Post-modern obscurantism and the lure of blasphemy
Keynote lecture,
Conference on Blasphemy, The Graduate Institute, Geneva, 17
October, 2013
by
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Let me clarify first what I mean by postmodernism in order to avoid any
confusion, misunderstanding or sheer meaninglessness that this term
tends to evoke, it being often used lightly and vicariously, with jolly
promscuity and jovial abandon, sometimes luridly. I do not propose to
enter upon a socio-historical discussion in the manner of David Harvey,
Perry Anderson or Fredrick Jameson, although I must say that I find
particularly alluring the view of Arnold Toynbee, who saw a post-modern
age inaugurated in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the
waning of bourgeois cultural hegemony in favour of alternatives and far
more diffused ports of normative call: it is unsurprising that
postmodernist culture, supposedly radical, has come to embrace
enthusiastically personalities who would, until recently, have been
regarded as embarrassing bedfellows, or at least ones who brought in
their wake bizarre or otherwise very particular tastes: Carl Schmitt, Hans
Georg Gadamer, Maurice Halbwachs or Emanuel Levinas, and a myriad
1
of others who had been representatives of extreme right-wing or at least
highly conservative political and ideological trends.
From this perspective, I take postmodernism to be a title covering a
constellation of definable drifts, ideological, social and political, that had
been gathering strength until they crystallised together around 1989,
thereafter coming to constitute a template and an international koine once
the twin pillars of the international regime previously regnant – socialism,
developmentalism and Keynesianism -- had disappeared almost
overnight, with few traces remaining. I would characterise this as a drift –
often represented in the academy by using the metaphor of turns, linguitic
and otherwise, what the American Historical Review recently called
‘turn-talk’ – a drift away from cognitive canons of certainty and
verifiability in the social sciences and the humanities, and in politics as
well, in favour of matters variously called voices, subject-positions,
hermeneutical bilocations, geneaologies and related terms. This is a drift
wherein are identified being and thought in a way reminiscent of the
cognitive nihilism that characterised Lebensphilosophie at the turn of the
19th/20th centuries.
Associated with this is a related suspicison of analytical interpretation in
favour of an open hermeneutic, restorative of subjects and voices, each on
its own irreducible and little amenable to analysis in other, more general
terms. This is braided with a general hostility towards claims for grand
narratives and other templates of interpretation, except of course for a
profusion of parallel and incommensurable grand narratives of
singularity. Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist par excellence, for
one, believed that objectivity is reducible to social solidarity, and this
drift has often come to express itself in the excessive use of inverted
commas, the somberly graphic as well as droll digital, to gloss
2
mysteriously what are in fact concepts and words with clear meanings
such as magic, superstition, obscurantism or myth. There seems in this
drift to be more concern with the self-conscious observing subject and her
positioning or posturing, than with the object to which the gaze is
directed.
If we were to retrace our step briefly, and come back the names
mentioned, it will become evident that this drift is not entirely
unbounded. Gadamer, for one, defended what he saw as a positive
conception of prejudice to be counterposed to what he saw as the
Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice: an attempt, in his term, to
assert historicity against the claims of historicism (Gadamer, 1977, 9).
The boundary which in fact specifies the meaning of this desire is a
romanticism in the stong sense of an irrationalist, vitalist theory of
society, history and knowledge. In concrete terms, this yields partiality to
or at least a sympathy for communalism, primitivism, ancestralism, cults
of singularity and memory, mystifications of otherness and of sheer
Difference, a cultivation of the pre-Galilean and pre-Baconian, and,
crucially for my purposes this evening, tolerance of obscurantism served
up as cultural sensitivity. In a word, the drift I have been speaking of
yields a postmodern tolerance of and de facto socio-political legitimation
of multiform archaisms that include obscurantism, in the name of historist
claims and ethical imperatives attributed to them.
