Good afternoon, everybody. Let us begin with our second session.
Which is about liberalism, secularism, the nation state.
Uh the speakers this afternoon to my modify tomorrow to make far right professor professor Elizabeth
Chapman heard a she's a professor of political science at Northwestern University of Politics.
She teaches and write on religion and politics, the politics of human rights and the right to religious freedom,
the legal governance of religious diversity, U.S. foreign relations, and the international politics of the Middle East.
A work pursues an integrity of approach to the study of politics and religion that offers
insights into dilemmas of national and international governance involving difference,
governance, power, law and pluralism.
She is a regular contributor to public discussions on U.S. foreign policy and the politics of religious diversity.
And among her many academic publications are the politics of secularism in international relations from 2008 and beyond.
Religious Freedom, the new global politics of religion from 2015, both published by Princeton.
And to my closer right. Yolanda Johnson.
Johnson, should I say in Dutch, you say Johnson Johnson,
who is an associate professor of social and political philosophy at the University
of Amsterdam and a board member of the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies.
And she is also a special professor for the Socratic Foundation at VCU University.
So the full name in the free university from the university where she holds the chair for humanism in relation to religion and secularity.
Her research deals with social and political philosophy, in particular critical theory, pluralism, multiculturalism and democracy,
genealogies of secularism, humanism and religion, irregular migration,
Judaism in Europe, Islam in Europe and French culture and literature in particular.
The Work of Marcel Proust. Among her many publications are secularism, assimilation and the crisis of multiculturalism.
French modernist legacy is available for free online.
Yes, yes. Yes. And the regularisation of migration in contemporary Europe.
Deportation. Detention. Drowning.
Thank you so much. Would you start, please, with some opening?
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the invitation to my first visit to Oxford.
So I'm very happy to be here, even just for a few hours. I study the legal and political lives of religion as a category,
and I looked particularly at the concept of secularism and its legal and political life in my first book and then in my most recent book,
Beyond Religious Freedom, looking at the construct of religious freedom and its very contested and contentious international legal and political life.
So I'm interested in kind of looking at how these concepts get operationalised and lived out and
fought over and imagined and re-imagined in a variety of public governance settings and contexts.
And so today I actually took Ya'acov up on the challenge to try to think very specifically about what the title of this symposium,
which is Dialogues and the Geopolitics of the nation state, is really in a wider context.
And I want to talk a little bit about a couple of concepts that I think can help us have this conversation and then talk
about a new book that I think will also bring a comparative angle onto the Israeli case that I will turn to near the end.
And what I'm calling this concept is the religion trap.
And the religion trap is something that I want to emphasise all traditions and all states are equally susceptible to.
And this trap is to conflate broad, contested, shifting traditions with specific forms of state power and state interpretations of religion.
This is kind of secularism, par excellence. It's a form of secularist politics.
And although we we are well past, I know, secularism and religion in any sort of stable,
reified understanding because we've been through our deconstructive move already this morning, and I think that's important and helpful.
And I also think we're done with that in this field. I think it's time to move on,
and I think it's time to start thinking about the fact that these concepts have political and legal lives that we have to reckon with.
And so understanding the variety of those lives, I think, is very important to to understand better how they shape people's actual lives.
So the religion trap, I think, is a is is this just a heuristic that I'm using?
That reflects secularist anxieties about defining the religious in confining it to certain legible and manageable spaces and places.
So whenever you hear a reference to religion or the religious, it is a secularist claim.
It is a secular move in our contemporary context to make those kinds of statements.
What the religion check does and this collapsing of these broad traditions into very narrow understandings of them, specific forms of state power.
What it does is that it reproduces certain collective understandings of how the religious or religion looks in the modern world,
which is something that has legible authorities, texts and institutions that often look more or less like churches.
When Sullivan refers to religion in the American legal imaginary as taking up a church shaped space.
In her new book, That'll be out next year,
and I think this is really helpful to think with The Religion Trap also reflects an inability to really think about religion,
to think theologically, to contend with the political and the ethical stakes and the limitations of trying to do so in its starkest forms.
I think it reflects a secular tendency to take at face value, state sponsored realisations of representations of religion or the religious.
It also, and I think this is important to understand, enjoys the support of many religious authorities who are well served by a stable,
bifurcated binary between the secular and the religious that allows them to be comfortable and empowered politically.
So this is part of what I refer to in Beyond Religious Freedom as the new global politics of religion.
And this is a completely different stage in the trajectory of what we call secularism or secularisation.
So I think it's worth remembering, as Nadia Marzuki argues,
that the religious secular divide is contextually produced and contested rather than existing as any kind of predefined historical structure.
And there's a quote from a 2015 piece by Title Assad that I think illuminates the focus of my remarks today.
Assad says My aim is to explore a problem that remains generally obscured in the secular hostility to what is assumed to be religion.
The problem with what can be called political religion is the politics that derives from
the sovereign state and the religion that is conceived and practised in response to it.
And I think for thinking with with and against Israeli politics in a number of violences,
this is the problem space that I would want to focus on today.
So the particular forms of political religion that are so often confused and conflated with much broader shifting,
essentially contested and amorphous religious and social fields.
And I would intentionally open that up so that it becomes a claim that's very fuzzy borders and boundaries.
So in one of its stronger forms and in the context of American support for Israel,
the religion expresses itself clearly in the form of a total reduction of Judaism to the Israeli state project.
This naive and often problematise tendency has been, of course, widely criticised,
including in rich historical and philosophical detail by Yaacov in his book, which I highly recommend to you all.
And he was kind enough to send over to me Judith Butler,
as Yolanda will discuss attacks head on this violent reductionism with her contrary
proposal to sever Jewishness and Zionism altogether to part ways once and for all.
I think it's important to consider as a prelude to Yolanda's talk,
the discursive field in which Butler's proposal is situated and from which it emerges.
This is a field which, due to its facile equation of Jewishness and Judaism,
with particular interpretations of Zionism and Israeli state politics and policy due to the religion trap.
In other words, that is the trap. It has become normal in the US to equate anti-Zionist political and religious views with anti-Semitism,
something that's come up numerous times in our informal discussions at this workshop.
Butler's formula is a rejection and outright slam of that equation, and in some ways,
in rejecting so badly and awkwardly and tragically, as Yolanda I think will explain more,
may reinforce some of the problematic assumptions about Zionism, Judaism, Israel and their interrelations that we want to talk about here.
How did we get to a place where Butler takes the position she does?
So I'm hoping that this we will in this way open a space for Yolanda's talk, which will highlight the broader, extra Zionist,
non-Jewish political and theological fields in which concepts of Judaism, Zionism and so on are and always have been embedded.
How do we get to a place where Butler's parting of ways between Jewishness and Zionism became not only possible, but also for some necessary?
And what are the alternatives? So before turning to Israel, though,
I want to make a comparative move with the religion trap and talk briefly about how it operates in a different context.
And that context is contemporary Malaysia. It's very important to my work to keep a comparative lens open at all times.
I think it makes it possible to refract questions that we may want to ask about Israeli politics
through a wider lens that encompasses that the politics of the nation state in general.
