Good afternoon. Good morning.
Depending on your time zone and welcome to our third event for the term and it's actually coming right in the last week of term
here in Oxford of our Political Thought Seminar as part of the Middle East Centre's Contemporary Islamic Studies programme.
And it gives myself and Satechi great pleasure to welcome two scholars from across
the Atlantic who are really sort of leaders in the study of religion and secularism.
To talk about this week's theme, the theme of religion scholars are Elizabeth Chapin,
heard from Northwestern University, I understand Abbasi from Stanford University.
And Beth, you'll be speaking about Decolonising, the category of religion.
Oceania will be speaking about regulating religion in premodern Islamic government.
So we're going to be straddling historical range in the course of this hour and a half.
And we'll start with yourself, Beth, so I'll give you a brief introduction.
You'll be able to speak for 20 minutes. Russian will then be able to speak for 20 minutes, and then we'll shift to a discussion.
And we always tell participants, please feel free to put questions in the Q&A or in the chat and we'll come to them.
So even mid-stream, while you're sort of listening, feel free to do that.
And Faisal and I will basically coordinate a discussion afterwards.
So very often Beth and Rush and Faisal and I kind of take the privilege that we have as co-chairs of the panel to engage you both in discussion.
And we thoroughly enjoy that process as well, but we usually try and get to everyone's questions as well.
So without further ado, I'd like to briefly introduce it is a segment heard.
So Beth is Professor of Political Science and Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University.
She studies religion and global politics. She's a very prolific author and co-directs Talking Religion,
Public Politics and the Media and Global Politics and religion research groups at Northwestern University.
Her recent public pieces are three myths about religion and politics and dangerous logic at the borders, religion and the travel ban.
It says here, Beth, and this is on your website. You're currently writing a book on about the American border and as political theology.
But I have a feeling that that's the book you are just showing us as having been published.
Oh, no, no. So you are currently writing, but you're also working on also published other recent work.
Never a dull moment in your sort of literary life, shall we say?
So without further ado, I'd like you to introduce your topic of Decolonising, the category of religion.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Sam.
Thank you. So it's so good to see you. Even only on the Hollywood Squares screen, you're saying very nice to meet you.
Thank you for being here. And I look forward to connecting with you and engaging with your work as we go forward.
So this is really a privilege and an honour for me to be here.
Thank you for having me. So I've been asked to speak today about the category of religion,
and I want to begin with two brief vignettes that illustrate kind of the kind of thinking that I'm doing right
now about decolonising the category and some of the tensions that inhere in that process in particular.
The first is from the Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive that I co-curated with Winifred Fowler Sullivan.
And it's a case that's based on the historical and anthropological work of Paul Johnson, who works in Brazil.
The second will draw on historian Kate Ramsey's book on Voodoo and Power in Haiti.
Each of these two vignettes, they're very short,
is suggestive of the limits of the category of religion that we traffic in with such ease and facility in most of our everyday conversations,
and specifically the ways in which that category,
in fact in courts and reflects and re instantiate histories and relations of power that more often than not involved
white Europeans asserting various forms of domination over peoples of colour in colonial and post-colonial contexts.
I'll then suggest that those contexts do remain with us today in some surprising ways.
Drawing on a very brief example from my own current work, my own research.
So the first vignette in 1870 in Brazil, Judge Miguel Jose Tavares,
received a letter which accused an Afro-Brazilian possession priest named Luca Rosa of practising false magic.
Judge Tavares prosecuted Rosa for charlatan ism and fraud,
claiming he was attempting to immorally profit by representing himself as the bearer of false,
magical powers with no legal definition of religion outside of the church,
the spectre of Rosa's syncretic and uncategorizable religion, the religion that falls outside the boundaries of the category of religion,
raised a number of debates over what religion is and what it could be in Brazil at that time.
Ultimately, he was convicted and sentenced to hard labour, and central to his conviction were fears of sexual deviance,
material gain and of his, quote, stealing from Catholicism from nefarious sense.
He received six years of prison and hard labour, and the context in which that case arose was the rise of separatism in Brazil,
a movement originating in France that was concerned with spirits and spiritual possession, which became widespread in the 19th century.
Its popularity amongst Afro Brazilians in particular,
alarmed the colonial authorities as Afro religions and ritual gatherings producing states of
possession were seen as potential sources of insurrection by the enslaved and lower classes.
This is, of course, drawing on Paul Johnson's book on this topic and possession.
As these laws repress the religious practises of Afro Brazilians began to spread,
the juridical regulation of religion intersected very closely with issues of sexuality, race, class and power in this particular case of cover.
The second vignette during the US occupation of Haiti, which occurred between 1958 and 1934,
the Occupiers were concerned about potential political dissent and anti-colonial
insurgency being expressed once again through indigenous religious practises.
The Americans, as a result, drew a close association between what they called sorcery and popular insurgency.
They framed sorcery as insurgency,
and they enforce laws against laissez les or spells in the name of moral decency as a way to consolidate American control over Haiti.
To put it very bluntly, there is no religious freedom for sorcerer insurgents.
There's also done for Catholics, by the way, in this context,
these same anti superstition campaigns against voodoo targeting, materialism and paganism also targeted Catholicism.
So there was a different grammar of policing in place at this time with different grammar of regulation, different grammar about casting.
What is there is not religion, illegitimate religion.
The Occupiers attempts to enforce moral decency were not understood, however, to involve the export or the establishment of religion.
And this is important. I think instead they were.
And today, as my work has shown, they remain in U.S. foreign policy in particular, entangled, deeply entangled with the promotion of universal values,
the notions of a free market, modern scientism of democracy, of public health, the rule of law and indeed, religious freedom itself.
This, of course, is part of a global story involving the invention of these modern ideals of religion, secularism, nation and citizenship,
which are all carefully and closely entangled with each other in ways that we need to examine in contextually specific ways.
In his work on spirits in Brazil, Paul Johnson describes.
The effects of the purification of the mid-17th century category of religion, conceived as a properly civil religion,
in dialogue with and in contrast with what he calls a proto anthropological notion of spirit possession as civil danger.
In a recent post on the blog contending modernity, Snelson, not another theorist,
wrote that whoever defines, identifies and explains religion wields much power.
We've known this for some time. We've all been students of Talal Assad.
These vignettes compel us to ask, Is it possible for scholars, practitioners, lawyers, decision makers, journalists to continue to use this term?
Religion, given its entanglements with colonialism, its dizzyingly complex legal lives,
its complicity in hierarchies and histories of domination, many of which are also deeply racialized.
Can we deploy this category anymore without simply reproducing these hierarchies,
these forms of oppression that are represented in these vignettes as well as in so much other work in this field?
There's a brand new book just out called Errand in the Wilderness by Michael Graziano, which charts the religious governance effected through the CIA,
the Central Intelligence Agency, which I think of as some of the best new work in this area.
But there's a lot of it. Can we then do something other than say we were wrong?
Ukca Rossa And the Haitians deserve their religion too.
This is a struggle and I think we need to use the term very, very carefully.
Modern, rational religion was and remains famously defined by its lack of entanglement,
its separation from both supernatural powers on the one hand, and the secular state on the other.
It is widely acknowledged that making religion across colonial contexts has involved
condemning and often criminalising practises described as superstition and witchcraft,
and that these powers are criminalised as dangerous, uncivilised, wild, pre-modern, thuggish, demonic and dissenting.
The state and its religions, meanwhile, become the domain of reason statecraft,
law, individual belief and non-belief and modern forms of rational authority.
Muddying that divide. Troubling that divide between good and bad religion, between religion and non religion is part of my job.
