“I’m scared of those women in chadors.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. Not all of them are supporters of the government. Look at my aunts. They dress like that.”

“Yeah, but you can’t trust them. Look at the way they’re looking at me. I feel like they’re going to come and choke me. I’m scared they’ll confront me, and that somehow something bad will happen because of the way they act.”

“Don’t be scared. Nothing is happening right now. I mean, some of them can have that weapon ready to fire, but we still can’t make a definite judgment about all of them. Wearing a hijab is not the same thing as supporting the government. Not everyone who wears one supports them.”

“Yeah.”

“But they’re frightening. Really frightening.”

“Because of the way they look at you?”

“Not only that. It’s everything that comes with it. You grow up seeing these things. You hear what happened to people. You see what happens in the street. Then you get on the metro and suddenly there’s one of them sitting across from you, staring at you. I’m scared that I’ll put my foot on the train, one of them will start an argument with me, and somehow, I’ll end up being pushed in front of the train. Maybe it sounds irrational, but historical experience has taught us that these people can be violent.”

The fear in this conversation is real, but what is real about it is not necessarily the proposition contained in it. The person who fears the woman in the chador is not simply making a judgment about another individual. She is encountering an accumulation of historical meanings that have attached themselves to a body, a garment, a gaze, and a public space. The woman in front of her has become difficult to distinguish from the history that appears to stand behind her: religious authority, state enforcement, moral policing, street confrontation, memories of punishment, stories of violence, political identification, and the strange heaviness of a gaze that seems to contain more than the person who is looking. The gaze becomes heavy because it is interpreted as the gaze of an institution, and the body becomes frightening because it seems to carry the institution with it.

Yet this is precisely where the philosophical difficulty begins. A history can produce a genuine fear without making every individual who bears one of its signs identical with the history that produced the fear. The woman in the chador may be a supporter of the government, or she may not be; she may be religious, political, apolitical, frightened herself, indifferent, or opposed to the very institution with which the observer associates her. The philosophical problem is therefore not simply whether the fear is justified. It is how a historical relation becomes an apparent essence, how a symbol becomes a subject, how a garment becomes a political will, and how a person becomes the representative of an entire structure before she has done anything at all. What is frightening here is not simply another person. It is the historical compression through which another person comes to appear as an institution, and through which an institution becomes visible through a person. The problem is therefore already larger than fear. It concerns the manner in which tradition makes relations between bodies, symbols, laws, authorities, memories, and political forms durable, and the manner in which those same relations can later become unstable without disappearing.

I want to begin precisely there, because this small scene reveals something much larger about the way we have imagined the state, religion, tradition, and even ourselves. One of the great obstacles to thinking about secularism today is what I would call the myth of state-phobia: the assumption that the state, simply by being the state, is an essentially dominating force that stands outside us and acts upon our subjectivity from above, so that whatever emerges against the state must automatically count as an emancipatory movement. I do not think this is enough. Nor do I think that the opposite position, according to which the state is simply legitimate because it is the state, tells us anything useful. The same problem appears when religion is treated as an intrinsically oppressive substance or, conversely, as an intrinsically sacred and therefore unquestionable one. Both positions turn historical formations into metaphysical objects. Both create myths.

What matters for the kind of secularism I am trying to formulate is not whether the state or religion possesses some eternal essence of domination or liberation, but how the political, social, legal, military, civic, religious, mythical, and institutional roles that we call state, city, country, army, religion, law, nation, and myth are continuously redefined within a tradition. The question is not simply who dominates whom. The question is how the field in which domination, authority, resistance, obligation, belonging, rights, and political identity become intelligible is itself repeatedly reorganized. Something that appears “against the state” may reproduce another form of domination; something that appears “against religion” may simply replace one mythology with another; something that appears obedient may contain an internal reinterpretation that only becomes visible much later. The important distinction is therefore not between state and anti-state, religion and anti-religion, or tradition and anti-tradition, but between fixed identities and renewed relations.

This is why soft secularism cannot be reduced to the separation of religion and politics. In fact, that formulation is too narrow to capture what I mean. Soft secularism does not begin with two entities called religion and politics and then attempt to draw a line between them. It begins with tradition as the dense historical field in which religion and politics have already been entangled with law, family, memory, territory, language, morality, military power, collective identity, myth, architecture, clothing, ritual, and everyday life. The task is not to empty this field until only a minimal political structure remains. It is to understand how the field itself changes its internal relations. The state does not have to disappear for the state to change. Religion does not have to disappear for religion to change. Tradition does not have to be abandoned for tradition to change. What changes is the role that each of these things is permitted, expected, or required to play within a continuously reconstituted whole. Soft secularism is therefore not a doctrine of subtraction. It is a process of redefinition. It is tradition discovering, often unwillingly and without a final plan, that the forms through which it once organized its own existence cannot simply remain in the same relation to one another when the conditions of existence have changed.

The important point is that this redefinition does not occur outside tradition, as though an enlightened subject could step out of history, redesign the whole structure, and then return to it. The redefinition occurs through people who are already inside the tradition, through conflicts that emerge within it, through institutions that have already been formed, through laws that have already been enacted, and through experiences that have already become part of collective memory.

