Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report

Mahmood (Politics of Piety) explores secularism by considering the situation of religious minorities in Egypt. For Mahmood, secularism contains an intense irony, in that the supposed inability of the state to dictate religion leaves few avenues for minorities to redress grievances. Looking at the situation of Coptic Christians and Bahais, she persuasively argues that religious conflict in Egypt is not a result of too little secularization but a clear consequence of secularity. Perhaps the strongest chapter covers family law, where she shows how secularism's relegating religion to the private sphere intensifies religion's control over the other key elements of private life%E2%80%94especially gender and sexuality. Her work contains enough history of Egyptian politics to show how secularism is both an imposed norm of European colonialism and a development internal to Islam. In crisp prose, Mahmood convincingly shows that secularism's promise for equal protection under the law for all religious believers has deeply shaped the modern world, despite the ways in which secularism itself thwarts this hope. This book challenges Western perceptions of the Middle East while deeply questioning the ability of secularism to live up to its promises. (Dec.)