Talal Asad — Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

587 published claims from this book.

• A principled universalist stance can coexist with deep condemnation of historic crimes
• A Protestant reading of ritual shapes modern secular concepts like scapegoat
• A reforming Muslim jurist reframed shari’a courts as guardians of family privacy
• A secular self underlies rather than results from religious experience.
• A state’s own legal-institutional move can be a religious judgment on a faith’s essence
• A suffering body can be active despite being passive to sensation.
• Abduh framed sharia courts as guardians of family privacy
• Abduh held a dual conception of sharia as both rules and moral formation.
• Abduh held that sharia must be embodied, not merely known as rules.
• Absolute non-interference is impossible, so overlapping jurisdictions are ontologically prior to simple space.
• Absorbed activity makes pain present yet un-noticed until reflection.
• Acts carry ethical significance apart from any notion of answerability
• Agency includes acts neither voluntary nor involuntary but constituted by conflicting self-definitions.
• Agency is a historical concept that shapes religious-secular boundaries.
• Agency is a historical concept, not a natural category
• Agency should not be equated with history-making or self-empowerment
• All social life is framed so no action belongs absolutely to its agent.
• Allegory conveys a painful secular disenchantment that symbolic language soon obscured.
• Allegory interweaves the sacred and the profane as an instructive form of expression.
• Allegory suits the fragmented material world of baroque courts
• American foreign policy globalizes human rights as a secularized redeeming duty.
• American nationalist intolerance is compatible with and intertwined in secularism.
• American prophetic language fuses scripture with national founding narratives.
• Amin’s feminist plea actually substituted Western for Islamic patriarchy.
• An atheism that deifies humanity ironically mirrors incarnational doctrine
• An eighteenth-century theologian argued Christianity would survive scripture’s divine inspiration being denied.
• Anglo-liberal and continental traditions frame state power over persons differently.
• Anthropology is defined by comparing embedded concepts, not by fieldwork
• Apparent scientific boundaries about rights are really formulas for privileging the privileged
• Appealing to human rights still requires other nation-states, not escape from state power.
• Arab nationalism confines religion to the private domain, as secularism requires.
• Asad shifts from immigrant attitudes to Europe’s own representational capacity
• Attributing a religious motive presupposes contested theories of inwardness and sincerity
• Attributing violence to single religious agents obscures complex multi-actor networks.
• Autonomy as a secular-liberal ideal is class-differentiated and state-regulated
• Baroque drama treats sovereignty’s exercise as willful and dangerous, not fated
• Baroque drama’s theme is mourning over social power, not fate
• Being a partial subject means agency exists without full authorship
• Bentham argued torture for instrumental purposes was easier to justify than punitive suffering.
• Bentham considered immediate torture less cruel than prolonged imprisonment
• Bernard Williams nearly equated moral responsibility with criminal law.
• Body art can appropriate Christian iconography to explore martyrdom.
• Both defenders and critics presume tradition needs historical verification to count as real.
• Both democratic citizenship and market choice reduce persons to countable statistical units
• British codification transformed Shari’a into state-administered Anglo-Muhammadan law
• Burke’s sublime prefigures a modern secular understanding of the sacred
• Calling colonial reform opponents reactionaries explains nothing without accounting for their motives
• Calling nationalism a religion begs the question of how religion is defined.
• Calling nationalism a religion uncritically presumes a fixed definition of religion
• Calling resistance reactionary explains nothing and masks a teleological bias
• Christian missionary history forged the fusion enabling modern political redemption
• Christian missions fused spiritual promise with political transformation, enabling modern redemption.
• Christian sacraments function as authoritative networks of signification requiring institutional exposition
• Christian-framed civil rights discourse mobilized America where Malcolm X could not
• Christianity uniquely revalued suffering as valuable where antiquity did not
• Christianity’s valuation of pain broke from Stoic and Galenic frameworks
• Chronicle-writing conventions masked authors’ failure to explain events theologically
• Church-state separation alone does not constitute secularism as a distinct doctrine.
• Church-state separation alone does not define secularism’s novelty
• Citizenship and humanity, though linked, are not the same status
• Citizenship and humanness are connected yet not identical, and one can diminish the other
• Civil rights claims remain within one nation’s jurisdiction, unlike human rights claims.
• Civil-rights claims must run through the violating state, while human rights bypass it
• Claims about European identity rest on a Lockean theory of property and cultivation.
• Closing a legal debate is a distinct performance, not discursive failure
• Coleridge redefined imagination as having reason’s functions, opposed to fancy
• Collective ways of life depend on embodied practice, not just recognition of group identity.
• Colonial appropriation was framed as lawful inheritance once cultivated by Europeans.
• Colonial authorities dismissed practitioners’ own claims of painlessness as irrelevant to the moral verdict.
• Colonial authority rejected native self-reports of painlessness as morally irrelevant.