This is where Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī becomes important to me, not because he was secretly a secular thinker, which he plainly was not, but because his philosophy gives us a way of thinking about historical continuity without reducing continuity to repetition. His account of renewed wills, al-irādāt al-mutajaddida, allows us to see how something can remain connected to what came before without remaining identical to it. He distinguishes what acts by nature from what acts by will, and within willing he distinguishes between a permanent will and renewed wills. The renewed will belongs especially to a world in which things change, decay, succeed one another, and acquire new conditions through what has already happened. A voluntary movement occurs because there is a will for it, but the continuation of movement requires another act of willing. The first will produces a movement. The movement reaches a result. Knowledge of that result becomes the condition for another will. The second will is therefore born from the first movement, but it is not identical with the first will. It is neither a repetition nor an absolute beginning. It is new because the world in which it occurs has already been changed by what came before.

This is the first idea I take from Abū al-Barakāt: A realized will does not terminate willing; it changes the conditions under which willing can continue.

This distinction matters because it allows us to understand renewal without imagining that every new act must come from nowhere. The second will is genuinely new precisely because it is conditioned by something that has already happened. Its dependence upon the previous movement does not cancel its novelty. On the contrary, that dependence is what makes its novelty historically intelligible.

That point is essential because it allows us to escape two equally inadequate images of history. In the first, everything repeats itself: tradition simply reproduces tradition, institutions reproduce institutions, and the future is merely the past wearing new clothes. In the second, genuine novelty must arrive through rupture: something completely new must destroy what existed before it. Abū al-Barakāt’s renewed will gives us another possibility. The new can emerge from the consequences of the old without being reducible to the old. The second will needs the first because it inherits the world produced by the first, but precisely because it inherits a transformed world, it cannot simply be the first will again.

This is not merely a theory of individual action. It gives us a model for understanding institutions, laws, political arrangements, cultural forms, and traditions. A law is a realized will. Once realized, however, it produces a world that was not present before its realization. That world becomes the condition for another will. A political institution is created to solve a problem, but its existence changes the problem. A social norm is established to stabilize a relation, but stabilization creates new expectations. A religious practice is preserved under new conditions, and in being preserved it acquires meanings that were not exhausted by its original function. Renewal therefore does not mean abandoning continuity. It means recognizing that continuity itself produces difference.

The structure becomes even more precise when we follow the movement through knowledge. The first will produces a movement from A to B. Once B is reached, knowledge of B becomes possible. That knowledge is not merely an observation added to the original action; it becomes part of the causal history of what follows. A new will arises in relation to the knowledge of B and produces movement toward C. C then becomes the condition for another act of knowing and another will. What matters here is that each new will is both conditioned and causally productive. It comes after something, but it also creates something that was not there before. This gives us a model of historical development in which consequences are not passive residues. Consequences become active elements in the production of the future.

A society therefore does not simply “have” a history. It acts through the knowledge of what its previous actions have produced. Its institutions become experiences. Its experiences become knowledge. Its knowledge becomes the condition of renewed willing. This is precisely why a realized tradition can become the condition for its own reinterpretation. The tradition is not simply carried forward. It is encountered again through the knowledge of what its previous forms have done.

The second idea I take from Abū al-Barakāt concerns time. Time, in his philosophical framework, cannot simply be reduced to the measurement of motion, because it is bound more deeply to the continuation or extension of existence. This is crucial for understanding renewed willing. A will does not merely happen at a particular moment and disappear. Its consequences extend into a world that continues after the original act. The persistence of a will through history therefore does not require that the will remain identical to itself. It requires that it remain capable of being renewed.

This gives us the second principle: A will persists through time not by remaining identical to itself, but by becoming capable of renewal within the continuation of existence.

Tradition can therefore be understood not as a fixed object that survives by resisting all change, but as a historical form of continued existence whose survival depends upon its capacity to enter into new relations. A tradition that cannot be renewed does not become more purely traditional. It becomes incapable of living historically. This is why time in the present argument is not simply chronological distance. It is the continuation of existence through which an earlier will acquires consequences that can no longer be separated from the conditions of later willing.

This is where I want to place tradition at the center of the theory. Tradition is neither entirely ours nor entirely foreign. We do not create it from nothing, but neither do we simply receive it as an untouched object. We enter it before we have consciously chosen to enter it. It gives us languages, memories, categories, prohibitions, symbols, stories, institutions, forms of belonging, ways of understanding the sacred and profane, and even ways of recognizing what counts as a problem. But because we enter it as living beings, we also alter it. We ask questions that it did not previously contain in the same form. We bring it into contact with experiences that earlier generations could not have known. We resist some of its meanings, preserve others, reinterpret still others, and sometimes discover that what seemed like one thing from one historical distance appears as something entirely different from another.

