Good afternoon. Good morning.
Depending on your timezone and welcome to our third event for the term and it's actually coming right in the last week of term here in
Oxford on the of the our political thought seminar as part of the Middle East Centre's sort of contemporary Islamic studies programme.
And it gives myself and facility a 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.
Our scholars are Elizabeth Shachtman, 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 and 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 in Russia and Faisal and I kind of take the privilege that
we have as sort of co-chairs of the panel to engage you both in discussion.
And we thoroughly enjoy that process as well. So but we usually try and get to everyone's questions as well.
So without further ado, I'd like to briefly introduce Elizabeth 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 Sorry 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 were just showing us as having been published.
Oh, no, no. So you are currently writing, but you're also working on you've 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 for 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 in here in that process in particular.
The first is from the Teaching Law and religion case study archives that I 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 Rose's syncretic and uncategorised 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 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. Now, 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 and 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, a VUCA approach to. 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 of outcast.
What isn't there is not religion, legitimate 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, 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 separatism 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 Identities, Nelson and other authors 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 Asad.
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?
You go, Rosa. 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.
Imagine 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 Crossing's new book,
which is called Experiments with Power Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad, which I think accomplishes this very complex balancing act.
Christian 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, bringing them into the interface.
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.
Obey, after all, was a crime in Trinidad until 2000, and it remains one today in much of the Anglophone Caribbean.
Crossan 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.
Crossing concludes 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 Obama 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 Obey clearly runs into a wall.
He says his interlocutors reverse 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 used 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 Pen and David Chittister 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.
Chittister 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 I specifically will speak for a moment about sent 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 as a sympathetic would be saint of the downtrodden and leave it at that.
US-Mexican, 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 these themes 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 are term. If I may, I'm just going to share my screen here and pull up a slide of something where that.
Okay. This is less than Disney mine. Everywhere you go, increasingly here in Chicago as well.
You can find all kinds of devotional items to the Asante Sigma, also known as Latin Fettuccini Girl.
In my own local grocery store, I have found this candle,
this that which is my knights and says the prayer which is written in Spanish on the back last Antisemite 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 saint, a templo, a temple to send them with they where everyone is invited to come for the rosary every Sunday at 12 noon.
So you get to she is ubiquitous is just to give you a sense with her globe and her size.
So let me just 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 spiritual insurgency that involved worship of a perverted Christian God.
This has made its way into the American courts as well. And I tell all, 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 described 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 anti indigenous elements of the persecution of devotees of science and what they 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 them, 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 cult.
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 warns Santa muerte de 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 wear say 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 that pick this up and then run with it and develop their own nefarious interpretations of reverence in Santa muerte.
So if this slippery cult 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 would be really easy to dismiss these perspectives as ignorant and 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.
These. Understandings and these interpretations and these criminalisation of them which 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 fossil deity named Ton,
not seen, according to Luis Leone,
and like sent them where they Guadalupe decimated the border between European and Native American religions through processes of syncretism,
continuity and transformation. In a new article in which she 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 am 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 Haiti,
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 border lands, 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 Whitney 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 muerte 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 loss, 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.
I'm going to quickly and thank you also for keeping to the time.
So exactly 20 minutes.
I'm going to and in the interest of time and the subsequent discussion straight on to
reactions sort of presentation regulating religion in pre-modern Islamic governments.
But 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've 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 Abdullah Centre for Islamic Law and Civilisation at Yale Law School.
And without further ado, I'd like to hand it over to you. Okay.
Thank you so much. Let me just share my screen.
Oh, 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,
and 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 a theory,
which is to say to use the the hammer of history to de-legitimize the theoretical findings,
but to problematise certain assumptions within the 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'll 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 saying no, the undermine is book questioning secularism,
and it's a questioning power that's driven by this 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 the understanding of legal secularisation.
And here I'm really thinking about this wonderful volume after secular law,
which I think only Sullivan and others edited as the kind of assumption of a sort of Christian sovereignty.
Celebrities, excellent articles, and they're 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 of 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 Islam to think through some.
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 study,
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.
So 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 I'll show even outside of them about how and where to draw the lines between the Dini and the doing early forms of hostility and enmity.
Diala And in short, really the question is this you know,
if you have a witness who 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 at one level, a DINI or 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 sanctioning that, 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.
Abdullah. So one of the commentators in the Shafi School, and I would say the shabby school,
had the most sophisticated of reflections on this particular question of Hossein Madani, 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 second. So he says a a secular form of of of Azaria, whether it's tribal, ethnic, whatever it might be,
is perforce alleged illegitimate in courts but and also be 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 testimony or else the courts are not 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 sponsored by some of the analysis of the in the 17th century Egyptian Shafik scholar Johanna Lockwood.
He actually replicates the official formula of the matter 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 don't know how to do it. The Falantil Fulani are now, 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, theological.
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.
So 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 in the question of the Dunya and the legal courts?
And the way I would proceed would elucidated is that the danger of a 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 and the Islamic one being a novel development in this long trek.
So what we see then, if we think about this comparatively,
and this is the kind of work I think I'm doing it 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 I 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 problem of the Dunya is merely a tool of governance, of governance, rather than a tool of Governmentality.