The challenge and decolonising the concept of religion then will require more than
merely including other practises into the category of religion and moving on.
We need to think religion otherwise and carefully.
I will give an example of a new book, Brent Carlson's new book,
which is called Experiments with Power Obama and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad, which I think accomplishes this very complex balancing act.
Preston studies Obeah, which he describes as a form of spiritual work or experiment with power.
He sets out in his project at first to redeem it. He wants to show that it's really not all that bad.
It's not all that dangerous. It's a good religion.
And presumably he wants to kind of add it to the pantheon of protected and respected world religions,
which is exactly the move that is often made in policy debates as well.
Bring them into the interfaith dialogue. Now what he learnt was that this wasn't going to work.
He had assumed that religion in its proper forms was exclusive of harm and he wanted to
morally vindicate its practitioners from the darker popular associations that went with it,
which he saw as the product of, of course, its colonial and post-colonial denigration and criminalisation.
Which is understandable. Obama, after all, was a crime in Trinidad until 2000,
and it remains one today in much of the Anglophone Caribbean press and was drawn to what he calls the race making powers of religion.
And this is a complex idea that has to do with the race based exclusion of
African identified practises from both sides of the secular religions dialectic,
which he identifies this exclusion as a foundational act in the making of religion and secularism as modern universals.
So the terms themselves in this account are deeply racialized across and conclude that the identification of evil with African, not religion,
has been a key part of Western modernity's moral and racial discourse,
particularly in representations of obeah and voodoo for American, British, French and West African audiences.
Now, Vincent Lloyd and Jonathan can make a similar claim in their excellent volume, Race and Secularism in America.
And I think that the entanglement of racialisation with the categories of secularism
and religion needs to be a part of all of our discussions at this point.
Now crossings redemptive project of Obama clearly runs into a wall.
He says his interlocutors reversed the terms of that project rather than making Obama into a religion, he says.
They made me ask how spiritual work challenged the hegemonic limits of the category of religion itself, forced outside the comfort of that category.
He abandons his redemptive aims, and these are precisely the kind of moments.
And they're kind of scary because in what categories you use to talk about what we do, when, where are our jobs, what department do we work in?
But these these objects of study are challenging the hegemonic, moral, racial limits of our own received categories of analysis.
And this is part of the challenge today. Religion is one such category.
Of course, there are others as well. There's also some tension here.
Eminent scholars such as Webb Payne and David Chidester have argued that we're
not in any position to set aside these categories religious and secular.
They're part, as Keynes suggests, both elites and everyday discourse.
And they mediate self-awareness everywhere. They have themselves become social sex.
Chidester agrees, after reviewing the history of religion's colonial productions on contested frontiers.
He says we might happily abandon religion and religious as terms of analysis if we were not, as the result of that very history stuck with them.
So the question is, are we stuck? The U.S. is out of Haiti at least this week, although certainly there are reparations to be paid.
At the same time, the governing logics of the occupation endure, they persist.
When it comes to the moral, racial limits of religion at home and abroad,
I'll now turn finally to an example from my own current research on the American border,
and specifically, we'll speak for a moment about them, what they are, holy death,
the unofficial patron saint of the marginalised, threatened and the poor.
She's a skeletal female figure, clad in a long robe, and she's holding a knife and a globe.
You may have seen her represented. She also has kind of parallels in other traditions.
Less anti-Semite has this incredibly rich history, and I can't go into that here due to reasons of time.
She has many devotees in the borderlands, the US-Mexican borderlands, and she also now has devotees all over North America.
She offers protection from harm, and she serves as a reminder that no one, not even Customs and Border Protection, can escape death.
She embraces those in limbo. She loves the narco, which is a pejorative Mexican Spanish word, meaning low class and uncultured,
which also carries anti-indigenous and racialized connotations.
She's also beloved by many sexual minorities.
Historians and ethnographers often portray Santa muerte de as a sympathetic would be saint of the downtrodden and leave it at that.
US-Mexican and law enforcement officials tell a very different story about her, though, and this is where I became interested.
Echoing their forefathers who occupied Haiti a century ago, they depict less than the stigma as a threat to American and Mexican national security.
She is maligned by the Catholic Church as a form of idol worship, if not the devil itself.
She is vilified by Mexican-American law enforcement as a folk saint of the drug cartels and criminalised
as a death cult by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office and a source of spiritual insurgency.
They turn. If I may, I'm just going to share my screen here.
How's that? Can you see that now? Yeah. Very good. Okay.
This is less than these mind. Everywhere you go, increasingly here in Chicago as well,
you can find all kinds of devotional items to the Asante Sima, also known as Latin Fettuccini Girl.
In my own local grocery store, I have found this candle, this that which is one lights and says the prayer which is written in Spanish on the back.
That 97 is absolutely everywhere. She is ubiquitous.
Let me just show one more photo, if I may, which is taken last week in Nogales,
which is a town on the border of the United States and Mexico, in southern Arizona, in northern Sonora.
And this is a temple to send them what they where everyone is invited to come for the rosary every Sunday at 12 noon.
So you get she is ubiquitous is just to give you a sense with her globe and her size.
So let me just give you a little bit of a flavour of the fear that she inspires.
One expert American law enforcement described devotion to her as a spiritual insurgency that involved worship of a perverted Christian God.
This has made its way into the American courts as well. And I tell I'll tell this story in a longer version of this.
But there are court records showing that there are prayer recitations, prayer books,
statuettes and even skeletons emblazoned air fresheners for your car that are now being used as evidence in efforts to detain and convict suspects.
Another expert described her as describing her connexion with the revival of human
sacrifice in Mexico and specifically worship of the female Aztec god of the dead.
So I'm interested in exploring some of the indigenous elements of the persecution of devotees of science and wordplay in particular.
So for law enforcement, her followers are anti religion.
They use that term anti orthodox and anti law and order.
While some in the drug trade may engage in non-religious killing for followers of what they, it is impossible.
All killing is religious. In the eyes of law enforcement, devotees have fallen prey to bad religion,
exacerbated by a childlike attraction to pagan ways that conducive to violence.
So she poses a kind of spiritual threat by marshalling these dangerous and subversive indigenous,
pagan, dark skinned forces against US law enforcement.
And this racially tinged fear of the cults threads through a master's thesis written for the U.S. Marine Corps University in Quantico.
And I just want to give you one quote from that. And the thesis itself is called Santa Muerte de Threatening the U.S. Homeland, which sums it up.
And the author, Warren Santander Day, is in and of itself a religion incompatible to good order and discipline.
It promotes a society of lawbreakers. And then he goes on to trace the forms of devotion to the failure to codify Aztec religion.
And he contrast that with canon law in Catholicism.
He says the problem is Aztec religion has no written doctrine, but traditions passed on through word of mouth and ritualistic practise,
making the belief system susceptible to the damaging effects of individual interpretation.
So he says that basically the Mexican people who wear substance and where they they got this kind of embedded into the principles of their belief,
this obsession with death and mysticism that they inherited from the indigenous predecessors to the Spanish colonials.
And due to the lack of doctrine, the lack of a written doctrine in specific,
the narco cultures have picked this up and then run with it and develop their own nefarious interpretations of reverence and sentiment.
So if this slippery called could have been pinned down and written down, he says, things might have come together differently.
But the bottom line is, right now, what we're facing is societal collapse.
Now, I think I'm going to wrap up here and just say that I think that it'd be really easy to dismiss these perspectives as ignorant and that or naive,
but they actually put people in jail for life in many of these cases.
And so while that may be tempting, there are a lot of people who are suffering as a result of these understandings and
these interpretations and these criminalisation of some of them where they worship.
