Islam and the Secular State Negotiating the Future of Shari’ah By Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. 336 pages.)

Abstract

An-Naim’s book is an addition to the genre of studies that apply the tools
and mechanisms of secular liberal change and social engineering to Muslim
societies behind a benign façade of Islamic concern. His opening words
emphasize the necessity of a secular state for a Muslim to be a believer by
conviction. He claims a different perspective of the term, which really is not
that distinct from common understandings of what constitutes a secular
state, namely, neutrality regarding religious doctrine (p. 1). According to this
organizational principle Islam does not need to be separated from politics or
public life, but rather from the state, so as not to allow for its manipulation.
At first glance this sounds like a perfectly sensible premise, as many
Muslim countries do, in fact, suffer from such a predicament. The problem is
that in the process of suggesting the means and methods of how to do so, An-
Naim contests Islamic values as relative, infusing them with ambiguity, as a
prelude to essentializing western values and structures of state, constitutionalism,
human rights, and citizenship as universal and deterministic. This way,
he sets the hierarchy of privilege in favor of the latter. Consequently adaptation,
if not clearly succumbing to instead of challenging, the “reality” of a
Eurocentric postcolonial world (pp. 31-32) should be accepted as a starting
point. This is the contextual fact to which Islam and Muslims have to reconcile
themselves, and thus any notions of applying the Shari`ah should be forsaken
and is, in fact, “impossible” (p. 18) ...