The. Because I think we are talking about, if not universal, somehow generalising tendencies.
And I like to compare these cases. So in his new book that some of you may have had a look at constituting religion,
Tom or Mustafa writes about these two poles of state liberalism on the one hand,
and state interpretations of Islamization and Islamic law on the other.
The trap, of course, in the Malaysian case, as in others that I'm asking us to think with, is the conflation of Islam in general, whatever that is,
with specific forms of state sanctioned Islam and specific construal of Islamic law and projects of Islamization in Malaysia today.
Now this conflation is so common, this collapse of Islam in general, with what the state is interpreting as Islam,
that it can be very difficult to see, after all, how many Islamization projects present themselves as departing from the real Islam.
It would not actually really help your case. Mustafa avoid this trap, though.
And he does this in a way that I think is helpful for us, who want to think about religion and state in a different register,
moving beyond the discursive limitations of the secularist imaginary, which which I think we're all at least sort of agreeing that we need to do.
So Malaysia has two legal systems that are kind of parallel.
One is understood to be secular or civil, and the other as Islamic.
And this binary, of course, does not resist, reflect a sort of pre-existing reality.
It actually helps to construct it.
So what Mustafa does is he tells us the history of how this came to be, that we had this creation and entrenchment of a binary over several decades.
And I think this is really helpful in terms of what was discussed this morning and to what do we do next with deconstructed everything?
How do we get down to specific contexts and how these categories are actually shaping lived legal and political realities?
And I think here in Malaysia,
we have a kind of an inescapable fact that what constitutes Islam and who participates in Islam are always deeply contested.
And these are theological, legal and political questions that can never be fully disentangled.
So any secularists claim to have disentangled them is just that it's a political
claim and we can situated in its context and not take it as face at face value.
So the world we live in, of course, though,
is one where state power tends to and often endorses one interpretation of religious tradition over another.
This is also the case in the US. We have a particular understanding of disestablishment, which of course also involves particular state endorsements,
of particular traditions, practices, institutions as religious.
The Malaysian system that Mustafa describes, though, continually breathe new life into this binary between Islam and secular liberalism.
So the result is that secular religious difference has become kind of hard and kind of ossified in the society there.
And we have a secular religious divide, defining and polarising politics in society.
And this polarisation between what Mustafa calls rights and rights are as and right.
These this polarisation between rights and rights is policing the boundaries of legal and religious possibility,
and alternatives are getting passed below the threshold of legitimacy and legibility.
And I think this happens in the Israeli case all of the time.
And I think your book is an attempt to actually retrieve and to bring back those possibilities into our field of vision.
So in Malaysia as elsewhere, again, I want to refract and bump these cases against each other.
NGOs, the media, advocacy groups and even regular, ordinary folks have all been swept up in this legal and discursive storm that is fuelled
by an either or duality between what the state considers as Islam on the one hand,
and liberalism on the other. This has become like an either or situation.
What gets lost in this tsunami of litigation and popular mobilisation is the distinction between Islam and projects of state Islamization.
So the Religion Trap, as an MP today have recently argued on the imminent frame.
Islam is a fluid set of ways of being Muslim that is both contingent and coherence.
These and this is not back to my words can it can be reduced to state law only with extraordinary interpretive license, power and violence.
And nowhere is this collapse of Islam and state Islamization more evident than in Malaysians own understanding of Islamic law.
So they have a very particular understanding of Islamic law that Mustafa describes
as a legal code that will yield one correct answer to any given question.
And this, of course, is a complete change and a complete shift from previous understandings of Islamic law.
So what I want to just give you one quote.
He says, The finding in this is a survey finding that most lay Muslims understand Islamic law is a legal code yielding only one.
Correct answer to any given question is a testament to how the modern state has left its imprint on legal consciousness.
Whereas Islamic jurisprudence is diverse and fluid, it's understood by many Malaysians as singular and.
Implementation of a codified version of Islamic law through the Sharia courts is assumed to be a religious duty of the state.
And indeed, it appears most Malaysians believe that the Sharia law do apply God's law directly, unmediated by human agency.
So now if we believe his survey results and everyone here is probably rightly sceptical of surveys, I know I am.
They're always partial, they're always oversimplified.
So if we believe it, though, this is a kind of capture of the Malaysian legal imaginary and it runs deep and it's very complex.
So what we have is a distinct. The distinction between Islam and state projects of Islamization has crumbled,
and not only for scholars, for public officials or for judges, but for ordinary Malaysians, too.
And I'm curious,
and this is more of a question than a statement about the extent to which this has also occurred in the case of contemporary Israeli geopolitics,
politics. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
So anyway, what this means is that if you publicly criticised a legal initiative that is construed by the authorities as Islamic.
Many Malaysians will receive this as an attack on Islam in general, as a defence of liberalism.
And you can see this leads to a culture where along the lines of what we have in the US.
This means conventional readings of Article 31 of the Malaysian Constitution, which states Islam is the religion of the federation,
which emphasises its ceremonial and symbolic meaning are being not only pronounced unfaithful to the federal constitution,
they are said to challenge Islam itself.
So conversely, if one criticises a law as liberal, a secular or human rights based, this is quickly categorised as being pro-Muslim.
So this is like an either or situation that has really taken hold.
So there's a there's some examples of this we can talk about specific cases.
I think I'll skip that over in the interest of time. I also want to bring up the question of race, which has not come up yet.
Race is also part of the picture. This is also the case in Israel.
The conflation of a state centric, racialised and ethnicity side with legal interpretations of Islam, with Islam in its entirety.
If we can even talk about such a thing haunts the Malaysian legal system.
It renders certain forms of solidarity impossible, certain ways of being Muslim unimaginable, and certain understandings of Islam unthinkable.
It's gotten worse as religion has become increasingly judicial ized and politicised.
So Mustafa shows us the way out of this impasse.
He says that Anglo Muslim law, as it's developed in Malaysia, is just simply not the full and exclusive embodiment of the Islamic legal tradition.
Yakub spoke does that to some extent with the various traditions of Judaism and Jewishness
that flowed into and fed and contradicted and interacted with contemporary forms of Zionism.
So I see them as complementary. At the same time, liberal secularism and this goes back to this morning's conversation,
is not an unchanging monolith that exists outside of particular political and legal contexts.
So neither these neither that neither Islam nor liberalism can be said to exist as autonomous, pure or coherent formations.
I think that that's a pretty important takeaway.
So I have another story I love to tell about counterrevolutionary Egypt in my recent trip Down the Nile,
which was extremely enlightening in a lot of ways,
but I'm going to skip over that and in the interest of time and just go say a few words about some of the some of the what's going on in the US.
But first of all, let me just say that if we understand with Tony Howe that part of our job as scholars and as commentators is to challenge
and expand established ideas of what constitutes and who participates in the discursive traditions that we're studying,
which I think it is.
I think that that is part of the challenge that we take on board when we problematise and contextualise the religious secular binary is that we then
need to question how people who depict themselves as speaking for a particular tradition and others is not how they came to have that authority.
