Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report by Saba Mahmood (review)

In the last two decades, there have been some original developments in the anthropology of religion. Within it, the anthropology of Islam seems to have made impressive contributions that significantly enrich and nuance our understanding of this important dimension of human existence. Talal Asad (1993, 2003) made a clear rupture in the field when he demonstrated that what we commonly call religion is a category of the Enlightenment unseparated from the category of the secular and that religion itself is defined by the secular state. Several of Asad's students have built on his thoughts and provided original contributions to the anthropology of Islam (Hirschkind 2006, Agrama 2012). Among them is Saba Mahmood, who made significant contributions first to the anthropology of Islam and feminism (Mahmood 2005); and in her most recent book to the anthropology of secularism.

In Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Saba Mahmood examines the secularization of Egyptian national life by tackling the issue of religious minorities residing in Egypt. In the first chapter, she undertakes a genealogy of the concepts of religious liberty and minority rights, noting that these two concepts were introduced by European powers in the 19th century as part of their strategies of intrusion and the weakening of the Ottoman Empire. With the emergence of the nation-state as a global polity, the concepts were integrated within the discourse of civil and political rights. She shows how in the inter-war period, the League of Nations legalized the concepts, and how the problem of minority rights continued to generate tensions in the human rights charters of the United Nations. The concept of religious liberty, she notes, was unseparated from the principle of state sovereignty and for this same reason it was used to undermine the Ottoman state. Interestingly enough, the two seemingly secular concepts have been the result of secular and religious forces, including US Evangelical missionaries and lobbyists. The very genealogy of these concepts—religious liberty and minority rights—are indicative of how much the secular and the religious are intertwined.

In the second chapter, Mahmood shows how other concepts, notably the private and the public, were also introduced in Egyptian society by colonial powers. These two principles transformed the understanding of the self in political and social life of Egypt. Mahmood maintains that the transformation of Egyptian social and political life is similar to secular state across nations, including Western ones. Mahmood writes that this is because secularism everywhere has a shared genealogy. The situation of the Copts is a case in point. Mahmood analyzes Egyptian national debates around the concept of "minority" from 1922 (with the then new constitution) to the present. She shows how secularism, while promising civic and political equality, has exacerbated religious difference in Egypt in unprecedented ways. Before colonialism, religious communities, including Muslim ones, had much more flexibility in defining and negotiating their religious differences.

In the third chapter, Mahmood shows how the dilemma of minorities (Copts, but also Baha'i) is an outcome of the secular state and is linked to the introduction of the principles of private and public already in place during the colonial period. For instance, while Islamic family law constitutes majoritarian norms of national identity, Coptic family law is an exception. It is not subject to the sovereignty of the nation-state, but rather to the sovereignty of the Coptic Orthodox Church. While citizens are equal in front of the law, the Baha'i, whose religion is not recognized by the state, see themselves treated differently not only from the majority, but also from the Christian minorities. Through a close reading of Egyptian family law Mahmood persuasively shows that the principles of private and public allow the state to intervene in religion towards which it is supposed to be indifferent and neutral. While religious authority becomes marginal through its relegation to the private sphere, Mahmood argues that by the same token it acquires a greater power over the regulation of family and sexual...