The Islamic Secular
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Abstract
It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the substance 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 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 extension) 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 secular.” 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.
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Sherman A Jackson, University of Southern California
Sherman A. Jackson is King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity, at the University of Southern California. His research interests begin in classical Islamic studies, including law, theology, and intellectual history, and extend to placing this legacy in conversation with the realities of modern Islam,
most especially Muslim communities in America. This implicates issues of race, immigration, liberalism, democracy, religion in the modern world, pluralism, constitutionalism, Muslim radicalism and related areas of inquiry, again, all in conversation with the classical and postclassical 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.
