Bibliography 2: #BIB39755

Key	BIB39755
Reference type	Journal Article
Title	[Review] : Devotion to the Administrative State : Religion and Social Order in Egypt by Mona Oraby
Journal	Political Science Quarterly
Author	Fuchs, Simon Wolfgang
Year	2025
ISSN	0032-3195
Abstract	Saba Mahmood looms large in Mona Oraby's excellent new book that questions and ultimately tries to overcome influential arguments regarding the supposed privatization of religion. Mahmood, in her 2016 Religious Difference in a Secular Age, highlighted the workings of the modern (secular) nation state that “inevitably must take normative judgments about what religion is or ought to be and its proper place in the social life of a polity”. Oraby instead insists on the unbroken centrality of the sharia to Egyptian public law: “The belief that the Abrahamic traditions were revealed in succession and are irreversible in their truths remains a powerful normative framework that judges use to decide administrative questions” (125). Even more important, her account does not grant pride of place to the dominating sovereignty of the modern state in transforming religion and institutionalizing inequality while claiming to do the opposite (211). For Oraby, this role should rather be ascribed to citizens belonging to marginalized minority groups who are in an emotive bind with the state that she frequently describes as “devotion” (9). Even though this may sound strange at first to many Western readers, Oraby emphasizes that Christians and Bahá'ís are, in fact, “yearning for distinction” (4): they want to be demarcated and singled out as minorities by the Egyptian republic because only this distinction makes their communal life possible (251). To a certain extent, regulating this status difference is at the heart of what religious bodies have been engaged in for millenia. To Oraby, it is not a “unique outcome of positivist law” and “cannot be said have a modern provenance” (250). What has changed, however, is that “the difference of one's religion became intertwined with citizenship,” leading to top-down and bottom-up efforts to work out these implications (18).
Reviewed item	Devotion to the Administrative State : Religion and Social Order in Egypt / Mona Oraby. -- Princeton : Orinceton University Preess, 2024.
Language	English
Keywords	BOOK REVIEW; RELIGION; EGYPT; LAW; MINORITIES; OPPRESSION; OTHERING
URL	https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqaf032
DOI	10.1093/psquar/qqaf032
Legal note	11.
Access date	4/23/2025

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