Making Sense of the Secular

Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia

Ranjan Ghosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415536950
• eBook ISBN: 9781136277214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Atheism

This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies.

Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China's encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.

Part I

Europe

1 Formations of the Secular State and Islam in Britain Today

Naheem Jabbar

And for every critical system grinding on there are events, heterogeneous and unorthodox social configurations, human beings and texts disputing the possibility of a sovereign methodology of system.

—Edward Said¹

Politics is concerned with necessity.

—Michel Foucault²

On February 18, 2008, a British judge, Justice Henriques, before sentencing Parviz Khan, a 37-year-old unemployed charity worker with three children, as the chief instigator of a plot to kidnap and behead any Muslim soldier in the British armed services (‘a plot to take a single life of a person not yet identified’), remarked how the plot with four others—two British Muslims, Hamid Elasmar (a Moroccan-born national with British citizenship) and a Gambian, Basiru Gassamma—was aimed to strike ‘at the heart of Government in this country.’³ Living in Alum Rock, an area with a high Pakistani population in the UK’s second largest city, Birmingham, Khan obviously threatens the stable order of things. But before analysing the Muslim question as a particular species of danger and the problem individuals like Khan typify for the state authorities, I want to comment on the way in which the modality of counter-insurgency—that is, a tactic that is ordinarily deployed almost exclusively by the repressive apparatuses of the state—diffuses itself across civil society.

Secularism has been an epistemological impulse informing European modernity since the Classical Age. In the twenty-first century, it has begun to function as a unique instrument through which the power of the state exerts itself on and through the individual; it is not merely a complex methodological a priori of scientific investigation into the impenetrable ancient mysteries. As a political doctrine and as the essential taxonomic element of European power, secularism also requires certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires to be identified and constituted as individuals. Foucault concludes how the methodological precaution following from the fact that an individual is the ‘articulation’ of power is an analysis conducted in an ascending order: from ‘its infinitesimal mechanisms’ to its global manifestation.⁴ This is my desired mode of explanation for how Muslim individuality is constructed according to the British state’s norms of secularity. In other words, secularity is an indispensable element in the prose of counter-insurgency used by the British state (‘our way of life’) to combat terrorist threats; madness is Foucault’s local example.

In the creation of its own sphere of reference, the democratic social order must use whatever means at its disposal, material and ideological, to render human behaviour normal; it is no different from other social forms in history in this respect. The case I use is an illustration of how this norm is created as a precondition of secularity, where ‘A certain structuring attachment to subjection becomes the condition of moral subjectivation’; and, in particular, where the doxological force—that is, the practice of being Muslim for some Muslims comes into conflict with this obligation.⁵ I will, however, exclude from this ambition any attempt to square the first ‘political’ with the second ‘ethical’ process for reasons that ought to become apparent as I go on. But at the outset I will state the hypothesis informing my view of the reasons for this inconsistency: ‘The history which bears and determines us,’ Foucault reminds us, ‘has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning,’ and any attempt to account for the intrinsic intelligibility of conflicts in terms of a dialogue is to return the ‘always open and hazardous reality of conflict’ to the primal moment at the origins of power where ‘bare life,’ the essentially neutral human material, is fully integrated into the structure of the state and ‘even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty.’⁶ This is the promised calm of the polis.

Arguably, Khan, as the condemned man, had to re-create the inward condition where ‘the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy’ so that he appears to the state authorities as ‘the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself.’⁷ Khan, who ran to allegedly find ‘time for reflection away from general life’ (whatever that is), who looked after his mother as a registered carer and provisioned his scheme, including frequent travels to Mirpur in Pakistan, with a modest income of around £900 per month, maintained an obdurate silence throughout questioning. He initially confided his ‘religious persuasion’ to an officer at Birmingham International Airport upon his return from a trip, claims of being ‘a moderate Sunni Muslim’ who has ‘tried to self-teach by buying books on Islam.’⁸

The subsequent trial represents the logical outcome of the process Foucault drew our attention to as a more general condition of our modernity, although, as the traditional caution of presumed guilt by silence implies, the legal violence of the state’s authority has a creative potential for the rest of society: it is ‘made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio : it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it.’ Life is here ‘originarily excepted in law,’ and the collective’s decision between nomos and physis is undecidable—the philosopher contends—because the sovereign decision renews this moment ‘between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion.’⁹

Foucault was to give this mythical meridian of politics the supreme task of managing the life of populations by the modern European state, ‘the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ between culture and nature ( nomos and physis) , that marked the movement from the religious sphere as one dominant species of social solidarity to the secular as another—a rather pedestrian-sounding name, he called it ‘bio-power.’i ¹⁰ The techniques of modern power that calculate the menace of the terrorist bomber with his or her primitive claim to truth on these axes were instrumental in ‘guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.’¹¹ I will return to this point.