Tradition therefore grows through a dialogue between itself and those who inhabit it. Yet this dialogue is not a meeting between two independent parties, because we are already shaped by the tradition with which we are negotiating. We do not stand outside it in order to reform it. We reform it from within, and the very capacity to reform it is partly inherited from it. The new does not have to arrive from outside the old in order to be genuinely new. Sometimes the most radical novelty appears when something already present in tradition enters into a relation that did not previously exist.

This means that tradition should not be imagined as a homogeneous system seeking unity. Its actual form is closer to a dense accumulation of things that do not always fit together neatly. It contains religious commitments and political institutions, myths and laws, armies and rituals, cities and memories, prohibitions and desires, inherited moral vocabularies and newly invented social practices. It can contain contradictions without immediately resolving them. It can preserve incompatible interpretations side by side. It can absorb something foreign without ever making it completely foreign or completely its own. It is precisely this density that makes tradition historically productive. What looks like disorder from one perspective can reveal an unexpected structure from another. What looks unified from one distance can appear radically plural from another. Tradition is therefore both ordered and disordered, coherent and incoherent, continuous and internally divided. This is not a defect that must be corrected before political philosophy can begin. It is the very condition in which political philosophy has to operate. The tradition does not first become a coherent object and then enter history. It is coherent enough to persist and unstable enough to change, and the tension between these two conditions is precisely what allows renewed wills to work through it.

For this reason, I want to describe tradition not through minimalism but through “maximalism”. This is not maximalism in the sense of demanding the maximum amount of law, the maximum amount of state power, or the maximum amount of religious authority. It is maximalism as a description of the density of historical existence. Imagine a room that is completely messy. There is a frame hanging on the wall, a dog barking somewhere in the room, and an Iranian carpet covered in intricate patterns. Books are lying on the floor, while some of them have somehow ended up on top of the refrigerator. My shoes are a pair of pink and yellow shoes. Nothing appears to obey a single organizing principle. Yet the room is not without order. I can walk through it. I know where I am. I recognize the objects. I remember why some things are there. Someone else entering the room might see only chaos, while I might see a very particular arrangement whose logic has emerged through years of living. The room is not orderly because every object occupies its ideal place. It is orderly because relations have developed among objects that do not need to be reduced to a single scheme.

Tradition is like this. Its apparent disorder is not the absence of order; it is an order whose multiplicity becomes visible when we stop demanding that everything conform to one principle. Its maximalism consists precisely in the fact that it contains more relations than any single organizing principle can exhaust.

This is why soft secularism should not be understood as an attempt to clean the room. It is not the secular equivalent of throwing away the carpet, removing the dog, putting every book on a shelf, choosing one color of shoe, and declaring that the room has finally become rational. Such a project would misunderstand the very historical material with which secularism has to work. Soft secularism moves through the maximalism of tradition. It finds possibilities for differentiation within an already overcrowded field of meanings. It discovers that a new order can emerge without first producing emptiness. It does not require that religion be removed, that the state be minimized, that law become thin, that tradition be purified, or that public life become ideologically neutral. It asks instead what new relations can be generated among the things that already exist. Its task is not to make the room empty. Its task is to make the room newly inhabitable.

It is therefore important that “soft” not be misunderstood as a synonym for weak, harmless, moderate, or politically insignificant. Softness describes the manner in which the transformation occurs. It moves slowly because it has no external point from which to impose a complete arrangement upon the whole. It grows through displacements, protests, crises, refusals, encounters, institutional failures, legal contradictions, new experiences, and changes in the meaning of inherited practices. It may begin so quietly that nobody recognizes it as secularism. Only later, after the accumulated consequences have become visible, does one realize that the relations among the objects in the room have changed.

This is also why I reject the assumption that secularism necessarily requires a minimalist law or a minimalist political order. What soft secularism requires may be almost the opposite: a kind of legal and political maximalism, in the sense that multiple layers of authority, identity, right, obligation, public interest, religious practice, personal autonomy, institutional responsibility, collective memory, and historical belonging may all remain present at once. The challenge is not to reduce them to one another but to discover how they can be differentiated without being falsely separated. A society does not become secular because it has fewer things in it. It can become secular because the things already in it acquire new relations to one another. This is a much more difficult conception of secularism because it refuses the fantasy of purification. There is no clean room waiting behind the messy room. There is only the possibility of seeing the room differently.

Legal and political maximalism therefore does not mean that the state should legislate more, punish more, regulate more, or penetrate more deeply into social life. It means that law and politics themselves must be understood as dense historical formations containing multiple, sometimes contradictory layers of authority and meaning. The legal order is not a thin instrument placed above society. It is one of the things inside the room.

This point is essential because every law is a piece of tradition. A law does not stand outside the historical room and then enter it from above. It is produced by a particular configuration of wills, concepts, fears, memories, religious interpretations, political interests, institutional capacities, and historical experiences. Once enacted, however, it becomes an object within the same room. It encounters other laws, other practices, other beliefs, other institutions, other bodies, and other forms of memory. It can reinforce one part of tradition while disturbing another. It can stabilize a religious interpretation while generating resistance to the political institution that enforces it. It can protect a practice while changing the meaning of that practice. It can attempt to freeze a relationship and thereby produce new relationships that undermine the very stability it sought to create. The law is therefore not simply a command. It is a historical object that begins to live among other historical objects. Its meaning is continually reconstructed through what it encounters. This is what I mean by legal maximalism as an extension of traditional maximalism: the law is itself one dense piece of an already dense world, and its effects cannot be understood independently of the other pieces with which it is entangled.

