American Journal of Islam and Society Special Issue.indb


170

The Islamic Secular (2017)*

S H E R M A N  A .  J A C K S O N

Abstract
It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the sub-
stance of the category “religion” and the category “secular.” Given 
its putative rejection of the separation between the sacred and 
the profane, this conflict is presumed to be all the more solid in 
Islam. But even assuming Islam’s rejection of the sacred/profane 
dichotomy, there may be other ways of defining the secular in 

Sherman A. Jackson is King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture and Pro-
fessor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity, at the University of South-
ern California. His research interests begin in classical Islamic studies, including 
law, theology, and intellectual history, and extend to placing this legacy in conver-
sation with the realities of modern Islam, most especially Muslim communities in 
America. This implicates issues of race, immigration, liberalism, democracy, reli-
gion in the modern world, pluralism, constitutionalism, Muslim radicalism and 
related areas of inquiry, again, all in conversation with the classical and postclas-
sical legacies of Islam. He is now in the early stages of a major book, tentatively 
entitled Beyond Good and Evil: Shari`ah and the Challenge of the Islamic Secular.

This biography appeared in the article when it was first published.
*This article was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 2 (2017): 1-31
Jackson, Sherman A. 2024. “The Islamic Secular (2017).” American Journal of Islam and Society 41, 
no. 1: 263–298 • doi: 10.35632/ajis.v41i1.3424
Copyright © 2024 International Institute of Islamic Thought



J A C K S O N:  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R     171

Islam and of thinking about its relationship with the religion. 
This is what the present essay sets out to do. By taking Sharia as 
its point of departure, it looks at the latter’s self-imposed limits 
as the boundary between a mode of assessing human acts that 
is grounded in concrete revelational sources (and/or their exten-
sion) and modes of assessing human acts that are independent of 
such sources, yet not necessarily outside God’s adjudicative gaze. 
This non-shar`ī realm, it is argued, is the realm of the “Islamic sec-
ular.” It is “secular” inasmuch as it is differentiated from Sharia as 
the basis for assessing human acts. It remains “Islamic,” however, 
and thus “religious,” in its rejection of the notion of proceeding 
“as if God did not exist.” As I will show, this distinction between 
the shar`ī and the nonshar`ī has a long pedigree in the Islamic 
legal (and theological) tradition. As such, the notion of the Islamic 
secular is more of an excavation than an innovation.

Introduction

Few contemporary constructs generate the definitional ambiguity evoked 
by the term secular. Such definitional vagueness notwithstanding, secular 
almost invariably implies an antagonistic relationship with religion.1 This 
illocutionary effect accrued to the term as a product and co-producer of 
an emergent Western modernity.2 And this hostility to religion is rou-
tinely abstracted out of that context and assumed to inform the way that 
all religions engage (or perhaps should engage) the world, especially the 
modern world. Of course, as José Casanova points out, “religions that 
have always been ‘worldly’ and ‘lay’ do not need to undergo a process 
of secularization. To secularize – that is, ‘to make worldly’ … is a process 
that does not make much sense in such a civilizational context.”3

This insight, however, as keen as it is, does not appear to go very 
far when the topic under consideration is Islam. Instead, its worldliness 
notwithstanding, the antagonism between “secular” and “religious” is 
assumed to be all the more acute in Islam, as the latter is understood to 
defy the distinction between sacred and profane, and modern Muslim 
movements seem bent on sustaining the non-existence of this boundary 



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in favor of the religious. The result is a dichotomous bifurcation between 
the “Islamic” and the “secular,” according to which an act, idea, or insti-
tution can be described either as Islamic or secular, but never both. This 
perpetuates in the minds of many the presumed necessity of having to 
choose between the two.

In this paper, I shall propose a reading of Islam that suggests a differ-
ent understanding of its relationship with the secular. This relationship is 
both uncovered and mediated through a more careful reading of Sharia 
that imputes jurisdictional boundaries to the latter, thereby challenging 
the notion of it being coterminous with Islam as religion. Ultimately, it is 
the space between the bounded Sharia as a concrete code of conduct and 
the unbounded purview of Islam as religion, that is to say, life lived under 
the conscious presumption of an adjudicative divine gaze, that consti-
tutes the realm of “the Islamic secular.” This domain is secular inasmuch 
as it remains, to borrow Max Weber’s term, differentiated, meaning that 
it is neither governed nor adjudicated through the concrete indicants of 
revelation or their extension as recognized in Islamic legal methodology 
(uṣūl al-fiqh). It remains Islamic, however, in its imperviousness to the 
impulse, first articulated by Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, to 
proceed “as if God did not exist” (etsi Deus non daretur).4 On this reading, 
while the secular and the religious both intermingle and remain distin-
guishable from each other, they are not, as with the Western secular, 
effective rivals; nor is the secular relied upon or primarily valued for its 
ability to police or domesticate religion. The Islamic secular is not forced 
upon Islam (or Islamic law) from without but emerges as a result of the 
Sharia’s own voluntarily selfimposed jurisdictional limits.

Numerous implications as well as challenges attach to this read-
ing, the most salient of which I will engage over the course of my 
discussion. As a final preliminary, however, I would like to spell out 
more clearly, in an effort to avoid confusion, the nature and degree of 
overlap and divergence I see between the Western and Islamic secu-
lars. This will enable us to discern more readily an important aspect 
of my thesis, namely, that the most operative distinction between the 
Islamic and Western seculars resides not so much in their substance as in 
their function. This difference is indebted to different historical realities 



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confronting (Western) Christianity and Islam, as well as to differences 
in their structure and ethos. Reference has been made to the religio-po-
litical challenges reflected in the Thirty Years’ War (161848).5 According 
to Jonathan Israel, this also birthed the emergence of a radical fringe of 
dissenters and republicans who conceived that “there might be a purely 
secular, philosophical rationale for dismantling ecclesiastical author-
ity, [promoting] freedom of thought, and independence of individual 
conscience.”6 This was the beginning of the Early Enlightenment, at the 
heart of which lay theological debate and the specter of overturning “all 
forms of authority and tradition, even Scripture and Man’s essentially 
theological view of the universe.”7

Prior to this, a more quotidian sense of crisis had already set in. 
According to Nomi Stolzenberg, a major impetus behind the emergence 
of the Western secular was “an acceptance of the fact that the divine 
law and sacred ideals of justice have to be violated in the temporal 
world.”8 This generated fears that religion and religious institutions 
might be corrupted and their authority undermined by what would 
eventually amount to normalized violations. The response, particularly 
within Protestantism, was to create an alternative realm presided over 
by non-religious values, authorities, and expertise, the flouting of which 
would not connote inadequacy, irrelevance, or corruption on the part 
of religion or its institutions. This was not a mere exercise in religious 
navelgazing or kicking the institutional can down the road; there was a 
genuine concern for the practical needs and aspirations of the day. As 
Sheldon Wolin summarizes the fears of Martin Luther, “the world would 
be reduced to chaos if men tried to govern by the Gospel.”9 The Western 
secular, then, initially arose in an effort to protect both religion and soci-
ety. The way it came to operate subsequently need not be assumed to be 
a function of its essential meaning or to go back to its origins.

By contrast, at any rate, pre-modern Islam did not replicate the Thirty 
Years’ War (1618-48). Not even the Ottoman-Safavid conflict took on 
quite the same religious tone or implications, and Muslims did not birth 
anything comparable to the Enlightenment. In fact, faced with the chal-
lenges of quotidian reality, Muslim jurists sought to expand the scope of 
the religious law through analogy (qiyās), equity (istiḥsān), public utility 



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(maṣlaḥah mursalah), blocking the means (sadd al-dharā’i’), adaptive 
legal precepts (qawā’id fiqhīyah), and even inductive readings of scrip-
ture (istiqrā’).The aim of all of this, as with the early Western secular, was 
both to secure the interests of society and preserve the sovereignty of the 
sacred law. And on this approach, obedience to the religious law became 
an increasingly more protean construct. For example, while the Hanafi 
school condemned “provisional sales” (bay’ al-wafā’) for centuries, they 
would later confer legal sanction upon them, as dictated by need, all the 
while declaring their new position to be firmly within the law.10 Such 
examples could be multiplied.11 And on this combined tendency toward 
expansion and recognizing obedience as a mutable construct, there was 
never a perceived need or effort among the jurists to create a formally 
recognized separate realm over which explicitly non-religious delibera-
tion reigned as an alternative to, or check on, religion.12

Meanwhile, the divine origins of the religious law retained universal 
recognition, and this, in tandem with Islam’s understanding of monothe-
ism (tawḥīd), generally implied that only what God dictated or intended 
as religious law could be rightfully recognized as such. The battle cry of 
the early Khariji movement, “There is no rule but God’s” (lā ḥukm illā 
li-llāh) may have been an exaggeration in the eyes of the majority, but 
it was neither fundamentally wrong nor off track.13 Indeed, the nerve it 
struck continued to pulsate through the rise of Mu’tazilism in the second/
eighth century, when the question of the scope of God’s specifically legal 
address became a topic of debate. Ultimately, the Islamic secular would 
emerge (eventually more explicitly) out of what was seen as being at 
stake in these deliberations. But it emerged as a more or less “innocent” 
by-product, not as a rival or a competitor with religion or the religious 
law. Again, while its substance bore much in common with that of the 
Western secular, namely, its dependence upon sources and authorities 
outside the parameters of religion’s concrete (in Islam’s case shar’ī) 
indicants, its function was patently different from the role the category 
“secular” came to play in the West.

A common feature of depictions of the Western secular is its 
essentially regulatory function vis-á-vis religion. In his seminal work 
Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad points out that part of the very 



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meaning of the (Western) secular resides in the perpetual dislocation 
it visits upon religion through the generation and deployment of an 
evolving series of cognitive oppositions (reason/myth, public/private, 
autonomy/submission), all of which are designed and normatively 
function to establish and reinforce the primacy of the secular over the 
religious.14 The secular, in other words, not only contrasts with but is 
expected to control the religious. We see a similar recognition in the 
description of Casanova, who locates the secular precisely in the moment 
when people transcend the secular/religious divide. “Secular,” he writes, 
“stands for self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, when people are not 
simply religiously ‘unmusical,’ but closed to any form of transcendence 
beyond the purely secular immanent frame.”15

Drawing on the insights of Weber, Casanova identifies the secular 
with the rise and proliferation of non-religious fields of inquiry and 
expertise as eventually breaking down the monastic wall that once 
defended religion’s primacy and separated it from the worldly realm. 
The crumbling of this wall eventually laid bare the entire terrestrial order 
as a field of secular conquest, where religion would ultimately end up 
struggling to find – and vindicate – its place.16 Once again, the hierar-
chal, “paternalistic” relationship between the secular and the religious 
is confirmed. Of course, Casanova’s reference to an “immanent frame” 
implicates the work of Charles Taylor. In his massive A Secular Age, 
Taylor, like Asad, identifies the boundary between the secular and the 
religious as porous.17 But the secular constitutes the super-context, the 
“immanent frame,” that circumscribes and increasingly exerts “pressure” 
on the much smaller sphere of religious influence. This pressure progres-
sively squeezes God’s presence out of public life, contributes to a general 
falling away from religious sensibilities and practices, and ultimately 
makes it difficult to maintain belief in God.18 The secular increasingly 
functions, in sum, as the primary, active force in life, while religion is 
gradually reduced to a passive, reactionary role.

Alternative notions of the (Western) secular include variations on 
French laïcité,19 or the attitude that opposes living life “in a way that 
puts God first.”20 Others equate it, following the American model, with 
“state neutrality,”21 where the (secular) state domesticates religion and 



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legitimizes itself via the implicit promise to protect society from it. Still 
other descriptions include “the fashioning of religion as an object of con-
tinual management and intervention, and of shaping religious life and 
sensibility to fit the presuppositions and ongoing requirements of liberal 
governance.”22 Again, in all of these depictions, the (Western) secular 
essentially arrives on the scene as the new sheriff in town to define and 
police the proper boundaries of religion. By contrast, the Islamic secular 
assumes neither the urgent need nor authority to define or police the 
religious. Rather, it is merely the result of the religious law’s own efforts 
to define and impose boundaries upon itself. Again, on my reading, the 
boundaries of Sharia are self-imposed, not a retreat or diminution in the 
face of some independent, external authority called “the secular.”

