Thank you very much for this question. You understand, that I don’t buy the official American position on Iraq as a secularist position. It’s an imperial(ist) position, plain and simple. An imperialist position can be established, authorized, and defended either by ’secular’ imaginaries or by ‘religious’ imaginaries. It’s still imperialist. (Remember, in the early Bush years, work in Iraq was justified in terms of a new Crusade. Why is this position a secularist one? Because it comes from the American government? That’s not enough.)

As such, imperialist practices will of course disguise themselves. There will not be explicit admission — “we’re there to control the oil”; “we’re establishing a military base for Middle East operations” etc. In response to this disguise (which some people call secularist politics), the anti-secularist position regarding Iraq does not give us any ground for anti-imperialist action, except a naive and surely nativist notion of self-determination.

But here my position is uncompromising. There cannot be self-determination by recourse to authority that exists outside this self. OK, philosophical language, but in essence political. I’m the last to decry the role that a kind of transcendental slavation played as galvaninzing force in various struggles — even revolutionary ones — against colonialist etc. oppression. It’s real and valid. But it has never produced real self-determination in the post-colonial sphere, and this Frantz Fanon had seen with incredible clarity even within the time-frame of anti-colonial struggle.

So, the question is not what role is Islam playing, as revolutionary authority in the course of insurgency, but what role is it to play as an imaginary of post-insurgency, or victory, if you will — of emancipation and self-determination. I have real doubts that it can. If it will, I will acknowledge it.

To Robin Leslie:

I’m not certain I understand the spirit of your remarks as something that challenges my position and that I need to respond. This is why I did make a distinction between the various terms — and my general outlook suggests exactly what you are saying, about the need to consider the matter in more philosophical terms than sociological ones. In both cases, however, historical factors are key.

The secular was conceived at the Enlightenment as distinct from the sacred, and conceptually dichotomised in subsequent discourse up to the late twentieth century, when more critical questions about the actual, practical organics of the sacred-secular relationship began to asked. In fact the debate among interdisciplinary theologians, philosophers and ecologists deals with secular and transcendental (sacred/spiritual) realities in a more nuanced and dramatic way than the rather pointless necrophilic debate among sociologists of religion and the apologists of secularism. Western neo-liberal beliefs in Progress, technology, rationality and political control are now going out of various discourses and being supplanted by more recent interdisciplinary debates which revive some of the medieval conceptions whilst developing these in a new context.

The challenge for me is to understand how the secular can work against empire, even against the history of secularism’s complicity with colonialist and imperialist practices.

And

In the most direct sense, secular criticism purports to unmask social historical situations where authority is assumed to emerge from elsewhere.

Those are very general remarks, and I have been wondering how they might be applied to a current issue.

To wit: It is clear that the American “secular imagination” has fixed on the sectarian aspect of violence in Iraq (violence between religious groups) as a distinguishing characteristic the violence there, and on the other side of the coin there seems to be an idea that American troops (the “secular” power) cannot leave in the foreseeable future, partly because their presence moderates the violence, and their departure risks exascerbating it. This underlying “imagination” is at least partly to blame for the lack of pressure for withdrawal. It seems a pretty straightforward case of “secularism’s complicity…” to use your phrase.

What I can’t quite make out is where your secular critique of the secular imagination would take you. Would it merely be content to say “it’s about the oil etcetera”? Or to put it the other way around, would your approach to critique have anything to say about possible meeting of the minds between between the “secular” and the islamic sides? Or would you consider that “anti-secularist thinking”?

I am curious how you would propose to go about making “the secular work against empire” in this case.