in Islamic legal tradition until the twelfth century, apostasy trials had
practically disappeared in the Middle East between 1883 and 1950. It is
only in the 1980s that apostasy emerges as a litigable crime for the first
time in the modern Middle Eastern history of the penal code. Baber
Johansen shows that it was not until the 1980s, under increasing demand
for the codification of Islamic law (taqnin al-sharia), that classical notions
of apostasy came to be integrated into the penal code in a number of
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countries such as the Sudan (1991), Yemen (1994), and Egypt (1982).
Insomuch as the Sharia only applies to matters of Personal Status Law,
it is through this channel that apostasy has reentered the legal system
in Egypt. Baber Johansen, “Apostasy in Egypt,” Social Research 70, no. 3
(2003): pp. 687–710.
100
50
Indeed, this is the basis on which a number of legal theorists objected
to the ECtHR’s decision. See for example, Sajó, Censorial Sensitivities,
and Martinez-Torrón and Navarro-Valls, “The Protection of Religious
Freedom in the System of the European Convention on Human Rights.”
51
While my argument here focuses on the French legal tradition, a
similar tension haunts the American tradition as well. Winnifred
Sullivan explores the paradoxical implications of the First Amendment
(particularly the freedom of religion clause) in the legal history of the
United States. She analyzes a representative court case in Florida in
which a municipal authority was sued on First Amendment grounds for
banning display of religious symbols in a public cemetery. In adjudicating
this case, the court had ultimately to distinguish and decide which of the
religious beliefs claimed by the litigants were real from the standpoint
of the law. In doing so, the federal court had to engage in theological
reasoning and judgments, an exercise that sharply contradicts the
principle of state neutrality with respect to religion enshrined in the First
Amendment; see Winnifred Sullivan, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom
(Princeton, NJ, 2005). There are other examples in U.S. legal history,
such as the Supreme Court ruling that banned the use of peyote in
ceremonial rituals of the Native American Church. On that case, see Vine
Deloria and David Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations
(Austin, TX, 1999).
52
Here I am reminded of the fact that the relative abatement of racist
attitudes against Jews and blacks in Europe and the United States is not
an achievement of the law alone (although the law helped), but crucially
depended upon the transformation of the dense fabric of ethical and
cultural sensibilities across lines of racial and religious difference.
53
Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed.
Jane Gallop (New York, 2004), pp. 13–37.
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
Judith Butler
The Sensibility of Critique:
Response to Asad and Mahmood
ONE MIGHT EXPECT THAT a volume centrally engaged with the events
of the Danish cartoon affair and its aftermath would move directly to the normative questions of whether the cartoons constituted
a substantial injury, whether those who crafted and published
the cartoons were rightfully exercising their freedom of speech,
and whether the offense of religious sensibilities ought rightly to
be prohibited. Much ink has been spilled on these issues, but little
attention has been paid to the question of why outrage against
the cartoons by Muslim populations across the globe was of a
certain kind, and of what specific meaning that injury had and
has. To say that vast populations were injured, or understood
themselves as injured, as a consequence of these public displays,
however, is still not to say anything about how that injury ought
to be addressed or redressed. But it does point to a certain limit of
the normative imagination when it is constrained by established
juridical protocols on free speech. If one objects to learning about
the meaning of the injury at issue because one fears that such an
understanding will directly imply a legal proscription of speech,
then one embraces a certain norm at the expense of understanding itself—an anti-intellectualism that characterizes forms of
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moral dogmatism, whether secular or religious. Not only would
one prefer to remain ignorant, but one embraces one’s ignorance
in the name of unyielding moral principles—a comic and tragic
position, to be sure.
The two papers featured here petition us to approach the
question of blasphemy and injury in another way. They explicitly
query whether the available juridical frameworks (deemed “secular” and “liberal” by both authors) that establish the normative
questions, is this free speech? and ought it to be protected? are
the right ones for understanding what has happened here and
what its meaning and importance may be. Of course, to query the
adequacy of that framework is not to say this is not free speech
and ought not to be protected, since that judgment stays within
the same juridical framework—although there will be those who
think that any position that refuses to answer these normative
questions regarding justification and prohibition is sidestepping
the main questions of the day. But such critics have effectively
decided that there is but one normative framework within which
to understand and evaluate this phenomenon, and that the phenomenon is presumptively understood well by that framework.1
Those who work within the presumption of a single and adequate
framework make all kinds of suppositions about the cultural
sufficiency and breadth of their own thought. As a result, they
will doubtless think that the refusal to accept this monolithic
framework (secular, legal) is nothing but a covert way of taking up—and disavowing—a position within that framework. Such
reasoning confirms the monolithic hegemony of the framework.
However, it remains indifferent to questions of social history and
cultural complexity that reframe the very character of the phenomenon in question. Such critics presume that the normative
juridical framework within which they work is, and must be,
not just predominant, but the necessary way to understand the
meaning of events.
It may seem that the problem, as outlined, depends on a dis102
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tinction between the “meaning” of the events and the “normative
evaluation” of those events (justified/unjustified; permissible/
impermissible). I am not always sure how Talal Asad and Saba
Mahmood would negotiate this distinction, and it does seem that
sometimes they direct us to try to understand the meaning of
the injury at issue and to suspend the question of evaluation, or
“judgment.”
I would like to suggest, however, that something more farreaching is at issue here, since, depending on which normative
framework controls the semantic field, the phenomenon in question will turn out to be a different sort of thing. In other words,
we can choose to locate the meaning of “blasphemy” within
Christian discourse and social history, or as a problem produced
by the emergence of free speech doctrine in the last few centuries of European and American legal history. We refer to those
frameworks in order to locate the phenomenon, and those frameworks are for the most part normative, addressing the question of
whether or not blasphemy is, and ought to be, permitted speech;
whether it tests the limits of free speech; and whether its permissibility is a sign of the robust condition of free speech in any given
society. If we are asked instead to understand how blasphemy
and injury function within Muslim religious law and its history,
then we are immediately up against a problem of translation: not
only the problem of whether the injury of the Danish cartoons is
rightly translated by tajdīf or isā’ah but also of whether the moral
framework and discourse within which the outrage took place
was not in some key ways at odds with the moral framework and
discourse that for the most part controls the semantic operation
of “blasphemy” as a term. The translation has to take place within
divergent frames of moral evaluation. Indeed, one of the points
of these essays is to show that in some ways the conflict that
emerged in the wake of the publication of the Danish cartoons is
one between competing moral frameworks, understanding “blasphemy” as a tense and overdetermined site for the convergence of
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differing schemes of moral evaluation.
Of course, to suggest that there may be other normative frameworks for understanding the problem of blasphemy or offense is
not the same as saying that one ought to adopt those other frameworks or that those frameworks ought now to become the ones
within which normative judgments are made. And yet, it would
not make sense to say that description and prescription are absolutely distinct enterprises. The point is that when we judge, we
locate the phenomenon we judge within a given framework, and
our judgment requires a stabilization of the phenomenon. But if
that stabilization proves impossible, or if the phenomenon—in
this case, blasphemy—exists precisely at the crossroads of competing, overlapping, interruptive, and divergent moral frameworks, then we need first to ask ourselves why we locate it within
the singular framework that we do, and at what expense we rule
out the competing or alternative frameworks within which it is
figured and circulated. The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks,
although it is doubtless a “good” to know the cultural range of
moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and
knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point
to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence
to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,
what would judgment look like that took place not “within” one
framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping? It would seem a practice of
cultural translation would be a condition of such judgment, and
that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a
given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies
are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of
acknowledging and repairing injury are available.
In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see
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why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to
evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift
from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see
why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on
all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already
committed to an evaluative framework, prior to the question of
any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first
describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment,
but if the very phenomenon at issue only “exists” within certain
evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description—as is
surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural
and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly
Muslim, that were not brought to bear. In this instance, the point
is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why
something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue. These two anthropologists are trying to get
us to expand our understanding of what was at stake, but I gather
they are doing this because they think not just that we should all
become more knowledgeable (and that broader knowledge of our
world is a moral good) but also that the secular terms should not
have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a
kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish
cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially
when religious minorities are racialized).
This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest
that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation
of hegemonic secularism only when we pass through a certain
displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical
perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An
inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral
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logical, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference
in the effort to “parochialize” certain absolutist and monolithic
conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly,
forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination—
or, as Asad puts it, the “European revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.” 2
IN A SEPARATE CONTEXT, I have sought to make the case for Asad’s
normative commitments, despite his very interesting and confounding protestations to the contrary.3 My position is probably
not one that either Mahmood or Asad would embrace in the forms
I have offered previously or now, but it is nevertheless one that
I could not have undertaken without the benefit of their work.
Consider the effect of Asad’s injunction to establish a comparative
framework for thinking about why we respond to violence as we
do, with what affect, and with what sorts of moral evaluations.
In On Suicide Bombing, he asks why death dealing on the part of
nonstate actors fills most people in the “West” with greater horror than death dealing on the part of recognized nation-states. He
writes explicitly:
I am not interested here in the question, “When are particular
acts of violence to be condemned as evil, and what are the
moral limits to justified counter-violence.” I am trying to think
instead about the following question: “What does the adoption of particular definitions of death dealing do to military
conduct in the world?” 4
Clearly, we want to know what adopting certain definitions of
death dealing does to military conduct not because we are simply
purveyors of military landscapes. Presumably, we want to know
about these differential ways of defining and experiencing death
dealing because they are consequential for why and how wars
are waged, and we are trying to shed light on these differential
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modes in order, in whatever way, to counter and undo them with
the hope of ending or ameliorating such wars. And we want to
end them, if we do, because we think they are wrong, unjust,
contemporary forms of conquest, racist and destructive. All of
these are “sentiments” or “affects” that are bound up with our
criticism of the differential way in which death dealing is defined
and lived.
