Talal Asad,Wendy Brown,Judith Butler,and Saba Mahmood,Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy,Injury and Free Speech

Reviewed by Matt Sheedy, University of Manitoba, Canada

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech was initially published in 2009 by the Townsend Center for the Humanities No. 2, based on a symposium that took place at UC Berkley in the fall of 2007, where Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood presented papers with their reflections on the Danish cartoon affair, with a response by Judith Butler. The 2013 edition includes an introduction by Wendy Brown and two replies to Butler by Asad and Mahmood, along with a new preface by the authors.

In her introductory remarks, Wendy Brown argues that one of the central premises underlying the notion that critique is “secular” is the presumption of a radical split between reason and religion, where the former is assumed to possess an ability to “unveil error” (2), while the latter is seen as its irrational opposite. This is particularly evident in the case of Islam in its relation to the purported secularism of “Western” democracies (4). This binary, Brown notes, is an inheritance of Enlightenment discourse, particularly the tradition stemming from Marx through Western critical theory, where the “rational, material, real, scientific and human” are seen to supplant religion once and for all (6−7). Offering more than a mere challenge to the discourse on the “varieties of secularism,” then, “the weight of the symposium” aims to cut to the heart of “one of critical theory's founding planks” (7), by asking “whether critique itself is or must be secular, and of whether secularism is the prerequisite of critique” (12). While Brown’s critical approach to questions of reason is evident, she is well placed to introduce the various authors in the text, providing an incisive overview of their central positions and clearly laying out the terms of the debate.

Talal Asad's essay, “Free speech, blasphemy and secular criticism,” looks to situate the Danish cartoons affair in a broader historical context, including the Rushdie affair and the “War on Terror,” while providing a genealogical account that he hopes will aid in thinking “about the place of blasphemy—a religious concept—in secular society” (15). While noting, for example, the production of “secularization” in both a Christian past and in a post-Christian present (16), Asad looks to interrogate the discursive space in which liberalism, along with such putative concepts as freedom, autonomy, and democracy, gain their particular power—that is, by demarcating the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion (19). Pointing to the particular historical matrix in which concepts like blasphemy and heresy became legally separated within the Euro-west (e.g. following struggles for political toleration) (27), Asad argues “that we see blasphemy in these cases [the Danish cartoons] not as a discursive device for suppressing free speech but as an indicator for the shape that free speech takes at different times and in different places, reflecting, as it does so, different structures of power and subjectivity” (29). Despite distinct and sometimes divergent genealogies, Asad notes how the World Union of Muslim Scholars classified the Danish Cartoons affair using the term isa'ah and not tajdif, indicating “insult, harm, and offence” (32), and thus implying that the issue or offense was not so much one of “blasphemy,” in the Christian sense of enforcing correct “belief,” but more of “a solemn social relationship having been openly repudiated (e.g. ‘being unfaithful')” (37). As a way to think differently about these conflicts, Asad suggests that we consider the plurality of “critiques” (42) that have come to shape our current understanding of these and related issues. Here he points to the Kantian legacy of privileging epistemology over “mundane life” (44), and suggests that this must always be contrasted with the Hegelian notion of “ethical life,” where understanding is tied to particular contexts. The failure to do so tends to privilege the position of dominant groups, which can result, as it sometimes does in contemporary debates, in reinforcing “the ideological status of European Muslims as not fully human because they are not yet morally autonomous and politically disciplined” (50). A call toward rethinking such disciplinary power and the logic of these debates is thus urgently call for.

In her essay, “Religious reason and secular affect: An incommensurable divide?” Saba Mahmood explores the moral impasse that is created when the contemporary rhetoric of secularism is marshaled in favor of a rigid conception of certain “internal and external goods” (59), between blasphemy and free expression (60), where individuals are urged to take an either/or stance in relation to this purported divide. Looking to problematize this picture, Mahmood raises the issue of Islamophobia in a post-9-11 world, along with the question of how the “religious dimension” of Islam is connected to race (62). Drawing on the work of Webb Keane in his book, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007), Mahmood looks to complicate normative conceptions of secularism, which follow a common pattern of Protestant semiotic ideology (66), where questions of “moral injury” are reduced to a particular hermeneutic of “belief” that functions to limit the scope of what is considered legitimate ethical debate. Mahmood argues that the issue for many traditional Muslims was not so much one of following commandments, but of embodying certain virtues, where mimetic practices involve “a relation of similitude” (70) with the Prophet Muhammad, and where the pious are encouraged to “emulate how he dressed; what he ate; how he spoke to his friends and adversaries; how he slept, walked, and so on” (69). At stake for Mahmood, then, is not some stark choice between “assimilation or marginalization” for Muslim minority communities living in the Euro-west (83), but the development of a “labor of critique” that moves beyond the narrow frame of secular “claims to moral or epistemological superiority” (85) toward a widening of how “cultural and ethical sensibilities” (83) are variously understood and negotiated.

