egyptian secularism?

Agrama, Hussein Ali. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. University of Chicago Press, 2012. ISBN 0226010694. $27.50.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press, 2003.

Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. 2nd Revised edition. Fordham University Press, 2013.

Yavuz, M. Hakan. Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Article 2 of the Egyptian constitution states that “Islam is the religion of the State, Arabic is its official language, and the principles of the Islamic sharia are the main source of law.” The Syrian constitution carries a similar clause, except that the sharia is substituted for fiqh, the various law schools (madhāhib) which represent different interpretations of the holy sharia, based on the Qur’an and hadith (the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad). The clause in the Syrian constitution on the sources of law may be historically and hermeneutically more accurate, as we are dealing more with interpretations of the sharia than with the holy law itself, which stands as divine, hence could only be approached hermeneutically: the corpus of the fiqh, in its various Sunni and Shi‘i law schools, does indeed assume a principle of contingency, as each interpretation would be contingent on both the school that carries it and the jurist that has propounded it.

The question, however, as raised by Hussein Ali Agrama’s Questioning Secularism, is, would such constitutional clauses make a country like Egypt more “religious” than “secular”? Does Egypt have a “secular” future? The anthropologist Talal Asad, Agrama’s mentor, has differentiated between the concepts of the “secular” and “secularism,” tracing the genealogy of the former to medieval Christianity, in its attempt to delineate a “profane” discursive field that would stand outside religion proper, while the latter is a nineteenth-century phenomenon on a par with nationalism and the nation-state, both of which require an ideology of integration into a “society” of autonomous individuals. Various European nations could thus be described as having gone through a process of secularization, which would imply implementing the doctrine of secularism as a discursive practice that would separate the domain of the modern state from that of the religious proper. For example, a newly formed nation like Turkey, which, in the wake of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, proclaimed the secular nature of its state apparatuses since its 1923–27 constitution, had to go through a process of secularization whereby the Turkish élite, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, disbanded many of the most famed religious institutions of Sunni Islam, beginning with the venerable caliphate and the position of Shaykh ul-Islam.

Agrama is frank that when he started his research on the Egyptian judiciary in the 1990s, he wasn’t much interested in secularism per se. What seems to have changed his mind was the Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd case, the University of Cairo professor who was accused of apostasy in his views regarding the interpretation of the Qur’an and scriptures, and was ultimately forced to divorce his Muslim wife through an order that originated from a personal status court. When the Cairo Appeals Court declared Abu Zayd an apostate, it wrote in its judgment that

The Court notes that there is a difference between apostasy, which is a material action with its basic elements and conditions…and belief (i‘tiqād). Apostasy is necessarily comprised of material acts that have an external being. Such acts must make manifest, in a manner undeniable and without dissent, that one has called God Most High a liar, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, a liar by denying what he has brought to Islam….Belief, however, differs clearly from apostasy. For apostasy is a crime whose basic material elements are presented before a judge to decide whether it exists or not…but belief concerns what is in the interior of a human’s being self, belonging to his domain of secrecy. (Agrama 50)

Here Agrama seems to be missing the point in his rush to interpret the Court’s judgment:

Thus freedom of belief was not defined as freedom to believe what one wants; it was not solely a matter of being able to choose one’s own opinion or views. Rather, freedom of belief also consisted in a protection from those actions and practices that would corrupt religious belief and obstruct the conditions needed for its proper maintenance and practice. Belief therefore required investigation when obstructions to it were manifest. (Agrama 51)

Agrama’s interpretation misses completely the distinction, clearly demarcated by the Court, between the internality of belief, on the one hand, and the externality of apostasy on the other. It is therefore not (at least primarily) a question of “freedom” to believe or not believe for the subject, but in the externalization of acts (including speech) which may or may not signal and internal belief. What the Court clearly stated was that as long as belief, being a purely internal phenomenon without any external manifestation, it has no legal consequence. No judge could judge me on my belief for the simple reason that it is internal, hence invisible in the eyes of justice and other mortals. I could get in trouble for stating—which in itself is an act of externalization related to speech—a religious opinion, not because it necessarily reflects an internal belief of mine, but simply because it is, in the language of the Court, a “material act” or an “external being,” which could be the subject of a counter-opinion, a judgment, or a lawsuit. In other words, the Court would not care less about my internal beliefs, and whether there is a “correlation” between my core beliefs and my external acts, for the simple reason that we only have knowledge of and can only judge the latter. Put simply, the expression “freedom of belief” is meaningless, as belief is internal, and there is no one to judge me on it. It is therefore neither free nor restricted.

