A post-secular reading of public sociology

Abstract

There are two theses originally put forward by Michael Burawoy but which still need to be highlighted; the first is the necessity of challenging the assumed neutrality of the social sciences and the second is the necessity of public engagement in the form of encouraging co-practice in society. Burawoy suggests public sociology should play a role in the struggle to protect humanity against the tyranny of the market. I tend to challenge this by arguing that a post-secular and post-neutrality public sociology could only work as a frame of dialogue about the priority of each struggle. Otherwise, it can be easily turned into a target for the criticism of those who do not share the interest in Burawoy’s preferred struggle. The article would also suggest that Ali Shariati’s political rereading of religious ideas not only to adapt to the modern world but also to transform it makes this Iranian intellectual a classic figure of the traditional post-secular public sociology.

Introduction

Michael Burawoy believes that open and free dialogue will lead us to deepen our internal democracy (Burawoy, 2005; 2007). It is true that we need to recognise ‘others’ at least as eligible to be heard and as an equal people. Public sociology, as he suggests, would be an unconditional dialogue and negotiation between several scholars who represent a multiplicity of narratives of truth and their counterpart public societies, the final outcome of which will be more inclusive of the suppressed and the unheard (Burawoy, 2005). Let us say it in this way: in the past sixty years many marginal movements tried to rewrite the text of modernity by including themselves, as in the case of the excluded women. For example, Simone de Beauvoir (1967), Donna Haraway (2013) and Luce Irigaray (1985), and in the case of excluded former colonial societies, Edward Said (1978), Gayatri Spivak (1999) and Homi Bhabha (2004), and for excluded ethnic minorities, John Rex (1973) and Stuart Hall (1997). Below, however, I will argue that public sociology, which is at the centre of current sociological discussions, needs something more than the demand of the inclusion of the marginalised groups. I would argue that public sociology could be read as a plan for active public engagement and co-practice.

In the first part of the article, I will highlight the arguments on the rejection of the possibility and also on the plausibility of the neutrality of the social sciences. I will begin with the definition of post-secularism which in the broadest sense of the term has been regarded as a challenge to the idea of neutrality of the secular. That is to say, post-secularism can be used as a term to address the intellectual scepticism about the possibility of fabrication and construction of a secular space somewhere outside (what Rawls called) the comprehensive doctrines. I will argue that the most effective argument for post-secularism in this sense has been put forward by revealing the historicity of the secular. I mean, the secular has been a historical invention which served as an intelligent resolution for some historical tensions (i.e. European Confessional Wars) among certain social forces. In the second part of the article, I will show how the conception of post-secular as a challenge to the idea of neutrality could couple with practice. Accordingly, the suggestion is that challenging the ideal of neutrality would pave the way for co-practice. I will try to make my point by reviewing the intellectually overlooked experience of one of the classic Middle Eastern public sociologists (i.e. Ali Shariati) who led massive socio-political changes as a result of his public engagements. The conclusion is that a post-secular public sociology, the seeds of which existed in Burawoy’s thesis could only work as a framework for public dialogue on the priority of each field of co-practice. Otherwise, social sciences in a post-neutral era would merely turn into a chaos of varieties of value-judgements with equally problematic truth-claims which cannot lead social actors in their co-practice.

Post-secularism as a challenge to the idea of neutrality

Our understanding of post-secularism like any other understanding of the term depends on how we define the secular (a modern epistemic category), secularism (a world view or ideology) and secularisation (conceptualisation of modern world processes) (Casanova, 2011: 54ff). Thus, we need to distinguish different ways of using the term. There are many categorisations of the secular (for example, Beckford, 2012), but Casanova’s typology holds more importance.

Casanova distinguished three meanings of the term secular and consequently three senses of the term post-secular (2011: 60; 2013: 27ff). Firstly, mere secularity in the broadest sense of the term originated from the very Medieval Christian use of the term saeculum. The Middle Age use of the term secular as temporality, in fact, was not used in contrast with religion. Understandably, they used to juxtapose this concept with eternity (Calhoun, 2012: 340). Thus, they were able to distinguish between ordinary priests and secular priests. The latter group, unlike the former, did not take vows of chastity and poverty. Instead, they could live in wider society. So they were still considered to be devout Christians but the ones who lived in the cities and among lay people, not in the monasteries. The prevailing idea during the Middle Ages was that human flourishing was something to be attained with restricted religious ascetic rules inside the monasteries. Some branches of the lay or secular priests, mostly in late Middle Ages, tended more towards popularising asceticism. These cleric movements are linked to the modern idea of secular self-creation. In its modern sense the term secular turned into a positive interpretation and confirmation of worldly life and considering it as ‘the place for human flourishing’ (Milbank, 2006; 2013). Taylor’s description of the emergence of ‘exclusive humanism’ refers to the final outcome of the transition of those monastery ascetic ideals and skills to the cities. From one perspective, ‘exclusive humanism’ or the emergence of the idea of self-flourishing detached from any sense of higher being was partially the result of the mission of secular priests to remake society according to ascetic life (Taylor, 2007: 150–160; Sloterdijk, 2013: 150ff). Be it as it may, the first meaning of the term secular would be the classic idea of not-religious, temporal and inner-worldly.

