What inspired you to write The Politics of Secularism? What sparked your interest?
After studying international politics at Wesleyan I spent some time in France and North Africa, and it was during that time that I realized that the lived experiences of politics and religion in the public sphere in those countries were very different from what I had been accustomed to in the United States. Following my time abroad and working at USAID in Washington, I decided to pursue an M.A. in international relations, and took a class with Khaled Abou El-Fadl in Islamic Law at Yale that sparked my interest in the relationship between politics, law and religion. At the same time I continued to study the history and cultural and moral underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy, international relations theory, and religion and state in the modern Middle East. I began to wonder how all these pieces would fit together, and started to develop a comparative and international interest in religion and its relationship to the political, both in European and non-European contexts. During my Ph.D. studies at Johns Hopkins, I realized that vital historical and international questions on the topic had not been asked, particularly in political science. Thinking about religion in the West, I was confronted with a narrative of secularization that was always described in the same terms: we have a category of the secular that we have inherited, that we assume as given, which seems to have fallen from the sky, and which is extraordinarily powerful. This puzzled me, so bringing together my interests in the Middle East, political theory, religion and politics, U.S. foreign policy, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial global politics I was able to begin to address these questions. The result is this book.
What's the most important take-home message for readers?
The central puzzle of my book is how might we begin to think about secularism, and eventually, secularisms in the plural, as forms of political authority in contemporary international relations. What does this mean for international relations theory and for understanding the resurgence of religion? What kinds of politics follow from different forms of secular commitments, traditions, habits, and beliefs? I argue that the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but socially and historically constructed. I then suggest that the failure to recognize this helps to explain why international relations theory and practice has been unable to come to terms with secularism and religion (they go together) as forms of authority in world politics. I conclude that overcoming this problem—opening up the black box of secularism and digging into the complex negotiations that take place inside this box—allows for a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations involving the politics of religion. Examples discussed in the book are the long- standing conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and the global religious resurgence.
Anything you had to leave out?
I'm fascinated by the relationship between secular authority and sovereign authority, particularly as it developed in Europe in the 17th century as the modern state system became consolidated. I allude to this briefly in Chapter Two, but did not have the time to look carefully and fully at what has been written on this subject and incorporate it into my discussion. It's a complex question, and I think there's work to be done in this area particularly if it can be done in such a way as to reach international relations scholars and practitioners who carry a range of deeply held assumptions about the secular nature of modern international norms including but not limited to sovereignty.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?
That one must be either for or against secularism. Everyone who studies the politics of secularism has to take on a range of assumptions and biases (including one's own) about the topic. It's a highly charged set of issues, and people have strong views about it. In response to preoccupation about being either for or against secularism, Saba Mahmood says it best in a recent entry on the SSRC blog The Immanent Frame: "the crucial problem with this kind of thinking is its assumption that a secular worldview is the opposite of a religious one, each indebted to a distinct epistemology irreconcilable with the other…[yet] the emergence of the modern category of the secular (to be distinguished from the pre-modern use of the Latin term saeculum) is constitutively related to the rise of the modern concept of religion wherein it is impossible to track the history of one without simultaneously tracking the history of the other." Along these same lines, people make a lot of assumptions about my individual convictions based on my writing—some assume I'm a secular humanist, others that I'm Muslim, others that I'm very religious, others that I'm not, others that I'm Christian. This fascinates me, because I don't fit neatly into any of these categories. People are so attached to their categories, and this interests me.
Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing?
I wrote this book for an academic international relations audience, but I've found that it speaks to a wide range of people, including religious studies scholars, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, Middle East studies scholars, and policy-makers in Europe, the United States and the Middle East.
Are you hoping to just inform readers? give them pleasure? piss them off?
My hope is to inspire people in Europe and the United States to see what is right in front of them differently, to understand their own lived experiences involving secularism and religion in a new way, to appreciate that we live in a world that contains many varieties of secularism, and to see the political impact that these secular settlements have both domestically and in world politics. Secularism provides a series of cultural and historical templates that are so powerful that they are almost invisible, yet they condition how Europeans and Americans represent and relate to non-Western traditions. I'm hoping to make them less invisible, to open space for modifying them in the direction of a deep pluralism as elaborated by William Connolly. I want to make room for alternative instantiations of the secular-religious divide to work their way into political practice, as is occurring today in Turkey. I see my attempt to open these new epistemological and political spaces as working against attempts to assert the supremacy of any single tradition over and against all others. I'm thinking for example of Pope Benedict XVI's recent reassertion of the spiritual supremacy of the Vatican, in which he called for believers to return to the "true faith" and harden their suspicion of Protestants, atheists, Muslims, pluralists, Jews, secularists, and others who (allegedly) threaten that faith.
What alternate title would you give the book?
I suppose you could call it Lost in Translation. Things get lost in translation with this subject: between metaphysics and politics, between different languages and national traditions, between (so-called) secular and religious perspectives, between Enlightenment ideals and the realities of their colonial and postcolonial instantiations, between people from different academic disciplines, and even between individuals trying to talk through these issues across personal, generational, and professional divides. Sometimes it can be a challenge to even have a conversation about this subject—you know what people say about bringing up politics and religion at dinner. But maybe that title is too pessimistic, since there are also positive gains that come out of cultural, religious, and political dislocation—some things are lost, others found. It's unpredictable, and this makes it interesting.
How do you feel about the cover?
Hmm…that's kind of like asking the chef how she likes the meal. One thing I can say is that pulling things together for the cover at the end of the production process was pretty crazy. My email program kept altering the Persian script very slightly in transmission, so that apparently it was no longer legible, or just barely legible but wrong. The different versions (correct and incorrect) were almost identical, and because I don't read Persian, and neither did my designer at Princeton, this was a problem. I ended up getting help from a very gracious colleague on campus, and we scanned it, emailed it again to verify that it was correct, and then sent it as a .pdf to the press. It took a few days to sort this out and it was nuts. I wasn't sure things would work out and couldn't get much assurance that the cover would be correct up until the book came out—and it would've been pretty embarrassing to have it wrong, given the argument of the book. The Arabic term came through well, though there are several other candidates for translating "secularism" into Arabic. This "lost in translation" aspect of the topic, the technological challenges, is fascinating to me since it speaks to the complexities, and the cultural, historical, and political specificities, of the concept of secularism.
Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why?
José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon. It amazes me how he writes an entire paragraph without any punctuation, and yet gets his message across so subtly and powerfully. He's a sophisticated thinker, and somehow manages to work through these incredibly complex topics and paradoxical questions in beautiful prose.
What's your next book?
I've just begun work on a project about the role of, and interactions between, political theology, law, and religion in international politics. I'm interested in the idea of politics as "postmetaphysical," and am looking into what kind of work this assumption does in international relations. I'm also interested in boundaries, not only the secular-religious oppositional binary but also others such as law and religion, for instance. I am also at work on contributions for several edited volumes on secularism, religion, and international affairs that expand upon the arguments of this book.
Tags: pluralism, secularists
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