The problem, however, in the Abu Zayd case, is not simply that he did externalize—in the form of written texts—what he may or may not have believed in regarding his interpretations of the Qur’an and scriptures. Abu Zayd could have made the rightful claim for his right of ijtihād, that of personal interpretation and reasoning, but, here again, the Court of Cassation, which has sustained the decision of the lower Appeals Court, made it clear that the entire text of the Qur’an is not to be subjected to personal reasoning, except for verses that are not straight-forward and clear enough, or have no other verses to support them (Agrama 52). So, once more, the crucial matter, in the case of apostasy, is not one of “freedom of belief,” but its externalization in an act (speech act or otherwise) that could be assessed and judged. Once externalized in publications, as Abu Zayd did in his numerous academic writings, the various courts found it legitimate to intervene, not, however, on the basis of freedom of belief. Belief is simply, for those secular-religious courts, the noumenal unknown, about which nothing could be stated, and regarding which the courts have nothing to say or judge.

Here we need to address a couple of related issues. First of all, where does this separation between the internality of belief and externalization of apostasy come from? Is it Islamic (established in the fiqh, philosophy, or theology)? Or is it unrelated to Islam? What are its repercussions on the debate between religion and secularism? In my view, the importance of this matter stems from the fact that such position would point at broader differences with Christianity, and for that very reason, the religious–secularist debate cannot be solely addressed in terms of a contextualization of a particular religion based on its practices, for instance, court practices. What needs to be addressed are the broader issues of truth, belief, and the externalization of belief across religious experiences.

Talal Asad, an astute genealogist in line with the likes of Nietzsche and Foucault, and Agrama’s mentor, noted the following regarding the Abu Zayd case:

Disbelief incurs no legal punishment; even the Qur’an stipulates no worldly punishment for disbelief. In the classical law, 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 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. (Asad et al. 36–7)

From Max Weber to Marcel Gauchet, up to Asad’s own Genealogies of Religion, it has often been pointed out that since medieval Christendom it has become customary to question this internal invisible motivation precisely “on the basis of inferred or forcibly extracted internal belief.” In his groundbreaking Genealogies, Asad documents at great length how in medieval Christendom pain and truth came hand-in-hand in the inquisitorial institution of judicial torture in order to extract a truthful confession. What this means is that, unlike in Islamdom, it mattered to know what the internal motivations and beliefs of a subject were. They had to be extracted by force and externalized. Which to put it bluntly, Christianity demarcates itself from Islam and other systems of belief in placing the burden of proof and socialization on the individual and his or her individual consciousness. Which makes Christianity more universal in that the requirements for social and religious requirements into the community (communitas) are more demanding to say the least. The difference between the secular and sacred, since medieval Christianity, may be seen in the notion of a communitas whereby there is an intense community spirit propelled by a common ritual, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness. Communitas is therefore the experience of people experiencing liminality together. The secular by contrast focuses more on structure, on what needs to be done together for the sake of the survival of the community. When Europe moved to modernity, this common structure implied the nation, nationalism, and the nation-state. What is important for our purposes, however, is that this transition from the religious to the secular not only needs to be historically contextualized, but more importantly, it is itself set within religious parameters which are determined by the essence of the system of religious beliefs to which a community belongs. In short, an Islamicate society like Egypt, in process of secularization, would experience the spirit of a secular community differently from any European community, due precisely to Islamicate principles.

This internality–subjectivity of belief versus the externality–objectivity of a religious behavior (e.g. blasphemy) operates perfectly well even within the strict confines of a secularist space of an Islamicate society like Turkey. Turkey went secular in 1924 during the formative period of the Turkish Republic, modeling its “laic” law, which separated state institutions from various religious powers, more after French laïcité (officially established in the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State) than American secularism per se. If laïque in its original Greek meaning is that which “belongs to the people,” hence, in its later post-Revolution meaning, would refer to that common political good, the body politic of the nation which should not be monopolized by clerical power, then to “laicize” would entail more radical measures than secularization proper. In effect, to laicize would not be limited to the removal of clerical power and symbols only, or the secularization of the state, as it would be more radical than that: namely, the banning of religious symbols (and symbolisms) from public institutions and public life. Hence a cross, which would symbolize Christian values, would be banned from the person who is wearing it in public, or at least within the confines of a public institution that preaches laïcité.