• Colonial bureaucratization absorbed shari’a courts into the modernizing state apparatus
• Colonial capitalism and print made Islamic elites adopt European decline narratives
• Colonial discourse distinguished offensive suffering from redemptive, necessary pain.
• Colonial power operates by strategically separating law from morality.
• Colonial reform distinguished intolerable suffering from pain needed to realize humanity.
• Colonial rule was framed as a moral civilizing improvement despite being undemocratic.
• Colonial rule was justified as abolishing cruel indigenous practices
• Colonial-era elites adopted European civilizational decline discourse to claim independence
• Colonial-modern states transmuted shari’a into codified private status law.
• Corporations count as legal agents even though they lack subjectivity
• Criticizing tradition does not amount to abandoning it.
• Critics rarely question US dominance despite its liberal democratic ideals
• Cruelty to animals may underwrite cruelty to dehumanized humans
• Cultural theory collapses agency into a drive for self-empowerment and less pain
• Cultures are unequally displaced practices, not just fragmented ones
• Debates over Islam and secularism are conceptual, not resolvable by evidence alone
• Debating relativism versus universalism misses how judgments justify violence
• Decentered pluralism requires continuous deconstruction of sacralized identity narratives
• Democracy and markets both reduce choosers to interchangeable statistical objects
• Democratic equality is logically a mathematical, quantitative conception of equivalent units.
• Deprivatized religion cannot differ from secular vote-seeking politics
• Deprivatized religion in liberal society must behave like secular politicians
• Discrediting the magic-religion binary should destabilize secular moral theory.
• Distinct traditions run on heterogeneous temporalities that secular time cannot contain
• Divine predestination does not absolve individuals of moral responsibility
• Doubting divine inspiration of scripture shifted weight onto historical reliability of the Gospels
• Doubting scripture’s divine authorship shifted Christian concern onto historical reliability
• Early Christianity uniquely valued pain where Stoicism and medicine did not
• Early Egyptian feminism reproduced colonial patriarchal dominance under liberation’s guise.
• Early modern secularism emerged from controlling the poor, hostile sects, and colonial expansion
• Early modern thisworldliness arose from political instability, not scientific advance
• Early rights theory arose in the slave-trading states and defended slavery.
• Early-modern secularity arose from fear, not from reason’s triumph
• Egypt’s legal secularization hinged on colonial police and prisons
• Egyptian legal reform along European lines was a tool for resisting European penetration
• Egyptian legal reformers invoked Europe’s civilization to justify law reform.
• Egyptian secularism debates cannot be settled by empirical research alone
• Egyptian secularists and Islamists both frame the lower classes as culturally backward.
• Egyptian Westernization combined European coercion with elite infatuation
• Eichhorn’s prophet-as-artist move silently stripped prophets of divine calling
• Eighteenth-century theories of artistic genius drew on shamanistic and mantic models
• Embodied ethical sensibility, not reasoned responsibility, can drive moral action
• Emotions are treated as external forces that diminish legal culpability
• Engaging Scripture through the senses has epistemological consequences
• Enlightenment physicians accepted placebo power of quack rhetoric
• Enlightenment rationalism grounded morality in medical science, reversing the older Christian order.
• Enlightenment rationalism made medical science the ground of morality.
• Enlightenment secularization also sacralized profane history and myth in new ways.
• Ensoulment, not mere embodiment, grounds a shared Mediterranean tradition of bodily agency.
• Entering public debate may require disrupting its inherited assumptions, not accommodating them
• Entering the public sphere may require disrupting its dominant assumptions.
• Europe constituted its own identity through overseas expansion
• Europe made itself through overseas expansion rather than merely extending outward
• Europe without plural temporality becomes an imperial market anxious about Muslims
• Europe’s colonial past is an ongoing transformative project rather than a closed epoch
• Europe’s colonial past is irreversible and constitutive of its present identity
• Europe’s colonial past remains constitutive, not an ended epoch
• Europe’s contested borders function to separate it from communist and Islamic alienness
• Europe’s identity was constituted through, not despite, its colonial expansion
• Europe’s self-identity depends on constructing Islam as its hostile other
• European civilization is defined as the accumulated sum of its productive acts.
• European identity discourse masks suppressed fear of non-Europeans
• European moral solidarity’s boundaries exclude colonial violence but include internal slaughter.
• Even Kant’s general benevolence falls under the same suspicion as compassion
• Even solitary Islamic prayer depends on socially learned, communal practices.
• Even the senses have a history, so secular worldliness is ideological too
• Even the senses have a history, so secular worldliness is not brute sense-truth
• Everyday cruelty toward animals may underwrite persecution of those deemed not fully human.
• Explaining religion’s influence requires tracing followers’ traditions, not mechanical causation
• Failed communication of pain can make pain seem incommunicable
• Faith is a cultivated disposition, not a guarantee of God’s existence.
