Abstract:A substantial scholarship has studied the extent to which states across the political and geographic spectrums rely on legal, bureaucratic, and judicial institutions to govern religion. However, a deeper inquiry into the mechanisms through which regulation occurs has yet been achieved. This article foregrounds conversion, understood as mobility between social groups in which belief and sincerity may figure but is not reducible to either, to observe these dynamics. Through an analysis of Egyptian jurisprudence … Show more
“…The sizable body of case law on gurdwara leadership disputes has emerged from distinctly local histories of racial governance and Sikh practices of religious and political mobilization. Yet, as I have illustrated in this article, this specific case law is symptomatic of the secular state's more generic capacity to decide and establish the legal and political boundaries of religion (Agrama, 2012; Oraby, 2018; Sezgin & Kunkler, 2014; Sullivan, 2005), which Mahmood (2015) suggests has assumed a characteristic form across different geopolitical contexts. As Mahmood (2015, p. 4) explains,The two propensities internal to secularism—the regulation of religious life and the construction of religion as a space free from state intervention—account for its phenomenal power to regenerate itself: any incursion of the state into religious life often engenders the demand for keeping church and state separate, thereby replenishing secularism's normative premise and promise.To contribute to sociolegal theory and critical secular studies, this article offers novel insights into the multiple intersecting mechanisms through which state law expands its authority over religion, attending to how processes of judicialization are mediated by the statutory parameters of civil society institutions as well as the discursive practices of litigants.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 86%
“…The sizable body of case law on gurdwara leadership disputes has emerged from distinctly local histories of racial governance and Sikh practices of religious and political mobilization. Yet, as I have illustrated in this article, this specific case law is symptomatic of the secular state's more generic capacity to decide and establish the legal and political boundaries of religion (Agrama, 2012;Oraby, 2018;Sezgin & Kunkler, 2014;Sullivan, 2005), which Mahmood (2015) suggests has assumed a characteristic form across different geopolitical contexts. As Mahmood (2015, p. 4) explains,…”
Since the 1990s, a sizeable body of case law has formed in the Canadian province of British Columbia in response to disputes over the political leadership of local gurdwaras, the name for Sikh places of worship and assembly. Although the disputes stemmed from religious and political disagreements, the legal issues addressed by the courts concern the proper bureaucratic administration of Sikh institutions that have been legally incorporated as nonprofit “societies.” Through a textual analysis of 55 legal decisions related to gurdwara leadership disputes, this article explains how the courts have decided these cases without ceding the pretense of secular neutrality by mobilizing a series of shifting discursive distinctions between religion, politics, materiality, civil society, and bureaucratic procedure. Building on critical secular and sociolegal theory, this article tracks how law is able to establish and extend the state's jurisdiction over Sikh practices and populations through its capacity to inscribe and delimit the social and political parameters of religion. It illustrates how this case law serves as a mechanism of racial governance by extending forms of surveillance and legal intervention that work to embed the diasporic practices of Sikh communities within the spheres of Canadian state power.