The point here, at least in relation to Egyptian secularism, is what happens when the political space of a modern nation-state officially declared secular, or better still, laïque, with all the French connotations of that term, which the Turkish Kemalist Republican élite had wholeheartedly assumed and staunchly protected (even if that implied in the post-World War II era one military coup after another in order to protect Turkish Kemalist secularism). Does such a situation imply a complete reversal to Egyptian secularism, which is not openly declared, but only negotiated piecemeal on every occasion, whether implying a judicial verdict or not?

Consider, for example, what happened in Turkey in 1998, amid the 1997 military coup that banned “Islamist” parties of the likes of the Refah and Fazilet, which brought down the successful government of the Refah leader Necmettin Erbakan. In 1998 the Constitutional Court (CC) took aim at redefining secularism in theory and practice in light of what it saw as “serious transgressions” from the practitioners of the banned Islamist parties. Before handing down its decision, the CC redefined secularism as “the way of life,” as the only officially sanctioned “regulator of political, social and cultural life of the society.” The central goal of Kemalism was defined as being a political, social, and cultural system “free of any religious influence or presence. Religion, for the CC, only can be tolerated in the private conscience of an individual, and any externalization or reflection of religiosity in the public domain is defined as an antisecular act against the principles of Kemalist secularism. The CC decision also alludes to “the different nature of secularism in Turkey on the basis of the unique characteristics of Islam and the sociohistorical context of Turkey.” Indeed, the court defines religion in opposition to secularism and argues that “religion regulates the inner aspect of the individual whereas secularism regulates the outer aspect of the individual.” (Yavuz 247)

What is remarkable here is that between Egypt which would not adopt an open secularist stance, and Turkey where secularism is staunchly protected in the constitution, there is that common view that belief in Islam rests on the duality between an internalized–subjective attitude which could always be tolerated as such by the official state authorities—precisely because it remains a Kantian noumenal invisible—versus a parallel attitude of belief which is externalized and rendered visible by the practicers themselves. As belief remains subjective and internalized, hence unknown to state and judicial authorities, as long as the actor-individual-subject would not publicly externalize it, the externalization of religious belief, however, once open to the public, could be subjected to state and judicial scrutiny. That’s at least the logic behind the decisions taken by both the Egyptian supreme court in the case of Abu Zayd’s alleged apostasy, and, roughly the same time, in the late 1990s, by the Turkish CC regarding the practices of members of Islamist parties. What is remarkable in both instances is, whether the system is openly based on sharia law or secularist, it still operates within the duality of internality and externality of belief. As the likes of Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, and Marcel Gauchet have argued, such an attitude is not that of Christianity, which beginning in medieval times, extracted and objectified internal belief, even if that meant judicial torture. One could argue in favor of a principle of universality in Christianity in that the practices of integration achieve a disciplinary status, whereby the individual is integrated within the community of believers based on internal acceptance of the faith, which runs deep and is not to be limited to externalized rituals of admission or otherwise. In Islamdom by contrast, allegiance to the faith and umma is left to the observance of externalized rituals, which, if not in conformity to the principles of Islam, could be subject to punishment and persecution. Thus, when the Turkish CC claims that “religion regulates the inner aspect of the individual,” one should cautiously add as a remainder that for a religion like Christianity such regulation of the inner life must be externalized, controlled, and disciplined, otherwise adherence to the faith would be meaningless. And when the same CC adds that “secularism regulates the outer aspect of the individual,” it is Islamdom that regulates faith in terms of an internality that cannot be monitored and an externality that could be subject to judicial sanctions. As such, Turkish secularism is an outcome of Islamic belief in the way it demarcates the internal from the external.