• Faith’s stillness is tranquillised fatalism, not depression or PTSD
• Feminist theory has refused to treat unwilled childbirth as agentive
• Finding non-Western development roots still accepts teleological history’s criteria
• Fontenelle diagnosed myth’s appeal as indifferent to Enlightenment reason
• For Benjamin the secular problem is opaque intentions between persons, not self versus nature
• Foucault’s interest was power, not torture, contrasting sovereign and disciplinary power
• Foucault’s real subject was power, not torture
• Free speech is always constrained by legal limits and secrecy practices
• Free speech is limited by the time and one’s formed character, not just law
• Free speech limits are intrinsic to subject formation, not just external constraints
• Free speech requires being heard, not just the right to speak.
• Freedom from control paradoxically requires an inner self disciplined in specific ways.
• Freethinkers coined ‘secularism’ to dodge charges of atheism
• Freud located irrationality as what excludes taboo from moral agency
• Fundamentalist Islamic myth operates as commanding law invisible as myth
• Fundamentalist myth has acquired the character of law, becoming invisible as myth
• Geertz saw sacred symbols as central to all political life.
• Genealogy works backward from present certainties to their contingencies
• Greek gods’ world-immanence contrasts with Christianity’s separative cosmology
• Greek mythos originally meant truthful powerful speech, not fiction.
• Group life requires institutions, not just recognition of identities.
• Habitus-driven action is necessary passion, not chosen responsibility.
• Hegel was an early secularization theorist of modernity
• Herder reframed shamans as oral poets who made audiences feel a greater force
• Hobbes merged supernatural punishment with natural causality
• Hobbes reduced moral obligation to prudential self-interest calculation
• Holding weapons of mass destruction constitutes declared readiness to inflict cruel death on civilians
• Home-birthing women treat unmedicated childbirth as empowering
• Human rights become market-dependent floating signifiers of personhood
• Human rights declarations are born from war and project warfare metaphors into reform
• Human rights discourse collapses social justice into state-enforced law.
• Human rights discourse does not exhaust political languages of the human.
• Human rights enforcement depends entirely on sovereign state power.
• Human rights law is incoherent without the nation-state it purports to transcend
• Human-rights appeals merely shift authority between unequal sovereign states
• Humanizing societies do not simply expand which pains they deem unacceptable
• Humanizing societies have not steadily expanded the range of morally condemned pain
• Huxley pictured nationalism as a new evolutionary stage of religion
• Identifying a religious motive presupposes an unacknowledged theory of motives
• Identity discourse signals shattered certainties and suppressed fear, not ethnic rediscovery
• Illness makes the lived body appear as an object, a given substance.
• IMF restructuring that cripples rights is framed as development, not violation
• IMF-led economic liberalization escapes human rights categorization entirely
• Imperialism is best conceived as an emergent moral landscape rather than a strategic actor
• Imperialism operates as a converging totality of forces, not a single strategizing actor.
• In Homer, mythos meant an authoritative public speech-act, not a symbolic or false story.
• In Islamic tradition the body is not individually owned but bound by collective obligations
• In Roman law sacredness could mark objects as inviolable and persons as killable
• In traditional sharia, virtue spans all accountable behavior, not just nonsanctioned areas
• Inflicted pain can be embraced and repurposed by its recipients
• Inflicted pain can be embraced and transformed by its recipients into something else.
• Intentional affectivity directed at pain differs from pure body-consciousness
• Interiority-bound acting styles devalue plot, ideas, and rhetorical form.
• Internal criticism of tradition does not prove rejection of that tradition
• Internal violence strengthens rather than dilutes European solidarity.
• Internalizing religious goals makes them more central to the self.
• Iran’s torture practice is equally essential under both its modern regimes
• Islamic graded moral categories cultivate virtue where Kantian ethics sees only diluted wrongness
• Islamic moral discipline makes penalties intrinsic to learning right action
• Islamic religious duties are partly constitutive of social relations, not abstract
• Islamic spiritual discipline aims to align human desire with divine law
• Islamism is not a form of nationalism despite succeeding it.
• Islamism presupposes and works through the Western-imposed nation-state rather than rejecting it.
• Islamists pursue state power because the nation-state monopolizes legitimate social arenas, not nationalist ideology
• Judaism and Islam as bodies of law must claim distinction for security reasons
• Kant’s ethics reject casuistry and graded moral categories, unlike Islamic practice
• King framed justice as religious redemption that morally restores the white majority.
• King sought moral redemption of white America, not merely legal rights
• King’s Christian-redemption framing mobilized America more effectively than Malcolm X’s rights language
• King’s Christian-redemption language moved American opinion where Malcolm X’s rights language could not.
• Knowledge of what one has done, not intention, obligates action and suffering.
• Law always operates through coercion and authorizes particular patterns of pain
• Law and morality are distinguished by the type of punishment attached
• Law is coercion that authorizes pain and defines the human
• Law loses its legitimacy when detached from embodied moral sensibilities.