As with cognitve relativism, originally ironical and urbane, later serene
and sentimental, but now rather garish, so also with culturalism: this
transposes the history of human groups, nations, communities, or
religions, from the order of history to the order of nature, according to a
theory of incommensurability and abeyance, now further fired by regard
for the natural, the primal, the authentic, in a mood of preservationism
3
from outside, or revanchisme from inside, respectful of irrational limits
that Gadamer calls ‘horizons,’ what is not uncommonly designated by
seemingly innocent terms with interesting pragmatic histories such as
Weltanschauungen and so forth. None of this is new or specific to
postmodern times. It has been grist to the mill of right-wing and populist
movements everywhere. The innovation of the culturalism now prevalent
is that it takes the theory of human types once expressed in terms of race,
and expresses it in terms of culture. Since 1989, we have been living in a
world where the predominant ideological mood, the mood energising
animal rights no less than NGOs and UN commissions, is romantic. They
are romantic not only in the sense of cultivating an aesthetic of the
primal, of soil, blood, nation, community, culture, or religion, but in the
transfiguration of the idea of an original creative energy inherent in
human collectivities, much cultivated in romantic aesthetics, to the
collective regarded as an organism, working with a vitalist and biologistic
metaphor.
It is under these conditions, as expressed in the politics of identity, that
blasphemy is again placed on the agenda, and it is from these same
conditions that it derives what one commentaror has termed “a vibrant
cultural resource” (Nash, 2007, 8), and even becomes salonfaehig or
presentable. Weber would have been truly shocked, he who, in 1906,
reported in Die Christliche Welt on the way in which religion effects
conduct in the North Carolina, saying that this was such as ‘must seem to
us grotesque and frequently repellent.’ (Weber, 2002, 204). Thus, for
instance, Professor Roger Scruton, Mrs Thatcher’s onetime in-house
philosopher, commenting on the Danish Muhammad cartoons (q. by
Klausen, 144): “If we mock the religious taboos of Muslims we pour
scorn on the icons of Christianity … we must respect the icons of the
4
Muslim faith, even if we think them ridiculous, indeed specifically if we
think them ridiculous.” There is here clearly more than just a use of
Muslim rage as a fillip to the defence of Christianity, which had been
clearly the case among a variety of churchmen (and rabbis, for related
reasons) arguing against the cartoons, and, earlier, against Rushdie and
other manifestations involving charges of blasphemy. There is in
Scruton’s position an attitude of noblesse oblige towards a group that
might not be in a position to know any better, not without an admixture of
xenophobia, or at least of reserve, in the guise of gracious xenophilia. It
will come as no surprise that the two tend to mirror one another, as both
are premissed upon an assumption of cultural incommensurability in the
manner just described, one in an attitude of enthusiasm or sympathy, the
other of hostility or tolerance or both. Islam appears, as it did to many
Europeans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a foil: as a
metonym, standing for something else, undeclared, undeclarable. But this
time, unlike previous centuries, it is directed not against Christianity, but
against the Enlightenment.
I will move on to “the icons of the Muslim faith” of which Scruton spoke
in a moment. In the meantime, I shall try to disengage some of the
features of blasphemy reclamations and accusations as they have
appeared in the past two decades – in fact, since the Rushdie Affair. Two
matters arise, one concerning attitudes, the other, agents. The backdrop to
both is one of vexation at what is clearly an unexpected anachronism of
enchantment in an age held to be disenchanted, and vexation regarding
the reinstatement of God’s terrible majesty against the claims of
transgression, indeed of transgression that is no longer transgression.
Among many others, in his memoirs of his years of occultation, Salman
Rushdie expressed this vexatious surprise at matters that were no longer
5
thought to be expected, not even by Weber in 1906; by all accounts, one
had the impression prior to the fatwa of a person not quite expecting the
amplitude of what was to arrive in no time at all, and expecting to keep
taking matters in his stride.
Let us remember that blasphemy is not so much errant belief as lèse
majesté and an insult to the honour of God and his dogmatic and cultic
auxiliaries and extensions, his physical, sensuous presences: His Son, His
Word, His Prophet, His Book. Under modern conditions, must in terms
of legal responsibility figure as an hypothetical beings with no rights as
such, rights being held by actually existing and duly constituted bodies
with legal personality that might be in a position to bring charges of
blasphemy under the law as it exists. This was expressed in almost so
many words in the United Kingdom by the House of Lords Select
Committee of 2002. Yet there has been, in the past quarter-century, a
renewed insistence on the restriction of certain types of statements
respecting the sublime, the sublime being invariably, in the words of
Edmund Burke, “some modification of power” (Burke, 2004, 107).
