POLITICAL THEOLOGY

https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2021.1885827

On the Secular State: A Response to Mohamad Amer Meziane

Talal Asad
Graduate Center, CUNY, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay deploys a reflection on the secular state and the forms of secularism; democracy; the
violence that constitutes it. It formulates several comments about modern State; anthropology
its sovereignty as well as the distinction between about morality of secularism; violence
and politics. It then responds to several critical questions and
crucial arguments made by Mohamad Amer Meziane in his
innovative essay on The Deafness of the State. Its conclusion
particularly responds to different themes formulated in Meziane’s
essay such as the status of the voice in Islam, the nature of
modern sovereignty and the relation between decolonization and
the state.

I want to begin by noting that in what follows I am concerned to think about secularism
as a form of the modern liberal State, and that it is here we encounter the much-debated
matter of the alleged Christian origin of secularism and consequently of the need for non-
Christians to de-christianize secularism. I am not persuaded that this is a useful way to
think about secularism mainly because the origin of an idea should not determine
whether it is or isn’t valid. The rejection of secularism because of its alleged Christian
origin is often condemned as “nativism” – that is to say, as rejecting an idea or practice
merely because it isn’t one’s own. But this kind of debate about rejection and critique
tends to deflect inquiry into what I think is a more interesting question: given that secu-
larism can be part of both liberal and non-liberal States, it is often claimed that secularism
makes especially good moral and political sense in a liberal State; but what is it then that
sets the latter apart as a distinct form of the modern State? Thus, the political philosopher
Larry Siedentop puts the matter this way:
What is the crux of secularism? It is that belief in an underlying or moral equality of humans
implies that there is a sphere in which each should be free to make his or her own decisions,
a sphere of conscience and free action. That belief is summarized in the central value of clas-
sical liberalism: the commitment to ‘equal liberty’.

I think one should begin by recognizing that the modern State – whether it is called a
liberal democracy or not – has distinctive forms of enmity and exclusion. It would not be
a State, for example, if it did not legally include citizens and exclude non-citizens. Citi-
zens are assumed to enjoy a certain kind of equality within the State, and so they are
unequal to non-citizens. Perhaps the most important form of political inequality in
modern States (including liberal democracies) is a consequence of the fact that they

CONTACT Talal Asad tasad@gc.cuny.edu

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
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were empires, as Mohamad Amer Meziane seems to suggest in his introduction to this
special issue. Carl Schmitt put it well when he wrote:
Modern imperialism has created countless new governmental forms, conforming to econ-
omic and technical developments, which extend themselves to the same degree that democ-
racy develops within the motherland. Colonies, protectorates, mandates, intervention
treaties, and similar forms of dependence make it possible today for a democracy to
govern a heterogeneous population without making them citizens, making them dependent
on a democratic state, and at the same time held apart from this state. That is the political
and constitutional meaning of the nice formula ‘the colonies are foreign in public law, but
domestic in international law’.