This is part of the job we have.
If we want to do that, then we also have to do this for other political theological traditions and not only for Islam.
I don't know about you guys, but I am tired of Islam being the kind of go to example of how,
you know, if we're going to talk religion, we're going to talk about Islam.
So that's one of the reasons I'm here, is because I appreciate the fact that you're putting the spotlight on Israel.
So if we fail to reckon with this religion trap, then there's this temptation to collapse.
Islam into whatever project of Islamization is prominent, might be Saudi,
might be whatever Christianity gets collapsed into a in the US case, a project of Christian nationalism.
Or as the debate rages and here I'll talk about Israel for American support for Israel,
Judaism gets collapsed with the particular project of Zionism, and that temptation is, in many cases, irresistible.
We've seen it in Malaysia. We're seeing it now in the Israeli American relationship.
So I'm just going to say a few words about that by way of segue into Yolanda's contribution.
And I think that one thing we've seen and of course, everyone here knows that criticising a Jewish state is not anti-Semitic.
But in the US there has been a remarkable and pronounced.
Tendency to collapse the state.
The distinction between a tradition on the one hand, which we may or may not call a religious tradition, I don't think I would,
after having read your book and its state sponsored and always partial and incomplete and contested realisation.
On the other hand. So in the Israeli case, of course,
Judaism gets reduced to state sponsored political Zionism and criticism of the latter is depicted as an attack on the former.
So if, as Israel's most impassioned American defenders insist,
it is by definition anti-Semitic to criticise Israel because Israel embodies the Jewish people,
then any criticism of it is forcibly of the state is forcibly anti-Semitic.
So the Israeli state, of course,
does a lot to support that narrative and a lot of active work on American campuses that I have experienced firsthand there.
They have created this legal and sociological reality, reproducing a discriminatory, religio national hierarchy,
which then inoculates itself against criticism with the argument that it is anti-Semitic to acknowledge
that hierarchy because it dismisses the Jewish Jewish people's right to self-determination.
That's the argument that we get. So we could talk here a little bit about the new basic law and hoping that that comes up,
which is called Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
I think that this is this law is suggestive of Israel's attempt to capture the field of possibility of Jewish statehood.
Darrell Lea argued in a recent review that the idea that the basic law is a surprise or a perversion of the Zionist project,
as some have suggested, is questionable. Lee criticises what he calls the agonised handwringing of this balancing model.
He writes Israeli jurists and legal scholars circulate to and from Europe and the Anglophone settler colonies to engage with interlocutors,
largely white, through a dense web of professional connections, l'om and doctoral programs, conferences and workshops, visiting faculty appointments.
Clerkships. Israel Palestine is a particularly poignant case of this problem,
as a glaring example of how the Global South and Global North can unfold in the same space and not by accident.
The result is a parochial cosmopolitanism, a kind of moderation or echo chamber that can only see the nation state law as a
betrayal of Israel's promise rather than a sadly predictable fulfilment of it.
This is what I think Judith Butler is reacting against.
Butler aside, in the US, we have limited space for dissent from the official consensus around unequivocal support for Israel.
Some would say, as I did in a recent op ed, that there's no room for Judaism.
Mustafa's description of the collapse of a distinction between Islam and projects of
state Islamization in Malaysia then finds its parallel in US debates over Israel.
And I think this is just. It's important to see this as one way of reckoning with unfounded charges of anti-Semitism because it's not only Israel.
This is something that is inherent and arguably in the DNA of the modern state.
Right. So there's also a sense in which us in the US, anti-Semitism has been weaponized as a means of silencing political and theological critique.
So the space for debate on Israel is constricted like almost no other in the in the US politics.
And I think it's important to come to terms fully with the reasons for this constriction.
I want to conclude with an anecdote that illustrates one of them and also segues into what I think Yolanda will be speaking to us about.
Last week I was reading grad student papers all week for my class on religion, race and politics an imperial and global perspective.
It was a really fun class,
and one of the students is writing her dissertation on American Christian interactions with the Holy Land, both real and imagined.
So she's looking at tourism and she's looking at pilgrimage to the real Holy Land,
and she's also looking at all of the romanticised and commercialised replicas of the Holy Land that are located in the United States,
which some of you may know about. This is something that is absolutely fascinating.
An example is the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando.
Has anyone heard of it? We might experience theme park and theme park.
Now you've heard of it. Okay, so I read this paper.
I was blown away.
And I, of course, could not resist visiting the Holy Land Experience website and especially the shopping section because I love to shop.
So for those of you who haven't yet explored the website, you will not be surprised to hear that.
When I clicked on Judaica to see what would be for sale, the first thing was a big Israeli flag.
Yeah. For us. Mm hmm. Okay. So that gives you something to think about in the American imagination.
And this for me, includes the commercial evangelical Christian imagination,
which is in some ways coterminous with the American imagination as a whole.
We are all evangelicals as a family. There is literally no room for the possibility that Judaism in Israel are not the same thing.
This is cultivated actively through religio commercial enterprises like the Holy Land experience,
which create the conditions of possibility for the religion trap,
for unconditional support, for American support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, despite everything.
Speaking of evangelicals in US politics,
another challenging aspect of this situation involves the risk of unwittingly exculpate and Christian Zionist non-Jew.
As Europeans and other parties for responsibility for what Israel has been and is becoming.
So I want to turn now to Yolanda to think about the possibility and the perils of critique in such an environment.
Thanks. I hope I didn't go too. I'm sorry for distracting you with my Coca-Cola problem before.
Thanks a lot. But it goes with the American evangelicals, you know?
Yeah. I was also a little bit afraid of having them wrong. But it's still not well that we talk about.
But, um. Yeah.
Thank you, Yaakov, for the. Thank you for coming. Yeah.
And we had been asked to prepare dialogue with, as you see, still difficult not to prepare a little paper still.
So I'm trying to keep a little bit short.
So you have some questions to ask you? Three. Um, we were talking about this morning's discussion before already.
And as I said, like, we sort of, um, um, we, we,
we have been talking about the difficulty of religion as a category and political and ideological dimensions for a long time already.
And it's time to take a next step in many ways.
Um, and I would like to, I was just before the break we were discussing, during the break we were discussing with the growth and um,
we were discussing like, why is it so important that you were also hinting at this?
And um, I was wondering to say two things about that.
Like, um.
Um, there's a nice piece from Brian Luke about the use of the concept of Islamophobia, and he comes up with a stunning perspective and he says,
like, we know that these gateways are constructed and that they have their ideological uses, but still they are being used in specific contexts.
And you have to look at those contexts and their they can have a legitimate fear or at least they cannot be replaced so easily.
And also, if you look at the use of all those concepts, then you can see that very often there are something like family resemblances.
So it's not they they are contentions and they they are problematic.
But there are also like you can look at the genealogies and then see how they develop in which political context you can learn this a lot.
So that's also why it's important to really look at the uses of the concepts in specific contexts and not just remain at the remain circling around.
They're constructed to us. So and the second thing I would like to do, and that was what we were talking about like I'm,
um, so my appointment as a Scottish professor is, it's a bit strange appointment.