THE SECULAR NATION

In addition to being monitored throughout the investigation by the West Midlands Counter-Terrorism Unit in Operation Gamble by surveillance operatives who are identified in the disclosed material by number only on the grounds of national security, officers who closely followed the men from their homes to numerous outlets, as well as noting visitors down to the odd child, so-called evidence of fraternising with insurgents was identified by Khan’s notebook containing lists of laptops, battery chargers, a video camera, satellite radios, binoculars and camping equipment for inclement terrain, including inflatable pillows, storm shields, elbow and knee protectors, thermal blankets, self-inflating mattresses, head torches and so on.¹² The agent of foreign forces seemed quite at home staging insurrections. No obvious terrorist group was identified by the contents of Khan’s notebook. However, for Khan, no doubt, the insurgent has to move beyond the dialogic realm of contested meanings about how to lead a good life as a Muslim to the pragmatic effort of preparing to enter the relations of war: Khan’s inspiration for gathering articles in preparation for combat was not an Afghan or Pakistani ‘handler,’ a mujahid , a warrior but material on a website, ‘Encyclopaedia of Jihad,’ in a section called ‘Ultimate Sniper—An Advanced Training Manual for Military and Police Snipers.’ The intelligence analyst duly compared the items to the advice offered to these professional squads.¹³

All the suspicious paraphernalia destined for Mirpur was contained in taped cardboard boxes, seventeen of which were intercepted eventually by police at the airport for DNA and fingerprinting.¹⁴ Khan was also questioned as to the use he might have for purchasing an antibugging device as well as hexamine fire-lighting tablets, and this, of course, suggests he suspected or at least vainly attempted to protect himself from covert surveillance.¹⁵ The fire-lighting tablets were not mentioned in the manual. In the absence of a single remark in explanation, the conclusion drawn by the ex-navy police officer questioning Khan was that his sending equipment was not for the use of a ‘few kids in a village in Mirpur’ but to ‘assist the Taliban in their fight against British … [and] against the Afghanistan soldiers who are supporting the British soldiers in Afghanistan.’¹⁶

I want to go beyond the proverbial wisdom Sartre expressed so elegantly when once noticing a veiled Berber woman riding a bike as something bewitching and virulent, the idea that ‘The discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about non-Europeans.’¹⁷ The ‘undecidable’ nature of state power philosophised about is still an essential element of our present-day secular-democratic social order, but the demands of modern state power necessitate a more coherent response. In other words, the disciplinary regime of the modern state is instrumental in making obsolete those social behaviours once determined by religious consciousness so that individualisation is no longer achieved by the ceremonial rite, by ancestral tradition, the genealogical or the commemorative; its anonymous species of power is instead concerned with identifying the infantile gap in the maturing consciousness so that ‘when one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing.’¹⁸

I do not want to reduce the fundamental crime the Muslim male dreams of committing to the psychoanalytical symptom where ‘it appears that Muslims are more disposed than average to use splitting’—that is, more than an ordinary individual’s alienation with the state of things in the world that results in a schizoid or split identification with reality, a primitive awareness of goodness versus evil.¹⁹ All this belongs to the ‘descending’ order of social being in terms of the ‘calculable man’ rather than the ‘memorable man’ in Foucault’s terms. It can, therefore, be dismissed but for the fact that the state’s discourse around the terrorist threat is all about calculability, and it is worth remembering that, ‘Even in its repressive role, law involves an eminently positive aspect: for repression is never identical with pure negativity.’²⁰

Khan and his cohorts were consistently interrogated about the nature of their political beliefs in the context of extremism and radical standpoints as well as affiliation to groups. The forensic delineation of Khan’s subversive psychology, before he is questioned about the contents of the boxes item by item, objects around a tonne in weight, included the adducing of ‘ideological’ material from confiscated property. A jihad sermon contained the view that Muslims are ‘the most humiliated nation on the face of this earth,’ and the reason for this state of affairs is ‘because martyrdom to us is not appealing, it’s not as appealing to us as it was to those ancestors, the great warriors are that past us who lived around the best creature that walked this earth.’²¹ The interrogating officer makes good use of ‘use splitting.’ The officer interrogating Khan at the police station reads aloud the contents of the voice on a tape, the voice that apostrophises the prophet Muhammad. Muhammad must open his eyes to massacres in Bosnia, Kosovo, Burma, Indonesia and those still occurring in Kashmir. Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq are cited, ending with the figure of ‘those brothers’ in Cuba, enslaved, with heads shaved, wearing orange suits, ‘humiliated, degraded, downtrodden.’

The police officer goes on to invite Khan to identify with his interpretation of these passages, that they instance ‘a criticism of the Muslim faith, in that they’ve [Muslims] allowed themselves to be encapsulated by western ideas and it appears to [him] to be a call to Muslims to go back to their routes [sic] , to follow the more traditional teachings of Islam.’ This is an important early moment in Khan’s case by the British authorities; it is also an important facet of the strategy adopted by the state to counter the threat emanating from Europeans who are still, in some often-indefinable way, non-European. This prose of counter-insurgency has two semantic levels, one of which includes the possibility of maintaining a purely formal distance between what Muslims believe and what they purport to believe; the other remains at face value for the investigating authority: the possibility of identifying the cause of these isolated incidents of dangerous rebellion in a generally penetrable array of ‘metonymic relata,’ ‘the perfect authentication of the idiot’s view of history as one damn’d thing after another: rising—information—decision—order.’²²

Let me explain. These anachronistic elements that function in the believers’ imaginations as articles of faith and not as the constituent parts of an empty calendrical time, which is purportedly the staple of modern nationalism, are easily accommodated into the investigative modality of the secular state—here represented by the police apparatus²³ Otherwise, why would the idea of a Muslim nation not present itself...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Making Sense of the Secular
• Part I: Europe
• Part II: Asia
• Contributors
• Index