Asad effectively poses the question, why is it that aggression
in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas
the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy,
does not? He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism
may well constitute a “tension” at the heart of the modern subject.
And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But
clearly something more is at stake.
We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made
explicit in Asad’s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some
moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated
by the comparison. Asad’s questions derive their rhetorical force
from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous
outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of
religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those
who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many
reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing,
but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and
the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the
normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad’s work
makes available to us. In my view, Asad’s work not only provides
new modes of description and understanding but also makes an
intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly
secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the
domain of “understanding” contemporary cultural and military
conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and conseIs Critique Secular?
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quential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.
Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon
for judgment. On the basis of this comparative and interruptive
work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states,
and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of
illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion
not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but
also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.
If Asad’s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do,
that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since
we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more
horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face
of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational
schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end
up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock. The posing
of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces
new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the
worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing
over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment,
an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.
Criticism, Critique, and Formations of the Subject
Asad himself would seem not to agree with the conclusions I
derive from his mode of analysis, but perhaps I am offering him
a gift he will come to appreciate. Some reflections on “critique”
and “criticism” inaugurate and end the essay he offers here. As
Wendy Brown has pointed out in the introduction to this volume,
the distinction between “critique” and “criticism” is an important
one. I would gloss that distinction in the following way: Criticism
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usually takes an object, and critique is concerned to identify the
conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears. And although this latter seems like a Kantian definition, it
is a Kantianism that has been rewrought several times in the last
few centuries with consequences for global politics within and
outside the Euro-Atlantic.
As for criticism, consider the difference between Asad’s characterization and that, for instance, of Raymond Williams in
Keywords.5 After querying whether “criticism signifies liberation,”
Asad writes, “Let’s bear in mind that the term ‘criticism’ embraces
a multitude of activities. To judge, to censure, to reproach, to find
fault, to mock, to evaluate, to construe, to diagnose—each of these
critical actions relates persons to one another in a variety of affective ways. Thus to be ‘criticizable’ is to be part of an asymmetrical
relation.…One should be skeptical, therefore, of the claim that
‘criticism’ is aligned in any simple way with ‘freedom.’”6
Williams offers a very different formulation, noting that criticism has been unfairly restricted to “fault-finding” and calling for
a way of describing our responses to cultural works “which do not
assume the habit (or right or duty) of judgment… [W]hat always
needs to be understood is the specificity of the response, which is
not a judgment, but a practice” (76). Adorno as well makes clear
that judgment of an instrumental kind ought not to be the exemplary act of critique, since the point is not to decide under what
category a phenomenon belongs, but to interrogate the taken-forgranted categorical schemes through which phenomena appear.
In other words, for Williams and Adorno both (and we might include Deleuze’s infamous “having done with judgment” as well),
critique does not depend “on a variety of taken-for-granted understandings and abilities” 7—a position that would, among other
things, seem to presume secular understandings as the precondition of its “Western” operation. Indeed, many theorists of critique
have rejected judgment as its defining gesture, a trend reversed
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course to Kant’s aesthetic judgment as a model for politics.8
Later, in relation to blasphemy, Asad remarks, “[T]he worldly
critic wants to see and hear everything: nothing is taboo, everything is subject to critical engagement.” 9 Is criticism here the same
as critique? If it is, it clearly enjoys a bad reputation as a random,
negative, destructive, and judgmental operation. But is this really
necessary or, indeed, warranted? Asad cites Said on the notion
of the “secular critic,” but does this view of criticism really extend adequately to the task of critique, a term that Said himself
eschewed? I won’t belabor the point here, but consider just a few
more formulations that would seem to position critique not only
as affectively invested but also as potentially quite powerful in
bringing out the secular presuppositions of modern criticism.
Over and against the notion that the worldly critic wants to
see and hear everything and subject everything to critical engagement, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that we can only
subject to “critique” that which we need in order to live. Notice
her insistence on this when she considers the stakes of the critique of essentialism: “Deconstruction, whatever it may be, is not
most valuably an exposure of error, certainly not other people’s
error, other people’s essentialism. The most serious critique in deconstruction is the critique of things that are extremely useful,
things without which we cannot live on, take chances.” 10 So here
“critique” is bound up with survival, with living on. Although
formulated first in relation to the literary arts, Walter Benjamin
distinguishes commentary (the object of the critic) from critique
by claiming that “critique seeks the truth content of a work of
art; commentary, its material content.”11 He explains further that
“truth content is bound up with its material content” and that
those “works that prove enduring are precisely those whose truth
is most deeply sunken in their material content, [and] then, in
the course of this duration, the concrete realities rise up before
the eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly the more they
die out in the world.” Obviously not drawing on secular sources,
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Benjamin’s idea of critique is articulated through metaphors of
burial and animation that are as anachronistic as they are true:
“If…one views the growing work as a burning funeral pyre,
then the commentator stands before it like a chemist, the critic
(Kritiker) like an alchemist”(298). This last sense of “critic” aligns
more closely with critique. This operation is hardly an incessant
and random practice of destruction; it is an effort to derive temporality and truth from the material dimension of a work: “[E]very
contemporary critique comprehends in the work the moving
truth,” one that is fossilized or, indeed, crystallized by the force
of “progress.” For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality
and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the
modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who
seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are
confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central—
and potentially fatal—to its operation?
Clearly taking his distance from Enlightenment presumptions, Benjamin’s ideas of both criticism and critique draw upon
a concept of temporality strongly informed by notions of messianic time (which is less a future time, conceived chronologically,
than “another time” by which the present is “shot through”).12
But surely, one might respond, some positions on critique derived
from Kant, for instance, participate in more complicit ways with
the project of secularization. In the history of the Kantian influence on contemporary notions of critique that Asad provides, the
legacy of Hermann Cohen and the Marburg School is left to the
side, although that reading of Kant laid the groundwork for the
critical projects of both Benjamin and Derrida.13 Nevertheless, let
us briefly consider the more difficult case, namely, Foucault, who
would seem, according to Asad, not only to situate critique in
the tradition of Enlightenment but also to move toward a heroic
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conception that Asad opposes.
Asad makes the following two central claims about Foucault’s
essay “What Is Enlightenment?” a text that, in conjunction with
“What Is Critique?” offers a way to understand Foucault in light
of the Kantian legacy.14 The first claim is that “Foucault seeks to
equate critique with the Kantian notion of Enlightenment.” The
second is more speculative. He writes, “[T]here is the insistent
demand [within modern life] that reasons be given for almost
everything. The relation to knowledge, to action, and to other
persons that results when this demand is taken as the foundation of
all understanding is perhaps what Foucault had in mind when he
spoke of critique.”
My sense is that both of these claims are not quite right. In
the first instance, Foucault never “equates” critique with Kantian
Enlightenment. In fact, in asking “what is Enlightenment?”
Foucault re-poses verbatim the title of Kant’s small essay, a mimetic display that calls to be read. Why does Foucault repeat the
title? What difference takes place between the first and second
iteration? And what is the significance of the question form?
It turns out that, for Foucault, enlightenment is not a place or
time, but, in Kant’s words, “a way out.” 15 So already Foucault
breaks with a certain historical sequence that would consider the
Enlightenment a distinct period of European history. It is a way
out, but a way out of what? Is Foucault claiming that Kant provides a way out, or is Foucault, through his very citation of Kant,
seeking to establish a way out of Kant? Part of Foucault’s brief
essay rehearses the Kantian position, to be sure, but perhaps most
significant is the moment in which Foucault clearly breaks with
Kant’s notion that “reason” is the substance of critique. Although
Foucault attributes to Enlightenment the injunction, “dare to
know,” he clearly takes distance from the idea that knowledge
is an exclusive function of reason. Foucault exposes the contradictory character of public reason in Kant, since only in relation
to public authorities is one authorized to deploy the critical use
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of reason. The private remains immune from such criticism. So
can the recourse to “reason” work at all, if it continually founders on this assumption (one that we can also call “Protestant”)?
For Kant, it is the use of reason that determines the appropriate
conditions under which to accept law and governance, to ascertain what can be known, what must be done, and what may be
hoped. But for Foucault, as we know from The Order of Things and
his criticisms of the Frankfurt School, there is no singular “reason” but orders of rationality, regimes that succeed and converge
with one another. Although that is not the point Foucault makes
here, it is clear that he breaks with the Kantian exposition in the
midst of this essay. Indeed, the break happens rather abruptly
when Foucault turns from Kant to Baudelaire. If critique is incessant and does not stop happening, then critique can turn on the
concept of reason itself. Indeed, Foucault characterizes the operation of critique in modernity as an “attitude” and an “ethos”—a
notion that comes close to the idea of “sensibility” that informs
the work of Asad, Mahmood, and the anthropologist Charles
Hirschkind.16
So, in the first instance, Foucault takes distance from any
Enlightenment concept of progress as well as any idea of history
that would periodize the Enlightenment as part of a successive
chronology of European history. Second, by insisting that critique is an “attitude,” Foucault breaks with the Kantian claim that
critique belongs to the regime of reason. By “attitude,” Foucault
means a mode of relating to reality or, alternatively, an ethos—a
way of acting and behaving that belongs to a certain culture or
community, that signals that belongingness, and that is also an
ongoing process and which presents itself as an obligation and a
task. The sign of modernity, for Foucault, is to be found neither
in the constitutive role of reason in human deliberation nor in
the acceptance of existential transience. Rather, it is to “take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration” (311) and to
“adopt…a certain attitude with respect to this movement.”
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At the end of this essay, which poses or, rather, re-poses the
question of Enlightenment, Foucault’s own relation to the Kantian
tradition proves to be complex. Although the tone of this piece is
not particularly aggressive or negative, the indebtedness is finally
one from which he breaks. True, he relies on Kant, derives some
of his vocabulary from Kant, departs from Kant, and remakes
Kant, showing only that Kant’s text is useful for him. But, in the
end, he is refusing the language of adherence and rejection. His
argument, he tells us, “does not mean that one has to be ‘for’ or
‘against’ the Enlightenment” (313).
