REVIEW EXCHANGE

luca mavelli and anne norton

review each others books on
discourses on islam, the west
and post-secularism
luca mavellia
a
School of Politics & International Relations, Rutherford College, University of Kent,
Canterbury CT2 7NX, UK

doi: 10.1057/eps.2015.11; published online 13 March 2015

Book Reviewed:
On the Muslim Question
Anne Norton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), xi+265 pp.,
ISBN: 978-0691157047

ost of the literature on the idea of many testify to the limits of Islam and the

M a clash of civilization between

the West and Islam has either
rejected or embraced this thesis by focus-
ing on the alleged compatibility or incom-
patibility of Islam with Western liberal
and secular values. In On the Muslim
Question, Anne Norton advances a more
original perspective: The controversies
surrounding Islam in the West and the
idea of a clash of civilization are not a
product of Islams democratic deficit, pro-
blematic idea of equality or lack of secu-
larity, but the expression of tensions,
contradictions and anxieties at the core of
Western civilization. To advance this argu-
ment, this wide-ranging book engages
with a number of questions such as free-
dom of speech, sexuality, the secular and
Christian character of Europe, which for
196 european political science: 14 2015
inevitability of a clash.
Norton begins her analysis by looking at
the Rushdie Affair and argues that what
Muslims challenged was not freedom of
speech, but a blasphemy law that pro-
tected Christians but not minority reli-
gions. She then discusses how the Danish
cartoon controversy revealed a broad Eur-
opean incapacity to grasp the difference
between free speech and insulting a min-
ority religion. In this regard, she points
out how the often repeated injunction that
moderate Muslims should publically
denounce 9/11 and radicalization, as well
as endorse the mockery of their religion
(42), violates the right to remain silent, a
fundamental dimension of freedom of
speech. The result, she contends, is that,
when it comes to Islam, freedom of