Blasphemy and sacrilege are in this respect an elevated and much
amplified form of defamation, and there are curious moral and legal
parallelisms between the conception of defamation and that of
blasphemy. Both are seen as forms of moral injury, blasphemy being one
performed against a form of ultimate majesty, and there are, in view of
the sublime, also most interesting, ultimately anthropological parallelisms
and homologies between a king and a deity, both sharing a terrible
majesty (Hocart 1927; Al-Azmeh, 2007). Both are irreducible instances
beyond recall, inscribed in a hierarchy without reciprocity, and both, in
times hopefully more archaic than ours, require the ritual display of
subordination. Such subordination is otherwise known as worship, and
6
majesty, including the sublime majesty seemingly vulnerable to insult and
injury, requires, like the curse, a performative continuity between word
and deed. The distance of majesty is awesome, and does not encourage
warmth, requires but does not offer intimacy, enveloped in needy jealosy,
joy in the smell of burnt flesh and covetousness of affection (so the OT),
guileful and deliberately devious (so the Qur’an), generating an increate
son destined to be sacrificed on the cross: Jean-Pierre Wills reminds us
memorably that, thus construed, Gott ist nicht gemµtlich (title of ch. 3 of
Wills 2007).
This is a situation starkly described, and it is one which, against
expectations and without attenuation, is being put on the table today. It is
being put on the table in a form which is very old, redolent of die
mosaische Untercheidung used by Jan Assmann to describe the
consequences – what he called the price -- of monotheism. This is of
course a very ancient motif; many things have moved on since then and
much water has flown under very many bridges, yet this iron-age motif
seems to becoming back to us, under novel conditions yet according to a
conception not too far removed from that which animated its beginnings.
This is vexing and surprising, and requires some explanation which might
conjoin the inertial energy of this motif with a renewed momentum
arising from emergence of socio-political forces that have elective
affinities with it, in such a way that the motif, along with related ones,
figures as an element in these forces’ constitution as self-perpetuating
bodies, that is, as authoritative institutions at once social, political and
cultural.
It is the very admissibility of bracketing the sacredness of the sacred in
public pronouncements, including works of literature, theatrical
performance, and the visual arts, that is coming under pressure in the
7
recent reclamations of blasphemy. This, in a situation where the cognitive
and moral authority of religion has for long been much undermined, and
in almost all crucial instances subordinated to cognitive and normative
regimes of modernity (cf. Jean-Pierre Wils’ discussion of religion’s moral
claims: 2007, 22f.). It is a situation in which, as suggested, this sort of
clamour was expected by very many to have become marginal to the
degree of insignificance, following the normal course of Norbert Elias’
civilising process, going the way of barbarous hygiene, uncouth table
manners and overly enthusiastic or violent forms of self-expression.
Finally, it is one in which an inconsolable and inapproachable deity is
coming to appear in Europe as a foreigner bent on revenge (Wills, 2007,
27).
Yet for all its seeming exotism, the reclamation of blasphemy is not only
vestigial, a survival, a persistence by sheer force of inertial energy. Its
deployment has a crucial element of novelty brought about by
postmodern political conditions in countries that have had stable
democratic institutions since the Second World War, in some cases,
longer, as in Britain for instance. These conditions make its reclamation
possible, and allow blasphemy to play the crucial role it has come to
acquire with the Rushdie Affair. I refer to the series of events that
constitute this affair not only because it is intrinsically curious and
interesting, nor for the sake of personal reminiscence or antiquarian
recall, but because it appears, in retrospect, to have been crucial to the
later fortunes of the notion of blasphemy, including arguments made in
favour of its admissibility and its legal reinstatement or extension, way
beyond what some call cultural sensitivity to claims for immigrant
ancestralism – I do not much like these terms, but such are the terms of
the debate overall.