If we define the secular in this general sense, as mere secularity, then the first meaning of post-secular would be the re-sacralisation of the world (Casanova, 2013: 30). This is how, for instance, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk understands the term post-secular and consequently rejects it (Sloterdijk, 2013). Most of today sociologists would also agree that there is not enough evidence for a positive process of ‘re-sacralisation’ of the world (Zuckerman, 2008; Joas, 2014).

The second meaning of the secular, Casanova argues, is what Taylor understands by the term. That is the self-contained secularity which is the phenomenological experience of living in the ‘immanent frame’, that is, ‘an interlocking constellation of the modern differentiated cosmic, social, and moral orders’ (Casanova, 2013: 30). So it is the result of a transition from a medieval society in which the belief in God was the unproblematic and unchallenged standpoint of most of the members of the society which has been replaced by recent modern society in which being religious is just one option among several others (Casanova, 2013: 30–31; Taylor, 2007). Consequently, the post-secular in this latter context would imply what Peter Berger described as ‘de-secularisation’ (Casanova, 2013: 31; Berger, 1999). Also the term post-secularism as has been used in the field of international studies has the same connotation (See Mavelli and Petito, 2014).

Finally, Casanova called the third category the secularist secularity. It is closely connected to the term secularisation as a particular philosophy of history that turns the specifically Western historical experience of secularisation into the ‘teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief’ or from the irrational to rational (Casanova, 2013: 32–33). In his 2008 book, Habermas criticised the recent conception of the secular. Thus post-secular for him implies ‘reflexively abandoning or at least questioning the modern secularist […] consciousness’ (Casanova, 2013: 33).

According to Habermas, we need a process of ‘complementary learning’ to correct the insufficiency of the past theories of secularisation (Rosati and Stoeckl, 2012: 3). Habermas proposes a ‘revised framework of citizenship’ in which both religious and non-religious citizens should undertake a mutual reform plan. For example, the religious people should acknowledge that they are living in a secular society so their religious certainties are not accepted by most of the other people (Habermas, 2008: 129). They can also be open toward reconstruction of their sacred truths in the light of modern condition. For instance, they can negotiate over embedding the egalitarian individualism and universalistic morality into their religious point of views. This is possible solely through a self-reflective inside examination in those traditions (Habermas, 2008: 137). Habermas also defines a project of translation of the vocabulary of a particular religion to a more generally accessible language (Habermas, 2008: 131–2). The secular citizens, for their part, should go beyond mere political tolerance which is necessary but not enough. They also need to be reflective and should not just presuppose the existing situation as a given. So they should try to transcend the existing borders (Habermas, 2008: 138). Habermas’s post-secularism, as a result, is about a society which is epistemically adjusted to the continued existence of religious communities. That is a process of ‘becoming reflexively aware of […] secularistic self-misunderstanding’ (Casanova, 2013: 33). Habermas’ scheme thus contains, on the one hand, some levels of openness towards religious claims. It, on the other hand, focuses on the inner religious potentials to modernise religious consciousness through a process of negotiation with the secular other. Thus the goal of such a post-secular society would be co-existence and co-presence through the processes of mutual learning as well as inner-modernisation of religions (Rosati, 2012: 61ff).

Beckford, appropriately, criticised Habermas by asking two questions. First, how religion could be defined so all interested parties would be happy. It is noteworthy that ‘religion-in-itself’, does not exist. There are varieties of social phenomenon called religion because of their ‘family resemblances’. Secondly, and related to the former point, Beckford asks; while Habermas was always critical of fundamentalism and the New Age tendencies:

… one wonders whether he thinks that the postsecular applies only to relatively tolerant and liberal forms of religion. It remains to be seen where the outer limits of Habermas’s willingness to tolerate and listen seriously to religious values and beliefs are located in the so-called postsecular age. (Beckford, 2012: 9)

Beckford also pointed at an important issue in an increasingly connected modern world in which the comprehensive doctrines are divergent, finding such an overlapping consensus becomes increasingly challenging. It will not be easy for Habermas to give a criterion which simply divides the fundamentalists from the tolerant religious groups. Even if it is possible, what are the limits of openness toward their narrative of truth?

I want to push this critical point one step further. There is a fourth meaning of the secular as the neutral. Accordingly, post-secular can be interpreted as a consciousness about the impossibility of neutrality. This means that the secular will remain as an option in the modern world as Taylor described it. It will not, however, consider being the neutral context of interaction of all other value-laden comprehensive doctrines.

