Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
by saba mahmood
princeton, 248 pages, $24.95
While I was reading Saba Mahmood’s new book on religion and secularism in Egypt, my university’s president—Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M.—published an article in Inside Higher Ed about the National Labor Relations Board’s attempt to assert jurisdiction over Catholic universities and colleges. Although Egypt and Chicago seem worlds apart, the two are connected by a common narrative about the relationship between religion and the secular, a narrative that both Mahmood, a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley, and Fr. Holtschneider call into question. I will return to the NLRB later, but I want to signal from the outset that the implications of Mahmood’s argument extend beyond Egypt to both foreign and domestic policy in the United States and other Western countries.
