By Febriyanti Lestari

Historically, secularism was born and developed in Europe as an effort to solve the religious conflicts among different Christian sects. This Western concept seems to have been effective in predominantly Christian societies, but the success of its application elsewhere remains debatable. Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2016) challenges the notion that secularism is a solution to the problem of religious strife rather than a force in its creation. Based on her ethnographic research in Cairo, Egypt between 2008 and 2013 focusing on two religious minorities: Coptic Christians and Bahai faith, she demonstrates how the modern secular governance has contributed to the exacerbation of religious tensions in postcolonial Egypt, hardening interfaith boundaries and polarizing religious differences. Throughout this book, she tracks the modern career of political secularism in Egypt through the institutionalization of five of its signature ideas: political and civic rights, religious liberty, minority rights, public order, and the legal distinction between public and private (11).

This well-researched book is divided into two parts and an epilogue. The first part of the book provides the history that reflects the sociopolitical developments in Egypt from 1911 to 2012. Focusing on the religious liberty and minority rights, her observation begins with the religious inequality under the Ottomans to1919 Revolution until recently in the postcolonial Egypt. This historical context is useful to understand the shifts of meaning in religious liberty and minority rights in the Middle East. She finds that the current military rulers of Egypt are too devoted to the project of privatizing the state which makes it difficult for them to repair the existing religious fracture precisely. Secularism in Egypt is indeed permeated with the legacy of both Islamic rule and Oriental Orthodox Christianity which have shaped the majority-minority relations in this region at present.

The second part of the book is based on three case studies: on secularism, family law, and gender inequality, on religious and civil inequality, and on the relation between secularity, history, and literature. In Chapter 3, she elaborates how the privatization of religion and family has created a volatile symbiosis between religious identity and family law in Egypt, and the religion-based family law in the Middle East is commonly regarded as evidence of the region’s incomplete secularization (147). Moreover, focused on the Bahai, her analysis in Chapter 4 suggests that the legal grammar of political secularism is neither neutral nor abstract but is spread over with the historically specific norms and values that give the nation-state a distinct identity. Until 2006, the Egyptian state only recognized Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

Interestingly, in Chapter 5, Mahmood uses Azazeel, a novel by a Muslim author Youssef Ziedan, to widen her observation on the sensibilities, which is explored through the conflict between Church’s call to ban the novel and the secularist entreaties to freedom of expression. This controversial novel is a historical fiction set in the 4th century, during the period that is foundational to the identity of the Coptic Orthodox Church. While Azazeel received literary honors in the Arab world, it was also accused by the Coptic Orthodox Church as an exploitation of the Christological schism to impugn the Christian creed while upholding the Islamic view. This case shows that the secular is not a neutral ground but is itself generative of such conflicts.

One of the strengths of this book is Mahmood’s stimulating theoretical framework. She scrutinizes the deficiency in secularism without denouncing, or trying to eliminate, this concept. This thought-provoking book calls for a reformulation of secularism in order to successfully address the current issues because the dilemmatic application of political secularism is now globally shared. She points out not only the fact that equality itself is an ambiguous concept but also the reality that the threat a minority poses to a given polity may also change over time. It is especially true in the case of Egypt, depending on who the ruler is. She demands that the secular aspiration for religious equality in everyday life should be distinguished from its legal form.

Another strength of this book is her finding that that there is too much agency of the state. She argues that secularism “reduces religious equality to the politics of rights and recognition, strengthening the prerogative of the state to intervene in and reorder religious life which… often results in the exacerbation of religious polarization and inequality” (210). Based on her thorough case studies, she persuasively shows how the institutions and practices of modern state hierarchize religious differences, enshrine majoritarian religious and cultural norms in the nation’s identity and laws, and allows for religious inequalities to flourish in society while proclaiming them to be apolitical. This constructive criticism is a necessary reminder to revisit the concept of secularism.

Very well-written and rather specific in its case studies, it is difficult to find what is missed in Mahmood’s argument. However, due to this limited scope, she seems to fail to mention the similarly significant wave among the conservative Christians who also believe that secularism has been unable to keep its promise for being “neutral” and instead victimize the religious communities. Mahmood is also shy away from addressing the growing accusations on the failure of secularism as she seems to preferably preserve secularism but one with a refined concept. However, although she provides an intriguing new framework to view secularism based on her case studies in the Middle East, she does not really provide a clear alternative of what kind of secularism will promote a more tolerant system which can be universally applied.

Readers who are interested in the subject of secularism but not yet familiar with the context of political secularism in the Middle East will find this book very useful. There is a shared problem of collective incapacity to imagine a politics that does not treat the state as the arbiter of majority-minority relations, and Mahmood shows the failure of both societies in the West and in the East to accommodate minorities, both Muslim and non-Muslim countries. She concludes that the ideal of interfaith equality might require not the bracketing of religious and political resources but their “ethical thematization” as a necessary risk when the conceptual and political resources of the state have proved inadequate to the challenge this ideal sets before us.

Lastly, this book does contribute not only to the field of political theory in terms of minority relations, the study of religion in plural societies but also to literary study by connecting the text with the social and historical context. (FL)

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