If we return to Asad’s remark that criticism invariably relies
on taken-for-granted schemes of evaluation, we can see that, for
Foucault, critique neither destroys the inheritance of thought nor
affirms it unequivocally. I note that Asad points out that Islamic
jurists working within the Sharia tradition “adopt the principle
of epistemological skepticism” (ironic, indeed, when contrasted
with first amendment absolutists). In this context, could we say
there might be a convergence with the sensibility of Foucault?
In “What Is Critique?” the task of critique is precisely to call
into question established frameworks of evaluation—a position
that would clearly have strong resonance for a critique of secularism. Moreover, critique does not return us to already established
frameworks and norms, but constitutes “a means for a future or
a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it oversees a domain it would not want to police and is unable to regulate.” 17 As a
mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is
understood as a “practice” that incorporates norms into the very
formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is
always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this
conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?
IF CRITIQUE WITHIN MODERN critical theory requires the object whose
conditions of possibility it seeks to know (Spivak), or stands in an
alchemical relation to the object to which it is related (Benjamin),
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or is finally an “attitude” and “ethos” (Foucault), then perhaps it
is not primarily or fundamentally about judgment. Even in Kant,
it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment,
but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing
are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment, and that
these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of
course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features
of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure
onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do. When that
happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific
historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do
our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge?
If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of “critique,” then critique would
be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to
the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of
judgments we make.
In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment
and perhaps closer to Asad’s project than would at first appear.
We could say that critique delimits conditions of possibility for
knowledge and judgment, but even that would perhaps be too
definitive. When we ask what historically formed schemes of
evaluation condition and inform our shock and outrage over
suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit
the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response. Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how
secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral
responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so
doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us. Comparative
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work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that
taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain
process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that
therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition
within the West.
It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying
to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or
successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the
various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as
the preconditions of various “acts” of knowledge. This incomplete
effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that
upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all.
The ways to do this are various: through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural
lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account
of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as
universal and postcultural. If this is one set of critical practices,
how different is “critique” from Asad’s own critical procedure,
finally?
Blasphemy and Self-Ownership
Asad makes clear at the outset of his paper that he is offering
“neither an apologia for Muslim reactions to the cartoons “nor
a criticism of” those who defended the publication. In the place
of apologia and critique, he seeks to “treat [blasphemy] as the
crystallization of some moral and political problems in liberal
Europe.” Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a
constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative question of whether
or not we will censor drives from the start the way in which
we conceptualize the phenomenon? If we were to conceptualize
the phenomenon differently, would different kinds of normative
issues come to the fore?
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Of the questions Asad poses about blasphemy, the following
seems to be among the most central: Is there an idea of the human implied by prohibitions and protections related to speech,
and if so, how does this idea serve to distinguish between what is
called the religious and what is called the secular? Asad considers
that we take for granted that law functions to protect and prohibit
certain kinds of speech, but that we fail to recognize the way in
which a given legal system also establishes or produces what will
qualify as “free speech.” It is not that people are speaking freely
(in a prelegal state), and then law comes along, after the fact of
free speech, to decide which speech ought to be protected and
which speech not. The law does not arrive first and foremost as
an adjudicator of already existing speech. Asad points out, for
instance, that “copyright is not simply a constraint on free communication but also a way of defining how, when, and for whom
literary communication… can be regarded as free, creative, and
inalienable.” Rather, free speech is produced precisely through
the circumscription of the public domain and its protections and,
most importantly, it is presumed to belong to a subject who exercises free speech as a right. This subject owns itself and its free
speech, and it exercises speech freely as a “property” of its own
personhood.18 As self-owning, the subject possesses its own personhood and exercises that personhood freely; free speech is a
paradigmatic example of this self-owning subject. In this way, the
claims to free speech are embedded in a certain ontology of the
subject, and it is this ontology that is challenged by theological
claims that assert the subject or self’s dependence on or participation in a transcendent power. The theological claim seems, on the
surface, to contest the secular ontology of the subject.
Significantly, the charges against the cartoons were not blasphemy (tajdīf) but isā’ah—the latter means insult, harm, injury.
Specifically, the cartoons were understood as efforts to coerce disbelief. And whereas Islam, according to Asad, offers no punishment for disbelief and in no way mandates belief, it opposes any
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efforts to coerce belief or disbelief. Belief itself is not a cognitive
act, not even the “property” of a person, but part of an ongoing
and embodied relation to God. So any attempt to coerce someone
away from his or her belief is an effort to break a relation to a
transcendence by which one is sustained. It is not, in these terms,
a quarrel between beliefs or an attack on an idea, but an effort
to coerce the break of a bond without which life is untenable. As
Asad puts it, “what matters, finally, is belonging to a particular
way of life in which the person does not own himself.” The outrage against the cartoons articulates an objection to “something
that disrupts a living relationship.”
In light of this analysis, we can understand how, in the framework of the liberal legal imaginary, blasphemy is a charge that
seeks to curtail free speech. The legal imaginary of liberal law,
which protects free speech against blasphemy, makes the claim
that the charge against the cartoons is blasphemy. This immediately makes the issue into one of whether or not free speech
should be curtailed. On the other hand, to situate blasphemy—
or in this case, isā’ah, insult, injury—in relation to way of life
that is not based in self-ownership, but in an abiding and vital
dispossession, changes the terms of the debate. It does not provide an immediate answer to how the question of prohibition or
censorship should be legally decided, but shifts us into a mode of
understanding that is not constrained by that juridical model. In
other words, to understand blasphemy as an injury to a sustaining relation is to understand that we are dealing with a different
conception of subjectivity and belonging than the one implied by
self-ownership. (I am tempted to say that this mode of subjectivity functions as a critique of self-ownership within secular hegemony.) The public outcry against the cartoons is also a way of
refusing and parochializing the specific property-driven ontology
of the subject that has come to support the claim of free speech. In
this case, to change the framework within which we seek to understand blasphemy makes it possible to see that what is at stake
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is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or
prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of selfidentity and self-ownership. The cartoons are injurious not only
because they fail to understand this way of life but also because
they deploy the iconography of Muhammad to direct the viewer
toward a repudiation of that way of life. To claim that someone or
anyone can “own” the image is to seek recourse to a framework
of property that is implicitly criticized by the living relation to the
icon. So the critical question that emerges is whether ways of life
that are based on dispossession in transcendence (and implicit
critique of self-ownership) are legible and worthy of respect. It is
then less a legal question than a broader question of the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions
of subjective life divide between those that accept established
secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of
self-coincidence and property.
It would seem that we are being asked to understand this battle
as one between, on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the
other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the
subject as dispossessed in transcendence. This explanation, however, asks us to assume that there is a certain generalized secular
ontology of the subject, and that secularization has effectively
succeeded in establishing that ontology within the parameters of
law and politics. I have questions about whether the secular and
secularization are as monolithic as this, but I will defer them in
order to follow through with this argument. For if we accept that
secularization is the way that religious traditions “live on” within
postreligious domains, then we are not really talking about two
different frameworks, secularism versus religion, but two forms of
religious understanding, intertwined with one another in various
modes of avowal and disavowal. Indeed, the binary framework
crumbles further when we consider modes of secular criticism
that take place in religious contexts (for example, the discourse of
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the current pope) as well as modes of religious reasoning that recur within secularism (for example, Protestant commitments to
the distinction between public and private life that have become
essential to modern liberalism).
Mahmood: Politics of the Icon
In some ways, Mahmood directs us toward the specificity of
the relation to the icon in the Danish cartoon affair, launching
a criticism of the presumption of state neutrality with respect to
religion. Asserting the principle of state neutrality, understood
as secular, some have argued that there ought to be no accommodation of religious sensitivities. In this way, the secular is
understood as a practice of “abstention” in matters of religious
sensitivity. According to Mahmood, secularism has never, in fact,
been neutral with respect to matters of religion, but has been
actively engaged in regulating and defining the domain of religion. In fact, the “neutral” law must be recast, in her view, as a
productive and regulatory law, so that our very conceptions of
religion now depend upon the stipulative force of neutrality. One
way this works is by casting religion as a set of beliefs—and hence
subscribing to a cognitive account of religion—but another way
is through the privatization of religion, a strategy that separates
state and religion by identifying public politics with the state and
relegating religion to private life. How, she asks, do we reconcile
freedom of religion with freedom of speech? Freedom of religion is understood as the freedom to assemble in private zones to
practice religion, so “freedom” here is understood as a protection
from coercion and prohibition. Indeed, that way of understanding freedom of religion relies upon and confirms a public/private
distinction that cannot address some of the public forms that religion takes and some of the contemporary conflicts that call for
understanding and adjudication.
So, one might reasonably ask, where does Mahmood stand on
the question of legal redress for injuries sustained? It seems to
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me that there are two separate arguments at issue here, both of
which have to be considered together in order to understand the
complexity of her view.
On the one hand, Mahmood considers whether there are appropriate legal precedents that could serve the purpose of seeking redress for the injury caused by the blasphemy against Muhammad.
Any effort to move in this direction would have to decide on an
appropriate legal basis for making such a claim. There are three
main arguments about these strategies in Mahmood’s essay. If
the ground for such a claim were that such depictions threaten
public order, and that such depictions should be outlawed because
of the threat to public order they create, then the claim would be
strengthening a legal precedent (public order should be protected
against incendiary representations) that has been used to fortify
the rights of majorities over minorities. In this way, that legal
move would strengthen a legal instrument that could very easily be used against religious minorities in European countries:
“Muslims have come to be perceived as a threat to state security,”
which means that explicit representations of their faith may well
fall within the category of incendiary depiction that threatens
public order (indeed, the very presence of Muslims in Dutch and
Belgian society, for instance, is considered such a “threat” according to several right-wing groups whose positions are becoming
more, rather than less, mainstream). Mahmood thus counsels
against this strategy.