A law may therefore be understood as a temporary crystallization of tradition. It gives a particular relation a fixed institutional form at a particular moment, but this fixation does not remove the relation from history. On the contrary, it gives the relation a new history. Once the law exists, people experience it. They obey it, evade it, contest it, reinterpret it, internalize it, criticize it, use it against one another, or detach their own beliefs from the coercive authority that claims to represent them. These experiences become knowledge. Knowledge generates renewed wills. The renewed wills then return to the law itself. They demand amendment, reinterpretation, resistance, repeal, stronger enforcement, weaker enforcement, alternative institutions, or new distinctions between what should remain a religious obligation and what should become a matter of public coercion. The law therefore reproduces the very process through which it came into being. It becomes a realized will that produces the conditions of another will. This is where the Baghdādian structure becomes a philosophy of law without ceasing to be a philosophy of renewed willing.

Iranian law concerning hijab offers an especially clear example of this process. Article 638 of the Fifth Book of the Islamic Penal Code places openly committing a ḥarām act in public places and roads within criminal law and separately provides punishment for women who appear in such places without “Islamic hijab.” The important point for my argument is not simply that a religious norm has become a criminal norm. It is that this transformation produces a new relation among religion, law, state, public space, and individual conduct. A norm that can be understood religiously becomes institutionally legible as a matter of public regulation. Once this happens, the norm no longer exists in exactly the same historical position it occupied before institutionalization. The state gives it procedures, sanctions, visibility, enforcement mechanisms, and a particular kind of public meaning.

But the law itself then becomes part of tradition and therefore becomes subject to the same process of renewed willing that produced it. The legal meaning of hijab is no longer exhausted by the theological meaning of hijab. It becomes entangled with public space, criminality, citizenship, authority, resistance, gender, political identity, fear, and memory.

A realized law changes the world in which people live. People respond to it. Some comply because they believe in the underlying religious obligation. Some comply because they fear punishment. Some resist the law while continuing to regard the religious practice as meaningful. Some reject both. Some wear the hijab while rejecting the political order that enforces it. Others remove it precisely because the state has attached political meaning to what they once understood as religious or cultural practice. These responses become new historical facts. The law therefore cannot simply freeze the meaning of hijab. It multiplies its meanings. It can turn a garment into a sign of faith, coercion, family, resistance, identity, memory, conformity, protest, or political allegiance. The attempt to stabilize meaning can therefore generate new meanings. This is renewed will at the institutional level. The law does not merely regulate tradition; it enters tradition and is itself transformed by the tradition it regulates.

Here the familiar language of secularism becomes insufficient. If the only question is whether religion should be separated from politics, we miss the more interesting transformation. The question is how a religious obligation, once translated into state coercion, produces a new historical distinction between religious obligation and political enforcement. The person who says “I believe this is religiously required, but I do not believe the state should punish people for failing to do it” has not necessarily become secular in the conventional sense. Yet a distinction has emerged inside the tradition that did not need to exist in the same form before the religious norm became an object of criminal regulation. Soft secularism inhabits this distinction. It does not demand the disappearance of the religious norm. It changes the relation between the norm and the authority that claims the right to enforce it.

This distinction is crucial because it shows why soft secularism is not simply the weakening of religion. Religion may remain entirely meaningful to the individual while its political and legal authority is differentiated. The secular movement is therefore not necessarily a movement away from religion; it can be a movement toward a more complex distribution of authority within a tradition that continues to contain religion.

This same logic extends beyond hijab. Laws concerning enjoining good and forbidding wrong, public morality, criticism of officials, the protection of privacy, and the institutional responsibilities attached to religious norms all demonstrate how tradition becomes institutionalized and then encounters its own consequences. Once institutionalized, tradition is no longer merely inherited doctrine. It becomes a network of roles, procedures, rights, obligations, sanctions, expectations, and interpretations. This network can become extremely dense. And that density is precisely why the image of minimal secularism is inadequate. The secular transformation does not necessarily simplify the world. It can make the world more differentiated while remaining just as full. The legal order can remain extensive while its internal authorities become more differentiated. Political institutions can remain strong while no longer claiming one undifferentiated authority over every dimension of life. Maximalism in this sense is not a celebration of coercion. It is an acknowledgment of density.

The same principle applies to political maximalism. A political order is not simply the state standing above the citizen. It is a field of relations among citizens, institutions, laws, cities, armies, families, religious organizations, economic structures, cultural memories, and forms of collective identity. A political maximalism worthy of the name does not mean that one institution should dominate all others. It means that political life cannot be reduced to one relation, such as state versus individual. There are many relations, and they continually redefine one another. The citizen is also a believer, a family member, a worker, a resident of a city, a participant in a culture, a bearer of memories, and an interpreter of law. The state encounters all these dimensions at once. Soft secularism therefore does not seek to erase the density of political identity. It seeks to prevent any single institution from mythologizing itself as the sole source of meaning within that density.