It's also possible to read her slightly differently and to understand the forms of insurgency and religiosity that she represents as a
form of agency of political and religious solidarity and transformation that recalls earlier figures such as Our Lady of Guadalupe,
who some of you may know first appeared in 1531 to the newly colonised indigenous
peoples of Mexico and became associated herself with a male fossil deity named Tomasi.
According to Luis Leone and like Santamaria,
de Guadalupe decimated the border between European and Native American religions through processes of syncretism, continuity and transformation.
In a new article in which he charts the contributions of indigenous political thought to the Mexican Revolution,
Arturo Chang describes the revolutionaries efforts to reclaim Catholicism itself as simultaneously indigenous, Mexican and Pan-American.
I think this is part of the future of the study, of the category of religion, which is why I'm highlighting it here in conclusion.
And he wants to retell the whole history of Mexican Republicanism through this focus on marginalised
groups that had envisioned their own postcolonial emancipation in collective indigenous terms,
radical Republicanism and Indigenous demands came together in a restorative moment that demonstrated what
Chang calls the influence of indigenous religion and plebeian politics and Republican political thought.
Like her revolutionary forebears and with Chang's work in mind,
we might ask if devotion to Santa muerte also represents another indigenisation of borderlands, religion and politics.
Information. Her popularity surely exceeds her status as a demonised icon of death or a pitiable pseudo saint of the dispossessed.
Confounding the line between pure and impure religion.
Her celebrations are marked by an openness to the exorbitant, the unsettled, even the monstrous beyond the reach of church and state.
She's a repository of anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti and indigenous agency.
Her followers could be seen to represent a new indigenous ecclesia, in the sense described by Pamela Claassen,
Paul Johnson and Winnie Sullivan in their new book by that name Ecclesia,
a collective imbued with charisma that stands apart from the hegemony of both church and state,
one that is composed of the inter, penetrating and mutually constitutive forces of religion and politics.
Now to assimilate Santa marta into our pantheon of world religions would clearly be a mistake.
Her devotees sit outside the secular religious dialectic.
It is even perhaps irrelevant to them.
How can we do them justice without reducing them to the categories from which they have been and continue to be violently excluded?
Decolonising religion requires telling a series of different stories not only about religion then, but also about law, politics and indeed history.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Beth.
Really sort of a journey into a world of religion that is unfamiliar to many of us, but truly illuminating.
And thank you also for keeping to time. So exactly 20 minutes.
I'm going to,
in the interest of time and the subsequent discussion straight on to Roshan's presentation regulating religion and pre-modern Islamic governments.
So Russian Embassy is a mellon postdoctoral fellow in Humanities and lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University.
He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Mary in Languages and Civilisations at Harvard University in 2021,
where his dissertation was awarded the prestigious Alwaleed bin Talal Prise for best dissertation in Islamic Studies.
For those of us who have seen it, we just think we really think it was a thoroughly deserved recognition of its brilliance.
He formerly served as an associate research scholar at the Obelisk Centre for Islamic Law and Civilisation at Yale Law School.
And without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Ocean.
Thank you so much. Let me just share my screen. We can see it.
Excellent. Thank you both. And thank you both for this fascinating talk.
And I feel as though I'm doing something very different and working on an entirely different historical context.
I feel we align very closely in terms of our ethical objectives and even the ways in which we think about secularism.
And precisely what I'll try to do today is to think religion otherwise by telling these other stories in history.
Is this one indigenous to the Islamic context,
not only as a as a way of helping contemporary Muslims think through these issues and how these categories have worked in their own context.
But also what I'm really trying to do here is to use the example of the pre-modern Islamic past,
to think through some issues around secularity, particularly within the field of secularism studies,
which I think is a new way of moving forward to expand the horizons of our thinking beyond the modern or Euro-Atlantic centric view,
which has naturally been at the forefront of secularism studies.
So today I'll be talking about regulating religion in pre-modern Islamic governance,
just as you'll see from the subtitle as a tool for thinking through the problems of secularity.
So let me just get right into it. Essentially what I'm trying to do is to offer historical intervention into theory,
which is to say, to use the hammer of history to de-legitimize the theoretical findings,
but to problematise certain assumptions within a field,
and to think through various of these issues as a way of helping me understand the Islamic past.
Actually, so briefly and this is something which I think we all know what the advances in secular studies have taught us very clearly
is that what we're really talking about when we think about secularism is the management and regulation of religion.
And that, of course, is itself a category that's indebted to a distinctively Christian genealogy.
And I think even in the modern Islamic context, when you come across these terms,
there's no way in which they're not inflected by this Western genealogy.
Given how pervasive the West is, it is perhaps the major, if not the central element of the operation of secularism.
And I'm completely sympathetic to this view. But what I want to do today is to incorporate this non-Western pre-modern perspective on, quote unquote,
religion in order to complicate certain of these assumptions that I've seen within the field.
And again, it's only to complicate them, help us better understand them,
not necessarily undermine them, because I've found so much value in each of these perspectives.
So the first point I look at is this idea of secularism as a kind of questioning power, which I find very compelling.
This features in the works of the undermine his book, Questioning Secularism.
And it's a questioning power that's driven by this sort of indeterminacy at the heart of secularism around this religious secular divide,
or, as Beth alluded to, good and bad religion.
And the second is the understanding of legal secularisation.
And here I'm really thinking about this sort of wonderful volume after secular law,
which I think Andy Sullivan and others edited as the kind of ascension of a sort of Christian sovereignty.
So there are these excellent articles in there are talking about this longer genealogy of the very notion of secular law.
And so I want to think through that with the case of Islam.
And then the last question, the last issue has to do with the universality and particularity,
which I think is really at the core of much of our debate surrounding secularism.
And I've always found a problem in trying to figure out precisely what's going on here.
And and what I'll try to do today is to use this long to think through some of these issues a little more clearly.
So how I'll proceed as I look at three case studies,
so looking at a sort of theological historical question within pre-modern Islam and then thinking about the theoretical implications.
And this is really a work in progress. I'm thinking of writing this shorter book that's oriented towards the field of secularism studies,
so I'm really looking forward to your comments and feedback.
So the first case study centres on the question of what makes an act of witnessing religion.
So witnessing is this all important institution in all pre-modern forms of governance, really,
because you don't have sort of modern forms of forensic evidence and these sorts of things.
So the witness plays as all important role in court proceedings.
One of the things that I encountered in my reading of Islamic law is that the Muslim jurists who are the functionaries at these imperial courts,
they continuously debated this question in their legal handbooks and as also even outside of them about
how and where to draw the lines between the DINI and the doing early forms of hostility and enmity.
Aidala And in short, really the question is this.
You know, if you have a witness, your house is harbouring some sort of hostility or some sort of enmity towards a plaintiff or defendant.
This obviously delegitimizes their testimony and for various reasons, they had to separate these sorts of categories of enmity.
Right. So on one level, a dini, a religious form of hostility was perforce legitimate,
precisely because non-Muslims, for example, were not allowed to take a stand.
Also because religious forms of animosity are legitimate in an Islamic polity.
Obviously, it's sort of embedded deeply in the Koran.
And one might say this sort of drawing of lines of distinction between these communities and
even harbouring some sort of sort of and many are hostility towards someone else's religion.
But at the same time, this poses a problem for these jurists in their functioning of the courts,
because they needed to separate out secular forms of hostility in which,
for example, as was said, people hate a certain person because of the tribe they're from, or so on and so forth.
So basically they wanted to exclude the latter, this form of hostility from this sort of illegitimate form of testimony for pragmatic reasons,
to protect sort of justice within the court proceedings, while also sanction sanctioning the former for ideological reasons.
