“No man ever gained much honor by writing against a king”

]There are a lot of interesting threads to pick up on in these posts, and I am excited to see if any of the questions that Mahmood (or we) have posed are answerable. Mahmood indeed calls upon the academy to the explore tensions between “the labor entailed in the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own beliefs in certain secular conceptions of liberty and attachment” (91), so our discussion (here and in class) is a step towards answering his call. Perhaps mostly because I, perhaps like some others that have expressed frustration with the pertinence of ‘critique’ to their work, am always reading for material I can use in my own work, what I take away from Mahmood has the potential to be off topic. Hopefully, though, my thoughts on Mahmood will be relevant.
What did I find most compelling about Mahmood’s “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?”. .. ? Well, I was drawn to the concept of the iconoclast, but more in terms of political, than religious, authority. Mahmood asserts that ‘icon’ “refers not simply to an image but to a cluster of meanings that might suggest a persona, an authoritative presence, or even a shared imagination” (74). An iconoclast works to break this cluster of meanings, potentially threatening the persona, authority, or shared imagination. So was the Danish cartoon (of which I have never heard before) iconoclastic? Did it (threaten to) destroy the authority of Muhammed? The only knowledge I possess of the Muslim reaction to the cartoon derive from Mahmood’s article. Her construction of the events suggests that the Muslims were deeply offended by the cartoon rather than led to disbelief, which makes me think that, were the cartoon an iconoclast, it was an ineffective one. An earlier instance of an ineffective iconoclast was Milton’s Eikonoklastes, in which he denigrates Charles I as a tyrant, carefully unravelling the rhetoric of Eikon Basilike and attempting to destroy the earlier text’s martyr-like construction of the king. Eikonoklastes was a relatively unsuccessful attempt to defame the dead king. Yet, Milton’s intent behind the work was made abundantly clear--even by the title! Milton, the heretic! Is the Danish cartoon blasphemy? Heresy? What the Danish cartoonists were trying to accomplish with the cartoon is less obviously iconoclastic, and I would have liked to have seen Mahmood more carefully consider the implications of iconoclasm in relation to the cartoon. Is the “choice” to follow/honor a king analogous to the “choice” to believe in and adhere to a particular religion and its tenets? Can we consider secular authority alongside religious authority?
Conversely, is it even possible to consider religion and secular power separately? Mahmood characterizes the interaction between secularism and religion as one of domination: “secularism has historically entailed the regulation and reformation of religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices to yield to a particular normative conception of religion” (87). Therefore, I find it problematic to consider whether critique is secular without considering the way in which religion potentially operates in it or complicates it. If we work with the premise that secularism and religion could be at play in critique, then, we are left with a new question: how do secularism and religion function in critique?