The conception of the secular as the neutral has emerged historically as an intelligent resolution for the horrors of the Confessional Wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Accordingly, the secular was an impartial place of neutrality. That was somewhere outside of religious dogmas and diverging interpretations of the Scripture. So, theoretically all religious groups could be agreeing on this (Calhoun, 2012; Dupré, 1993; Elshtain, 2008; Michea, 2009; Milbank, 2013). However, in its original form it was a political resolution but it also was translated into cognitive terms; hence, scientific ‘facts’ were considered to be something beyond any dispute.

What Taylor called subtraction stories were the cornerstone of the modern conception of the secular as the neutral. I mean, it has been imagined that if all the dogmatic illusions (including religious ones) are disappeared what remains will be ‘pure fact’, ‘pure reason’, ‘pure nature’ and ‘pure individual/thinker’ etc. (Taylor, 2007). So, the secular, from the point of view of subtraction stories, does not have any history. Rather it is just there outside, waiting for us to put aside our ideological glasses. Accordingly, the most intellectually suitable way to challenge those stories would be to show the historicity and evolution of the secular.

One can argue that one of the current trends of post-secular critique is dedicated to challenging different forms of subtraction stories. Calhoun, for instance, rejected the myth of neutrality by challenging the myth of ‘the secular as an absence’ not a presence (Calhoun, 2012: 351; Gorski, Kyumn, Tropey and VanAntwerpen, 2012). This kind of approach to the secular as something which has been constituted, historically led to Casanova’s project of sociology of the secular (Casanova, 2011: 54). The mission of the proposed research field would be to recognise and distinguish the historical and sociological differences between varieties of versions of the secular in different countries in the past two centuries (Calhoun et al., 2011; Warner et al., 2010). For example, the secular emerged as a sort of ‘distance from religion’ in the Western Europe. Nonetheless in India it has been defined with ‘the equity toward religion’ which includes ‘equitable state subsidies for Hindus, Muslims, and others’ (Calhoun, 2012: 337). Yet the American understanding of the secular was designed to protect religious differences and ‘helped to create a sort of marketplace for religions’ (Calhoun, 2012: 336). Generally, post-secularism means going beyond a historically constituted misconception of attributing neutrality to the secular. Accordingly, challenging the idea of neutrality will open the space for co-practice of the followers of varieties of versions of comprehensive doctrines. This is also another theme of Burawoy’s public sociology. Before dealing with the pragmatic aspect of his scheme, let me examine the relationship between public sociology and the ideal of neutrality.

The legitimacy of a post-secular public sociology

Contemporary social theory is a chaotic field in terms of the divergence of the foundational value judgement of each school of thought. Feminist social theory and post-colonialism along with cultural studies, on the one hand, and the semi-positivist movements of the Strong Program in Professional Sociology (Nicholas, 2007: 119–48), on the other, are only a few examples of those diverging value commitments. By emphasising this theoretical chaos, an essential question would be: is there any standard sociological insight to be invoked by the public sociologists? Is there any neutral sociological point of view about social ‘facts’ that the public sociologists are going to promote in the society? If not, what is the use of public sociology? In this section, I would support the idea of a post-secular public sociology and I would suggest that its seeds existed in Burawoy’s original thesis as well.

To answer those questions, first we need to answer this one: what is public sociology? Burawoy, the former president of the American Sociological Association, in his presidential address of 2004 talked about the idea of public sociology which, in the decade that followed, became one of the central discussions of sociologists around the world. Burawoy believes sociologists have spent a century making professional knowledge by ‘translating common sense into science’ and now is the time for back-translation (Burawoy, 2005: 5). That is to say, public sociology is a way of turning sociology into a ‘moral and political force’ capable of making real changes in society through sharing the basic insights of social theory with people (Burawoy, 2005: 6). Nevertheless, Burawoy emphasises that this does not mean public sociology is the negation of professional sociology. Quite the contrary, they both complement each other perfectly (Burawoy, 2005: 5). There cannot be public sociology without professional sociology because the latter prepares ‘legitimacy and expertise’ for the former (Burawoy, 2005: 10). Public sociology, in return, builds constructive dialogue between sociologists and the public through which each adjust to the other. The process of dialogue is ideally a mutual understanding in which the sociologist not only teaches something but also learns from the people. The reciprocity and mutuality is essentially part of an ideal dialogue. Moreover, the ideal speech condition is equal. That is to say, persuasion depends on nothing beyond the best argument. However ‘equality’ in this sense is a necessary fiction which never occurs in the real world. Burawoy also recognises the inherent inequality and differences in the process of the public engagement of sociologists. But he suggests the combination of professional, public and also critical sociology will make a more moderate version of sociology. The function of critical sociology, as the third type of sociological efforts, is to show the biases of professional sociology and to suggest alternative foundations for social theory (Burawoy, 2005: 10). The fourth type of sociology is policy sociology which is a sociological knowledge in the service of a goal defined by a client which might be either government or the private sector. Finally, Burawoy believes critical sociology, on the one hand, is the conscience of professional sociology and public sociology, on the other hand, is the conscience of policy sociology (Burawoy, 2005: 10).