Of course, placing Islamic law at the center of a discussion of the sec-
ular would seem to require some vindication. After all, law in the West 
is an emphatically secular, profane institution from which there would 
seem to be no point in drawing any contrast with the secular. But com-
parative examination of the traditional dichotomy between the sacred 
and profane might point us in the direction of relief. In his discussion of 
the sacred and profane, Talal Asad points out,

attempts to introduce a unified concept of “the sacred” into 
non-European languages have met with revealing problems of 
translation. Thus although the Arabic word qadāsa is usually 
glossed as “sacredness” in English, it remains the case that it 
will not do in all the contexts where the English term is now 
used. Translation of “the sacred” calls for a variety of words 
(muharram, mutahhar, mukhtass bi-l-`ibāda, and so on), each of 
which connects with different kinds of behavior.23

It does not take much to recognize that all of these candidates for 
“sacred” come under the gaze and authority of Islamic law, as Sharia (or 
shar`ī discourse) is the basis upon which the applicability of all of these 
adjectives is determined. In this regard, Sharia can be seen as uphold-
ing or mediating a boundary of sorts. Whether, however, this boundary 
divides the world, to use Durkheim’s notion, into “two domains, the one 



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containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane,”24 or simply 
restricts the validity of viewing the world, even as a single domain, 
through a shar’ī lens is a separate (though deeply relevant) question. 
Earlier in his discussion, Asad had noted: “In the Latin Roman Republic 
the word sacer referred to anything that was owned by a deity, having 
been ‘taken out of the region of the profanum by the action of the State,’ 
and passed on into that of the sacrum.”25

By contrast, Islam insisted, of course, that God ultimately owned 
everything. In fact, the theologian al-Bayhaqi (d. 458/1065) cites an early 
linguistic opinion to the effect that the name Allāh was derived from the 
phrase “la hu,” namely, “it is his/its,” “it belongs to him/it.” The Arabs 
added the definite article along with a medial alif (ā) for emphasis (in 
accordance with linguistic convention), yielding the proper name for 
God, Allāh, as Owner of everything in the universe.26 Sharia functions in 
this context, not as did the Roman State, to assign or transfer ownership, 
but to identify that area of what God owns that is the object of God’s 
direct, concrete address aimed at regulating normative human behavior.

In this process, again, given God’s summary ownership of everything 
in the universe, separating the sacred from the profane in the Western 
sense alluded to by Asad will prove problematic. But the parameters of 
Islam’s shar`ī discourse can be clearly distinguished from those of the 
non-shar`ī. And it is the shar`ī alone that represents God’s concrete divine 
address that aims at regulating human behavior. It is in this sense that 
Islamic law plays the definitive role I have assigned to it in establishing 
and sustaining the category of the Islamic secular.

Sharia: Unbounded Stereotype versus Bounded Reality

Of course, Sharia is commonly depicted as boundless in scope. As the 
celebrated Joseph Schacht once put it: “Islamic law is an all-embracing 
body of religious duties, the totality of God’s commands that regulate the 
life of every Muslim in all its aspects; it encompasses on an equal footing 
ordinances regarding worship and ritual, as well as political and (in the 
narrow sense) legal rules.”27 More recently, Wael Hallaq characterized 
Sharia as “a representation of God’s sovereign will [that]… regulates the 



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entire range of the human order, either directly or through well-defined 
and limited delegation.”28 In addition to Islam’s presumed rejection of 
the sacred-profane divide, such depictions probably owe something to 
the equally common presumption that law is the bulwark against man’s 
exploitation of man. As John Locke famously put it, “Whereever Law 
ends Tyranny begins.”29 This positive association between Sharia and 
the rule of law is equally popular in modern Muslim circles. In sum, 
the view that Islamic law is boundless and thus mandated to address 
every aspect of life is common to both modern Muslim and non-Muslim 
discourses on Sharia.

To be sure, this notion has potentially far-reaching implications. For 
example, if, as has been suggested, the Muslim state exists “for the sole 
purpose of enforcing the law,”30 such a state might be aided and justified 
in extending its executive authority to proportions co-extensive with a 
boundless law. This implication is indirectly confirmed by Hallaq, who 
sees the unbounded sovereignty of the modern (secular) state as plac-
ing it in full and irreconcilable conflict with an Islamic state founded 
on Sharia.31 In other words, Sharia and the modern state represent a 
clash of unbounded sovereignties. Meanwhile, another implication of 
Sharia’s being credited with infinite scope would be the elimination of 
“the people” from the enterprise of negotiating the socio-political and 
economic orders. For to the extent that the unbounded Sharia is Islam’s 
sole basis for judging human action, only those authorized to determine 
its substance, namely, the religious establishment (fuqahā’), can have any 
impact on defining a normative Islamic order.32

Having said all of this, there is a reading of the classical Islamic legal 
tradition that would appear to warrant a “totalitarian” understanding of 
Sharia. Certainly from the time that analogy (qiyās) was vindicated as 
a means of expanding legal rulings, Islamic law acquired an ostensibly 
boundless capacity to go beyond revelation’s direct address. But the 
validity of qiyās remained far from a point of unanimous consensus 
(ijmā`) for centuries, and the manner in which Sunnis debated its admis-
sibility directly implicated the matter of scope. The Zahiris, for example, 
who appear in the third/ninth century and were not, as they are popu-
larly cast, “literalists,” rejected analogy precisely on the grounds that one 



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could not go beyond what the revealed sources indicated directly (which 
is not the same as what they indicated “literally”).33 As A. Kevin Reinhart 
points out, the Zahiris affirmed that “Revelation’s writ ran to what it 
explicitly addressed and no more … it applie[d] strictly, but it applied [in 
relative terms] to very little.”34 In sum, they insisted that any number of 
issues simply fell outside the boundaries of scripture and remained, as 
such, unaddressed. It was wrong, according to them, to claim that God 
had a concrete legal ruling for all issues.

The Zahiris lasted well into the fifth/eleventh century and were far 
from marginal outcasts. In his influential book Ṭabaqāt al-Fuqahā’, the 
stated purpose of which was to catalogue the names and schools of 
all those whose views were to be considered in making and breaking 
unanimous consensus, the famous Shafi`i jurist Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi 
(d. 476/1083) lists them alongside the other four Sunni schools, again, 
despite their rejection of analogy and all that that implied in the way 
of the law’s limited reach.35 But even beyond them, the importance of 
scope is reflected in the early controversy over whether the legal cat-
egory “neutral” (mubāḥ) referred to what God directly declared to be 
inconsequential or to what simply fell outside the boundaries of God’s 
shar`ī address, as a matter of happenstance, as it were.36 This issue was 
still being discussed as late as the sixth/twelfth century, as we see in Ibn 
Rushd the Grandson’s commentary on al-Ghazali’s Al-Mustaṣfā.37

The point in all of this is that there was a centuries-long period 
during which an important minority of Muslim jurists accepted or at 
least entertained the idea that God did not have a direct or even an ana-
logically determined ruling on every thing. And even the majority who 
rejected this position did not find their orthodox sensibilities offended to 
the point of casting charges of unbelief (kufr), unsanctioned innovation 
(bid`ah), or moral turpitude (fisq) against those who espoused it. In sum, 
the view that there are jurisdictional limits to Islam’s shar`ī address is 
not new; nor, obviously, given how far back it goes back, could it have 
been imposed from without by a secularizing, emergent modern West; 
nor was it ever definitively placed outside the pale of Sunni orthodoxy.

Of course, these controversies over scope would ultimately be 
resolved in favor of an expansive view of Sharia that recognized the 



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validity of analogy and placed the neutral category between the oblig-
atory and forbidden categories as part of God’s shar`ī address. But this 
should not be seen as a contradiction of the claim that Sunni jurists 
remained alive to the issue of scope and suspicious, if not critical, of 
haphazardly totalizing conceptions of the religious law. Indeed, careful 
analysis reveals that even mainstream jurists, who accepted the expan-
sive, positivist notion of Islamic law, remained nonetheless vigilant 
in their recognition that there were limits beyond which the Sharia’s 
authority simply did not extend.38 In sum, even in the post-formative 
period,39 when Islamic law took on its fully developed form, Sharia was 
perceived as a bounded and not an unbounded affair.

The Islamic Secular: Shar`ī versus Non-Shar`ī

Much of my work on Islamic law has revolved around the thought of 
the great Egyptian Maliki jurist Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. 684/1285). 
Elsewhere, I have shown that he was quite direct and unequivocal in 
imputing jurisdictional limits to Sharia.40 This sustained focus on al-Qa-
rafi might give the impression that he was alone or unique in this regard. 
But this is demonstrably not the case. And while space will not allow for 
a full accounting here, the following should suffice to make the point.

Going all the way back to the Prophet, we find indications to this 
effect. Standard books on the Prophet’s biography (sīrah) report that 
when he issued instructions to the Muslim forces at Badr, the Companion 
al-Hubab b. al-Mundhir asked if this was revelation or simply the 
Prophet’s considered opinion. The Prophet responded that it was the 
latter, at which time al-Hubab offered his own plan, which the Prophet 
accepted.41 In the “canonical” hadith literature, we read that when a 
group of farmers whom the Prophet had advised on pollinating their 
trees complained that the trees died (or failed), he responded: “Do not 
hold me accountable for mere (non-revelational) ideas. But when I inform 
you of something on the authority of God, take it, for I will never invent 
lies against God.”42 In this same section, Muslim reports that the Prophet 
stated: “You are more knowledgeable (than I am) regarding your secu-
lar affairs” (antum a`lam bi amr dunyākum).43 These references clearly 



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reflect an understanding that the divine address was limited in terms of 
the range of issues regarding which it could be taken to bind Muslims to 
a concrete legal injunction. In the generations after the Prophet, we see 
a subtle blurring of the boundary between the concretely legal (shar`ī) 
and the non-legal (non-shar`ī). At least as early as Malik (d. 179/795), 
factual determinations, such as details of the kinds and quantities of food 
due a wife as part of her maintenance (nafaqah), are clothed with legal 
authority despite not being based on scriptural sources.44 We see it as 
well in the writings of al-Shafi`i (d. 204/819)45 and his early followers on 
such factual matters as determining the prayer-direction, the uprightness 
of witnesses, and the like. As Ahmad El Shamsy notes: “Although the 
determination of the qiblah represents an empirical matter while legal 
theory involves interpretive judgments, at least in the early centuries 
Shafi`i jurists do not seem to have drawn any distinction between the 
two.”46 But already with Ahmad b. Hanbal (d. 241/855) in the first half of 
the third/ninth century, a more explicit recognition of scripture’s juris-
dictional boundaries appears to be in evidence. In his account of the 
famous Inquisition (miḥnah) over the Qur’an’s createdness, al-Tabari 
(d. 310/923) reports that Ibn Hanbal’s initial response was: “It is the 
speech of God; I have nothing to add beyond that” (huwa kalām Allāh 
lā azīdu ‘alayhā),47 clearly suggesting that the question of its created-
ness or uncreatedness, or perhaps his understanding of the issue at the 
time, fell outside the scope of what Ibn Hanbal deemed scripture to have 
concretely addressed.

Later, the distinction between shar`ī and non-shar`ī becomes more 
concrete. Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), for example, rebukes those he terms 
“ignorant friends of Islam” who condemn non-Muslim natural sciences 
as contravening Sharia. Against this view, he insists that “the religious 
law has nothing to say about these sciences, either positively or neg-
atively” (wa laysa fī al-shar` ta`arruḍ li hādhi al-`ulūm bi al-nafy wa 
al-ithbāt).48 With al-Qarafi, of course, we get perhaps the most explicit 
articulation.49 He cites as examples of nonshar`ī sciences mathematics, 
geometry, sense perception, knowing the identity of prevailing customs, 
bounteous things, and the like: “Knowledge of none of these things 
reverts to scriptural sources (sharā`i’).”50



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This basic recognition of shar`ī limits did not stop with al-Qarafi. 
Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) routinely cites instances where the shar`ī 
tradition neither confirms nor negates (lā nafyan wa lā ithbātan) an 
imported concept or technical term.51 He also insists that purely rational 
claims (e.g., the validity of Greek logic) cannot be judged on the basis 
of scripture alone, but must be examined on the basis of reason.52 In 
their commentary on al-Baydawi’s (d. 685/1286) Minhāj al-Wuṣūl ilā 
‘Ilm al-Uṣūl, the Shafi`i father and son, Taqi al-Din (d. 756/1355) and Taj 
al-Din (d. 771/69) al-Subki, confirm the distinction between knowledge 
that is contingent upon the divine address (shar`ī) and knowledge that 
is not,53 everything that could be considered knowledge, in other words, 
not falling within the boundaries of the shar`.