So this goes back to a textual basis, a SHAFI This foundational jurist speaks of conflict as giving way to hostility.
So one of the commentators in the Shafi School, and I would say the shabby school,
had the most sophisticated reflections on this particular question of Hossein Amrani, who lives in the 12th century.
He divides between the Dina and Jeremy, as so many of these other jurists do.
And he, for example, looks at the question, the issue of partisanship of ACB.
And again, he limits it to the secular.
So he says a a secular form of Azaria, whether it's tribal, ethnic, whatever it might be, is perforce alleged illegitimate in courts.
But and also the other it's based on religious grounds is necessarily protected precisely because
Muslims might harbour hostility towards Jews and Christians on the basis of their religion,
but nevertheless, they have to serve in the courts upon hearing testimony or else the courts are not be able to function.
And just to give an example of how this was not simply a kind of theoretical construct, but actually made its way into the into the courts.
This shrewd handbook, accompanied by some of the analysis of the in the 17th century Egyptian Shafik scholar Johanna Lockwood.
He actually replicates the official formula of Camembert here, which is required for documentary purposes within the model of courts.
And the statement, which includes here as to the proposed witness, is that he is hostile and so too so and so on secular grounds.
I know I do at least Milan and Forlani, although I don't know.
So it became a term that actually I think became the the documentary and the legitimate way of speaking about hostility.
And so the point I'm trying to make here is that. For the purposes of legal governance.
Pre-modern Muslims actually had to, in the course of legal proceedings, divide between the religious and secular for particular political purposes.
Pragmatic, logical. And this, I think, serves as a useful case for thinking about secularity in today's day and age,
which is, of course, has often been approached through the perspective of of law.
For example, Professor Hird and others have done so in thinking about this.
I started to drawing on Hussein El-Gamal and the work of David Scott.
Think about the problem space of doing the right and the problem space, as David Scott considers it,
is essentially the sort of constellation of questions and answers upon which certain ideological and political stakes hang.
And this is obviously historically conditioned. There's a temporal element to it there.
There's no universal working at play in this equation.
And so I thought, what are the stakes here in the question of the union and the legal courts?
And the way I would elucidated is that the danger I environment binary in this case at least emerges as a
sort of theoretical construct and importantly within a distinctively and self-aware Islamic tradition.
This is long before the advent of European influence as a theoretical construct
used to address practical issues emerging from the problem of religious plurality.
So we see at the core of it is the question of religious plurality.
This is not something that is sort of invented anew in the modern European world, but it's something that I think, and I'll argue later,
actually goes back to the sassanian and to the Roman empires and the Islamic one being a novel development in this long direct.
So what we see then, if we think about this comparatively and this is the kind of work I think I'm doing,
one might describe it as archaeological in the audience sense of doing a sort of comparative analysis.
As opposed to the modern regime of the secular right in which there are, as a divide and secular divide, obtains a distinctive salience.
This is how he describes it, and I think it's the right way of doing it and even a sort of centrality to the political order.
And I think Professor Herder was alluding to this as well. The notion of social order hangs on this divide and this dividing process.
The Islamic problem space is merely a policy that is merely a tool of governance, of governance, rather than a tool of governmentality.
And here I'm talking about Governmentality either Foucault. And that's precisely because it lacks this ideological hegemonic function.
If we think about that term as grand schemes, it uses that.
Here. We see it as a sort of pragmatic form of governance,
a tool that I speak about here as a kind of product or or either a product or a tool of lawmaking, rather than being the very foundation of law.
And this, you know, going back to that volume after secular law,
it really shows that the very foundation of secular law is this sort of problem space.
And so what I think this helps us do, it helps us clarify the distinctiveness of modern secularity as we bring it into a broader leaf.
Historically speaking, it highlights the very pervasiveness rather than this sort of secularising strategy,
which one finds in mediaeval historical context.
And here I will also highlight the work of Connor O'Brien, a historian at Oxford in the History Department,
who's written quite a bit about the mediaeval Christian Western secular.
And he's he's developed this idea of secularising strategies as a sort of pragmatic
form of differentiating between religion and non religion in the Western case,
which I also see in the mediaeval Islamic case, and we could think about this as a form of secularity that might be more conducive
to governance in terms of grappling with the problem of religious plurality,
rather than a kind of rhetorical ideological use of secularity,
which one which is precisely what one encounters in reading the law in America or reading the law in Europe and so on and so forth.
I'll move on to my second case now. And of course, there's a lot to unpack here and hopefully we can do that in the Q&A.
What is one to do when beliefs collide with principles of social order? This is, of course, a central question when we think about secularism today.
And to stick with the theme of witnessing.
I look now at this another 11th century scholar, a very important one from the Hanafi School ICRC, who was a canonical figure in the Hanafi School.
So he also talked about witnessing in a different context, and he tells us a very expected thing that heretics usually and the Catholic Church,
and we understand that heretics cannot transmit religious traditions. They can't serve as reliable witnesses to the testimony of religious evidence.
Right. Because of their religious corruption.
But what's interesting is he argues that heretics can, in fact,
take the stand a in a court on a secular basis when they're not speaking to religious matters.
And the way in which he formulates that is this is he says, witnessing is a part of the realm of injustices and disputes the law or not.
And the heretic with respect to these matters is not partisan. Right. So it goes back to this question of bias, of partisanship.
And it's interesting the way he formulates this,
because I've done a lot of other work on this in my book I'm writing now, but this category up to volume of injustice.
And so and it's often invoked in the context of distinguishing it from the religious realm or the realm of Baghdad.
It's seen as a sort of civil realm in which, for example, Sharia can apply to non-Muslims, even as the ritual aspects of law cannot.
This element can precisely because it's predicated on justice, this kind of universal justice, really, in the way in which they're considering it.
And subsequently, this is a different point, but it also helps us think of these issues,
he clarifies, in a different thing than believing in divine inspiration.
Islam Harm Right is a very popular category of gods,
essentially revealing the truth of the dream or even awake if one believes that this sort
of kind of this knowledge that one receives is a socially practical form of knowledge,
right? That one can sort of speak of it and use it as a basis of knowledge in courts,
renders one's testimony invalid precisely on account of holding this false belief.
So even the way they're talking about it is a very pervasive category.
So because they hold they're holding on to this belief and invalidates their testimony because of the problems it poses to social order.
Right. There's now and there's a sort of epistemic unsettling that's happening here, and they're aware of it and they're grappling with it.
So it aligns in one in some ways, but also diverges from, for example, rule six,
one of the U.S. rules of evidence, which I'm sure a professor and others are familiar with.
While the rule of Forecloses enquiry into the religious beliefs or opinions of a witness for
the purpose of showing that his character for truthfulness is affected by their nature,
which is sort of what we're seeing here. An enquiry for the purpose of showing interest or bias because of them is not within the prohibition.
So this is a very complicated rule here where you're able to sort of look into religion as it pertains to this particular individual as a way of,
you know, figuring out bias.
But it's precluding a kind of deeper engagement with their religious beliefs as a way of invalidating the truthfulness of their testimony.
What we see here is precisely that sort of thing.
And and I'll talk about this in a second, but it helps us, I think, understand what's really going on here.
And so here's I'm thinking about the the potentials and also the limits of legal secularisation.
So what's interesting about what I think is happening with Saraki here is his help.
He's helping us actually see the sort of paradoxical nature of secularity, of secularisation.
So how I describe it is this that in his aspiration to secularise the legal realm in which I mean to
exclude certain types of religious beliefs from functioning within this secular kind of regime of the law,
by removing this sort of, quote unquote, questionable religious beliefs,
he falls in this kind of paradoxical secularism of his own making akin to what we find in the modern period.
