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REFLECTIONS ON LAïCITé & THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Talal Asad

Keynote address at the "Beirut Conference on Public Spheres," October 22-24, 2004

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Introductory
The idea of the public sphere rests on a binary scheme: public vs. private. The public sphere is also thought of as part of a tertiary structure, the space of general communication and information that mediates between the overarching state and the many restricted spaces of daily life. Its historical origin is reflected in the growing power and need of the bourgeoisie in early capitalist society. This development has been seen not only as a step in the emergence of a modern public, but as essential to the formation of liberal democracy. Essential to that formation also is the political doctrine of secularism.

In modern society there is typically a multiplicity of religious beliefs and identities, and—so we are told—they can be held together only by a formal separation between religious belonging and political status, and the allocation of religious belief to the private sphere. To be fully part of a participatory democracy citizens holding different religious beliefs (or none) must share something that enables them to have a common political life—a public space in which information affecting the entire political community can be exchanged and ideas debated. But reasoned discourse can take place in that space only if religion does not dominate it. According to this conception, the public sphere is ideally a secular space central to a secular state.

In what follows I want to discuss a recent re-statement of secularism (or laïcité) in France—arising from the so-called Islamic headscarf affair—and to look briefly at the role of public opinion in it. But what interests me here is not the degree to which the public sphere enables or obstructs rational debate, or who is excluded, or whether it actually facilitates the active participation of citizens in forming a critical public opinion or obliges them to consume passively distorted opinions prepared by corporations, or how it relates to the problem of democratization. I view the public sphere as a domain in which particular kinds of subjects are formed as morally independent and socially responsible. For even speaking is more than self-expression and communication—it is also, famously, making oneself and being made, investing the self with a variety of emotions.

For most of 2003 and much of the following year, French public opinion was exercised by the affair of "the Islamic veil." Should Muslim girls be allowed to wear a covering over their hair when they are in public schools? The dominant view was definitely that they should not. A considerable amount of polemic was published on this topic.1 This was not the first time that the matter had been publicly discussed, but on this occasion the outcome was a government-appointed body—the Stasi commission—that was charged with providing an answer to what was seen as a serious social and political problem, namely, the undermining of laïcité. The commission consulted a wide range of opinion and submitted a report to the President in which it recommended a law prohibiting the display of religious symbols (crosses, kippas, and headscarves) in public schools.

The headscarf worn by Muslim schoolgirls has become the symbol of many aspects of social and religious life among Muslim immigrants and their offspring to which many people publicly object. Researchers have enquired into the reasons for their lack of integration into French society,2 and especially for the drift of many of their youth towards "fundamentalist Islam" (l'islamisme), a drift that some of them trace to pervasive racism and to economic disadvantage, but that others see more as a result of manipulations by conservative Middle Eastern countries and by inflammatory Islamist web-sites. Intellectuals have debated whether and if so how it is possible for religious Muslims to be integrated into secular French society. The passions that have led to the new law are remarkable. It is felt by the majority of French intellectuals and politicians—of the left as well as of the right—that the secular character of the Republic is under threat because of Islam, which they see as being symbolized by the headscarf.

People commonly find the origin of laïcité in the constitution of the Third Republic at the end of the nineteenth century. But secularism has many beginnings, and I find it useful to begin the story in early modern times. At the end of the sixteenth-century wars of religion, the states of Western Christendom adopted the cuius regio eius religio principle (the religion of the ruler is the religion of his subjects). This agreement is part of the genealogy of secularization in that it attempted to resolve religious conflicts by adopting a political principle. Contrary to what is popularly believed, it was not the modern world that introduced a separation between the religious and the political. A separation was recognized in medieval Christendom, but there it articulated complementary organizing principles. Now that distinction had become contingent: religion could be absorbed by the political or excluded altogether from it. That this arrangement did not end persecution is not surprising. After all, transcendent power and authority were now given to the state to decide not only on who was deserving of religious tolerance but on what precisely religious tolerance was.

In 1589 the Edict of Nantes gave French Protestants the right to practice their religion in a Catholic realm, at the very time when Spain was on the verge of expelling its Muslim converts. Although the Edict was subsequently revoked, the French Revolution two centuries later denounced all religious intolerance and attacked ecclesiastical power in the name of humanity. The political oratory and pamphleteering of the Revolution created a public space that was national in its focus and ambition. By then, of course, the essence of religion had come to be generally defined as consisting essentially of personal belief so that the Church as a public body appeared simply as a rival for political authority. The result was nearly a century of bitter conflict between the state and its internal competitor for sovereignty, a conflict finally resolved under the Third Republic that was dedicated to a civilizing mission in the name of the Revolutionary ideals of humanity and progress. When in 1882 the Third Republic made secular schooling compulsory for six- to thirteen-year old children, public education became a means for cultivating future citizens who would take part in the formation of responsible public opinion. It was coincidentally then, under the Third Republic, that a significant extension of France’s colonial conquests took place, justified by its mission civilisatrice, the complement to its positivist nation-building at home. (Although Algeria had been conquered earlier in the century in 1830, Tunisia was annexed in 1881 and Morocco in 1907, both under the Third Republic—as were other places in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.) Anti-clerical schooling at home, unequal agreements with the Church, and imperial expansion abroad were the pillars on which laïcité was established under the Third Republic.3

I want to suggest that the French secular state today abides by the cuius regio eius religio principle even though it disclaims any religious allegiance and governs a largely irreligious society.4 It is not the maintenance or interdiction of a particular religion by the state that is significant in this principle but the installation of a single power drawn from a single source and facing a single political task: the worldly care of its population regardless of its beliefs. Since "religion" draws the attention of subjects to other-worldly concerns, political power needs to define its proper place for the worldly well-being of the population in its care. This requires answering the question: What are the signs of religion’s presence? Laïcité therefore seems to me comparable to other secularisms, such as that of the United States, a society hospitable to religious belief and activism and a Federal government seeking to apply the principle of neutrality towards religious groupings but a government that also finds itself needing to define religion (and therefore its necessary limits) through the courts. In both cases one could say that what properly belongs to the public sphere (a space of continuous debate and diverse interpretability) is absorbed into the state’s constitutional domain in which an accumulation of legal judgments seeks to fix meanings.

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