A second strategy would be to show that the Danish cartoons could be conceived as hate speech and therefore subject
to European hate speech laws. She considers as well that hate
speech laws devised to protect racial minorities from discrimination tend to rely on a distinction between religious and racial minorities. This presupposition, however, fails to see that religious
minorities can undergo racialization, becoming racial minorities.
This failure to understand how the process of racialization works
undermines the effort to distinguish in clear and timeless terms
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the difference between religion and race. And yet, even if a court
were to accept the argument that, historically, Muslims have become racialized, would that be a good way to proceed? Mahmood
does not come out in favor of this approach, but she seeks to show
that the way in which religion and race are differentiated establishes the juridical domain as an instrument of certain embedded
secular presumptions and, inevitably, a site for the reproduction
of that secularism. For instance, religion is understood as a set of
“beliefs” and even a matter of private choice and association. But
what if the religion at issue is based less on cognitive belief than
in embodied modes of existence that are bound up with certain
texts and images? This raises the question of whether there ought
to be, given the history and function of Western law, a legal solution to the problem at all.
Earlier, Mahmood considers that secular presumptions are at
work in the way we think about pictures and subjects. In this extended and rich discussion, she points out that within Islam, the
religious subject’s relation to the representation of Muhammad
constitutes a relation that is indissociable from one’s own sense
of self. The “self” at issue is not a discrete and bounded individual, but a relation to an animated image; the self has to be
understood as a set of embodied and affective practices that are
fundamentally bound up with certain images, icons, and imaginaries. In Mahmood’s terms, “the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find oneself
in a structure that influences how one conducts oneself in this
world… a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object
or imaginary.”19 Now one might conclude that Mahmood is suggesting that blasphemy against the image of Muhammad is thus
an injury to Muslim personhood, and that the law that seeks to
distinguish between injurious conduct and incendiary expression
misunderstands not only the ontology of personhood but also the
character of the injury. The twin conceits of state neutrality with
respect to religion are that (a) religion ought to be protected as a
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private issue and that (b) no religious beliefs should drive public
law or policy. And yet, if religion becomes inextricably bound up
with personhood, and injurious conduct against persons is legally
proscribed, could not this new conception of the ontology of personhood mandate a change in legal reasoning and judgment?
Interestingly enough, Mahmood does not take this tack, but
counsels against the domain of juridical redress as an appropriate and effective venue for taking up the challenge of the Danish
cartoons. Instead, she uses the language of “moral injury” to
distinguish the issue from the ways in which it is conceived by
reigning legal vernaculars. Indeed, she is quite explicit about the
policy implications of her analysis: “[T]he future of the Muslim
minority in Europe depends not so much on how the law might
be expanded to accommodate their concerns as on a larger transformation of the cultural and ethical sensibilities of the majority
Judeo-Christian population that undergird the law.” Moreover,
this turn to the cultural and ethical domain is conditioned by an
argument that the law is so pervasively secular that any effort
to seek redress for injury through the law would strengthen the
very instrument through which secularism asserts its hegemony
and defines the proper domain of religion.
The final argument of her paper rests on several distinctions,
quickly issued, that may not be as stable or clear as they appear. If
the task is to change sensibilities, we need to know how that can
be done. Of course, Mahmood is right to point out that the terms
of existing law ought not to constrain our understanding of the
cultural and ethical dimensions of this issue. On the other hand,
is it right to understand law as radically distinct from questions of
sensibility? After all, does law (civil rights law, for instance) not
function on certain historical occasions to change sensibilities,
to foster new parameters for equality and justice, including new
sentiments, or are we being asked to understand “sensibilities” as
definitionally extrajuridical? Are there not legal sensibilities at
issue here?
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This final call to change does not tell us in what way change
might or should happen, which leads me to wonder whether we
are being asked to take the foregoing analysis as precisely the
kind of cultural and ethical intervention that is needed. If that
is the case, several questions still emerge: do we understand the
“cultural and ethical domain” to be radically distinct from law?
and on what basis do ethics and culture constitute an alternative and separable domain or set of domains? Mahmood calls
for “comparative dialogue” as well as a kind of “thinking” that
happens in “unaccustomed ways,” but what would be the institutional venues for these activities? Though these practices are
considered distinct from “political action,” are they for that reason not political strategies?
Mahmood specifies that we have to cleave judgment from description in the context of discussing religious fanaticism, presumably because our judgments tend to overwhelm our descriptions.
And yet, how would we then return to the question of judgment
after having made that initial separation? What form would some
more fully informed judgment take? To enter into political action
surely requires some kind of judgment about what is the case, and
what should be the case. We have to consider whether politics is
being allied with “law” or legal solution in this discussion, and
what a politics might look like that did not model itself on juridical decision and action. When Mahmood makes the decision
to turn away from law and politics, does she not inadvertently
overlook the possibility of a politics, including a political judgment, that might not be constrained by legal norms or practice?
Does “ethics” distinguish itself from politics as part of the effort to
find an alternative to legal solutions in this matter? And does her
argument now invest with neutrality the sphere of culture and
ethics that has been wrested from law? Is this finally an apologia
for anthropology itself? The final line invokes “the academy” as
one of the few places where such tensions can be explored. Are
we left, then, with academic exploration, comparative work, and
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dialogue as the cultural, if not culturalist, alternative to law and
politics? This is a strange conclusion given how engaged with the
politics of law the essay is, but perhaps we are meant to be persuaded that this is a domain from which we should all finally
retreat. This final set of moves strikes me as curious, given that
Mahmood has offered quite a few strong and well-argued political judgments throughout the essay: the pervasive secularism of
European law; the misunderstanding of racialization; the widespread ignorance and hatred of Islam; the necessity to expose the
secular production and deformation of religious practice. These
are strong political positions. Even exposing the contradictions
of secular law is clearly a strong critical move that seeks to combat a sustained and consequential hegemony within the law. Is
Mahmood really operating to the side of politics and judgment?
Can she give an account of the place of politics and judgment in
her own analysis, indeed, in the argument she gives about why
we should work to the side of both politics and judgment?
In a final coda, Mahmood raises the question of whether “critique” can take account of its own “disciplines of subjectivity,
affective attachments, and subject-object relationality.” At this
point, it seems clear that the model for thinking about the Muslim
relation to the image of Muhammad sustains certain analogies
with the practice of critique itself. Both seem to be embodied and
affective practices, modes of subjectivity that are bound up with
their objects and, hence, relational. Is this a generalized account
of subjectivity or one that pertains to specific kinds of practices of
the self? This is not precisely a point pursued by Mahmood, but it
does raise a question about the status of critique. In the end, she
holds out for a notion of critique that relies on the suspension of
the kind of closure characteristic of political action. So critique
appears to be neither judgment nor action, but a certain invested,
affected, way of thinking and living that is bound up with objects or, indeed, an imaginary, and this way of thinking—and
what it thinks about—is not usual, not customary. Inasmuch as
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secularism has established the domain of the usual and customary, there can be a critique of secularism that calls that takenfor-grantedness into question. I take it that this would be part of
what Mahmood would accept as “critique.”
In reading both Mahmood and Asad, one sometimes wonders
whether the problem is the “reputation” of critique as negative,
suspicious, taking religion as its object, differentiating itself from
dogma, where dogma is understood to be the presumptive characteristic of religion but not of secularism. But let us be clear that
critique is not the same as judgment, and that the formulation
of critique in Marx is not, as Wendy Brown has shown, without
its own history and legacy in religious metaphor and structure.20
Whereas Asad remarks that “the use and reception of criticism
depend on a variety of taken-for-granted understandings and
abilities, however temporary particular understandings and abilities turn out to be,”21 Mahmood seems to hold out for a notion
of critique that is directed not only against the customary and
taken-for-granted understandings but also against those generated by secularism in particular.
Coda on Dutch Politics
It remains difficult to know under what conditions we understand speech to be a kind of action or conduct, and under
what conditions we understand it to be the free expression of
ideas. Films such as Geert Wilders’s Fitna charge Islam with being a murderous religion, so there was some public debate in the
Netherlands in the Spring of 2008 over whether the film should
be shown, whether it had a “right” to be shown, and whether
state television should or should not be part of its showing. Would
the film cause social unrest (a consequentialist and securitarian
concern)? Would the film effectively discriminate against Muslim
minorities (a question of equal rights and, hence, of the range and
limit of hate speech law). It is possible to say that such films depict
violence, but also that they do violence, and, most peculiarly, they
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do both in the name of freedom. To understand such a claim,
we would have to know what kind of violence is depicted, what
kind of violence is done (by the film), and what kind of violence
emerged or will emerge in the response to the film: we have to
be prepared to distinguish among kinds of violence if we want
to locate violence in every dimension of this social scene, which
would include the film’s production, its content, and its reception.
To use the same word “violence” for each dimension of the scene
is not to assume that the same violence is at issue. Similarly, the
term “freedom” has become highly contested in these debates. Is
the freedom in free speech the same as the freedom to be protected from violence, or are these two different valences of freedom?
Under what conditions does freedom of speech become freedom
to hate? And how have these confusions sown discord within the
European left?
For me, it has been particularly painful, for instance, to see
how some members of the lesbian and gay community found
themselves in a quandary, since freedom of expression and the
opposition to censorship have clearly been cornerstones of the
movement for decades. The movement for sexual freedom has
required freedom of expression, and, in many places outside the
Netherlands, censorship has inhibited the efforts of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer people to publish, to assemble, to document and publicize their history, and to organize and
express their desire. So it is quite understandable that there might
be a strong group of sexual progressives who maintain that freedom of expression is essential to the movement, that the lesbian,
gay, bi, trans, queer, intersex movement is not possible without
freedom of expression and without recourse to freedom itself as
a guiding value and norm. Of course, to posit such a principle
of freedom does not answer the questions of whether and how
that norm is to be reconciled with other norms, nor does it tell us
precisely what is meant by “freedom.”
