Sabancı University
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Social and Political Sciences Program Seminar Series
Sinem Gurbey
PhD Candidate in Political Science
Columbia University
SPS Program 2004 Graduate
The Priority of the Public Over the Private: A Critique of the Post-Secular Understanding
of Modernity
Date: January 5, 2011
Time: 13:30-15:00 pm
Place: FASS 2034
Abstract: A prominent academic
literature that intersects anthropology and political theory characterizes
secularism as a coercive and disciplinary tool of Western imperialism. It is
claimed that the secular distinction between public reason and private faith is
in hospitable to the virtuous and religious ways of living of Muslims. I argue
that the post-secularist stance is theoretically faulty on three grounds.
First, it rests on an essentialized definition of the Muslim as cognitively
incapable of distinguishing the political from the religious. Second, by
defining the political community in terms of a friend-enemy distinction (secularists
vs. Muslims), it is ill-prepared to face the problems generated by multidimensional
plurality. Third, by prioritizing the public over the private, it runs the risk of turning private life into a matter of
public concern and anxiety. Following these theoretical objections, I also point to the
empirical implications of the post-secular understanding of modernity for the
case of
Turkey
with reference to the activities of the Directorate of Religious Affairs
(Diyanet) in the post-1980 period. I argue that the post secularist stance
helps strengthen the recent calls of the Diyanet for gender-inequality in
Turkey rather
than solving the problems generated by state-imposed secularism. As an alternative
to both post-secularism and the Turkish laicite, I propose to re-think liberal secularism
in relation to the idea of constitutional state that seeks to protect
individual rights from the will of temporary majorities by differentiating the
political and the legal dimensions of
state sovereignty.