• Law operates through coercion in every state including secular ones
• Left, center, and right all reject the citizen as abstract numerical unit
• Legal agency does not require subjective intention or a human body
• Legal agency need not coincide with individual biological bodies
• Legal and ethical transformations in colonial Egypt created social spaces that made secularism thinkable
• Legal coercion underlies the secular state’s supposed persuasion and negotiation
• Legal rights frameworks require rigid categorical boundaries that flexible ontologies cannot accommodate
• Legal rights require rigid binary categories that reject graded differences
• Legal-institutional transformation created the social space for secularism.
• Liberal ‘natural rights’ language described an underlying reality, not an aspiration
• Liberal autonomy is class-stratified and state-regulated rather than universal
• Liberal consent-based obligation cannot easily survive the decline of state sovereignty.
• Liberal democracies are not direct-access societies but elite-mediated ones
• Liberal democracy rests on two contradictory secular myths in tension with each other.
• Liberal democracy’s secular theory rests on two mutually contradictory myths
• Liberal governance works through managed self-discipline, not force or consent.
• Liberal self-defense of sacred goods licenses punitive violence
• Liberal state torture targets noncitizens strategically in service of national interests.
• Liberal states calibrate allowable pain by objective means rather than felt suffering
• Liberal states rationalize torture by calibrating pain to legal necessity thresholds.
• Liberal tolerance of religion extends only to religions accepting liberal discursive assumptions
• Liberal torture is a strategic state tool, not primitive cruelty
• Liberal universalism requires violence against the outside it defines as unredeemed darkness.
• Liberal universalism requires violence against the unredeemed outside world
• Liberalism must dominate the unredeemed world by reason or by force
• Liberalism’s core principles rest on empirically questionable descriptive claims.
• Liberalism’s exclusions can be reframed as an incomplete project of emancipation.
• Liberalism’s secular myth resembles but differs from Christian redemptive myth.
• Liberals frame Muslim presence in Europe through Enlightenment universalism versus romantic nativism
• Liberation-from-control paradoxically requires self-control by a prior autonomous self
• Locke grounded morality in the voluntary action of a sovereign subject
• Martin Luther King framed civil rights in a redemptive national-biblical language
• Mauss proposes mystical states rest on learnable body techniques
• Mauss’s habitus names an embodied capacity exceeding physical ability
• Medieval Christendom and Islam recognized overlapping bonds instead of single sovereign authority.
• Medieval overlapping jurisdictions hold ontological priority over modern simple space
• Medieval sacraments were defined by three distinct functions of sign, institution, and sanctification.
• Methodist self-control practices threatened the passivity at their faith’s core
• Minorities are defined only within hierarchical structures of power
• Minority representation raises problems absent from the international system.
• Minority status depends on hierarchy, not on numerical size.
• Modern anthropology began with Mauss’s conceptual analysis, not fieldwork
• Modern anti-torture categories are historically particular despite their universal framing
• Modern conscience condemns pain without approved instrumental reason, defining cruelty
• Modern conscience is defined by sovereign internal moral judgment
• Modern discourse treats theatrical imitation of martyrdom as suspect while keeping genuine martyrdom unmarked
• Modern ethics falsely severs morality from socially formed virtue and recognition
• Modern hostility targets pain that exceeds a rational conception of the human
• Modern humane punishment rests on a Benthamite commensurability of suffering
• Modern humane punishment rests on treating subjective suffering as objectively comparable.
• Modern liberal governance differs fundamentally from ancient democracy.
• Modern liberal governance rules through strategic self-discipline, not force or consent.
• Modern liberal governance works through managed statecraft, not individual self-discipline.
• Modern Muslim reformers redefined sharia into a private sphere of conscience
• Modern poetic inspiration is a subjective accommodation to the Reformation’s deontologizing of language.
• Modern political-constitutional concepts are secularized theology
• Modern rights theory arose in the centers of the slave trade
• Modern rights theory made liberty alienable property, sanctioning slavery
• Modern secular society contains multiple incommensurable temporalities, not one homogeneous time.
• Modern self-government requires legally remaking entire subject populations.
• Modern torture requires a rhetoric of denial while premodern torture was public display
• Modern torture’s defining feature is the rhetoric of denial, not the act itself
• Modernist Arab poets deployed ancient myths against Islamic tradition to signify Western modernity
• Modernist myth use grounds secular values known to lack foundations
• Modernity is a political project institutionalizing conflicting principles, not a state of affairs
• Modernity progressively restricted the domain of divine accident
• Modernization of traditional cultures always requires political coercion
• Modernizing Islamic law redefines sharia as personal status law with separate moral sanctions.
• Moral heterogeneity in modern society blocks religion’s appeal to a shared conscience
• Moral responsibility can attach to acts regardless of the actor’s intentions
• Most social life is framed, so self-disavowal is not confined to theater
• Movement focus on state power is a secular-state response, not ideology
• Multiple coexisting temporalities exceed a single secular timeline.