We have to be clear about what we mean by freedom, since
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from the beginning freedom has been, not the same as the liberty
that belongs to the individual, but something socially conditioned
and socially shared. No one person is free when others are not,
since freedom is achieved as a consequence of a certain social
and political organization of life. The queer movement, conceived
transnationally, has also sought to fight homophobia, misogyny,
and racism, and it has operated as part of an alliance with struggles against discrimination and hatreds of all kinds. The emergence of a queer politics was meant to confirm the importance
of battling homophobia no matter what your identity was. But it
was also a signal of the importance of alliance; an attunement to
minoritization in its various forms; a struggle against precarious
conditions, regardless of “identity”; and a battle against racism
and social exclusion.
Of course there is also a now-entrenched tension between
identity-based and alliance-based sexual minority politics, and
my affiliation with “queer” is meant to affirm the politics of alliance across difference. Broadly put, a strong alliance on the left
requires, minimally, a commitment to combating both racism and
homophobia, combating both anti-immigrant politics and various
forms of misogyny and induced poverty. Why would any of us
be willing to participate in an alliance that does not keep all of
these forms of discrimination clearly in mind, and that does not
also attend to the matters of economic justice that afflict sexual
minorities, women, and racial and religious minorities as well?
So let us consider more carefully, then, how the politics of speech
enters into this situation and how we might try to think about
hate speech in light of a commitment to a left alliance that refuses
to sacrifice one minority for another (which does not mean there
may not be some serious antagonisms that remain essential to the
articulation of this alliance). It is perhaps important to remember
the importance of the critique of state coercion and state violence
for a robust left political movement, even as we recognize that
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tial poverty levels. Can we even think, though, about a politics
of the speech act without noting how the state speaks, and what
force it exercises when it speaks?
Clearly, the Netherlands has seen its share of violent speech
acts. The wound that killed the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh,
was literally a message that was violently thrust into his body.22
And politicians across the political spectrum feel free to wage insulting discourse against Islam, as if Islam were a monolithic entity, as if their own murderous impulse belonged constitutively to
the object of their hatred. Why is there a righteous defense of the
political right to insult Muslim minorities at the same time that
insults to the Dutch government, any critique of state coercion,
constitutes an unacceptable assault on civilization, modernity, or
reason itself? When this kind of split thinking happens, freedom
of speech not only depends on protection by the state but empowers that state; this, in turn, leads to the situation in which speech
against the state is effectively or implicitly censored. Hence, the
freedom we think belongs to the individual is actually conferred
by the state, so we misunderstand its origin and its meaning. This
is also why, if we want to develop a critical conception of freedom
of speech, it will have to be one that legitimates itself outside
of state power, that is able to criticize state power as part of its
free expression. We have to ask whether “relying on the state”
leads to the “augmentation of state power.” If Islam is figured as
the religion or the name of the population who will do violence
to Dutch civilizational values, then that gives the Dutch state a
certain license to do violence to what seems to threaten its own
values. That also logically means that “doing violence” becomes a
Dutch value. We see the intensification of anti-immigrant activities, the base ideological implementation of the Civic Integration
exam, the overt celebration of hateful speech of the so-called autochthonic Dutch against religious minorities as a sign of freedom
itself.
The question is not whether hateful speech is part of free
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speech, but rather, why has freedom in certain European contexts come to define itself as the freedom to hate? What does
it mean when the notion of freedom has been twisted to ratify
discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and nationalism?
The Dutch Civic Integration Examination was one case in
point. In 2006, immigrants were required to take an examination that included the mandatory viewing of images of two gay
men kissing as a way to test their “tolerance” and, hence, capacity
to assimilate to Dutch liberalism.23 Do I want this test administered in my name and for my benefit? Do I want the state to
take up its defense of my sexual freedom in an effort to restrict
immigration on racist grounds? What happens when seeking recourse to the protective actions of the state in turn augments and
fortifies the state’s own power, including its power to articulate a
racist national identity? And what happens when lesbian and gay
freedoms are instrumentalized to harass religious minorities or
to ensure that new immigrants can be denied entry on religious,
ethnic, or racial grounds? Under these circumstances, sexual
progressives must become “critical” of the state that appears so
enthusiastically to be supporting our freedoms. What precisely
is it doing with our freedoms? And are we willing to have our
claims to freedom instrumentalized for the purposes of a racist
reproduction of Dutch national identity through restrictive and
coercive immigration policies?
Let me make the point even more precisely, if I can. It is one
thing for the state to value freedom of expression and to protect
expression, but it is quite another for the state to be the agent who
decides whose freedom of expression will be protected and whose
will not. Under what conditions does the state decide that a minority is threatened by certain kinds of aggressive speech, and
under what other conditions does the state decide that a minority
must tolerate being targeted by aggressive speech as a sign that we
live in a democracy that savors freedom of speech? Perhaps this is
the new meaning for Dutch tolerance: you must tolerate the pain
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and abuse we will deal you, and that is the proof that you can
“integrate” and become part of Dutch citizenship. We have to ask
why the state gives free reign to racist speech at the same time
that it demands respect for sexual minorities. Is the latter being
played against the former? And what would happen if sexual and
religious minorities refused to be pitted against each other in this
way? What would happen if both of them turned against the nationalist and racist strategies of the state as a joint strategy?
If, following gay conservatives, we understand freedom as personal liberty and then base a politics on a libertarian notion of
freedom, we sacrifice an important social dimension to the left
understanding of freedom. If freedom belongs to the individual,
then we can surely ask: which individuals are recognized as individuals? In other words, what social forms of individuality establish the recognizability of some persons as individuals and others
not? If such an individual liberty exists only to the extent that it
is protected by the state, then the state exercises its prerogative
to protect in some instances and to withdraw all protection in
others. Let’s remember, then, that the libertarian notion of the
individual corresponds to a certain version of state power and
economic property, and, whereas in early versions of libertarianism the state is supposed to remain minimal (or privative) in order
to maximize economic freedom, that is surely not the case in the
present instance in which the state differentially protects rights
depending on whether that protection suits its national aspirations, even its national self-understanding as “European,” against
the new immigrant communities from North Africa, Turkey, the
Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
In the context in which the state makes use of liberties in this
way (differentially exercises its prerogative to protect or retract individual liberties, decides who will count as an individual whose
rights are worth protecting, and who will not), we have a different situation. In such a case, “freedom of speech” presupposes
that there will be no open public criticism of the state or its inconIs Critique Secular?
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sistent and racist actions (after all, the state is the protector and
the adjudicator in this scene). This means, implicitly, that only
those modes of freedom of expression will be protected that in
turn protect the state, unless also protected is the open criticism
of the state’s racist speech. If the fortification of the state against
established and new immigrant communities involves depriving
them of freedom, questioning their own rights of assembly and
expression, if it casts its own Muslim population as a threat to
the value of freedom, then it protects one claim of freedom only
through the intensification of unfreedom, through the augmentation of the state’s own coercive mechanisms. If independent filmmaking is to remain a critical practice, separate from and willing
to criticize state power, then one has to analyze closely the situation in which film becomes the cultural means through which
the state’s anti-immigrant practices are implemented and rationalized. The film industry then becomes the culture industry for
the state, and it loses its standing as “independent” or, indeed, as
“critical.” Under these conditions, we lose the independence from
state authority implied in the term “independent film,” and that
medium becomes a form of embedded reporting, taking on, even
ratifying, the perspective of the state. As such, it becomes another
visual instrument, like the cameras in Abu Ghraib, which stage
and fortify the vicious embodied action of the civilizational mission, linking its propaganda against Islam with the torture and
human rights violations in Iraq and Guantánamo.
Of course, the right to insult and the right to produce provocative art become rights that the state defends, but when it defends
those rights differentially and for specific policy purposes, those
rights become suspect. If those rights are to have legitimacy, they
cannot be justified through recourse to their utility in rationalizing the deprivation of certain rights to religious practice and
belief, in other words, certain rights of expression. There may
be no legal way to “manage this risk,” but that is no reason why
this instrumentalization should not become the focus of critical
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analysis and political opposition. To understand when and where
the claim of free speech is robust, we have to ask, “If we point this
out, and maintain a critical and public relation to this particular
prerogative of state power, is our speech still protected?” If it is
still protected, then free speech is an active part of democratic
contestations and political struggles. If it is not, we must militate
against its restriction, differential application, and instrumentalization for nondemocratic ends.
If the prerequisites of a European polity (and this could be either the nation-state or the European Union) require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then, either
way, the solution is figured as assimilation or integration into a
set of cultural norms that are understood as internally already
established, self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not
considered changeable according to new demographic shifts, and
they do not seek to respond to new populations and new claims to
belonging. Indeed, if the core norms are already established, then
one already knows what Dutch culture is, and one is closed to
the idea that it may become something else, something different;
indeed, one refuses the recognition that it already has become
something different and that the change is, in fact, irreversible.
When freedom of expression comes to mean “the freedom to
express an unwillingness to undergo change in light of contact
with cultural difference,” then freedom of expression becomes
the means through which a dogmatic and inflexible concept of
culture becomes the precondition of citizenship itself. The state
to which we appeal to protect the freedom of expression is the
state that will close its doors to whomever it does not want to
hear, whose speech is unwelcome within its borders. Within this
framework, the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory
understanding of cultural difference. Such suppression makes
clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize coercive and discrimiIs Critique Secular?
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natory state policies toward Muslim immigrants.