8
The Rushdie affair deployed blasphemy as a standard emblem in political
mobilisation, and, by an objective Machiavellism or by a wonderful
serendipity, blasphemy became subsequently a standard motif and
emblem in the mobilisation of particular bodies of publics by specific
authorities that constituted themselves as religious, socio-political and
cultural. These not only mobilisation, but wholesale re-socialisation as
well -- deployed the relation between blasphemy and a wider body of
claims, and of special pleading, for claims to historico-social singularity,
communal separation, reparation for injury, and a temper that expects and
flourishes on moral injury, and indeed invites it with a certain
determination through a closed circuit of visible tokens of selfstigmatisation: manners of coiffure and couture, a standard set of facial
expressions, irrepressible clamour, exhibitionistic piety, proudly-declared
fanaticism, an almost autistic degree of incommunicative introversion
proudly declared by exorbitant special pleading. It is almost as if some
were self-consciously and quite deliberately playing the stark contrast of
H. G. Wells’ dark and subterranean Morlocks seeking to devour the white
Eloi, softened and further whitened by civilisation and captivity to the
ends of civilisation. In describing street protests, Rushdie evoked
Bellow’s ‘event glamour’, and spoke of ‘faces performing anger for the
cameras’ (Rushdie, 129) – ‘happily angry faces, rejoicing in their anger,
believing their identity to be born of their rage’ (Rushdie, 128).
The organisation of outrage, to use a term used in one contribution to this
conference, and the staging of public manifetations of outrage, genuine,
ingenuous or contrived, are crucial aspects of this condition – let us not
forget that ourtrage is also solicited, provoked and expected by networks
of neo-conservatism and racism, provocations which are unfortunately
almost invariably eliciting the desired response. Let us also remember
9
that there was always a time lag between the event itself (the cartoons, the
Satanic Verses) and their public consequences. The aftermath of the
Danish Muhammad cartoons has been studied and traced in detail by
Klausen, and much is known about the Rushdie affair, Theo van Gogh
and analogous events. For ultimately, the notion of blasphemy in the
archaic form in circulation today is a set piece in a psychodramatic
political theatre where roles are type-cast entirely. This is a political
theatre staged by authorities – Muslim communal leaderships in Europe,
often with the help of state social services, and made possible by the
conjunction socio-economic segmentation and racism -- constituting and
maintaining themselves by claiming to speak for Muslim identity
exclusively, in terms of injury and ressentiment. And these authorities
became relatively cohesive and self-sustaining as a result of the Rushdie
affair: let us not forget that one effect of this series of events has been to
inject blood into the capillaries of a number of transnational social,
educational, cultural and political networks that had been set up from the
1970s, well-funded, but, until then, relatively dormant. Rushdie’s Satanic
Verses has had an elixiric effect.
And these networks had been created under the ideological signature of a
specific form of Islam which is highly Protestantised, having crucial
motifs analogous to those of the radical Reformation and of Southern
Baptism in the United States; many of the motifs of this type of Islam
would have had distinct analogies and inflections and echoes in Calvin’s
Geneva and Zwingli’s Zurich, and especially in Anabaptist Mµnster. This
form of Islam, generically known, not always accurately, as Wahhabism
or salafism, is literalist, rigourist, patristic (this last word a fair translation
of salafism); it had been latent in some subcultural locations throughout
the histories of Muslims in much the same way as such currents have
10
existed in all monotheistic religions. But its prominence is new, as is its
move to occupy centre-stage and to expand and occupy spaces previously
occupied by more traditional, less rigourist tendencies within Islam. One
could say that this condition is made possible by secularism in Muslim
countries as well as in Europe, and is a corollary to the classical
secularisation thesis of social differentiation. For the further Islam, like
other religions, was removed from social practice, the better able has it
been to constituting itself as an autonomous and stand-alone social
instance that could act in its own right and attempt to appropriate cultural,
social and political spaces hitherto operative in keeping with other
principles and under the auspices of different kinds of authority.
