[lbo-talk] Talal Asad on Secularism, Liberalism, and Human Rights

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Hi Yoshie,
Your messages seem to be archived earlier than you send them, so I 
think I may be missing them. But Asad seems to praise Massad's ideas 
about how Arab sexuality came to changed in the course of imitating 
Western norms in the 19th century, not your apologetic ideas about 
the Iranian regime or dismissal of gay activists as the witting or 
unwitting agents of imperialism even if they say that the latter 
compounds the problems.  What does Nikkie Keddie say has been the 
discursive forms through which women have articulated their fight in 
Iran? I don't think she thinks clever reinterpretation of the Qur'an 
hs been that important but rather reference to the demands of a 
modern economy. Bhikhu Parekh has long been questioning liberal ideas 
about the essential attributes of the human (of course for the 
liberal it is choice and will in abstraction from actual social 
conditions for obvious reasons), the limits of liberal secularism 
(think of violence against Catholics after the French Revolution) and 
tolerance (Locke's workcamps for kiddies) and comparing attempts to 
secure human dignity through liberal right versus other political 
forms and underlining the justifications for aggression and rights 
suspension built into liberalism. So I think he can be read side by 
side with Asad, though Paul Gilroy and others think Parekh makes too 
many concessions to liberalism. Ashish Nandy raised many questions 
about secularism almost thirty years ago, so one question I have is 
what is the state of the critique of the critique of secularism.
Rakesh