This is why the relation between state and religion must be understood differently. Neither has an absolute priority over the other in soft secularism. The state does not become the final container of religion, and religion does not become the final source of political legitimacy. Both are contained within a larger historical field: tradition. Tradition “swallows” both, not by destroying them, but by making them elements of a larger historical process. It is from within this field that new relations emerge. The state may become less religious without religion becoming less culturally important. Religious communities may become more autonomous without becoming politically irrelevant. Laws may distinguish between religious duty and state coercion without denying the existence of religious duty. These are not contradictions to be eliminated. They are precisely the kinds of differentiated relations through which soft secularism develops.

This is also why the idea of temporal distance is so important. A crisis rarely solves itself in the moment of crisis. A society responds to an event, and that response becomes part of the conditions of the next event. A protest may produce a reform; the reform may produce a new expectation; the expectation may produce disappointment; the disappointment may generate another protest. A law may suppress a practice; suppression may politicize the practice; politicization may produce resistance; resistance may generate new institutional responses. The passage of time does not automatically resolve the contradiction. It allows the consequences of the previous response to become visible. Temporal distance therefore does not mean that history heals itself. It means that history accumulates enough consequences for a previous will to become intelligible as part of a new situation. This is why a crisis should be regarded as part of oneself and one’s mode of living rather than as something that must always be expelled as an alien interruption.

The openness to crisis is therefore not a sentimental openness. It can be painful, dangerous, and deeply uncomfortable. But if a tradition treats every crisis as something completely external to itself, it loses the ability to understand how the crisis has emerged through its own relations. This is why even destructive historical events can become part of the formation of a new political and secular structure.

Terrorism is an extreme example. To say that terrorism can become historical material within soft secularism is not to defend terrorism, justify it, or claim that religious belief naturally leads to it. It is to recognize that terrorism can reveal what happens when a tradition enters a dangerous relation with an external object and responds through withdrawal, anger, unilateral definition, or violence. The event then changes the institutions that follow it. It changes security practices, public fears, religious interpretation, political identities, state capacities, and the meanings attached to particular forms of religious or political expression. The event becomes part of the room. It cannot be removed from the history simply because we morally reject it. Its consequences become part of the conditions of later willing. In this sense, even catastrophic violence can be absorbed into the historical production of new forms, though this does not make the violence itself necessary or legitimate.

This is why I do not think soft secularism can ever give itself to subjectivity as a separate autonomous entity. It is not something that stands outside tradition and waits to be discovered. It does not exist as a finished ideology that can be handed to society. It is always after another will. Something has already happened; a relation has already been formed; a law has already been enacted; a crisis has already occurred; a symbol has already become politically charged; a generation has already experienced something differently from the generation before it. Soft secularism emerges from the renewed relation to that prior will. It is therefore always “mutajaddid”: renewed. It never remains at one point, but neither does it follow a guaranteed direction. It can stop. It can be interrupted. It can be repressed. It can be redirected into something authoritarian or exclusionary. Nothing in the theory guarantees that renewal will produce a morally better world. What it guarantees is only that realized forms create the conditions for new willing.

This is also why soft secularism requires self-knowledge. But self-knowledge here cannot mean arriving at a final definition of who we are. It means precisely the opposite: becoming capable of recognizing that every definition of the self remains incomplete because the self exists through relations that continue to change. Soft secularism contains within itself a kind of non-arrival at the self, a failure—or better, an impossibility—of ever fully reaching oneself. We are always becoming intelligible to ourselves from a position that has already been changed by what we have learned.

This is again visible in Abū al-Barakāt’s renewed will. The second will does not arrive after the first as though history had reached a conclusion. It emerges because the first will has already altered the conditions from which the second will is formed. Then the second becomes part of the conditions from which another will emerges. A produces B, but B does not merely replace A. B takes something from A, transforms it through its own realization, and then becomes a condition through which A itself can be reinterpreted. What we become helps us understand what we were, and what we understand ourselves to have been becomes material for what we might become next. Self-knowledge is therefore not a final possession of the self. It is an endless revision of the relation between past and future.

This is why soft secularism is calm, but not because it is passive. It is calm because it has no final object to destroy. It does not promise to end religion, end tradition, end the state, end myth, or end history. It works through their redefinition. The softness lies in the absence of a final act. There is no point at which one can say: now the work is finished. There is only another relation to be reconsidered. The secular does not arrive as a completed condition. It appears as an altered capacity to distinguish, negotiate, reinterpret, and live together within a tradition that remains full. It can be almost invisible while it is happening and enormous once its consequences have accumulated. A small shift in the meaning of a religious practice can eventually change the meaning of public space. A change in the meaning of public space can alter the relationship between citizen and law. That alteration can change how authority is perceived. That change can produce new political identities. Those identities can alter the tradition from which they emerged.