Right. One which undermines its own neutrality precisely in the effort to produce a neutral public realm.
Right. So this sort of catch 22 of secularism, right.
In the process of creating the polity, you have to draw those boundaries.
You have to ask these questions which are at the very heart of this problem space.
Right. And and I think this is a useful way of characterising the problem space of, you know, secularism, if we think of it.
And here I'm just sort of thinking out loud and creatively, if we think of it functionally in terms of the role it plays in managing human society.
And the reason I put functionality at the forefront here is because I am thinking about this,
you know, in a problem space that is very distinct, right?
The questions and the answers that are being produced are hinged on very different epistemological assumptions,
very different conceptions of the human right. Yet we still see the same sorts of grappling within the enterprise of governance.
And that's why I think this sort of functional perspective might be useful way of pursuing this.
What tells us is that it's somewhat universal.
I know I use this word very carefully and I probably not even want to use it, but that we find it in other contexts.
And this is, I think, an important move for us because it helps us move beyond our perspective,
our kind of Eurocentric perspective when we think about secularism, that it can't be comprehend.
They explained with reference reference to modernity. There's other things I can do with this.
But let me just conclude with one last example, because I know we're short on time.
I thought we started late. It's a very quick question here. Does Islamic law apply to non-Muslims?
It's a very important question addressed our thinking about throughout the ages.
And here I take a quote from an Romans book on Islamic law.
What she says called The Assembly constituted a certain factual reality that contributed contributed to delimiting the claim space of Sharia,
which I think is a very useful way of thinking about the Sharia. Right.
And the thing that I find historically that happens in the mediaeval period between the ninth and the 12th century is
that we see this gradual move towards restricting religious communities to the regulation of non civil internal affairs.
Right. And this is akin to what I see in reading about colonial law in some ways, in a kind of essential way.
It's sort of overlapping, right? Then you have this process of communal ization rights that communities have now to regulate, delimit themselves,
hold the regulation of their internal affairs, which are precisely ritualistic,
having to do with the ritualistic elements of marriage, of inheritance.
And these are the same categories the jurists are using.
And it's actually the same sort of categories we find under the Sassanian, under the Romans as well, with reference to the jurist.
And so I see this as a process of sort of imperial governance.
Right. But again, my point is not that it's the same thing.
It's to say that this comparative work can help us think about what's distinctive about this modern process and the doctrinal basis for it.
You know, here's one quote from Kashani Important. We are commanded by God to leave them to their own religious beliefs.
Now you're actually doing Armageddon, right? What they believe is they hold on to or what they confess.
So, again, this category of belief is also here, and I'm sort of thinking through what that's doing.
But in terms of the theoretical applications, and I'm good at this,
Julian Stevens is writing this wonderful book about colonial law in Islamic context within India.
And she speaks of secular governance, legal governance as equal, the cumulative power of laws,
normative scripts, and defining newly divided spheres of religious and secular governance.
Right. And I think it's a wonderful definition. Now, as you'll see, I struck out newly here.
Now, I think newly works in one way, in the sense that there's a new division taking place here,
which I call it a kind of reinvention of the religious secular divide, which is based on a new cumulative power of laws, normative scripts.
Right. And that's what I think is really distinctive here.
But for example, you know, the close association of religion with domestic and ritual matters I don't think was a colonial innovation.
I think, again, this is something that I've already found in my reading of Islamic law, even in the late antique world.
And I think it actually coheres with this widely spread view that I find in my writers that I'm
reading of the inherent universality of the enemy as opposed to the particularity of the DNA.
This is something I worked a lot on in my I think a lot about in my book,
but they often align with the other either as a kind of epistemic category of secular knowledge or in the terms of the donor.
We as a kind of legal category with something that is supra confessional, right, as opposed to the DNA,
which is culturally particular, which is based on, you know, cultural norms that are unique to one's own sort of history.
And so I think what's really changed here is that under the modern secular order, the particularity of religion is no longer maintained.
Right. And know we can think of Hegel, we can think of so many examples in the early modern European period.
Right. So now the religious itself is now subject to the forces of Christianisation and Westernisation.
Right. And this is where I absolutely agree with Professor Hertz that this manifests in a racialized and gender way.
And that's precisely because and I'll concluded this I agree here with George Foreman's idea,
and this is part of his contribution in race, in secularism in America.
He critiques calls Schmidt, you know, call Schmidt or say liberalism.
Secular, liberal, secular order has no political theology.
And what he, I think compellingly argues is that, no, there's precisely a political theology.
It's a racialized political theology. And that's what we are now realising in every manifestation that we look at,
whether it's with Muslims in Europe or with precisely these Atlanta cases that Professor Hurd's looking at,
there is this racialized Christian Western white supremacist order upon which hinges this problem space.
Right. And part of what's happening here is I think that this particularity of religion has been
tossed out and the universality has sort of pervaded all domains rather than this domain,
which I see here, which I think is a far more robust conception and one that, you know,
allowed for this precisely these complex spaces, communities to do, function and thrive.
Indeed. I'll close with that. And I hope I haven't sort of lost you and all of these thoughts.
I'm just really thinking the recently,
but I'm really happy I had this opportunity to do it and I look forward to the conversation and I apologise for the time I've taken.
Thanks. Thank you, Richard, for really a fantastic and extremely rich.
Presentation.
I think it got us all thinking a lot, and I think I'm happy to hand over essentially to physically if you want to conduct the Q&A portion of this.
But I just want to start by reminding everyone that we do have these two wonderful scholars for the next 40 minutes or so.
And so if anyone has any questions now, now's the time to ask.
As panellists, we also have our own questions that I'll hand over to,
basically because I really feel like I have the privilege to sort of take things to this point.
But thanks. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks very much, Richard and Beth, really both wonderful presentations.
So much squeezed in, too. So little time. I only wish we had more time, but of course, as do you can only do for 2 hours.
Maximum defined and we won't even keep you for 2 hours.
You know, perhaps I can begin with a question for but one for you, Beth, and then one for you and Rashan.
And then we can, you know, Sam, I'm sure, will chip in and then we'll we'll get questions slowly filtering in from the audience.
So, Beth, you know, I took you to say that in a way, religion as a category is only possible universally,
even though where the universal belongs is disputed.
So religion is an abstract universal category in its own right, like the state, like the secular.
So in some ways they are all part of the same in on the same plane in some strange way,
even though you want to make distinctions between them, between universal and particular.
But of course, those two categories are dependent, one on the other that, you know, you can't have the particular without the universal.
It's simply a moment of the universal in, say, Hegelian sense.
And in that sense, they're all part, if you will, of a secular order.
And, you know, the question centre word erasers, which I find so interesting,
is not simply the recognition of which you, I think, very rightly say about the problem, but the category of religion.
But how do you actually think the non universal this goes back to Webb Keynes critique in another way, you know,
whereas he would say that we've all inherited the category of religion so it's already part of our life once what we do,
you know, in a way, my point is not that it's like but you already have the universal how would you think it view need
to unpick it how is it possible to think the non universal and why this interests me is because.
In some other work I've been doing on Gandhi, Ghandi as a political thinker.
You know, he very deliberately comes to this question as in part someone who identifies as a Hindu.
Hinduism being a religion, if you want to call it that, that does not, in his view, permit conversion.
So it is a non expansive religion. We can argue whether that was correct or not, but in his view.
And it makes him think about how Hinduism does or does not belong in the category of religion itself,
alongside, say, Christianity as as expansive religions.
But it's not just religion that he's talking about. He also questions humanity as a universal category for him.