Hence it is often claimed that Israel is a liberal democratic State – meaning, that it has
institutionalized elections, a political system formally built on the balance of powers
and on the rule of law, and that its citizens are able to criticize government failures pub-
licly – in spite of the occupation and control of the West Bank and Gaza for over fifty
years. (“Israel a liberal democracy!” exclaimed my Palestinian friend incredulously,
“But there’s no secular marriage in Israel!”) My point, nevertheless, is not that Israel is
incompletely liberal, but on the contrary that it is liberal; and that the reason for that is
that the liberal democratic State representing citizens at home does not find it an imposs-
ible contradiction, at the same time, to dominate and regulate subjects abroad. (This is
not contradicted by the fact that some self-styled citizens have criticized the imperial
adventures of their own countries; my point is about the capaciousness of the liberal
democratic State and not about the moral censure of imperialism by individual liberals.)
In brief, like the nineteenth-century European liberal democracies that possessed
empires, Israel is capable of being at once open and repressive, egalitarian and invidious,
secular and religious, flexible distinctions that are deployed not only through the citizen/
alien binary but also through that of ethnic majority/minority. My suggestion is that
Israel is, like other liberal democracies, a State able comfortably to ride horses that
appear to go in divergent directions at the same time. Repression and authoritarianism
are not accidental departures from (failures of) liberal democracy; they are compatible
with it – if its history is anything to go by.
When people make the claim that such and such a State isn’t “really” – or “completely”
– a liberal democracy, they are simply indicating that they have an ideal model in mind of
what liberal democracy is; the model emerges only as details are argued over. Since there
is no universal consensus on what a “complete” liberal democratic State is, and since the
very idea of “liberalism” has evolved historically and been at the center of political argu-
ments with different assumptions about the essence of “the human,” this kind of claim is
not very helpful as a description. It is precisely the fact that liberalism is at the center of
political dispute that matters most. “Liberalism” is often presented in linear time as a
project in process of completion – toward liberty and justice for all; but if the history
is placed spatially, it can also be seen as a series of overlapping differences. This
doesn’t mean one cannot use words such as “liberalism” or “secularism” or “religion”
– or “the modern State” for that matter – but that one must be aware of what exactly
is being endorsed or rejected in the particular use of these terms, and the context in
which they are argued over. (“Context,” as Derrida pointed out, is a highly ambiguous
notion, given that its limits can’t be specified universally. But that is precisely one of
the crucial sources of argument.)
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Let me elaborate briefly by way of the question as to whether or not “the sovereign
State” exists any longer. Foucault famously argued (in the lectures entitled Society
Must Be Defended) that sovereignty is a juridical theory, that is, a theory of right,
whose purpose has always been to legitimize the relationship of political domination
that defines the State. In early modernity, says Foucault, the discourse of sovereignty
and right was challenged by an evolving discourse of history – that was at once a narrative
of war (a representation) and a weapon in war. This is not, of course, quite the same as
saying that in a globalized world there is no such thing as a sovereign State. But my point
here is simply that to the extent that the discourse of sovereignty (“juridical discourse”),
that Foucault opposes to the discourse of history, expresses and furthers argument and
confrontation it is itself more than mere representation, more than merely an ideological
justification of domination. It, too, like the law of the State, is a political instrument,
capable of being used in different ways (and with differential force) by the mutually
hostile sides of a social conflict. The concept and practice of sovereignty show in these
disputes that “State” and “civil society” do not simply stand in opposition to each
other; they partly constitute each other.
“Sovereignty” in that sense is integral to the modern State, to modern politics, just as
secularism is integral to liberal democracy. It is precisely because the State is, as Hobbes
argued, a body distinct from the bodies it contains – hence Leviathan – that secularism is
integral to it. (Note: my point is not that Hobbes provides the authoritative definition of
the modern State but that most people involved in politics and government assume that
distinction.) The argument and conflict is over what “real” sovereignty is, on the one
hand internally, in relation to its citizens and its subjects (in what sense are “citizens”
co-terminous with “the people?”); on the other hand externally, in relation to other
States (is the State capable of defending itself against threats?). There are States, of
course, that one cannot easily describe as sovereign in this double sense. Thus in 2003
Iraq was not able to defend its sovereignty against an attack by the United States and
its allies; on the other hand, the successful attack was a vindication of American sover-
eignty – even if it was a crime according to international law.
In spite of the claim by some political sociologists that “sovereignty” no longer exists
(modern States are too dependent on external forces), I believe that sovereign States,
whether they count as liberal democracies or not, do exist and indeed will continue
to exist for the foreseeable future. And while they exist, they offer some means for
securing a measure of social order that is presupposed in any conception of social
justice. But that is not equivalent to saying that only sovereign States can provide
the conditions for ordinary quotidian life, or that that is all States offer. Today, sover-
eign States have become particularly dangerous because they promote the two major
threats of our time: the probability of nuclear war and the certainty of global climate
change.
The State’s danger seems to me to consist not simply in the fact that the liberal demo-
cratic State can morph into a system of mass surveillance and authoritarian repression,
and in its increasing use of violence to protect and encourage economic and political pro-
jects abroad. It is evident also in the fact that the military power of the State now consists
of a massive array of nuclear weapons whose use is made more likely by the “first strike”
doctrine. State power is now so dependent on corporations (especially computer indus-
tries, industries based on fossil fuels, and the manufacture and sale of weaponry to other
4 T. ASAD