Early modern jurists continue along these lines. Ibn Abidin (d. 
1258/1842), for example, notes that the knowledge that fire burns or that 
grammatical subjects are in the nominative case falls entirely outside the 
parameters of the religious law. In fact, in words reminiscent of al-Qarafi, 
he states that “what is meant by shar`ī … is that which would remain 
unknowable absent an address from the Divine Lawgiver.”54 Clearly, on 
these articulations, the idea that Sharia and its relative adjective shar`ī 
is bounded as opposed to unbounded was not unique to al-Qarafi, but 
was a widely recognized feature of pre-modern Muslim juridical thought 
that made its way down to modern times.55

This restrictive understanding of the category shar`ī lays the foun-
dation for my working definition of the Islamic secular: “that for concrete 
knowledge of which one can rely neither upon the scriptural sources of 
Sharia nor their proper extension via the tools enshrined by Islamic legal 
methodology (uṣūl al-fiqh).” At first blush, this might appear to be a rather 
strained use of the term secular, given the latter’s entrenched associa-
tion with indifference, if not hostility, toward religion. But Sharia is the 
medium through which God’s will is made known in concrete, objec-
tively verifiable terms (objective in the sense of existing in the public 
domain, where everyone has equal access to them). And to the extent 
that Sharia does not concretely address every issue, it does acknowledge 
the existence of other bases and norms of assessment. This corresponds, 
in the main, to the “differentiation” that Casanova identified as a central 



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feature of the secular.56 At the heart of differentiation is specialization in 
distinct fields of concern – religious, economic, political, and so forth. 
And while Islam may not insist on such an explicit, formal division of 
knowledge, the distinction between the shar`ī and the non-shar`ī is, in 
fact, an expression of specialization. The secular is simply differentiated 
from religion in Casanova’s depiction, whereas it is differentiated from 
the shar`ī in my working definition of the Islamic secular.

This basic understanding and valuation of “differentiation” is not the 
preserve of Casanova alone. Asad essentially recognizes its role and cen-
trality when he writes: “It is when something is described as belonging to 
‘religion’ and it can be claimed that it does not that the secular emerges 
most clearly.”57 And Taylor speaks of an “independent political ethic” free 
of confessional allegiance as part of his understanding of the secular.58 
Of course, given its juristic thrust, my concept of the Islamic secular will 
fall dumb before any number of the brilliant sociological and anthropo-
logical insights of these (and other) treatments of the secular. But with 
differentiation as a point of departure, the idea that Islam’s religious law 
is not the only forum for negotiating the value of human acts should go 
a long way in demonstrating a point of convergence with established 
discourses on the secular and in vindicating my use of the term.

Reason and Revelation

Again, the claim that Sharia does not concretely address a particular 
matter is not the same as saying that Islam takes no interest in it. In 
fact, a Muslim may not be able to ignore this matter because of the 
magnitude of potential benefit or harm his Islamic sensibilities lead him 
to surmise. In more concrete terms, of course, the actual substance of 
“benefit” and “harm” will have to be defined; and Islam and/or Sharia 
will play an obvious role in this regard. But beyond the basic recognition 
that a particular action is inspired, obliged, or simply allowed by Islam 
or Sharia, the empirical question of which particular modality of its con-
crete instantiation will best serve the interest associated with it is not, 
properly speaking, the business of shar`ī deliberations. It is one thing, 
in other words, for Sharia (or Islam) to support or actively promote the 



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value of wealthcreation; it is quite another to see Sharia (or Islam) as the 
direct source of the concrete acts or policies that actually create wealth.

Ultimately, this takes us back to the ancient controversy over the role 
and status of reason (‘aql) in Islam, as reason would be the ostensible 
alternative to deliberating matters on the basis of Sharia. But the Sunni 
response to early Mu`tazilism (which argued that reason could inde-
pendently apprehend the moral and soteriological implications of acts) 
gave rise to the view in Western scholarship that Sunnism rejected rea-
son’s evaluative power in matters of religion tout court. And this has led to 
the assumption that rigid “scripturalism” is the presumed norm in Islam. 
One could argue, however, that the primary object of the Sunni rejection 
of Mu`tazilism was Mu`tazilite cosmology and the notion that revelation 
was bound to confirm whatever moral or soteriological conclusions reason 
reached.59 It did not imply that reason was incapable of or barred from 
making religiously relevant value judgments independent of revelation.

This is clear in the response of Mu`tazilism’s most bitter opponents, 
the Ash`aris, especially later Ash`aris. In Kitāb al-Irshād, for example, 
al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085) plainly acknowledges that communities can 
know, based on their own communally accepted premises, that certain 
things are good or evil, even if there is no indication of such according 
to God.60 In Al-Iqtiṣād fī al-I`tiqād, al-Ghazali is even more explicit in 
pointing out that what is routinely deemed good or evil is simply what is 
deemed to serve or contradict individual or collective desires or interests, 
which can be known independent of revelation.61 In Kitāb al-Arba`īn 
fī Uṣūl al-Dīn, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1209) affirms that there is a 
realm of “good and evil that is merely an expression of that which attracts 
and repels us by nature (ṭab`), and that there is no dispute that this can 
be known by reason.”62 We might note that this was not an exclusively 
Ash`ari position; both the Maturidis and even Traditionalists essentially 
agreed with it.63 In fact, none other than the “puritanical” Hanbali Ibn 
Taymiyyah states explicitly that revelation (i.e., the Qur’an and Sunna) 
could never provide human beings with all they need for a successful 
worldly life or even otherworldly salvation.64 And reason, according to 
him, was perfectly capable of apprehending worldly benefit and harm 
(maṣlaḥah aw mafsadah), even if, in the absence of indications by the 



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religious law, such judgments could not guarantee reward or punishment 
in the Hereafter.65

In sum, across the theological spectrum, Sharia was not enshrined 
as the only basis upon which value judgments could be made, especially 
in the practical realm. The notion, as such, that scripture is as far as a 
Muslim can legitimately go in negotiating quotidian reality is simply 
inaccurate. This is critical to a fair assessment of the Islamic secular. 
Otherwise, the latter is likely to be brought under indictment as an aber-
ration that seeks to grant an unauthorized role and authority to reason. 
At the same time, we should be mindful of the fact that reason, in the 
Muslim understanding, has traditionally been broader than the mere 
faculty of formal reasoning. In fact, it might be more accurate to speak 
of ways of knowing, apprehending, imagining, or even sensing reality. 
On this understanding, reason would include such things as sense per-
ception, social convention, “taste,” imagination, spiritual epiphany, and 
the like.66 This should be borne in mind as we approach the practical 
implications of the Islamic secular.

The Islamic Secular: Practical Implications

The stubborn notion that reason is antithetical to religion, coupled with 
the perceived Western purchase on the concept “secular,” gives rise to at 
least three reactions to the secular on the part of contemporary Muslims: 
(1) reject it altogether (as un-Islamic) and thus leave all issues falling 
within its orb to chance, haphazardness, and non-regulation; (2) reject 
(or simply overlook) it (again, as un-Islamic), but this time by simply 
subsuming it into the shar`ī realm and attempting to regulate everything 
through the Sharia’s rules and instrumentalities; and (3) embrace it, but 
here in its Western guise as the antithesis and/or overseer and domes-
ticator of religion, in response to the Sharia’s perceived failure to speak 
effectively to legitimate human interests.

We begin to see the inadequacy of completely rejecting the secular 
(i.e., as a construct), however, when we consider such basic questions as 
the legal age for driving or what a specific national healthcare plan or 
immigration policy should actually be. Clearly, these questions cannot 



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be ignored, as they impinge upon broader communal interests (e.g., the 
preservation of life), which both Islam and Sharia clearly recognize and 
seek to promote. Yet no concrete scriptural sources can dictate the con-
crete substance of such rules or policies, either directly or by analogy. Of 
course one might argue that scripture does indirectly instruct Muslims in 
this regard by obliging them to avoid what is harmful and protect basic 
human needs (e.g., ḥifẓ al-nafs, hifẓ al-nasl, and so on).

But the question goes beyond the theoretical to the practical matter 
of whether this legal age for driving, this healthcare plan, or this immigra-
tion policy will sufficiently or best serve the community’s interests. This 
cannot be determined on the basis of scripture or its shar`ī indications, 
but must be pursued through various secular, non-shar`ī instruments 
(e.g., empirical observation, practical experience, childhood psychol-
ogy, modern medicine, public administration, actuarial science, and the 
like), none of whose substance or inherent authority is derived from or 
necessarily contradicted by Sharia. The scope and significance of all of 
this becomes more obvious when we expand our vistas to include FAA 
regulations, monetary policy, building codes, education policy, zoning 
laws, tenure procedures, passport regulations, and a virtually endless list 
of issues in the public domain.

To be clear, the argument here is not that these issues must be contem-
plated in a manner that is entirely devoid of shar`ī (or Islamic) influence 
or consideration. The fact that, for example, Sharia holds empathy (sha-
faqah) and loving care (ḥanān) to be essential to a child’s welfare, or that 
residential buildings must respect the rights of neighbors, may inform 
such disciplines as childhood psychology or architecture, respectively. 
But while Sharia seeks to produce legal rulings (aḥkām), such norms of 
assessment as efficient, safe, profitable, beautiful, and fun are simply not 
shar`ī categories. And yet these qualities remain critical to the realization 
of what Islam, and perhaps Sharia, would recognize as interests. For exam-
ple, a legal driving age that ignored safety or an inefficient healthcare plan 
could hardly be said to serve the broader aims and objectives (maqāṣid) 
that justify (if not obligate) their existence. Thus, one could not simulta-
neously ignore these secular categories of assessment and successfully 
pursue the interests of Islam or Sharia in concrete terms.



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At the same time, however, even assuming that a particular legal 
driving age or health-care plan fell perfectly within the general param-
eters of the religious law (though obviously not dictated by it), one could 
not claim that it was “God’s law” or against “God’s law” in the same 
way that one could claim this about the obligation to support one’s 
family or avoid alcohol consumption. Neither, however, given the source 
of its inspiration, would it always be appropriate to adjudge this legal 
driving age or healthcare policy as entirely “non-religious,” let alone 
anti-religious.

As for the tendency to subsume the secular into the shar`ī realm, 
perhaps its most common manifestation is the exaggerated focus in many 
Muslim circles upon unmediated scriptural interpretation (ijtihād). To be 
sure, ijtihād is important to the enterprise of moving beyond the reali-
ties, presuppositions, and going opinions of the pre-modern world and 
navigating through new and changing moods and circumstances. Strictly 
speaking, however, it is relevant only to the explicitly shar`ī realm.67 
And in this light, an exaggerated focus upon ijtihād leaves the optimal, 
concrete instantiation of Islamic or shar`ī values in a state of confusion 
or neglect. The result is often a misplaced reliance on Muslim juristic 
activity and a frustrating dissonance between the perceived Islamic or 
shar’ī ideal and the modern quotidian real.