It's, it's like we have something like special professorships in the Netherlands and originally these
are professorships which are financed and also supported by specific religious organisations.
So we have to help out a professorship for Catholic studies and the like to support
this professorship for a so as I came as a like a real academic philosopher,
having done work on secularism in France, they ask me to to apply to be a professor of humanism so I can send it.
And I was really it's really nice because now I'm also sorry humanism.
Well it has its problems but but anyway so I really like that appointment.
But it's also strange because now I am at a originally Protestant university and there I'm teaching in the religious studies or theology department,
but they have a policy of having religious diversity studies.
And now I'm there as a humanist and as a representative of one of the religious pillars.
So it's but it's so that's that's this has all these like contingent aspects.
But, um, one of the things I was asked to do, for example, is to look at the documents and the questions that I and,
and that's the Dutch immigration organisation that they use to assess whether people who claim to have fled from mostly Muslim countries,
that they who claim there have been flying atheists and that they're persecuted for reasons for religious reasons,
like how do you assess whether this is the true story?
So and then they ask me to look at that and I found it's very like challenging.
Should I do that or not? How do I get involved in this or not?
It's I oppose all those policies. So and all those kinds of questionnaires, whether it's about homosexuality or about religious, it's so complicated.
But still, if I don't do it, maybe someone else with less scholarly views may get the to do it.
So I did look at it. And then the first question they asked the people who.
It's like, when did you convert to atheist? So I tell the world goes with the history.
Now you look at it. So, um.
So that's where it gets so complicated. You can say, okay, well, religion is constructed, convert all those concepts, have their issues.
But still, then what do you do in a practical situation like that?
Can you can you say something about it? What does it help to know all these historical vicissitudes?
Where do you direct people then? So that's the kind of questions I would really like to be able to deal with, but it's still very difficult.
Yeah. So now Beth already told me that, already told you that I was going to try to react to some things in a Judith Butler's book,
because I've been working on an article about it on the request of some people working on a special issue about it.
And I would like to share this with you, because this is a very good public also, but I'm very insecure about it.
And I want to give some introduction first so that you know where I come from.
Um, so I've been working a lot on what the sociologist Marcus Dressler has called religious secularism,
and it's more or less what we've been talking about here. But he what I like about it is the idea that we have to talk, that we have to maybe, um, um,
step aside a little bit more than we even did yet outside of the, like what you could call the religious,
secular paradigm in the sense that they are being used as epistemological categories to understand social conflict concerning religion or
cultural difference in a very broad sense and relatively privileged categories in comparison to conceptualisations more focussed on culture,
economy, politics, migration, history of coloniality race and the articulation between all of them.
And I think religious secularism has different layers.
We need to distinguish them so we can talk about,
like the history of secularism and the history of like using religion as a more or less reified concept.
And we can have a reflection on that. But there's other and then for example,
work we have often been doing is talking about how this has stimulated understanding
religion from a Protestant or a secular assumptions with their colonial Oriental dimensions.
That's what we've been talking about this morning. But I think there's one other dimension to religious secularism,
which is that the critique of this history is still being held very much in terms of religion and secularism itself.
And that's my worry a little bit with, for example, the work of Mahmoud and also that it remains like when you're talking about post secular,
it remains very much in terms of that the contending terms are still religion and secularity.
And I think we need to insert more terms to the debate to get it in a better place.
And that's where, for example, I would think that Coloniality race,
economy are very important to have them on the same level than the secular religious terms.
So that's that's one thing I've found important and maybe I'll show you relation to what we were talking about,
terms of the, um, the relation between liberalism, secularism and um, and the nation state.
Um, what, uh, what I would think also in the European context, I can explain this more later.
What is important is that, um,
there have also been versions of liberalism and of liberal democracy which have
tried to think beyond the concepts of religion and secularism as much as possible.
So it's important not to conflate liberalism and secularism too much.
Of course, they're very much interrelated. But there are versions of liberal and multiculturalism which have tried to, um,
to accommodate religion and religious tradition and religious practices much more than
we tend to see when we look at where just with the lens of critique of secularism,
and it makes it impossible to see different versions of liberalism also and also different possibilities of accommodation,
of different religious traditions in the European context.
And I think this is important to remember also because in the 1980s, 1990s, there were from within like lighter versions of liberal democracy.
There were inventions of all kinds of tolerating and tolerance practices.
Not. And I mean. Told once in a very broad sense that we saw first of pluralism that we shouldn't forget as auctions.
So now if we reconstruct the role of secularism in having certain conceptions of the nation state,
we may also overlook options within this these traditions.
I'm a little bit fake. Sorry. I mean.
Can I interject here and maybe ask you a question regarding this?
Because this something that comes up from both of your comments and I think maybe would be a way to, you know, to think of you more down to the point.
Is there a way to when it comes to liberalism and multiculturalism and religious
tolerance or tolerance of religious diversity and so forth and so forth,
so on and so forth? Is there a way to think of a multicultural setting without a liberal multicultural setting,
without necessarily forcing the cultural diversity into these Christian categories?
What Beth referred to as the collapsing of everything into existence.
No, that's it. No, there's no way that we may disagree.
So. Yeah, no, no, I, I, I tend to agree as well.
Yes, but there's different outside, there's different gradations of how bad it is to be inserted into those categories.
And that's what I mean, that there are options within like European,
like if we now think again that the nation state is something very, uh, nationalistic by nature and that it's, it's,
it's so in a certain sense we say the populists are right in their conception of the nation state as something very monolithic,
which cannot be pluralist, pluralistic, which can only be, well, either nationalistic or maybe Christian nationalist or maybe whiteness oriented.
It's also a way of of of of agreeing with that kind of discourse and thinking we need something radically different.
And on the one hand,
I think theoretically we have to think about that very much and also step outside religious secularism and the Christian kind of backgrounds of it,
and the European Christian like colonial kinds of backgrounds of it.
But it remains important to see that there are different version of different versions of this kind of history,
and that we can have more and less acceptable versions. And that in the 1990 and early 2000, in all kinds of multicultural theories,
there were options for accommodation and even conviviality or other concepts that we shouldn't forget about.
Yes. So we have to do both.
Like remember, like there were better, much better options within the the the like the secular religious framework than we tend to think of now.
And we have to theoretically rethink the whole picture, taking into account much more how it's always,
um, has this like Christian civilizational background, which is very problematic.
So, but I think we should do both. But can you elaborate on your.
No? Yes. The notion of religious diversity is a liberal secular concept.
I don't think we can get out of that. It presumes that there is something called religion that can be segregated from other areas of human life.
And this is part of what we're I understand the gesture that we got to this
morning is that that is a problematic and artificial separation and segregation.
And that move is itself a secularist move, which is something that, you know, the sort of societies have been arguing for a long time.
And so if you if you want to acknowledge that the notion of religious diversity is always and already a problematic notion,
because it is the secularist claim that segregates religion from the secular and then defines and
then you can't really work with that concept and you have to somehow find other vocabularies.