Which leads us to an uncanny position when it comes to comparing Egyptian with Turkish secularism. In both instances, Islamic faith has to be externalized in order to be subject to judicial consequences. Without that awry process of externalization, the judiciary would be at a loss, as it would be unable to “read” what is in the mind of the believer. A case in point was when the CC used statements by the Refah Party as examples of antisecular activities: “the headscarf must be free in the universities” and “the right to choose your own legal system, including the sharia,” as examples set to deconstruct the true nature of Kemalist secularism. (Yavuz 247)

How do we then study secularism when, as is the case in Egypt, not only it is not overtly declared as a state policy, but the Constitution openly acknowledges its debt to sharia law? Should we read secularism in between the lines, pretending that we see it operating under certain circumstances—e.g. the Abu Zayd case—even though it remains without official declaration? Agrama’s solution to this methodological impasse is to object to any reading that would place Egypt either on one side or the other. His stance is that, of course, Egypt is a modern nation-state, which means subjecting individual citizens to an allegiance to political power on a national scale, and to disciplinary normative power. Does it therefore make sense to declare Egypt religious simply on the basis that its constitution openly declares the sharia as the source for modern law? Agrama’s démarche, by refusing to take a stance on this, seems set within a modernist paradigm that modernization is no simple matter and that “things are not what they appear on the surface.” He therefore misses the opportunity to explore the difference between an open declaration of secularism, as is the case in Turkey, and one where it is not openly declared, leaving sharia law—at least in principle—the source of all law. Here it is not enough, as Agrama does, to claim that even though sharia law remains the source, Egyptian law is by and large historically Napoleonic, and that even sharia law must subject itself to secularism. Such claim would, indeed, not free us from raising the issue as to why Egypt did not openly adopt secularism as Turkey did. And would that have made any difference in the practices of law? To wit, if secularism is such an important component of the modern nation-state, why isn’t openly declared and practiced as such?

Maybe what is needed here is more than a smart postmodernist playfulness. Class configuration and antagonism, the possibility of a hegemonic élite (in the sense of Gramsci) that governs civil society, and the stability of the hegemonic formation, are all factors that would play in favor of secularism. Thus, in the case of Turkey for example, what became the Turkish Republic in the wake of dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire was composed of an élitist configuration, composed of men in the military, landowners, industrialists and financiers, intellectuals and independents, with much stronger ties than any other country on the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the Turkish élite was beefed up by all kinds of officials, civil or military, who had to abandon their posts in the multi-ethnic peripheries to join the new Republic upon the Empire’s demise. The point here is that what ultimately became “Turkey” as nation-state was already in the very heart of the Mediterranean as the Empire’s center. The Turkish élites were for centuries debating major issues on the future of their Empire, and that pattern was inherited when the Republic came into being. The Kemalist hegemonic ruling group was composed, in its early phase, of militaries, intellectuals, landowners, industrialists and financiers. As such, it was not limited to a single dominating class or group, but it was an assortment of groups (or fractions of classes) and individuals that made their domination over civil society possible. Here the ideology of secularism was primarily destined to weaken the bonds between the religious establishment and society, attempting to render them obsolete by neutralizing them through a secularist public space, which precisely would not have been possible were it not for the hegemonic structure.

Egypt, by contrast, lacked such hegemonic structure. Historically, the Wafd party, instituted in 1919 in the wake of the Versailles Peace Conference, created a “corporatist” culture that would absorb diverse groups, including representatives of the working class and trade unions. The corporatist culture implied a loose assortment of societal elements that would weaken even further with the British gradual withdrawal from the political scene. That was already visible amid the Anglo-Egyptian treaty in 1936, and by the 1940s the old establishment was in full crisis mode, divided between a weakened Wafd,  workers and trade unionists attempting to create their own autonomous working class system of representation, and an unpopular monarchy. The 1952 Free Officers’ revolution only capitalized on such crisis by instituting its own corporatist and populist political space, which is still present, in spite of the fall of the Mubarak régime in early 2011. In sum, at no point in Egyptian history of the last century was there a stable class configuration that would have opted for secularism as an official state policy. Unstable class configurations in Europe and developing countries would invariably lead to a mixture of corporatism, populism, and fascism, which tend to harness on the existing cultures rather than challenge them with anything “alien.”

