MINORITY RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY: ITINERARIES OF CONVERSION

This chapter provides an account of political secularism in the Middle East by tracking the career of two of its signature concepts — religious liberty and minority rights — across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Less a chronological history than a genealogy, it seeks to capture key shifts in the meaning and praxis of these concepts in order to understand how relations between Muslims and non-Muslims were reconfigured in the modern period. Because I am interested in how religious difference has come to be regulated and remade under conditions of modern secular governance, I focus on the problem of religious minorities rather than groups defined by ethnic, linguistic, or other attributes. This chapter tracks broader international and regional developments that are crucial to how religious difference has come to be imagined and lived in modern Egypt. In doing so, I go back and forth between European and Middle Eastern history because I firmly believe that no analysis of secular political concepts and institutions in the latter is complete without simultaneously accounting for their evolution in the former. Consequently, this chapter does not so much offer an "indigenous genealogy" of the concepts of religious liberty and minority rights as it highlights the overlapping histories that have shaped their modern trajectory.

There are three historical shifts around which this chapter is organized. I start in the nineteenth century, when the concepts of religious liberty and minority rights gained traction in the region with the expansion of European power into the territories ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Christian European states systematically used the discourse of religious liberty and minority rights to undermine Ottoman sovereignty in the name of safeguarding the interests of "Eastern Christians," as they were called at the time. Eventually, a weakened Ottoman Empire adopted religious liberty and minority rights within its governing apparatus in order to shore up its territorial sovereignty and harness the fractious loyalties of diverse irredentist groups. The adoption of these legal concepts did not simply level old religious hierarchies but recalibrated them to a new calculus, opening up certain forms of political belonging for non-Muslims while closing others.

A second historical shift in the meaning of religious liberty and minority rights came about with the institutionalization of the nation-state as the globally dominant form premised on the principle of popular sovereignty and formal equality. From instruments of imperial patronage, religious liberty and minority rights became part of the broader vocabulary of civil and political rights. While in Europe, the transition from imperial to popular sovereignty was a fait accompli by the end of the nineteenth century, this was not the case in the Middle East; there, popular sovereignty had to be developed institutionally and discursively within the context of expanding missionary activity and (direct or indirect) colonial rule. International law, which was supposed to institute a global political order based on the doctrine of sovereignty, readily accommodated the exceptional nature of colonial and mandatory rule. As a result, the meaning and praxis of religious liberty and minority rights in the Middle East were forged in the context of differential sovereignty between Europe and the Middle East, a context that, as I hope to show in this book, remains relevant to how the minority issue is debated in Egypt today.

A third shift that I track in the concept of minority rights belongs to the interwar period. Under the auspices of the League of Nations, an authoritative definition of "national minority" was developed and a system of minority treaties was established to track infractions in countries that were, for the most part, subject to European power. This period in the League's history is instructive not only because it exemplifies the logic of differential sovereignty that attends rights discourse in international law, but also for its consistent thematization of an irresolvable tension located at the heart of the concept of minority: on the one hand, a minority is supposed to be an equal partner with the majority in the building of the nation; on the other hand, its difference (religious, racial, ethnic) poses an incipient threat to the identity of the nation that is grounded in the religious, linguistic, and cultural norms of the majority. Even though the League of Nations and its minority treaties system were dismantled, eventually replaced by the United Nations and its charter of human rights, contemporary struggles over minority rights continue to reenact this tension in various forms.

This chapter is also an argument for why the discourse on religious liberty and national minorities needs to be urgently rethought outside the framework of rights. It belongs, I want to suggest, to a far broader field of secular political praxis that secures the prerogative of the modern state to serve as the arbiter of religious differences, to remake and regulate religious life while proclaiming its sanctity, in the process fundamentally transforming how people perceive and negotiate religious identity and communal relations. Viewed from this perspective, religious liberty does not simply protect religious belief (or unbelief) from state intervention, but secures the distinction between public and private that is so foundational to secular political rule. Similarly, the legal concept of national minority does not simply signify a predetermined demographic group upon whom the modern state confers rights and obligations. Rather, its institutionalization also produces the kinds of subjects who can speak in its name, transforming how religious differences are lived, recognized, and contested. Perhaps if we can apprehend these dimensions of religious liberty and minority rights we may be able to appreciate the double-edged character of political secularism, which promises religious neutrality even as it remakes the fundamental contours of religious life.

Sovereignty and Religious Liberty

The signing of the Peace of Westphalia treaties in 1648 is often narrated as the foundational moment in the emergence of the concept of religious liberty; it not only brought an end to nearly one hundred years of religious warfare among Christians, but also created a political order in which subjects of a state were allowed to hold religious beliefs that were different from the ruler's. While some scholars view the Peace of Westphalia as an earlier moment in Europe's unfolding commitment to the virtue of religious tolerance, others see it as a far more pragmatic instrument that helped settle long-standing territorial disputes by granting formal independence to polities struggling to be free...