Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

This is a subject of great topical importance, so I was looking forward to an interesting debate about the limits of free speech and the nature of religious injury, taking place between these American scholars two with a Muslim background and one with a secular Jewish background. Unfortunately not only the question remains open ended but they seemed to be at cross purposes as it became obvious that Judith Butler misinterpreted Asad and Mahmood arguments in her critical sum up to which they had to reply in a further attempt to clarify their initial contributions!The problem is that these thinkers are obfuscating their arguments with labyrinthine post- modernist jargon to dissipate meaningful statements and clear logical sequencing. Asad in particular who can occasionally be an original thinker contrives at obscuring his main line of argument. In the Foucaldian tradition he loves to digress or subverts meanings by the liberal use of metaphors thus exasperating the reader with either equivocal ambiguous statements or unsustainable assumptions and irrelevant loose analogies. For instance when contrasting blasphemy in the Muslim sense with the Christian one he brings in the concept of seduction and its various meanings in Islamic theological thinking and then goes at a tangent by denouncing modern consumerism as a form of seduction therefore blasphemous to the true Muslim believer. What has this got to do with blasphemy and the condemnation of the Danish cartoons by the Muslim world? Again when discussing the various historical forms of "critique " which was developed in the West he conflates the growth of scientific activity and the production of useful knowledge with modern state and corporate power stating that scientific enterprise remains immune from " critique" , deliberately ignoring bioethics , the ecological movement , the questioning of gene technology and stem cell research , the opposition to fracking etc. attitudes that are constantly attempting to redefine the boundaries of scientific activity.In his discussion of liberal democracy he introduces the notion of substitutability which means that each citizen has the same electoral value as the next one, he then asserts that this notion is essential to bureaucratic control and to market manipulation in modern capitalist countries which rely on statistical modes of representation and thinking, thus undermining in his eyes the liberal notion of personal dignity! Obviously it can't be Athenian democracy with citizens gathered in the Agora, furthermore the notion of equal citizenship is absent in Islam.In some countries women are disenfranchised and non Muslims have no equal rights as Dhimmis, but these uncomfortable facts are skimmed over. Asad chooses to ignore that the electoral process imperfect as it is, represents only one facet of western liberal democracy. The presence of a flourishing civil society with its free institutions that includes the University he belongs to , ensures pluralism and a greater degree of freedom of expression completely absent in most parts of the Islamic world! This was demonstrated by his discussion of the trial of the Egyptian scholar Nasr Abu Zayd for apostasy who was found guilty for advocating a less literal interpretation of the Quranic text and was forced by the Sharia court to divorce his wife.I wonder where Prof Asad would rather hold his academic tenure?There are endless examples in the same vein but I will refrain from commenting further. I have focused on Talal Asad because of his importance as a critique of Western secularism, though I wish that all three authors would stick to clear lucid expositions ,at least they will be able to reach some tangible rational conclusions which can be followed by the reader, let alone debated by themselves.