Nevertheless, still a question remains untouched: is there any standard sociological insight public sociologists need to share with the public? Burawoy’s answer is that such a standard sociological insight and message does not exist. The multiplicity of public sociologies reflects not only different publics but different value commitments on the part of sociologists. Public sociology has no intrinsic normative valence other than the commitment to dialogue around issues raised in and by sociology. It can just as well support Christian Fundamentalism as Liberation Sociology or Communitarianism. (Burawoy, 2005: 8–9).

Accordingly, Burawoy rejects the seeking of neutrality or any demand of a ‘pure sociology’ which is beyond any public engagement (Burawoy, 2005: 16; Burawoy, 2007: 318–322; Turner, 2007). Alternatively, Burawoy seeks a kind of ‘value science’ and in support of this idea writes: ‘in the contemporary world a sociology hostile to values, politics, diversity, utopias, and above all to publics no longer makes sense – if it ever did’ (Burawoy, 2007: 317). Thus, he recognises that opening the Pandora’s Box of public engagement means to enable a huge social transformation. Moreover, he prescribes that quarrel.

Probably the most controversial part of Burawoy’s idea is when he adds that sociology must defend the interests of humanity by defending civil society against the ‘state despotism and market tyranny’ (Burawoy, 2005: 24). We might wonder where this obligation comes from. On the one hand, Brint (2007) persuasively shows that Burawoy’s claim is rhetorical not analytic (Brint, 2007: 247). Brint adds that it is not quite evident why we should ‘defend humanity’ only in the civil society. Furthermore, it is not easy to define concepts such as humanity, civil society and social justice with much precision (Brint, 2007: 247). On the other, McLennan (2007), criticising the shortcomings of Burawoy’s project, pinpoints those leftist values of Burawoy’s which led him to determine a liberating mission for sociology. If sociology should support civil society against the tyrannies of the market and the state, McLennan suggests, we also need to add, ‘and against the encroachments of religiosity too’ (McLennan, 2007: 859). Consequently, we have several nominees here to be defended or to be opposed.

Burawoy, in response, said he never denied his own Marxist values and clearly stated while ‘social science without values is impossible’, we only need clarify which set of values ‘makes more sense today’ (Burawoy, 2007: 320). After that he draws his own point of view on Karl Polanyi’s study of the rise of classical liberalism, The Great Transformation (1944), by separating three waves of sociology which resonate with three waves of marketization of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Burawoy, 2007: 323–327). The first wave was at the time of Chartism and other trade union movements. The counterpart sociology at that time was ‘utopian sociology’. The second wave, accordingly, was in the age of extremes – as Hobsbawm famously called it – with the horrific universal ideological divides. The counterpart sociology of that age was the expansion of policy sociology which in the West was dealing with the question of the emerging welfare state (Burawoy, 2007: 324). The last wave of marketization has happened in our time, in which, according to Burawoy, state and market have become allies and together colonised civil society. Indeed, in this situation the defence of humanity is intertwined with the defence of civil society against the state and the market (Burawoy, 2007: 324).

Be that as it may, a supporter of the idea of ‘open dialogue’ can argue that all of these interpretations are sociological insights. Namely, the anti-religious perspectives of McLennan, along with the Marxist approach of Burawoy are the equally legitimate candidates. Consequently, the only necessary imperative for that ‘open dialogue’ would be the acceptance of the legitimacy of the contribution of the other groups in the discussion.

This quotation from Henrik Dahl’s chapter on public sociology, as he claims, is the result of his twenty years of being an academic sociologist. Dahl says:

In my personal experience, disagreement is much stronger when pure sociologists are involved in debates with other pure sociologists or with practical sociologists than it is when similar social groups debate. I have personally witnessed levels of aggression I found comparable only to disagreement about schismatic religious differences inside hard-core or esoteric religious communities. (2008: 147)

Dahl’s conclusion is also interesting. He believes the only way out of these disputes is an agreement that we cannot criticise a colleague for betraying our values (whatever they are); rather we should criticise them for betraying their own values (again, whatever they are) (Dahl, 2008: 154). In other words, at the end, the question is only about the consistency of one’s ideas, not the content. Furthermore, Burawoy believes that ‘If sociology actually supports more liberal or critical public sociologies that is a consequence of the evolving ethos of the sociological community’ (Burawoy, 2005: 8–9, italics mine). Therefore, we can conclude not only that no standard sociological standpoint exists, but also that what looks like a solid sociological insight is nothing but the historically constructed ethos of sociologists which does not contain anything necessarily ‘authentic’ or manifestly ‘reasonable’. Now, we should talk about the pragmatic aspect of Burawoy’s public sociology.