When the acts of one member of a group or some small number
of members of a group are taken to be the defining actions and
beliefs of the group itself, then that is not only an unjustified generalization but also racism, and it must also be opposed. Surely,
there is an ongoing clash or antagonism between those who feel
that their values of sexual freedom or freedom of expression are
threatened by some minority religious beliefs and ways of life,
but these are differences to be worked out through cohabitation
and struggle, through participation in public discourse, through
cultural and educational projects, allowing modes of separateness
to coincide with modes of belonging (and not trying to close the
fissure between the two). These are surely better strategies than
appealing to a state that makes use of the defense of “freedom” to
reassert its national purity—its racist conception of culture—as
the precondition of reason, modernity, and civilization, and to
halt all public criticism of the way it polices its borders and patrols its minority populations. A racist discourse can recast itself
as the necessary groundwork of morality, reformulating its own
hatred as moral virtue. Some crucial part of freedom of speech
involves “speaking out,” which means, invariably, speaking out
within specific scenes of address: speaking with and from and
to one another. This implicit sociality in all address demands
the recognition of freedom as a condition of social life, one that
depends upon equality for its actualization. At stake is a rethinking of the processes of minoritization under new global conditions, asking what alliances are possible between religious, racial,
and sexual minorities (when these “positions” are less identities
than modes of living in relation to others and to guiding ideals).
Then perhaps we can find constellations where the opposition
to racism, to discrimination, to precarity, and to state violence
remain the clear goals of political mobilization.
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Endnotes
1
For an essay that stays within the juridical understanding of the
events, see Robert Post, “Religion and Freedom of Speech: Portraits of
Muhammad,” in Constellations 14, no.1 (2007). Post’s paper was also given
as the Una’s Lecture in 2007 at the University of California, Berkeley.
2
Cited from an unpublished earlier version of Talal Asad’s “Free Speech,
Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” which was slightly revised after this
response was written.
3
Judith Butler, “Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative,” in Frames
of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London, 2009).
4
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York, 2007), 20.
5
Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York, 1976), pp. 75–76.
6
Talal Asad, “Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism,” in Hent de
Vries, ed., Religion Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008), p. 586.
7
Cited from Asad, “Free Speech,” unpublished version.
8
In Arendt’s view, aesthetic judgment does not subsume existing
particulars to already constituted categories, but seeks to open up new
categorical schemes. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political
Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago, 2002).
9
Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in this volume.
10
“An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Boundary 2 20, no. 2
(1993): 24–50.
11
Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA, 1996), p. 297.
12
See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” thesis 17, in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), p. 263.
13
See Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans.
Simon Kaplan (Atlanta, 1995).
14
Perhaps most important, however, in tracing Foucault’s Kantian genealogy
is his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, ed. Roberto Nigro, trans. Roberto
Nigro and Kate Briggs (Boston, 2008). There Foucault points out a
recurrent schism between the critical claim to transcendental reason and
the study of man. The anthropos itself becomes undone through recourse
to the idea of Gemüt, or inner sense, which might be compared to a notion
of sensibility. See also Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the
Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford, 2002).
15
Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and
Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York,
1997), pp. 303–20.
16
See Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (New York, 2006).
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135
136
17
Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère
Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York, 1997), p. 25.
18
See Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and
Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Philadelphia, 2005).
19
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable
Divide?” in this volume.
20
Wendy Brown, “The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor
and Karl Marx,” a forthcoming volume of essays on Charles Taylor’s A
Secular Age, ed. C. Calhoun et al. (Cambridge, MA, 2009).
21
Cited from Asad, “Free Speech,” unpublished version.
22
Theo van Gogh was a vocal libertarian Dutch filmmaker who was
murdered in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri,
several months after the release of Van Gogh’s film Submission. That film,
made in cooperation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, sought to show the abuse
that Muslim women suffer by projecting verses from the Qur’an onto
the nearly naked bodies of four Muslim women who tell their stories.
The film was controversial, since it showed no concern for violence
against women in other contexts, including secular households. But the
reaction to the murder of Van Gogh, a strong libertarian, was universal
outrage. The knife found in Van Gogh’s body operated like a writing
instrument, recalling the most graphic dimensions of Kafka’s In the Penal
Colony. Although Van Gogh was shot eight times with a gun, the knife
became the symbolic instrument of death dealing when Bouyeri pinned a
five-page statement, including Qur’anic verses, to Van Gogh’s torso with
a knife. The scene of the murder repeated the motif of attaching religious
verse to the torso, suggesting that Van Gogh’s film enacted a symbolic
murder of Qur’an by making it responsible for violence against women’s
bodies, and yet Bouyeri’s idiosyncratic and hideous use of the verse
seemed eerily to confirm the murderous character of those words and the
Qur’anic tradition. Unfortunately, the incident bolstered the worst fears
and rampant ignorance about Islam, and displaced public attention from
the question of new forms of Dutch intolerance toward new immigrants
and how injury is understood within differing religious traditions to the
question of why the demonization of Islam is supposedly perspicacious
and righteous. A similar debate continues today in relation to the film
Fatwa and whether it constitutes hate speech against religious minorities
or ought to be regarded as free speech. Feminists and sexual progressives
have been notoriously divided on these issues.
23
For an analysis of the Dutch Civic Integration Exam, see Eric Fassin,
“Going Dutch,” Bidoun: Arts and Culture from the Middle East 10 (Spring
2007, special issue Technology): pp. 62–63; see also my more extended
discussion in “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time,” in Frames of
War. The examination was found unlawful in July 2008.
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
Talal Asad
Reply to Judith Butler
I CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION Judith Butler has initiated here about
critique. In doing so, I set aside the many important points on
which we agree. In what follows I try instead to persuade her, by
clarification and elaboration of what I wrote, that we may also
agree on other points.
I begin by endorsing Butler’s insistence that intellectual inquiries into events such as the Danish cartoons scandal must go
beyond the normative judicial framework to which the defenders
of both “free speech” and “religious sensitivities” have addressed
themselves. But I must say that her representation of what I try to
do in my article isn’t quite how I would put it. I am not concerned
with “the meaning of the injury at issue” but with the assumptions
of coherence that underlie what may be called the secular liberal
interpretations of religious irruptions. When I look briefly at some
conceptions in Islamic thought that overlap liberal ideas, I do so in
order to see how the former can shed light on the latter (hence my
extended discussion of “seduction,” for example), not in order to
seek to expand Western understandings of why so many Muslims
felt injured. That is a praiseworthy undertaking, but it’s not what
I’m trying to do. My interest is not in what extralegal ways there
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may be “of acknowledging and repairing injury.” I seek to explore the conceptual assumptions that underlie positions taken by
so many secular liberals in discourses surrounding such events
as the Danish cartoons scandal and the French head-scarf affair.
More generally, my interest can be partly summed up in questions
such as: How is the freedom of critique shaped? In what ways does
its truthfulness connect to power? My debt here to Foucault is obvious. But there are other questions: Why does secularity invoke
“maturity”? What happens to our political life when Christianity
can claim “the secular” as its offspring, and secularity has the
power to assign objects to the category “religion”?
Referring to something I wrote recently on violence,1 Butler
observes that “[b]y showing how normative dispositions (mainly
secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the
domain of ‘understanding’ contemporary cultural and military
conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.”
I would put it differently: My effort aims at inciting the reader
to consider the notions of objectionable violence and grievable
death not in order to highlight the normative dispositions that
have entered into evaluative frameworks but to examine what
the concepts exclude and suppress, how they obscure their own
indeterminacy and acquire their vitality. An examination of the
binaries “objectionable/unobjectionable” violence and “grievable/
nongrievable” deaths problematizes the categories of criticism and
critique as Butler uses them. I have often been asked to what moral or political end this effort at exploring and problematizing is
directed (justice? compassion? truth?). My view is that there can
be no abstract answer to this question because it is precisely the
implications of things said and done in different circumstances
that one tries to understand. I think one should be prepared for
the fact that what one aims at in one’s thinking may be less significant than where one ends up. By which I mean that in the
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process of thinking one should be open to ending up in unanticipated places—whether these produce satisfaction or desire,
discomfort or horror.
Butler reproves me for confusing critique with criticism by explaining that “[c]riticism usually takes an object, and critique is
concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a
domain of objects appears.” But does one have to choose between
two mutually exclusive senses demanded by these definitions—
the one of tediously finding fault,2 the other of engaging in a high
discourse about the conditions of knowledge? “The point of portraying and jeering at bad character types, at the boor, the surly,
the buffoon, the harebrained enthusiast,” writes Annette Baier,
“is like the point of developing critical standards in appreciation
of literature.”3 Making such discriminations is not only how everyday life is lived, it not only rests on the implicit understandings that make criticisms possible; it is also—in ways trivial and
profound—how standards are recognized or proposed, and how
disagreements can be expressed and debated. Thus fault finding (criticism?) can be linked to constructive appreciation, to
affection—or to skepticism. On the other hand, identifying an
object’s conditions of possibility (critique) may be little more than
an exercise in cruelty—or seduction. Notoriously, critique as the
drive to truth may be motivated by delight in the sheer exercise
of power over another (torture is only an extreme case of this),
and conquest may indeed be critique’s primary function. How
should one compare these motivations of critique with those of
fault finding? My question, then, is this: Can one engage in critique if one doesn’t consider the activity of morally charged criticism as one of the conditions of possibility under which a domain
of objects appears and is taken for granted—and if one doesn’t
attend to critique itself as the expression of a moral or religious
attitude?
The postmodern theologian John Milbank finds in Augustine’s
City of God “the original possibility of critique that marks the
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139
western tradition, of which later Enlightenment versions are, in
certain respects, abridgements and parodies.”4 Milbank’s understanding of Augustinian critique straddles both the evaluation of
objects in a sinful world and the identification of the conditions
of possibility under which a domain of such objects appears. A
religious psychology, including faith in divine grace, accounts for
the possibilities of virtue and vice in worldly affairs and the objective limits of politics. The truthfulness of this critique is rooted
explicitly in a theology that seeks to transcend the moral dispositionalism embraced by many secular and Christian liberals alike.
