Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report - Brossura

Mahmood, Saba

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691153280 ISBN 13: 9780691153285

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2015

Riassunto

How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities

The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains.

Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe.

A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Saba Mahmood is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton) and the coauthor of Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"Saba Mahmood is a premier scholar of the constitutive powers of secular governance. This extraordinary work is at once a fascinating ethnography of two religious minorities in Egypt and a compelling formulation of how secularism generates strife it claims only to modulate."--Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

"Mahmood delivers an expectedly insightful scholarly performance about the ways secularism, purported to be a solution to interreligious conflict, has in fact not only contributed to that conflict but also exacerbated it by producing new forms of religious polarization. This book is both an indispensable and intellectually delightful read."--Wael B. Hallaq, author of The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament

"In this stunning book, Mahmood calls into question a good deal of the received wisdom about secularism and the divisions between East and West. Religious Difference in a Secular Age is original, pathbreaking, and important."--Joan Wallach Scott, author of The Politics of the Veil

"Written by one of the most prominent anthropologists of her generation, Religious Difference in a Secular Age is a significant contribution to political theory and the study of religion in the contemporary world."--Webb Keane, author of Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Religious Difference in a Secular Age

A Minority Report

By Saba Mahmood

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Saba Mahmood
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15328-5

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, ix, 
NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION, xiii, 
Introduction, 1, 
Part I, 
Chapter 1. Minority Rights and Religious Liberty: Itineraries of Conversion, 31, 
Chapter 2. To Be or Not to Be a Minority?, 66, 
Part II, 
Chapter 3. Secularism, Family Law, and Gender Inequality, 111, 
Chapter 4. Religious and Civil Inequality, 149, 
Chapter 5. Secularity, History, Literature, 181, 
Epilogue, 208, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 215, 
INDEX, 229, 

CHAPTER 1

MINORITY RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY: ITINERARIES OF CONVERSION

This chapter provides an account of political secularism in the Middle East by tracking the career of two of its signature concepts — religious liberty and minority rights — across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less a chronological history than a genealogy, it seeks to capture key shifts in the meaning and praxis of these concepts in order to understand how relations between Muslims and non-Muslims were reconfigured in the modern period. Because I am interested in how religious difference has come to be regulated and remade under conditions of modern secular governance, I focus on the problem of religious minorities rather than groups defined by ethnic, linguistic, or other attributes. This chapter tracks broader international and regional developments that are crucial to how religious difference has come to be imagined and lived in modern Egypt. In doing so, I go back and forth between European and Middle Eastern history because I firmly believe that no analysis of secular political concepts and institutions in the latter is complete without simultaneously accounting for their evolution in the former. Consequently, this chapter does not so much offer an "indigenous genealogy" of the concepts of religious liberty and minority rights as it highlights the overlapping histories that have shaped their modern trajectory.

There are three historical shifts around which this chapter is organized. I start in the nineteenth century, when the concepts of religious liberty and minority rights gained traction in the region with the expansion of European power into the territories ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Christian European states systematically used the discourse of religious liberty and minority rights to undermine Ottoman sovereignty in the name of safeguarding the interests of "Eastern Christians," as they were called at the time. Eventually, a weakened Ottoman Empire adopted religious liberty and minority rights within its governing apparatus in order to shore up its territorial sovereignty and harness the fractious loyalties of diverse irredentist groups. The adoption of these legal concepts did not simply level old religious hierarchies but recalibrated them to a new calculus, opening up certain forms of political belonging for non-Muslims while closing others.

A second historical shift in the meaning of religious liberty and minority rights came about with the institutionalization of the nation-state as the globally dominant form premised on the principle of popular sovereignty and formal equality. From instruments of imperial patronage, religious liberty and minority rights became part of the broader vocabulary of civil and political rights. While in Europe, the transition from imperial to popular sovereignty was a fait accompli by the end of the nineteenth century, this was not the case in the Middle East; there, popular sovereignty had to be developed institutionally and discursively within the context of expanding missionary activity and (direct or indirect) colonial rule. International law, which was supposed to institute a global political order based on the doctrine of sovereignty, readily accommodated the exceptional nature of colonial and mandatory rule. As a result, the meaning and praxis of religious liberty and minority rights in the Middle East were forged in the context of differential sovereignty between Europe and the Middle East, a context that, as I hope to show in this book, remains relevant to how the minority issue is debated in Egypt today.

A third shift that I track in the concept of minority rights belongs to the interwar period. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, an authoritative definition of "national minority" was developed and a system of minority treaties was established to track infractions in countries that were, for the most part, subject to European power. This period in the League's history is instructive not only because it exemplifies the logic of differential sovereignty that attends rights discourse in international law, but also for its consistent thematization of an irresolvable tension located at the heart of the concept of minority: on the one hand, a minority is supposed to be an equal partner with the majority in the building of the nation; on the other hand, its difference (religious, racial, ethnic) poses an incipient threat to the identity of the nation that is grounded in the religious, linguistic, and cultural norms of the majority. Even though the League of Nations and its minority treaties system were dismantled, eventually replaced by the United Nations and its charter of human rights, contemporary struggles over minority rights continue to reenact this tension in various forms.

