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Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2010

Hussein Ali Agrama
Hussein Ali Agrama*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Chicago
*
hagrama@uchicago.edu
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Extract

In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity. For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together, giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt's religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 495 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010

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