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  • Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report by Saba Mahmood
  • Sari Nusseibeh (bio)
Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 237 pp.

Chapters 1–4 of this thought-provoking study address secularism—the idea that nonreligious regimes deal best with religious differences within states—and chapter 5 deals with secularity: the subjective dimension occupied by the norms and values upheld by citizens within that state. While the primary focus of the first four chapters is the contemporary Egyptian experience (the travails of the Coptic and Baha'i minorities), the author reinforces her general argument—that secularism exacerbates rather than nullifies religious frictions—by also drawing on legal cases affecting Muslim minorities in Western secular regimes. The fifth chapter addresses the public debate over a recent and prizewinning novel (involving events in the early history of Christianity) that engaged Christian and liberal intellectuals in Egypt and that exhibits in clear terms the ongoing influence of religious narratives on public consciousness. Overall, the author challenges the "common wisdom," which says that, if religious minorities in Egypt (or in other countries in the Arab world) continue to suffer under secular regimes, the answer lies simply in more secularism. As she tries to show (from cases both in Egypt and in secular Western societies), the profoundly religious background cultures in all of these polities manage to slip into and reinforce themselves in the legal instruments and laws of those societies—in the Western hemisphere, through the legal but precarious distinction between religious belief and religious display; and in Egypt, through laws still informed by a hegemonic Muslim jurisprudence. The study is groundbreaking and richly researched, bringing into view and synthesizing elements from different fields that together present a coherent and forceful argument.

In the end, some readers, however, may feel that they still need an answer to this question: if not secularism, then what? If no alternatives exist, would secularism not be better than the systems it has replaced? The author quotes Feuerbach and then Marx on the nature of (liberal) states, as if to intimate that the ultimate fault lies in the very concept of the state as a (modern) human-centered edifice. Thus, minority problems may be inherent in the structure of liberal-democratic [End Page 534] regimes encompassing significantly diverse cultural elements, while attempting to modulate private and public goods and rights. If the author believes that even secularism cannot resolve those problems, then hers is an eminently reasonable argument, amply demonstrated, throughout her study, to be the case.

Sari Nusseibeh

Sari Nusseibeh, formerly president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, holds the UNESCO professorship in freedom of expression there. He founded, with Ami Ayalon, the People's Voice, a Palestinian-Israeli peace initiative, and was co-recipient (with Amos Oz) of the Siegfried Unseld Preis. A Commander of the Order of Léopold, the highest order of knighthood in Belgium, he is the author, most recently, of The Story of Reason in Islam; What's a Palestinian State Worth?; and Once upon a Country: A Palestinian Life.

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