Anti-Gender Ideology and Mahmood’s Critique of the Secular Age

Abstract

IN Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in A Secular Age: A Minority Report, she dedicates a chapter to the topic of “Secularism, Family Law, and Gender Inequality.” The discussion takes up the common prejudice that where family law is governed by religious codes or authority, something premodern has survived as a remnant into modernity. That historically uninformed view, she argues, does not see that by relegating family law to a private domain of religion, religion is itself made into a private matter, and marriage and divorce become subject not just to religion but to religious law in particular. Even if a religion traditionally handled marital and family issues through nonlegal means (customs, norms, consultation with religious authorities), it becomes a rival legal system or authority under secular conditions. The view that regards religion-based family law as a premodern remnant fails, then, to take into account the way that the secular state has established family law as the defining feature of religion itself—a fact that confirms the way that secularism redefines religion and its essential concerns. Conventions and norms regarding family life only become understood as “legal” when secular law differentiates itself from religious law as it decides the appropriate jurisdiction of religious law.

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