And here I'm talking about Governmentality. I love Foucault, and that's precisely because it lacks this ideological hegemonic function.
If we think about that term as Graham Skinner's right uses it 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 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 question 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 you think about secularism today.
And to stick with the theme of witnessing, I look now at this.
Another 11th century, a scholar, a very important one from the Hanafi School ICRC, who was a canonical figure in the Hanafi School.
So he also talks about witnessing in a different context, and he tells us a very expected thing that heretics usually attend the Catholic Church.
And we understand that heretics cannot transmit religious traditions. Right?
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 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 Harlem nomad and the heretic with respect to these matters is not partisan.
Right. So it goes back to the 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 of the volume of injustice and so on,
and it's often invoked in the context of distinguishing it from the religious realm or the realm of a bad.
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 that believing in divine inspiration in harm right is a very popular category of gods,
essentially revealing the truth of a 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 this 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,
one of the US 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 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.
Well, 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 potentials and also the limits of legal secularisation.
So what's interesting about what I think is happening with surrogacy 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 neutrality, 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,
and 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 comprehensively, comprehensively 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. There's a very quick question here. Does Islamic law apply to non-Muslims?
It's a very important question address to start thinking about throughout the ages.
And here I take a quote from on Roma un's book on Islamic law,
which she says called within me 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 around the ninth, three 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 the colonial law in some ways, in a kind of essential way.
It's sort of overlapping, right, that you have this process of communal ization rights that communities have now to regulate,
let delimit themselves of 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 Casani important addressed. We are commanded by God to leave them to their own religious beliefs.
Now you're actually doing our Mallya ordinance, 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's what that's doing.
But in terms of the theoretical implications and I'm good at this,
Julien Stephens has written this wonderful book about colonial law in the Islamic context within India,
and she speaks of secular governance, legal governance as, quote, 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 which 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, 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 writing.
Is that a reading of the inherent universality of the enemy as opposed to the particularity of the DNA?
This is something I work a lot on and I think a lot about in my book, but they often align with the DNA.
We are there 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 this what's really changed here is that under the modern secular order, the particularity of religion is no longer maintained.
Right. And here 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 Herr that this manifests in a racialized and gender way.
And that's precisely because and I'll concluded this I agree here with George Shulman's idea,
and this is part of his contribution in race, in secularism in America.
He critiques call Schmidt. You know, Karl Schmidt will 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 are 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 dunia 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 potentially 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.
So but I'll hand over to basically because I really feel like I have the privilege to sort of take things to this point.
Well, thanks. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks very much. Rich and Beth, really both wonderful presentations.
So much squeezed in to so little time.
I only wish we had more time, but of course, as you can only do for about 2 hours, maximum might find 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 Russian.
And then we can, you know, some, I'm sure will chip in and then we'll we'll get few 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 that 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 independent, one or the other, that, you know, you can't have the particular without the universal.
It's simply a moment of the universal in in sectarian sense.
And in that sense, they're all part of you will have a secular order.
And you know, the question Santa word erasers, which I find so interesting is not simply the recognition of which you,
I think very rightly say about the problem with the category of religion.
But a how do you actually think the non universal this goes back to web 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 words.
What do we do? In a way, my point is not that it's like, but you already have the universal.
How would you pick it? You need to unpick it.
How is it possible to think that non universal and why this interests me is because.
In some other work I've been doing on Gandhi 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 expensive 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 Islam and 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 presumed positive.
But you know what's talked with. It's always the negative that you gain with.
And again, he alien 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.
It's not a word. You know, you ended, Beth, 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 US-Mexican border,
but 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. But apart from saying this is something different, it cannot be talked about in terms of the religion,
the religious and the non-religious, 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's 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 Gandhi 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 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 position 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's 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, when I'm hearing from you and 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 it is instantiating a the religious.
So what I think, I mean, there are there's more than one move and that needs to be made.
And as I was listening to Shane and as I was listening to this 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 in those precisely those kind e centring, pragmatic, surprising moves,
but very much with a certain kind of ethos, a certain kind of mode of engagement.
Which also brings to mind Nadia MARZOUKI, whose work in machine 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 ideal in 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,
a kind of tempering, of the arrogance that reminded me of precisely the ideal of democracy that you were describing.
Machine, 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 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, this 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 pass that language that Russian had read and put on the screen for us,
and that those kinds of 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 in the insensibility,
and maybe it'll give me a whole new understanding of something with it and the most happy.
Thank you so much. Well, I'm not sure about that.
I think, you know, the Santa marta 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 either of you since Matt referred to your talk whether you would like to enter
this conversation that I have another question for you as well as I'm sure there's Osama.
I'm sure. I mean, I think you can go ahead. I mean, I'm just yeah, I'm very glad to hear this.
And I think you helped me think through some of the things we're trying to do.
I mean, I precisely am. I think the prior 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 nothing much a good book and I'm looking forward to reading it.
But it's precisely this 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 even I mean, not even more so, probably equally so.
