Legal-institutional transformation created the social space for secularism.

Evidence

In this chapter I try to trace some changes in the concept of the law in colonial Egypt that helped to make secularism thinkable as a practical proposition. I focus on some of the ways that legal institutions, ethics, and religious authority became transformed, my purpose being to identify the emergence of social spaces within which “secularism” could grow. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 991

Categorization

• XREF: Methodologically parallels Foucault’s genealogy of concepts and the idea that categories become thinkable only under specific institutional conditions. — connects to: The Institute located social-constitution causes in religion and culture, not law and labor