I find this approach to critique interesting, but in my view what
is called for is not locating the true origin of critique (whether
in theology or in social science) but tracing its genealogy for our
time—and thus engaging with what critique has now become in
our secular world.
To show that an object’s desirability or immovability or menace rests on contingent conditions is also in a sense to begin undermining its appearance. This possibility is both an opportunity
and an anxiety for secular liberal politics because although critique can be destructive, for liberalism that destruction carries the
promise of improved life but also the threat of chaos and continuous mess. I wonder, in this context, what exactly are Butler’s
anxieties and hopes?
So how should one understand critique (the laying bare of
the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects
appears) when, in public life, it fails to bring listeners who belong to a different tradition around to the truth? My query here
is not epistemological but political. It is not the secular claim to
truth that worries me, but what critique may do to relationships
with friends and fellow citizens with whom one deeply disagrees.
Critique is no less violent than the law—and no more free. In
short, I am puzzled as to why one should want to isolate and
privilege “critique” as a way of apprehending truth. What does
this do to the way one is asked to—and actually—lives?
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Am I entirely wrong in suggesting that Foucault’s conception of
critique is founded on Kant’s epistemological concerns, as Butler
suggests? This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion
of Foucault’s evolving views—nor was my essay on blasphemy. It
is worth noting, however, that Foucault’s early work, especially
the Archaeology of Knowledge, clearly employs a Kantian concept of
critique and that, even after his turn to Nietzsche, Kant’s epistemological project is not abandoned; it is relocated genealogically.
Thus in Discipline and Punish Foucault writes, “Beneath the increasing leniency of punishment, then, one may map a displacement of its point of application; and through this displacement,
a whole field of recent objects, a whole new system of truth and a mass
of roles hitherto unknown in the exercise of criminal justice.”5
This sense of critique is Kantian too, although here the practice
of knowledge isn’t simply limited by the way knowledge is organized, it is also productive of that organization. There seems to
me another interesting shift evident in Foucault’s lecture “What
Is Critique?” where he comments on Kant’s famous essay on
the Enlightenment: “[I]t is characteristic that in this text on the
Aufklärung Kant gives examples of the maintenance of mankind
in immaturity, and consequently as examples of the points on
which Aufklärung ought to lift this state of immaturity and turn
men in some way into adults, precisely religion, law, and knowledge. What Kant described as Aufklärung is indeed what I tried earlier
to describe as critique, as that critical attitude one sees appear as a
specific attitude in the West from, I believe, what was historically
the great process of the governmentalization of society.”6 Critique
thus becomes for Foucault at once part of the historical emergence of governmentality and crucial to pulling mankind out of
a state of immaturity in religion, law, and knowledge. Of course
Foucault is fully aware of the Kantian distinction between limits and possibilities interior to the process of knowledge [critique]
and limitations that are restrictions imposed by external authority [and rejected by Aufklärung], and he deals with it also in the
Is Critique Secular?
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discussion that follows the lecture.7 What is interesting here is
that for Foucault critique is an attitude, a way of living, because
living as an adult requires thinking for oneself, rejecting external
authority. This is true for Kant too, as Foucault points out. Butler
may be right to cite Gayatry Spivak approvingly to the effect that
“we can only subject to ‘critique’ that which we need in order to
live.” But the attitude Foucault identifies is precisely what defines
this need: In principle there are no limits to critique, even if in
practice everything cannot be interrogated at the same time. This
is critique as enlightenment and maturity, not critique as an account of the limits internal to the process of knowledge. Its focus
is not what we need to live but how we should live when we reach
“adulthood.”
Was critique also seen as essential to “the progress of mankind,” to the need for humanity to move ever forward once it
had attained maturity? I think so. The desire for social reform is
as old as recorded history, but this notion of critique, integral to
the individual’s desire to govern himself, is not. It is not any form
of criticism, not even the criticism employed in the eighteenthcentury idea of progress as a finite process of education—that is
enlightened. Critique of which Foucault speaks here articulates
the desire (and the necessity) of continual, truthful self-reinvention—and perhaps encouragement of others to do the same—because that is how one demonstrates maturity to oneself. It is this
that seems to me to constitute a heroic attitude, a particular view
of subjectivity and its prime duty.
Of course Foucault’s shift to genealogy and to governmentality transformed Kant’s idea of critique through an attention to
networks of power and knowledge, but he claims nevertheless
that there is something that continues right through modern
Western history, something essential to governmentality. And
that something is critique regarded as a transcendent task. Butler
rightly notes, when presenting her definitions of criticism and
critique, that “although this latter seems like a Kantian defini142
THE TOWNSEND PAPERS IN THE HUMANITIES
tion, it is Kantianism that has been rewrought several times in
the last few centuries with consequences for global politics within
and outside the Euro-Atlantic.” True, the concept of critique that
Foucault inherited from Kant was reformulated over the last two
centuries. But it must be stressed that that reformulation doesn’t
merely have an intellectual genealogy; it has gone through and
been transformed by the changing experiences of revolutionary
Europe, of the non-European world as it encountered the West’s
attempt to civilize it, and of today’s capitalist consumer society.
An account has yet to be given of the multiple materialities that
have constructed our modern understanding of critique, of why
critique now seems to some to be the indispensable way to truth
and the essence of freedom.
It is often said that the nineteenth-century belief in unlimited progress was undermined in the first half of the twentieth
century as European empires dissolved. But has a new domain
of transcendent judgment—and the worldly actions issuing from
that judgment—now given a new confidence to Euro-American
believers in critique? I refer to human rights. The project to humanize the world calls on the North to assign rights (and emergency aid) to those in the South who need them, and to assume
responsibility over their lives. After the Second World War the
theory of sovereign state rights was formally qualified in the
United Nations Charter—although ad hoc qualifications had appeared in the peace treaties after World War I. In the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the absolute right to protection was
shifted from states to individuals, with a consequent obligation
placed on the Great Powers (now referred to by governments,
journalists, and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] as “the
international community”) to protect humans everywhere. The
continuous exercise of criticism and critique by governments,
journalists, and NGOs has been directed at ensuring that these
rights and obligations are properly observed. International fingerwagging and many of the North’s legal, financial, and military
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interventions are together designed to promote the conditions
of possibility in which, ideally, everyone can govern themselves.
These material interventions are critique; they are among the
practices by which local appearances are dismantled and universal truth is encouraged, in which the South is taught, often coercively, the true meaning of maturity.
I hope that Butler will come to agree that, in practice, forms of
criticism and critique are so intertwined that their vocabularies
can’t be neatly separated. The illocutionary acts they involve—
questioning, judging, analyzing, accusing, defending, arguing,
supporting, attacking, seducing, and so on—presuppose one another. Criticism/critique belongs to very disparate moral, political,
and theological projects in the world. Butler is right to say that “every description is already committed to an evaluative framework”
(although framework seems to me a too systematizing word), but I
would urge her to go beyond this important recognition. We now
need to address the following questions: What are the conditions
of possibility under which the ethical and epistemological promise of “critique” emerges in contrast to the self-indulgence of “criticism”? When does intellectual “critique”—as against embodied
practice—come to be regarded as the indispensable foundation
of knowledge? How does power inform “critique,” and how does
“critique” sustain power? I hasten to add that these questions are
intended not as a “criticism” of critique (because “critique has a
bad reputation”) but as a plea for a “critique” of critique, something that must begin with genealogy.
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Endnotes
1
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York, 2007). I have also dealt with
the theme of acceptable and unacceptable violence in a forthcoming
article: “Thinking About Terrorism and Just War,” Cambridge Review of
International Affairs, special issue: Ethics and the Scholarship on War.
2
Incidentally, I don’t find Raymond Williams’s entry on “criticism,” in his
Keywords (New York, 1976) as helpful as Butler does.
3
Annette Baier, “Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant,”
in Moral Prejudices: Essays in Ethics (Cambridge, MA, 1995).
4
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford, 1990), p. 389.
5
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, 1977), pp. 22–23;
italics added.
6
Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in
James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and
Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 386–87; italics added.
7
Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklärung]
Compte rendu de la séance du 27 mai 1978,” Bulletin de la Société française
de Philosophie 84, no. 2 (1990): pp. 53 ff. Unfortunately, Geiman’s
translation, which I cited in my original essay for this volume (and
to which Butler responds), omits the very interesting discussion that
follows the lecture.
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145
Saba Mahmood
Reply to Judith Butler
FIRST OF ALL, I would like to thank Judith Butler for taking the time
to engage with and comment on my essay. It seems to me that it
is only through a process of dialogue, commentary, and exchange
with interlocutors that one is able to both clarify and sharpen
one’s arguments and to foreclose some common misunderstandings of what one has said or written. It is in this spirit that I would
like to acknowledge the main points of convergence between us
and then move on to clarify what I think is a misreading of my
argument expressed toward the end of Butler’s remarks.
I think it is important to state at the outset that we are in
agreement that the secular and the religious are not opposed but
intertwined both historically and conceptually such that it is impossible to inquire into one without engaging the other. I agree
with Butler that secularism neither entails a monolithic process
nor a single ontology of the subject. Having said this, however, it
is important to point out that there are certain modular arrangements and practices that have come to be identified with modern secularity (such as the ideological separation of church and
state or privatization of religion) that give secularism a certain
coherence and structure. It is a feature of modern secular power
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to constantly regulate, identify, and demarcate what is properly
religious from what is not (in which both state and nonstate institutions play a role). This does not mean, of course, that the
ambition of secular power to coherence and regulation is stable or
complete, but it does mean that its instability is contingently produced, the analysis of which requires attention to the particular
concepts, institutions, and practices at play at a given historical
conjuncture.
