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

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Wed Oct 24 12:05:01 PDT 2007


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



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