Judith Butler's response to Asad and Mahmood's essays, “The sensibility of critique,” and the two authors' subsequent replies, lend the book its most provocative angle, as these similar-yet-distinct critical theorists— philosophers, political and cultural theorists, and anthropologists—discuss the boundaries between epistemology and judgment, ethics and politics, and culture and law. Butler's main point of contention with Asad and Mahmood's arguments is that they fail to adequately distinguish the “meaning” of these events from questions of judgment or “normative evaluation” (97). For Butler, this reiterates the long-standing tension between “criticism,” as a method for pointing out that a position is incorrect (e.g. by showing what it excludes) and “critique,” as a mode of presenting evaluative claims that aim at a better understanding on the phenomena in question, and are suggested normative models for political action. Contrary to the “criticism” of these events by Asad and Mahmood, where their purported aim was to displace dominant, normative, Euro-western conceptions of “critique” by problematizing the ways in which “secularism” and “religion” are imagined and enforced by those in positions of relative power (both historically and in the present), Butler aims to push the question further, arguing that in this instance “it seems most important to ask, what would judgment look like that took place not ‘within' one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping?” (98). In short, Butler suggests that Asad and Mahmood avoid the more difficult question of how to approach the political problem of judgment in conflicts that arise between culturally distinct groups—a position, she maintains, that we can never avoid—and rely more on a “culturalist” understanding (especially in the case of Mahmood) that allows them to stand on the margins (99).

In his reply to Butler, Asad remarks that he has often been asked what political ends his genealogical style of analysis effectively serves, while arguing that there is no abstract answer available to this question since what is primary as a scholar, for him at least, is the processes of understanding words and actions in different contexts (132). In response to Butler’s charges, he poses the following counter question: “But does one have to choose between two mutually exclusive senses demanded by these definitions—the one of tedious fault finding, the other of engaging in a high discourse about the conditions of knowledge?” (133). Contrary to Butler's claims, Asad contends that his query is not in fact an epistemological one but rather political in that it argues for the maintenance of a more fluid connection between criticism and critique since that latter can be “no less violent than the law” (134). Mahmood, for her part, rejects Butler’s suggestion that she strays too far in the direction of “culturalism,” and that she has somehow abjured “politics and law in favour of ethics” (141). In her defense she argues that a space for tolerance cannot even be claimed when secular liberal discourse leaves certain narratives unintelligible (142), and cautions against a hasty turn toward questions of law, suggesting a movement beyond critique toward “a more difficult transformation of the social and ethical domains” (145).

The new preface that is included in the 2013 edition provides a decent summary of the book's primary goals, including the aim to destabilize such binary oppositions as secular and religious, West and Islam/East (viii), along with the uncritical reliance on the Protestant assumption that religion must be aligned with “subjective and interior belief” (x). Underlying these problems is the question of whether or not the current, normative “discursive horizon” of rationality and critique is even equipped to deal with understanding what is taking place when such conflicts arise and thus whether it can rightfully claim a place to pass judgment and adjudicate it (xvii).

Outlining their task as one that seeks to better understand these normative assumptions about religion, along with gaining a better conception of the interpretative practices of Muslims, their hope is that these arguments will help to shed light upon how such competing frameworks can be thought about together (xiii). Among other things, this includes broadening the discourse on how to approach the “fact of plurality” and its variations, especially in relation to the universalizing project common to the West (xv). This may involve “translating across temporalities [and] rationalities” (xv), including “semiotic practices” and how they are experienced differently (xiv), as well as redefining critique to include genealogy (xviii−xix).

The arguments presented throughout this text are highly provocative and challenging, drawing upon a contemporary incident in order to grapple with long held and widely cherished assumptions within Western discourse and critical theory. My one criticism of the 2013 edition is with what seems to be a missed opportunity, which could have included an afterword revisiting these concerns some four years since the Townsend publication (2009) (six years since the initial symposium) in light of on-going debates over such issues as the headscarf or shari'a law in Europe and North America, as well as more recent events such as the French publication of satirical depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in September 2012 and subsequent reactions, or the massacre in Norway committed by Anders Behring Breivik and the many debates that ensued in its wake. Given Judith Butler's challenge to both Asad and Mahmood to address questions of judgment in relation to these competing frameworks in the initial symposium and their replies in the Townsend edition from 2009, this recent publication would have benefited greatly from some further reflections on how these fault-lines have been rethought in the intervening years or if their positions remain the same. While the book is engaged, challenging, and highly provocative, one gets the sense that the authors have not come up with much that is new since its initial publication.