Equally problematic, however, is the tendency to try to overcome 
this gap by simply doubling down on ijtihād. For assuming, as I think 
we must in many instances, that the problem is not the substance per se 
of a shar`ī rule or that the rule is simply too univocal to accommodate 
“reinterpretation” (e.g., the ban on adultery), the problem would have 
to be seen as residing in the rule’s concrete instantiation.68 And to the 
extent that this is the case, ijtihād, which is about extracting rules from 
the sources, would seem to be powerless to make any difference.69

For example, in a scathing critique of marriage in early twenti-
eth-century Egypt, Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) criticizes the jurists for 
their pathetically transactional attitude toward the institution of matri-
mony, especially as it affects women. According to him, their juridical 
definitions focused almost exclusively upon a husband’s sexual rights 
over his wife and were “entirely devoid of any reference to “ethical 



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obligations” (wājibāt adabīyah) between spouses.70 This, according to 
him, undermined the whole point of marriage, which was for two hearts 
and minds to come together in love and compassion (mawaddah wa 
raḥmah). Asad has suggested, incidentally, that European influence was, 
at that particular time, informing Egypt’s discourse on gender.71

My focus, however, is not so much on Abduh’s critique as it is on 
what he seems to offer as a solution. Rather than sheer callousness, 
it seems reasonable to assume that the jurists omitted “ethical obliga-
tions” because they fell outside their shar`ī purview, as entities for which 
Sharia could not prescribe any concrete instantiations in the form of spe-
cific acts. “Love and compassion,” in other words, could mean different 
things in different contexts and could thus be concretized in a myriad 
of ever-changing, socio-culturally embedded ways, from bringing home 
flowers to bringing home a rare cut of meat. Their instantiation, in other 
words, was not a shar`ī matter but rather an activity to be pursued by 
individuals and communities via their culturally literate engagement 
with the Islamic secular. But rather than recognize this non-shar`ī, secu-
lar dimension of the problem, Abduh appears to double down on ijtihād, 
going back to the Qur’an and Sunnah and reiterating their provisions for 
marital bliss, especially for women: “All we have to do is hear the voice 
of our Sharia and follow the rulings of the Noble Qur’an, the authentic 
Sunna of the Prophet and the ways of the Companions in order for 
women to find happiness in marriage.”72

Abduh’s goodwill and eloquence notwithstanding, his approach here 
runs the risk of ignoring the extent to which issues of culture can affect 
a rule’s reception and efficacy no less than the actual substance of the 
rule itself. Even if a man harbors the most intense love and compassion 
for his wife, this alone serves as no guarantee that the latter will actually 
feel loved and cherished. Rather, this will depend on how adept he is at 
translating these sentiments into actions that effectively convey them 
to his wife. But this is far more a matter of cultural literacy than it is 
of knowledge of or commitment to the religious law per se; after all, a 
“good” Muslim can be a “bad” kisser (or dresser or conversationalist). As 
such, doubling down on scriptural exhortations to love and compassion 
(especially given that in this case these already exist) would seem to be 



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of little effect. Rather, cultural adjustments, including enhanced cultural 
literacy, would appear to constitute the bulk of the remedy; for culture 
fundamentally informs the manner in which the law, including its reli-
gious values, virtues, and overall vision, are concretized and instantiated 
in real time and space. In the case at hand, for example, non-shar`ī cul-
turally informed charm and winsomeness can clearly be seen as serving 
the shar`ī interest of marital harmony.

Yet cultural production per se is not a shar`ī endeavor. While the law 
may determine the general parameters in which culture must operate, 
even within the domain of the legally permissible (ḥalāl), scripture-based 
rulings (aḥkām/ sg., ḥukm) cannot tell us what actually is pretty, fun, 
chic, romantic, and so on. Culture-production is simply not the province 
of the jurists. On the contrary, it is the domain of the Islamic secular 
and is undertaken by “the people.” While ijtihād determines the law’s 
substance, culture contributes directly to what Peter Berger refers to 
(in another context) as the law’s “plausibility structure.”73 Thus cultural 
producers, and not jurists, will play a critical role in priming social con-
ditions and spreading cultural literacy to the end of promoting greater 
realization of the law’s broader aims and objectives and, in so doing, 
engendering broader voluntary compliance.

In this sense, both the generality of Muslims and jurists can be seen as 
bearing responsibility for the overall state of the socio-cultural-cum-legal 
order and to be engaged (constructively or not) in religious activity.74 
Yet, the tendency to “over-sharī`atize” and ignore the Islamic secular 
summarily blocks this insight from view. And with this, we effectively 
arrive at the third contemporary Muslim response to the secular: Sharia 
and the religious establishment are burdened with the complete and sole 
responsibility for any dissonance existing between the religious law and 
the “ideals” of the religion, not to mention the “legitimate aspirations 
of the people.”

I do not mean to imply by this that the Islamic secular is reducible 
to culture-production. But the significance of culture in this context, 
like that of architecture, childhood psychology, and actuarial or military 
science in other (aforementioned) contexts, does suggest, pace those who 
would look exclusively to “ethics” as the antidote to over-sharī`atization, 



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that the Islamic secular is not synonymous with ethics.75 In fact, ethics 
is often irrelevant to the Islamic secular because the values or interests 
at stake are often neither moral nor ethical in nature. Constructs such as 
chic, fun, profit maximization, or even efficiency are not, strictly speak-
ing, moral or ethical. Even if we assume that efficiency, for example, 
actually is ethical in that it is the opposite of wasteful, determining what 
actually is efficient in concrete terms could not be achieved on the basis 
of purely ethical considerations. Rather, this would require, again, the 
same sorts of secular instruments cited above, such as reason, actuarial 
science, cultural imagination, or plain old experience.

The often marginal relevance of ethics is even more glaring in the 
area of cultural production. To take one concrete example, the Nation 
of Islam, despite its theological irregularities, was able to craft salutary 
approaches to the cultural, existential, and socio-psychological chal-
lenges confronting its followers. This enabled the group to produce an 
“Islamic” cultural identity that actually resonated in an American con-
text, while relying upon no material artifacts from the Muslim world 
(e.g., thawbs or ṭaqīyas). Clearly, the great bulk of these innovations 
defied the categories “ethical”/”unethical.” And yet their approach was 
far more successful than any other to date at producing an indigenized 
cultural expression of “Islam” in America through which they were able 
to secure a more empowered sense of self and an independent moral 
identity, both clearly Islamic, shar`ī interests. Had Sunnism followed suit, 
these cultural semiotics might have greatly complicated the efforts by 
Islamophobes today to cast Muslims in America as fifth-column aliens.

The Islamic Secular and Siyāsah Shar`īyah

To many, much of the foregoing may sound like a restatement of the con-
cept of state-owned discretion (siyāsah shar`īyah). To my mind, however, 
siyāsah shar`īyah, especially in its modern, popular form, is not a fully 
adequate approach to or substitute for the Islamic secular. According to 
this approach to siyāsah shar`īyah,76 rulings and policies, particularly 
discretionary rules and policies that issue from the state, do not have to 
be based directly on scripture; they merely have to show themselves to 



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be in accord with it.77 The problem with this criterion, however, is that 
it ultimately restricts any assessment to the simple question of “permis-
sibility” (jawāz, ibāḥah), leaving aside the qualitative question of what 
is actually best or most suitable. On this criterion, a highway speed 
limit of 30 mph or a legal driving age of thirty-nine could theoretically 
pass muster. Similarly, leaders or officials could hand down disastrous 
administrative or economic policies, and all of this might be unassailable 
from a modern siyāsah shar`īyah perspective. To my mind, by contrast, 
successful engagement of the Islamic secular must include not only an 
adequate area of discretion and non-shar`ī rational deliberation, but also 
the legitimate right of communities to press for decisions and policies 
that are qualitatively and functionally sound.

As an alternative to the modern siyāsah shar`īyah approach, I would 
revert to an insight afforded by Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi. As part of his 
effort to distinguish the shar`ī from the non-shar`ī, he insisted that the 
only binding and unassailable instrument in Islam is the legal ruling 
(ḥukm). The ḥukm, however, is actually of two types: (1) juristic (shar`ī), 
whose authority resides in the fact that it reclines upon scriptural proof 
(and in the case of judges, courtroom evidence as well); and (2) discre-
tionary, whose authority resides in the ruler’s (read: state’s) authority 
to pursue the community’s preponderant interests. While al-Qarafi was 
certainly not a populist (and even more certainly not a democrat), he 
invests significant authority in “the community” (al-ummah). He insists 
that a ruler’s decree acquires binding status not merely by the fact that 
he issues it, but by the fact that it actually serves the public interest.78 
This, in turn, empowers the community to question or even reject those 
decrees that it deems inconsistent with what is best for the public good.79

Beyond the ḥukm, al-Qarafi recognized a genre of “official decrees,” 
which he placed under the designation “discretionary action” (taṣar-
ruf). The difference between a taṣarruf and a ḥukm is precisely that the 
latter is assumed to be binding and unassailable, whereas the former is 
provisionally binding but not unassailable. In the case of bankruptcy, 
for example, although a judge can sell a debtor’s property for a certain 
amount, this sale is not considered to be a ḥukm but rather a taṣarruf. 
While it may be assumed, in other words, to be valid and binding in terms 



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of settling the dispute at hand, it might also be legitimately challenged 
and overturned, in contradistinction to a ḥukm. That is to say, the debtor 
may legitimately protest that his goods were sold at too low a price. And 
upon receiving such a complaint, a subsequent judge (or other official) 
could legitimately reverse this sale and demand a fairer price.

The Islamic secular, being non-shar`ī, would be subject to a discre-
tionary ḥukm only when the latter clearly and uncontrovertibly served 
the community’s interest, what al-Qarafi termed al-maṣlaḥah al-rājiḥah 
aw al-khāliṣah. But inasmuch as what is actually and concretely safe, effi-
cient, most profitable, culturally edifying, and the like are not fixed but 
indeterminate, it could rarely be claimed that any particular state-spon-
sored ruling or policy in the area of the Islamic secular was in and of 
itself unassailable or beyond review. The Islamic secular, in other words, 
is not, generally speaking, the realm of the ḥukm but rather the realm 
of the taṣarruf, which may be legitimately challenged and reversed. This 
applies to both the private (e.g., bankruptcy cases) as well as the public 
domain (e.g., public policy).

Regarding the latter, the right to petition for redress would accrue to 
the community at large, and its cumulative wisdom, experience, insight, 
and expertise could legitimately function as a check. In other words, if a 
state decree in the realm of the Islamic secular fails to stir the community 
to significant protest, such a decision may be assumed to be valid and 
binding. But if it fails to meet community standards, then the community 
may legitimately seek redress without being accused of engaging in an 
improper display of contempt for legitimate authority. Of course, the pre-
cise procedural mechanisms through which all of this is negotiated and 
held in balance is a technical question beyond the scope of the present 
discussion. Two points, however, might be noted.

First, whatever mechanisms are arrived at for negotiating the use of 
state power in the non-shar`ī realm of the Islamic secular will emerge 
largely out of deliberations that are themselves grounded in non-shar`ī 
disciplines, apparatuses, experiences, and insights. That is to say, much 
of what goes into these deliberations will transcend questions of per-
missible and impermissible and hinge upon empirical considerations 
(e.g., efficiency, orderliness, justice, privacy, and the like) and how these 



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can be most effectively instantiated in concrete terms, as opposed to 
being merely acknowledged theoretically as valid interests. In this capac-
ity, these deliberations may not be dominated by jurists but rather by 
non-clerical experts from other fields and disciplines. Indeed, care must 
be taken to ensure that the jurists’ shar`ī authority is not mistaken for 
a universal authority that empowers them, qua jurists, to speak author-
itatively in the non-shar`ī realm of the Islamic secular.

Second, the distinction between shar`ī and non-shar`ī (i.e., between 
ḥukm and taṣarruf) comes with at least three theoretical advantages that 
are not, to my recollection, explicitly highlighted in the modern siyāsah 
shar`īyah approach. First, by promoting a broader recognition of the 
legitimacy of the Islamic secular, government officials are insulated from 
inflated charges of violating Islam every time they propose or imple-
ment rules or policies that are not based on strictly shar`ī justifications. 
Second, it empowers the community to impose a modicum of account-
ability on its leaders through the legitimate right to police the quality of 
their discretionary decisions. Finally, it domesticates power in the realm 
of the Islamic secular by denying the decisions and policies made therein 
the automatic, unassailable authority of a ḥukm backed by Sharia.

Concluding Thoughts

My attempts at carefulness and circumspection notwithstanding, these 
articulations may still inspire in many the suspicion that the concept of 
the “Islamic secular” can only put Muslims on a slippery slope toward 
secularization in the modern, Western sense of the word. Bit by bit, and 
under the pressure of the West’s dominant cultural and intellectual hege-
mony, they may sense that such a construct will merely prompt Muslims 
to interpret away as much of the Sharia’s authority as they can in order 
to justify expanding the realm in which such secular instruments as 
reason, science, public opinion, custom, experience, cultural imagination, 
and the like can be legitimately invoked.

This is a serious challenge. Yet, it may go some way in vindicat-
ing my project to call to mind that a major effect of neglecting the 
Islamic secular is to burden Sharia with the responsibility for speaking 



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effectively to all and sundry matters. When this fails, as it surely must 
(i.e., how can Sharia or the jurists know what will make one’s spouse 
feel cherished or maximize personal or communal wealth), the frus-
tration that sets in can only strengthen the allure of secularism in the 
modern, Western sense. In short, its undeniable liabilities notwithstand-
ing, we are simply faced with an inescapable choice: either the Islamic 
secular or Western secularism.

