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Session #4: Saturday, 10 January, 11.30 - 13.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Stewart Motha, Law School, Kent University (s.motha@kent.ac.uk)
Chair/discussant: Kalpana Kannabiran, Professor of Sociology of Law, NALSAR, Hyderabad/Stewart Motha, Law School, Kent University (kalpana.kannabiran@gmail.com/s.motha@kent.ac.uk)
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This paper offers the lineaments of a genealogy of occidental law as a secular theology. The genealogy is traced through three cumulative phases: empire, revolution, modernity; each phase being, as it were, captured in the work of a corresponding thinker who is taken as a constituent instance: Vitoria, Hobbes, Nietzsche.
Talal Asad in his erudite treatise, Formations of the Secular, has provided a powerful critique of liberal secularism. He challenges the dominant perception that secularism pushes back religions to the closets of the private. Instead, Asad argues, liberal secularism strives to properly discipline the religious, so that ‘religion’ – instead of being an exclusive sphere to politics – becomes complimentary, in fact necessary, to governmental operations. Not that secular liberalism prohibits extreme forms of violence; a good secular subject can indeed kill or sacrifice, but only on behalf of the nation-state. Secularism is thus fundamentally a form of governmental power that aims at anchoring a subject’s political belonging in the nation-state and its values. From this vantage point and following closely on Foucault, Asad analyses the different facets of liberal governmental technology: how its agenda of limited government in practice means pervasive governance, how the liberal art of governance – while drawing polemical charge from the notion of freedom of the individual citizen – transforms that condition by shaping life logistically and biopolitically, and so forth. Liberal secularism would call this a project of realizing one’s humanity. Any other arrangement of the religious in the polity would therefore be deemed inhuman or not exactly human. The paper I am proposing largely agrees to Asad’s critique of liberal secularism, but also asks whether there can be a critique of secularism in isolation from a critique of politics that foregrounds religion or, what I would like to call, the religious political.
In the chapter, ‘Thinking About Agency and Pain’, Asad discusses modern Islamic subjectivity. For him in the Middle East, religion is not an uncontested discursive practice but is developed through “tradition-guided-reason”. The virtuous Muslim, he writes, “is thus seen not as an autonomous individual who assents to a set of universalizable maxims but as an individual inhabiting the moral space shared by all who are bound by God (the umma).” As an example of tradition-guided-reason, Asad talks of the different framing of pain in Islamic countries. In contrast to western societies which seek intervention to minimize pain, in Middle East the experience of pain itself is a mode of living a relationship. The secular emphasis on the integral human body as the locus of moral sovereignty makes it difficult to grasp the idea of pain as an imagined relationship in which such ‘internal’ states as memory and hope mediate sociality. The case he cites is that of child-birth without medical intervention in Egypt. One can, Asad points out, live pain sanely or insanely. To live pain sanely is to desire not for another form of control but to be controlled by the world in a certain way and not in certain others. Asad does not, however, elaborate on what it means to be controlled in certain ways and not in certain ways. Instead what he puts forth is a certain notion of habitus and maintains that tracing agency to habitus is the ability to act sanely. Habitus is not something one accepts or rejects, but it is what one essentially is and must do.
Asad does not specify what sort of politics emerging from this understanding he would subscribe. Neither does he defend himself from the criticism that a mandated ‘shared way of life’ as the principal source for constructing moral space might ultimately mean a singular form of Islamic identity. In another essay, “Redeeming the Human through Human Rights”, Asad suggests that the formal practices of a given religious tradition are an essential element of the religious adherent’s very being. If this is so, then it follows that a religious community must ensure that all of its members remain observant of such traditions, and the boundaries of orthodox practices are carefully guarded, for any variation from traditional formalities will result in an inauthentic adherence. I would argue that Asad’s claim that Islam and Islamic subjectivity are universally unified by one collective form of practice makes his position precariously close to a sort of orientalism, minimizing internal differences for the sake of external distinctiveness.
In his recent book, On Suicide Bombing (2007), Asad provides the perfectly acceptable argument that contemporary jihad is a deadly response to an equally deadly illiberal component of liberalism. He, however, also maintains that jihaddis of Al-Qaeda and similar other outfits are not motivated by Islam but by plain love of fighting and killing. The question may be raised that if Al-Qaeda is only motivated by plain love of fighting and killing, how could it possibly engage in a strategic warfare against a massively more powerful enemy? I find problematic Asad’s attempt to altogether evacuate the religious from contemporary acts of terror and suicide bombing. For him, Islamic Brotherhood and the writings of one of its early founders, Sayyid Qutb, are modernized and maligned versions of Islam having very little to do with Islam. The paper makes a bid to critically read such arguments in the changing context of religious/secular configurations fostered by neoliberal geo-political order. If today a section of non-white youth in multicultural West is embracing Islam (or Hinduism) in a big way, I venture to ask whether it can’t be read primarily as a sign of frustration of being rejected by the promise of equality of western secular order? If it can be, then in the Western context the problem is fundamentally of racism, and not so much with secularism. But the idea of a practicing notion of non-racist secularism – a secularism that is stripped of its pedagogic role and its sense of being at the pick of religious orders – has an ominous historical load to carry, conjoined as it is with the two opposed legacies of enlightenment: namely, the notion of non-racist secularism (couched as universal reason) and, along with it, an elaborate scheme of racism that justified itself in its own terms. The situation is more complex today as communities seem to be talking among themselves, if at all they do, more and more through the mediation of commodity-sponsored language.
If hate is understood as an operative function that extends outwards, how can it be recognized in its most simple form? This paper is a preliminary attempt to describe some of the contours of hate literature by focusing on the discursive relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai (Bombay until 1994). My argument is that the plots, actions and narrative situations described in this literature do not remain fixed within the discursive boundaries of a particular text. Rather, there is a multiplication effect as stories about these books are carried into conversations, become subjects of political speeches, and are transformed into political actions of protest and sectarian slogans. This multiplication forms the bedrock of riot speech and is the linguistic counterpart of practices of violence between Hindus and Muslims. It is not uncommon to see that even after the events around the publication of a particular book, exhibition or cartoon have lost their immediate salience, they can reappear in new contexts. This dispersion and multiplicity, both spatial and temporal, is characteristic of the hate literature that I examine. What is marked here is the centrality of laws on censorship. If this literature is produced through the censoring procedures of the state – both colonial and postcolonial – it is equally the product of an active address to these very laws.