As Agrama seems uninterested in raising the issue as to why Egypt opted for a “bargaining with secularism” rather than secularism as an official policy, his Questioning Secularism hinges on a defensive apologetic mode of reasoning whenever the Islamists seem on the lead. Take for example the Abu Zayd case, which, simply on procedural matters, would have been unthinkable in Turkey. The principle that the petitioners had employed was dubbed as the ḥisba, defined within Islam as “the commanding of the good when it is manifestly neglected, and the forbidding of the evil when its practice is manifest.” It goes without saying that the principle of ḥisba is historically determined, and when used in different historical contexts, could lead to a variation of meanings and interpretations based on how the users at a specific juncture want to operate with such principle. In the context of modern Egypt, therefore, Agrama argues, “the principle and practice of ḥisba acquires a distinctive thrust and import through and within the Egyptian law. While ḥisba, in its classical sharia elaborations, was part of a form of reasoning and practice connected to the cultivation of selves, in the courts it became focused on the maintenance and defense of interests aimed at protecting public order.” (Agrama 20) So in order to bypass the manifest contradictions between secular law and sharia, Agrama’s argument “liberalizes” the ḥisba in the context of Egyptian liberalism and secularism. The ḥisba is no more an “irrational aberration” (Agrama 19) that would not match with its classical Islamic precepts. Instead, it becomes an operative concept in relation to Egyptian secular law. The truth, however, is no matter how we contextualize ḥisba, the fact remains that a professor at Cairo University in the 1990s has been declared apostate by the Appeals Court, estranging him from his wife, declaring his marriage null and void, and wrecking apart his private and public life. First of all, Agrama is here wrong at characterizing the ḥisba in its classical premodern connotations as a “cultivation of the self,” which genealogically is more a medieval Christian concept that involves an interiorizing of belief than an Islamic one, while in modern times it is meant at “protecting the public order.” In both instances, the classical and modern interpretations of ḥisba, both operate, as the higher court argued, on the externalization of belief as manifested in visible acts. In both instances, therefore, the judicial authorities were concerned at “protecting public order.” What is at stake here is that a classical Islamic concept, even when interpreted in the liberal context of a modern nation-state, still operates under the assumption of externalization of belief in relation to a statist public order that needs to be protected. Without such externalization there would be no perjury, no court decision.

The second aspect of the debate concerns the “What if?” question: What if Egypt’s constitution had been fully secular? Obviously, the whole logic of the ḥisba logic would have been inoperative. The point not to be missed here is that the ḥisba logic would not ascribe itself as a Universal in Egyptian law, as it remains a Particular that the petitioners employed—as a legal procedure of its moment—in order to prosecute Abu Zayd. Agrama’s interpretation of the case would not even offer the possibility that it could be routinized for uses in other circumstances. That is to say, it remains a Particular that works for a particular case, but which, to use a Hegelian jargon, cannot be “sublated” for a higher more abstract Universal. Secularism as a Universal that applies itself under all conditions would have by contrast rendered such particular cases inoperative.

The modernization of Egyptian law, which begins in earnest under Mehmed Ali in the early nineteenth century, implied the introduction of Napoleonic codes in civil, penal, and commercial laws. The Ottomans did something similar with the Tanzimat once the nizami courts became operative; the new courts, following a Napoleonic model, introduced a diversity and identical hierarchy for all courts with the right to appeal to a higher court. The new Tanzimat system, both the Egyptian and Ottoman, instituted a split between modern secular codes and courts, on the one hand, and the sharia based courts of personal status on the other, a split that is still operative in the majority of Arab countries. The wager here is that the sharia courts themselves have become since the nizami courts a member of the court hierarchy, that is to say, having lost their prime role as the only operative courts that would handle anything from contracts and obligations, up to tort and crime, the sharia courts have been relegated to personal status only, operating within a hierarchy of courts. They thus have de facto been liberalized, in congruence with modern civil law. The Egyptians for their part integrated the personal status courts within the civil system in 1954, though the entire legal system takes the sharia as its “source,” as required by the constitution. But even the personal status code and courts, which would apply the sharia in matters of “obligations” (farā ͗iḍ), have implemented a liberalized version of the sharia, one that reasons in terms of secular codes, whereby the various religious groups would keep their own obligations operative in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. That this blurs the lines between the religious and secular is fairly obvious, though this should not prevent us as to why secularism was never adopted as an ideological and juridical stance in the first place.

