Agrama (2012, Review) - Questioning Secularism by Solomon

7/23/2019 Agrama (2012, Review) - Questioning Secularism by Solomon

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Hussein Ali Agrama

Questioning Secularism: Islam,Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 288. Paperback. : 978

0226010694. $27.50.

Scholars of Islamic law and society, such as those who form the main audience

of this journal, may initially skim over this volume on the shelf of their favorite

bookstore, or as is more likely these days in the mass of titles that appears

on the bottom of their screens during their Amazon searches. Positioning his

research within the burgeoning debates on secularism and state power occur-

ring in anthropology and the study of religion, Hussein Agrama does not ex-

plicitly highlight his contributions to the literatures in Islamic law in the titleor framing of this volume. This is a shame, as the book makes substantial and

innovative contributions to the key debates in this eld, in addition to explor-

ing new and exciting territory on state secularism and the nature of religion

under secular power. For this reason, rather than ofering a broad appraisal of

this books contents (a task that has been undertaken amply in other reviews),

I want to use my limited space in this forum to discuss the books main con-

tributions to the study of Islamic law. Along the way, I want to make a case for

why I think that not despite but rather because of its engagement in debates

concerning the nature of secular power it deserves to be on the shelves of all

scholars interested in the study of Islamic law in the contemporary world.

In its most basic formulation, Hussein Agramas key contribution to the lit-

erature on Islamic law is his inquiry into how the Sharia is elaborated and

practiced within everyday life under the conditions of secular power and pos-

sibility established by a modern state (p. 5). In other words, Agramas book

examines both what has become of sharia as a mode of jurisprudence in the

modern state (that is, how it continues to function at the heart of a politics

deeply infused in the problem space of secularism), and what has become of

peoples relationship to sharia under these particular conditions. The rst task

he undertakes primarily through a study of the apostasy case of the late Egyp-

tian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the invocations of the Islamic principle

of hisba (lit. reckoning, or, the commanding of good and the forbidding of evil)

as a means of prosecuting him, ofering a close reading of the trial itself. The

latter exploration emerges out of Agramas eldwork, which included partici-

pant observation he undertook in two legal spaces that engage the sharia in

very diferent ways: the Fatwa Council of al-Azhar Mosque and the Egyptianpersonal status courts. (Agramas eldwork also included work with Islamist

lawyers, exploring how they develop an Islamic language of justice while at the

same time being deeply enmeshed in the secular problem space of rule of law.

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ISSN 0928-9380 (print version) ISSN 1568-5195 (online version) ILS 1


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The results of this inquiry appear in the nal chapter of this volume. Though it

contains much of interest, for reasons of space, I will not cover it here.)

Let us begin by exploring this second feature of Agramas book: his com-

parison between the Fatwa Council and the personal status courts. Agramascomparison between these two legal spaces presents him with a puzzle. He

observes that both the council and the courts are legal spaces that employ

sharia, and yet his informants have radically diferent relationships to the

judgments they give, deeply respecting the authority of the former and ap-

proaching the latter with great suspicion. Why, he wonders, using himself as a

confounded foil (a strategy, and an efective one, that he uses throughout the

book when encountering a seeming and sometimes actual [e.g. p. 71] para-

dox) is there so much suspicion in the [courts], despite all of the safeguardsagainst manipulation, while there is so little in the [council], despite that there

are none? And why does the [court] have so little apparent authority, despite

enforcement mechanisms, while the [councils] have so much, despite their

seeming lack of them? (p. 120). Agrama ultimately contends that whereas the

courts participate in a broader discourse of rule of law, constituting a new

form of organized suspicion against power (pp. 130 f), the Fatwa Council,

even though it has been constituted by the state, remains outside of its formal

legal system and thus does not engage its particular afects and sensibilities.Instead, the Fatwa Council is a space wherein legal scholars form pedagogic

relationships with petitioners as part of a process to which the petitioners have

