notes to pages 147–148 261
History 1 , no. 2 ( 2004 ): 222. López García, “ 30 años de Arabismo Español,” makes
a similar argument about the convivencia debates.
35. Gordon, “Continental Divide,” 222 – 23.
36. Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” Com-
mentary, no. 43 ( 1967 ): 45 – 57.
37. Jonathan Sheehan, “Sacrifice Before the Secular,” Representations 105 , no. 1
( 2009 ): 19 : “[W]e only succeed in recycling concepts of theology and the secular in
which each (depending on your commitments) becomes an ‘intangible core con-
tent’ hidden as the secret heart of the other.” Benjamin Lazier, “On the Origins of
‘Political Theology’: Judaism and Heresy Between the World Wars,” New German
Critique 105 , no. 35 ( 2008 ): 164 : “On this view, the liberal stance works (unwit-
tingly or not) to produce a fundamentalist- style theocracy as an alternative. It pro-
duces theocracy as an enemy against which to marshal its own resources and so, in
a weird way, to ensure its own survival. In this vein, political theology represents
the embodiment of liberalism’s anxieties about itself.”
38. Despite writing from different perspectives, Asad, Genealogies of Religion,
28 ; and Taylor, A Secular Age, 542 – 57 , agree on this point.
39. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Sub-
ject, xi: “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.” Cf. Geertz,“ ‘The Pinch of Destiny,’ ” 4 : “Firmer, more
determinate, more transpersonal, extravert terms — meaning, say, or identity, or
power— must be deployed to catch the tonalities of devotion in our time.”
40. Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission En-
counter; and idem,“Secularism As a Moral Narrative of Modernity,” Transit: Eu-
ropäische Revue 43 ( 2013 ): 159 – 70.
41. Hent de Vries, introduction to Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de
Vries. Cf. Alister Chapman, John Coffey, and Brad S. Gregory, eds., Seeing Things
Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, 50.
42. Agamben, Homo Sacer; idem, State of Exception; and Taylor, A Secular Age.
For critiques, see Peter Eli Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God:
Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 , no. 4 ( 2008 ):
647 – 73 ; Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular
Age,” in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun, eds., Va-
rieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 217 – 42 ; and Catherine Malabou, “The King’s
Two (Biopolitical) Bodies,” Representations 127 , no. 1 ( 2014 ): 98 – 106 , esp. 102.
43. See Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System” ( 1966 ), 90 : “[A] re-
ligion is ( 1 ) a system of symbols which acts to ( 2 ) establish powerful, pervasive,
and long- lasting moods and motivations in men by ( 3 ) formulating conceptions
of a general order of existence, and ( 4 ) clothing these conceptions with an aura
of factuality that ( 5 ) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” On the
enduring influence of Geertz, see Nancy K. Frankenberry and Hans H. Penner,