PLURALISM AND FAITHtheologians, anthropologists, philosophers, and social scientists place such practices
within a cognitive framework that either ignores the embedded character of embodied
faith, diminishes its importance, or reduces it to modes of cultural manipulation to be
transcended by cognitively pure belief. Cultural theorists often speak of the body. But
many who do so continue to reduce ritual to a mechanism through which beliefs are
representedrather than a medium through which embodied habits, dispositions, sensibili-
ties, and capacities of performance are alsocomposed and consolidated. Atheists, too, par-
ticipate in this tendency when they act as if the only question is whether you ‘‘believe’’ in
a transcendent God, accepting, in doing so, the assumption that cognitive belief or disbe-
lief is both the only critical element and separable from the education of the senses:
‘‘The idea that there is a single clear ‘logic of atheism’ is itself the product of a modern
binary—belief or unbelief in a supernatural being.’’^24
Euro-American Protestants and secularists are thus apt to obscure those practices of
dress, demeanor, perception, gesture, dreaming, and prayer that help to composetheir
orientations to being, even as they focus on them in a relatively unfamiliar constituency.
They are apt, that is, to reduce their own faith to a set of abstractbeliefs, while concluding
that a Muslim minority lacks the secular division between private belief and public behav-
ior that marks a tolerant society.
Many contemporary Euro-American secularists—both the majority who privately
profess belief in a transcendent God and the minority who do not—fasten onto this issue,
contending that the problem of ‘‘Islamic faith’’ inside and outside Europe is generated by
the failure of its adherents to accept the division between freedom of private faith and
participation in democratic governance of the state by citizens who bracket their faith
when they enter the public fray. Both nationalists on the right and secular liberals contend
that ‘‘the de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimila-
tion of non-European peoples to European civilization.’’^25 The critical point is that as and
if you discern how faith and demeanor are connected you also become less confident
about the secular picture of a wall between private faith and public reason.
Asad does not claim that Muslims in Europe make no contribution to the difficulties
they face. Those who constitute their faith as the universal faith that should govern others
on the same territory may experience themselves to be persecuted merely because the
political regime in which they participate does not make their faith the governing one. In
that respect they mirror the demands of those Jews, Christians, and atheists who have
demanded territorial hegemony for their faiths. Asad suggests, however, that the negotia-
tion of a new pluralism in Europe willalsoinvolve reassessment on the part of secular,
enlightened Europeans of their own tendency to treat belief as neatly separable from
disciplinary practices, cultural routines, and the education of sensory experience. August-
ine knew these things, too. He knew, for instance, that confession voiced in the right way
in the proper mood of devotion helps to embed the faith it articulates. Even Kant knew
better.
PAGE 291291.................16224$ CH14 10-13-06 12:35:33 PS