Besides that Agrama fails to question seriously the possibility of an “openly stated” secularism, one that would have to be explicitly stated in the constitution, he also fails to acknowledge how such “lack” of an explicit secularism is probably linked to a military–one–party “corporatist” dominance without hegemony, as Ranajit Guha would say. For example, on p. 221, a claim is made that “Egypt is often described as a repressive, authoritarian state, and many studies of it proceeded on that premise. Its extended space of emergency, numerous presidential decrees, apparent abuses of constitutional powers, use of torture, and flouting of international conventions are all seen to provide ample evidence for this… And yet there is now a large body of literature, some of it decades old, that documents how Western democratic states have increasingly relied on emergency powers to conduct their affairs even since before World War II. Western European states used emergency powers for state reconstruction and the maintenance of colonial control. In the United States emergency powers began to be increasingly invoked since Roosevelt’s attempts to counter the Great Depression of the 1930s. Since a long time, according to this literature, the exception has become the norm.” First of all, let’s note here that “the state of exception,” following Carl Schmitt, is the very condition of the existence of law, hence of the state as such. That is to say, state-law only validates itself through itself as the exception to all norms pervading in society (Derrida’s force du droit). Second of all, beyond the fact that “the state of exception” is validated differently from one society to another and under different historical junctures, there is a big difference between liberal laissez-faire societies and authoritarian states like Egypt. For one thing, authoritarian states reason in terms of the Party that defeats the adversary, the enemy-figure, maintains the route to socialism, thus providing with a Grand Narrative that the liberal state clearly fails to provide. In the latter, abusive situations, such as torture, are secretly managed for narrow purposes, which remain “loose” on their own, outside a grand narrative.

In its stead, Agrama pursues “Egyptian secularism” as if it is already there, that is, explicitly stated in some constitutional text: “How then does secularism, as a form of power, work? And what work does it do upon the behaviors, attitudes, and ways of knowing that constitute our ways of life?” (p. 2)

Can we pose such questions in the context of societies which are Islamic but with no historical tradition of secularism? One can here allude directly to a decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court (CC) in January 1998, amid a decision to outlaw “Islamist” parties, regarding “the different nature of secularism in Turkey on the basis of the unique characteristics of Islam and the sociohistorical context of Turkey” (Yavuz 247). Indeed, the court confines religion in opposition to secularism and argues that “religion regulates the inner aspect of the individual whereas secularism regulates the outer aspect of the individual.” Thus, Turkish secularism can be seen as different from democratic forms of secularism in terms of its “Jacobin,” “militant and militarized,” and “antireligious” features that impose a top-down Western lifestyle. Secularism in the Turkish context is a state ideology and an instrument of othering and criminalizing opposition. (ibid.)

Hence the special nature of Turkish society, which historically was an Empire-driven Islam, where qānūn-mindedness (not the sharia per se) was the political norm (Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, v. 3), implied, upon the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923–27, an explicit policy of adopting “secularism,” understood as a top-down “Jacobin” approach to society, whereby the state would take a militant and militarized, if not antireligious, attitude, openly declaring “Islam” as “unfit” as religion of the state; even “unfit,” in some respects, as religion “of the people.” The point here is that the newly born republican state took an aggressive stance, much more than French laicism on the eve of the First World War, to “fashion” a secular state and society. That is to say: considering that secularism did not historically grow as discourse and practice within the Empire, it was an outcome of the new policies of the nation-state. The latter, however, is not, at least for colonial societies, a “prime representation,” but a representation of a representation; a representation that emanates from the prime representation that the west made of the nation-state for itself. The beginning is therefore the nation-state itself, which prompted a policy of secularism as a concept, and secularization as a practice. Which is precisely the problem: the nation-state in this instance is a western representation, which historically evolved out of the European history of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The “secular” was already a doctrine of the middle ages whose purpose was to separate the profane from the religious. Secularism comes through as a nineteenth-century representation of the secular within the context of the nation-state. The nation-state primarily implies an “imagined community” whose roots emanate from a print-capitalism of the vernacular; which implies centuries of “coming together” for religious beliefs, regional differences, groups and ethnicities; it implies a “society of the individuals” who come together not simply endowed with political and civil rights, but of common forms of life (Wittgenstein). When a newly founded society like “Turkey” adopts secularism in conjunction with the nation-state, one must remember here that it is always the nation-state that comes first as a historical necessity, because Empire as a form of polity is obsolete; secularism is a byproduct of the nation-state, a second necessity out of the first. But, in the Turkish case, the nation-state did not mature out of the history of Empire; it was rather a bastard byproduct (opération césarienne) which was imposed by colonialism and whose concepts were borrowed from Europe. Consequently, the parts that make this nation-state are only parts; they’re a non-All, whose Oneness and Wholeness remains imaginary. In Europe, critical literature deconstructs the nation-state as a non-All which fails meeting its ideal of democracy, fairness, and cohesiveness. Such non-All deconstructionism, however, always assumes the overbearing existence of the nation-state as historical reality whose evolution was witnessed in Europe itself. Deconstructionism therefore primarily aims at a deepening of democracy, which always hides exclusionist policies of the non-All: to accept l’étranger, l’intrus, in me, not as alien foreigner, but as an other.