States) that it is unable to respond adequately to the effects of climate change, the destruc-
tion of the natural environment, and the very real possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The
drive for immediate profit, and the use of that profit for short-term political interests,
regardless of the long-term cost to humanity, prevents the sovereign State (whether it
claims to be liberal or not) from acting in a rational way – that is, if “rationality” is
measured by the long-term survival of humanity as a whole.
The genealogy of the discourse and practice of secularism (like that of “liberalism”)
needs to be continually investigated. Because secularism is not simply a doctrine of the
modern sovereign State; secularism is rooted in individual sensibilities, often determined
by partial understandings and ambiguous feelings. And in turn, of course, the power
practices of the State have important consequences for secularized/secularizing beliefs
and attitudes.
Nevertheless, I want to propose that the secular State in the West today, whether
French or American, seems to abide by the cujus regio, ejus religio principle, that is,
“the religion of the ruler is the religion of the people.” This is the case even though secu-
larism disclaims any religious allegiance and governs a society that is largely irreligious,
because in my view it is not the commitment to a particular “religion” (or to no religion)
that is most significant about secularism, but the pre-emption of the domain of political
truth and power. That is why secularism requires the installation of a single power (the
sovereign State) legitimized by a single abstraction (the nation) and facing a single task:
the worldly care, regulation, and defense of its citizens against threats from within and
without. Secularism is essentially a modern attempt at totalizing power (although not
always a successful attempt) and in that sense it was entirely unknown to the pre-
modern world.
One way of understanding secularism, therefore, is this: Since liberal religion
encourages the attention of subjects primarily to “other worldly concerns,” worldly
power needs to secure the worldly wellbeing of its people. This includes everyone’s
right to religious belief (or non-belief) and the ability to exercise that right publicly.
So, in all secular governments, whatever they call themselves, there is an imperative
need to identify (define) religion before it can be separated, before it can be protected
– or for that matter restrained from undermining social order. It is the existence of a
central sovereign power that makes the revolutionary desire to capture the State for
the radical project of establishing “true” popular wellbeing. The possibility of capturing
State power makes it possible for revolutionaries to insist, regardless of whether they are
secular or religious, that the State’s overriding duty is not only to maintain its power in
the abstract, but also to defend what is called its “national personality” or its “national
culture” against enemies within and without. (That phrase is recognized in France, but
here, in the United States, we also have other expressions, like “the American Consti-
tution,” or “the American way of life.”)
At any rate, the doctrine of secularism interpreted as the separation of religion from
public space, that is to say from the space of politics, requires that the State have the
power to identify and deal with religion in relation to, and not only within, that space
of publicity and power. In France, that means dealing with “The Muslim problem,”
and in the United States, with “the War on Terror” – both of which, incidentally, have
become closely intertwined. This has involved not only the continued attacks on
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Muslim countries and the killing of innocent civilians there but also the surveillance of
Muslim citizens in France and the United States.
So, I want to end by stressing again the dangers of the sovereign State. It is because the
modern state is what it is that the violence associated with it appears in extraordinary
forms. Much has been written about the brutality and cruelty of civil war – in Spain,
Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Syria, Congo, and elsewhere – but the vindictive destruction, the
deliberate defacement of the human body and human habitation, is not simply, as is
usually claimed, a function of “the breakdown of the State”; it is an expression of the
desire to restore, repeatedly, through terrible acts of purification (including acts of self-
destruction), the unified State’s fearsome monopoly of violence. Put another way: the
experience of civil war is invariably used to argue for the restoration of State violence
(both practiced and threatened) and rarely for critical inquiry into, and for overcoming,
the roots of violence against life itself. The cruelty of war between States – and of the so-
called “War against Terror” – is usually thought to be less disturbing (for no good reason)
than the cruelties of civil war, although in that form it is the direct expression of sovereign
power to kill.
It has been frequently insisted that the liberal democratic State be conceptually distin-
guished from all other kinds of State. It is argued, for example, that in such a State (and
only in such a State) citizens have the right not only to choose their political representa-
tives but also to criticize government publicly and to protest against its alleged moral fail-
ures. This may be a description of certain States at certain times, but I think this
argument encourages us to look at matters from the wrong perspective. Why? Because
as a kind of Hobbesian structure, the modern State is a body distinct from the bodies
of both rulers and ruled, and so incapable of hearing moral criticism – although individual
officials of the State may indeed be able to hear and respond to it. As Hannah Arendt
persuasively argued, it is the ability of individuals to break away from the political
status assigned to them by the structure to which they belong, their ability to think
and act for themselves, that opens a space for what can be called a moral demand. In
what way can a structure, defined in terms of a monopoly of legitimate violence, a struc-
ture intertwined in various ways with dominant interests and powers invested in the
status quo, respond to moral critique? My point, in brief, is that the modern sovereign
State is not capable of responding to moral protests and moral arguments that its citizens
might make. And in using the word “moral” here I am drawing, as is appropriate, on the
post-Kantian conception of morality.
Mohamad Amer Meziane is certainly right to ask the following question: Doesn’t the
State respond to moral critique in jurisprudential terms, by legislating laws that liberals
urge and that they regard as progressive? However, I would suggest that the law of the
State is not in essence a moral argument but a command. True: legal argument –
“making a legal case” – is an important part of judicial activity, but in modern law
that is quite distinct from making a moral case. Furthermore, it is not always clear to
whom “the law” is addressed, what kind of human being is assumed by the law of the
secular State to whom the law applies. Thus in criminal law, the human being addressed
is thought to be a secular, reasoning person who is capable of choosing how to act, and
thus of bearing responsibility and blame for his/her actions. In medical law, on the other
hand, the prevailing view seems to be that the human being, and especially the human
body, is sacred – and the kind of sanctity invoked in juridical discourse is closer, for
6 T. ASAD