(196 202) & 2015 European Consortium for Political Research. 1680-4333/15 www.palgrave-journals.com/eps
speech in the West has been turned into a
disciplining framework that requires Mus-
lims to speak, but does not allow them to
speak freely.
In relation to sexuality, Norton ques-
tions conventional readings of the Islamic
headscarf as a sign of repressed sexuality
or hypersexuality by offering a reading of
veiling as a means of challenging sexual
commodification. This is the commodifi-
cation celebrated by the late Theo Van
Gogh, whose attack on Islam concealed
an attack at more conservative Dutch
visions of sexuality. A similar instrumental
use of sexuality is crucial to understand
politicians like Pim Fortuyn, who have
used the intolerance suffered as a justifi-
cation for the intolerance they can inflict
onto Muslims (58). This analysis is even
more powerful in the section Women and
War where, it is argued, the advance-
ment of womens rights becomes the jus-
tification for invasion and nation building
(67), and female soldiers like the Abu
Ghraib torturer, Lynndie England, are
turned into both sexual abusers and vic-
tims induced to use their body as a tool of
torture to stage the construction of Mus-
lims as sexually repressed others.
The construction of Muslims as others
to Western civilization, Norton contends,
has not spared many renowned scholars,
including Jacques Derrida and Slavoj
iek, who have emphasized the secular,
Judeo-Christian and atheist character of
Europe. Norton, however, questions this
narrative and discusses how, at the heart
of Europe, there are Christian, Jew, Mus-
lim, secular, Arab, Latin and Greek roots
that make it impossible to gauge where
Europe starts and ends. In this context
of multiplicity and uncertainty, Western
Muslims are instrumental to secure
European identity because that identity is
constructed against their alterity. Even
more, Muslims become a repository for
those aspects of their past that Westerners
find unacceptable. The case of the concept
of Islamofascism is emblematic: we of
the West gave the world Nazism and
now place the burden of our past on
others (164165).
I fully share and endorse Nortons
approach, which has the merit of reversing
the underlying Orientalist framework that
still, often unwittingly, underpins much
literature by shifting the focus from the
deficiencies of Islam to the limits and
contradictions of Western civilization.
What I find less clear, however, is whether
Islam as a tradition, a set of embodied
practices or an ensemble of subjectivities
simply highlights these limits or can actu-
ally contribute to overcome them. The
problem is that, although Norton reverses
the Orientalist hierarchy, she ultimately
preserves its logic by framing Islam as a
projection of Western anxieties. In the
book, Muslim voices are largely absent
save for a discussion of Sayyid Qutb and
some brief references to Ibn Khaldun,
Al-Farabi and Tariq Ramadan. The contribu-
tion of these scholars and more generally of
Muslims living in the West toward the con-
struction of a more inclusive and pluralistic
democratic order receives limited attention.
Hence, is it just Westerners who should
open themselves to Islam, or should Mus-
lims also strive to embrace features of the
West? If Europeans are asked to come to
terms with their problematic past and con-
tradictory present, can we possibly demand
Muslims to embark upon the same trans-
formative process?
These questions raise a more basic ques-
tion: Who are the Muslims in Nortons
account? Are they the expression of an
original identity, of a radical alterity that
represents a healthy challenge to the
European system of secularity? Or do
they share an underlying sameness that
makes them not that different from Wes-
terners? On a number of occasions the
discussion seems to point in the latter
direction by highlighting elements of a
shared past and modern forms of integra-
tion ranging from literature and food to
politics and sport, yet the underlying
luca mavelli european political science: 14 2015 197
 framework of the book points in the direc-
tion of two different and, at times, sepa-
rate traditions.
These unresolved aspects, however,
should not detract from the achievement
of a book that, in exploring the Muslim
question through a critical deconstruction
of Western thought, offers new possibili-
ties for thinking the encounter between
the West and Islam.
RESPONSE TO MAVELLI
The reader will recognize that Luca Mavelli
and I have a good deal of common ground.
Both of us recognize that there are Wes-
tern Muslims, European Muslims, Ameri-
can Muslims. We are uneasy with the
discourses, popular and philosophic, that
cast Islam against the West. We share an
interest in the uncertainties and instabil-
ities of secularism. Neither of us is, in the
Orientalist sense, a scholar of Islam.
I am therefore slightly puzzled when
Mavelli asks, If Europeans are asked to
come to terms with their problematic past
and contradictory present, can we possi-
bly demand Muslims to embark upon the
same transformative process? No, we
cannot. The West (whether that is under-
stood as continental Europe or the greater
West of the Antipodes and the Americas)
is in no position to make demands on
others. It is unseemly to make demands
of those still subject to formal and infor-
mal discrimination.
There is, however, no reason to demand
what is already being done. For the greater
part of the last century, within and beyond
the West, Muslims have been engaged in a
remarkable renascence of political thought.
They have debated democracy, liberalism,
secularism, the rights of women, the claims
of science and what it means to bear wit-
ness. They have sought, often unsuccess-
fully, and often without the support of
liberal-democratic states, to reform their
practices and their politics. They have,
198 european political science: 14 2015 islam, the west and post-secularism
however, succeeded in capturing the atten-
tion of scholars previously confined within a
narrow West.
Comparative political theory has done
much for the field, but it has been domi-
nated by two imperatives: mastery of a
scholarship presented as arcane, and the
comparison of traditions understood as dis-
tinct and alien. The first is useful work, but
as Orientalism (Said, 1978) taught us, it
has pathologies. The second offered a place
to begin. A more capacious political theory
refuses the separation of currents of
thought, bodies of work, thinks and ideas.
Creole political theory refuses segregation
by civilization. I urge attention to Muslim
political thought in all its forms, but not only
to Muslim political thought. Latin American
political thought speaks powerfully to
issues of inequality, fields distinctive ideas
of sovereignty, and gives great resources to
those interested in property, indigeneity
and race. We have been so enriched by
South Asian thought that it has become
second nature, less a tradition in its own
right than part of the common enterprise of
political theory. In a mongrel, creolized
political theory the question comes first.
The questions Mavelli raises in his
review of On the Muslim Question antici-
pate the work I am doing now. I have
turned to elements of the Muslim philo-
sophic tradition to make democratic the-
ory and practice more radical. I turn to
Al-Farabi, as I did in On the Muslim Ques-
tion, because he sees democracy as desir-
able, and difference as the substance
of democracy. I turn to Ibn Khaldun to
rethink the precariat. I am interested in
these thinkers not because they belong to
Islam, but because they have enabled me
to think differently about democracy. The
recognition of a radical democracy rooted
in a precarious life, cultivated in diversity,
also comes in Creole political theory, in
the work of African-American theorists, in
the practices of South American commu-
nes and fugitive slaves. I will draw on
these as well.
 Mavelli is right to draw our attention to
the ways in which the binary of Islam and
the West slyly reaffirms itself in the face of
critique. We need people with his analytic
acuity and scholarly care. My own effort to
overcome interpellation into the binary of
Islam and the West will come through a
rude indifference to lineage and prove-
nance, and a refusal to ignore the impact
of political inequality on scholarly debates.