I have mentioned proudly-declared fanaticism: proudly declared, because
it is a potent and unmistakable identitarian emblem in a politics of
identity. Proudly declared: but also given the form of violence, sometimes
indiscriminate violence, cathartic and revelatrory, like other acts of
exemplary violence designed as spectacle: the suicide of Dominique
Venner, the actions of Brejvik, Russian nihilists, Spanish Anarchists, are
all of type. Politics of identity invariably involve set pieces; in the case of
identitarian Muslims I have already indicated some of these dramaturgic
tropes, delivered, like the delivery of all such identitarian set pieces, in
varying degrees of taste and adroitness ranging from the artlessly selfparodic to the charmingly entrancing. The fanatical respresentation of
outrage, and especially outrage at blasphemous insult, and the
manifestation of distemper is a constituent element of this scenario. I
know that care is needed when deploying terms such as fanaticism and its
cognates such as enthusiasm as used against non-conformist Protestants
until this last word itself had been tamed in the early nineteenth century,
and perhaps most resonantly the German Schwärmerei, with its recall of
11
the indistinct but menacing din of the swarm. And we do have many
studies that seek analytically to domesticate fanaticism, usually in a
sentimentalist or mawkish apology, but also, and I refer here to Ernst
Bloch and especially Roberto Toscano’s Fanatisicm: the Uses of an Idea
(Toscano, 2009), including his reading of Bloch, to arrive at an historical
appreciations beyond polemics pro or contra. I might also mention in this
regard Marx’s views, often formulaically misconceived, and relevant
directly to the two authors I have just mentioned.
Yet care and fairness need to be conjugated with what, in my case, is a
robust cognitive purpose that would require the use of terms that are
adequate to the description of relevant phenomena. I am suggesting, in
other words, that the public manifestation of extreme and inconsolable
distemper, by individuals or crowds alike, is not only a demagogic means
for mobilisation, but that it is also, together with brooding over insoluble
historical injustices, however imagined, a constitutive element in a
particular type of politics of identity seeking to replace the
responsibilities of citizenship by loyalties to ancestralism and blood, most
often imagined. Self-stigmatisation and the disappearance of any
workable horizons associated with the manifestation of recalcitrant
distemper lead to only one possible social and political arrangement,
namely, that of communal separation, usually officiated under the benign
title of multiculturalism.
One academic apologist for Islamist rage tried her hand at an
hermeneutical exercise seeking to comprehend the impulses behind
certain forms of reaction to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, and ended up
with the sketchy and impressionistic description of what are clearly –
according to her description -- praisworthy predilections for delusion that
she attributes to Muslims. The person of Muhammad, and his visual
12
depiction, this critic considers, paradoxically given the avowedly
iconoclastic views of the party defended, should be regarded as an icon;
as such, they are in a certain way inhabited (Mahmoud, 2009, 71-2;
Mahmoud, 2001). Additionally, she suggests a mass-pathological
description of what she takes, for no good reason, to be the standard
Muslim reaction – always in the singular in these apologies, and in the
polemics as well, both clicheed images of changeless nd impermeable
collectivities – to the Muhammad cartoons: a mimetism seeking to
‘ingest, as it were, the prophet’s persona into oneself’ and to mark a
relation of similitude, and so on and so forth in a description that would
have been grist to the mill for analyses by Freud, Le Bon, Cannetti,
Girard and others, including a huge amount of studies on National
Socialist and Fascist rallies, that have sought to articulate masspsycological profiles of crowd action: suggestibility, mimetism, loss of
individuality, the removal of restraint, and so forth. Interestingly, in
postmodern times, many of these features might be seen to be extended to
virtual crowds that matter enormously, and as primary and no longer
secondary phenomena: virtual crowds are sustained by the the
abbreviation of word and sentiment, the virtual biologisation of
perception through images, the constant, endlessly repeatable visibility of
the mobilising emblem, the emblem of offence and indignity (cf. Egerton,
2011, ch. 3 and 4).
The issue of blasphemy is central to all of this political and
psychodramatic performance, as a token of unity and of division, as
proof, if proof be needed, that Muslims are hated and derided, and that
they cannot allow themselves to be still – as one major impresario during
the Rushdie affair, the late Dr. Kalim Siddiqui, said, and I am quoting
from memory: ‘we Muslim always strike back; we sometimes strike back
13
first.’ I have spent half a professional lifetime trying to show in detail that
the moods of Islamist maximalism and perpetual rage are to be seen as
new phenomena that have little beyond symbolic continuity with any
imaginable Muslim past, and that primitivism is a highly recherché form
of self-presentation. I shall not expostulate on this matter, but I shall
rather assume it as I wind down to the next and final stage of my lecture
this evening, one which will allow me to reconnect with what had been
said at the outset about postmodern drifts.