Still, it would be remiss to ignore Montesquieu’s ever-so-cunning 
words: “A more certain way to attack religion is by favor, by the com-
forts of life, by the hope of fortune, by what makes one forget it; not by 
what makes one indignant, but by what leads one to indifference when 
other passions act on our souls and when those that religion inspires are 
silent.”80 The greater the area of the non-shar`ī Islamic secular, in other 
words, the greater will be the area in which Sharia waxes mute (or may 
be called upon by its opponents to do so), quietly leading to more and 
more indifference toward what is perceived as an increasingly silent 
religion. And, of course, the greatest threat to religion is almost never 
persecution but the apathy born of its own irrelevance.

There are two considerations, however, that I hope would be taken 
seriously in the face of this challenge. First, the advocates of ijtihād are 
relentless in pointing to the deleterious effects of taqlīd (fixed readings81). 
Of course, taqlīd is assumed to imply a reading not of the sources, but of 
the precedents upheld by the schools of law (madhhabs), which are them-
selves assumed to have executed a proper reading of the sources. This is 
what confers such an immoveable authority upon these fixed readings. 
While the bulk of attention, however, is directed toward “legal taqlīd,” 
the effects and logic of this phenomenon extend to the socio-cultural, 
economic, and political realms as well. Just as modern Muslims labor 
under the constraints of pre-modern legal and para-legal deductions that 
have been infused with pre-modern facts, sensibilities, and presupposi-
tions, they labor perhaps even more so under the authority and influence 
of pre-modern socio-cultural and political norms, whose presumptive 
status is underwritten by a vague association with scriptural texts that 
are assumed (or occasionally claimed) to be the basis of their authority. 
In this capacity, the effects of “secular taqlīd” are often far more difficult 



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to overcome than are those of legal taqlīd, because the former is less 
recognizable and thus less susceptible to critical analysis.82

Meanwhile, paying more careful attention to the Islamic secular could 
alert us to the fact that much of what is upheld as “Islamic” is not a func-
tion of textual interpretation or even reliance upon madhhab precedent, 
but of the exercise by pre-modern jurists (and others) of their own reason, 
imagination, cultural literacy, and other faculties en route to discretionary 
and other nonshar`ī conclusions deemed appropriate to their own context. 
By recognizing this, contemporary Muslims could free themselves from 
the would-be authority of any number of bygone conventions, vogues, 
preferences, insights, biases, assumptions, and the like. For inasmuch as 
these did not concretely recline upon direct scriptural or shar`ī authority, 
the most they could amount to would be practical discretionary choices that 
even pre-modern jurists would deem open to ongoing critique and revision.

By recognizing and engaging the Islamic secular, then, we would 
free the rational, cultural and imaginative powers of contemporary 
Muslims – from all walks and disciplines – from the undue constraints 
of an over-inclusive understanding of Islamic law and history. And in so 
doing, we may actually render them more, rather than less, likely to avoid 
secularization both by sparing Sharia the responsibility for inadequately 
addressing issues it was never calibrated to address and by opening the 
way for present-day Muslims, including, or perhaps especially, those 
outside the clerical class, to deploy their talents to the end of (re)acquir-
ing the kind of cultural and intellectual authority via which Muslims 
can (re)construct an appropriate and functionally effective plausibility 
structure for Islam in the modern world.

Second, and finally, as I have repeated several times over the course 
of this essay, the shar`ī and the religious are not synonymous. Whereas 
the shar`ī necessarily implies the religious, the religious does not neces-
sarily entail the shar`ī. Thus, even if our engagements with the Islamic 
secular lead us to greater comfort, hope, and fortune above and beyond 
the strictly shar`ī, this need not imply, pace Montesquieu, the irrele-
vance of Islam as religion. After all, between one supremely reasonable 
economic policy, drug-treatment program, or speed limit and another, 
something other than reason will have to guide us to a final decision.



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Islam, in this context (i.e., as religion and the fount of trans-rational 
direction, insight, virtue, and guidance), remains thus inextricably rel-
evant to the Islamic secular realm. The Islamic secular, in other words, 
is entirely and permanently deaf to Grotius’s suggestion to proceed “as 
if God did not exist.” This is the most important substantive difference 
between it and the Western secular. And this binds the Muslim to perpet-
ual, conscientious engagement with Islam as religion, even in the most 
secular of endeavors. In the end, therefore, as I have noted elsewhere, it 
may be far less the notion that Sharia is limited in scope that opens the 
path to Western-style secularization than it is the sense or belief among 
Muslims that, by relying on a purely intellectual engagement of “Islam” 
or Sharia or the Islamic secular, they can so perfectly master the art of 
living that they have no need to seek supra-worldly guidance directly 
from God.83



J A C K S O N:  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R     197

Endnotes
1 Of course, “religion” also generates its share of definitional ambiguity. See, for exam-

ple, R. T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications: A Critical 
Survey,” Numen 42, no. 3 (October 1995): 284-309; J. Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, 
Religious,” Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 
1998), 269-84.

2 According to T. N. Madan, “the word ‘secularization’ was first used in 1648, at the 
end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, to refer to the transfer of church prop-
erties to the exclusive control of the princes.” See his “Secularism in Its Place,” 
Secularism and Its Critics, ed. R. Bhargava, 6th ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University 
Press, 2007), 297. According to Madan, the Englishman George Jacob Holyoake 
coined this term in 1851. See Madan, “Secularism,” 298. According to Ashis Nandy, 
Holyoake coined it in 1850, a time when it was still “accommodative of religion.” 
See his “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in 
Secularism and Its Critics, 327. The Thirty Years’ War was a devastating religious 
conflict, ostensibly between Protestants and Catholics, that claimed several million 
lives and ended with the Peace of Westphalia. I note for the record the dissenting 
view of W. Cavanaugh regarding the significance of Europe’s wars of religion. See 
his The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict 
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 123-80.

3 J. Casanova, “Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad,” Powers of the 
Modern Secular: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. D. Scott and C. Hirschkind 
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 19-20. Casanova mentions, incidentally, 
Confucianism and Taoism as examples in this regard.

4 Cited in C. Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” Secularism and Its Critics, 34.

5 See note 2.

6 J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of 
Man 1670-1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 64.

7 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 65.

8 N. Stolzenberg, “The Profanity of the Law,” Law and the Sacred, ed. A. Sarat, L. 
Douglas, and M. M. Umphrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 34.

9 S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Politics and Change in Western Political Thought 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 147.

10 See, for example, M. Zurqa, Fatāwā Muṣṭafā al-Zarqā (Damascus: Dar al-Qalam, 
1420/1999), 405.

11 For example, while Ibn Rushd cites unanimous consensus on the ban on Muslims 
inheriting from non-Muslims, the Hanbalis Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qayyim al-Jaw-
ziyyah incline toward allowing converts to inherit from their non-Muslim relatives, 
partly in light of their recognition that this ban was functioning as a bar to Islam. 



198    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

See Ibn Rushd, Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr, n.d.), 
2:264; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Aḥkām Ahl al-Dhimmah, 3 vols., ed. A. al-Bakri and 
A. al-’Aruri (Dammam: al-Ramadi li al-Nashr, 1418/1998), 2:853-72, esp. 2:253-58.

12 One might make a case for the maẓālim courts as a formally recognized, secular 
forum. But they were more an alternative régime of enforcement, not an alternative 
régime of law per se. This is certainly the impression one gets from such author-
itative descriptions as that of al-Mawardi. See Abu al-Hasan Ali b. Muhammad 
al-Mawardi, Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭānīyah wa al-Wilāyāt al-Dīnīyah, ed.

 A. al-Baghdadi (Kuwait: Maktabat Dar Ibn Qutaybah, 1409/1989), 102-26. On page 
15, for example, he explicitly states: “Maẓālim jurisdiction does not recognize rul-
ings disallowed by the religious law” (naẓar al-maẓālim lā yubīḥ min al-aḥkām mā 
ḥaẓarahu al-shar`).

13 For example, the modern jurist Muhammad Abu Zahrah insists that “there is unan-
imous consensus to the effect that the ḥākim in Islam is God the Exalted and that 
there is no religious law (lā shar`) except from God.” See his Uṣūl al-Fiqh (Cairo: 
Dar al-Fikr al-Arabi, n.d.), 63.

14 T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 2003), 21-66.

15 J. Casanova, “The Secular and Secularisms,” Social Research 17, no. 4 (2009): 1052.

16 J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1994), 15; see also the discussion at 20-25.

17 C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 594.

18 Ibid., 2-3.

19 See O. Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, trans. G. Holoch (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2007), xii-xiii, 7-8, 59 and passim.

20 S. L. Carter, God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (New 
York: Basic Books, 2000), 4.

21 See, for example, A. March, “Are Secularism and Neutrality Attractive to Religious 
Minorities: Islamic Discussions of Western Secularism in the ‘Jurisprudence of 
Muslim Minorities’ (Fiqh al-Aqallīyāt) Discourse,” Cardoza Law Review 30, no. 6 
(2009): 2821-54; A. An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of 
Shari’a (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1.

22 See H. A. Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law 
in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 24.

23 Asad, Formations, 36-37, nt. 41.

24 Ibid., 31, nt. 24.

25 Ibid., 30.

26 See Abu Bakr Ahmad b. al-Husayn b. Ali b. Abd Allah b. Musa al-Bayhaqi, Kitāb 
al-Asmā’ wa al-Ṣifāt (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, n.d.), 35.



J A C K S O N:  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R     199

27 Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1.

28 W. B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament 
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 51.

29 J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (New York: The New American 
Library, 1965), 448.

30 See N. J. Coulson, “The State and the Individual in Islamic Law,” International and 
Comparative Law Quarterly 6 (January 1957): 49.

31 After explaining how the modern state is ubiquitous in terms of its jurisdiction, 
Hallaq writes: “Whereas the modern state rules over and regulates its religious 
institutions, rendering them subservient to its legal will, the Sharī’a rules over and 
regulates, directly or through delegation, any and all secular institutions. If these 
institutions are secular or deal with the secular, they do so under the supervising 
and overarching moral will that is Sharī`a. Therefore, any political form or political 
(or social or economic) institution is ultimately subordinate to the Sharī`a, including 
the executive and judicial powers.” See Hallaq, The Impossible State, 51. Given the 
entrenched incumbency of such a view, based in part on the straightforwardness 
of its logic, it may be difficult at times for readers to remain focused on my actual 
point. Suffice it to say at this juncture that there is a difference between Islam and 
Sharia. And where Sharia’s jurisdiction ends it simply cannot concretely regulate 
a matter, even if the matter itself remains within the purview of Islam’s values and 
virtues. In short, even if Islam may preside over all matters, Sharia does not.

32 O. Anjum wrestles head-on with the problem of the community being excluded 
from negotiating the quotidian order in his Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic 
Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

33 In his classic work on the Zahiris, I. Goldziher discerned that they were not about 
literalism per se, but rather constituted an attempt to combat ra’y (i.e., informed opin-
ion), which could not recline directly on the sources for it content. See I. Goldziher, 
The Zahiris: Their Doctrine and Their History, trans. W. Behn (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1971.) 
Meanwhile, we might note that Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), among the greatest represen-
tatives of Zahirism, explicitly recognizes the legitimacy of figurative or allegorical 
renderings of certain passages of scripture. See, for example, his Al-Iḥkām fī Uṣūl 
al-Aḥkām, 8 vols., ed. A. M. Shakir (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadidah, 1308/1993), 2:28

34 A. K. Reinhart, Before Revelation: The Boundaries of Muslim Moral Thought (New 
York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 16.

35 See Abu Ishaq al-Shirazi, Ṭabaqāt al-Fuqahā’, ed. I. Abbas (Beirut: Dar al-Ra’id 
al-’Arabī, 1970).

36 On the general debate around this point, see, for example, Reinhart, Boundaries, 
128-32.

37 See Ibn Rushd, Talkhīṣ al-Mustaṣfā, ed. J. Alaoui (Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 
1994), 47-48.



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38 Part of the point I shall argue is that even where Sharia requires action or nonac-
tion, there may remain other evaluative bases upon which to assess how this act 
or non-act is most appropriately instantiated in real time and space. Here we may 
think of Sharia’s limits in terms, perhaps, of depth as opposed to scope. See below, 
14-18.

