Wrestling with the Violence and Paradoxes of Secular Power: A Forum on Saba Mahmood's Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report

SherAli Tareen is an assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His work centers on Muslim intellectual thought in early modern and modern South Asia with a focus on intra-Muslim debates and polemics on critical questions of law, politics, and theology. He is also interested in the intersection of secularism and South Asian Islam. His first monograph, “Contesting Muhammad in Modernity: Tradition, Reform, Innovation,” is forthcoming in 2019 from the University of South Carolina Press.

Arvind-Pal S. Mandair is an associate professor of Sikh studies at the University of Michigan. His publications include Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, published by Columbia University Press (2009), and Secularism and Religion-Making (with Markus Dressler), published by Oxford University Press (2011).

Nermeen Mouftah is an assistant professor of religious studies at Butler University. She is currently completing the manuscript “Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Activism between Reform and Revolution.”

John Modern is a professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (University of Illinois Press, 2001). “The Religion Machine; or, a Particular History of the Brain” is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Modern is a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and will be an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in 2018–19.