submitted as a means of moral betterment. Moreover, suspicion of power, such

as that which is exhibited by his informants toward the courts and the form of

sharia that they utilize, does not arise naturally, but rather is a direct result of

the adoption of the sensibilities of rule of law that they engage. Agrama writes

that there is the possibility that the vigilance and suspicion against power so

characteristic of liberal thought and sensibility are actually shaped by, andthrough, the law. In other words, such vigilance and suspicion are not natural,

default conditions, but are instead historically cultivated sensibilities whose

cultivation depends integrally on modern legal processes. In this case, law

would not be an external mode of domination, but intrinsic to the cultivation

of a liberal sense of self (p. 127). Agrama is able to demonstrate the non-

naturalness of this mode of suspicion by comparing a legal space infused by

liberal sensibilities (the personal status courts) with one that is not (the Fatwa

Council). Along the way, Agrama responds to Talal Asads call for an anthropol-ogy of secularism. This is one of the few books that ethnographically substanti-

ates theories about the nature of subject formation within the problem space

of secularism (another is Mayanthi Fernandos recent The Republic Unsettled:


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Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism,Durham: Duke University

Press, 2014), examining how this occurs through a set of sedimented practices

intrinsic to the modern state.

While, in the scheme of his larger argument, his work on the Fatwa Councilis merely a scientic control to show the non-naturalness of the relationships

to the law experienced in the courts, we should not lose sight of the fact that

Agrama has also made a signicant contribution to the study of a shariaout-

side of the problem space of secularism. Indeed, while Agramas main goal in

his work on the Fatwa Council is to depict a site wherein the relationship to the

law he traces in the rest of the book does not apply, along the way he manages

to ofer an entirely new reading of the device of the fatwa itself, ofering a com-

pelling theory of the nature of its particular authority. As in the other chaptersof this book, in chapter 5 (What is a Fatwa?) we explore the research territory

hand-in-hand with the author, solving the problems he encounters together

and often not arriving at answers to the puzzling questions he poses at the

outset of the chapter until the very end. This chapter, a development of his

extremely well-regarded article Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Towards an An-

thropology of the Fatwa (American Ethnologist, 37:1), rejects the common

denition of a fatwa as a device for doctrinal creativity and instead argues that

the fatwas primary purpose is to facilitate the pious life by helping those whoare facing some sort of obstacle to move forward within the limits of doctrine

and tradition (see pp. 168 and 1779). He proves his point by ofering the reader

an extremely compelling ethnographic vignette in which a mufti ofers two

diametrically opposed fatwas in response to the same question from two mus-

taftis. The answer the mufti gives when Agrama voices his befuddlement at

what seem to be two contradictory points of doctrine is that the particular

situation of each petitioner required a diferent tool: the goal was not doctrinal

pronouncement but facilitating the care of the self (pp. 17982). Building onthe work of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind on the nature

of tradition, Agrama writes, I propose to recruit this ethical notion of the care

of the self[to] the problem not of freedom, but authority, of how selves are

maintained and advanced within the traditions to which they bear a sense of

obligation, or put alternately, how a tradition is inherited by its adherentsI

suggest that the practice of the fatwa be understood as a mode of the care of

the self, as a practice by which selves, in the multiplicity of their afairs, are

maintained and advanced as part of Islamic tradition (p. 180). Given that thebulk of literature on fatwa-giving has concerned the way in which muftis adapt

doctrine to new circumstances, Agramas focus on the fatwas mode of author-

ity is, as he recognizes (p. 162), novel. By ofering a close ethnographic reading


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of the fatwas place in a process of shaping Muslim subjects, Agrama trans-

forms our sense both of what fatwas are and of how they work.

