Since the military's ouster of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Egyptians (and many non-Egyptians) have once again been puzzling over Egypt's future: What should be the place of Islam in the Egyptian constitution? Can Islamist parties be accommodated or should they be outlawed? And more fundamentally, what is the proper relationship between religion and politics? These questions, which have been asked persistently since the making of the Egyptian nation-state, lie at the heart of Hussein Agrama's Questioning Secularism. Yet, far from providing answers, this book brilliantly calls into question the questions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Cairo carried out during the lead-up to the 2011 uprising, as well as careful analysis of laws, legal reforms, and court proceedings, Agrama offers two critical interventions: he unravels the workings of secular power, and he offers insight into what he calls the “asecular.” As such, this book does not simply contribute to the study of secularism; it deconstructs the very questions underpinning much literature on the subject.
The book's key intervention is to show how the secular relentlessly entangles us in questions about the proper line between religion and politics. M. C. Escher's lithograph on the book's cover illustrates this point. It locks the viewer's gaze onto a set of stairs that at first sight seem interconnected but upon closer inspection are not. The image compels us to keep looking at it in order to solve a puzzle whose solution is deferred indefinitely. Using the image as a metaphor, Agrama argues that “secularism's power may lie more in the underlying question it continually provokes and obliges us to answer than in the normativity of the categories it presupposes” (p. 29). While continuously compelling us to ask about the line between religion and politics, secularism simultaneously inscribes the state as the ultimate arbitrator, entrenching it ever more deeply in the social fabric and intimate domains of everyday life.
While Agrama engages many fields of literature—among them the anthropologies of secularism, Islam, and Islamic law—his arguments are firmly grounded in ethnography. The book focuses on two sites in particular: personal status courts and al-Azhar's Fatwa Council. These two institutions have much in common: they are products of modern reforms, are under state control, and are based in the shariʿa. And yet they are fundamentally “different spaces of action and sensibility” (p. 111). The personal status courts reinscribe a public/private divide and are marked by a pervasive vigilance against power, expressed in an embodied suspicion on the part of many Egyptians toward the court, litigants, and judges. The Fatwa Council, by contrast, is a space of self-care in which intimate issues are discussed openly. The guiding question here is not who is right but what is right (p. 123). Fatwas cultivate humility and openness and aim to help people get on with their lives. They are indifferent to—or evade—the continuous question of how to draw the line between religion and politics.
In addition to the Fatwa Council, the book touches upon another example of the asecular: the 2011 uprising which, Agrama holds, at least in its beginnings stood prior to religion and politics and was indifferent to the question of their distinction (p. 231). While acknowledging the “unknown potential and possibility inaugurated by this unprecedented moment in Egyptian history” (p. ix), Agrama is wary of how quickly these potentials were erased or contained. In light of more recent developments, his cautionary tone seems fully justified. Agrama argues that, far from being “stuck in the past,” Egypt's longstanding state of emergency illuminates one potential secular future toward which many Western democratic states might be moving as well. Effectively pushing beyond the entrenched boundaries of area studies and culturalist approaches, Agrama draws comparisons to the United States, Israel, South Africa, France, Germany, and Britain. With regards to Egypt's future, Agrama's prediction remains of critical importance: what matters, he writes, is not who wins the elections but whether “state sovereignty succeeds in further asserting itself into social life” (p. 235). The prospect of a security state with an ever-growing sphere of influence and surveillance is as grim today as it was when the book went to press.
This prospect raises a question that remains largely unanswered by the book. Agrama compares the asecular Fatwa Council to “a bubble within a bubble, produced by [the secular] but no longer of it, bouncing around within its confines yet otherwise largely indifferent to it” (p. 187). But does not the asecular at times push back against secular power, intentionally or not? While providing compelling insight into everyday exchanges at the Fatwa Council, Agrama tells us little about how this space might spill over into, or subvert, secular power. Similarly, he points to an alternative language of justice found among Islamist lawyers—a language that insists on the inherent situatedness of the human and rejects the abstract “human” in human rights discourses—but does not comment on the political potentials of this language.
More generally, the book left me wondering about the moments when the power of the secular might fade or be undermined. Is the question about the line between religion and politics equally binding and compelling to all Egyptians? For instance, do Sufis and Salafis consider this question as urgent (and as worthwhile) as others? Are intellectuals haunted and driven differently by an ethos of suspicion? Do class and educational background inflect the power of the secular? How are court decisions and fatwas taken back into ordinary lives, and how do they interact with the relationships, sensitivities, and concepts of justice they encounter there?
The book also raised a methodological question for me by compelling me to think about the ways in which academic inquiries are themselves caught up in the kind of questioning and suspicion that is intrinsic to a liberal modernity. In line with other recent work in the anthropology of Islam, Agrama approaches Islamic religiosity not as a “problem needing explanation” but as a “way of life, reason, and experience that merits exploration and understanding” (p. 17). Yet does this approach not merely replace the object of suspicion, rendering liberal modernity into a problem needing explanation? Could we imagine a different mode of critique (and of ethnography), one less guided by suspicion? In other words, how might the ethics of the fatwa—an asecular ethics of self-care that aims at unblocking the way—speak back to anthropology as a mode of inquiry?
Questioning Secularism is a provocative book that offers critical contributions to literature on the secular, Islam, sovereignty, and state power. While the argument is relevant far beyond Egypt, it is carefully grounded in nuanced historical and ethnographic context. Remarkably, the book remains extremely readable and accessible even as it handles highly complex questions and never opts for easy answers. This book will invigorate—and transform—the study of the secular. It is therefore a must-read not only for all those interested in the region but also for those with an interest in secular power more broadly.
