Indeed. One weakness of Talal Asad is his failure to make a clear distinction between secularism won from below through authentic social revolution against the alliance of clerical hierarchy and landed oligarchy on one hand and secularism imposed from above in defense of ruling class interests on the other hand.
I recommend Asad's work to historical materialists, just as I recommend the work of Joseph Massad, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Dror Ze'evi, and so on, as well as the work of Michel Foucault, in that theirs is an antidote to vulgar Marxism which, like liberalism, is explicitly or implicitly committed to the myth of Progress that has us believe the West as the telos of humanity, but their analysis needs to be complemented by class analysis.
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2007/10/varieties-of-secularism.html> Varieties of Secularism
Secular leftists as well as liberals tend to think that religion is an ideology, a product of alienation, whereas secularism isn't. Secularism, however, is a political doctrine, and as such, it is as much of an ideology as religion.
What kind of ideology is secularism?
There are at least three major varieties of this ideology that we need to study:
* republican secularism (secularism won from below
through authentic social revolution, seen, for instance,
in France and Mexico);
* authoritarian secularism (secularism imposed from
above, for instance, Kemalism, an ideology invented as
much to dissociate Turkey from its own region and
make it a member of the mythical West1 as to pacify
the working masses by dictating and controlling their
ideology, purging religion here, promulgating a
state-sanctioned variety of it there);
* the American separation of church and state (which
makes the state legally secular but makes religion,
both good and bad varieties, flourish in civil society).
Not all varieties of religion are valuable, nor are all varieties of secularisms. Among the three, only republican secularism may serve as a path to the proletarian Enlightenment, political or intellectual, that empowers them.
Nevertheless, even republican secularism, if the Left is not careful, can be deformed by the power elite into an instrument of social control, for example, as a weapon of xenophobic attack on predominantly proletarian migrants from France's former colonial possessions in the MENA region. An uncritical approach to secularism just helps make the empire more powerful at the expense of working people, in the North as well as the South.
1 Initially, Kemalism was an ideology of modernization as Westernization. The European Union's reluctance to admit Turkey as its member, however, has begun to change it. Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of the Turkish Daily News, recently observed:
What is most striking in this nationwide division is
that the so-called Islamists are generally on the
liberal pro-Western side, while the secularists are
often on the other. In the general election held on
July 22, the "Islamist" AKP had the most strongly
pro-E.U. platform, whereas the ultra-secularist
Republican People's Party tried to woo voters with
Euro-skeptic rhetoric. (The AKP won the elections
with a clear victory of 47 percent, while its main
secular rival took 21 percent.) The AKP is also a
strong proponent of free markets and foreign
investment, whereas most secularist politicians
see such things as "imperialist" and favor a
state-protected economy. As Ziya Onis, a political
economist at Koc University in Istanbul, said
recently, the current power struggle in Turkey is
between "conservative globalists" and "defensive
nationalists" -- including the ultra-secular Kemalists.
("The Protocols of the Elders of Turkey," Washington
Post, 7 October 2007, p. B2)
It is in this context where the strangest variety of anti-Semitism, which peddles "a conspiracy theory about a Zionist plot to create an Islamist state" in Turkey, has emerged among Kemalists.
Look in just about any bookstore in Turkey, and
you'll see some of the strangest bestsellers imaginable.
The cover of "The Children of Moses," the first and
most popular book in a series of four, shows the
country's devoutly Muslim prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, in the middle of a six-pointed Star of
David. Inside, you'll find a head-spinningly weird
argument: that Erdogan and his conservative allies in
Turkey's ruling pro-Islamic party are actually crypto-Jews
with secret wicked ties to the conspiratorial forces of
"global Zionism."
The books are hardly a fringe phenomenon. They're
arrayed in chic bookstores along Istiklal Avenue, the
funky pedestrian mall that's the heart of secular Istanbul.
They're openly displayed alongside Orhan Pamuk
novels at Ataturk International Airport. And they're even
sold on tiny bookstands on the Princes' Islands, the
vacation destinations in the Sea of Marmara that many
well-off Turks view the way Manhattanites do the
Hamptons. By the publishers' figures, they've sold
about 520,000 copies since the books started rolling
out this year -- a staggering figure for a nation of
about 71 million people.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ergun Poyraz, who wrote the series, is a self-declared
"Kemalist," the term used here to describe the
committed followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the
resolutely secular war hero who founded modern
Turkey in 1923. The politicians whom Poyraz is out to
skewer define themselves as sensible conservatives,
but they're derided as closet fundamentalists by their
foes among Turkey's traditional elites, who are still
deeply suspicious of any intrusion of Islam into the
public sphere. Poyraz's books argue -- apparently in
all seriousness -- that "Zionism" has decided to steer
Turkey away from its time-worn secular path and turn it
into a "moderate Islamic republic." It is hard to believe
that "Zionism" (let alone any sane Israeli leader) would
prefer an Islamist Turkey to a secular one, but Poyraz
is convinced that a mildly Islamic state would be more
easily manipulated by foreign powers than a
staunchly nationalist one. (Akyol, 7 October 2007, p. B2) -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/>