“…The sizable body of case law on gurdwara leadership disputes has emerged from distinctly local histories of racial governance and Sikh practices of religious and political mobilization. Yet, as I have illustrated in this article, this specific case law is symptomatic of the secular state's more generic capacity to decide and establish the legal and political boundaries of religion (Agrama, 2012; Oraby, 2018; Sezgin & Kunkler, 2014; Sullivan, 2005), which Mahmood (2015) suggests has assumed a characteristic form across different geopolitical contexts. As Mahmood (2015, p. 4) explains,The two propensities internal to secularism—the regulation of religious life and the construction of religion as a space free from state intervention—account for its phenomenal power to regenerate itself: any incursion of the state into religious life often engenders the demand for keeping church and state separate, thereby replenishing secularism's normative premise and promise.To contribute to sociolegal theory and critical secular studies, this article offers novel insights into the multiple intersecting mechanisms through which state law expands its authority over religion, attending to how processes of judicialization are mediated by the statutory parameters of civil society institutions as well as the discursive practices of litigants.…”
Section: Discussionmentioning
confidence: 86%
“…The sizable body of case law on gurdwara leadership disputes has emerged from distinctly local histories of racial governance and Sikh practices of religious and political mobilization. Yet, as I have illustrated in this article, this specific case law is symptomatic of the secular state's more generic capacity to decide and establish the legal and political boundaries of religion (Agrama, 2012;Oraby, 2018;Sezgin & Kunkler, 2014;Sullivan, 2005), which Mahmood (2015) suggests has assumed a characteristic form across different geopolitical contexts. As Mahmood (2015, p. 4) explains,…”
Since the 1990s, a sizeable body of case law has formed in the Canadian province of British Columbia in response to disputes over the political leadership of local gurdwaras, the name for Sikh places of worship and assembly. Although the disputes stemmed from religious and political disagreements, the legal issues addressed by the courts concern the proper bureaucratic administration of Sikh institutions that have been legally incorporated as nonprofit “societies.” Through a textual analysis of 55 legal decisions related to gurdwara leadership disputes, this article explains how the courts have decided these cases without ceding the pretense of secular neutrality by mobilizing a series of shifting discursive distinctions between religion, politics, materiality, civil society, and bureaucratic procedure. Building on critical secular and sociolegal theory, this article tracks how law is able to establish and extend the state's jurisdiction over Sikh practices and populations through its capacity to inscribe and delimit the social and political parameters of religion. It illustrates how this case law serves as a mechanism of racial governance by extending forms of surveillance and legal intervention that work to embed the diasporic practices of Sikh communities within the spheres of Canadian state power.
“…The scholar of comparative law and religion, Mona Oraby, argues that religious difference is made and maintained in Egyptian law (2018). None of my Beni Suef interlocutors, however, regarded this regulation (such as the printing of an individual’s religion on their government ID cards) as evidence of secularism.…”
Section: Ordinary Experiences Of the Centralized Egyptian Statementioning
In recent decades, secularism has emerged as one of the most studied concepts in sociocultural anthropology, and Egypt a primary site of its analysis. This article considers trends in Egypt’s modern and contemporary history in order to complicate the great explanatory power some anthropological works have granted to secularism. Above all else, it interrogates the manner in which the state’s regulation of religion (which is the defining feature of Asadian conceptions of secularism) has unfolded in recent Egyptian history. First, I survey the different ways scholars have portrayed secularism in Egypt, focusing in particular on the insights and limitations of Asadian theories. A second section employs ethnographic data to uncover how ordinary Egyptians in the provincial capital of Beni Suef have experienced state power, religion, and secularism in their everyday lives. Contextualizing these ethnographic perspectives alongside several prominent instances of state violence between 2011 and 2013, I elucidate how, rather than typifying a secular state, Egyptian politics, above all else, have been driven by an opportunistic realpolitik. My final section brings historical and ethnographic perspectives into sustained conversation to argue that the state regulation anthropologists sometimes frame as secularism is better conceptualized as a form of state centralization. I conclude, in turn, that political developments in modern Egypt have most often been shaped by flexible national and imperial interests.
“…In international contexts, "the reference to credibility assessments (also known as 'refugee status determination' or RSD) is particularly contentious" and "in scenarios of religious persecution, courts engage in RSD to make categorical distinctions between legitimate refugees and so-called religious imposters. " As Nijhawan concludes, "when asylum adjudicators set out to decide whether to accept such refugee claims, they can quickly fi nd themselves administering a process akin to a religious trial" (Nijhawan 2016: 108, citing Kagan 2010: 1181; see also Oraby 2018 andMarzouki 2012).…”
Section: Religion-talk In the Context Of Asylummentioning
The politics of religious asylum is ripe for reassessment. Even as a robust literature on secularism and religion has shown otherwise over the past two decades, much of the discussion in this field presumes that religion stands cleanly apart from law and politics. This article makes the case for a different approach to religion in the context of asylum-seeking and claiming. In the United States, it suggests, the politics of asylum is integral to the maintenance of American exceptionalism. Participants in the asylum-seeking process create a gap between Americans and others, affirming the promise of freedom, salvation, and redemption through conversion not to a particular religion or faith but to the American project itself. This hails a particular kind of subject of freed om and unencumbered choice. It is both a theological and a political process.
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