The opening fear therefore becomes more complicated when seen through this framework. The woman in the chador does not need to be transformed into a symbol of liberation for us to reject the assumption that she is necessarily an agent of state power. Nor does she need to be transformed into an innocent religious subject for us to recognize the historical reality of coercion. What matters is to break the mythical identification between the symbol and the institution. The chador is not the state. The state is not religion. Religion is not tradition. Tradition is not the government. And none of these is identical with the subject who encounters the others. Yet they have all entered into relations with one another, and those relations have produced real consequences. Soft secularism begins when we become capable of seeing those relations without converting them into essences.

This is what I mean by the demythologization of both state and religion. Demythologization does not mean hostility toward them. It means refusing to grant them an absolute character that history itself does not possess. The state is not naturally terrifying. Religion is not naturally oppressive. Neither is naturally emancipatory. They acquire political and social functions within particular traditions and historical arrangements. A state can protect, repress, redistribute, educate, discipline, symbolize, remember, forget, organize, and destroy. Religion can console, bind, divide, discipline, inspire, legitimate, resist, interpret, and transform. None of these capacities is contained in an eternal essence called “the state” or “religion.” Their meanings emerge through the roles they occupy within a tradition. To demythologize them is therefore to return them to history. Once returned to history, they become capable of being redefined. And once they become capable of redefinition, neither resistance to them nor obedience to them can be regarded as automatically emancipatory or automatically oppressive. Their meaning depends upon the historical relations through which they are enacted.

This is why I resist state-phobia as much as I resist state-worship. If we imagine the state as an external monster that necessarily invades our subjectivity, then our political imagination becomes strangely dependent on the state we claim to oppose. Every act against it becomes automatically virtuous, and every act performed through it becomes automatically suspect. But our task is more difficult. We must ask what kind of state, performing what role, within what tradition, under what historical conditions, through what laws, and in relation to what conception of the citizen. The same question must be asked of religion. The point is not to discover whether either is secretly good or evil. The point is to understand the historical game through which their roles are continually assigned and reassigned. Soft secularism is this redefinition of roles within tradition.

The word “game” here should not suggest triviality. The stakes can be enormous. A role can determine who is protected and who is punished, who is recognized and who is excluded, whose body is considered legitimate in public, whose speech counts as criticism, whose religious practice is protected, and whose political identity is presumed. But precisely because the stakes are so high, we need to stop treating the institutions involved as metaphysical substances. If the state is an eternal monster, there is nothing to analyze. If religion is an eternal truth embodied in an institution, there is nothing to analyze. Political thought begins when these things return to the contingency of history without becoming arbitrary. Their roles have histories. Their meanings have consequences. Their institutions have been made, stabilized, challenged, and remade.

A law remains law, an institution remains an institution, religion remains religion, and the state remains the state, but their relations to one another become less predetermined. The point is not to eliminate the pieces. It is to make their relations revisable.

This is where the distinction between maximalism and minimalism becomes indispensable. A minimalist imagination says: remove religion from politics, reduce the state, simplify law, and the problem will become manageable. A maximalist conception of tradition begins from the opposite fact: there are already too many things here to be reduced without remainder. There are religious obligations, constitutional arrangements, legal rights, cultural memories, political identities, families, cities, armies, myths, economic relations, technologies, personal desires, collective traumas, and inherited forms of belonging. The task is therefore not to erase the excess. It is to learn how to move through it. Soft secularism is a practice of differentiation within excess. It is not over-secularization. It is not an attempt to make every dimension of life secular. Rather, it reveals different dimensions of the same historical world and makes possible a form of unity that does not require their reduction to one another. The unity it seeks is therefore not uniformity. It is the possibility of inhabiting plurality without requiring plurality to disappear.

This also explains why crisis is so important. A crisis does not simply interrupt tradition from outside. It reveals the relations that were already there. A political crisis may show that a religious symbol has acquired institutional meaning. A social crisis may reveal that a legal category no longer corresponds to lived experience. A violent crisis may expose the danger of a unilateral relation to the world. A protest may show that a supposedly unified tradition contains incompatible wills. A new generation may reveal that the inherited meaning of a practice has already changed. The crisis does not solve itself merely by the passage of time. Instead, temporal distance allows the consequences of responses to become visible. One solution becomes another problem. Another problem produces another will. The tradition becomes more complex precisely because it has survived. To become receptive to crisis is therefore not to celebrate crisis. It is to understand that crisis can become part of one’s own mode of living, because the responses to crisis are themselves absorbed into the tradition and become conditions for future action.

This is why soft secularism should not be understood as a destination toward which Iran, or any other society, is inevitably traveling. What is inevitable is not secularization but renewed willing. There is no guarantee that renewed willing will produce liberalism, democracy, tolerance, or peace. It can produce repression. It can produce violence. It can produce religious revival. It can produce authoritarianism. It can produce political fragmentation. But whatever form it takes, it alters the conditions of subsequent willing. The path is not predetermined. The path is generated by the consequences of previous movement. In this precise sense, where will persists, it finds its way—not because a destination has been assigned to it, but because each realized movement creates the terrain on which another movement becomes possible.