judge and litigants, to a particular conception of religious authority than it is either to

liberal moral choice or to political utility. The State must, therefore, identify and categor-
ize moral critique, as well as the enunciator of critique, before it can respond in accord-
ance with its primary functions and powers. And in so far as the liberal State’s primary
interlocutor is the citizen, the citizen as “person” is a construct of the law – nothing more
than a right-and-duty bearing body equal to all other citizens and not an autonomous
moral subject who deserves to be listened to for that reason. It is sometimes said that
the welfare State was established after World War II as a response of the State to the
war effort by the entire nation (as exemplified, say, in the explicit reasoning of the Bev-
eridge Report that appeared in Wartime Britain). But, in my view, this should not be seen
as a moral response to the moral demand of citizens (there were in fact many contingent
reasons leading to that move) but as a political contract in which the liberal State offers
welfare to its citizens in exchange for their war effort.
Because the State must, first and foremost, seek to maintain itself and its effective
power (without which it cannot defend and care for its citizens), it can initiate actions
abroad and at home that many liberals would – do – regard as immoral: such as
killing innocents in “war,” and assassinating or torturing individuals in “peace,” or
even engaging secretly in corruption and allying with despots for what are claimed to
be “higher political ends.” Anything becomes rational if it is essential to the maintenance
of the State’s safety and its power: Thus a liberal democratic State argues that it is necess-
ary to drop atom bombs on entire cities in order to defend the lives of “millions of Amer-
ican soldiers,” or to undertake secret surveillance in order to identify dangerous internal
enemies. In a liberal democratic State the game of securing what is politically useful for
the protection and welfare of the people is played differently from an openly repressive
State, because much of what it does has to be done with an awareness of its possible effect
on liberal audiences: it is more secretive, more apologetic, and more realistic. Liberal
politicians can justify the necessity of political lying in ways that are at once entirely
novel and entirely familiar. Thus in 1987, Tony Blair explained: “The truth becomes
almost impossible to communicate because total frankness, relayed in the shorthand
of the mass media becomes simply a weapon in the hands of opponents.” (The Times,
24 November, 1987.) The political activity that has come to be known since about the
‘seventies as “spin” was not invented by liberals of course but it was systematically weap-
onized by politicians like Blair – because politics within the modern State is (is it not) a
war. So this brings us finally to the dominant reason why the State cannot hear moral
criticisms: realistic representatives of the State recognize that modern liberal society con-
stitutes a gridlock that makes moral demands politically impossible to meet. It is not only
that powers and interests are differentially distributed in liberal democracies; it is that the
distribution hinders the recognition of critique as moral, and makes it difficult for indi-
viduals to respond positively to it when it is recognized.
I agree with Meziane that seeing the State as a process is useful, but I would also
emphasize that it has an ideology of legal order that both rulers and ruled appeal to,
and that that invocation from various sides is part of the process. The legal order articu-
lates the different rights and duties of all citizens, beginning with the most general:
unconditional loyalty of every citizen to the sovereign State (disloyalty amounts to
treason). Loyalty to the State implies not only the duty of the citizen to defend and
uphold it by any means necessary but also the right to carry out certain actions –
 POLITICAL THEOLOGY 7