What happens in states like Egypt where there is no open declaration for secularism? The book tackles the “blurs” in Egyptian law and society between the religious and the secular. In the end, it keeps telling us that things are so blurred that Egypt cannot be described as a religious state, in spite of the constitution naming the sharia as the main source of law. For example, the sources of Egyptian civil law are French, hence “many fundamental provisions of the sharia are patently ignored and unimplemented” (2). The lesson here is that many things exist formally on paper, which in principle would prescribe religious law, but in practice have no value. But then, if that’s the case, then why doesn’t Egypt officially declare secularism? And would that make any difference? Was the Turkish declaration of secularism only in relation to an open-minded élite, or was it fostered through a particular combination of class hegemony? In any case, the non-declaration of secularism is in itself revealing, even if de facto most of Egyptian civil, commercial, penal laws are indeed secular, unaffected by the precepts of the sharia and fiqh. Moreover, the fact that personal status law regulates kinship, marriage, divorce, alimony, and inheritance, means that it controls significant chunks of social relations, even for non-Muslims. Finally, the absence of official secularism means that “minorities” are treated as minorities, as dhimmis, rather than as citizens under a universal civil law. To wit, the status of dhimmis, in particular the Copts, is not limited to personal status, as it affects their religious and political rights. In this regard, even Turkish secularism is “incomplete,” as it forbids “minorities” to form political parties, build religious sites, places of worship and cemeteries. In sum, whether secularism is officially declared as policy or not, there are always “hidden” and overt attitudes towards the religious that regulate that dividing line between the declared and undeclared. The question then becomes not so much whether Egypt is religious or secular (Agrama 3), but the declared versus the undeclared: each enunciation opens up for the graded areas of language.

Considering that every religious phenomenon, be it legal, ritualistic, political, is inscribed into the modernity of civil law, capitalism, the nation-state, the mass-media, and receives its raison d’être from such institutions, it is then fairly obvious that borderlines between the religious and the secular are fairly blurred. What then is the point of asking what is religious and what is secular? What we can do, as historians, sociologists, and anthropologists is document how such transformations take place; how in the inscription of traditional non-modern non-western phenomena in modern lifeworlds specific to them, they receive new meanings. The meanings could be varied: the personal in relation to the collective (community, society, state, mass-media); the inscription into modernity; the structure of labor and capital in society.

Agrama distinguishes between a modern state and a modernizing state (p. 5). The distinction stems from the difficulty of categorizing Egypt in terms of oppositions: modern versus non-modern, religious versus secular. Still, there is a problem: “It doesn’t tell us how we define and distinguish fully secular states from incomplete ones; it doesn’t tell us about the processes by which secularism is implemented; it doesn’t tell us how practices of defining full from incomplete secularity might be an integral part of these very processes. Such reasoning therefore begs the question not only of Egypt’s secularity or religiosity but also of secularity and religiosity more generally.”