Though chapter 5 ofers us a break from the problem space of secularism,

for most of the book secularism remains at the center of Agramas interroga-tive domain. The books title, Questioning Secularism, can be read in two sens-

es, referring at once to Agramas interrogation of secularism as a mode of

governance and to secularisms own mode of power, which, he argues, is se-

cured through its questioning (rather than normalizing) function, brought

about through the instability of its own normative categories and its incessant

blurring of religion and politics (e.g. pp. 33, 107, 184). The primary example he

uses to illustrate what he calls secularisms intractable and paradoxical

qualities is his reading of the apostasy trial of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and theuse of the principle of hisba therein, which occurs in chapter 1. Here he exam-

ines the nature of sharia in the modern state, that is, after it has been subordi-

nated and reorganized through its incorporation into a modern civil law

system like that of Egypt. Here again, Agrama presensts his readers (and him-

self) with a puzzle: On the one hand I had shown how hisba as elaborated in

the court judgments had acquired distinctive liberal precepts. Yet on the other

it seemed to subvert essential secular tenets, such as the freedom and privacy

of belief. It was therefore unclear whether hisbawas an instance of the secular-

ization of a religious concept or the subversion of secular legal precepts (p. 21).

Agrama refuses to give us an either-or answer. Instead, he comes to argue that

secularism makes this question not a false one, but one that is impossible to

answer: hisba is in fact a product of a secularism that itself incessantly blurs

together religion and politics in Egypt, and that is a form of power that works

through and relies upon the precariousness of the categories that it estab-

lishes (p. 71). So hisbahas indeed been secularized as a tool of the modern

state, but secularization itself is always simultaneously a mode of mobilizing

and containing religion. Indeed, Agrama argues that hisbahas come to resem-

ble secularism itself The states reserving of hisba for itself and out of the

hands of private citizens could be seen as a move of secular power, toward

maintaining and extending the states sovereign authority to decide on the es-

sence of religion and of politics (p. 102) not a religious aberration within the

secular state or an instance of its incompleteness, but a prime instance of its

agenda.

For the scholar who is more narrowly interested in the practice of hisba it-

self and what happens to it when it is adopted by the modern state, Agramaalso ofers much to think about.Hisba certainly has gone through major trans-

formations when integrated into the modern state: While hisba,in its classical

Sharia elaborations, was part of a form of reasoning and practice connected to


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the cultivation of selves, in the courts it became focused on the maintenance

and defense of interests aimed at protecting the public order (p. 20). Thus

hisba comes to be a device of state sovereignty, far removed from its earlier

ethical functions. Under civil law (what Agrama calls the legalization of his-ba) hisba is no longer understood to be the protection of Gods rights vis--vis

proper Muslim selves, possessed of the correct desires and passions (p. 64)

but rather comes to be understood in reference to the protection of the pub-

lic upon whose order and submission the stability of the state rests.

Agramas discussion of what happens to the sharia in the modern state pro-

vides a unique intervention into the literature on the subject. Though he ofers

a careful and sophisticated account of the techniques of moral inquiry and the

sedimentation of virtues particular to the classical sharia system that are lostthrough the restructuring of sharia under civil law (e.g. pp. 545, 57), Agrama

does not exhibit the kind of nostalgia evident in other recent works on Islamic

law and the modern state. (Though he makes no citations on this point, the

implicit critique of those works is evident: The idea that muftis directly access

the Islamic tradition, while judges do not because of a code, comes close to

saying that the Sharia has a traditional essence to which legal codication a

mark of modern law will always be alien. Yet this idea of a traditional essence

fundamentally alien to modern innovation is hard to sustain, both conceptu-

ally and historically [p. 128].) Rather than ofering a eulogy for an ideal sharia,

Agrama tells us about the transformation thereof, along the way providing a

careful appraisal of how modern legal subjects in Egypt are formed at the inter-

section of liberal rule of law and Islamic jurisprudence. In showing how this

happens, Agrama moves us away from more speculative conclusions about the

death of sharia,showing us precisely what becomes of it in the modern state

and under the secular logics to which it has come to subscribe.

Noah Salomon

Carleton College

[email protected]

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Agrama (2012, Review) - Questioning Secularism by Solomon