39 The division between “formative” and “post-formative” is contested, both in terms 
of when it occurred and of its meaning and implications. Recently, Intisar Rabb has 
offered “founding period” as an alternative, pointing to three distinct phases: (1) the 
founding period (the seventh to ninth centuries CE); (2) the period of textualization 
(the tenth and eleventh centuries CE), including the purported “closing of the gates 
of ijtihād”; and (3) the period of synthesizing textual and interpretive authority. See 
I. Rabb, Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic 
Criminal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8-9.

40 This goes back as far as my doctoral dissertation, “In Defense of Two-Tiered 
Orthodoxy: A Study of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī’s Kitāb al-Iḥkām fī Tamyīz 
al-Fatāwā ‘an al-Aḥkām wa Taṣarrufāt al-Qāḍī wa al-Imām” (PhD diss., University 
of Pennsylvania, 1991).

41 See, for example, Ibn Hishām, Al-Sīrah al-Nabawīyah, ed. M. al-Saqa, I. al-Abyari, 
and A. Shalabi (Damascus: Dar Ibn Kathir, 1426/2005), 523.

42 See Muslim b. Hajjaj, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 1416/1995), 
4:1464.

43 Ibid.

44 See, for example, Jamal al-Din b. Umar b. al-Hajib, Jāmi’ al-Ummahāt, ed. A. al-Akh-
dari (Damascus: al-Yamamah li al-Tiba’ah wa al-Nashr wa al-Tawzi’, 1421/2000), 
331ff.

45 See, for example, Al-Risālah, ed. A. M. Shakir (Cairo: al-Maktabah al-’Ilmiyyah, 
1358/1939), 487-503 on ijtihād.

46 A. El-Shamsy, “Rethinking Taqlīd in the Early Shafi`i School,” Journal of the American 
Oriental Society 128, no. 1 (2008): 14-15. Emphasis mine.

47 See Abu Ja`far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari, Tārīkh al-Ṭabarī, 6 vols. (Beirut: Dar 
al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, 1433/2012), 5:190.

48 Al-Ghazali, Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl wa al-Muwaṣṣil ilā Dhī al-`Izzah wa al-Jalāl, ed. 
J. Saliba and K. ‘Ayyad (Beirut: Dar al-Andalus, n.d.), 102. Of course, al-Ghazali did 
not always speak with complete consistency in this regard. In Al-Mustaṣfā 1:3, for 
example, he places among the three genres of knowledge, “the purely rational (‘aqlī 
maḥḍ) which the religious law neither encourages nor applauds, such as statistics, 
geometry, astronomy and the like, all of which amount either to false suppositions 
… or valid knowledge that is of no benefit.” His Maliki commentator, Ibn Rashiq (d. 
632/1235) criticizes this view, insisting that these sciences cannot be categorically 
dismissed as being of no benefit. See al-Husayn b. Rashiq, Lubāb al-Maḥṣūl fī ‘Ilm 



J A C K S O N:  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R     201

al-Uṣūl, 2 vols., ed. M. Jabi (Dubai: Dar al-Buhuth li al-Dirasat al-Islamiyyah wa 
Ihya’ al-Turath, 1422/2001), 1:189. Of course, both of them are speaking in a specific 
historical context regarding the degree to which non-Muslim science in general may 
or may not touch upon issues of relevance or potential harm to religion.

49 See my Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Shihāb al-Dīn 
al-Qarāfī (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 113-41.

50 Al-Qarāfī, Sharḥ Tanqīḥ al-Fuṣūl fī Ikhtiṣār al-Maḥṣūl fī al-Uṣūl, ed. A.F. al-Mazidi 
(Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-`Ilmiyyah, 2007), 109.

51 See, for example, his Dar` Ta`āruḍ al-`Aql wa al-Naql, 11 vols., ed. M. R. Salim 
(Riyadh: Matba’at al-Imam Muhammad b. Sa’ud, 1399/1979), 4:146.

52 See, for example, Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Juhd al-Qarīḥah fī Tajrīd al-Naṣīḥah (Beirut: 
al-Maktabah al-`Asriyyah, 1430/2009), 91-92 (an abridgment of Ibn Taymiya’s 
Naṣīḥah Ahl al-Imān fī al-Radd ‘alā Manṭiq al-Yūnān). This is not to say that scrip-
ture would necessarily have nothing to say about the religious status of a particular 
rational claim. The point is simply that the claim itself would have to be rationally 
examined to determine its actual substance before a shar’ī ruling could be reached. 
On another note, I obviously cannot concur with the view of my former colleague 
John Walbridge when he writes: “The great fourteenth-century fundamentalist 
reformer Ibn Taymīya hated reason wherever it expressed itself in Islamic intel-
lectual life.” See his God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.

53 See Al-Ibhāj fī Sharḥ al-Minhāj, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, 1424/2004), 
1:30.

54 Radd al-Muḥtār ‘alā al-Durr al-Mukhtār Sharḥ Tanwīr al-Abṣār, 12 vols., ed. A. Abd 
al-Mawjud and A. Muawwad (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmiyyah, 1415/ 1994), 1:118.

55 The late Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn wrote: “Whoever looks carefully will see 
the difference clearly between what the religion provides guidance on and what it 
leaves to the tried and tested experience of society.” See his Dirāsāt fī al-Sharī’ah 
al-Islāmīyah (UAE: Maktabat Dar al-Farabi, 1326/ 2005), 13.

56 Casanova, Public Religions, 21-25.

57 Asad, Formations, 237.

58 C. Taylor, “Secular Imperative,” 32-33.

59 Intisar Rabb summarizes the Mu`tazili position as follows: “The idea was that there 
is a moral system woven into the fabric of this world that humans could ratio-
nally discern, but that God made them free to follow or disregard the dictates of 
that morality and promised to judge them on that basis… [W]hatever the human 
intellect perceives as morally good or morally wrong is indeed so before God… In 
other words, morality is objective, meaning that perceptions of moral value should 
not differ from God to human beings.” See her Doubt in Islamic Law, 273. I would 
argue that this Mu`tazili realism, and not reason’s evaluative capacity per se, was 



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the real, primary target of the critique by the Sunnis, who favored a more volun-
tarist approach that accommodated God’s right and ability to act independently. 
Of course, just how voluntarist God is would become a bone of contention within 
Sunnism itself. For example, while characterizing the Mu`tazili position as “weak” 
(ḍa`īf), Ibn Taymīyah rejects what he sees as Ash`arism’s completely “empty cos-
mology.” He thus complains that, on their understanding, where the Qur’an speaks 
of the Prophet “commanding good and forbidding evil,” this does not refer to any 
substantive good or evil in existence prior to the command itself; rather, this phrase 
merely means that “he commands them to do what he commands them to do and 
forbids them from doing what he forbids them from doing.” See his Majmū`al-
Fatāwā, 37 vols., ed. Abd al-Rahman b. Muhammad b. Qasim (Riyadh: Maktabat 
al-Ma`arif, n.d.), 8:433.

60 Kitāb al-Irshād ilā Qawāṭi` al-Adillah fī Uṣūl al-I`tiqād, ed. Z. Umayrat (Beirut: Dar 
al-Kutub al-`Ilmiyyah, 1416/1995), 110.

61 Al-Iqtiṣād fī al-I`tiqād (Cairo: M. al-Babi al-Halabi and Sons, n.d.), 80-82.

62 Kitāb al-Arba`īn fī Uṣūl al-Dīn, ed. M. A. Mahmud (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-’Ilmi-
yyah, 2009), 244.

63 On the Maturidis, see, for example, Kamal al-Din Muhammad b. Muhammad b. Abi 
Sharif al-Maqdisi, Kitāb al-Musāmarah fī Sharḥ al-Musāyarah, 2 vols. (Cairo: al-Mak-
tabah al-Azhariyyah li al-Turath, 2006), 2:38; Abd al-Rahim b. Ali b. al-Mu’ayyad 
Shaykh Zadeh, Naẓm al-Farā’id wa Jam` al-Fawā’id fī al-Masā’il al-Mukhtalaf fīhā 
bayna al-Sādah al-Ash`arīyah wa al-Sādah al-Māturīdīyah, Arabic MS. # 875, ‘Ilm 
al-Kalām, 14 vols. (Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyyah).

64 See his Amrād al-Qulub̄ wa Shifā’uhā (Cairo: al-Matba`ah al-Salafiyyah wa 
Maktabatuha, 1386/1966), 12-13.

65 Majmū` al-Fatāwā, 8:434-35.

66 ‘Aql, as employed by pre-modern Muslim jurists and theologians, included affective 
and other elements that the Enlightenment explicitly sought to eliminate from 
reason as a construct. When Mu`tazilis (and others) speak of the good of saving 
a drowning man or the evil of falsely accusing an innocent man as being known 
by reason (‘aql), this is clearly more than the dictates of reason as an autonomous 
faculty unbounded and uninformed by culture, sensibility, or convention. By con-
trast, the latter is precisely what Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant proposed 
reason to be, namely, “an autonomous faculty in the sense that it was self-govern-
ing, establishing and following its own rules, independent of political, cultural or 
subconscious interests.” On this point, see F. C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German 
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 8.

67 Of course, it might be objected that this is only according to my restricted definition 
of ijtihād. But any attempt to return to the formative period’s approach, according 
to which the boundary between the interpretive and the empirical was blurred 
or absent, must be openly acknowledged as such. In addition, it should openly 



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take account of the potential abuses of the religious law that such an approach 
might engender in a modern context. Second, any advocacy or recognition of the 
distinction between scholars of the texts (‘ulamā’ al-nuṣūṣ) and scholars of context 
(‘ulamā’ al-wāqi’) should be accompanied by an explicit acknowledgment that what 
is desired in many instances is not a religious ruling (ḥukm shar`ī), but some other 
evaluative judgment. Otherwise, we remain firmly within the shar`ī realm and 
effectively the domain of the scholars of the text.

68 Even Qasim Amin, for example, would state that his issue was not with hijab itself 
but with a specific concretion thereof in Egypt at the time: “Were there a single 
text in the Sharia requiring hijāb as it is known among some Muslims today, it would 
be incumbent upon me to avoid any investigation into the matter, and I would 
not write a single letter that goes against these texts, no matter how harmful they 
might appear to be at first blush; for one must submit to divine commands without 
investigation or debate. But we do not find any texts in the Sharia requiring hijāb 
as it is typically worn today (‘alā alṭarīqah al-ma’hūdah).” See his Taḥrīr al-Mar’ah 
in Qasim Amin, Al-A`māl al-Kāmilah, ed. M. Imarah (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1409/ 
1989), 352.

69 This might provide some insight into the observation of Tariq Ramadan, a major 
proponent of ijtihād: “[A]fter constantly referring to ijtihād, tajdīd, and iṣlāḥ for 
over a century, Muslims – whether in Muslim-majority societies or Western com-
munities – still find it difficult to overcome the successive crises they go through 
and to provide something more than partial answers; and even the answers [they 
do put forth] remain constantly apologetic or [are] produced by mostly defensive 
postures.” See his Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2009), 30. Oddly, he appears at times perhaps to fall into the trap 
of inflating the role of fiqh to the point that it acquires relevance beyond the strictly 
legal. And where fiqh does reach its limit, “ethics is often pressed as the appropriate 
alternative. On what I see as an inadequacy of the ethics-approach, see below, 17-18.

70 Muḥammad Abduh, “Al-Zawāj,” in Al-A`māl al-Kāmilah li al-Imām Muḥammad 
‘Abduh, 5 vols., ed. M. ‘Umarah (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1427/2006), 2:70 (the essay 
runs from 2:70-75).

71 Asad, Formations, 232-34.

72 Abduh, “Al-Zawāj,” 73. Incidentally, it is not my intention in adducing this example 
to imply that Abduh’s approach overall failed to recognize the Islamic secular.

73 See P. L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion 
(New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 110-13. Berger argues, inter alia, that early 
modern Protestantism’s significant success in stripping the world of any mystical 
or super-natural elements has sapped religion’s ability to sustain its relevance in 
the modern world, spawning the rise and diffusion of a secular (i.e., non-religious) 
worldview. My argument is not that this has obtained in the Muslim world (the 
situation of Muslims in the West is a different matter). My point is simply that the 



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intellectual and cultural “immanent frame” in which religion exists will affect its 
overall plausibility as a way of life.