Reference

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books.

anne nortona
a
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 3440 Market St. Suite
300, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA

Book Reviewed:
Europes Encounter with Islam: The Secular and the Postsecular
Luca Mavelli (London, Routledge, 2012), 172 pp., ISBN: 978-0415693295

uca Mavelli has written an erudite, secularism (1). The book, as Mavelli writes,

L theoretically sophisticated and hu-

mane account of Europes Encoun-
ter with Islam: The Secular and the
Postsecular. Mavellis work, as the title
indicates, goes beyond the terrain of cul-
tural and religious conflict. Europes
encounter with Islam provides Mavelli
with a gate into a wider field of inquiry:
that of European secularity and the pro-
mise of the post-secular. Rather than a
study of the question of Muslims in Eur-
ope, Mavelli offers a critical engagement
with the variable Europe : engaging the
terms in which Europe encounters Islam,
exploring the genealogy of Europes privi-
leged secularity, and marking the intellec-
tual and political limits of European
is primarily concerned with the question of
the secular in its specific European dimen-
sion (2). Europes Encounter with Islam:
The Secular and the Postsecular is Mavellis
first book, and it should be welcomed not
only as a valuable contribution to work on
the Muslim question, but as the opening
of an invaluable scholarly career in critical
theory.
Mavelli offers a multi-faceted interroga-
tion of the European secular: its origins
and its operation, its license and limits,
its implications and entailments. Kant is
the dominant figure in this account, the
author of both a secular conception of
knowledge and of an autonomous subjec-
tivity. Mavelli offers a profound, outwardly

