Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?

The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims

“…12 This orientalist and homonationalist discourse has been discussed in relation to a number of other contexts such as gay refugees (Long 2009;de Jong 2008) and gay activism in Germany (Haritaworn et al , 2011. See also, Asad (2006), Brown (2006), Mahmood (2009) and Razack (2008) for analyses of nationalist and state discourse on Muslims as a threat to modern 'Western' values. 13 Timeline by the International Homo/Lesbian Information Centre and Archive, available: http://www.…”

Islam and the legal enforcement of morality

“…Marzouki also notes that Park 51 opponents were beholden to a "liberal conception of harm," as the incensed mosque was not objected for the sake of a "moral doctrine," "blasphemy against a God," or a "holy tradition," but in secular memory of the victims of the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 (p. 861). Moreover, no frontal attack on the limitations of "secular law" was made by Park 51 opponents, while such lament was loud and clear on the part of the Danish Cartoon opponents (e.g., Mahmood 2009). A bit of cool structuralism, for which there is no intrinsic meaning to signs outside their relations, is a useful antidote to the hotter "clash of civilizations" rhetoric that vitiates the debate on Islam in the West.…”

“…However, Mahmood's (impeccably "correct") version of the event does not seem to be so far from such reading. Mahmood (2009) may draw an unduly exotic picture of Islam. As Andrew March (2012) has objected, in her emphasis on "emotional pain" she even gives an ironically "secularized" version of "Islamic discourse."…”

Roundtable on Eve Darian-Smith, Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law

“…The Danish cartoons, first published by Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and again by numerous media outlets in Denmark, Europe, and the US in 2008, is ''exemplary of the standoff between religious and secular worldviewsparticularly in liberal democratic societies,'' (Mahmood 2009, 838, emphasis mine) she writes. In critical and conservative responses to the cartoons, the Muslim protests they generated in Europe and globally, and the Islamophobic reactions to these demonstrations, freedom of speech, Mahmood (2009) observes, was frequently positioned as opposed and even antithetical to religious beliefs and practices. This polarization between religion and secularism some have argued, have raised critical questions regarding the acceptable practice of religion in European societies, especially the place of Muslims and the future of Islam (see Geoffrey Brahm Levy and Tariq Modood 2009).…”

“…Contemporary and ongoing struggles over secularity, religion, and racism that are apparent in the Danish cartoon controversy as Mahmood (2009) examines it, and also in struggles over Islam in Europe and in North America, point to the timeliness and urgency of Eve Darian-Smith's most recent book, Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Modern Anglo-American Law. Writing across five centuries, Darian-Smith traces the dynamic, contested and vexed relations between religion, race, and rights, three themes that have figured unevenly in socio-legal studies and have not often been analyzed together.…”