74 And here I suspect that the insight of Edward Bernays is gravely relevant, espe-
cially given the realities of our contemporary globalized world: “The conscious 
and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses 
is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen 
mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling 
power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our 
ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” See his Propaganda (New 
York: Ig Publishing, 2005), 37. The book originally appeared in 1928. This might also 
provide the context within which to appreciate a view more recently expressed by 
Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to the effect that rather than violent jihadis or more 
assiduous commitments to jihad as organized violence, what Islam needs today is, 
“a massive army of preachers, teachers and competently trained journalists who are 
able to address today’s public in the language of the age and the style of the times, 
through voice, image, spoken word, physical gesture, books, pamphlets, magazines, 
newspapers, dialogue, documentaries, drama, motion pictures and everything that 
ties people to Islam. This peaceful jihad which is an absolute necessity (al-jihād 
al-silmī al-ḍarūrī) we have not undertaken by one thousandth of what is required 
of us.” See his Fiqh al-Jihād, 2 vols. (Cairo: Maktabat Wahba, 1430/2009), 1: 402-03. 
Of course, all of these activities would fall under the Islamic secular, none of them 
being shar`ī endeavors.

75 This is related, I suspect, to the tendency to equate Islam with morality as an abso-
lute first order priority alongside the assumption that no other values (e.g., order, 
privacy, safety, and charity) can compete with morality. Sharia, in this context, is 
viewed as course-motor morality with ethics allowing us to fine tune things. Hidden 
from consideration, meanwhile, is that the ethical still traffics in dos and don’ts and, 
as such, remains impervious to the world beyond good and evil.

76 I acknowledge that my reference here to a modern approach to siyāsah shar`īyah 
is oversimplified. The contrast I have in mind, however, might be highlighted by 
a comparison between classical and modern definitions. In the introduction to 
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīyah’s Al-Ṭuruq al-Ḥukmīyah fī al-Siyāsah al-Shar`īyah, M. J. 
Ghazi cites the definition of siyāsah by the pre-modern Hanbalite Ibn ‘Aqil (d. 1119) 
alongside that of the modern Abd al-Wahhab Khallaf. Ibn Aqil: “[Implementing] an 
action according to which the people will be closer to wholesomeness and farther 
from corruption even if the Prophet laid down no precedent and no revelation 
came down in that regard.” Khallaf: “Arranging the public affairs of the Islamic 
state in accordance with what secures the realization of interests and averts harm, 
in ways that do not go beyond the boundaries of Islamic law (min mā lā yata’addā 
ḥudūd al-Sharī`ah) and its universal principles (uṣūluhā al-kullīyah), even if this 
goes against the views of the mujtahid-Imāms.” See Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, 
Ṭuruq al-Ḥukmīyah fī al-Siyāsah al-Shar`īyah, ed. M. J. Ghazi (Cairo: Matba’at 



J A C K S O N:  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R     205

al-Madani, n.d.), p. ‘A (‘ayn). Khallaf also cites these two definitions in his Al-Siyāsah 
al-Shar`īyah, 15 and 17, apparently without seeing any tension between them. We 
might note, incidentally, in Ibn Aqil’s definition, the implied recognition of formal 
limits to Sharia beyond which those discretionary actions for which there are no 
concrete scriptural indications are appropriately invoked.

77 See, for example, F. Vogel, Islamic Law and Legal System (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 
173-74, discussing aspects of this approach in the context of Saudi Arabia.

78 See, for example, his Al-Furūq, 4 vols. (Beirut: ‘Alam al-Kitab, n.d.), 4:39, in which 
he discusses those discretionary decrees that are to be enforced and those that are 
not.

79 See, for example, his Kitāb al-Iḥkām fī Tamyīz al-Fatāwā ‘an al-Aḥkām wa Taṣarrufāt 
al-Qāḍī wa al-Imām, ed. A. Abu Ghuddah (Aleppo: Maktabat al-Matbu’at al-Islami-
yyah, 1387/1967), 183, in which he points to instances, such as the Imam’s declaring 
jihad, where the community may ignore the state’s discretionary decree if they deem 
it lacking in substance or legitimacy.

80 Cited in J. J. Owen, “Church and State in Stanley Fish’s Antiliberalism,” American 
Political Science Review 93, no. 4 (1999): 922.

81 Ramadan, Radical Reform, 22.

82 This is not to suggest that every secular conclusion institutionalized by premodern 
Muslims was wrong, illegitimate, or treacherous. It is simply to point out that no 
society will be able to rely entirely upon law in the strict sense even for its legal 
institutions. As such, society will have to draw upon any number of extra-scriptural 
norms and presuppositions. Extra-scriptural, however, does not necessarily mean 
wrong or illegitimate. Indeed, the Qur’an directs the Prophet and his followers to 
draw upon any number of pre-Islamic Arabia’s ma`rūf (prevailing notions of good 
and wholesome). The problem, of course, comes with imputing to such conventions 
an authority that is greater or longer lasting than what they should properly enjoy.

83 See, for example, my “Islamic Law, Muslims and American Politics,” Islamic Law 
and Society 22 (2015): 289.



206

The Islamic Secular: Comments (2017)*

M O H A M M A D  F A D E L

Professor Sherman Jackson’s essay “The Islamic Secular” challenges the 
popular conception within the Muslim community that norms are either 
“Islamic” or “un-Islamic.” Insofar as popular Muslim consciousness accords 
legitimacy only to the “Islamic” and grants only grudging, if any, legitimacy 
to the “nonIslamic,” this intervention is welcome and profoundly needed. 
But his ambition here goes beyond correcting misconceptions within the 
community itself: It is also an intervention in debates about the secular, sec-
ularization, and religion in western academic discourses. In the brief space 
allotted to me to respond to this very rich and important essay, I will limit 
myself to the arguments he directs toward the terms mentioned above and 
his argument that the “Islamic” secular presents a different phenomenon.

Jackson argues that the western intellectual tradition’s understand-
ing of the relationship of the secular to religion is based upon the notion 

Mohammad H. Fadel is associate professor, University of Toronto Faculty of 
Law; Canada Research Chair for the Law and Economics of Islamic Law; and 
a columnist for The Islamic Monthly. He has published numerous articles in 
Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism.

This biography appeared in the article when it was first published.
*This response was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 2 (2017): 32-34
Fadel, Mohammad. 2024. “The Islamic Secular: Comments (2017).” American Journal of Islam and 
Society 41, no. 1: 299–303 • doi: 10.35632/ajis.v41i1.3424
Copyright © 2024 International Institute of Islamic Thought



FA d E L :  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R :  C O M M E N t S     207

that it is the function of the secular to discipline religion, with the ulti-
mate goal of making it consistent with sociability and rationality. In 
contrast to the western secular, he posits that the Islamic secular is inter-
nal to Islam, insofar as the Sharia itself places jurisdictional boundaries 
on what religion can rightfully claim, thereby creating a legitimate space 
for non-religious (i.e., secular) reason. Broadly speaking, although this 
secular domain exists within an abstractly Islamic normative scheme, 
its contents are not explicitly determined by revelation. This gives rise 
to an Islamic secular in which secular reason predominates, but never 
proceeds “as if God did not exist.”

Jackson provides many details of his interesting argument that 
deserve a more lengthy engagement than is possible here. I wish to 
focus my comments, therefore, on what I consider to be the most aca-
demically provocative part of the thesis: Given that the idea of the secular 
is internal to the Sharia itself, the crucial role that western intellectuals 
have assigned to it, namely, the necessary disciplinarian of religion – 
whatever its merits in European history might have been – is superfluous 
with respect to Islam. The difficulty with this argument, in my opinion, 
is that it equates the Sharia to Sunni conceptions of the Sharia. It is not 
simply that all of the particular examples of historical cases that he 
cites come from the Sunni tradition, or that the techniques of legal rea-
soning1 so critical in generating the Islamic secular emerge from Sunni 
jurisprudence, it is the failure to consider as fully Islamic the alternative 
conceptions of Islam against which Sunnism defined itself.

Whether or not one accepts Sunni historical claims that their posi-
tions simply “are” a continuation of the authentic teachings of the 
Prophet and his Companions, it is historically incontestable that not 
all Muslims accepted as normative all of the theologically controversial 
positions that came to be associated with Sunnis. Among these positions 
are deferring the status of the major sinner (al-fāsiq) to God; rejecting 
the requirement that legitimate rule requires the rule of the most virtu-
ous (al-afḍal); rejecting the doctrine of charismatic authority (al-naṣṣ), 
whether in politics or religion in favor of community choice (ikhtiyār) 
and the objective nature of knowledge (‘ilm)2; and rejecting violent 
change as a legitimate means for correcting governmental misconduct.



208    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

Insofar as all of these questions were not conclusively settled by 
revelation, it is implausible to believe that the particularly Sunni answers 
can be divorced from any consideration of the disastrous political 
consequences these contrary doctrines had on the peace of the early 
community. Indeed, elevating the caliphate from a question of law (where 
differences would be tolerated) to one of theological doctrine (where dif-
ferent positions are not) – a positioning that theologians such as Sa’d 
al-Din al-Taftazani admitted was awkward – seems to me precisely to 
be a use of secular reason to discipline otherwise socially dangerous 
conceptions of religion, whether Khariji puritanism or Shi’i messianism. 
Moreover, the way in which Sunni political theology excludes both of 
these alternative conceptions from the orbit of legitimate theological 
doctrine strikes me as not generically different from the role that the 
secular plays in disciplining religion that Jackson identifies as a marker 
of the western, but not the Islamic, secular.

This is significant because if I am right, the particular reflective equi-
librium between the secular and the revealed that Jackson discusses in 
his otherwise persuasive essay depends upon sustaining a particular set 
of theopolitical doctrines that are all closely connected to maintaining 
social peace and the state’s role in underwriting it. One could argue that 
the religious-inspired violence plaguing many areas of the Muslim world 
is a result not only of confusion among Islam, the illegitimate secular, 
and the legitimate Islamic secular, but also of the political failure of 
post-colonial states to sustain the kind of politics necessary to prevent 
either puritanical or messianic interpretations of religion.

Jackson’s failure to expressly invoke the state’s role in sustaining the 
Islamic secular is particularly odd, given that he cites Qarafi’s theory of 
the Imam’s taṣarruf as the paradigmatic example of the Islamic secular. 
The Imam’s authority to exercise this power to generate the provision-
ally binding norms that govern the public domain of the Islamic secular, 
however, is completely contingent upon the existence of a legitimate 
public order. While taṣarruf vindicates the legitimacy of the idea of the 
Islamic secular, it also undermines the claim that Islam, as a religion, 
constructs its secular by virtue of purely internal, pre-secular, as it were, 
restraints. Rather, it seems to me, the enduring teaching of Sunnism in 



FA d E L :  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R :  C O M M E N t S     209

this regard is that the existence of a proper polity is a condition precedent 
for preventing the distortion of true religion.

Whether one wishes to speak of true religion preceding proper pol-
itics or of proper politics preceding true religion, what is indisputable is 
that, from the Sunni perspective, politics and religion exist in a mutually 
reinforcing relationship, whether positively or negatively. In either case, 
however, it is hard to sustain the argument that the Islamic secular is 
interior to Sharia or, for that matter, that Sharia is interior to the secular, 
whether or not the latter is Islamic.



210    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

Endnotes
1 These include “analogy (qiyās), equity (istiḥsān), public utility (maṣlaḥah mursalah), 

blocking the means (sadd al-dharā’i`), adaptive legal precepts (qawā`id fiqhīyah), 
and even inductive readings of scripture (istiqrā’).”

2 See, for example, Bukhari’s statement in his chapter “Al-`Ilm qabla al-Qawl wa 
al-`Amal” in his Ṣaḥīḥ’s “Book of Knowledge”: “Knowledge is acquired only by 
learning (innamā al-`ilm bi al-ta`allum).”