Do we need, however, to make such rigid distinction? Doesn’t such line of questioning fall in the same trap that it pretends to avoid? The book is full of events and practices of the religious being inscribed in the modern meanings of civil law, the nation-state, capitalism, and the mass-media. (The book addresses in particular two sets of records: the al-Azhar Mosque Fatwa Council, and the personal status court records.) If the secular is the universal, then particulars receive their particular meanings from the lifeworlds they are inscribed into from the universal. (In the same way that universal capitalist labor, based on profit and capital accumulation, inscribes itself in Egyptian labor based on small family enterprise, and corrupt crony capitalism. The point here is not to declare that the case of Egyptian labor would not fit with the universal, because it is “incomplete” capitalist labor, etc. Universal labor itself, as analyzed by Marx, only makes sense as universal in the particular concrete situations of lifeworlds labors, which vary in time and space. In sum, when it comes to universal entities like the state, the secular, law, labor and capital, which receive their universal meanings from European history, they produce concrete meanings out of the concrete situations they are inscribed into.)

Consider, for example, the institution of the fatwa to which the author devotes a chapter (“What is a Fatwa?”). The fatwa is surprisingly conceptualized under the Foucauldian notion of “the care of the self” as souci de soi, which Foucault in his late years, within his multi-volume Histoire de la sexualité, had worked out for the Greeks and Romans: “I suggest that the practice of the fatwa be understood as a mode of the care of the self, as a practice by which selves, in the multiplicity of their affairs, are maintained and advanced as part of Islamic tradition. In this, the authority of the mufti is that of a guide.” (Agrama 180) Besides the fact that this is a farfetched “care of the self,” the fatwa, even if mufti and questioner are into uncertainties, remains a submission to an external judicial authority; in many respects, it is not that dissimilar to a judge’s authority (which may rely on that of the mufti) in that the applicant to a fatwa or legal case only obeys. Muftis, judges, administrative and upper courts, do not even have to demonstrate their line of reasoning. That is to say: their enunciations are meant to be performative, to be obeyed and followed. To elaborate, there is no mode of subjectivation per se for the simple reason that the questioner is there only to follow, not to argue. Moreover, the questioner is invariably restrained by the legal language and its procedures.

“Although the personal status courts and the Fatwa Council are both outcomes of modern reform, and thus represent entirely modern possibilities, their structures of authority could not be more different.” (Agrama 184) They are, indeed, different, but it is also a question of whether such differences matter to the point that the fatwa could be associated with the notion of “the care of the self.” A social actor may endlessly debate things with a mufti or judge, but in the final analysis, in both instances, she is submitting herself to a judicial authority. The care of the self assumes processes of subjectivization which legal systems cannot accommodate.

One of the virtues of postmodernity, assuming there is one, is that there is not only one modernity; even European modernity has become one among several, or has been “provincialized,” though it assumes the role of a privileged universal modernity, out of which the other modernities and postmodernities have erupted. Which means that every modernity, be it Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, is relative to the culture that produced it. Each modernity borrows from and adapts from others. Besides that each culture and civilization proceeds with its modernity operating with restrictions from its own past, present, and future. The wager for Islam is not simply its politicization, as the modernization of Islam touches on every aspect of the lifeworld. For example, when it comes to the family, sexuality, privacy, and personal status, it is difficult to picture an American court ordering a university professor to divorce his wife on the accusation of blasphemy. And the wager here is not to be limited to religion and secularism, as it touches on all kinds of sensibilities related to the “social.” So when an Egyptian court, based on an archaic reinterpreted (if not over-interpreted) notion of ḥisba, commands Abu Zayd to divorce his wife, this in itself is a form of “modernity” related specifically to Egypt; other courts in the Islamic world may, indeed, “borrow” from the Egyptian interpretation, or take the Abu Zayd case as precedent; but even in such instances, we are not “outside” the modernities of the modern.

But then within this postmodernist relativism western civilization has its special status: it is the civilization, which since the Greeks, Romans, and Christians, has provided the roots of modernity for the world at large. When Agrama states that issues of family, marriage, divorce, sexuality, personal status, are problematic in Egypt as they are in western societies (Agrama 184–5), he forgets to mention that in the secular west such problematizations become normative for the word at large, that is, they become the universal, “sublating” the particulars of other civilizations. The error would be to portray Egypt in a situation of “catch up” with the west and the rest, as it is difficult to argue in terms of a “stageable” historicism, an evolutionist history across societies and civilizations where certain prerequisites must be met, prior to more mature ones eventually showing up.

Zouhair Ghazzal

Professor of historical and social sciences

Loyola University, Chicago

zghazza@luc.edu