Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?

Abstract

In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity. For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together, giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt's religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.

Judicial Activism in the Context of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: Emerging Conceptions of Femininity and Masculinity

“…During the same period, the Egyptian family increasingly came to be considered central to the welfare of society as a whole and the 'family' -reconceptualised as the unit of the nuclear family (al-'usra) -became an object of state administration. Furthermore, nationalist discourse from the mid-19th century regarded the Western-derived ideal of companionate marriage and the nuclear family as fundamental in constituting the fledging Egyptian nationstate (Abu-Lughod 1998;Agrama 2010;Asad 2001;Kholoussy 2010). …”

From the Liberation of Women to the Liberation of Men? A Century of Family Law Reform in Egypt

“…Asad (2003), Agrama (2010) and Mahmood (2016) all conducted detailed analyses of the introduction of liberal secularism in Egypt in relation to religious family law. Their work is important because it shows that what looks like incomplete secularism -a failure to modernise -is nothing less than the process of liberal secularism at work par excellence, including the fundamental process through which religion and the family were assigned to the private domain.…”

“…They come to the conclusion that women's rights are strategically employed for the purposes of power consolidation by the state (For example Sezgin 2013). Other scholars have demonstrated that what looks like incomplete secularism has in fact emerged from secular processes, such as in Egypt, where the religious basis of the different family laws is a result of the state's formal adherence to the principles of liberal secularism (Agrama 2010;Mahmood 2016). Yet, by and large, scholars of gender in the Middle East, especially those focusing on family law, have concentrated on the impact of such laws on the lives of women, to the exclusion of men.…”

Confessional pluralism and the civil society effect: Liberal mediations of Islam and secularism in contemporary Turkey

“…Critiques of liberal secularism (Asad 1993(Asad , 2003Mahmood 2005), in particular, have underscored the incapacity of the liberal concept of religion as individual, privatized belief to comprehend the myriad ethical disciplines and communities that have come to constitute religion outside the heartlands of Western modernity. This purchase on the powers of liberal secularism has been especially fruitful for anthropologists of religion working in postcolonial contexts, such as South Asia and Egypt, which still bear the imprint of British liberal law and its distinctive configuration of religion (Agrama 2010;Chatterjee 1998Chatterjee , 2004Hansen 2000;Mahmood 2005). Nevertheless, this body of work does not fully tackle the questions that concern me here: How might liberal ideals and religious projects coincide within and on the basis of civil society?…”