211

The Islamic Secular: Comments (2017)*

H U M E I R A  I Q T I D A R

Professor Sherman A. Jackson, an authority on Islamic legal and intel-
lectual history, has claimed in this article that a particular form of the 
secular is internal to Islam. For him, the secular is primarily a manifes-
tation of the differentiation of spheres of human life. The Islamic secular, 
he argues, is revealed through a close reading of the boundaries that the 
Sharia self-imposes upon its jurisdiction and that implicitly operation-
alizes a type of differentiation. His argument rests upon a distinction 
between Sharia and the wider religion of Islam. This allows him to claim 
that the Sharia’s self-limitation supported a recognition of other modes 
of reasoning and argumentation within Islam, and that it is this space 

Humeira Iqtidar is a senior lecturer in politics at King’s College London. She 
was the principal investigator for the European Research Council funded pro-
ject “Tolerance in Contemporary Muslim Politics: Political Theory beyond 
the West” and is a co-convenor for the London Comparative Political Theory 
Workshop. Her research explores the shifting demarcations of state and mar-
ket in political imagination, and their relationship with Islamic thought and 
practice. She is the author of Secularizing Islamists? Jamaat-e-Islami and Ja-
maat-ud-Dawa in Urban Pakistan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

This biography appeared in the article when it was first published.
*This response was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 2 (2017): 35-38
Iqtidar, Humeira. 2024. “The Islamic Secular: Comments (2017).” American Journal of Islam and 
Society 41, no. 1: 304–308 • doi: 10.35632/ajis.v41i1.3424
Copyright © 2024 International Institute of Islamic Thought



212    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

of non-Sharia reasoning that constitutes the space of the secular within 
Islam. Arguing for such a relationship between Sharia and the secular, 
then, leads him to point out that the distinction between the Islamic 
and the Western seculars lays not so much in the substance, but in their 
function. In other words, substantively both versions of the secular seem 
to support rational, empirical thought; however, in the case of Islam, the 
function of the secular is not to reduce of religion.

These are exciting ideas. As many have already argued, the secular-
ization that happened in Europe was not needed in most other parts of 
the world because no exact equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church’s 
hierarchical, structured, and institutionalized control existed beyond 
Europe. Jackson carries that argument further to flesh out the precise 
contours of the difference between European secularization and Islam. 
There is much to appreciate in that move. Specifying the difference, 
while simultaneously enriching categories such as “the secular” with 
new layers of meaning, allows a greater depth to the whole discussion. 
I am also sympathetic to the political project of moving public debate – 
among Muslims as much as beyond them – away from the binaries of 
Islam and rationality, Islamic and secular, and so on.

However, several aspects of the argument require greater explication 
for the overall claims to be fully plausible. The first concept that needs 
some more unpacking is the idea of the secular itself. Jackson bases his 
definition upon José Casanova’s discussion of differentiation in order to 
argue that the secular is that differentiated realm which is not governed 
or adjudicated through revelation or its extensions. There is, however, a 
problem with differentiation more generally to consider. While differen-
tiation theorists have tended to assume that human life has been broken 
into these separate containers, it is clear that lived reality has somewhat 
obstinately refused to oblige; social, political, religious, and economic 
life continues to bleed across putative boundaries. Academics, of course, 
buy into this thesis more than many others. They need to operate as if 
the social and the economic, the political and the cultural, the rational 
and the irrational spheres of life can be rather neatly divided into not 
just different categories, but also into different disciplines with their 
own methodologies for studying these respective aspects of human life.



I Qt I d A R :  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R :  C O M M E N t S     213

The success of differentiation theory lies not in accurately describing 
an empirical reality, but in concretizing a shift in popular imagination. It 
is worth pausing to ask: Why do we need differentiation? What forms of 
human behavior and subjectivity are endorsed by assuming that human 
life can or should be divided into these separate spheres? How is differ-
entiation linked to capitalism? What role did differentiation play, if any, 
in pre-capitalist societies? At stake, then, are two issues that are unclear 
in Jackson’s current formulation:1 there seems to be an acceptance of 
differentiation as an ahistorical phenomenon, one not linked to the devel-
opment of industrial/colonial capitalism, and2 an implicit attribution 
of positive normative association with it, given the hint of rationality 
inherent in the definition of the secular used here. There is not enough 
time to flesh them both out in detail, but let me just note regarding the 
second that the reader is left wondering about the implications for our 
understanding of Sharia: Does it constitute the realm of the irrational, if 
the sphere of rational, empirical thought is located outside of it?

Linked to these questions is the definition of religion. As Jackson 
himself suggests, the jurists who argued for limitations to the Sharia’s 
application did not see other modes of reasoning as belonging to a differ-
ent sphere of human life altogether. They also did not assume that their 
self-imposed boundaries on Sharia would place them or these modes 
of reasoning outside of Islam. What did the jurists mean when they 
spoke of Islam? Did they imagine Islam as a distinct sphere of human 
life? Jackson insists, in fact, that we recognize “the space between the 
bounded sharia as a concrete code of conduct, on the one hand, and the 
unbounded purview of Islam as religion, on the other then constitute the 
realm of ‘The Islamic Secular’” (emphasis mine, p. 2).

However, he does not specify what the term religion means here to 
him and what it meant to the jurists about whom he writes. Nor does he 
specify the place of Sharia within “the wider religion.” Did these jurists 
even have a notion of religion equivalent to our notion of it today, which 
relies heavily upon differentiation theory to conceptualize religion as a 
particular aspect of human life, one that can be carved out separately 
from the political or the economic? Or did they think of Islam as a way 
of life, or a tradition1 that Sharia facilitated?



214    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

Relying upon a conceptual repertoire that, in turn, depends upon 
a very parochial history to make universal claims is an important lim-
itation of this thought-provoking article – and one that needs greater 
critical interrogation. It may be that there is a generalizable definition 
of religion, contrary to Talal Asad’s2 influential argument, but there is 
enough research from around the world that makes us recognize that the 
one currently used in Western academia and public discourse is not it. 
This dominant definition of religion is reliant upon a very limited and, 
at the same time, reified European experience of a particularly compli-
cated history of the development of industrial capitalism, the modern 
state with its vastly expanded repertoire of governance technologies, 
colonialism, and nationalism.

Jackson claims that the Western secular “initially arose in an effort 
to protect both religion and society.” But the brief narrative he lays out 
does not recognize that Martin Luther was looking not to reduce the 
spheres of religious influence, but rather to deepen religiosity; that 
Enlightenment thinkers painted a picture of deep religiosity as a foil for 
their arguments, but that the historical veracity of these claims remains 
open to question; and that the move from the Enlightenment to the 
modern period is not one of religion’s reduced influence, but, if anything, 
a greater role for public religion at the peak of colonialism and nation-
state building in Europe.

There is not enough space to discuss the many interesting questions 
raised in this essay. The evidence from Islamic sources that Jackson pro-
vides here is significant and powerful. It persuades one that the Sharia’s 
self-limiting feature was an important aspect of its entrenchment and 
longevity, precisely because it did not explicitly set up religiosity against 
rational thought and an empirical approach. I am also convinced that 
the Islamic experience can generate insights that go beyond relevance 
to Muslims alone, that it can provide the resources for generalizable 
theoretical insights. What we need now is a more fleshed out theoret-
ical framework, one that is built from the evidence that Jackson has 
presented here.



I Qt I d A R :  t H E  I S L A M I C  S E C U L A R :  C O M M E N t S     215

Endnotes
1 On the question of redefining tradition such that the Islamic experience provides 

the resources for more generalizable theoretical insights useful for Muslims and 
Non-Muslims, see my “Redefining Tradition in Political Thought,” European Journal 
of Political Theory 15, no. 4 (2016).

2 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity 
and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).



216

Response to Professor Fadel  
and Professor Iqtidar (2017)*

S H E R M A N  J A C K S O N

Professor Fadel sees me as claiming that the Islamic secular “places 
jurisdictional boundaries on what religion can rightfully claim, thereby 
creating a legitimate space for non-religious, i.e., ‘secular’ reason.” What 
actually I argued, however, was that Sharia placed limits on its own shar`ī 
jurisdiction, obviating the necessity-cum-legitimacy not of non-religious, 
secular reason but of religious secular reason. He appears to be unable 
to transcend the commonly held dichotomy between the secular and the 
religious (which my article calls directly into question) and thus to rec-
ognize the reality of the “Islamic secular” as I define it. This underwrites 
a profound misreading of my thesis.

It is true that I limit myself to the Sunni tradition. But it is difficult 
to take this as a serious critique, especially of the substance of my thesis. 
As for the Sunni exclusion of Shiite messianism and Kharijite puritanism, 
this is hardly a matter of the Islamic secular policing religion; this is 
Sunni religious orthodoxy asserting primacy over putative contenders, 
and this through explicitly shar`ī machinery. As for the notion of the 

*This response was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Societies 22, no. 4 (2017): 39-41
Jackson, Sherman 2024. “The Islamic Secular: Comments (2017).” American Journal of Islam and 
Society 41, no. 1: 309–311 • doi: 10.35632/ajis.v41i1.3424
Copyright © 2024 International Institute of Islamic Thought



state “sustaining the Islamic secular,” perhaps Fadel’s point of depar-
ture is the modern jurispathic state and its monopoly over law. But the 
Muslim state could no more define the Islamic secular than it could the 
shar`ī. As for guarding the integrity of the Islamic secular, certainly, 
politically speaking, this would be consistent with the state’s execu-
tive authority. But, at least in theory, this would not translate into any 
unassailable authority to assert the legitimacy of its own or others’ acts 
within this non-shar`ī realm.

Fadel’s closing remarks appear to double down on the aforemen-
tioned misconstruction of my thesis. Even were we to concede the 
relationship that he posits between a “proper polity” and “true reli-
gion,” and even were we to concede that “religion and politics exist in a 
mutually reinforcing relationship,” none of this would obliterate Sharia’s 
self-generated distinction between the shar`ī and the non-shar`ī dimen-
sions of religion and thus the realm of the Islamic secular. Once again, his 
inability to transcend the secular-religion dichotomy appears to impede 
his ability to recognize the secular within the religious.

Professor Iqtidar critiques my following the contested assumption 
of “differentiation theorists” that human life can be “differentiated” into 
insularly separate categories – economic, political, social, religious, and 
so on. But her focus on this debate, presumably as it unfolds among 
anthropologists and sociologists, directs her away from my actual point. I 
make no claim that Islam recognizes the division(s) she describes (in fact, 
I challenge this notion). My point is simply that shar`ī discourse can be/is 
differentiated from non-shar`ī modes of assessment and that the latter is 
the putative realm of the Islamic secular. How the “separate containers” 
(if we may speak of such) that emerge from this distinction bleed into, 
differentiate from, or relate to one another is a separate issue. The Islamic 
secular simply has no dog in that fight. Even in my invocation of José 
Casanova and others, I am explicit that mine is a juristic project, not a 
sociological or an anthropological one. In sum, I use “differentiation” in 
a manner that need not be taken to imply everything connoted by its 
use in formal sociological or anthropological discourses.

As for leaving the reader, “wondering about whether sharia … con-
stitutes the realm of the irrational, if the sphere of rational, empirical 

J A C K S O N:  R E S P O N S E  tO  P R O F E S S O R  FA d E L  A N d  P R O F E S S O R  I Qt I d A R     217



218    A M E R I C A N  J O U R N A L  O F  I S L A M  A N d  S O C I E t Y  4 1 : 1

thought is located outside of it,” we might note that “rational” is distinct 
from “rational, empirical.” Nothing I said in this article (or anywhere else) 
would deny the role of reason and rationality in Islamic law. Even taqlīd, 
in my definition, has a rational element. But when reason is deployed in 
the pursuit of empirical determinations, we are outside the shar`ī realm 
proper, even if the ultimate shar`ī ruling may be contingent upon such 
factual findings. To say, however, as I do in the article, that reason plays 
an Islamically legitimate role in the empirical realm is not to say or imply 
that it therefore plays no legitimate role in the shar`ī realm.

As for the charge that I do not define religion, I plead guilty. In the 
absence of such a definition, however, it seems reasonable to assume 
the common-use meaning. This is essentially what Iqtidar does in her 
own use of the term religion. At any rate, the final draft includes a few 
sentences that make it clearer what I am talking about, even if this does 
not amount to a formal definition.

Iqtidar seems to think that I am seeking to make some universal 
claim, for which my database is simply too thin. But I am not sure what 
that universal claim might be. As I clearly state, mine is a juristic project, 
an Islamic juristic project whose explicit focus is Islam. Regarding Martin 
Luther, I am not sure that my argument that he sought to establish a 
separate realm outside the religious is in full contradiction with her 
insistence that he sought to deepen religiosity. Perhaps I was not clear 
or forceful enough in making the point that Luther sought to protect, 
rather than destroy or weaken, religion.

Given the brutal limitations of space imposed upon this response, 
I could hardly hope to give these two rich and thoughtful critiques the 
attention they deserve. I do hope, however, that my trespasses against 
them have not been too egregious. And I would like to extend my sin-
cerest and heartfelt thanks to Professors Fadel and Iqtidar for taking 
the time to engage my work and for challenging, inviting, and helping 
me to think more clearly, deeply, and carefully about these and other 
important issues they raise.