And you say in a little bit earlier, other terms, other categories of analysis, other modes of relationality, of sociality,
other kinds of legal institutions, political institutions that do not depend on the difference that religion makes.
Can you be more concrete examples of what would be so?
Well, for example, there would be no projects to promote moderate Muslims and moderate Islam.
There would be no such thing because there is no such thing.
And the last thing we need is the US government shopping for moderate Muslims and then promoting them politically, which is the kiss of death anyway.
So a lot of them don't want that promotion. So politically it's very problematic.
But this idea that there is something out there that can be identified as moderate Islam is has generated, as I argue,
in beyond religious freedom, an enormous religio industrial complex which a lot of people have staked their careers on.
It's not just like a one time thing, it's their entire career.
And they're earning their money, either analysing these people or doing the theological analysis of the.
Karen to figure out which part of it is is causing violence and which part of it is causing moderation.
And there's a big industry and there's a lot of famous people. And this is not only the right, this is the left as well.
In fact, it's everybody in the US. I mean, it's like it's it's a huge cottage industry and there's a lot of room for academics to get involved too.
And this entire project is fatally flawed as far as I'm concerned.
And if you want to read a really cool book that helps to explain why there's an edited volume, I'm not in it and I have nothing to do with it.
So it's actually not an ad. It's called After Pluralism Reimagining Religious Engagement,
and it's a volume that was edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela Classen quite a number of years ago.
And it is excellent and it Problematise is exactly in the introduction, which is like 15, 20 pages long.
Why the concept of pluralism, which is quite similar and is very much inter-related with the concept of religious diversity,
religious diversity, religious pluralism are even sometimes used interchangeably.
Why this concept is so problematic and why we need to think outside of these boxes that we're being forced into by a received tradition of
basically political political socialisation into secularism and secularist understandings of religion that have that we are so reliant on.
They've taken hold so strongly in our collective political and social imaginaries that we cannot think otherwise.
And I think the best and the brightest people in this field are people who are thinking otherwise and offering
these alternative vocabularies for thinking about human social life outside of these very limited rubrics.
Is that a specific enough? Yes. If I think of Yolanda, can you know what she was still.
Yeah, so but but you want to just add to the same challenge and give some concrete examples of what would be within the religious secular discourse,
a more accommodating framework which is not assimilationist.
Um. Yeah, I think, um.
Well, let me just to connect to what you were saying.
You know, I in an ideal world, I very much agree.
And I also think this is one of the the the the the the the feet of the project that we have to go on that to invent new vocabularies.
But connected to your question this morning,
like we have all kinds of groups and people who understand themselves in these terms, it's just not enough to say.
The terms are very problematic. And and it's also it's not the concept that creates the power relations.
It's the concepts that give them some, uh, shape.
But these, uh, the power relations are there and they could have taken shape, maybe, you know, other concepts as well.
So it's not just a matter of correcting the concepts, of course.
And so the, so how to address the power relations there, I think, um, uh, it's, it's, well it's very important to,
to, to see how they work, but also to see that, for example, pluralism and like divide and rule.
It's of course, it's a it's a religious pluralism is one way to divide, but there are other ways, and it's about the invention of these ways.
So that's that's what I would like to.
So, but I think, uh, if, um, in the, in the European context, it's just, I think there's, it's good to remember the,
like the, the series of multiculturalism and of like, uh, multicultural jurisdictions, how they could work, how, um, um,
how there could be a complexity taking into account the differences between
traditions and how they would fit or not fit within certain categories that,
um, I think a lot of good work could be done there, even within the religious, secular a paradigm.
And we like in the, I think the blackening of I don't know if you use the correct word, but I mean,
the, um, the, the critique of multicultural options has come from the right but also from the left.
And it has been so radical that some of the options that were like working in practice, not only in English, for example, also in France,
they have sort of like been wiped out as s as possibilities, both from the radical left critics critique and from the right.
And I think in practical ways, these options were not so bad after all.
If you compare it to what we have now,
where we have this like increasing nationalist interpretations of the nations as secularist issues of the nation states and.
And polarisation. So that's that's that's what I would.
But it wasn't it. In fact, it was just a side remark.
And I they didn't want to make such a big point of it because I think one.
Well, my second step would be like, what does religious secularism hide from view?
And then we have talked about part of it already, like the racial,
colonial and etc. dimensions that I think we should stop talking so much in terms
of religion and secularism and insert the other categories in on the same level.
But something else and something also important and you also talked about it already is.
Um, I think we have to see more the how relational and like the the professor this morning was talk about cultural semantics or cultural
semiotics like how relational the identities of the different groups are and how much semantics plays and semiotics plays a role in there.
So we have to take a more cultural, analytical perspective than just look at specific categories.
And there I would have wanted to show a few quotes.
I think we can learn there very much from some work that has been done on the position of the Jews in Europe before the Second World War,
because there was so much consciousness of how relational the and the mirroring kind of identities and how this works.
So for example, there's a quote from your me you'll feel, which I like.
It's a bit complicated, but I can read it for you. And he says Like Jews.
So in the pre work context,
Jews provided Europeans with a mirror correct and laid a mirror in which to see a reflection of their own identity problems.
The Jewish problem was basically a European problem.
That is not only a problem for Europe, but a reflection of Europe's own problem with itself of how,
in an age of rapid transformation, Europeans were understanding their own identity, future and meaning of life.
So it's a fully relational kind of a process of meaning making.
And another one from Hannah Arendt.
And she makes it a little bit harsh, but then still very clear whether the Jews are a religion or a nation, a people or a race,
a state or a tribe depends on the special being and non-Jews in whose midst Jews live have about themselves.
But it certainly has no connection whatsoever with any German knowledge about the Jews.
As the people of Europe became nations,
the Jews became a nation within a nation as the Germans began to see in states something more than their political representation,
that is as their fundamental essence. The Jews became a state within a state, and since the end of the last century,
when the Germans transformed themselves into audience, we have been wandering through the world as Semites.
So that's where the relationality of the categories become really important.
And that's also something which is not so visible from this religious religio secular paradigm.
That's that's something that I would like to bring up. And then so in my book,
I worked very much on the like how Marshall pushed and uses all kinds of metaphors to study the this mirroring kind of questions.
So then you can really look at literature and what it does like how does this work in the imagination?
But we can't do this now. And but this this is as an introduction to what I would was working on when studying Judith Butter's book,
parting ways, Jewishness and the critique of Zionism.
But maybe we can first and then I think I think it's time for me to open it up to, you know, other people to question and that's fine.
Yeah. So and maybe through this you will go through and anyone want to comment and question right now or.
Well, I'm going to take that. I mean,
I have with I want to talk about the collapsing again or the restriction of the discourse through a specific tradition which hides behind the state.
So, for example, when it comes to different models of cultural multiculturalism or diversity,
the only question that is not asked is sovereignty, can the sovereign changes its its shape?
And obviously the answer is obviously never ask. So we can always ask how people correspond within it.
One of the interesting phenomena in this regard is how, um, and this is already predicted in both remarks, uh, Islam, Judaism,
whatever we manufacture it produces as a set meaning is starting to understand itself through American, Christian or evangelical concepts.