Making social movements and co-practice

In his 2004 lecture, Burawoy recalled a trip to South Africa to talk about public sociology. His audiences, he remembered, were ‘nonplussed’ looking at him because they could not imagine what else sociology could be (Burawoy, 2005: 20). That is to say, sociology, for the South Africans, was closely connected to the anti-apartheid movement and served nothing beyond making real changes in real society. So, it was already a public sociology. Burawoy concluded that ‘while in the United States we were theorising social movements; in South Africa sociologists were making movements’ (Burawoy, 2005: 20–21, italics mine). The same is true for many countries in the Global South. It is true that the idea of not only theorising but also making movements to change the real lives of people is at the centre of the public sociology project. But it has been forgotten for the past several decades in the West.

In the previous section, I tried to show that public sociology is the new battlefield of different sociological schools and ideas. In the following sections, I will review some lessons we can learn from the experience of public engagement of Islamic religious intellectuals. I will argue that a post-secular public sociology can work as a context in which challenging of neutrality and co-practice can join.

Burawoy distinguishes between traditional and organic public sociologists (Burawoy, 2005: 7-8). The books of the traditional public sociologists, on the one hand, are read beyond the academy and spark public discussions. This category includes Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Richard Sennett (1977) and Hanna Arendt (1958), for instance. The organic public sociologists, on the other hand, are those who make public dialogues a process of ‘mutual education’ between different groups (Burawoy, 2005: 8). Thus, this mutuality of the relationship is the point which separates organic public sociologists from the traditional ones. At a 2008 conference in Tehran, I asked Burawoy about the traditional sociologists in (what he calls) the global South. He immediately pointed to the picture of Ali Shariati (1933–1977) on the wall of the conference hall and said Shariati was a good example of such public sociologists.

For several reasons, I think that Burawoy is right and Shariati was indeed a fine example of a traditional public sociologist. Moreover, I will argue Shariati was a traditional post-secular public sociologist. It is noteworthy that Shariati was one of the most politically influential figures in the contemporary history of the Middle East. As Vali Nasr (2006) pointed out, the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran was partly the result of the two intellectual revolutionary interpretations of the Shia religious beliefs: the reinterpretation of Islamic messianism by Imam Khomeini ¹ , and the reinterpretation of martyrdom by Ali Shariati ² (Nasr, 2006: 130). It is remarkable Shariati was not a political character in the conventional sense of the term: he was not a member of one of the numerous political parties or teams of revolutionary activists against the Shah. Instead, he was a sociologist and lecturer who was educated in France and was in contact with the great intellectual figures of Europe such as Louis Massignon (1883–1962), Georges Gurvitch (1894–1965) and Jacques Berque (1910–1995). In France, he engaged with the anti-colonial movements in Algeria. The important turning point for him however was during the last years of living in Paris when he had come to realise what he needed was a combination of Marxism, existentialism and Islam. The result of the mixture, he believed, is a modern Islamic progressive and revolutionary ideology which can make real change in society (Rahnema, 2000: 128; Shariati, 1971). He was right and his ideology had a great effect on the emerging educated middle class youth who were dissatisfied with the tyranny of the Shah but had no alternative except socialism, which was not reconcilable with their traditional religious beliefs (Abrahamian, 2010: 143–147). Chatterjee describes Shariati’s popularity in Iran between 1962 and 1969 in this way:

The appearance of a western-trained professor using the language and jargon of western philosophers and social scientists couched in an Islamic terminology proved a novelty. In his lectures, traditional religious concepts were cast in a new mould that was no longer obscure, prosaic, and stale. (Chatterjee, 2011: 78)

Shariati’s novel interpretations of the religious stories such as the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham and companions of Muhammad, in addition to his imaginative, creative and poetic rhetoric, had impressed crowds. He was an avant-garde intellectual celebrity, but not for translating pioneering western ideas, which was common among many Iranian intellectuals of the time. On the contrary, he started from the so-called ‘retrogressive’ popular religious ideas and texts and reinterpreted them in an entirely new way. In his biography of Shariati, Rahnema (2000) wrote about the hostile reaction of the Iranian secular (mostly Marxist) intellectuals to Shariati. One instance was the case of his translation of a treatise on Salman, by Louis Massignon, from French into Farsi ³ . Amir Parviz Puyan (1946–1971), a Marxist political activist, sent a sarcastic message to Shariati saying: ‘instead of translating (Marx’s) Capital, is this (Salman) the present you have brought us from Europe?’ (Rahnema, 2000: 138). Shariati retorted that from now on he will work on ziyaratnameh-ha (i.e. the praying texts that Shia Muslim pilgrims read during visits to the holy shrines) (Rahnema, 2000: 138). Taking everything into account, Shariati was one of the pioneering figures of a new form of being Muslim in the modern world which became known as religious intellectualism, which had only a few precedents in Egypt. His novelty was the progressive modern reinterpretation of religious traditional texts and stories both to adapt to modern reality and to transform it. The division refers to two types of reform according to Tariq Ramadan in his Radical Reform (2009): adaptation reform and transformation reform (Ramadan, 2009: 33). Adaptation reform, on the one hand, was what Muslim scholars normally used to do during history – ‘observing the world, noting its changes then coming back to the texts to suggest new readings’ (Ramadan, 2009: 33). Transformation reform, on the other hand, concerns adding another step – moving again from the religious text to the society and trying to change it. Accordingly, transformation reformers do not accept the given modern context as the unchangeable fate (Ramadan, 2009: 33). Shariati, I should add, was a reformer in the second sense of the term.

