Workshop 12: Secularism and the Minority Question across the Mediterranean
Abstract
Since the early 2000s a heterogeneous body of scholarship has refashioned our understanding of secularism beyond the legal-political regimes of separating religion from the state. In this workshop we hope to advance the inquiry into the nature of secularism by focusing specifically on the question of religious minorities. We seek to combine an interest in how minority groups are constructed with an attention to the politics of secularism as a practice of state sovereignty. In doing so, we also attempt to construct a theoretical framework that may elicit new possibilities for comparative work across the Euro-Mediterranean region.We are interested in exploring the social and political imaginaries that underlie the concept of minority across the Euro-Mediterranean world. Drawing on an understanding of secularism as a shared problem-space, we hope to explore how cultural and religious factors inter-relate with history and power structures to shape the minority question and the politics of minoritization across the Mediterranean. We want to examine in detail the secular politics of recent controversies around minority groups in Europe and the MENA region, asking to what extent these controversies result from the way secular regimes constantly blur the lines between religion and politics.
We invite scholars to present case-studies that can speak to some of the theoretical questions and concerns outlined above. Papers may deal with well-established groups in the Mediterranean region or tackle more recent minorities. The workshop will be of interest to academics in a range of research fields and disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, religious studies, law and political theory.
Description
Secularism has been at the heart of much recent theorization in the social sciences and in the humanities. Since the early 2000s, a heterogeneous body of scholarship from various disciplinary perspectives has contributed to decentering previously dominant understandings of secularism (Asad 2003: Connolly 1999; Habermas 2008; Taylor 2007; Warner et al 2010). This decentering has typically involved a double move: the recognition that secularism cannot be reduced to the legal-political regimes of separating religion from the state that are designated by that name, on the one hand, and the growing interest in the politics of religion-making, on the other. In doing so, this body of knowledge has deprived the category of “religion” of whatever self-evident validity it laid claim to in the past. It has thus become increasingly difficult today to speak of secularism as simply separating religion and the state. Rather, the why and how of the constitution of religion is now what is increasingly being examined (Beckford 2003; Dressler and Mandair 2011; Smith 2004).
In this workshop we will draw on these debates in order to reframe the comparative analysis of minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean space. Religion and secularism have been at the center of public and academic debates in Europe and in the Middle East for quite some time now. And yet, despite the commonalities and inter-relations between the two contexts, the theoretical frameworks that scholars on both sides of the Mediterranean have mobilized to study these questions have tended to remain hermetically separated from each other. Although controversies around secularism are at work in the Southern, Eastern and Northern shores of the Mediterranean, scholars seem to be reluctant to take this convergence into account in the establishment of the relevant research agendas. This workshop seeks to redress this gap by proposing to develop a framework that might not only might enable novel and more fruitful comparative work between European and Middle Eastern contexts, but also - and more importantly – allow us to rethink the criteria which we use for identifying differences or commonalities between geographical spaces.
We recognize from the outset that the concept of “minority” is in many respects as problematic as it has become indispensable to contemporary debates (Cowan 2001; Mahmood 2012; Raymond and Modood 2007). The term “minority” suggests a clear-cut boundedness of human groups which often masks more complex structures of (in)equality - as well as complicated processes of identity formation. It sits uneasily with complex understandings of the way power operates. The term will thus be used here simply to designate a group whose difference places it in a position of inequality facing structural – legal, economic, discursive – obstacles in its attempts to achieve equality. The precise processes through which these inequalities are made durable - and minorities constituted or perpetuated - are a central concern of this workshop. We are interested in exploring how minorities have been constructed in Europe and in the MENA region, and what political and social imaginaries underlie this construction.
We take the works of Charles Taylor and Talal Asad as our shared starting point to think about secular arrangements in relation to minorities. Taylor’s A Secular Age has reframed the terms of current debates on religion and the secular across various disciplines. The erstwhile concern with debating the thesis of the decline of religion has given way to thinking about the secular as a set of conditions of both belief and unbelief in the modern age. The opposition between religion and the secular is now being increasingly problematized as their mutual imbrications have come into focus. In recent publications, Taylor has pleaded for a “radical redefinition of secularism” (Taylor 2011), arguing against those views that consider secularism as a matter of state and religion only. Rather, he suggests, we need to approach secularism in a broader perspective as “the (correct) response of the state to diversity” (Taylor 2011: 36). While A Secular Age is often read as an argument in favor of “secularity” as a category distinct from “secularism” (i.e. distinct from the political arrangements of state and religion), we propose to read Taylor’s work in conjunction with the scholarship of Talal Asad (1993; 2003). Asad argues that secularism - as the generic category for regimes of separation - is specifically modern only in that it “presupposes new concepts of ‘religion’, ‘ethics’, and ‘politics’, and new imperatives associated with them” (Asad 2003: 2). Asad and Taylor thus broaden our perspective on secularism by highlighting its necessary and still largely under-theorized conditions. Taking into account these conditions leads us far beyond the fields in which the official history of secularism has been located. Despite their differences, Asad and Taylor have prompted wide-ranging debates that demonstrate the need to think of secularism outside the usual legal, political and philosophical categories. They have also suggested new ways in which conditions in Europe and in the MENA region might be productively engaged and compared.