• Multiple simultaneous temporalities complicate any simple model of secular time.
• Muslim immigrants are simultaneously included in and excluded from the ideological construction of Europe
• Muslims are simultaneously included in and excluded from secular Europe
• Mystical experience presupposes learned bodily techniques, not just belief.
• Myth functioned as action-shaping material, not just representation
• Myth functions differently for religious believers than for modernist poets.
• Myth is conventionally opposed to the secular even by myth’s defenders
• Mythic discourse shaped action possibilities rather than simply misrepresenting reality
• Myths enabled psychological exploration of human passions in early modern art
• National parliamentary debate styles differ sharply in formality and heat
• Nationalism functions as a world religion marked by quarreling sects
• Nationalism’s borrowings from religion do not make religion its source
• Nationalist worldliness structurally depends on the secular concept
• Natural-law theorists rejected Hobbes’ war of all against all by positing innate moral knowledge
• Nazism and Stalinism, not better theory, revived liberal natural rights
• Nineteenth-century anthropology invented the sacred as a universal religious essence
• Nineteenth-century Muslim modernists stretched ijtihad from narrow legal reasoning into general free reason
• Nineteenth-century reformers redefined ijtihad as free reason against tradition.
• Nineteenth-century thought unified varied sacred usages into one universal religious essence
• No unified sacred domain organized premodern social life
• Non-European legal outcomes reflect divergent traditions, not failed modernization.
• Non-European reform outcomes can index distinct traditions rather than failed modernization
• Oedipus’s agency arises from action neither voluntary nor involuntary
• Oedipus’s guilt is predestined from birth, not merely discovered after the act.
• Only religion conforming to liberal civil-society values is deemed truly modern
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islamic fiqh as religious ethics, not law.
• Orientalist scholarship framed Islamic jurisprudence as moral deontology, not real law
• Ottoman-era shari’a courts were only one of several parallel legal systems
• Our moral discourse on cruelty is inseparable from legal and political categories
• Pain as bodily limit justifies the secular project of replacing pain with pleasure
• Pain can be agentive rather than merely a passive state
• Pain can be an action itself, not merely a cause of action.
• Pain can be engaged through learned structuration rather than given meaning
• Pain can function as an active force, not merely passivity.
• Pain in childbirth can be agentive without being chosen, willed, or empowering
• Pain is a mode of living a relationship, not merely a passive bodily state.
• Pain is an active practical relationship that inhabits time, not raw data
• Pain is socially structured through learned practices, not essentially private.
• Pain partially constitutes the body’s epistemological and moral status.
• Painful childbirth is agentive despite being unwilled and particularized
• Past in suspense, present expecting, and future free project are one reality.
• Physical and psychological pain are not cleanly separable categories
• Poetic and prophetic inspiration both involve uttering what the speaker does not fully understand.
• Policing torture stays secret to preserve both legality and informational advantage
• Political principles can float free of the background ethical views that embed them.
• Political religion threatens modernity only when it undermines liberal institutions.
• Political representation of tradition exceeds identity recognition to require institutions
• Political representation rests on a paradox of simultaneous absence and presence
• Popular French religion centered on saintete, not the learned concept of the sacred
• Positive invocations of the past are not always mere nostalgia
• Pre-modern Egypt had multiple parallel legal systems beyond sharia law
• Pre-modern Islamic states never had a single unified religious law.
• Pre-modern societies tolerated layered loyalties that sovereign states suppress
• Precarious secularity stems from obscured intentions between persons, not nature.
• Premodern cultures operated under differently structured rationalities and value systems
• Present experience re-encounters a past that was once a projected future.
• Present experience reencounters the past-as-once-imagined-future, shaping reorientation back
• Private reason means entitlement to difference rather than physical privacy
• Progress discourse divides suffering into punishable gratuitous pain and necessary pain
• Prophetic language enables critique but demands redemption on an excluding origin.
• Prophets were reframed as flawed human geniuses rather than superhuman vessels.
• Public torture and displays of power constituted Roman imperial sovereignty
• Punitive pain can be actively embraced and re-signified by its recipients
• Qasim Amin’s feminism reproduced colonial attack on native culture under liberation’s guise
• Radical skepticism destabilizes the very secular subject it defines
• Reading bodily dissent requires different translation criteria than reading class dissent
• Reading bodily suffering as dissent requires criteria distinct from reading class dissent
• Reading scripture as myth constituted the secular domain of history.
• Reading scripture as myth helped constitute the secular as an epistemological domain
• Reading scripture is shaped by tradition, habit, and situation
• Reading violent commandments does not incite believers to violence
• Recovery from trauma depends on others’ willingness to hear
• Recovery from trauma depends on willing listeners, not just the survivor’s words.
