Secularism is often conceived in the negative. It is said to denote the absence of religion from politics and public life, or to represent that which is left over once the fog of religion has dissipated. Over the past two decades, however, scholars across disciplines have worked to understand secularism as a positive political project of its own—as a substantial set of epistemological assumptions pertaining to time, history, authority, reality, and so on. They have worked to understand secularism, that is, as a historically traceable “formation” with specific temporal, geographical, and cultural coordinates. In this class we will focus on the work of Talal Asad, who charted a new course for the study of secularism and “the secular,” in order to understand this study’s innovations, possibilities, and ambiguities.

Core reading:

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. Introduction and Chapters 1, 5, 6, and (if time) 7.

Further readings:

Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Chapters 1, 3-6, 9, and postscript.

Mahmood, Saba. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Introduction, Part 1, and Chapter 5.

Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Scott, Joan. Sex and Secularism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Keane, Webb. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Especially Part 1.

Questions:

1)What is the relationship between “religion” and “secularism”/“the secular”?

2)To what extent can (or should) we say that secular concepts like “equality” and “religious freedom” are translations of earlier Christian concepts?

3)How does Islam figure in the rise of secularism? And what are the limits of secularism with respect to its capacity to “recognize” or “include” Muslims (as in modern Europe)?

4)Is nationalism a secularized form of religion?