book reviews

Islamic Law and Society 22 (2015) 317-321

317

Hussein Ali Agrama

Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 288. Paperback. ISBN: 978
0226010694. $27.50.

Scholars of Islamic law and society, such as those who form the main audience
of this journal, may initially skim over this volume on the shelf of their favorite
bookstore, or as is more likely these days in the mass of titles that appears
on the bottom of their screens during their Amazon searches. Positioning his
research within the burgeoning debates on secularism and state power occurring in anthropology and the study of religion, Hussein Agrama does not explicitly highlight his contributions to the literatures in Islamic law in the title
or framing of this volume. This is a shame, as the book makes substantial and
innovative contributions to the key debates in this field, in addition to exploring new and exciting territory on state secularism and the nature of religion
under secular power. For this reason, rather than offering a broad appraisal of
this books contents (a task that has been undertaken amply in other reviews),
I want to use my limited space in this forum to discuss the books main con
tributions to the study of Islamic law. Along the way, I want to make a case for
why I think that not despite but rather because of its engagement in debates
concerning the nature of secular power it deserves to be on the shelves of all
scholars interested in the study of Islamic law in the contemporary world.
In its most basic formulation, Hussein Agramas key contribution to the literature on Islamic law is his inquiry into how the Sharia is elaborated and
practiced within everyday life under the conditions of secular power and possibility established by a modern state (p. 5). In other words, Agramas book
examines both what has become of sharia as a mode of jurisprudence in the
modern state (that is, how it continues to function at the heart of a politics
deeply infused in the problem space of secularism), and what has become of
peoples relationship to sharia under these particular conditions. The first task
he undertakes primarily through a study of the apostasy case of the late Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the invocations of the Islamic principle
of hisba (lit. reckoning, or, the commanding of good and the forbidding of evil)
as a means of prosecuting him, offering a close reading of the trial itself. The
latter exploration emerges out of Agramas fieldwork, which included participant observation he undertook in two legal spaces that engage the sharia in
very different ways: the Fatwa Council of al-Azhar Mosque and the Egyptian
personal status courts. (Agramas fieldwork also included work with Islamist
lawyers, exploring how they develop an Islamic language of justice while at the
same time being deeply enmeshed in the secular problem space of rule of law.
ISSN 0928-9380 (print version) ISSN 1568-5195 (online version) ILS 1
Islamic
Law and
22 (2015)
317-321

koninklijke
brillSociety
nv, leiden,
2015|doi
10.1163/15685195-00223p09

318

book reviews

The results of this inquiry appear in the final chapter of this volume. Though it
contains much of interest, for reasons of space, I will not cover it here.)
Let us begin by exploring this second feature of Agramas book: his comparison between the Fatwa Council and the personal status courts. Agramas
comparison between these two legal spaces presents him with a puzzle. He
observes that both the council and the courts are legal spaces that employ
sharia, and yet his informants have radically different relationships to the
judgments they give, deeply respecting the authority of the former and approaching the latter with great suspicion. Why, he wonders, using himself as a
confounded foil (a strategy, and an effective one, that he uses throughout the
book when encountering a seeming and sometimes actual [e.g. p. 71] paradox) is there so much suspicion in the [courts], despite all of the safeguards
against manipulation, while there is so little in the [council], despite that there
are none? And why does the [court] have so little apparent authority, despite
enforcement mechanisms, while the [councils] have so much, despite their
seeming lack of them? (p. 120). Agrama ultimately contends that whereas the
courts participate in a broader discourse of rule of law, constituting a new
form of organized suspicion against power (pp. 130 ff), the Fatwa Council,
even though it has been constituted by the state, remains outside of its formal
legal system and thus does not engage its particular affects and sensibilities.
Instead, the Fatwa Council is a space wherein legal scholars form pedagogic
relationships with petitioners as part of a process to which the petitioners have
submitted as a means of moral betterment. Moreover, suspicion of power, such
as that which is exhibited by his informants toward the courts and the form of
sharia that they utilize, does not arise naturally, but rather is a direct result of
the adoption of the sensibilities of rule of law that they engage. Agrama writes
that there is the possibility that the vigilance and suspicion against power so
characteristic of liberal thought and sensibility are actually shaped by, and
through, the law. In other words, such vigilance and suspicion are not natural,
default conditions, but are instead historically cultivated sensibilities whose
cultivation depends integrally on modern legal processes. In this case, law
would not be an external mode of domination, but intrinsic to the cultivation
of a liberal sense of self (p. 127). Agrama is able to demonstrate the nonnaturalness of this mode of suspicion by comparing a legal space infused by
liberal sensibilities (the personal status courts) with one that is not (the Fatwa
Council). Along the way, Agrama responds to Talal Asads call for an anthropology of secularism. This is one of the few books that ethnographically substantiates theories about the nature of subject formation within the problem space
of secularism (another is Mayanthi Fernandos recent The Republic Unsettled:

Islamic Law and Society 22 (2015) 317-321

book reviews

319

Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism, Durham: Duke University

Press, 2014), examining how this occurs through a set of sedimented practices
intrinsic to the modern state.
While, in the scheme of his larger argument, his work on the Fatwa Council
is merely a scientific control to show the non-naturalness of the relationships
to the law experienced in the courts, we should not lose sight of the fact that
Agrama has also made a significant contribution to the study of a sharia outside of the problem space of secularism. Indeed, while Agramas main goal in
his work on the Fatwa Council is to depict a site wherein the relationship to the
law he traces in the rest of the book does not apply, along the way he manages
to offer an entirely new reading of the device of the fatwa itself, offering a compelling theory of the nature of its particular authority. As in the other chapters
of this book, in chapter 5 (What is a Fatwa?) we explore the research territory
hand-in-hand with the author, solving the problems he encounters together
and often not arriving at answers to the puzzling questions he poses at the
outset of the chapter until the very end. This chapter, a development of his
extremely well-regarded article Ethics, Tradition, Authority: Towards an Anthropology of the Fatwa (American Ethnologist, 37:1), rejects the common
definition of a fatwa as a device for doctrinal creativity and instead argues that
the fatwas primary purpose is to facilitate the pious life by helping those who
are facing some sort of obstacle to move forward within the limits of doctrine
and tradition (see pp. 168 and 1779). He proves his point by offering the reader
an extremely compelling ethnographic vignette in which a mufti offers two
diametrically opposed fatwas in response to the same question from two mustaftis. The answer the mufti gives when Agrama voices his befuddlement at
what seem to be two contradictory points of doctrine is that the particular
situation of each petitioner required a different tool: the goal was not doctrinal
pronouncement but facilitating the care of the self (pp. 17982). Building on
the work of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind on the nature
of tradition, Agrama writes, I propose to recruit this ethical notion of the care
of the self[to] the problem not of freedom, but authority, of how selves are
maintained and advanced within the traditions to which they bear a sense of
obligation, or put alternately, how a tradition is inherited by its adherentsI
suggest that the practice of the fatwa be understood as a mode of the care of
the self, as a practice by which selves, in the multiplicity of their affairs, are
maintained and advanced as part of Islamic tradition (p. 180). Given that the
bulk of literature on fatwa-giving has concerned the way in which muftis adapt
doctrine to new circumstances, Agramas focus on the fatwas mode of authority is, as he recognizes (p. 162), novel. By offering a close ethnographic reading

