Decolonizing Secularism’s “Conceptual Matrix”

This article responds to Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2016). It highlights those aspects of the book that intersect with intellectual work that actively experiments with alternative ways of conceptualizing difference in order to bring about a more rigorous decolonization of the conceptual structures of secularity. Central to this effort is the recognition, inspired by Gilles Deleuze, that secularity’s “conceptual matrix” can be seen as a very particular “image of thought.”