Since the 2011 uprising in Egypt, the Egyptian state has increasingly put to use the charge of defamation of religion (izdira’ al-din) to regulate speech acts and practices under the pretense of protecting religion, principally Islam. The charge, though sometimes thought to be a “medieval” hangover signaling Egypt’s incomplete or failed project of secularism, is based on a law that was added to Egypt’s penal code in 1982. It is part of a distinctly modern genealogy of the politics of religious freedom. Focused on that genealogy, this paper examines how religious freedom—a concept that emerged out of the experience of sectarian conflict and the rise of the modern state in Western Europe—was translated and accumulated meaning in the increasingly bounded political space of Egypt under colonial and semicolonial rule. Historians have observed that missionaries—both foreign and local—in Egypt understood religious freedom as the right to proselytize and the right of (Muslim) Egyptians to convert, since Egyptian law did not protect conversion out of Islam. For many Egyptians, by contrast, religious freedom meant the right to protect one’s religion from what was perceived as an outside assault. This paper follows the contingent formation of this conceptual paradox in the legal and political discourse of early twentieth-century Egypt and traces religious freedom’s manifestations through the 1930s. I show how the fluidity and instability of this concept, central to traditions of political liberalism, elicited continuous debates over its meaning. In Egypt’s interwar political context, and particularly in the face of a perceived missionary assault justified through the discourse of religious freedom, Egyptians articulated notions of this concept centered around feelings of moral injury and offense and through a local vernacular of ethics that, while embedded within the Islamic tradition, was shared across religious divides. In tandem, the Egyptian state gradually encoded these sensibilities into expanding positivist civil law as part of establishing and maintaining public order, thus delimiting Egypt’s political and, perhaps ironically, religious imaginaries. The paper should appeal to scholars of ethics, law, liberalism, religion, secularism, and modern Egyptian and Middle Eastern history.

This paper revisits a personal tragedy in 2009, the early days of my fieldwork in Indian-occupied Kashmir – the untimely death of the son of my primary interlocutor and friend, Haider. The narratives and circuits of affect that coalesced around this event wove in specific ways Haider’s individual history with political demands made in the movement for Kashmir’s liberation from India in which many young men had lost their lives. The movement for freedom, or Azaadi, from Indian rule was launched in 1989 in the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley. The armed militancy raged on for more than a decade and was subject to violent suppression and state reprisals. In the early years of the Azaadi movement, Haider had led a Shi’i militia in the armed struggle against the Indian state. Haider left the armed movement for reasons he did not specify, became an NGO worker and was active in the civil activist network in Kashmir. He was nearly fifty years old when his twenty-three old son died suddenly and inexplicably on a visit to a popular picnic spot. The event, its humdrum setting and absolutely random quality sought explication in Haider’s sociopololitical milieu. I attend to how the death of Haider’s son was received by a set of distinct but inter-related discourses: the discursive formulations around martyrdom that pervade the political landscape of Kashmir, the practices of piety that Haider flouted by openly declaring his fondness for rum and engaging in love affairs, and the eschatological horizon opened up by the notion of ajal, the preordained time of one’s death. By moving through the conversations that encompassed both the singular event of death and more general discursive configurations, I aim to convey the ethical shifts and improvisations that are entailed in living amidst political violence and attempting to exert some degree of control over dangerous conditions. By alternatively tracking its insertion into a personal history as well as sociopolitical scripts, I hope to render a picture, albeit partial, of the ongoing life of a conflict.

This paper examines how the circulation of genealogies and family histories in Saida, Lebanon constitutes who counts as kin and shapes practices of giving within families. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Saida, it analyzes the interplay of narrative and the formation and functioning of family mutual aid associations (rawabit/jama'iyat al-‘ayleh). In a context in which the state provides markedly limited social welfare, all of Lebanon’s largest religious groups (Sunni, Shia, Christian, and Druze) have increasingly joined together to found family associations. In Saida, stories about descent shape how one’s obligation to others is understood, experienced, and practiced. This paper begins with an analysis of the ways in which genealogical stories shape Sidonians’ (i.e., people from Saida) understandings of obligation and debt, within and between families, through an analysis of conflicting family histories told by members of one illustrious Sidonian family. Self-described fallen princes who traveled to the Levant from Morocco and Andalusia, the family’s disagreement about their history has led to the formation of two competing mutual aid associations: one based in Beirut, and the other in Southern Lebanon. In creating new kinship organizations, people sometimes wind up being counted as kin alongside people they had previously thought of as strangers, or even rivals. The process of bounding one’s kin group can cut across class, sectarian, and geographical lines. This paper shows how, in certain cases, ethical responsibility can be both prior and orthogonal to sect. It further shows how family associations can connect with and/or chaff against an ethics of belonging rooted in Arab Nationalism or forms of Islamic piety. It focuses in particular on the ways in which the bounding of kinship mutual aid associations, and the resulting relationships of obligation and indebtedness that emerge, have changed since the end of Lebanon’s civil war, and in the context of the crisis across the border in Syria.

In the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crisis, economists and financial experts have turned to Islamic banking and finance as an untapped continent with the potential to renew and recapitalize globalizing regimes of finance. This revalorized homo islamicus, previously a signification of difference to be overcome in the process of modernization, now stands as an alternative network of financial practice, the instruments of which, once purified into the legal formalisms of global financial markets, will place a check on the speculative and, ultimately, destabilizing tendencies of homo economicus. Recent scholarship has sought to deconstruct this simple opposition between the profit-maximizing figure of neoclassical economic theory and its more circumspect Islamic cousin. Scholars have demonstrated how the distinction is constructed in practice, a process of differentiation through which Islamic finance assembles and designates new boundaries to market calculation vis-a-vis an Islamic moral economy. As they have shown, the purification of Islamic financial instruments - the derivation of their value from the transactional forms of "conventional" finance with which they are always already entangled - has been concurrent with their historicization, the projection of homo islamicus into an Islamic past. This paper explores the engagement of Islamic reformers in colonial Egypt with questions of financial calculation and economic organization. The most well-known example is Muhammad ‘Abduh's 1904 pronouncement on the permissibility of interest-bearing savings certificates. Contemporary scholars of Islamic finance and economics have claimed ‘Abduh's statement to be the first attempt to circumscribe the novel financial instruments of a modern capitalist society within the moral dictates of the Islamic discursive tradition. Rather than reading this moment as an engagement between the economic and the ethical, the paper explores their imbrication as part of the broader articulation of Islam and economic liberalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century projects of legal reform. I argue that reformers such as ‘Abduh sought to assemble alternative networks of financial practice and, thus, reconfigure the linkage between the self-interested individual and possible forms of collectivity, whether national or Islamic. This is traced through the work of ‘Umar Lutfi, a contemporary of ‘Abduh most famously known as the father of the cooperative movement in Egypt, but also a proponent of Islamic reform. The paper examines how the nascent cooperative movement drew on the conceptual grammar of Islamic legal reform to refashion liberal notions of public utility and the calculative arrangements of the joint-stock corporation.