So just to give an almost always obvious example, uh, there obviously are a rabbinical or traditional understanding of,
uh, of abortion, but it has never been a political issue through a religious political issue, right?
Until the Americans make it one and then Israel is adopted.
So all of a sudden it becomes a new demarcated line of demarcation.
So my question would be, again, along these lines,
can you maybe comment a little bit about how we can indeed have this conversation without not just essentially saying Islam and Judaism and so forth,
but without forcing or I would say positively while listening to these traditions on ways of understanding themselves?
Well, yeah, I think that one thing we need to always ask and this is what the Tanaka quote that I that
I read a couple of times is we need to ask who is speaking on behalf of the tradition.
And that's not to say we shouldn't listen to that representative, whoever he or she is.
But it is to say that we should always think about and this goes for other, you know, politics of representation in general.
Right. So we need to ask who's speaking on behalf of that tradition and understand how they're situated in
a particular set of institutional or state hierarchies that gives them the authority to represent.
And so I think that's one way to get at this. I don't think that I mean, this is this is something we were discussing earlier,
because this question of news comes back for at least for many academics, to a question of religious literacy and religious education.
So how do we get enough different views from each tradition to represent a full and accurate?
And I think that this falls back into this sort of secularist trap that I'm trying to diagnose here,
which is to say that there is such a thing as this as these world religious traditions.
And if we could just get our the right representatives, I'll give you an example.
So when I was writing Beyond Religious Freedom, I went and hung around with religious freedom advocates because they were my ethnographic objects.
So I went to their meetings and to the advocacy groups meetings and um, to try to understand what was,
what their worldview was and how they understood themselves in relation to the politics of religious freedom.
That's one of the main things that they would always say to me is, well, would you?
They knew I was unhappy with it because I wouldn't join the movement. Would you be happy, Beth, if we had a Hindu on the International Commission,
the Commission for US Commission for International Religious Freedom Users,
because then, you know, we would have a representative, then you can't complain because there's a representative of each tradition.
And what if she was even a woman? Then would you be happy?
And this is part of this it's sort of part of this mindset that if we could just it's I call it religious freedom to point out in a snarky way,
if we could just make it better, if we could just like turn it up to 11 for those of you,
you're old enough to remember that me then we it would be okay, right?
And I'm saying, no, it's the problem is much bigger than that.
It is the entire epistemology, epistemology and you guys, I mean preaching to the converted here literally,
but we have to find different ways of understanding what we're talking about when we think we're talking about religion.
Yeah. And I think part of that is to get very close to the ground.
And I mean, the example I gave about looking at the Holy Land Experience website and going
to the Judaica shopping section and seeing the Israeli flag right there,
it's very material. It's very real. It allows us to see how Americans are politically socialised,
to get to the place where they actually believe wholeheartedly, that to be against Israeli policy is to be an anti-Semite.
It is to be a Nazi. How do you get to that place? Well, that's a long distance to travel, right?
Because there is a there are a lot of opportunities to take other paths and road.
But that is a cultural, commercial capitalist, political and social socialisation process.
That again, in order to see it, you do have to get pretty close to the ground.
You have to look at the whole Going Experience website. So for me,
it's going and finding those examples that help us to sort of to jar us out of the assumptions that we're so
comfortable sitting in and so that we stop looking around for the Hindu to put on the commission and we start saying,
what? Why do we have this commission? And as you know, if you've read my stuff, I have a big public op ed that says that we need to abolish it.
So it's not a secret what my position is. But I'll tell you that they did try to put me on it too, because the Dems want to abolish it too.
So now that I'm over religious freedom, I have to work in this field anymore where I can tell all of the dirty secrets of the religious freedom feel.
It's very, very deeply, hotly politicised and it's very, I think, important to sort of be able to pull back and say,
what is this project doing and whose name is it bringing freedom?
I mean, it's the new it's the new civilising discourse, right?
I mean, clearly, it's extremely, deeply racialized. It's gendered.
Yes, it has got I mean, I appreciate what Yolanda was saying about bringing these other lenses out of your word to bear on these contemporary events.
But I do think we need to be pretty close to the ground in order to rethink our assumptions on this,
because otherwise it just becomes a trafficking in abstractions.
And it is they're an utter religious group, which is so clearly identified with one state like Hindu.
Is it identified with India or. But I would like.
Sorry, you mean in the religious freedom world? Yes. Because you said there is this immediate identification with the state of Israel.
And is that is there an utter example of where a religious group would be identified so much with one?
Well, so what I mean in the US, I mean the good Muslim,
bad Muslim non Danny which and I also picked it up because I think it's good religion, bad religion in general.
That's what structures that's the lecture that I give now on the circuit is good religion,
bad religion, because I think it's how people understand religion today.
But I think that in in in the U.S. terms and in the religion freedom discourse,
good religion or good Islam is associated with countries that keep their Muslims in check.
And that's what actually I was going to talk about in terms of Egypt and Sisi today and the Saudis and bad Islam is those
countries where Muslims run the place and have free reign to do whatever they want and create theocracy like in Iran.
And that is the like distorted, crazy world that American foreign policy operates in.
So I think in terms of Islam, it's divided into good and bad.
In terms of Judaism, it's Israel. And if you want to talk about other traditions, if you want to talk about Hinduism, for example,
I don't think that there's enough even basic understanding of where where these people are or what they're up to.
I don't think most Americans have any idea what's going on.
Hinduism, the only people who do are the people who are protesting yoga in the American public schools as a violation of the establishment clause,
because they are saying that their their children are being secretly indoctrinated into Hinduism via yoga,
which is actually a fabulous I teach this case. It's a it's a legal case in Encinitas, California.
And it's a fabulous case, teach case to teach, because the students are I mean, they're like, wait a minute, what is it?
Is yoga a religion? And there's actually, you know,
it shows up the impoverished kind of edges and the ragged edges of the category in the ways
in which it doesn't actually encapsulate the complex realities that it pretends to represent.
And so, with the exception of those people, I don't think anyone knows what's going on with Hinduism.
But they did want but they did have this naive sense that if they put a Hindu on that on the commission, that it would then be religiously diverse.
And they and what I read as as a critic of this work, I am read as someone who just wants more diversity.
There's not enough diversity, mean more diversity. And I think that that is actually that misses the bigger problem that we're trying to deal with,
which is just this whole entire physiology of secular.
Religious. Hmm. So one of the rhetorical tools that I'm sure is thrown at you and I'm going to throw it just for the sake of the discourse,
is are you willing to give up on all of your hard fought and acquired liberties?
My liberties, yes. Oh, I'm going to force you to wear a burqa now or forced me to take it off.
Right. Yes. I don't know.
So. So this is in the context of the not willing to give up liberties.
But I don't usually talk about liberties. I guess I. So if we are, do I want to get we're challenging liberalism, right?
We are challenging liberalism that we are challenging the framework within religious diversity as discussed,
which is the challenging liberal constructs of religion. Yes. So are you challenging liberalism as a whole?
Realism as a whole? It depends what you mean by liberalism. There are certain aspects of it that that I'm definitely sympathetic toward.
