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2017

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Islamic Law

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Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh Mar 2017

Religious Difference In A Secular Age: The Minority Report By Saba Mahmoud (2016) Book Review, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Minority Report is a text that tries to respond to the problem of essentializing Islam (the culturalism problem) by performing a flip so that all the bad attributes typically associated with “Islam” are now attributed to secularism instead. It is secularism that discriminates, that is sectarian, that encourages violence, that is repressive, sexist, etc. This Mahmood does by on the one hand hyper-politicizing secularism (depleting it of its universalist drive), and on the other under-politicizing it by ignoring its internal indeterminacy, complexity, open structure and varied distributive effects. The result is an account that moves between crude historicism-secularism is …


Calling All The Statesmen: The (Not) Mubarak Trial, Lama Abu-Odeh Jan 2017

Calling All The Statesmen: The (Not) Mubarak Trial, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I read the decision that exonerated ex-Minister of Interior of Egypt and his assistants from the charge of giving orders to kill demonstrators textually. Shortcomings known to lawyers and journalists who were following the case about failure of performance on the part either of prosecutors, lawyers, or the judge overseeing the trial are not considered in my reading. You might call it a close reading—specifically, a reading of the rationalizing language used by the judge writing the decision to explain his verdict.