This chapter is also an argument for why the discourse on religious liberty and national minorities needs to be urgently rethought outside the framework of rights. It belongs, I want to suggest, to a far broader field of secular political praxis that secures the prerogative of the modern state to serve as the arbiter of religious differences, to remake and regulate religious life while proclaiming its sanctity, in the process fundamentally transforming how people perceive and negotiate religious identity and communal relations. Viewed from this perspective, religious liberty does not simply protect religious belief (or unbelief) from state intervention, but secures the distinction between public and private that is so foundational to secular political rule. Similarly, the legal concept of national minority does not simply signify a predetermined demographic group upon whom the modern state confers rights and obligations. Rather, its institutionalization also produces the kinds of subjects who can speak in its name, transforming how religious differences are lived, recognized, and contested. Perhaps if we can apprehend these dimensions of religious liberty and minority rights we may be able to appreciate the double-edged character of political secularism, which promises religious neutrality even as it remakes the fundamental contours of religious life.

Sovereignty and Religious Liberty

The signing of the Peace of Westphalia treaties in 1648 is often narrated as the foundational moment in the emergence of the concept of religious liberty; it not only brought an end to nearly one hundred years of religious warfare among Christians, but also created a political order in which subjects of a state were allowed to hold religious beliefs that were different from the ruler's. While some scholars view the Peace of Westphalia as an earlier moment in Europe's unfolding commitment to the virtue of religious tolerance, others see it as a far more pragmatic instrument that helped settle long-standing territorial disputes by granting formal independence to polities struggling to be free from the Holy Roman Empire (such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Savoy, and Milan). In this latter understanding, the Peace of Westphalia is credited with establishing the principle (if not the practice) of state sovereignty, with the sovereign's right to control his territory and subjects free from outside intervention. Writing forty years later, John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) made government conduct indifferent to religious truth far beyond the parameters of the Peace of Westphalia, further consecrating religious liberty as a foundational element of liberal political rationality and raison d'état. What I want to highlight here is that in European historiography, the birth of the concept of religious liberty is deeply intertwined with the establishment of the principle of state sovereignty, securing regional peace, and the creation of an intrastate protocol for handling what used to be called religious dissenters but later came to be regarded as "religious minorities."

While this foundational relationship between religious liberty and state sovereignty in European history is widely acknowledged, far less appreciated are the exceptions this narrative enacted as the discourse of religious liberty traveled to non-European shores. Notably, the introduction of the principle of religious freedom to non-Western lands often violated the principle of state sovereignty, instead of consolidating it. Consider, for example, the repeated attempts by Christian European rulers to assert their right to protect Christian minorities within the Ottoman Empire, beginning in the seventeenth century and only escalating over time. As long as the Ottoman Empire was strong, it could accommodate these pressures without compromising its sovereignty; but once Ottoman power started to decline, it could not resist Western European incursions on behalf of Ottoman Christians.

As early as the sixteenth century, Ottoman rulers granted special privileges — known as "capitulations" — to Western European traders, ensuring a considerable degree of self-government in matters of criminal and civil jurisdiction as well as freedom of religion and worship. Capitulations were legal instruments that a range of empires employed at the time to give extraterritorial jurisdiction to subjects of another state in order to bolster trade and strategic relations. Malcolm Evans, in his magisterial history of the global career of religious liberty, notes,

[The capitulations] were originally bestowed at a time when the Western States were economically and politically inferior to Ottomans but, as the balance of power shifted in their favour, they became a potent means of furthering their strength and the enfeebled Empire was unable to resist. Within this framework, the role of the Western European States as protectors of the religious freedom of their subjects within the Ottoman domains easily elided into a claim entitling them to champion the liberties, religious and otherwise, of all Christians in the Empire.

Over time, the capitulatory privileges came to apply to European missionaries and, eventually, to indigenous Ottoman Christian communities as well, who were placed under the protection of European Christian rulers. This amounted to a de facto revocation of Ottoman law in relation to many of its Christian subjects. Notably, no parallel privileges existed for Ottomans in relation to non-Christian subjects of European empires.

As the nineteenth century progressed and the Ottoman Empire started to lose large portions of its Christian-dominated territories to breakaway states, the European powers deployed the claim of religious liberty for non-Muslim minorities to expedite this dissolution and secure their geopolitical interests in the region. The Treaties of Paris (signed in 1856) and Berlin (signed in 1878) both contained religious-liberty provisions for non-Muslims, which the Ottomans and the newly independent states were forced to adopt under European pressure. The Treaty of Berlin, signed following the Russo-Turkish War, required that religious liberty be extended to minority subjects in the newly emergent states of Romania, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia. None of these states had the political power to negotiate similar terms from Europe. In the words of an influential scholar of the period, at the end of the nineteenth century the Ottomans "operated under severe constraints, the main constraint being the claim of Great Powers to be the protectors of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. This claim made the representatives of the Great Powers major actors in the domestic affairs of the Ottoman state."

