The further question I have is whether secularism is Western at all. Was there secular political organizing—in the sense of how the term has developed—somewhere else and before European modernity?

The answer is that there was. Among many other “non-Western” examples, Islamic history can provide few examples of “separation” between state and Church, and this was the case among the Ummayads, the Abbassids, and other dynasties.

The further point that is worth examining is whether we need to rather understand the question of secularism and the separation of state and church in relative terms rather in absolute ones. And here “separation of state and church” means the ending of the absolute rule of the Church, which is more of a European lineage than anywhere else.

Some who are critical of those “fanatics” who want to reinstate the role of the Church in government have legitimate fears. In Europe and the West in general, it means going back to times where people had much less of a say in their property, life, and liberty than they do now. In the “Muslim” world, some who oppose “religious fanatics” are opposed to something that was never there. There was never an absolute rule of the church in the Muslim world, and those “purists” are fantasizing about something that was never there, or about something that was that was “represented” for them by Western scholarship and discourse that continues to project its own history and reality rather than present serious analysis and history of what was in the Muslim world, and what is at this moment.
Groups who want to turn the clock back, rather than forward by learning and improving our living conditions in a political framework that is more just and tolerant to real diversity, exist both in the West and in the East. What is really troublesome is that in the academy as a site of critical reflection, there seems to be rather more of complicity, reaction, or complete denial.

In her book, Politics of Piety, Mahmood is not discounting that Secularity 3—in some form—already exists in Egypt; the fact that people feel able to join the piety movement point out that some form of religion as one option among is present, even if not as strongly in the West. It is not whether secularism exists in Egypt that troubles her, but rather what it does. Like Talal Asad, Mahmood worries that a modern secular worldview leaves no room for critiques that are non-liberal, making a distinct teleology—like that of the mosque movement—all but impossible. I think she has done an excellent job of furthering this discussion in her blog posts, but I’d like to take the discussion back to A Secular Age itself.

Mahmood’s definition of secularism fits more or less as two different forms of Taylor’s secularity 1 and 3: “Secularism has often been understood in two primary ways: as the separation of religion from issues of the state, and the increasing differentiation of society into discrete spheres” (47). She argues that if the mosque movement seeks to change anything, it is her second form of secularism, in which religion is relegated to its own private sphere. They “seek to imbue each of the various spheres of contemporary life with a regulative sensibility that takes its cue from the Islamic theological corpus rather than from modern secular ethics” (47).

Mahmood’s point here ties in with her book’s much larger purpose: a meta-critique of critique itself. She points out that a secular worldview (bearing some similarity to Taylor’s Secularity 3) is imposed upon Egypt as a totalizing, even redemptive vision, while a similar totalizing view (that of the piety movement) is disregarded immediately, without any sort of intellectual generosity or openness. There is no escaping secularism in the Middle East, which is “impacting everything from pedagogical techniques to conceptions of moral and bodily health to patterns of familial and extra-familial relations” (191). Responding to secularism then cannot simply be a political or economic discussion, but should emphasize “arguments about what constitutes a proper way of living ethically in a world where such questions were thought to have become obsolete. In Egypt today, the primary topoi for this ethical labor are the body, ritual observance, and protocols of public conduct” (192).

It is an important challenge, and a difficult one to respond to: after all, the world Mahmood describes is quite different from the one Taylor does and the compromise of “you do your thing and I’ll do mine” is, in fact, an implicit rejection of the piety movement and an acceptance of Taylor’s ethics of authenticity. For example, the “forms of attire toward which secular-liberal morality claim indifference” are the kinds that allow secularism in the first place (75-76). Mahmood’s critique bears important similarities to Talal Asad’s concern about the dominating power of Taylor’s secularism. Indeed, both challenge whether Secularity 3 can in fact function as the “overlapping consensus” Taylor calls for in his 1998 essay in Secularism and its Critics. I think it can, but I think the means of compromise ought not to be rooted in the axial age, but rather in fusing Taylor’s conception of Secularity 3 with the Foucauldian emphasis on bodily practice that Mahmood employs.

William Connolly talks frequently about the “politics of becoming” and the importance of cultivating a means of engagement. I’m not sure that is entirely what Mahmood is getting at, but I think they are onto something similar, something which can help Taylor take into account bodily practice. Mahmood writes that the mosque attendees want to ameliorate this situation through the cultivation of those bodily aptitudes, virtues, habits, and desires that serve to ground Islamic principles in the requisite strategies and skills to enable such a manner of conduct, and the lives of the most devoted participants are organized around gradually learning and perfecting these skills (45).

She later describes various participants in the movement talking about how bodily practice enables them to be more virtuous. However, it is important not to frame these as a sort of individual means of authenticating the self. Mahmood makes clear that she does not believe that an actor “uses various corporeal techniques to acquire a cultural specificity” (121). Rather, for her, bodily practice forms “the terrain upon which the topography of the subject comes to be mapped” and so the self moves not from internal to external but, in fact, the other way around. What practice does is more important than what it means:

What is striking about this approach to the explication of the self is that the work bodily practices perform in crafting a subject—rather than the meanings they signify—carries the analytical weight. In other words, the “how” of practices is explored rather than their symbolic or hermeneutic value (122).

This approach is particularly useful for Mahmood in her analysis of gender norms, when she argues that a hermeneutic approach might not capture the fact that “acts of resistance” compel the body to act in certain ways, requiring “the retraining of sensibilities, affect, desire, and sentiments—those registers of corporeality that often escape the logic of representation and symbolic articulation” (188).

Both Taylor and Mahmood agree that bodily practice does not much matter in the new form of secularity: this might be somewhat lamentable for Taylor, but it is downright tragic for the women in the mosque movement. But here is where Mahmood’s stern warning against hermeneutics becomes useful: we are not talking about how we interpret the body, which, quite likely, does in fact happen a lot less. We are talking about the existence of the body itself, which, following Foucault and others, does not ever really disappear. Whether or not we are aware of it, our bodies form our ethical sensibilities—a point first made by Aristotle, made contemporary by Elias, and used implicitly by Taylor. Mahmood would certainly agree that this is true for the women of the piety movement, and I am sure she would grant that the same is true for the rest of the secular world.

So the compromise I would suggest between the two is simple enough: we need to recognize that everyone—not just the women of the piety movement—are ethically formed by their bodies. Mahmood discusses the self-reflection that always happens in self-formation, even when it is mainly physical (I notice I pray in the right form or I don’t, so I adjust accordingly, etc.) (55-57). I think she is onto something important here, and I am borrowing from the Connolly’s politics of becoming to talk about it.

What if we all became more aware of our bodily practice? Of course, our various end-goals would still be quite different; we would still be, whether the women of the mosque movement like it or not, amidst the ethics of authenticity. The modern moral order will almost certainly rule, whether we like it or not. But if we are aware of what is visceral, what is bodily, what is habitual, and we are aware of these things as preconditioning our responses (rather that being the subjects of them), then we are—all of us—more able to engage in the sort of generous critique and interlocution which Mahmood describes.