Arguably, Shariati was neither a Marxist who used Islam for his political goals, nor a Muslim who was enchanted with modern Western philosophies. His goal, in fact, was a synthesis between the two (Shariati, 1971; Rahnema, 2000; Hunter, 2009: 50–56). He went back to the texts with which the ordinary people were familiar: the Quran, sacred texts and religious stories. Accordingly, he saw religion as praxis, not as ‘the opium of the people’ as most Marxists used to think. Let us focus on this aspect of his work by reviewing one of his central texts, eslamshenasi (Islamology, 1971).

Shariati in the first volume of eslamshenasi (1971) interpreted two verses of the Quran: ‘certainly we created man from a dry clay, of black mud fashioned in shape’ (Quran, 15:26); and ‘So, when I have made him complete and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down making obeisance to him’ (Quran, 15:29). Shariati stated that the human being is something between a piece of inferior mud and an unmatched spirit of God. He adds that neither of these refers to something real in the history of the creation of man. Instead, they are two metaphors to show two possibilities for the human condition (Shariati, 1971: 61–62). Thus, he concludes that in Islam, man is a hybrid entity or a ‘god-like creature in exile’ (Shariati, 1971: 73). As mentioned above, this kind of conception of man is shared between the Abrahamic religions. However, there are still huge theological differences between, say, Christianity and Islam. For example, in Islam God is more transcendental and inaccessible to man, but in Christianity, God is incarnated in the body of a man – Jesus. Yet both religions allow the believers much room for manoeuvre in terms of becoming like God. In Shariati’s unorthodox interpretation, we should depart from the Satanic muddy self (khistan-e lajani) toward the spiritual divine self (khistan-e khodayi) (Shariati, 1971: 66). And this is the very essence of an Islamic revolution on an individual scale. In the same vein, Shariati theorised the social and political changes. He did so by reinterpreting the Quranic story of Abel and Cain which for Shariati was ‘the Islamic philosophy of history’ (Shariati, 1971: 74). The fight between two brothers, for him, was the beginning of the eternal battle between the muddy side and the divine side of history. Consequently, Islam as a religion, for Shariati, could not be anything other than a path from the satanic side of the self to the divine side. In another of his books Niyayesh (Invocation, 1970), Shariati wrote: ‘if religion does not work before death, it certainly will not work after it’ (Shariati, 1970: 77). Accordingly, he defended the red religion of martyrdom against the black religion of unworthy rituals (Shariati, 2014).

These revolutionary interpretations, which turned into the basis for a revolutionary ideology, resulted in the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran. Many historians mentioned Shariati as the most important ideologue of the post-revolutionary government as well (Abrahamian, 2010: 143–47; Hunter, 2009: 50; Nasr, 2006: 130). It is unlikely that any other sociologist has since reached this level of popularity and political effectiveness. His rereading of religious ideas not only to adapt to the modern world but also to transform it makes him the classic figure of the traditional post-secular public sociology.

Shariati’s father, Mohammad Taqi Shariati, came from an educated and highly religious family. At the time of the absolute intellectual reign of Tudeh party, the main socialist party of Iran during 1940s and 50s, he made a significant distinction between the socialists’ concern for social justice and equality, on the one hand, and their materialist philosophy, on the other. He famously approved the former as compatible with Islam while rejecting the latter (Rahnema, 2000: 12). Following his father, Ali Shariati believed that materialists cannot be ‘real socialists’. The ‘real socialists’ are those who believe in monotheism (towhid). In a monotheistic point of view, Shariati argued, everything in the world has one origin and one goal. Any duality and dichotomy is a sign of either atheism or infidelity (kofr) (Shariati, 1971: 59). Thus, he believed that all dichotomies – such as spirit/body, nature/what is beyond nature, science/religion, landlord/peasant, Arab/non-Arab, Persian/non-Persian, capitalist/proletariat, etc. – in the monotheistic point of view are meaningless (Shariati, 1971: 58–59).

He tried to expropriate the secularist Westernised intellectuals’ paradigm and, one might say, tried to occupy their concepts which were a successful project in the Middle East. In a religious context such as in the Middle East, the revolutionary reformation in religion and redefining it as praxis, I believe, was one of the crucial causes of his success. Finally, Shariati’s main idea was to challenge the ‘sacred thus apolitical’ definition of religion. In contrast, religion should be ‘sacred’ and also political in terms of being devoted to the transformation of people’s worldly life.