But again, this goes back to something in the legislator role that you brought up, Bill.
He said, you know, was it you're in a tin tin tin.
I can't see you. You said you were a legislator and you know, you're a critic, not a legislator.
And I think I feel that way, too.
I don't feel like I'm in the business of legislating how you know which particular school of thought people need to affiliate themselves with.
I find that not that interesting.
So, no, I'm not going to say that I'm against liberalism, but I also feel like that's just that's trafficking in the abstractions I know.
And this is what happens with political philosophers who deal with these questions.
We have to ask these questions and then they get trapped in this imagination.
But so maybe you it more specifically when it comes to your notions of maybe again,
if you if we if we do legislate and we think constructively of what would be a more or a better multicultural setting,
how do we the obvious question that is asked in this context, how do we balance the well, the acknowledgement of certain traditions right.
To be expressed with, let's say, individual liberties.
Right. I mean, I think from the 1980s and I was shooting the 1990s, the question would be,
so what do we do with the tribe whose tradition demands the subjugation of women, for example?
Can we allow that all these again, political, philosophical, analytical questions.
Can you maybe address this in a in a more constructive way than might delay between question?
Well, it's a I think it's an important question.
And I was also thinking it was maybe linked to what Bill was talking about this morning when we were
talking when you were telling him about the use of the category of religion with the Pueblo Indians.
Yeah. And then you told about how the category was invented for them.
They didn't have it. It gave them some space, otherwise they wouldn't have had.
But then it gave also individuals within the community the space to withdraw and to say, well, it's my rights not to do it.
And then I was thinking and asking myself. And do you have any normative evaluation of that?
Because it's an important question. If you don't, that's you can remain entirely neutral.
But you can also say, well, there's an ambivalence to it and not just be nostalgic about when these rights weren't there.
And I would say it's ambivalent.
And I was also reminded of a discussion among anthropologists that a few years ago that I had is in the entire upper north of Europe in Tromso.
And it was about a research one of them had done in on a South American island where the concept of freedom of religion came
up very much with the whole American baggage and also with the advent of Christianity and with conversion and the like.
It's old age, though.
But then I think there was some consensus among them, like there is an ambivalence to this whole it is not you cannot say it's good or bad.
And that's also like, would you be willing to give up the the liberties that are there under religious freedom of belief?
You can also say, well, we have to understand better what it would mean in different contexts,
but it's still an important concept and especially I think that's what I meant with like the multiculturalism too.
Like in the European context, it's one of the ways we have in the legal system some leeway for different groups and also for different traditions.
And it's not it wouldn't be wise to give it up before we have this other language, but that's my idea.
And so that's the that's the ambivalence.
And just be critical about it. That's that's important. Like, what does it hide from view?
Where does it doesn't it do the work that's very important, but not to just bash it too much.
That's that's that's that's what I would think. Also in the legal system, it's like we were talking about that.
It's really like if you talk with judges or with people who have to, to use the category in a in a legal system,
then you cannot do with just saying it's a very problematic category and you have to do something with it.
And that's where we're. But to invent this other language and to say, what are the problems, it's very important.
But. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's what would be my.
So I want to go to I mean actually to go to battle.
But through, I mean, through a segway of the the Malaysian and maybe the Egyptian or, you know, Arab Muslim cases.
I'm thinking specifically about the wild book, The Impossible State, where the argument is made.
I think it's again, it should be preaching to the converted in our case that maybe not everybody.
Well, not so. The argument being that if we consider authentically and truthfully what, uh,
Muslim traditions tell us about governance, we see that it is simply incompatible with the modern notion of sovereignty.
So to designate a certain state, an Islamic state, is simply an oxymoron, because the notion of the modern state, as we understand it today,
and the notion of Islamic, as he would say, emerges out of the traditions of, uh,
of Muslim law, of Sharia, whatever, are simply two fundamentally incompatible.
And then an interesting question that emerges out of it is that what happens when it is nevertheless done?
So when a state calls itself an Islamic republic of Iran, or when Israel identifies as a Jewish state to certain degrees?
Um, I haven't written most of his book and I know that they should. What happens in other cases?
Can you maybe think about this nationalisation of tradition?
Yeah, I think what happens is this trap, this inevitable ineluctable and the judges are in this position, as Yolanda was just saying, reduction.
Yes. Collapse. Yes. Flattening, yes.
Of what? Of what is it? Kind of impossible to even encompass?
Yes. Set of traditions, histories, practice, institutions, etc., which we may or may not want to classify as religious.
To me, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's it's it's immaterial. But nonetheless, they get collapsed into a particular and authoritative.
So where is the resistance coming? And this is this is this is I mean, this is what's interesting.
I mean, there's a I think that there are different answers to that question.
Some people would say, including Hillock, that this is a sort of the violence of modern sovereignty in the modern nation state.
And in that and that's the sense in which I think for him,
Sharia is inherently definitionally ontologically incapable of being assimilated into the modern
state project that it does so much damage to what Sharia was as a living set of practices,
that it cannot be encapsulated or encompassed by the modern state without changing it to such
an extent of transforming it to such a degree that it's no longer recognisable as Sharia.
It's something else and it's not a pretty something else in his view.
So I think there's a sense in which he's what he's what he's referring to is very similar to what I'm referring to.
And what Thomas is referring to is I'm calling it a trap, Tom.
He talks about it just as this rights versus rights capture of the legal and social imaginary that the field of political
possibility is so delimited in Malaysia because of the capture by the state of the ability to construe what is Islamic,
what is this authentically Islam and authentically Islamic and what is liberal, secular,
and that because the state has kind of monopolised that field of possibility, there's very little room for alternative interpretations.
And not only is it is that these judges don't choose to interpret is that and so what
I was getting at and talking about who surveys it's that people have been socialised,
kind of trained and they've come to understand Islam as what the state is telling them.
It is, as opposed to any number of other interpretations which would be arguably equally valid or should be considered given the, you know,
multi faceted tradition as it's been lived out historically in many different contexts, including but not limited to the Malaysian context.
So there so I guess I'm not sure if that answers your question.
You want to talk about other states,
but there's a sense in which any state from this perspective that is claiming to be a Christian state, a muslim state, a Jewish state,
is that that claim is a particular kind of politics and in particular kind of geopolitics that I think
has to be unpacked and reckoned with and understood in much more nuanced way than what we usually see.
So. Any questions we have.
What, ten more minutes before? Or comments or comments or.
Oh, yeah. You can't all agree with everything that said.
Yeah, it is after lunch. Piece of information.
You mentioned that. I don't really. Yeah, that was.
That was it. Oh, I'm in the running.
No, no, no. That's not a book. It's a Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews.
Um, and then. I don't know, I don't remember the subtitle by heart, but if you look at Hegel nature and the Jews, you will find it.
Yeah. And this quote was from the introduction. Because I know.
And then she said, Yeah, yeah, it's the same old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And. Basically, Chris, the idea that there is this run or converted but you know,
the convert from Judaism Christianity to forced conversion and this creates a split identity which is at the heart of European modernity.