including the right to criticize the government. So the State is not a single process but a
contradictory one in which rulers and ruled try to justify legally what they are doing. The
modern secular conception of morality is not the same as the Islamic conception to the
extent that it deploys very different assumptions. The secular liberal idea makes individ-
ual consciousness the basis of ethics, even modeling it on the law (as a set of mandatory
rules and judgments) while keeping the law strictly separate from morality. This not the
place to elaborate what I think corresponds to ethics in Islam, except perhaps to note
briefly that discursive tradition is essential to it.
The questions Mohamad Amer Meziane raises in relation to his remarks about the
importance of the voice in Islam, as well as the “deafness” of the State, are highly original
and thought-provoking. Arguing, as Meziane does, that “following the Hobbesian indi-
cation that ears are the missing organs of the State, one might have to acknowledge that
the deafness of a State makes its sovereignty possible” is a brilliant move in that it allows
us to analyze the State as a permanent process, as claim and counter-claim. But I would
stress that what he describes as the deafness of the State does not mean that the rulers
refuse to hear; it means that the domain of State law and State functions make bourgeois
moral arguments impossible to respond to in moral terms. In other words, individuals
who occupy various formal positions within the apparatus of the State are concerned
first and foremost with carrying out functions that constitute the general order. When
confronted with protesters who make a moral argument for change, the government
can either modify its activity on the grounds that this is necessary for the maintenance
of general order, or it may argue that the change demanded simply undermine the
proper working of the law. (The law, after all, is capable of different interpretations; if
this was not so it wouldn’t be possible for opponents to argue pro and con in a court
of law and to have the dispute resolved authoritatively by a jury and/or a judge.)
Responding to the protests on moral grounds is impossible because that is the way the
political language-game – the language-game of sovereignty, the constitution, and
State law – has been set up. I am not therefore saying that no State judge, bureaucrat,
member of the legislature, or member of a political party is capable of recognizing and
hearing a moral argument. And, of course, I recognize that not all popular protests are
moral protests. My point is simply that given what the modern sovereign State is, as
structure and as process, it doesn’t make sense for it to respond to a moral protest as
moral.
As far as Mohamad Amer Meziane’s fascinating questions and remarks about decolo-
nization are concerned, I can only say that I don’t regard decolonization as reducible to
modernity, although in my view both are closely interconnected. What has happened
during the so-called period of “decolonization” is that in every case a new State has
emerged along with the rhetoric of the nation and its associated concept of minority.
The nation-State constitutes national minorities leading in most cases to their margina-
lization or even oppression. Where a minority is not expelled or liquidated, it is some-
times offered the choice of assimilating itself as a minority (i.e., dissolving itself as
distinct collectivity). Hardly any territorial State is homogenous, especially so-called
modern societies. This means that to the extent that decolonization aims at establishing
a nation-State the result is that it is dominated, like all modern States, by a paranoid com-
mitment to an impossible homogenization.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. He is
the author of Genealogies of Religion, Formations of the Secular and Secular Translations.