Islamic Law and Society 22 (2015) 317-321

320

book reviews

of the fatwas place in a process of shaping Muslim subjects, Agrama transforms our sense both of what fatwas are and of how they work.
Though chapter 5 offers us a break from the problem space of secularism,
for most of the book secularism remains at the center of Agramas interrogative domain. The books title, Questioning Secularism, can be read in two senses, referring at once to Agramas interrogation of secularism as a mode of
governance and to secularisms own mode of power, which, he argues, is secured through its questioning (rather than normalizing) function, brought
about through the instability of its own normative categories and its incessant
blurring of religion and politics (e.g. pp. 33, 107, 184). The primary example he
uses to illustrate what he calls secularisms intractable and paradoxical
qualities is his reading of the apostasy trial of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the
use of the principle of hisba therein, which occurs in chapter 1. Here he examines the nature of sharia in the modern state, that is, after it has been subordinated and reorganized through its incorporation into a modern civil law
system like that of Egypt. Here again, Agrama presensts his readers (and himself) with a puzzle: On the one hand I had shown how hisba as elaborated in
the court judgments had acquired distinctive liberal precepts. Yet on the other
it seemed to subvert essential secular tenets, such as the freedom and privacy
of belief. It was therefore unclear whether hisba was an instance of the secularization of a religious concept or the subversion of secular legal precepts (p.21).
Agrama refuses to give us an either-or answer. Instead, he comes to argue that
secularism makes this question not a false one, but one that is impossible to
answer: hisba is in fact a product of a secularism that itself incessantly blurs
together religion and politics in Egypt, and that is a form of power that works
through and relies upon the precariousness of the categories that it estab
lishes (p.71). So hisba has indeed been secularized as a tool of the modern
state, but secularization itself is always simultaneously a mode of mobilizing
and containing religion. Indeed, Agrama argues that hisba has come to resemble secularism itself The states reserving of hisba for itself and out of the
hands of private citizens could be seen as a move of secular power, toward
maintaining and extending the states sovereign authority to decide on the essence of religion and of politics (p.102) not a religious aberration within the
secular state or an instance of its incompleteness, but a prime instance of its
agenda.
For the scholar who is more narrowly interested in the practice of hisba itself and what happens to it when it is adopted by the modern state, Agrama
also offers much to think about. Hisba certainly has gone through major transformations when integrated into the modern state: While hisba, in its classical
Sharia elaborations, was part of a form of reasoning and practice connected to
Islamic Law and Society 22 (2015) 317-321

book reviews

321

the cultivation of selves, in the courts it became focused on the maintenance

and defense of interests aimed at protecting the public order (p. 20). Thus
hisba comes to be a device of state sovereignty, far removed from its earlier
ethical functions. Under civil law (what Agrama calls the legalization of hisba) hisba is no longer understood to be the protection of Gods rights vis--vis
proper Muslim selves, possessed of the correct desires and passions (p. 64)
but rather comes to be understood in reference to the protection of the public upon whose order and submission the stability of the state rests.
Agramas discussion of what happens to the sharia in the modern state provides a unique intervention into the literature on the subject. Though he offers
a careful and sophisticated account of the techniques of moral inquiry and the
sedimentation of virtues particular to the classical sharia system that are lost
through the restructuring of sharia under civil law (e.g. pp. 545, 57), Agrama
does not exhibit the kind of nostalgia evident in other recent works on Islamic
law and the modern state. (Though he makes no citations on this point, the
implicit critique of those works is evident: The idea that muftis directly access
the Islamic tradition, while judges do not because of a code, comes close to
saying that the Sharia has a traditional essence to which legal codification a
mark of modern law will always be alien. Yet this idea of a traditional essence
fundamentally alien to modern innovation is hard to sustain, both conceptually and historically [p. 128].) Rather than offering a eulogy for an ideal sharia,
Agrama tells us about the transformation thereof, along the way providing a
careful appraisal of how modern legal subjects in Egypt are formed at the intersection of liberal rule of law and Islamic jurisprudence. In showing how this
happens, Agrama moves us away from more speculative conclusions about the
death of sharia, showing us precisely what becomes of it in the modern state
and under the secular logics to which it has come to subscribe.
Noah Salomon

Carleton College
nsalomon@carleton.edu

Islamic Law and Society 22 (2015) 317-321