It unsettles the these codes that underwrite the the language we use our use and the way in which these laws,
like as 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 that anyway as as sort of bringing us or bringing
attention to this very different ethos and sensibility and aspiration that informs a similar kind of project,
but 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 Orientalist and 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 it's it's I think the moment we're in now that we're able to sort of move beyond that and think about, you know, historic sizing,
these sorts of things, the particularity not only of the assignment, but obviously, of course, of the the secular and the Western.
And so, yeah, this has been super helpful. And yeah, course I'd be very interested in hearing your question some in the other.
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 of 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 Indian but where 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.
Whereas Dean is a kind of permanent thing.
And 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.
I've just lost the word B. In other words, it's the new world.
But that has a quite distinct Christian genealogy.
Otherworldliness as opposed to being rich, I take it, is not otherworldly in that sense.
But if we think about temporality here,
then I think the universality of the Dunya that you ended with 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 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 being a.
And, you know, so on the one hand, of course, it's it seems abstract because of that quotation you read at the very end,
the, if you will, being of non-Muslims has also called itself like only Muslims have been and other people don't.
So they and that is your you know,
that it's a large part of the problem with this kind of equivalence and availability of do think that but I just wonder.
But you know, are we talking about this as kind of abstract universality or I don't you know, are we talking about a set of different particularities?
I believe that is a is a real is a it's a difference without distinction that I'm making here.
But I just wondered because, you know, I was thinking of the term, the plural of the beyond, which is not so often used.
And it it seems to, at least in the Indian material, that animals come, you know,
re-emerge or emerge in the 18th, 19th centuries, perhaps like the earlier in the late Mughal period.
And that sort of makes sense because you're thinking of what about in the Mughals are doing with the idea of being in the DNA.
Lahiri and all of that. As for me writes about. You know and there 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 the used in this sense abstractly redundant?
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 no, 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 there's this other ization takes place right on second reasons plane.
It's interesting with Dean and Antonia 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 of 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 of Arabic and largely but my own sense is that it comes from a special 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 and BROADMAN has written this excellent book in which he talks about sort of that.
But what I see in the mediaeval context, as you know, things have settled, are two separate distinctions that I have to sort of work through.
So there's the Donia and the athlete of this life in the next life, and there's Dina and Donia.
And I actually think Dina and Donia map on to a special kind of boundary drawing,
whereas the Donia in October is obviously very expectedly a temporal in nature.
So we have two sorts of categorisations.
And, and what's interesting about that is that when we see the Demian 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.
Okay. Well, where does religion stop and where does where do we go beyond and that sort of thing.
Right. And 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?
You know, I think it even goes back to Locke.
And when I was reading Locke and my students this quarter, 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 various forms of subject.
And that's the entire process that Locke is outlining.
And 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 is 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 of a subject who is able to only work according to the rationalist logic of the European Enlightenment,
and therefore be far more, far, far more useful to the ends of modernity.
Right. And this is Assad 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 same question I think is I think you're right.
I mean, what you do find is the 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 onto us a certain kind of universal phenomenon.
I think they would agree to that and they don't use the use are beyond quite a bit in the mediaeval context.
But really the the, the, the, 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. The individual persons, Dean Miller always means a religious community.
So Miller becomes the standard term for representing various communities.
So we have obviously this vast literature around middle one [INAUDIBLE], right, the creeds and the religions.
And it's actually interesting to think, you know, 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 they they they take on a particular significance.
Right. Because, you know, if you think about this current this classification literature of various Miller 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 debate, 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 as 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. Well, I mean, that's just very scintillating discussion all round one of the.
So 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 to as to only the Gemini's the question.
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 and and the 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 as you're talking about Santa marta is, you know,
this would be seen as a sort of like a 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, you know, does it is it meaningful for us to think in terms of, okay,
we need to discard a category or these categories all 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 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 a 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 we haven't one to have thought through as well as I would like.
But just to sort of add onto that, you know, these sorts of practises with the Saint of 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, Beth and Hassan, on this.
Thank you. Thank you so much, Nama. The first thing I wanted to 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 Oliphant.
And she's actually looking at French Catholic secularism.
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 to 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, you know, 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,
problematic nations of politics, 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 eminent 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 what we're saying. This 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 that.
See you in Oxford, Ivory there. But, you know,
just 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 sense 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 it 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, though, being totally at odds with Muslim morality.
Right. Famous. Famously allowed. Right. And precisely that distinction I was talking about with you 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 secular 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 and the kind of society and assumption.
Right, that they are products of embodied traditions, that we are not in the lockean 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.
Right? So even though they were theorising the sort of togetherness, 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 a 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 Jackson to has 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 than 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 fun. Thank you so much.
I am 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 that I actually I happen 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 the MP who acts as sort of the I forget the exact title,
but she deals with international religious freedom,
which is 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 and 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 world views 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 Baden-Clay will indulge us for not taking this question.
But I face it, I don't know if you want to call proceedings to a conclusion.
Thanks very much for. Thank you all an audience and thank you in particular, Beth and Roshan really wonderfully stimulating presentations.
And we really could have gone on so but I do hope we shall meet in person rather than simply online at some point.
Richard, 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. Thank you. Thank you.
It was lovely to be here with you. Have a wonderful day. All right.
Bye bye.