“Finding its way” therefore has no teleological meaning. It does not mean that history secretly knows where it is going. It means that a realized will produces consequences, consequences become knowledge, knowledge opens new possibilities of willing, and renewed willing produces another historical situation.

This is also why I would say that Iran cannot permanently escape the path of soft secularism. This does not mean that Iran must become a Western-style secular state, nor that religion will disappear from public life, nor that the state will necessarily become institutionally neutral in the conventional sense. It means something more fundamental: Iran cannot stop being historical. It cannot indefinitely reproduce every inherited relationship in exactly the form in which it was once established. The effort to preserve a relation changes that relation. The attempt to enforce a tradition changes the meaning of the tradition. The attempt to resist an institution changes the political meaning of resistance. The attempt to preserve a religious symbol can politicize the symbol. The attempt to depoliticize it can itself become political. Every realized will becomes part of the conditions of another. Institutions can delay, repress, distort, or redirect this renewal, but they cannot permanently abolish the historical fact that existence continues through changed conditions.

The image of skin-shedding therefore becomes useful, but only if we resist turning it into a progressive myth. A living organism sometimes sheds an old skin because continued existence requires another form. The new skin does not prove that the old skin was evil. Nor does it guarantee that what comes next will be better. It simply shows that continuation requires transformation. Iran’s transformation can be understood similarly. The alternative is not between being Iranian and becoming something else. The alternative is between remaining capable of historical renewal and attempting to freeze oneself into a form that no longer corresponds to the life being lived within it. Tradition does not survive by remaining untouched. It survives by metabolizing what happens to it. A tradition that refuses every transformation eventually transforms anyway, because the attempt to freeze it changes the meaning of what it is trying to preserve.

And this is why the messiness of the room matters. The frame on the wall, the barking dog, the Iranian carpet, the books on the floor, the books on top of the refrigerator, the pink and yellow shoes: none of these objects needs to be eliminated for a new order to become possible. Their relations can change. The room can become more inhabitable without becoming empty. A book can move from the floor to a shelf without ceasing to be the same book. The carpet can remain while the meaning of the room changes. The dog can continue barking. The pink and yellow shoes can remain absurdly pink and yellow. The point is not to impose a single aesthetic principle on the room. The point is to understand that an existing order can be reorganized from within its maximalism.

Tradition is exactly this kind of room. Its disorder is not the opposite of order. It is order seen from the wrong distance, or perhaps order whose multiplicity we have mistaken for chaos. What appears to be a mess from outside can contain a practical intelligibility for those who live within it, while what appears perfectly ordered from outside may conceal conflicts that become visible only from within.

Soft secularism therefore does not seek to clean tradition. It seeks to read it differently. It does not reduce the number of meanings. It makes it possible for those meanings to occupy different relations to one another. It does not demand that religion surrender to politics or politics surrender to religion. It asks how both can be understood as historical roles within a tradition whose own internal relations are changing. It does not eliminate myth. It demythologizes existing myths and thereby creates the possibility of new ones. This point is important because modern political life cannot exist without myths. The nation, the state, the people, the constitution, the revolution, the sacred, the citizen, the army, the city, even the idea of secularism itself can become mythic objects. The task is not to abolish myth but to prevent any particular myth from presenting itself as eternal and untouchable. Soft secularism opens the possibility of new myths precisely by loosening the old ones.

This is why the work of self-knowledge never ends. We do not reach a final self that stands behind all our historical transformations. We learn ourselves through the transformations. We understand an old fear differently because of what happened afterward. We understand an institution differently because of its consequences. We understand religion differently because of its political history. We understand the state differently because we discover that the state is not simply outside us but one of the historical forms through which our own collective life has been organized. We understand tradition differently because we discover that what we called tradition was already full of competing wills. Self-knowledge therefore means remaining capable of being surprised by oneself. Soft secularism is soft because it does not close this process. It does not give the subject a final identity from which all future judgments can be made. It makes the subject responsible for continuing the work of understanding the relations through which it has become what it is.

The person who fears the woman in the chador may therefore eventually fear something else. Tomorrow it may be the woman in a bikini with a dinosaur tattoo. The day after, it may be a man wearing something that appears culturally alien, a migrant, a religious minority, a political activist, an artificial intelligence, a new form of sexuality, a new technology, or simply a person whose appearance no longer fits the categories through which the previous generation organized public life. The point is not that these objects are equivalent. They are not. The point is that the structure of fear can reproduce itself by continually finding new objects. If we merely exchange one object of fear for another, we have not undergone secularization. We have only changed the costume of the myth.

Soft secularism requires a deeper movement: the ability to recognize that the object of fear is being produced within a historical relation and to ask what that relation has made visible, invisible, legitimate, or terrifying. The task is not to guarantee that we will never fear again. It is to make fear incapable of automatically becoming an ontology of the other.

