Islam and the Quest for a European Secular Identity: From Sovereignty through Solidarity to Immunity

Abstract

This study explores the process of cumulative ‘symbolic sublimation’ of power within secular formations as it unfolded through the formative phases that saw in Western Europe the rise and consolidation of patterns first of state sovereignty (within early modernity) and then of social solidarity (within late, colonial and postcolonial modernity). It spells out the process of symbolic sublimation through which secular power justifies itself in cultural terms, by effecting the simultaneous mutation and occultation of traditional symbols in order to underwrite sovereignty and solidarity. Finally, it shows that symbolic sublimation, particularly in the current phase that witnesses the erosion of both sovereignty and solidarity, can no longer disguise wider patterns of connectedness within social relations that are irreducible to either modernist formation. This contemporary stage of the ‘secular’ in the post-colonial era is analysed by reference to political and judicial decisions on issues related to the Islamic headscarf and responses thereto. It reveals the extent to which ‘immunity’, the obverse more than the antithesis of community, is both the long-term vector and the ultimate outcome of both sovereignty and solidarity as the two historic arrows of the ‘secular’.

Notes

¹Roberto Esposito, Immunitas. The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011 [2002]).

²Ibid., p. 83.

³Oliver Cromwell, in the same year of the Peace of Westphalia, famously stated at the trial of King Charles I: ‘I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it’.

⁴Klaus Eder, Geschichte als Lernprozess? Zur Pathogenese politischer Modernität in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991); Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988 [1959]).

⁵Klaus Eder, ‘Leviathan and Behemoth. State and Civil Society’. Unpublished paper, 2010.

⁶Talal Asad, Reflections on Laïcité and the Public Sphere, Social Science Research Council; Items and Issues, 5 (2005); Armando Salvatore, The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

⁷Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, ‘Politik und Religion. “Diskretes” Kulturchristentum als Fluchtpunkt europäischer Gegenbewegungen gegen einen “ostentativen” Islam' in A. Nassehi and M. Schroer (eds) Der Begriff des Politischen. Soziale Welt Sonderband, 14 (2003), pp. 273–297.

⁸Luca Mavelli, Europe's Encounter with Islam. The Secular and Postsecular (London: Routledge, 2012).

⁹Roberto Esposito, op. cit.; Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008 [2004]).

¹⁰Mavelli, op. cit., p. 83.

¹¹See Esposito, Immunitas.

¹²Mavelli, op. cit., p. 81.

¹³Ibid., pp. 62–84.

¹⁴Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

¹⁶Ibid.

¹⁵Mavelli, op. cit., p. 85.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 92.