And I find that somehow radicalised is something which is really very complex.
So that's why my ears perked up when you mentioned his name in a quotation.
Yeah, very, very interesting. So I just. I need to.
And I want to read I have the book on my shelf because it's sort of like what
would be interesting to me there is that how it's sort of like looks at how like,
um, um, uh, differences within identities, how this has a history in Europe and it's part of the history of modernity and that it doesn't,
it doesn't start with a modern secular subject and it's just not that.
So that, that there's like. That's what interests me in that book.
But I didn't really yet but read it in conjunction with a scathing review, I'll tell you that.
Oh, and the title of is reviews for the Unpronounceable Cause I Come From A.
And more trouble, possibly. Yeah.
If we already discussing you were going to have to mention he's very interesting in this regard because we are and I'm sorry that he's not here.
Maybe he's out of, uh, because you that wrote an interesting, uh, review of another project with which you really were,
was involved, which was an attempt at encyclopaedia ing sort of to make an encyclopaedia of secular Jewish identity,
where you will write this introduction where he needs to account for what is secular Judaism, and he goes through a whole list of negation.
It's not about law, it's not about religion. Obviously, it's, you know, it's secular.
And he ends up with an, uh, an affirmation that what defines the Jew as a Jew, specifically the secular Jew, is the anti-Semitic look at the Jew.
So it's exactly the reverse of the quote. You you mentioned that in a sense, the outside forces on the circle.
So without antisemitism, there would not be this project of positively asserting a secular Jewish identity,
which was, uh, you know, setting to doing this, uh, and this collection, which is very interesting.
This is like strata. It is, yeah. Yeah. So. Mm hmm.
But he's not here to defend himself and this. So, you know, we can't. Uh huh.
It's kind of. It's. It's a bit more on this whole question, I mean.
Opting out of that. Used to do it talking about. But you said you wanted to critique the critique system.
And I saw that it was very sort of an internal critique of Western liberalism.
What's your sense of ways of being that?
He's very much like that, of course.
What I mean is often his own critique is being absolutely right, kind of naive or romanticising what pre-modern was.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about this.
How do you think about this sort of these dilemmas of opting out?
And I don't to couch as a religious freedom because like you don't have a sense of catch cause you're deconstructing.
But then what would be sort of a positive way of being that would allow, you could say,
ways of protesting or negotiating as a community to find ways of being like, what?
How should we think about this? What kind of tools to use?
Because it is this dilemma between the internal voice of secular majority and the full practices.
And I just think, yeah, and it's a vicious sort of circles, but it's important as well.
I think we have to contend with. I mean, anyone who knows critiques of Western liberalism and also freedom of religion or the press as they should be.
Yeah especially has tons of period is this is a mostly I'm very much sympathetic but
automatically from people within these conservative Thomas who actually contesting
power relations in the high court in a record setting immediately they will come back
to this anyway using these tools to open up that kind of space that we can do X,
Y and Z. I think it's something you can't just dismiss.
Now you have just reminded me. Yeah, that's a supplement with some critique I just came through.
So, I mean, for me personally, I think it has to be critiqued on many levels,
but I think what she did in that article is essentially remove him from the Iranian context,
and it puts him in this logic of which I think that I was talking about, which is the war on terror.
Moderate Muslims are not completely does a massive injustice seem to actually have a massive transformative effect?
So I don't know if it's critiquing him either, but I think we have to do it correctly and.
Sort of site of proportion and in the context of this.
So if you have any thoughts. I agree.
And I think she did the same with the national site in the Egyptian context.
It's also a very problematic kind of and also romanticisation after of the of the Islamists as a critique.
So that's the risk if you critique secularism of very much like what is what is the kind of politics this is doing?
And it's that's an and that's important. What I would think is very important is like we in the break, we talked about decolonising political theory.
I think what we what would be important, I think, is to have to to use different categories at the same time.
So not to concentrate on religion and secularism too much.
Look at the history, also their colonial history,
but then also look at intersections with other concepts and fields like with race, but also with gender.
So look at oh and also how they interact.
Now, I like an article from Nikita, the one I don't know if you know her.
She's a political theorist of Indian background, has been in Germany for a long while and now she's working still in Germany and she has one article.
It's called The Empire Prays Back. And then it's about all the dilemmas that there are in different and how difficult it is to address power,
relations and inequalities and that you need more categories. That's not what she says.
That's what I saying. Like, for example, she says somewhere there's no decolonisation with without the simpleton ization.
So also decolonisation, it's not you cannot bet just on one term.
You have to look at I think the basic term still would be inequalities or social inequalities and their history and their very complicated histories.
And then look at all the different categorisations that play a role and they have to address position attitudes,
different scales as well, exactly like the local scale.
And then of course the empire, for instance. I mean, they might interact and the way they do is to talk about concretely.
Yeah, but I agree. And so we need the different categories.
We cannot just use one.
And maybe I can react to what you said about sovereignty, but for me, it's still that's such a complicated and difficult concept.
So it's an it's the. But also like there was critique of sovereignty in I was already you wrote about sovereignty like that it's also
the starting concept when you talk about the nation state in the sense that it has never been a sovereign as well,
you know, more. But I mean, for example, if you look at European political practices, etc., there's the, the,
the imaginary of sovereignty is very important, but the practices are much more like a diffuse, diffuse.
And so that's also needs to be taken into account if you look comparatively.
That's then yeah.
Experience with but just interested in the way that we we so try to avoid essentialism and so we just talk about contesting power relations.
But the people that are contesting power relations are often facing the last time.
They don't think of themselves as contesting power relations. They think of themselves as defending the truth.
Right. And so they want not to avoid essentialism,
but but one of the side effects of avoiding essentialism is not allowing people to claim that certain forms of Islam,
Christianity or whatever are true. Right.
But this is the real the real Islam. This is the real Christianity.
And in some ways, you have to allow people to make those kinds of claims.
So you have to allow them to do theology.
And that's really that's a really difficult thing.
And oftentimes we just want to shy away. And that that seems like one of the reasons why we want to appeal to something like religious freedom,
because we want to say, well, nobody can say what's true and what's not true.
So all we can defend is your right to, you know, to say whatever you want to say.
But in some ways, that doesn't justice to the idea.
So the question that you raise, you know,
like what happens when you you say it's impossible that you can't recognise the reconciled Islam with the state?
Is that what happens? Would it actually happen? I mean and.
I want to look at it from two angles or from one angle. You've got to look at it.
And so now say, okay, maybe that is empirically speaking, that is an expression of Islam,
but you have to allow the normative judgements as well for people that are Muslims to say no, that's not.
Yeah, you know, and here's and here's why. Here, here we have some kind of normative criteria to say that's you know, that's.
That's. That's not. Yeah. I think we should end here.
Thank you so much for this. While we were sitting without noticing, there's coffee and and some refreshments for all.
We are meeting again. We're reconvening at four. But stay here. Enjoy the refreshments.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Talk about butlers. Oh, yes, you can do that.
But I mean, actually, tell us exactly what Bill was saying, because it's a Jewish.