Let me turn to Butler’s closing remarks on my essay, particularly where she accuses me of being a “culturalist,” of abjuring
politics and law in favor of ethics, thereby erroneously assuming
that these are separable and autonomous domains. She asks if my
turn to “the ethical” is in fact not an instance of the anthropological fetish for cross-cultural understanding that sidesteps questions of power and politics. This is somewhat surprising coming
from Butler, whom I know to be a careful reader of my work. But
let me state (and clarify) that I fully recognize that law, ethics,
and politics are deeply intertwined, that it is impossible to engage
with one without troubling the other. Note that the term culture
is alien to my analytical vocabulary, and I do not evoke the familiar trope of “Islamic culture” here or elsewhere in my work.
Islam for me is not a single “cultural formation” but, following
Talal Asad, a discursive tradition whose practitioners struggle
over what it means to live as a Muslim in this world, a struggle,
furthermore, that unfolds in a field of power in which the historical development of “secular liberalism” commands considerable
force and weight. The analysis I offer in this essay, for example,
of the kind of moral injury at stake in the Danish cartoon affair,
is one understanding among others of how a Muslim relates to
the personage of Muhammad and is not coterminous with what
might be called “Islamic culture.” I suspect there are as many
Muslims who would disagree with the model of relationship between Muhammad and pious Muslims that I outline in this essay
as there are those who would concur with it.
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My aim in outlining this specific relationship, and the particular kind of injury at stake, was not to provide an authoritative
model for understanding why so many Muslims were upset by
the Danish cartoons (that is, to provide a “cultural rationale” for
their multifarious actions). Rather, I was puzzled at the time of
the Danish cartoon controversy by the fact that so little attention
was paid both in the Muslim and non-Muslim press to a conception of religiosity (expressed in folk devotional practices related to
Muhammad) that cannot be easily subsumed into the language of
identity politics so readily embraced by the critics and champions
alike of the Danish cartoons. In this essay I wanted to think about
the unintelligibility of this kind of religiosity as a diagnostic of the
secular, what it tells us about the kind of moral and ethical claims
that can be accommodated within a certain semiotic ideology
of communication and meaning and within juridical language
about freedom of speech and religion in European societies. The
mode of analysis here is not culturalist. It aims instead to get at
the terms of intelligibility through which one can even claim the
space for tolerance in secular liberal discourse on the basis of the
rights and protections extended to minority and majority communities of a nation-state.
As for how I view the relationship between the ethical, legal,
and political domains, I think it is clear from the essay that my interest lies in showing the dense ethical commitments underlying
the putatively neutral claims of the law (to mediate religious difference) and the political consequences that follow for Europe’s
Muslim minority. Butler reads my argument about the weight
accorded to “public order” in European laws about free speech in
terms of the prejudicial use to which they have been put: these
laws, she states, have “been used to fortify the rights of majorities
over minorities” (emphasis added). I want to note that for me
the problem lies not so much in the usage (which presumes that
the law can be put to a different use, one serving the interests
of the minority instead of the majority) as in the structure of
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sensitivities, affects, and commitments (which I gloss as “ethical sensibilities”) upon which the language of public order rests
and to which it gives expression when deployed in the European
Court of Human Rights decisions (or for that matter in Egyptian
courts). To recognize the ethical underpinnings of the law is not
to give causal primacy to the ethical, but to register the relationship between them, a relationship that is often ignored by legal
practitioners, liberal political theorists, and, perhaps far more importantly for my argument, by European Muslims who want to
seek protection within these laws.
As to how the ethical proclivities contained within the concept
of “public order” are to be changed is of course a political question. Butler reads my call to European Muslims to work on the
ethical register (instead of seeking protection within European
laws or changing them) as a turn away from politics. Given the
role civil rights legislation played in the transformation of majority attitudes toward the black minority in the United States, she
asks how a political stance concerned with European minorities
can turn away from using law as a weapon for social transformation. Let me clarify that it is neither my place nor intention to
recommend a political program for European Muslims to follow.
However, I do remain skeptical about the efficacy of European
laws to effect political transformation in Europe (vis-à-vis the
Muslim minority).
My reasons for skepticism are similar I believe to Butler’s in
Excitable Speech, where she warns against the double-edged character of state juridical power to adjudicate free speech and protect
minorities against hate crimes and speech in the United States.
While admitting that prosecution of hate speech may be unavoidable in some instances, Butler insists that the ability of the judiciary to adjudicate the injurious power of speech is saturated
with and predicated upon the judiciary’s unique power to enact
violence through its own metonymic displacements and its redefinition of the meaning and context of what constitutes injurious
Is Critique Secular?
149
speech. Analyzing the language used in two Supreme Court decisions in regard to hate crime (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul [1992] and
Wisconsin v. Mitchell [1993]), Butler argues that it is “necessary to
distinguish between those kinds of violence that are the necessary
conditions of the binding character of legal language, and those
kinds which exploit that very necessity in order to redouble that
injury in the service of injustice.”1 Similarly, at a different point
in Excitable Speech, she is critical of activists and scholars who turn
to the state to adjudicate civil liberties and instances of injurious
speech (such as pornography). “What happens,” she asks, “when
we seek recourse to the state to regulate such speech? In particular, how is the regulatory power of the state enhanced through
such an appeal?” 2 It is important to note that Butler here does
not rule out all recourse to state power as a means for producing political change. Rather, her caution emanates from a careful
reading of the characteristic ways in which the U.S. judiciary has
sought to regulate hate speech in recent times. It is on the basis of
these specific historical cases that she urges us to consider the discursive power acquired by the state when it is asked to pronounce
on issues of injurious speech and civil liberty.
My reasons for cautioning against Muslim resort to Europe’s
hate speech laws and legally permissible restrictions on free speech
are not that different from Butler’s. As I argue, none of these laws
are neutral mechanisms for mediating across different concepts
and practices of religiosity but, as instruments of secular power,
they demarcate and performatively produce normative notions
of religion and religious subjectivity. This is especially true of
the model of religiosity that I discuss in relation to Muhammad,
with its attendant notions of iconicity and injury: how can this
relationality be made commensurate with the kind of religiosity that is extended state protection under the right to religious
liberty or free speech? Is the term religion in “the right to freedom
of religion” clause simply neutral, capable of absorbing different
conceptions of religious life and practice? Or do certain forms of
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religious difference have to be made “indifferent” in order to be
given state protection? Can one draw parallels and distinctions
between hate speech driven by racial prejudice and religious bias
without reinscribing essentialist notions of religion and race or
the power of the state to adjudicate such distinctions? What is
erased in such a process of translation? What other avenues are
imaginable to members of majority and minority populations of
a nation-state to negotiate their differences despite the power
asymmetry that characterizes this relation?
These are difficult questions that are political as much as they
are ethical in nature; they entail both legal and extralegal sensibilities that are not easily parsed. To acknowledge and struggle
with the ethical dimension of these questions is not to eschew
politics but to recognize their mutual imbrication. More importantly, the point I wish to emphasize, one that echoes Butler’s
arguments elsewhere, is that these political and ethical questions
cannot be collapsed into juridical discourse without risk of reducing political action to legal action and thereby reinscribing the
state-sanctioned conceptions of religion and religious subjectivity.
It is for this reason that I voice caution about the hasty turn to the
law on the part of Muslims and non-Muslims to settle the score in
the aftermath of the Danish cartoon controversy and instead urge
perhaps a more difficult transformation of the social and ethical
domains that is no doubt political in substance.
Does this position translate into a withdrawal into intellectual rumination instead of political action as Butler suggests? I
do not think so. Both are necessary, but it would be a mistake to
think that the labor involved in academic analysis, such as the
writing of these essays or composing this response, is similiar to
that involved in political action. While my intellectual endeavors are colored by my political views (and vice versa), to reduce
one to the other is not to do justice to the distinct kinds of labor entailed in each praxis. Transforming the social and political
circumstances in which today’s Muslims live in Euro-America
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151
will require transformations of various kinds: transformations of
their socio-economic power base, of their political and cultural
legibility as European citizens (rather than imposter immigrants),
and of their participation in civic and political life (in which law
will no doubt play a role). All of these require action as much as
judgment, but of a sort quite distinct from that undertaken in the
practice of scholarly critique. The distinction I am making here
is neither ontological nor epistemological, as Butler suggests, but
consists in the distinct sort of material practices through which
one imagines and creates a different world.
Here the question of norms is important. I am open to accepting Butler’s argument that critique requires the shifting of normative assumptions that structure the possibility of knowledge. But I
am always struck by the fact that academics are seldom moved to
abandon their normative evaluative frameworks despite training
and exposure to this kind of thought. Regardless of how many
times I have presented this paper about competing understandings
of the Danish cartoons with distinct political and ethical entailments, most of my academic audiences have a hard time putting
aside their judgment that Muslims acted irrationally and their fear
that this kind of religiosity, if allowed in the public sphere, would
destroy the secular accomplishments of European society. My exercise in displacing strongly held views about the place of religion
in public life is often met with deep suspicion and discomfort.
(What is this woman trying to do?!) To decenter this intransigence, resistance, inertia, and suspicion I am afraid requires more
than simply critique, and this is in part what I am trying to get at
when I speak about the ethical register of sensible politics.
Let me close by way of an example. While civil rights legislation
was no doubt transformative of racial politics in the United States,
it should be noted that the activism of the civil rights movement
extended beyond the strictly juridical domain. It also entailed
performatively creating the space for the realization of black consciousness through a variety of collective and individual actions
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that were transformative of black and white sensibilities. While
these actions were clearly linked to the eventual transformation
of the laws regulating black-white relations, I find it interesting
to think about the relation of the sensorial and ethical actions to
the more crystallized demands for legal action: what were the
cultural, ethical and sensible means by which the relations were
affected and transformed?
Is Critique Secular?
153
Endnotes
154
1
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York,
1997), p. 62.
2
Ibid., p. 77.
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Contributors
TALAL ASAD is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at City
University of New York Graduate Center.
WENDY BROWN is Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, Berkeley.
JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments
of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of
California, Berkeley.
SABA MAHMOOD is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California Berkeley.
he Townsend Center for the Humanities
http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu
Distributed by University of California Press