The affirmative denial “I am not religious but I am spiritual” that has achieved ubiquitous purchase in recent years crystallizes this logic of difference. The spiritual here refers to something ineffable that is not really religion but that owes its recognition precisely in relation to religion. Spirituality takes the form of secularized religion unencumbered from institutional, doctrinal, and ritual demands. The rebirth of religion as spirituality is made possible by the power of the secular imaginary within which religion represents something out there, always available for critique, moderation, and humanization. It is precisely such a secular notion of the spiritual that sustains the liberal demand for religious moderation, a demand that is made most frequently on Islam and Muslims today. For a crude yet illuminating example of this demand, consider the language of a petition advanced this year by the group “Concerned American Citizens” entitled “separating Islamic Law, Shariah, from the spiritual side of Islam.” The first few sentences of this petition read as follows: “It is time to expose the moderate Muslim. Will the Moderate Muslim be willing to eliminate egregious seventh century Islamic Law “Shariah” from the spiritual side of Islam? It is also time to take a role call on this subject and hold all moderate Muslims accountable. If these moderates wish to practice only the spiritual side of Islam and desire to assimilate into the American culture, reform is mandatory, let it begin!!!”1 Leaving aside the theatrical provocations of these statements, they capture quite well the liberal equation of spirituality and moderation. In this view, the labor of moderation requires the embrace of spirituality as the only authentic, tolerable, and respectable expression of religion. Moreover, to moderate religion is to separate its “spiritual side” from the non-spiritual. This exercise of separation stands authorized through the secular assumption that religion is a category of life readily available to be separated, moderated, purified, and humanized.
A concept like ‘moderate Islam,’ that became centrally visible during the Park 51 debate, also owes its life to such a secular politics of spirituality that assumes the universal availability of religion. The defenders of the project rushed to remind skeptic opponents that their fears were misplaced. This was only a benign community center and not a mosque. Moreover, its spiritual leader, Feisal Rauf, was a ‘moderate Muslim’ who followed the peaceful brand of ‘Sufi Islam’ and who was not to be confused with the variety of Muslims prone to violence and intolerance. These were the kinds of apologist reminders that populated public discourse during this episode.
What these protagonists of moderate Islam have not sufficiently thought about is the racist colonial history that sustains the category of ‘moderate Islam’. The process of moderating Islam intimately depends on the modern colonial inheritance of religion as an object of critique that is readily available to be moderated, rationalized, and purified. Such an inheritance becomes possible through a sovereign decision on what counts as religion worthy of toleration. The moment of tolerating religion also represents the moment of defining the limits of religion. For religion to demand toleration and respect, it must first be baptized in the holy water of moderation. Moreover, the conceit of moderate religion is animated by the same desire that seeks to separate the spiritual from the religious. Life, according to this logic, is readily available for division, definition, and translation such that the proper domains of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’, the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ might be established.
Armed with the sovereign authority to choose the limits of life, one can now choose to be spiritual but not religious, embrace moderation over extremism. But the promise of this choice remains unfulfilled. It remains deferred to an unspecified future. This is so because any sovereign attempt to moderate religion, or to separate it from spirituality, can never resolve the irresolvable contradiction of seeking to retain the name while also deferring it from itself, of wanting to have religion that is not really religion.
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