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William D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture; Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; 236 pp.
In Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, William Hart offers a sophisticated, nuanced, and at times a refreshingly innovative interpretation of Said's critique of "culture" as the basis of "religious criticism". But H.'s analysis of Said moves beyond the descriptive for he also offers a persuasive critique of Saidian "secular criticism." The breadth of H.'s scholarship is impressive. As H. makes clear, the book is as much about Edward Said as it is about the many other thinkers he discusses. The author's approach is to use these other figures to highlight, to clarify, and at times to speculate on the all too often latent threads in Said's thinking about the religious-secular dichotomy.
H.'s point of entry is the extended dispute between Edward Said and Michael Walzer. At issue here is Michael Walzer's 1985 Exodus and Revolution. For Said, that book exemplifies the religious seduction of the secular critic. According to Said, H. argues, Walzer presents the Exodus narrative as "a paradigm for revolutionary politics", as a "sophisticated legitimation of contemporary Israeli-Palestinian relations, a historical repetition of the conquest of the land of Canaan" and as a "thinly veiled apology for the politics of the state of Israel." On H.'s reading, Said believes Walzer's work exemplifies for Said the return of repressed religiosity and the religious seduction of the secular critic.
H. openly acknowledges that his own sensibilities lie with Said rather than with Walzer. However, he argues that the Saidian attempt to divorce secular criticism from religion is mistaken, a division which forms the basis of H.'s critique of Said. H. seeks to distance himself from Said's understanding of the "meaning of secularism and about the sort of relations that a secular critic can properly have with religion." Rather than understanding secularism as "religion-abolished" or as "religion-strictly-quarantined", H. argues for what he characterizes as a complex and symbiotic relationship between secularism and religion, one in which...