The Islamic Secular

The basic point of the secular in the modern West is to "liberate" certain pursuits—the state, the economy, science—from the authority of religion. This is also assumed to be the goal and meaning of "secular" in Islam. Sherman Jackson argues, however, that that assumption is wrong. In Islam the "secular" was neither outside "religion" nor a rival to it. "Religion," in Islam was not identical to Islam's "sacred law," or " shari'ah ." Nor did classical Muslim jurists see shari'ah as the all-encompassing, exclusive means of determining what is "Islamic." In fact, while, as religion, Islam's jurisdiction was unlimited, shari'ah 's jurisdiction, as a sacred law, was limited. In other words, while everything remained within the purview of the divine gaze of the God of Islam, not everything could be determined by shari'ah or on the basis of its revelatory sources. Various aspects of state-policy, the economy, science, and the like were "differentiated," from shari'ah and its revelatory sources, without becoming non-religious or un-Islamic. Given the asymmetry between the circumference of shari'ah and that of Islam as religion, not everything that fell outside the former fell outside the latter. In other words, an idea or action could be non- shar'i (not dictated by shari'ah ) without being non-Islamic, let alone anti-Islam. The ideas and actions that fall into this category are what Jackson terms "the Islamic Secular." Crucially, the Islamic Secular differs from the Western secular in that, while the whole point of the Western secular is to liberate various pursuits from religion, the Islamic Secular differentiates these disciplines not from religion but simply from shari'ah . Similarly, while both secularization and secularism play key roles in the Western secular, both of these concepts are alien to the Islamic Secular, as the Islamic Secular seeks neither to discipline nor to displace religion, nor expand to its own jurisdiction at religion's expense. The Islamic Secular is a complement to religion, in effect, a "religious secular." Nowhere are the practical implications of this more impactful than in Islam's relationship with the modern state. In this book, Jackson makes the case for the Islamic Secular on the basis of Islam's own pre-modern juristic tradition and shows how the Islamic Secular impacts the relationship between Islam and the modern state, including the Islamic State. "This book argues that the common notion of a fundamental conflict between the secular and the religious cannot be applied to Islam. This is not because Islam rejects the secular in favor of the religious; it is because Islam's concept of the religious includes the secular. This is what is captured by the term "Islamic Secular." Contrary both to the notion that "religion" in Islam equals "sharī'ah," and to the concomitant notion that sharī'ah is the all-encompassing, exclusive metric of assessment in Islam, this book argues that, while Islam is all-encompassing, sharī'ah is bounded. This leaves a space between the limited circumference of sharī'ah and the unlimited circumference of Islam. While both spaces are "religious" in that they come under the adjudicative gaze of the God of Islam, only the shar'ī space draws directly upon sharī'ah and its sources, while the non-shar'ī space does not. In the end, this allows for a "religious secular," a space wherein matters remain "religious" but are not based on or assessed in terms of the content of sharī'ah or its sources. These shar'ī and non-shar'ī elements are not rivals but complements. As such, both "secularism" and "secularization," as non- or anti-religious tropes, are alien to the Islamic Secular"-- Provided by publisher Dedication Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: THE CONCEPTUAL LANDSCAPE 1. Secular, Religious, Islamic 2. Islam, Fiqh, the Ḥukm Shar‘ī, and the Differentiated Realm 3. The Islamic Secular PART II: THE ISLAMIC SECULAR, MODERNITY, AND THE MODERN STATE 4. The Islamic Secular and the Impossible State 5. The Islamic Secular and the Secular State 6. The Islamic Secular and Liberal Citizenship Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index