Since the eighteenth century, blasphemy in Europe, initially a crime of
lèse majesté entailing punishments related to the locus or instrument of
the offence, such the severing of tongues, was no longer in legal terms
entertained as a category of injury -- except in terms of its public order
consequences, involving the initiative of duly constituted institutions
(churches) and, more recently, spoken of in terms of accommodating
groups commonly referred to as Muslims. It is assumed at once that such
crimes, including visual representations of Muhammad, are punishable
under what is commonly referred to as Muslim law, that such law is in
fact still in effect, and, according to a romantic historist conception of
law, it is assumed that such law emerges by natural impulse out of what is
assumed to be Muslim culture. I would need another lecture to comment
on these assumptions, and will confine myself instead to discussing what
it is that makes such assumptions appear credible.
For its part, classical Muslim jurisprudence, with the exception of recent
developments in those few states that declare themselves to be Muslim, is
by no means a code, but rather a law of precedents, a few statutes, and
juristical techniques ultimately vested in the authority of the judge,
somewhat akin but not entirely equivalent to what Weber termed
Kadijustiz. In this vast body of precedents, the category of blashemy does
14
not exist, contrary to what apologetic discourses propose (following the
redaction of Asad, ‘Reflection,’ 591 ff.). What has existed in practice
intermittently in the classical period, has been the prosecution of some
blasphemers under the category of apostasy, which is in essence a public
order offence related to sedition, which brings matters very much in line
with developments in European legal practices since the eighteenth
century.
It is well known that legislation in European countries does place limits
on the freedom of expression; some of these are enshrined in older laws
against blasphemy that have been inactive for generations, they being no
longer compatible with conditions that have arisen since, and some
enacted by political or representative authorities, especially holocaust
denial and laws meant to offer protection against racism and related
offences. Many of these newer pieces of legislation were enacted as a
result of political deliberation and of pressure-group initiatives. But the
issue of blasphemy is distinct in two main respects, the first, that it
concerns religion and offence against hypothetical leggal entities, and the
second, that it is being brought about by mob action. Ultimately,
Muslims, or those who present themselves as such in these circumstances,
are less victims of double standards than of changing legal norms
(Klausen, 146), not least in countries where national law must be seen as
indivisible.
In response to such pressure for the reinstatement of blasphemy as a legal
and moral category, we witness a danse macabre between certain sniffily
conservative as well as some left-wing voices in essence anti-Muslim,
and Islamist declamations in favour of a more indulgent attitude towards
the notion of blasphemy – Rushdie has provided a tally of these voices
15
(Joseph Anton, 125, 160 and passim) who accused him of taking on a
well-known beast, only to turn around and shout: ‘foul.’
But of course the habits of this beast are being made as I speak, and have
little to do with ancestralist traditions. Aniconism and iconoclasm apart,
there was no taboo as such broken by displaying images of Muhammad
(as has been claimed: Asad, ‘Reflections,’ 605); there was disparagement,
certainly, but images of Muhammad, some of extraordinary finesse,
abound in manuscripts and miniatures produced under the Ottomans and
Safavids. Abbasid times have bequeathed upon us a very rich repertoire
of casual and picaresque blasphemy, some in the highest possible literary
modes of expression, no less than a body of philosophical and moral
freethinking that was explicitly critical of the derogation of human reason
in favour of divine command – including the earliest attestable statements
that were later to be put together in De tribus impostoribus and its further
developments in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe (La vie et
l’oeuvre de M. Benoit de Spinoza, published by the Baron d’Holbach).
Little or no punishment was meted out then, for the situation was
culturally very complex, in which orthodoxies were vying with each other
rather with precious little energy left over for freethinkers, and no
singular orthodoxy was in a position to impose its requirements upon
dissenters. These motifs and ideas also form part of the heritage of
Muslim peoples, if heritage were to be sought, which would be woefully
abbreviated were they, as is habitually the case, to be reduced to religion
in its most summary form. Yet all manner of definite habits, expectations
and demands are attributed to Muslims as a block; even the most
frivolous and eccentric are taken, almost invariably, as typical, both by
Islamists and by their hostile or indulgent adversaries.