• Redefining agency shifts the boundary between religious and secular
• Reformists’ family discourse responded to novel social conditions, not nostalgia.
• Relativism versus universalism obscures the real question of justified violence.
• Religious and shamanic practices across cultures aim to dissolve the suffering subject
• Religious deprivatization can be modern if it respects democratic institutions.
• Religious experience presupposes learned bodily techniques, making authority a bodily predisposition.
• Religious influence in modernity cannot be located by mechanical cause-effect tracing.
• Religious myth shaped modern historical knowledge without making it religious.
• Religious women claim drug-free childbirth as gendered empowerment
• Repeated vice hardens a person until virtue becomes impossible.
• Representation makes the absent present through a fundamental paradox
• Representation makes the new appear predetermined and therefore old
• Representing Muslim minorities in Europe differs from regulating Muslims internationally.
• Resisting imposed categories requires using them, not rejecting them
• Responsibility as imputability was foreign to Greek thought, not universal
• Restricting shari’a to personal status transmutes rather than merely curtails it
• Rights declarations carried the metaphor of warfare into social reform
• Rights discourse originated in war and revolution rather than moral appeal
• Rights theory arose in slave-trading states and could justify slavery
• Ritual drama extends participants’ subjectivity through self-inflicted suffering.
• Ritual emerged in comparative religion as a technology for regulating emotions in life crises
• Ritual suffering lets participants extend their selves by undergoing predetermined agony.
• Ritual suffering lets participants extend themselves as subjects
• Roman sacredness could make a person killable with impunity, not just inviolable
• Sacramental authority rests on disciplined recognition, not natural endowment of grace.
• Sacredness has historically meant both inviolability and exposure to violence
• Safwat opened a rigorous theoretical space for secular state law within Islamic reform.
• Salafiyya reformers’ work should be read through moral landscape shifts, not supposed failures
• Same public charitable works by religious actors are criminalized once they challenge secular authority
• Secret torture integrated with information extraction is a defining feature of policing
• Secret torture merged with information extraction becomes a form of policing, not sovereign display
• Secular and religious categories are constructed to structure how modern people must live
• Secular and religious categories are historically constructed, not essential.
• Secular Arab nationalism defines religion by confining it to the private domain
• Secular concepts of religion arose through colonial encounters that recoded native practice as illusion
• Secular conscience cannot make positive sense of suffering as Christianity once did
• Secular countries differ sharply in where religion sits institutionally
• Secular discourse relocated sacred inspiration into natural bodily capacities while preserving the mythic structure.
• Secular homogeneous time is a precondition for modern democratic legitimacy.
• Secular law and religious ritual do not share an underlying structure
• Secular legal categories do not map onto but erase shari’a’s internal classification schemes
• Secular liberal autonomy is class-stratified and state-regulated, not universal.
• Secular liberal states depend on political origin myths for their virtues
• Secular liberalism admits religion publicly only if it abandons coercion for persuasion
• Secular modernity distinguishes punishable gratuitous pain from necessary pain toward becoming fully human.
• Secular modernity expanded human responsibility to cover events agents were unaware of.
• Secular modernity frames consumer capitalism as a global project of equal pleasure rights
• Secular modernity paradoxically claims to have produced the religion it excludes.
• Secular moral action rests on now-discredited magic-and-religion contrasts.
• Secular moral categories are internally unstable because measure and excess conflict
• Secular progress distinguished punishable gratuitous pain from necessary pain toward humanity.
• Secular projects resemble Christian redemption without being essentially Christian
• Secular redemptive politics resembles Christian myth without being essentially Christian.
• Secular redemptive projects resemble but are not essentially Christian myths
• Secular regimes have been as cruel as religious ones
• Secular regimes have matched religious ones in systematic cruelty
• Secular relativism rules out reclassifying forced belief abandonment as cruelty.
• Secular responsibility presupposes reversible guilt that tragic fate lacks
• Secular rituals sacralized reason and civil society in early modern nations
• Secular states treat only the abstract human as sacred, not living persons.
• Secular thought reduces human condition to a stark agent-versus-victim binary
• Secular toleration re-admits privatized religion into public only as legally managed expression
• Secular tragedy replaced mythic sacrificial death with reasoned exemplary death
• Secularism as state doctrine emerged from linking personal morality to legislative social reconstruction
• Secularism claims to be separate from yet productive of religion.
• Secularism claims to have generated tolerant modern religion
• Secularism claims to produce religion while insisting on their sharp separation
• Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality
• Secularism collapses medieval interlinked time-space into a two-world duality
• Secularism collapses the multilayered Christian cosmos into a dualist world.
• Secularism defines private reason as entitlement to difference, not private space.
• Secularism emerged to manage mobile poor and warring Christian sects
• Secularism is a legal-moral arrangement, not the liberating opposite of religious tyranny
• Secularism is an enacted political mediation that transcends particularized identities
• Secularism is an enactment transcending identity, not merely a doctrine.