anne norton european political science: 14 2015 199

 directed reading of Kants conception of
the individual as a rational being who can
use his understanding without guidance
from another. Mavelli recognizes that the
other in Kants account is not only an
abstract or transcendent other but an
empirical one: present before us in poli-
tics and on the street.
Mavelli traces Kants separation of
reason and faith genealogically, back to
Aquinas, and through to Durkheim and
Weber. This account is integrated, very
effectively, with an engagement of the
debate between Talal Asad and Jos Casa-
nova on the limits and license of the
secular as an epistemic formation. Mavelli
explores the movement from autonomy
to isolation and the corollary turn away
from the other. It is at this point that
Mavelli turns to the specificities of Eur-
opes encounter with Islam.
Mavellis account considers multiple
dimensions of that asymmetrical, and
unhappily hostile, encounter of secular-
ism with the Muslim other. He engages
critically with Charles Taylor, noting that
Taylor ignores the history of Islamic
thought and practice, and grounds secu-
larism in a specifically European history.
He gives an incisive reading of the dis-
courses of redemption of the Muslim
other that demonstrates, very effectively,
the persistence of an element of a Chris-
tian theology in an ambiguously secular-
ized Europe. Drawing on the work of
Roberto Esposito, he explores how the
desire for secure individuality and auton-
omy can lead to a defensive condition of
immunitas that rejects reciprocity. Alter-
ity, Mavelli argues, drawing on Connolly
and Buber, should be seen as the occasion
for the opening and alteration of the self in
pursuit of knowledge, and the mutual
constitution of self and other. This is a
theoretically rich discussion, drawing on a
broad array of theorists and contempor-
ary debates.
This is not to say that Mavelli slights the
question of living, embodied Muslims in
200 european political science: 14 2015 islam, the west and post-secularism
Europe. One of the great virtues of this
book is the authors ability to see what
the theoretical looks like when it is at
home. He details how the conflict over the
headscarf displays the mechanisms of
semiotics and displacement at work in
political hysteria. He also shows how
European integration is imbricated with
an anxious search for co-immunity and
persistent patterns of exclusion and
discrimination.
No one is always persuasive to every-
one. Those conscious of Catholicisms
turn to doctrinal, social and political
conservatism under his pontificate will
balk at Mavellis portrait of John Paul II
as pastoral and benign. John Paul IIs
published writings offer little more
than reluctant tolerance of Islam and
multiculturalism.
A more important question is raised by
Mavellis account of epistemic hege-
mony. The idea that Kant rules, unseen
and omnipotent, over the minds of Wes-
terners is vulnerable from at least two
directions. Kant is famously difficult,
rarely read beyond academic circles and
not always understood within them. The
Kantian episteme must therefore be a
distillation or a bowdlerized and errant
version of the original. The idea of a
Kantian hegemony may sound plausible
when one is sitting in a room of Raw-
lsians, but it is considerably less so in a
crowded subway car in any city of the
West. The recognition of class, cultural
and intellectual difference, of the other,
indeed of dissent itself, speaks against
the claims made for hegemony. The
alternative approaches Mavelli identifies
come from the West, run through and
divide it. Perhaps Europe is less Kantian,
less secular, even less Western, than it
appears.
Mavellis book, at once learned in the old
and opening to the new, offers a powerful
analytic for understanding the shape,
hazards and promise of the present
European moment.
RESPONSE TO NORTON
In thanking Anne Norton for her critical
engagement with my book and her words
of appreciation, I would like to take the
opportunity to respond to the three main
criticisms she raises. First Norton argues
that the idea that Kants model of knowl-
edge, autonomy and freedom shapes the
dominant Western understanding of secu-
larity clashes with the complexities and
intricacies of Kants arguments. Kant is
the object of intense debate within
restricted academic circles, but is hardly
read by men and women in the street. My
point, of course, is not to assume the
existence of an automatic mechanism of
causal transmission from Kants writings
to ordinary people, but to suggest that
Kants conceptualization of modern forms
of autonomy that (partially) break with
religious tradition is central to the geneal-
ogy of European secularity being the
advancement of the philosophies of
Aquinas and Descartes and crucially shap-
ing the sociologies of Durkheim and
Weber. As such, his philosophy provides a
crucial terrain of inquiry to grasp some of
the key features of the modern secular
episteme. Kant, in other words, repre-
sents a hermeneutical key to modern
secularity. Having said that, I also share
John Maynard Keynes view that the gap
between theorists and lay people may not
be as wide as generally considered. The
ideas of economists and political philoso-
phers, both when they are right and when
they are wrong, are more powerful than
is commonly understood. Indeed the
world is ruled by little else. Practical men,
who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct
economist [or political philosopher]
(Keynes, 1936: 383).
To be sure, this does not mean that the
Kantian secular framework rules unchal-
lenged. Indeed, I agree with Norton that
within the Western tradition there are
internal sources of resistance that question
the Kantian hegemonic understanding of
secularity. In the book, I strive to recon-
struct an alternative tradition of European
secularity that locates the possibility of
freedom and autonomy not in a process of
isolation as in the Kantian model (the with-
drawal from God and the empirical other
to embrace the pure transcendental facul-
ties of the subject), but in a process of
encounter with alterity, the different, the
other. The composite ensemble of scho-
lars I discuss to this end includes thinkers,
such as Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor,
Roberto Esposito, William Connolly, Martin
Buber and John Paul II.
Norton argues that the presence of the
latter in such a tradition may clash with
John Paul IIs turn to doctrinal, social, and
political conservatism under his pontifi-
cate and that he ultimately offered little
more than reluctant tolerance of Islam
and multiculturalism. While I may agree
with the first point and I am more skepti-
cal about the second, I should stress that
my primary goal is not to assess the
sincerity of Karol Wojtyas stances toward
Islam, let alone to provide an evaluation
in terms of progressivism/conservatism
of his pontificate. Rather, my primary goal
is to consider how his ecumenical, interreli-
gious and dialogic efforts were crucially
informed by the idea of the law of the gift
that is, our ability to give ourselves
which he considered to be the ultimate
expression of our freedom and agency.
Accordingly, the critical scholars I discuss
to reconstruct an alternative tradition of
Western secularity are not relevant
because of what they specifically say
about Islam, but because they embrace
in very different forms what could be
described as a post-secular vision that
locates autonomy and freedom not in
the isolated individual, but in the
encounter with the other, which in my
account is Islam the ultimate other
of Western, and particularly European,
secular modernity.
anne norton european political science: 14 2015 201
 Hence, and to conclude, I agree with
Nortons idea that perhaps Europe is
less Kantian, less secular, even less Wes-
tern, than it appears. Yet this less
still presupposes a dominant secular
framework, which is what my book strives
to challenge by reconstructing the
sources of Europes (and more broadly
the Wests) tensions and lack of sym-
pathy toward the Muslim other. This for
me is not just a moral issue but a sign of
the limits, contradictions and ultimately
crisis of the European framework of
secularity.

Reference

Keynes, J.M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.

About the Authors

Luca Mavelli is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. He is
currently completing an edited volume on post-secularity and international politics and
researching the impact of secularization on modern forms of violence.

Anne Norton is Professor of Political Science and Comparative Literature at the University of
Pennsylvania. She is the author of a number of books including On the Muslim Question, and
95 Theses on Politics, Culture and Method.

202 european political science: 14 2015 islam, the west and post-secularism