Secular liberals read public religion reductively as power, not meaning

Evidence

The reason progressive leftists like myself have such diffi y recognizing these aspects of Islamic revival movements, I think, owes in part to our pro.. found dis.. ease with the appearance of religion outside of the private space of individualized belief. For those with well.- secular..liberal and progres. sive sensibilities, the slightest eruption of religion into the public domain is frequently experienced as a dangerous affront, one that threatens to subject us to a normative morality dictated by mullahs and priests. … Within our secular epistemology, we tend to translate religious truth as force, a play of power that can be traced back to the machinations of economic and geopolitical interests. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s Islamophobia cluster and to Asad’s secularism critique; Mahmood’s point that secular epistemology translates religious truth into ‘power’ is the exact epistemic frame the Islamophobia sources critique.
• DEFINE: Names the analytic move — ‘translate religious truth as force’ — that defines the secular-liberal misreading of revival movements.