• Secularism is best studied through bodily attitudes and sensory structures, not doctrine alone.
• Secularism is bound to a system of unequal capitalist nation-states
• Secularism is not a mask for religion.
• Secularism is not essentially religious toleration or rational ethics
• Secularism is studied through embodied attitudes and legal regulation
• Secularism legitimizes the nation-state through consensus or religion-independent political ethics.
• Secularism requires believers to hold their beliefs lightly or detached from conduct
• Secularism’s contested meaning turns on its relation to ontology and epistemology.
• Secularism’s essence is not protecting freedoms from religious tyranny
• Secularism’s problem is its link to unequal capitalist nation-states, not its European origin.
• Secularism’s public presence of religion varies across modern nation-states.
• Secularism’s Western Christian origin does not limit its modern global applicability.
• Secularists and Islamists both accept statist control of shari’a.
• Secularity can be lived precariously rather than merely discovered.
• Secularity is constituted through specific conceptions of agency and pain
• Secularization of history simultaneously sacralized profane events into a singular subject
• Secularization of pain reflects changed sensibilities, not mere disenchantment
• Secularization of pain shifted attention from consoling relationships to detached investigation
• Secularization originally meant a legal transfer of church property to lay owners.
• Selective adaptation does not dissolve a tradition’s coherence or integrity.
• Self-inflicted suffering can be embodied ethical performance rather than punishment
• Sensation and action cannot be cleanly separated in bodily experience
• Senses themselves have a history and differ across lifeworlds.
• Separating state law from religious morality requires a new conception of ethics.
• Seventeenth-century critics held that moral sense predates government
• Seventeenth-century financial volatility drove the modern legal concept of the self.
• Seventeenth-century rights theory defined humanity as capacity for punishment-awareness.
• Severing law from embodied moral tradition makes state force its sole authority
• Shamans enabled audiences to sense a force greater than themselves
• Shari’a courts function as a state-mandated depository of family secrets
• Sharia ties moral judgment to embodied relationships rather than an inaccessible conscience
• Sharia’s own distinction between law and ethics predates the secular split
• Sick bodies’ suffering can be self-inflicted punishment rather than social dissent
• Sincerity rhetoric presupposed a sovereign secular self, not a religious product
• Social change does not follow a single instrumental motive because people inhabit multiple temporalities
• Social change resists purely instrumental explanations because actors inhabit multiple temporalities
• Socrates’ death secularizes myth by replacing sacrifice with reasoned example
• Source criticism techniques devised by theologians produced modern secular history.
• Standard European history excludes whole regions and peoples to preserve an invented homogeneous identity.
• State conscription and capitalism dismantled extended rural family structures in Egypt.
• State privacy rulings can constitute religious judgments about a faith’s essence.
• Stockpiling WMDs constitutes standing state readiness to kill civilians
• Stoic acceptance of suffering affirmed life’s injustice rather than denying it
• Stoicism was an elite withdrawal ethic, not imperial ruling ideology
• Subjectivist property-rights theory made slavery morally defensible.
• Suffering and pain can make the living body an active agent.
• Sufi spiritual discipline aims to align human will with sharia commands.
• Sufism’s purpose is aligning human desire with sharia commands
• Survivors of trauma need a willing audience to reconstruct their selves
• Taylor holds Western-origin secularism universally applicable to modern societies
• The actor’s craft requires emptying oneself to objectively reconstruct another
• The Arabic word for secular was invented in the late nineteenth century
• The Arabic word for secular was invented only in the late nineteenth century.
• The Arabic word hadith spans both newness and tradition’s present reencounter.
• The body is a self-developable means, not passive imprint or natural expression
• The categories of religion and secular are socially constructed through definitional acts.
• The claim that Islamic law stagnated is an orientalist projection, not history.
• The classical spirit unites Versailles hedging, theology, law, and court speech
• The colonial power to separate law from morality is what defines the colonial situation
• The concept of conscience as hidden self-government is modern and Christian
• The concept of torture has expanded from physical pain to include cruelty.
• The defining of religion and secular categories is itself a contested act.
• The discourse of artistic inspiration shifted from metaphor to physiology
• The Enlightenment story that torture was abolished for its cruelty is suspect and self-serving
• The Enlightenment’s sacred-profane to imagination-reason shift was no simple hegemonic transfer
• The equation of institutional religion with violence and fanaticism will not do
• The established church made English national community possible rather than merely influencing it
• The feeling of pain depends on how it is socially expressed
• The French word for sacred was absent from ordinary medieval Christian speech
• The Greek constitution is proclaimed in the name of the Holy Trinity
• The human-animal boundary is a modern, contested construction, not a given
• The human-animal line was drawn at awareness of punishment.
• The human-rights declaration makes sovereign states, not persons, the arbiters of individual fate.
• The human-rights turn re-sacralized state law instead of empowering nonstate norms.