Religious Inequality under the Ottomans

The status of non-Muslims under Ottoman rule varied widely in part because of the empire's territorial scope and long duration. Not only did the Ottoman Empire rule over an immense diversity of faiths (including Judaism, various forms of Christianity, and heterodox Islamic sects) in a territory that extended across Asia, Europe, and Africa for over six hundred years, Ottoman policy also differed depending on the density of the non-Muslim population in a given region, the contracts negotiated at the time of Ottoman conquest, and the proximity of the conquered to the imperial center of the state. Historians, however, have tried to describe key features of Ottoman rule in regard to the status of non-Muslims. A striking feature of Ottoman rule was that it did not aim to politically transform difference into sameness (through forced conversion or assimilation) but allowed diverse religious communities to exist contiguously within a system where Muslims occupied the highest status. Thus, unlike Christian empires that forced nonbelievers to convert in order to save their souls, this was not a part of Ottoman imperial policy. This distinctive feature of Ottoman rule has led one scholar to characterize it as the "empire of difference." Under the pact of dhimma (literally, pledge of security), non-Muslims (ahl al-dhimma) were accorded state protection and the right to practice their religion, maintain their places of worship, and have communal courts as long as they recognized the supremacy and primacy of Islam. Christians and Jews, as "People of the Book" (ahl al-kitab), a Quranic concept (9:29), had special status in comparison to non-Muslims who did not belong to the Abrahamic faiths. The ahl al-dhimma communities were required to pay an additional poll tax (jizya), and Christians were regulated through sartorial markers and restrictions placed on the performance of religious rituals and church construction.

In comparing the Ottoman treatment of religious minorities with the Christian empires of Europe during the Middle Ages, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis note that, unlike the Jews in Europe, Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were not forced to live in ghettos and their movement and occupation were not restricted; while at times subject to violence, they were neither exiled nor killed for their faith. Najwa al-Qattan's work shows that despite their lower legal status, when non-Muslims used Muslim courts (which they often did, particularly regarding issues of marriage and inheritance), they "had a fair chance of prevailing," even against Muslim adversaries. For the modern reader it is hard not to translate these observations into a calculus of greater or lesser tolerance, of equality versus persecution. Yet, as a number of historians argue, these terms are anachronous for describing the premodern Ottoman world, where inequality was the norm; just as women were unequal to men and slaves unequal to masters, non-Muslims were not equal to Muslims. The fundamental question that occupied Ottoman rulers was how to manage religious diversity while maintaining Islamic supremacy. As Anver Emon puts it, the pact of dhimma was a legal instrument for the political inclusion of non-Muslims into the empire as much as an expression of their lower doctrinal and legal status. The freedom of worship granted to non-Muslims, therefore, did not mean that the Ottoman state was neutral in regard to religion or sought to treat its subjects equally; the universality of the truth of Islam was indeed presumed, as was the imperial sovereignty of the sultan over his subjects, even as "People of the Book" had a (limited) space of autonomy over their religious and legal affairs. In this sense, the Ottoman state was quite open-handed in proclaiming Islam's religious and political hegemony.

Consider, for example, the case of Coptic Orthodox Christians, who regard themselves as the indigenous inhabitants of Egypt. They suffered brutal repression for two hundred years at the hands of Byzantine emperors for their dissent at the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD). The Egyptian Church, as it was known then, broke with the Chalcedonian consensus and embraced instead its own version of hypostatic Christology (for a resonance of this history in the present, see chapter 5). Over time, the Egyptian/Coptic Church developed a fiercely independent ecclesiastical structure and theology, as well as a strong sense of agonistic autonomy from the rest of Christendom (including Eastern Orthodox Christianity). With the arrival of Muslim conquerors in 639 ad and the subsequent consolidation of Muslim rule, the Copts went from being a persecuted community at the hands of Christian rulers to a subordinated group in relation to Muslims, who quickly gained a large number of converts in Egypt. As "People of the Book," Coptic Orthodox Christians came to be governed under the system of ahl al-dhimma as a separate, protected, and unequal community in relation to Muslims. Over the centuries, the Coptic condition varied dramatically with the vicissitudes of the Islamic empires that ruled Egypt. The Mamluk era (1250–1517) is often cited as the worst, marked by a decline in the Coptic population, losses due to conversion to Islam, and its subjection to harassment. When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, they continued to regard the Copts as ahl al-dhimma but were markedly less persecutorial than the Mamluks. Coptic Christians were allowed to select their religious leaders, administer religious courts, own property, and ascend to important positions within the bureaucratic and economic structure of the empire. Physical segregation based on religious affiliation and prohibitions on the public display of Christian religiosity continued.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Religious Difference in a Secular Age by Saba Mahmood. Copyright © 2016 Saba Mahmood. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691153280
• ISBN 13: 9780691153285
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 237
• Contatto del produttore: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; U.S.A.
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile