Secularism and Its Discontents: The Moor’s Last Sigh and Riot

The recurrent theme of dropping frontiers in a world which has become increasingly heterogeneous but intolerant is the leitmotif of Sashi Tharoor’s Riot and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The figure of the Moor and his hybrid genealogy is central to Rushdie’s vision, as he reconstructs a syncretic, tolerant Moorish Spain and juxtaposes it with Bombay, his haven of pluralism. He celebrates Nehru’s vision of a new Indian nation which, in keeping with the traditions of western modernity, promised to be above religion, clan, and narrow parochial considerations. With the vanishing of such ideals and hopes, as boundaries and religious communalism are getting intensified these diasporic cosmopolitan writers make a case for a boundless world. Their response is a human subjectivity which transcends color, class, narrow parochialism, tribalism and fundamentalism. Secularism is the very base of their humane approach. This essay, therefore, analyzes the theme of secularism and its discontents, particularly in the context of the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India, as it runs through Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Tharoor’s Riot by exploring the various layers of allegories related to pluralism and the critique of fundamentalism in them. Toward this end, it will focus on the recent debates on Indian secularism by scholars to interrogate the relevance of the European model of secularism which argues for the separation of state and religion

Book review: Questioning secularism: Islam, sovereignty, and the rule of law in modern Egypt

"Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, And The Rule Of Law In Modern Egypt." Hussein Ali Agrama. University of Chicago Press. November 2012. --- The central questions of the Arab uprisings—what is the appropriate relationship between religion and politics and what is the function of the national security state —have developed into a vigorous debate amongst actors from across the political spectrum. But what, exactly, is secularism? What is its relationship to the ‘deep state’ in Egypt? In Questioning Secularism, Hussein Ali Agrama focuses on the Fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, to argue that secularism is a historically contingent phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. He probes the meaning of secularism and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Reviewed by Corinna Mullin

Book Review: The Crisis of Secularism in India

A review of The Crisis of Secularism in India edited by Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan

Derrida and the Danger of Religion

This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida’s work entails that a secularism of this kind is both impossible (because religion remains influential in the wake of secularization) and unnecessary (because religious traditions are diverse and multivalent). Some attempt to contain the disruptive force of religion by excluding it from the public sphere, but Derrida argues that one may endure instability for the sake of something more important than safety. Although Derrida admits that religion is dangerous, he demonstrates that it is nevertheless an indispensable resource for political reflection

Public Religions in a Postsecular Era: Habermas and Gandhi on Revisioning the Political

An embedded ideology of the religious-secular binary in its various forms has assumed currency in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. This ideology highlights the difference between religion under modernization, broadly defined by the secularization thesis, and that of religious revival in a period characterized by postsecularism. It reflects the rise of new epistemologies and the dissolution of the antinomies between faith and reason characteristic of a postsecular culture. A common argument found in these writings is that enlightenment secularization, which relegates the sacred to a private sphere, seems to have discovered its own parochialism as religion continues to provide

Religious Difference in a Secular Age: The Minority Report by Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review

The Minority Report is a text that tries to respond to the problem of essentializing Islam (the culturalism problem) by performing a flip so that all the bad attributes typically associated with “Islam” are now attributed to secularism instead. It is secularism that discriminates, that is sectarian, that encourages violence, that is repressive, sexist, etc. This Mahmood does by on the one hand hyper-politicizing secularism (depleting it of its universalist drive), and on the other under-politicizing it by ignoring its internal indeterminacy, complexity, open structure and varied distributive effects. The result is an account that moves between crude historicism-secularism is its history- and formalist generalizations reminiscent of the ways “Islam” is treated in mainstream discourse. Islam is nothing but the history of its conquests and its doctrines create the world in a specific way. But a flip does not a critique make

Negotiating French Muslim Identities through Hip Hop

In The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, Gérard Noiriel contends that in France, the modern idea of the nation emerged as a means to subvert the dominant influence of the nobility, whose rule was underwritten by the aristocratic idea that “the nation was founded on ‘blood lineage.’”1 Noiriel posits that “the revolutionary upheaval discredited not only the old order but everything that harked back to origins, so much so that the first decrees abolishing nobility were also directed against names that evoked people’s origins: an elegant name is still a form of privilege; its credit must be destroyed.”2 The rejection of group differences as well as the exaltation of assimilation policies that were strengthened by a social contract in the postrevolutionary political climate reflected, above all else, a contestation of the privileges that had been accorded to the nobility.3 It is from this historical background that Noiriel examines contemporary arguments regarding assimilation—specifically, which groups are deemed “assimilable” and which ones are not. This rhetoric of assimilation under the banner of laicité has framed hotly debated discussions vis-à-vis the position of Muslims in France within the imagined national community. In an environment where Muslim bodies and symbols are relentlessly quarantined and prevented from “contaminating” secular spaces, this article will examine the ways in which French Muslim Hip Hop artists such as Médine, and Diam’s have employed different rhetorical strategies to navigate their French and Muslim identities through their lyrics