You know, I've come to the provisional conclusion that he plays with negative ideas, and so many of God's ideas are negative.
I can say non-violence, non-cooperation, non possession, you know, where you're presumed positive, but you're never talked with.
It's always the negative that you deal with. And a gaming, Hadian says negative is the principle of movement and dynamism in general.
But what you're suggesting is something that seems similar and yet quite different with certain words.
You know, you ended both by talking about the let me quote it, you know how it decimates the border.
I found that such a striking phrase, because, of course, it's not just the U.S. Mexican border,
which is what you you also made a border between the universal and the particular between religion, the secular, all kinds of borders.
But that doesn't do the kind of Gandhian negative.
It rather seems to shift the phenomenon away from the language game of Universal in particular, which are conjoined anyway.
But apart from saying this is something different. It cannot be talked about in terms of the religion, the religious and the nonreligious,
the religious and the secular, the cultic and the religious or whatever.
How might you characterise it, say, in contrast with this kind of, you know, Gandhi's negative approach to the problem?
Sorry, it's a rather lengthy question due to the kind of richness of your presentation.
Thank you so much, Faisal. I think that it's a very important question.
How to characterise it I think is I'm not sure and maybe I need to look into
some of those candy and resources that would be helpful in characterising it.
I would say that part of the challenge or as I search for resources for thinking through how to do precisely what you're describing,
is actually related to what Roshan is talking about, in fact, which is what your talk brought to mind.
Roshan was this very important necessity of kind of making two moves at once,
which is that kind of parochial ization of liberal ideals on the one hand.
And that may be in some ways that the process of privatisation may in some ways be related to the Gandhian sensibility that Faisal is describing.
I'm not sure.
But on the other hand, it's also a reworking and a refashioning from the inside of those very ideals so that they are no longer recognisable.
And in that sense that touches on what I'm hearing and correct me if I'm mistaken, what I'm hearing from you,
which is this Gen Y domain, which is a very different, rather refashioned understanding of the secular that has different ethos,
a different sensibility, different aspirations,
and a very different understanding rigidities of the problem space that it is creating and that is instantiated vis a vis the religious.
So where I think, I mean, there's more than one move and that needs to be made.
And as I was listening to Hussain and as I was listening to you on your question,
I kept thinking about two thinkers, which is William Connolly's work on the ethos of Pluralisation,
which is very good at making those precisely those kind of e centring arising moves, but very much with a certain kind of ethos,
a certain kind of mode of engagement, which also brings to mind not marzuki work in Washington.
I thought of her specifically when you were speaking and her argument in her book, Islam in America, which some of you may be familiar with.
She has a powerful conclusion at the end in which she argues for the need to disconnect the liberal idea of the liberal secular ideal.
But the liberal ideologue general from the very exclusive norms and codes that it's become tied to.
So there's a sense in which there is an internal refashioning of stepping back, a sense of humility, kind of tempering,
of the arrogance that reminded me of precisely the ideal of working that you were describing was Shane, if I'm not understanding it.
And so I feel like the universal particular only gets us so far here.
And so I'm very sympathetic to that gesture that you're suggesting this this guardian move.
And I'm not sure how I would say through that prism or through that lens,
but I do think that it will involve not only kind of listening and trying to
understand these alternative religiosity is in the forms of political agency,
you know, just kind of from the outside, but actually actively reforming what Nadia calls the ensemble of codes and norms
of exclusion that have become so closely associated with liberal order in which,
you know, there's Rule 610 of the US federal policy of evidence is one of the main rules that gets cited in these cases,
and they're kind of trying to parse that language that we wish they had read and put on the screen for us.
And that language can obviously be read a lot of different ways, and it's a question of how it's read and by whom and which context.
And I think that those small differences and those shifts in the level of arrogance and the level
of presumption and the level of presumed liberal hegemony are going to be really important.
But tell me whether I need to read about this.
I got in the inflexibility and maybe it'll give me a whole new understanding of something with it and be most happy.
Thank you so much. Well, I'm not sure about that.
I think, you know, the Santa muerte example really teaches us a great deal, obviously, and I'm looking forward to your book once it comes out.
But I don't know I don't know if you since Beth referred to your talk, whether you would like to enter this conversation.
But I have another question for you as well. And as I'm sure there's a sidebar.
Sure. I mean, I think you can go ahead. I mean, I'm just very glad to hear this.
And I think you helped me think through some of the things I'm trying to do.
I mean, I precisely am. I think the primary motivation in doing this kind of work was to add that extra
move that I thought was not that I felt very deeply and very personally.
I felt like I needed to do. And I haven't seen that in much of his book and I'm looking forward to reading it.
But it's precisely the sort of refashioning that I think is strategically a useful way, a valuable way for us to move forward as well.
Right. Because it does I think it even I mean, not even more so.
Probably equally so.
It unsettles the these codes that underwrite the language we use and the way in which these laws like as you, as you mentioned, are interpreted.
So it's in this act of refashioning that I think, especially if, you know, if you have a whole movement of people doing this sort of thing,
which I think I at least I'm noticing is taking place now in the academy and even outside.
I think that's a really valuable thing moving forward.
So I really appreciate the way in which you describe my project of the anyway as a sort of bringing attention
to this very different ethos and sensibility and aspiration that informs a similar kind of project,
but in from a very different perspective that can trouble our way of proceeding right.
And I think I would just add that doing it from the Islamic perspective is the most unsettling sort of a way of moving forward,
because it's disturbing precisely because Islam is at the very heart of this project of secularism and I mean,
in sense of it being the great other of secularism.
And I think that's what also was provoking me so much in my reading of the sources
is that it did not map on even to the sort of modern rehabilitation of Islam,
which obviously emerged out of a colonial dialectic between Orientalism and modern nationalists, who for good reasons had to develop,
you know, projects of Islamic modernity that were going to be effective within their societies.
But of course, you know, fell into the trap of being encoded by this this larger logic.
Right. And I think the moment we're in now that we're able to sort of move beyond that and think about, you know, historicism,
these sorts of things, the particularity not only of the Islamic, but obviously, of course, of the the secular and the Western.
And so, yeah, this has been super helpful. And yeah, yes, I'd be very interested in hearing your question some and the others.
So thanks thanks for said. You know I was thinking when you were speaking it's very new stuff so I'm really you know,
I just wanted to congratulate you for allowing us to think in these ways.
But when you were talking about. The Dean and dunia distinction.
For instance, in contrast to the religion and the secular one of our times, I realise you're not making the fundamental distinction between them.
The religion, secularism, distinction of our times is often understood in spatial terms.
Not always, but very often.
The public space of the secular and, if you will, private space which could be inside you, or it could be a building or something, an institution,
whether the Dean Junior distinction is a temporal one or can be a temporal one, certainly in the in more modern usages of the union.
But now that I am familiar with. The gesture is off to the transient nature of the bonia that it might be ubiquitous.
And that's one word that might describe it nicely, perhaps, but it is purely transient.
But as Dean is a kind of permanent thing.
And, you know, how might this allow us or would it perhaps allow us to think slightly differently about the categories?
You could, of course, use the more familiar ones of a word be, in other words, the newest world.
But that has a quite distinct Christian genealogy otherworldliness as opposed to being, which I take it is not otherworldly in that sense.
But if we think about temporality here,
then I think the universality of the domain that you ended with is really fascinating because it's a, if you will,
a universality premised upon transience, premised upon the vanity of this world, which is as yet,
and therefore everywhere it's transient, and yet it survives, and yet it contains.
And yet it's ubiquitous, as I said, in that way.
Does that make sense? That's one question. And the other had to do with the particularity of dying.
