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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2005

Public/Private and references to Islam

Résumé

In this chapter, we claim that there is nothing that can be characterized as an "Islamic public sphere" outside what people actively claim to be such. We shall first ground our praxiological argument by showing that "public" and "private" are contingent categorizations only. These are characterization procedures that are always particular, always contextualized and never open to generalizations from one interaction to another, even though people contextually and situationally give them some objective meaning. From a praxiological point of view, "public" is necessarily a redundant categorization simply because the analyst cannot take into consideration anything else but procedures and references that are shared and known as such. Second, we shall substantiate our analysis through the use of cases implicating moral characterizations during the course of daily exchanges. Indeed, morality is an activity that consists in normatively characterizing preferences in the thread of an interaction. As such, it is nothing but a public object, something that has no social reality outside its instantiation in public circumstances. Third, we shall also concentrate on cases in which the judicial institution is asked to adjudicate in issues of morality. The trial is, in this sense, a paradigmatic instance of the fixation of moral preferences. It is a mechanism that is oriented par excellence to the production of a decision. In other words, law is a non-moral mode of punctual reduction of moral indeterminacy. However, as far as the "public" is concerned, it does not correspond to some "public" intervention within a realm that is allegedly "private", since it consists only in a formalized reference whose sharing is explicitly taken for known and known as constraining.
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Dates et versions

halshs-00178901 , version 1 (12-10-2007)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-00178901 , version 1

Citer

Baudouin Dupret, Jean-Noël Ferrié. Public/Private and references to Islam. A. Salvatore and M. LeVine. Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.135-153, 2005. ⟨halshs-00178901⟩
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