Beyond Religious Freedom

Saba Mahmood in her recent book Religious Difference in a Secular Age delves deeply into the nuances of how the secular state acts in regards to religious freedom and minorities. While we had seen such ideas such as the secular state’s ability to craft a particular definition of religion when creating governmental policies in Elizabeth Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom, Mahmood pieces much more of the theoretical depth underpinning the secular state (its role, premises, temporality, and religious and explicitly non-religious policies), and additionally she provides good, concrete examples to illustrate her points (Coptic laity versus the ecclesiastical class). While each chapter provides an important argument, her overarching thesis argues …show more content…
First, Mahmood on page 197 makes an incredibly important distinction between calendrical time and sacral time, arguing that Bishop Bishoy and Ziedan both deploy their arguments against one another’s writings within the calendrical time, the secular perspective of history. However, I am not entirely sure I understand the difference between sacral and calendrical time. Nor am I convinced that the only two conceptualizations of time. What is the relationship between secularity and this schism between “reality” and “meaning”? (The quotations are hers, not mine, and are in reference to these time distinctions.”) Are there other temporal spheres besides what she seems to describe as the transcendent and the immanent? Likewise, what exact frame of time is categorized as transcendent and immanent, for it appears as though at different moments these two descriptions are used to define both terms? I have heard similar discussions regarding different realms of temporality; however, I think this deserves a little bit more time and sifting through in order to make sense of it, especially within this …show more content…
It is one that has persistently come up within previous discussions we have held and will continue to come up, I am sure. Are we as religious studies scholars capable of capturing this paradigm shift from a secular or calendrical time to another temporal or ontological sphere reliably or by making the shift, if we choose to, do we undoubtable create an entirely new class of religious scholarship? While reading descriptions of the Azazeel and the humanist interpolations, I could not help but think of the other pieces I have read this semester (in this class and outside it) that really conforms to such an outlook. Theology has entered the calendrical time sphere (if it was truly never there to begin with). Furthermore, how are we to treat these separate time line? Furthermore, throughout this class, we have also discussed a developing branch of scholarship today that attempts to liberate itself from secular temporality and secular metaphysics in exchange for epistemologies that have been other-ized and typically invalidated historically by scholastic methods, assumptions, and