Authenticity of struggle

So far I have argued against a neutral conception of the secular, showed how it fits into Burawoy’s conception of public sociology and claimed that Ali Shariati’s revolutionary project stands at the intersection of post-secularism and public sociology. In the rest of the article, I will argue for the main positive project which will be the result of these theses; that is what I, following Peter Sloterdijk, called ‘co-practice’ (2012; 2013). Underlining the significance of co-practice can be traced back to Marx and also his fervent follower Antonio Gramsci.

Let me begin by Marx. From the pragmatic point of view, the true Marxian question was what Lenin asked: what is to be done? Bernstein showed that getting into the roots, for Marx, was to understand that ‘[g]enuinely new potentialities arise as a result of human praxis’ (Bernstein, 1972: 70). It was in his Manuscripts that ‘practice takes on the creative power of the divinity’ (Feenberg, 2014: 215). Namely, nature was treated as a raw material and subject to human’s godlike will, manipulation and transformative decision.

Marx attempted to go beyond the modern unbridgeable gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ or fact and value through praxis. The attempt was ‘to break through the barrier of alienated and reified cultural forms to a reflexive concept of transforming practice’ (Feenberg, 2014: 215). This issue can be addressed by rejection of a common misconception of Marx’s role as a moralist. Marx famously invited a revolution in the role of the philosopher thus he asked them to change the world not to merely interpret it. He was also the writer of the most heated passages against capitalism and for the sake of proletariat revolutionary action. However, Bernstein, echoing Lobkowicz, convincingly showed that Marx did not believe that one can measure the alienated state of human being against some image of ‘transcendental human nature’, ‘logically predetermined future’ or a definite self-actualised human (Bernstein, 1972: 69–70). So Marx had not begun with such an ‘ought’ as a moral basis of the rejection of the existing capitalism. It is crucial to note Marx’s Hegelian context. Both Marx and Engels considered the Hegelian tradition as being ‘essentially completed’ (Feenberg, 2014: 16) and it was time to study it from ‘outside’. So while for Hegel the resolution of antinomies was a merely speculative and theoretical task, for Marx even the philosophical categories were the ‘sublimated versions of concrete social relations’ (Feenberg, 2014: 204). If so, philosophical dichotomies can only be transcended through social practice.

The result of practice is, Marx argued, the possibility of envisaging new and previously unknown possibilities of ‘ultimate human self-actualisation’ (Bernstein, 1972: 70). So in this sense, the results are ‘genuinely new potentialities’ because they cannot be foreseen before action. Thus, Marx was not suggesting that man should overthrow the existing conditions of production. His whole point was that ‘the ‘material practice’ necessarily does overthrow them’ (Lobkowicz, 1967: 418). The point that both Bernstein and Lobkowicz were trying to make was that Marx was not a mere moralist and prophet who imagined a revolution and the results of his imaginative future were the Manifesto (on the united revolutionary action of the workers of the world) or his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (on the necessity of changing the world by philosophers). Marx’s answer to Lenin’s question (i.e. what is to be done) was to transcend the philosophical dichotomies by practice which will lead to new potentialities of self-actualisation.

This is more or less true for Gramsci as well, but he began from another aspect. He tried to re-interpret orthodox German Marxism of his time and contest its deterministic conception of laws of history. I mentioned above that Burawoy was influenced by Polanyi’s scheme but it is crucial to see Gramsci’s influence on his conception of politics as well. In fact, Burawoy in his seminal work on what he calls Sociological Marxism (2003) put forward a synthesis of Polanyi and Gramsci’s versions of Marxism. He, accordingly, highlighted Gramsci’s understanding of society; in his view ‘society is not a general notion that applies transhistorically to ancient and medieval worlds, tribal and complex systems, traditional and modern orders’ alike (Burawoy, 2003: 198). It rather is civil society which is defined against the state and proliferated in a geographically specific area which is the West, and particular time which is nineteenth century (Burawoy, 2003: 198). As a result of that, Gramsci was able to see society as a hybrid entity which can ‘collaborate with the state to contain class struggle’ and likewise ‘its autonomy from the state can promote class struggle’ (Burawoy, 2003: 198). Seeing society against the backdrop of its time and place lets Gramsci see social consent as a fabrication which is imposed and organised through certain institutions; not ‘spontaneous consensus’ that ‘holds society together’ (Burawoy, 2003: 215). In fact, challenging the neutral and ahistorical conceptions of notions such as ‘society’, ‘consensus’ and (particularly in the case of Shariati) ‘religion’ could be seen as a prerequisite of invitation to co-practice. In a way, co-practice needs a sort of problematic understanding of these notions. That was, arguably, what Shariati did with Shia version of Islam; he problematized it.