• The idea that romantic love grounds family value entered Egypt as a colonial import
• The instability of pain as a concept generates both contradictions and escape routes
• The instrument metaphor secretly requires the actor to construct a stable self
• The law must endlessly re-demarcate religion’s boundaries because secular life keeps shifting them.
• The liberal public sphere is necessarily structured by power, not merely imperfect
• The modern Arabic concept of society did not yet exist in 1900
• The modern concept of responsibility is foreign to Greek tragic agency.
• The modern cult of artistic genius was shaped by shamanic ideas of ecstatic inspiration.
• The modern discourse of identity depends on others’ recognition, unlike older meanings of sameness.
• The modern discourse of identity depends on recognition by others and masks suppressed fear
• The modern liberalized Church rejects ritual corporal punishment of monks.
• The modern meaning of identity as recognition emerged only after the Second World War
• The modern nation-state renders all social activity political, so religious charity becomes politically suspect
• The modern scapegoat concept stems from radical Protestant theology, not ritual history.
• The modern state is an articulation rather than a cause of secularization
• The modern state is built on declared readiness to inflict cruel death
• The myth of Europe defines whose violence counts as morally culpable.
• The narrative of colonial progress toward eliminating suffering is a self-serving story.
• The narrative of progress from religious to secular is now untenable
• The notion of orthodox Islam functions inside religious disputes, not neutral historiography
• The orthodox-versus-mystical Islam binary reflects scholarly projection, not a real split
• The orthodox-versus-Sufi binary is a scholarly artifact, not an intrinsic Islamic split
• The Reformation made language merely representational, giving birth to the experimental method.
• The relativism-universalism dispute obscures what really matters in human rights
• The religious and secular are not essentially fixed categories.
• The sacred and the secular are mutually dependent concepts.
• The secular as epistemic category and secularism as doctrine need separating analytically
• The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion.
• The secular concept precedes secularism as a political doctrine
• The secular cruelty standard depends on comparing incommensurable sufferings
• The secular Enlightenment replaced one conceptual binary rather than ending binary thinking
• The secular is a contingent doctrine, not an emancipation from religion
• The secular is best studied indirectly through its marginal cases and shadows
• The secular is best studied through its indirect manifestations
• The secular is conceptually dependent on the idea of religion.
• The secular is neither a continuation nor a negation of the religious.
• The secular originally named church property transfer, not religion’s opposite
• The secular was originally a theological, not an anti-religious, concept
• The secular-religious categories that define modern living are constructed, not discovered
• The shari’a concept of virtue resists the modern law-morality divide.
• The skeptical ideal of secular autonomy is internally unstable
• The torture category expanded psychologically while excluding physical cases
• The umma differs from nations in what it predicates, not in being imagined.
• The unified legal person emerged with property law and discipline.
• The universal concept of the sacred is a nineteenth-century scholarly invention
• The very word secularism was a strategic euphemism devised by Victorian freethinkers
• Theatrical agency is a model of partial subjectivity without full self-ownership
• Torture became scandalous only once its pain was recategorized as gratuitous
• Torture cannot be explained by a single real goal or torturer psychology
• Torture has no single real goal separable from its justification
• Torture is integral to modern disciplinary societies, not a barbaric survival
• Torture occurring in a modern society does not prove it is integral to modernity
• Torture persists alongside rather than giving way to modern discipline
• Torture’s secrecy lets states claim civilized status while preserving coercive knowledge
• Tragedy can be a necessary form of life no reform can eliminate.
• Tragic agency is constituted by the past rather than liberated from it
• Treating liberty as alienable property historically legitimated slavery and absolutism
• Universal human rights are administered through sovereign states that decide individuals’ fates
• Universal rights rhetoric is undercut by the citizen-state’s arbitrary jurisdiction
• Universal suffrage and government by classification replaced the medieval body of Christian souls.
• Unstable capitalist work undermines self-narratives that human rights discourse then redeems
• Unwilled bodily events like childbirth need not count as passive or agency-free.
• Unwilled, painful birth is still a form of female agency
• US air-war doctrine replaces torture with indiscriminate bombing
• US-led international agencies promote a singular American model including secularism
• Utilitarian calculus enables cross-cultural moral comparison of suffering
• Violence within Europe strengthens, rather than dilutes, European identity
• Virtue as embodied necessity is not a chosen or rejectable stance
• Waqf endowments usually had nonreligious as well as religious purposes
• War cruelty is reconciled with pain-sensitivity by quantifying pain
• Weber’s account of Islamic law came secondhand from a colonial reformist
• Western horror at female circumcision but not male circumcision reflects sexual-pleasure ideology
• What a community imagines itself to be determines how its members act
• Whether Europe can represent its own cultural diversity is an open question
• Whether performance pain is real hinges on unknowable private experience
• Without complex space and time, Europe becomes an anxious imperial common market