If one conceives secularism as a “problem-space” - i.e., an “ensemble of questions, stakes, and range of answers that have historically characterized it” (Agrama 2010: 501) in which the dividing line between religion and politics is the central question to which fundamental rights are attached, how are the particular historical configurations specific to each national context brought to bear on the minority question(s)? What is the significance of culture and religion in contemporary politics of minoritization across the Mediterranean: what Is the precise relation between them, and how do they intersect with broader power relations and structures of inequality? How does the emergence of new religious minorities - following conversion, migration, etc - destabilize established modes of governance?
In asking these questions we are particularly inspired by Saba Mahmood’s engagement with A Secular Age in her contribution to Warner et al (2010). Alongside other scholars, Mahmood has drawn attention to how “globalized practices of law and governance“ in the modern period make it difficult to maintain strict boundaries between post-Christian Europe and its outside. She pointedly asks whether there are “conceptions of the self, agency, and accountability that modern secularism makes possible which link ‘us’ and ‘them’ indelibly (if messily) across putatively civilizational divides?“ (Mahmood 2010: 295). This question has a number of important implications for this workshop. It draws attention to the increasing difficulty of positing unambiguous boundaries based on religious referents like “Islam” or “Christianity”. Jose Casanova has pointed out recently how Western concepts of religion and secularism have themselves been globalized (Casanova 2011). The globalization of modular forms, however, extends to various other fields of practice, from state-building to economy to aesthetics. The global circulation of these concepts complicates simple oppositions. This recognition in turn invites us to approach secularism analytically as “a historical practice of state sovereignty” (Agrama 2010: 521).
While there can be no doubt that these practices vary greatly from one country to another, it is also true that the “indeterminacy” which Agrama considers to be a main characteristic of secular regimes is to be found in all countries across the Mediterranean. Many recent studies on Islam in Europe and Christianity in the MENA region have precisely emphasized the constant blurring and intertwining of the fundamental categories of politics and religion, religion and culture, private and public. In doing so, these studies have validated the claim that “Secularism, supposed to separate religion from politics, hopelessly blurs them” (Agrama 2010: 521). In this workshop, and with this framework in mind, we hope to go beyond the often repeated claims concerning the ‘misapplication’, ‘violation’ or ‘betrayal’ of secularism in relation to minorities. Instead of viewing these controversies simply as the result of partisan politics, we ask what the frequency and seeming inescapability of secularist failures may tell us about secularism as a practice in the first place; and how these secular politics are played out in various contexts in relation to minority-making. Minority issues are a privileged site for realizing such investigations. To the degree that the state’s claim to secularism implies more or less pronounced claims of equal treatment and neutrality, as is indeed the case, minorities are at the very center of secular politics in Europe, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. They provide a starting point for rethinking secularism in a comparative perspective.
We invite scholars to present case-studies that can speak to some of the theoretical questions and concerns outlined above. Papers may deal with well-established groups in the Mediterranean region (Muslims in Eastern Europe, Jews in Western Europe, Christians in Egypt, etc) or tackle more recent minorities (Muslims and other immigrant groups in Western Europe, converts across the Mediterranean, etc).
The workshop is intended by the co-organizers as a step in the elaboration of a longer research project. It will be of interest to academics in a range of research fields and disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, religious studies, law and political theory.
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agrama, Hussein (2010) “Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (3): 495–523.
Asad, Talal (1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad, Talal (2003) Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Beckford, James A (2003) Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Casanova, Jose (2011) “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms”, in Calhoun, Craig et al (eds) Rethinking Secularism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 54-74.
Connolly, William (1999) Why I am not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cowan, Jane K. (2001) “Ambiguities of an emancipatory discourse: the making of a Macedonian minority in Greece”, in Cowan, Jane K et al (eds) Culture and Rights. Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 152-176.
Dressler, Markus and Arvind Mandair (2011) (eds) Secularism and Religion-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
Mahmood, Saba (2010) “Can Secularism be Otherwise?”, in Warner, Michael et al (eds) Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 282-299.
Mahmood, Saba (2012) “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East", Comparative Studies in Society and History 54: 418-446.
Özyürek, Esra (2009) "Christian and Turkish. Secularist Fears of a Converted Nation". Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29 (3): 398-412.
Özyürek, Esra (2009) “Convert Alert: German Muslims and Turkish Christians as Threats to Security in the New Europe”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(1): 91–116.
Raymond, Gino and Tariq Modood (2007) (eds) The Construction of Minority Identities in France and Britain. Palgrave MacMillan.
Roy, Olivier (1999) Vers un islam européen. Paris: Esprit.
Roy, Olivier (2009) Holy Ignorance. When Religion and Culture Part Ways. New York: Hurst and Columbia University Press.
Smith, Jonathan Z. (2004) Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, Charles (2011) “Why we need a radical redefinition of secularism”, in Mendieta, Eduardo and VanAntwerpen, Jonathan (eds.) The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. New York: Columbia University Press/SSRC, 34-59.
Page last updated on 04 September 2018