Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

Talal Asad was born in Saudi Arabia and educated in Britain. He now teaches anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Among her many book titles are Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015), and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019). Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books include What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022); The Force of Nonviolence (2020); Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015); Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004); and Senses of the Subject (2015). Saba Mahmood was born in Quetta, Pakistan on February 3, 1961. She moved to the United States in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She taught at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She was a scholar of modern Egypt who specialized in sociocultural anthropology. Her work focused on the intersection of Islam and feminist theory. She wrote several books including Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject and Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. She died from pancreatic cancer on March 10, 2018 at the age of 57.