Slandering the Sacred: Forum Introduction
SherAli Tareen Introduces Marginalia Review of Book's forum on J. Barton Scott's Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India
Slandering the Sacred by J. Barton Scott is a landmark study in the field of religion and South Asia, taking the specific case study of Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, which prohibits deliberate harm or injury to religious feelings of a community, to raise and address larger and immensely consequential questions connected to the interaction of law, religion, and secular power in India and beyond.
A multifaceted intellectual history cum literary analysis of blasphemy law, Slandering the Sacred moves between nineteenth-century and contemporary Britain and India to show that colonial discourses and conceptions of blasphemy were shaped and indebted to the life of this category as it operated among the colonized religious communities of India. By combining close readings of religious and polemical texts (in Urdu and Hindi) from a variety of settings with finely grained analysis of legal debates and discourses emanating from nineteenth-century Britain and India, Scott shows the cross-pollination as well as the mutual dependence of law, religion, and emerging notions of modern state sovereignty in the colonial period.
There are four central arguments advanced by Slandering the Sacred that operate in distinct yet interconnected registers. The first is that the very definition of what counts as blasphemy has remained a subject of tremendous debate, ambiguity, and political expenditure, in India as well as in Britain. At stake in this debate, moreover, is the very definition of religion in modernity. How one defines harm or injury to religion is inextricably tied to how one defines and demarcates the boundaries of religion.
J. Barton Scott. Slandering the Sacred. University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 272. $30 (paperback)
From this stems Scott’s second major argument: rather than representing the opposite of secularism, blasphemy and its legal determination and application are thoroughly entangled in the workings and contradictions of modern secular power. In fact, the story of blasphemy in Britain and India is precisely a story of the inherent tensions and irresolvable contradictions of secularism whereby circumscribing the domain of harm to religion and religious feelings required a priori the circumscription of what counted as religion. Scott thus adds to the recent burgeoning academic scholarship invested in disrupting the religion/secular binary (Asad 2004; Agrama 2012; Mahmood 2016) through an intensive study of an idea, that of blasphemy, commonly imagined as the quintessential expression of religious excess only to demonstrate its intimate entanglement with secularism and secular power. Through a series of intensive micro-histories situated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scott shows that rather than ameliorating interreligious tensions or discontent, blasphemy laws only provided the discursive and political fodder for further intensifying the performance and specter of religious injury.
Third, Scott presents the conceptual argument of viewing the law as a site saturated with affective potentials and outcomes. The religious feelings that blasphemy law has sought to protect do not exist outside the law but are generated by and interwoven into the law itself. It is this argument that renders this book a particularly effective text to generate intellectual conversations and debates among scholars of religion, law, secularism, and affect/performance studies.
Fourth and finally, in terms of its contribution to intellectual history, a central thrust of Slandering the Sacred lies in its attempt to offer a corrective to a dominant liberal Whig account of secularism whereby the liberal “West” is seen as having shed over time its involvement in seemingly illiberal projects like the state policing of blasphemy. As an alternative, Scott shows the relationship between blasphemy and varied instantiations of secularism in settings like Britain to be a lot more uneven than what a linear and self-congratulatory narrative of overcoming religious excess might suggest. Moreover, the persisting shadows of blasphemy and its perceived threats in contexts like Britain can only be appreciated through a careful consideration of the discursive, legal, and political career of blasphemy in colonial and contemporary India.The liberal “West” can never be abstracted from its colonies and the violence of colonial power, Scott forcefully argues.
As the diversity of the range of scholars who are participating in this book forum attests, Slandering the Sacred provides a theoretical model and set of conceptual tools and resources that should attract scholars from multiple fields including Hinduism, law, secularism, Islam, South Asia, and of course Religious Studies more broadly. The five commentaries and analyses that accompany this special forum navigate both specific and broader themes animating Scott’s book; collectively they showcase the importance and dividends of a truly interdisciplinary examination of a question as timely as it is thorny: defining the limits of religious offense in a supposedly secular world.
SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023).