Shariati adopted a position shared by Marx, Žižek, Badiou and, indeed, one major reading of teachings of the Abrahamic religions; that is the centrality of remaking society through co-practice. Let us begin with Žižek; He argued that the conflicts over multiculturalism are not about the contrast between pluralities of cultures (Žižek, 2012: 44). They, instead, are about Leitkultur (dominant culture). How do they want to co-exist? What do they have to share? Žižek rejects the ‘liberal game of tolerance’. Questions such as; do we need to tolerate them banning their women to drive? Do we need to tolerate them praying in public? These questions, Žižek believes, are distracting us from the most needed solution which is ironically a struggle. ‘The only way to break out of the deadlock is to propose and fight’ for a positive project (Žižek, 2012: 46). So, for him, going beyond tolerance is only possible when citizens begin to co-practice in a fight and struggle. There are two noteworthy points regarding the necessity of struggle: firstly, during the struggle the differences between men, women, Jews, Muslims, and so on become increasingly problematic; because the members of the society share one thing which is the battleground. Secondly, today’s dividing lines were also the result of the earlier struggles. The most important function of co-practice would be to generate those shared memories of common achievements that will serve as a ground for a sense of solidarity among the members of a given community. Badiou is sharing this view with Žižek: ‘Rather than tasking ethics with the job of respecting difference by practising tolerance, Badiou begins with the assumption, as does Deleuze, that difference is the natural state of the world’ (Hawes, 2015: 84).

The difference and contradiction, as Badiou suggests, is all that we can say about the ‘normal’ state of the world. Difference in itself, thus, is not the main concern. The important point is a form of practice to ‘recognise’ and more accurately to construct the sameness. Here is an ontological schism. Assuming sameness as a normal state of the world would result in the prescription of tolerating differences. It also leads to the assumption of neutrality. That is to say, it has been suggested that when there are a variety of cracks in the society, the best thing to do is to presuppose a neutral sphere in which everybody can be represented. So, neutrality and tolerance are two sides of one coin.

Žižek and Badiou, alternatively, argue that the point is not the formerly constituted differences and identities. The point is to make a new set of collective memories which will serve as a basis for remaking a Leitkultur, not mere absorbing and including of the others into the existing dominant culture (Žižek, 2012). Here again Žižek who is categorised under the title of ‘the sceptics of post-secularism’ (Beckford, 2012) can be seen as a post-secularist in the fourth sense of the term i.e. the negative questioning of neutrality which is joined with the positive prescription of co-practice.

Shariati also tried to re-read the history of Abrahamic religions to attach religion with revolutionary co-practice by considering the former social ties (i.e. nationality, family etc.) as battlegrounds. In the same vein, he interpreted the role of religion in the context of the ontological authenticity of differences and struggles. So he distinguished ‘revolutionary religion’, which destroys and rebuilds, from the religion of pre-determination and fate (Shariati, 1988: 31–32). The original and real dichotomy for him was not religion versus irreligion. It rather was the dichotomy of ‘the religion of justification of the existing situation’ against ‘the revolutionary religion of re-making and re-creation of society’ (Shariati, 1988: 31). One of the sources of Shariati’s authoritative appearance in the Iranian public sphere was channelling all the dissatisfactions and diversities toward a shared battleground of will to re-make the self through re-making, re-arranging and re-assembling society. So, he also attributed the authenticity to struggle. For Shariati, if one wants to be a good believer at any moment he or she needs to find the right field of struggle. Therefore, the main questions of a believer would be; are you struggling or not? Your struggle is against/for what (for example, discrimination, racism, certain social rights, etc.)? In other words, did you choose your ‘true struggle’ or are you fighting in the ‘wrong battlefield’? All in all, a post-neutrality and post-secular public sociology is intriguing and inviting such questions as the subject of negotiations in the public sphere not a mere discussion about passive co-existence, cultural absorption of the minorities and tolerance of the others. It seems that Burwoy also makes the same point. The only inconsistent part of his thesis, from this perspective, is the insistence on a certain battlefield which, for him, is ‘defending humanity and civil society’ against the tyranny of the market. Instead, I suggest that public sociology can work as a frame of debate about the priority of each battlefield. Otherwise, it can be easily turned into a target for the criticism of those who do not share the interest in Burawoy’s preferred struggle.

Conclusion

To the extent that sociologists are willing to challenge the subtraction stories and the underlying assumed neutrality, they will make a free space for creativity which is the result of practice. In this article, I have argued that we can consistently define post-secularism as a form of challenging the conception of the secular as the neutral. This critical process is not in any way, a return to the pre-modern or pre-secular. Indeed, and by contrast, it is a progressive movement of building on former achievements and, at the same time, it goes beyond the formerly fabricated borders. If there is no neutrality, a post-secular public sociology would develop around the ideal of the authenticity of struggle. Struggle from this point of view is a way of co-practice and making new identities based on the new shared collective memories of individuals who have diverging interests in society. However one needs to define the adversary of the struggle as well. Who are we fighting against? Are we defending society against the market as Burawoy and Polanyi wanted? Or might we need to defend civil society against encroachments of the state? Do we need to define it as a class-struggle or can we not use those classic sociological terms anymore? I have argued that public sociology could prepare us with a frame of dialogue about these questions. That would be a debate about the battlefield the choice of which makes more sense today.