Egypt A Secular or Religion State Discussion Briefly reflect on something that surprised you in a particular reading. You may reflect on anything at all, b

Egypt A Secular or Religion State Discussion Briefly reflect on something that surprised you in a particular reading. You may reflect on anything at all, but you must be specific. Provide an occasional quotation, or a page number to direct us to what excited you. Whatever it is, share it with us and elaborate on it a bit. One – two paragraph Comparative Studies in Society and History 2010;52(3):495–523.
0010-4175/10 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010
doi:10.1017/S0010417510000289
Secularism, Sovereignty,
Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a
Secular or a Religious State?
HUSSEIN ALI AGRAMA
Anthropology, University of Chicago
In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity.
For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together,
giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously
secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism
itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies
crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt’s
religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my
thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in
perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.
H I S B A , A P O S T A S Y, A N D T H E C A S E O F A B U Z A Y D
In the summer of 1996, the High Court of Egypt1 issued a stunning decision. It
concerned Nasr Abu Zayd, a Cairo University professor of Arabic and Islamic
Acknowledgments: These considerations derive from nearly two years of fieldwork in Cairo,
mostly between 1999–2001, observing law courts and sessions at the Fatwa Council of
Al-Azhar mosque, studying judicial reasoning, and exploring Egypt’s intertwined legal and religious history. I was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and Fulbright. Funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York enabled me to conduct follow-up research for this essay. For their
comments on different versions of this essay, I thank Talal Asad, Amahl Bishara, Maria-Eugenia
Bonilla-Chacin, Summerson Carr, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Baudouin Dupret, Kesha
Fikes, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood, Amira Mittermaier, Robin Shoaps, and Lisa
Wedeen. Thanks are also due to my anonymous CSSH reviewers, who also engaged my ideas so
carefully, as well as the CSSH editors for their help in editing the final version of this piece.
1
By “High Court” I mean the Court of Cassation (Mahkamat al-Naqd), Egypt’s highest civil and
criminal appellate court. A separate high court exists for administrative law: the Council of State
(Maglis al-Dawla). There is also a Supreme Constitutional Court. Moustafa 2007.
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studies. Based on its reading of his scholarly writings, the High Court declared
Abu Zayd an apostate from Islam even though he professed to be a Muslim, and
it annulled his marriage, against both his and his wife’s will.2 Under Islamic law
(the shari`a), which governs personal status relations amongst Muslims in
Egypt, a non-Muslim man cannot be married to a Muslim woman. That is
why the court annulled Abu Zayd’s marriage when it judged him an apostate
from Islam. The case was brought against Abu Zayd by a group of private citizens, using an Islamic concept that was nowhere to be found in the Egyptian
legal codes. That concept, called hisba, technically means, “the commanding
of the good, when it has become neglected, and the forbidding of the evil,
when its practice becomes manifest.” It was introduced in this case through a
kind of loophole in the Egyptian personal status law that makes possible the
use of un-codified Islamic principles for civil litigation.
The Court’s decision was stunning not only because it adjudged Abu Zayd
an apostate and annulled his marriage, and not only because it legitimized
the legal use of hisba.3 What was most stunning was its declaration that
hisba was a duty of all Muslim citizens, who should raise a case in court
anytime a wrong in society became manifest. The Court argued that the legitimacy of this use of hisba in civil litigation derived from the public interest and
especially from the requirement to protect the public order (al-nizam al-‘aam)—
an interesting legal concept whose salience for secular practice and power
has been largely neglected, and which I will discuss in some detail later in
this essay.
The Court also emphasized that its decision did not violate religious
freedom, because that freedom included maintaining the conditions for the
practice and cultivation of religious belief. Nevertheless, the decision created
tremendous, widespread anxiety, partly because no limits had been specified
on this now legalized duty of hisba. This meant that a whole range of practices
considered legitimately Islamic might now be put into question. But it also
meant that potentially anyone could now legally intervene into and possibly
break apart your marriage—a prospect that seemed to undermine the very
integrity of a private domain of personal rights. Hisba had become a power
of wide and indeterminate range, placed in the hands of private citizens, and
backed by the coercive capacities of the state.
To quell this anxiety and ostensibly protect the private domain of personal
rights, the legislature enacted a law restricting the use of hisba to state officials
only. But this did not reduce any of the indeterminate range of hisba, and thus,
2
The High Court decision upheld the Appeals Court’s verdict from a year before. The case was
initiated in 1993.
3
Indeed, hisba had been used successfully in the courts before, albeit in a restricted fashion,
during the 1960s, in a case where the husband had officially converted from Islam. That is different
from Abu Zayd, who professed to be a Muslim even though the Court declared him an apostate.
Johansen 2003.
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any of the anxiety caused by it. Indeed, both Islamists and secular liberals
opposed the legislation, Islamists, because it reserved the power of hisba for
the secular state and restricted their religious rights as private citizens, and liberals, because it recognized the legitimacy of a religious principle for public
decision-making and reserved that power to the state, in contradiction to its
constitutionally espoused principles of religious freedom. Liberals were
pitted against Islamists, and both were against the state. Abu Zayd, fearing
for the security of his family and himself, left the country.
