LAUSR

For some time now, the question about tolerance of religious diversity has largely been constituted in the terms of political liberalism: as a normative problem for a wellordered (liberal democratic) society, the solution to which may be found in a system of “reasonable pluralism” secured by an overlapping consensus. Such debates not only proceed within a modern liberal problematic constructed out of European experiences and transformations. The very categories that constitute this problematic–from “liberalism” to “Europe” to “the West”– have depended upon the production, persecution, and exclusion of an array of internal and external Others. This means that tolerance is at once far more and much less than a neutral principle that guarantees peaceful coexistence. As Wendy Brown has argued, it is also a discourse that has worked to define and regulate who and what is tolerable; shored up the dominance of those who deploy it; figured a range of Others as barbaric; justified violence; and rendered its own normativity “oblique almost to the point of invisibility.” Brown’s analysis dovetails with the relatively recent critique of secularism as a key vector of governmentality, along with the conception of religion with which it is twinned. Anthropologists, political theorists, philosophers, sociologists and scholars of religion among others have argued that secularism, constituted by liberal logic as a basic precondition of modern civilized coexistence, is a historically contingent set of norms, arrangements and subjectivities produced and regulated by the modern state. By the same token, the “religion” produced in opposition to secularism derives from