And, you know, so on the one hand, of course, it seems abstract because of that quotation you read at the very end,
the, if you will, being of non-Muslims is also called itself like only Muslims have been and other people don't.
So this and that is you are you know, that it's a large part of your problem this kind of equivalence and availability of be think that.
But I just wonder.
But you know, are we talking about this as kind of abstract universality or are we talking about a set of different particularities?
I believe that is a is a real difference without distinction that I'm making here.
But I just wondered, you know, I was thinking of the term, the plural of being A, B, R, which is not so often used.
And it seems to, at least in the Indian material, that animals re-emerge or emerge in the 18th or 19th centuries,
perhaps like the earlier in the late Mughal period.
And that sort of makes sense because you're thinking of what Akbar and the Mughals are doing with the idea of being in the DNA,
Lanhee and all of that. As for women writes about, you know, and their, you know, what, what imperial what empire does to ideas such as the.
So it goes back to what you were saying.
But before that, I mean, is is the plural of being used in this sense of secular Christianity or is it a kind of collection of,
if you will, specificities? You know, what kind of abstraction is it?
Again, this might be a distinction without a difference.
And now these are excellent questions and thank you for them to begin with.
The first you know, I'm thinking I've been thinking a lot about the specialisation of of secularism a lot.
And I actually had one of my grad students who is working on specialisation with another case.
And this is a late 20th century case. I forget the name, but it has to do with a community and ritual sacrifice.
Sacrifice being another one of the central nodes around which this other ization takes place.
Right. And on secular transplant, it's interesting with Dean and Dunya, I mean,
the way I and I find your characterisation very interesting and creative and fruitful,
I'm not sure if it entirely maps on to the way I have the historical reality I've encountered.
So the first thing to know, which is interesting, is that, I mean,
it's really hard to say where the Antonia comes from within the Arabic and then the logical and in the case that we're going to argue.
But my own sense is that it comes from a spatial perspective.
So it's actually the close and the FA.
So Dean and Dunya, when we see it in pre-Islamic poetry, it actually speaks of the nearness and the foreignness.
And Robin has written this excellent book in which she talks about some of that.
But what I see in the mediaeval context is, you know, things have settled are two separate distinctions that I have to sort of work through.
So there is the donia and the acid of this life in the next life, and there's Dean and Donia.
And I actually think Dean and Donia map on to a special kind of boundary drawing,
whereas the Donia in Austria is obviously very expectedly a temporal in nature.
So we have two sorts of categorisations.
And what's interesting about that is that when we see the Damien that we invoked in the cases in which I'm looking,
whether in law or in politics, I think you do find it's working to sort of, you know,
do this sort of conceptual specialisation work, right, of drawing these boundaries of, okay, well,
where does religion stop and where does where do we go beyond and that sort of thing, right.
And what's interesting about and I'm just thinking now about secularism as a kind of modern, distinctly modern European phenomenon, right.
When we talk about secularism today, is secularism today a specialised discourse?
I think it even goes back to Locke.
And when I was reading Locke and my students this order, you know, it's really about creating a new secular, universal, secular human body, right?
And it's about stripping away. I mean, this entire tradition that informs personhood, right, on premise informs the subject.
And that's the entire process that Locke is outlining in order to create a secular public sphere.
Right. So we're talking about a public when we're talking about a public,
I think it's a distinctively modern phenomenon and it would be anachronistic to use it in the mediaeval context.
I mean, there might be creative ways to think through it, but when we think about the kind of locking in public, it's sort of a mechanism of creating.
What I would say is this modern capital a subject who is able to only work according to the rationalist
logic of the European Enlightenment and therefore be far more useful to the ends of modernity.
Right. And this is also that has written about and everyone has written about, and it's been a fascinating sort of intervention.
And so I think that is uniquely distinct about the kind of modern secular order in terms of specialisation.
And so thinking about this graduate student of mine has worked on this.
You see this happening with respect to specific spaces about whether a church and I think this case happened in Florida,
whereas the space in which the sacrifice can take place and it's all about public order,
I mean, the entire discourse is about the welfare of the people and that sort of thing.
It even becomes nationalist. It's un-American to engage in ritual sacrifice.
Right? What does that even mean? And so so that is a sort of entirely distinct thing.
So when I'm thinking about a now and thinking about specialisation in terms of the DNA away,
I do want to separate it from that kind of a specialised discourse.
Now, I think this kind of conceptual space making and adjudicating is a kind of natural phenomenon amongst thinkers,
especially jurists who are trying to do this sort of work.
But the process by which that happens, the concrete effects of them, I think are entirely different precisely because the codes are different.
Right. And then finally, the question I think is I think you're right.
I mean, what you do find is there I would agree I would agree with your second formulation.
Right. I think it is a set of particularities that they're in.
And that actually helps me think through this. Right. Because maybe we're not really talking about universality per se.
We're talking about a recognition of a set of particularities which they view as mapping on to a certain kind of universal phenomenon.
I think they would agree to that. And they don't use they use are beyond quite a bit in the mediaeval context.
But really that the the standard term is Miller. Right.
So there's Miller which really becomes the term for a religious community, whereas Dean can have a sort of existential element to it, right?
In the individual persons, Dean Miller always means a religious community.
So Miller. It becomes the standard term for representing various communities.
So we have obviously this vast literature around middle one to [INAUDIBLE] ride the creeds and the religions.
And it's actually interesting to think in terms of what the president is talking about, right,
why these categories are used and how and by whom and at what points they take on particular significance.
Right. Because, you know, if you think about this of this classification literature of various million,
which is, you know, goes back to Shahristani, who's the kind of high point it dies down for a while.
And then in the early modern period under the Ottomans, it picks up again.
You have a translation of these works into Turkish. And this is all in the context of what historians now are calling confessional ization.
So you have obviously the Ottoman side of the divide, but the move, I would say,
towards the modern state of creating a subject along the lines of a unified religious creed.
Right. And so I do think that sort of maps on to what the modern state does.
Right. And here I would actually say we have early modern modernity is right. We have multiple modalities.
And we need to also think through that as a way of in particular that particular
moment of the state and thinking of new ways of imagining our modern condition.
But, you know, I've said too much now that these are very great questions. So thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. I mean, that's just very scintillating discussion all round.
So, Beth, I'm going to send back to you.
And I understand we've got sort of maybe 13 minutes left and I still want to welcome, you know, any of the participants.
I don't want us to only the Geminis to questions. So if you want to put in questions, please feel free.
But while I have the chance, I'm going to put mine.
And so Beth, in a sense, at a certain point you were talking about sort of colonising religion and leaving in a sense,
leaving behind the category of religion altogether.
This reminds me of the number of conversations that we constantly have in religion departments about,
you know, what's going to happen to our department after we discard this term as a conceptual category.
And they sort of politics of not making the case too hard, shall we say.
But at the same time, you know what, really, one of the things that struck me as an Islamist, as you're talking about Santa marta, is, you know,
this would be seen as a sort of like very problematic sort of cultic practise within an Islamic paradigm,
certainly in modern times, but also in to the pre-modern times.
And I wanted to actually tie in Russian with this to a certain extent that, you know, number one, is it meaningful for us to think in terms of, okay,
we need to discard a category or these categories or just sort of the experimentation and,
you know, contingent inventions of people at different points in time.
And, you know, it gives us a great, you know, reason to exist as academics who can spend our careers writing about them.
But beyond that, you know, it is this kind of like a kind of existential dance that academics and people are performing in various ways.
You know, in a sense, I got the sense that there is a kind of tendency towards recognising particularism everywhere.
And is that the universal that will ultimately subvert all of the sort of conceptual efforts at organising these sort of into principles?