This is why secularism, understood through self-knowledge, contains a “not reaching oneself.” It is a form of self-recognition that cannot become complete because the self is continuously transformed by what it recognizes. The will creates B out of A, but B then returns to A and changes what A means. A becomes intelligible through B, while B remains dependent upon A for the conditions of its own emergence. The relation is recursive. There is no final letter of the alphabet at which history stops. There is only the continuous reworking of what has already been inherited. Abū al-Barakāt’s renewed will gives us a philosophical language for this process without requiring a teleology. Renewal does not guarantee improvement. It guarantees only that what has happened becomes part of what can happen next.

This is the deeper reason why I call the process soft. It does not soften the world by removing its conflicts. It softens the boundaries between apparently final categories by making their historical formation visible. It turns the state from a mythic monster into a historical role. It turns religion from an eternal political essence into a historical practice whose roles can change. It turns tradition from a sacred object into a living field of relations. It turns secularism from a final separation into a continuous differentiation. And it turns the subject from someone who must choose one side of these oppositions into someone who must repeatedly learn how the oppositions themselves have been constructed. Softness is therefore not the softness of political compromise. It is the softness of a historical process that does not harden itself into a final identity.

The ultimate task, then, is not to choose between state and anti-state, religion and anti-religion, tradition and anti-tradition, secularism and anti-secularism. These oppositions are themselves too simple for the historical density in which we live. The task is to understand how the roles of state, religion, law, city, country, army, myth, citizen, family, and individual are continually reconstructed within tradition. The state is not inherently the enemy of the subject. Religion is not inherently the enemy of the subject. Tradition is not inherently the enemy of the subject. Nor are they inherently the subject’s friends. They are historical formations through which we have learned to organize our collective existence. Their meanings are therefore available for renewal. What matters is not to decide in advance which of these formations is morally pure, but to observe how each becomes transformed through its relations with the others.

Soft secularism is the name I give to the movement through which this renewal becomes a historical mode of life. It is not the separation of religion from politics. It is not the reduction of law. It is not the disappearance of the state. It is not the triumph of individual autonomy over inherited tradition. It is not even the victory of one side over another. It is the continuous redefinition of relations within a tradition that is too full, too contradictory, too historically accumulated, and too alive to be reduced to a single principle. It is the process through which the maximalism of tradition becomes capable of producing new forms of order without first destroying its own density. It is legal and political maximalism precisely because it does not require the legal or political field to become empty before differentiation can begin. Law remains, politics remains, religion remains, memory remains, institutions remain, but their relations cease to be treated as eternally fixed.

And perhaps this finally explains why the woman in the chador should not be the end of the story. She is the beginning because she shows us how quickly we turn history into essence. We see a garment and imagine a government. We see a gaze and imagine violence. We see religion and imagine the state. We see the state and imagine an eternal enemy. Soft secularism asks us to interrupt each of these identifications, not in order to deny the history that produced them, but in order to return them to history. Once returned to history, they become capable of change. The woman becomes a person again. The garment becomes a practice again. The state becomes an institution again. Religion becomes a living relation again. Tradition becomes a field of renewed wills again.

The metro continues moving. The gaze may still feel heavy. The fear may not disappear. But the object of fear no longer has to remain a myth. And perhaps that is the first movement of soft secularism: not the removal of what frightens us, but the moment in which we become capable of seeing that what frightens us has a history, that its history has been made by renewed wills, and that the same history which produced the fear can produce another way of relating to it.

Soft secularism does not promise that we will finally reach ourselves. It asks us to continue becoming capable of knowing that we have not yet reached ourselves. It takes the room as it is—crowded, contradictory, excessive, beautiful, ugly, religious, political, legal, mythical, historical, disordered—and begins from there. It does not throw away the carpet. It does not kill the barking dog. It does not put every book back on the shelf. It does not change the pink and yellow shoes merely because they do not match. It asks what kind of order can emerge from the fact that all of these things are already here. That is the maximalism of tradition, and it is precisely within this maximalism that soft secularism finds its way. Not by emptying the world, but by allowing the world to reveal more of its possible relations. Not by ending tradition, but by making tradition capable of renewing itself. Not by separating religion from politics once and for all, but by continuously redefining what religion, politics, law, state, citizen, and self can mean within the tradition that contains them all. What is inevitable, then, is not secularization as an endpoint.

What is inevitable is renewal wherever existence continues. A produces B; B emerges from A but is not reducible to A; B then becomes the condition through which A itself can be seen again and remade. The will renews itself because the world it has produced is no longer the world from which it began. Tradition renews itself because it can never again inhabit exactly the same historical world. Law renews its political meaning because every legal realization enters a world already full of other relations. Political institutions renew their meaning because their consequences become part of the knowledge from which subsequent political wills emerge.

And soft secularism is the name for one way in which that renewal becomes visible: a slow, incomplete, non-final, internally generated demythologization of the roles through which a tradition organizes its life. It is not the end of religion. It is not the end of the state. It is not the end of tradition. It is the end of their pretension to be final in any one historical form. The point is not to arrive somewhere. The point is that, having moved, we can no longer pretend that we are where we were.