Houston Hall, Room 218 (Ben Franklin Room)
Free and open to the public / Food provided
Co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies

Discussant: Joseph Lowry (Penn Religious Studies)

IN A WIDE-RANGING ATTEMPT TO BETTER UNDERSTAND the predicament of Muslims living in Euro-America today, Hussein Ali Agrama explores the historical relations between authority and suspicion in modern liberal states.  He first uses Hannah Arendt as a guide to understand the conceptual loss of authority in modern times, as manifested in Egypt during the aftermath of the 2011 uprisings and the short term of Muhammed Morsi’s aborted presidency. He then highlights a central feature of the modern state that liberal democracies share: the constant need to generate and manage secret knowledge in order to sustain sovereignty. He considers how this process has produced a distinctive economy of secrecy and suspicion and has given rise to particular understandings of truth, citizenship, and blasphemy that shape how Islam is understood and practiced within liberal democracies today.

HUSSEIN ALI AGRAMA is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His ongoing research interests are in the anthropology of law, religion, Islam, and the Middle East; in secularism, law and colonial power, and in the genealogies of sovereignty and emergency states. His work has been published in the journals Political Theory, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and American Ethnologist, and in several edited volumes. He is the author of Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt (2012).