A S E C U L A R O R A R E L I G I O U S S T AT E ?
The hisba decision poignantly demonstrates the blurring of religion and politics
with which I am concerned here. This is in two related ways. First, hisba
became a public, coercive power4 that could potentially be used to punish
people for holding to religious beliefs and practices defined as heretical. It
thus violated liberal secular prescriptions for religion’s proper boundaries.
Second, and more importantly, the courts and subsequent legislation articulated
hisba very differently from how it had been classically elaborated within the
Islamic shari`a. Within the shari`a it was part of a set of carefully gradated disciplinary practices that aimed to cultivate and secure certain moral virtues.5 But
in the court judgments and in legislation hisba was articulated as a legal practice connected to the protection of public interest, public order, private rights,
and religious belief.6 So hisba had become attached to liberal legal concepts
even as it violated secular precepts, as it seemed to remain a distinctly nonsecular power exercised by the state.
The anxieties, conflicts and confusions created by the hisba decision also
provoked with force and clarity a question that had long been and continues
to be asked about Egypt: whether it is a secular or a religious state. This has
been asked both within and outside of Egypt not just because of cases like
hisba but also because the state exhibits a number of peculiar ambiguities.
For example, its constitution names the Islamic shari`a as the principal
source of law.7 Yet, its legal system is largely derived from European,
mostly French-based law. And so, many fundamental provisions of the
Islamic shari`a are patently ignored and unimplemented. However, its personal
status law—which deals with the private affairs of family—is based on codes
derived from religious law. And yet the state continually tries to move personal
status law in a liberal direction. Although the constitution guarantees freedom
4
It was public initially in the sense that it was a power of the people, that is, of citizens, and
subsequently, after state legislation, of state officials who ostensibly represent their interests.
5
Agrama 2005.
6
See: Agrama 2005; al-‘Awwa 1998; Balz 1997; Berger 2003; Dupret and Ferrie 2001; Johansen 2003.
7
Its article 2 states, “Islam is the religion of the State, Arabic is its official language, and the
principles of the Islamic Sharia are the main source of law.”
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of religious belief and worship, the courts have banned some forms of women’s
headscarf in public schools and professions.8 But at the same time, they have
upheld the use of religious principles—like hisba—for private litigation.
While some religious institutions, like Al-Azhar and its Fatwa Council, are officially under the state, their role in state policy formation remains highly circumscribed. The state also refuses official status to any explicitly religious party and
continues to repress such unofficial party formations, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, even though they have long renounced violence. However, it
has allowed Brotherhood members to run and win as independent candidates.
So, is Egypt a secular or a religious state? That question has become even more
pressing today. That is because Egypt is one important center in the Muslim
world, which is, as we know, under tremendous transformative pressure. And
this, in turn, has placed the Muslim world at the center of some of the fundamental questions of contemporary liberal political thought regarding tolerance, sovereignty, democratization, the proper uses of violence, and the limits of freedom of
religion and expression. All of these have become wrapped up in the question of
whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state, of what kind of state it actually is
and what it might potentially become. But this is also a question now increasingly
asked of many states, both Western and not; it thus expresses deeper anxieties
about our contemporary secularity and the cogency of our criteria for it.
However, the question of Egypt has rarely been taken as a context for reflection
on these deeper anxieties. Its ongoing conflicts and ambiguities have only led to a
widely held view that it is an incompletely or precariously secular state, prone to
serious setback at any time. But this view is somewhat unhelpful, if only because
it is circular. That is, Egypt is still incompletely secular, and that is why it has
religious-secular conflict, and Egypt has secular-religious conflict, so that is evidence of its being incompletely secular! And this does not give us much insight
into the conditions of such conflict and ambiguity in Egypt. It does not tell us
about the criteria we use to define incompletely secular states, or even fully
secular ones, or about the processes by which secularism is implemented, and it
does not tell us how our criteria might be connected to these very processes. Moreover, this view implicitly posits a scale of secularity whose pinnacle is defined by
the paradigmatic secular states of Western Europe and North America; it thus
takes as analytic categories secularism’s normative standards, instead of exploring
the processes that put and keep those standards in place. In other words, this view
all too readily accepts secularism’s own criteria for judging its failure or success,
without carefully looking into the characteristic practices in which they are historically embedded, and their consequences for social life.
Here I pursue an alternative thesis that will allow us to see the hisba case, and
the larger question of whether Egypt is a secular or religious state, in a very
8
Balz 1999.
S E C U L A R I S M , S O V E R E I G N T Y, I N D E T E R M I N A C Y
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different light. The thesis, as I mentioned above, is that it is secularism itself
that incessantly blurs together religion and politics in Egypt. The question of
whether Egypt is a secular or a religious state is therefore one that arises out
of tensions within modern secularism and its distinctive modes of power.
Those tensions and modalities of power, however, are not peculiar to Egypt;
they are also characteristic of many states considered to be paradigms of
modern secularity, such as France, Germany, and Britain.
