Papers by Hussein Ali Agrama
For many years, my work centered on questions of religion, secularity and law in modern Egypt. I ... more For many years, my work centered on questions of religion, secularity and law in modern Egypt. I aimed to offer a different perspective on what's involved in secularity, how it's crucially connected to (and prompts us to rethink) state sovereignty, how it shapes religious and political knowledge and authority, and especially how it has induced subtle conceptual and institutional changes within Islamic tradition in places like Egypt.
Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism, 2022
An extensive review essay of Diana Pasulka's book "American Cosmic," co-authored with Greg Bishop... more An extensive review essay of Diana Pasulka's book "American Cosmic," co-authored with Greg Bishop and David Metcalfe.
Religion and Society, 2021
Zygon, 2020
In this essay, I discuss the reports and results of recent official studies of UFOs, and argue th... more In this essay, I discuss the reports and results of recent official studies of UFOs, and argue they may pose a challenge to contemporary science, religion, and secularity. While the question of UFOs has been well addressed with respect to religion, this essay, which is also a report on current research, highlights the challenge to secularity and some of its constitutive practices. It aims to show how current knowledge on UFOs renders both science and religion uncanny, placing them in a domain where they become irreducibly strange while unshakably familiar, pushing us to (re)consider some of the secular premises of the social sciences (e.g., anthropology) and the humanities (e.g., religious studies), and the possible need for new analytics.
(This is the full version of the conclusion to the Immanent Frame forum " Science and the Soul: N... more (This is the full version of the conclusion to the Immanent Frame forum " Science and the Soul: New Inquiries into Islamic Ethics " which appeared in shortened form due to space requirements. The forum is quite excellent and I hope you'll take the opportunity to look at the diverse contributions there. This piece here represents some my initial forays into science and secularism, and I welcome your thoughts.)
I want to thank our panelists for their thought-provoking papers on Peirce's notion of abduction,... more I want to thank our panelists for their thought-provoking papers on Peirce's notion of abduction, and I also want to thank them for inviting me to join as a discussant, so that we can think together along the various lines they have laid out. The reflections I wish to offer here, though inspired by all of the papers, are not specific to any one of them. What I have to say will nevertheless touch upon each one of them, although in a somewhat oblique way. But what I have become interested in, and would like to think about more, are some of the things abduction as a style of reasoning presupposes, especially in relation to the understanding of truth it entails, the notions of experience and time on which it depends, and the various virtues it valorizes – including the openness to surprise, the skill of being led by distraction, and the capacity for inventiveness. What I am especially interested in is the allure of abduction, not just in how we might get abducted by abduction, but also in how abduction might abduct itself and the conditions of its own efficacy, and particularly in the face of recent experience. Now at this point, even if it seems like a digression, I think there is something that needs to be said in light of recent events, which have come as a shock to nearly every person with a claim to social theoretical expertise. In the midst of the current confusion, we should seriously ask ourselves if we can trust our capacities to adjudicate between, or even come up with, social-political theoretical explanations at all. I speak not only of these elections. We might place their outcome within a continuum of recent events that have stunned and stymied all of us – including Brexit, the rise of Occupy and Tea-Party like movements across the globe, the election of an African-American president in a nation still deeply mired in racism and segregation, the financial crash of 2008 – whose magnitude we still haven't fully apprehended, and not least, the wave of uprisings that swept Egypt and much of the Arab world. That all of these took us by utter surprise, left (and continue to leave) us in great confusion, should lead us to doubt our capacities to understand the social world in which we live, much less adjudicate the various proposals made to apprehend these recent events. We might have to reassess the state of contemporary social theory, and question whether we have the analytic language we need to account for present times. Indeed, our social theory expertise seems futile with respect to the recent elections, the various renderings of which don't really add up. In the face of this, I have found the words of the following political commentator, whose work also conveys a skepticism of social-theory expertise, especially incisive:
In my comments today I'd like to take up just one of the interwoven threads of argumentation in T... more In my comments today I'd like to take up just one of the interwoven threads of argumentation in Talal Asad's complex essay, and trace it out a little further. This is when he writes, referring to James Q. Whitman's work on criminal punishment, that "it may not be the benevolent values of 'our moral culture' that matter but the contrary work done by legal disciplines and political structures." In particular, I'm interested in how our values, commitments, and emotional dispositions can be deeply embedded within a variety of practices, legal arrangements, and durable institutional forms that altogether form a dispensation whose outcomes are consistently contrary to those values and commitments. It's worth exploring a little further the implications of a situation like this, and the conflicted emotions that it provokes; I think it will elicit some considerations and questions that are in line with the ones that Asad raises. I'd like to do this by way of a slightly extended example, referring again to James Whitman, but this time not his writing on criminal punishment, but his recent work on a form of warfare called the pitched battle. 1 Whitman speaks of a brief period in European historythe 18 th centurywhen the violence of battle within Europe was relatively restrained in comparison to what went on before and what came after. This was a time when "the pitched battle" became a far more regular occurrence than ever before. Commentators often attribute the restrained violence of that era to two main causes. The first was a decline of those aspects of medieval Christian just war theory which framed war as a form of punishment connected to theological, moralizing conceptions of good and evil. And the second was the assertion of the values associated with an aristocratic chivalry, which shaped the conduct of killing in war in more honorable ways. But Whitman shows that these explanations are deeply mistaken, a result of distortions wrought by more recent humanitarian concepts, commitments and sentiments anachronistically projected back onto that era. He shows instead how there were a set of very different conditions in place, very different concepts and commitments, that do not fit with and would even be repugnant to more contemporary humanitarian views, but which counter-intuitively led to restraints on violence that many have found salutary.
American Ethnologist, 2010
Prevailing approaches to the fatwa construe it as primarily an instrument of Islamic doctrinal ch... more Prevailing approaches to the fatwa construe it as primarily an instrument of Islamic doctrinal change and reform, as bridging the constant gap between a settled doctrinal past and a future of continual novelty. Underpinning these approaches are familiar but questionable assumptions about temporality, imitation, creativity, and tradition that obscure the fatwa's integral ethical dimensions and our understandings of its pervasive authority. This article unsettles these assumptions and, through ethnography of the Fatwa Council of Al-Azhar in Cairo, offers a different view of the fatwa that helps us both understand its ethical authority and challenges conventional oppositions between authority and ethical agency.
this is the original version of the article that appeared in attenuated form in Political Theory,... more this is the original version of the article that appeared in attenuated form in Political Theory, 2006.
along with Asli Bali, Samera Esmeir and Tamir Moustafa, moderated by Lisa Hajjar.
Political Theory, 2006
... This assumption, however, has lent credibility to the booming "Islam Industry," as ... more ... This assumption, however, has lent credibility to the booming "Islam Industry," as As'ad Abu-Khalil has called it, which has littered the field with much sloppy scholarship, some of it bent toward barely concealed political ... Hussein Agrama Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore ...
Conference Presentations by Hussein Ali Agrama
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Papers by Hussein Ali Agrama
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Conference Presentations by Hussein Ali Agrama
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