16
Ultimately, and to reconnect with the primary motifs of this lecture, what
needs to be highlighted is that the question of blasphemy as we have it
today is one of stark, even savage identitarian positioning in the context
of a politics of pandering and crowd management, crowds being
understood both as physical presences with the variety of actions
attendant upon them, and of virtual crowds as well, all, to some, redolent
of ungovernability and of a magma of barbarity. It is a game at the edge
of things, with quite a number of consequences discernible: the
fragmentation of the body politic of citizens into bodies of constituencies
of blood and into the formation of a society of Estates (see Asad,
‘Muslims as a religious minority.’), and notions of legal extraterritoriality emblemetised by demands for what is known as the
‘application of the shari’a.’ What we have is, indeed, is the result, not so
much of Muslim ancestralism, but rather the result of postmodern drifts
towards the tolerance of obscurantism in the name of a politics of
recognition. This is in effect an acceptance of culturalist solipsism, on the
very questionable assumption that demands made today are historically
established (Asad, Idea, 14), a moral nihilism that is ready to accept that
the rights of humans be sacrificed to the honour of the gods.
Finally, I think that it is clear that this whole argumentative edifice
reclaiming a natural right to prejudice and powered conceptually by a
sociologistic form of fatalism that is otherwise known as vitalism (AlAzmeh, 2009, ch. 2; Al-Azmeh, 2012), is geared towards the deliberate
construction of separated minorities, and specifically of Muslim
minorities in Europe. It proposes a politics of recognition which involves
not so much the apprehension of reality as categorisation and
stereotypification.
17
I have no conclusion to offer. I have sketched out a certain interpretation
of the matter of blasphemy as it arises today and will simply end with a
reference to Apuleis who, in the second century, commenting on the
mystery cult of Cybele, said the following about a priest of this cult: he
‘acted the part of a raving lunatic – as though the presence of the gods did
not raise man above himself but depressed him to disease and disorder’
(Apuleis, 1962, 182).
Works cited
Apuleius, The Golden Ass, tr. J. Lindsay, Bloomington, 1962.
Asad, Talal, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Washington DC,
1986.
-----, ‘Muslims as a ‘religious minority’ in Europe,’ in idem., Formations
of the Secular, Stanford, 2003, 159-180.
-----, ‘Responses,’ Powers of the Secular Modern. Talal Asad and His
Interlocutors, ed. D. Scott and C. Hirschkind, Stanford, 2006, 206-241.
-----, Reflections on blasphemy and secular criticism,’ Religion: Beyond a
Concept, ed. Hent de Vries, New York, 2008, pp. 580-609.
Al-Azmeh, Aziz, ‘Monotheistic Monarchy,’ in idem., The Times of
History, Budapest 2007.
-----, Islams and Modernities, 3rd. ed., London, 2009.
-----, “Civilisation as a Political Disposition,” Economy and Society, 41
(2012), pp. 501-512.
Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful,
ed. David Womersley, Harmondsworth, 2004.
18
Caton, S., ‘What is an “authorizing discourse” ?’ Powers of the Secular
Modern. Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. D. Scott and C.
Hirschkind, Stanford, 2006, 31-56.
Chabrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe, Princeton, 2000.
Egerton, F., Jihad in the West, Cambridge, 2011.
Gadamer, H-G., Truth and Method, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977.
Hocart, M. A., Kingship, Oxford 1927.
Klausen, Jutte, The Cartoons that Shook the World, New Haven, 2009.
Mahmoud, Saba, ‘Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of
Ritual: Disciplines of ṣalā t,’ American Ethnologist, 28 (2001), 827-853.
-----, “Religious reason and secular effect: An incommensurable divide ?”
Is Critique Secular ? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free speech, by T. Asad, W.
Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmoud, Berkeley, The Townsend Center for
the Humanities, 2009, pp. 64-100.
Nash, David, Blasphemy in the Christian World. A History, Oxford, 2007.
Rushdie, Salman, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, London, 2012.
Toscano, Roberto, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, London, 2010.
Weber, M., ‘‘Churches” and “Sects” in North America’, in The
Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and other Writings, New
York, 2002, pp. 203-220.
Wils, Jean-Pierre, Gotteslästerung, Frankfurt and Leipzig, 2007.
19