No doubt, Egypt’s peculiarities make it seem vastly different from such paradigm states. But my aim here is to show how in its very difference it registers a
more profound mark of similarity that should provoke us into thinking about
modern secularism differently. As I will argue, the question of whether Egypt
is a secular or a religious state is but an expression of a question at the heart
of secularity, one that has become increasingly hard to ignore and equally difficult to get beyond. In other words, the question of Egypt’s secularity or religiosity
is not an answerable question, but neither is it a false one; it is rather a question
whose persistence, force, and irresolvability expresses the peculiar intractability
of our contemporary secularity. My aim in this essay is to elucidate some of the
conditions of this intractability, by showing how they incessantly raise the
question of whether Egypt is a secular or religious state.
S E C U L A R I S M A S A N H I S T O R I C A L P R O B L E M – S PA C E
Secularism, as we all know, has been the subject of much recent theorizing.9
This has been, in part, an attempt to give a picture of secularism that better
fits the actual practices of secular states, but that also allows for the important
differences between them. Much of this theorizing has emphasized that secularism involves less a separation of religion and politics than the fashioning of religion as an object of continual management and intervention, and the shaping of
religious life and sensibility to fit the presuppositions and ongoing requirements
of liberal governance. These newer approaches have thus effected a separation
between secularism’s normative standards and the analytic categories used to
understand them, in an effort to trace the processes of power by which these
normative standards were fashioned.
My argument here is certainly in line with these more recent theorizations.
However, I worry that there is a way in which they lay themselves open to collapsing the normative and the analytic all over again. Because even in tracing
the processes by which normative secularity is fashioned, one can still speak of
them as being almost fully, or only partially, completed. So that when it comes
to Egypt, it does not matter whether one holds an older view or embraces recent
theorizations of secularism: one can still cast it as only partially or precariously
secular. And this is just to accept secularism’s own criteria for success or
9
Asad 2003; 2006a; Bilgrami 2006; Connolly 1999; Sullivan 2005.
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failure. A scale of secularity, with the paradigm secular states at its pinnacle,
thus sneaks back in.10 It is just such a scale, with its collapsing of the normative
with the analytic, that I wish to avoid.
For this reason, I want to elaborate an alternative approach. It highlights two
related things that have not together received enough attention. First, that as a
process of defining, managing, and intervening into religious life and sensibility, secularism is historically and remains today an expression of the state’s
sovereign power.11 And second, that secularism, as a feature of the modern
state’s growing regulatory capacity, has long been, and is increasingly,
fraught with an irrevocable indeterminacy. Focusing on these two aspects
will shift our attention more securely to what secularism does, without invoking
its normative categories and standards as the analytic measure for what it does,
and which facilitate notions of partial, precarious, or complete success. For the
peculiar intractability of secularism lies not only in the normativity of its categories, but significantly, in the indeterminacies it provokes. These are not,
however, the indeterminacies that arise from the vagueness and interpretability
endemic in some degree to all human practices, and which are well known.
Neither are they the ones that arise from changing social conditions, which
sometimes require us to revise our definitions. The indeterminacies I will
focus on here are, by contrast, highly specific and historically entrenched;
they are fraught with distinctive sensibilities and anxieties, and indissolubly
linked to the sovereign power of the modern state.
To better consider these two features together, I approach secularism as a set
of processes and structures of power wherein the question of where to draw a
line between religion and politics continually arises and acquires a distinctive
salience. I say a distinctive salience because under a secularist framework
this question never arises as a simply technical or merely academic one. On
the contrary, it is ineluctably invested with high stakes, having to do with the
definition and distribution of the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens
and subjects. The answers to it are thus thought to be of utmost consequence
for how ways of life can be lived and fundamental freedoms are identified.
And so it is a question always suffused with affects, sensibilities, and anxieties
that mobilize and are mobilized by power.
10
Here I can cite examples from several disciplines. Most telling is philosopher Charles Taylor’s
(2007) magisterial work on secularism. At its very beginning, he casts secularity as a European,
Western achievement which is only partially evident in the rest of the world. Political theorist
Partha Chatterjee (2006), writing on India, argues that different countries have historically
managed the contradictions of secularism in different ways. However, he also writes that those
states where religious reform was internally motivated—he points out Britain and France—were
more successful. Even though this may have been inadvertent, Europe once again sets the standard
of success. Talal Asad (2006b) notes a similar tendency in the work of sociologist José Casanova.
One recent article by anthropologist Brian Silverstein that incorporates recent insights on secularism still speaks of it as being “almost complete” in Turkey (2008).
11
See Asad 2006a.
S E C U L A R I S M , S O V E R E I G N T Y, I N D E T E R M I N A C Y
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The connection between this question and these stakes is a historically distinctive one. For while there were certainly discussions and instances of the
separation of temporal and spiritual power during, for example, medieval
Christian and Islamic times, they nevertheless arose under very different presuppositions, and legal, political, and social conditions, and thus elicited and
mobilized very different desires and anxieties.12 In particular, the just distribution of the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens and subjects in a
diverse polity was not seen to depend on a principled distinction between religion and politics.13 What therefore distinguishes secularism as a historical
phenomenon is not just the question of where to draw a line between religion
and politics—which may have medieval analogues—but its historical connection with a set of specific stakes, one that has ineluct…
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