I don't know, maybe a bit of a subversive question and perhaps one I haven't thought through as well as I would like.
But just to sort of add onto that, you know, these sorts of practises with the same to death, so to speak,
would how would you situate something like that within an Islamic sort of mediaeval paradigm, if there can be one?
And just to think about how decolonising religion in Latin America through, you know,
decolonial theory in many ways is about sort of creating pluribus ability,
as they say, recognising that there isn't a universal, that there are many universal projects.
And is it useful to think of the mediaeval Islamic project as a universal project that is, you know,
creating another particularism in effect that we've become a bit more conscious of in the present?
I think I've sort of mixed in both of your presentations in that question, but I'd love to hear your reflections action on this.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Osama. The first thing I want to just say is it seems like part of the challenge.
We've been talking a lot about universality versus particularity,
and it seems like part of the challenge to me would be to recognise the power of the taken for granted.
And I just put in the chat a book that may be of interest to Rashan in particular and perhaps others as well, which is newly out by Elaine France.
And she's actually looking at French Catholic secularism, Catholic, and she's looking it's called the privilege of being banal.
And so for me, part of the challenge is I don't see it really as an academic exercise, but rather as an intellectual and political project,
which is to, first of all, to understand that which is seen as banal and to make it not banal.
And that's that you could cast that as particular izing it.
You could also cast it as understanding, perhaps a bit more modestly, because the particular, as Faisal kindly reminded us,
always requires that universal and perhaps we want to work to dislodge that tendency to be toggling between those two so tirelessly all the time.
So the first is to recognise the power of the taken for granted and then to perhaps think very
carefully about how to present alternative perspectives that are not indebted to that paradigm,
to that framing, that are working in a different conceptual grammar,
that are working out of a different set of ascetic practises and histories that are not at all relating themselves back to that presumed universal,
which we have now been allies. And so that leads to foreseen spaces, encounters, understandings, histories,
sensibilities that I don't think we can neatly categorise in terms of the universal in particular, but rather we can.
And maybe you're right, maybe we are falling back into the some sort of just world of particulars.
But I do think that there's a certain way of relating to that universal and to trying to problematise that and to dethrone it.
That puts us in a slightly different epistemological and political space.
And the other thing is, I don't think all of this is academic because I do spend a fair amount of time,
often despite my right, the best interest of my sanity, trying to translate some of these very complex, nuanced,
problematise nations of politics, the history, the secular, the religious into the public discourse,
into more accessible language that becomes perhaps a resource for individuals who are engaged in, say, lawmaking.
I've done congressional testimony just about just almost a year ago who are involved in policymaking,
who are to play an imminent role in the media, in setting certain kinds of conversations.
And I, in a very modest way, try to just nudge them toward the possibility of some of these alternative perspectives.
And I have found that people are often quite open, surprisingly open.
And this reflects maybe a lot of Shane is a very optimistic young person's perspective that I appreciate, is that, no, it's not all for nought.
And, you know, it's not just in our ivory towers, especially you and Oxford Ivory there, but, you know,
just that really there is some space for people who want to be they want to find a way out of the predicaments and the rigidities and the hate.
And so much of the violence that we're seeing in this country right now,
there is a real appetite, I think, for alternative ways of thinking and being and understanding.
And so I'm optimistic about the possibility of conversations like this,
leading to some success of other conversations that then do have an actual impact, however modest, in public policy in these legal debates.
And I'm anxious to hear about what some of them what they would look like in an Islamic mediaeval context.
So I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Yeah. Just very quickly, you know, I'm not a mediaeval Muslim jurist, so I can't say this definitively,
but what I will say is that it would not have looked like how know how it looks today.
Right. And what you're studying. And it's precisely because when it came to the the cultic or the particulars of religious traditions practises.
Right. That's precisely where this autonomy was granted.
I mean, absolutely. Really. Right. I mean, we know, for example, of, you know, very famously Zoroastrian ancestral marriages.
They were being totally at odds with Muslim morality.
Right. Famous, famously allowed. Right.
And precisely that distinction I was talking about with Danny about that as being sort of protected around that,
that these sort of practises would never have been.
I think, first of all, they would not have been problematise in the way that they are in the secondary order.
And moreover, they wouldn't have been as central to the very maintenance of that social order.
Right. And what's really I'm starting to think about now, what's interesting is in thinking about that that arrangement that took place then,
is the stark divergence between two realities, right?
So you have this theoretical reality of the protection of the particularity of a community, right?
So it seems like you have nice communities who are just regulating themselves.
And this is essentially the assumption, the kind of society. An assumption, right.
That they are products of embodied traditions, that we are not in an optimum conception.
These are rational individuals that can all be subsumed within some sort of universal regulation.
Right. There is that implicit recognition on the part of the mediaeval jurist.
But what's striking is that the historical reality is far more complicated because they were not siloed off community as right.
So even though they were theorising the sort, particularly what one finds and I'm working on this in a different aspect,
thinking about how Sufis were Christian at the same time there are Muslim rites and also just so much historical work being done on the,
you know, the Balkans and other places where you find literally a shared world.
So it's not as if the pre-modern mediaeval reality was one in which you just had particularities.
You know, so often there are different districts within the cities,
but actually a really robust culture in which people are interacting as humans with one another despite their difference.
Confessional differences, right. And that's the really striking thing.
And I think this historical work is only going to increase start to news as this wonderful God massive book,
you know, the making of the mediaeval, mediaeval Middle East.
And the second half the book is, I think, groundbreaking work that will only be further and talking about the actual shared world that we encounter.
And so I don't have an answer to this, but I do think about I think a lot about this this historical reality,
which doesn't seem to map on to our vision of this dark ages, of lack of plurality, of lack of actual syncretism.
Right. We really do find that. So this is just some scattered thoughts around that.
But I think it's a form. Thank you so much.
I'm very conscious of the time. We have maybe a couple of minutes and someone did put their hand up.
But before we take that potentially, because we usually ask people to write that question.
So I had asked the gentleman,
I just want to say I happened to be in Windsor right now at an interfaith sort of I'm at Windsor Castle actually in the Queen's residence,
so at St George's House. And the last time I was here, we actually had the MP who acts as sort of the I forget the exact title,
but she deals with international religious freedom.
So I actually I mean, this is why I appreciate your writing in these areas, because it is very accessible.
It can be read and understood by a lawyer in her case who has become an MP.
I don't think it wasn't a baroness. I think it was an actual Fiona.
I forget her. MP but I recommended your book to her.
I sent her an email with the title and link and I hope I mean she expressed an interest in it.
So, you know, I hope that complicates the worldviews that were being discussed in that room.
Fingers crossed. Thank you so much. We don't have the question and I'm really conscious of time.
I hope that they will indulge us for not taking this question.
But first, all I don't know if you want to call proceedings to a conclusion,
and I am happy to actually just quickly mention we're having our next session,
next and final session for the year in a week's time on the 22nd of June with Fadi,
by the way, and Nadia Abu Ali from Duke University and the American University of Beirut,
respectively, talking about Marxism in relation to Islamic political thought.
So we very much look forward to that. Thanks very much, Osama.
Thank you all an audience and thank you in particular, Beth and Roshan, really wonderfully stimulating presentations.
And we really could have gone on. But I do hope we shall meet in person rather than simply online at some point to chat.
It'll be good to meet you properly, Beth. It'll be wonderful to see you again.
And with that, we will close this session.
Very successful one, I think. Thank you all.
And we shall be in touch. And the recording, I think, will be put up and you will be sent a link to it.
Thank you. Thank you. It it's lovely to be here with you.
Have a wonderful day.