Islam and the Secular State

Islam and the Secular State
Author: Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2010-03-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674261445

What should be the place of Shari‘a—Islamic religious law—in predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a positive and sustainable role for Shari‘a, based on a profound rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state in all societies. An-Na‘im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari‘a by the state betrays the Qur’an’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, Shari‘a should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Na‘im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce Shari‘a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not Shari‘a or the Islamic tradition. Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology, Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of Shari‘a in Muslim societies.

Formations of the Secular

Formations of the Secular
Author: Talal Asad
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2003-02-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0804783098

“A dark but brilliantly original work . . . one of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.” —H-Net Reviews Opening with the provocative query “what might an anthropology of the secular look like?” this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the “strangeness of the non-European world” and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity. “A difficult if stunningly eloquent book, a response both elusive and forthright to the many shelves of ‘books on terrorism’ which this country’s trade publishers are rushing into print.” —Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature “This wonderfully illuminating book should be read alongside the author’s Genealogies of Religion.” —Religion “One of the most interesting scholars of religious writing today.” —Christian Scholar’s Review “Asad’s brilliant study remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.” —The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

The Republic Unsettled

The Republic Unsettled
Author: Mayanthi L. Fernando
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822376288

In 1989 three Muslim schoolgirls from a Paris suburb refused to remove their Islamic headscarves in class. The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.

A Secular Need

A Secular Need
Author: Jeff Redding
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020
Genre: Domestic relations
ISBN: 9780295747071

"Islamic law's relationship to secular governance is a fraught one in contemporary discussions. Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates, secularism's partisans, or publics caught in the crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islam and secularism as antagonistic. Moreover, the relationship between Islamic law and secularism seems increasingly discordant, with recent developments in the United States (e.g., calls for "shari'a bans" in U.S. courts), Western Europe (such as legal limitations on headscarves and mosques), and the Arab Middle East (such as conflicts between secularist old-guards and Islamist revolutionaries) indicating that unsteady coexistences are transforming into outright hostilities. This book's exploration of an Indian non-state system of Muslim dispute resolution-formally known as the dar ul qaza system, but commonly referred to as a system of "Muslim courts" or "shariat courts"-challenges conventional narratives about the inevitable opposition between Islamic law and secular forms of governance, and the impossibility of their coexistence. Moreover, it demonstrates how secular law and governance in India does not and cannot work without the significant assistance of non-state Islamic legal actors. For example, the conciliation-oriented Indian family court system is insufficient for handling divorce petitions brought by Muslim women seeking to unilaterally disassociate from their Muslim husbands. This volume shows how in these situations and others, Indian state secularism needs the Islamic non-state-so much so that this intense need often erupts into a complicated set of love-hate politics towards India's Muslims"--

Islam and Secularism

Islam and Secularism
Author: Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-08-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9788119024346

Written 40 years ago, Islam and Secularism is one of the most creative and original works of a Muslim thinker in the contemporary Muslim world. The author deals with fundamental problems faced by contemporary Muslims and provides real solutions, beginning with a discussion on 'The Contemporary Western Christian Background' in Chapter (I), followed by his analysis of the concepts (which he newly defines) of 'secular', 'secularization', and 'secularism' in Chapter (II). All this is then contrasted in Chapter (IV) of the book entitled 'Islam: The Concept of Religion and the Foundation of Ethics and Morality'. Based on all the preceding explanation, the author proceeds to analyze the Muslim 'dilemma' by declaring that it should be resolved primarily through what he calls the "dewesternization of knowledge" or, conversely, the "islamization of contemporary knowledge", an original concept conceived and elucidated by the author for the past five decades. Numerous original and profound ideas are contained in this book-arrived at chiefly through critical study of the Muslim tradition-such as the concepts of dīn, 'adl, ḥikmah, adab, ma'nā, and ta'dīb, and their significance in the development of an Islamic system of education. The rationale for the Islamization of contemporary knowledge and the establishment of a truly Islamic university was in fact provided for the first time in contemporary Muslim thought by this author long before the appearance of the present book, which explains these interconnected subjects more concisely. Further, the appendix entitled, 'On Islamization: The Case of the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago' is an actual explanation and application of the seminal ideas discussed in the book. This is a must-read for all Muslims and those concerned with the problems and effects of secularization in our world today. Islam and Secularism is a development of ideas contained in the many paragraphs of another book in Malay entitled: Risalah Untuk Kaum Muslimin, which the author wrote and completed during the first few months of 1974. Due to many circumstances which demanded the author's attention at home and ahmad, however, the Risalah has not yet been sent to the press. In this book, what is contained in Chapter III was composed and completed during the month of Ramaḍān of 1395 (1975), and delivered as a Lecture under the same title to the International Islamic Conference held in April 1976 at the Royal Commonwealth Society, London, in conjunction with the World of Islam Festival celebrated there that year. It was published as a monograph in the same year by the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia (ABIM), Kuala Lumpur, and in 1978 it appeared, together with other Lectures delivered on the same occasion by various Muslim scholars, in a book of one volume entitled: The Challenge of Islam, edited by Altaf Gauhar and published by the Islamic Council of Europe, London. All the other Chapters of the book were begun in March 1977 and completed in April of the same year, during my appointment as Visiting Scholar and Professor of Islamics at the Department of Religion, Temple University, Philadelphia, U.S.A., in the Winter and Spring of 1976-1977. What is contained in Chapter V was presented as a Paper entitled: "Preliminary Thoughts on the Nature of Knowledge and the Definition and Aims of Education", addressed to the First World Conference on Muslim Education held at Mecca in April 1977. It will appear, together with other selected Papers of the Conference, in a book entitled: Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education, edited with an introduction by the author and published by King Abdulaziz University and Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1979, as one of a series of seven books.

Secularizing Islamists?

Secularizing Islamists?
Author: Humeira Iqtidar
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2011-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226384705

Secularizing Islamists? provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama‘at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama‘at-ud-Da‘wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing her findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, Humeira Iqtidar proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. This book offers a fine-grained account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. Iqtidar particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. She highlights the role that competition among Islamists and the focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization. The result is a significant contribution to our understanding of emerging trends in Muslim politics.

Questioning Secularism

Questioning Secularism
Author: Hussein Ali Agrama
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2012-11-02
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0226010686

What, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In this work, Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart.

Secular Power Europe and Islam

Secular Power Europe and Islam
Author: Sarah Wolff
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0472132539

Reconsidering the European Union's secular identity

Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Author: Saba Mahmood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2015-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0691153280

How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.

Muslim Secular Democracy

Muslim Secular Democracy
Author: Lily Zubaidah Rahim
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2013-03-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1137282053

The book offers a nuanced and innovative analyses of the emergence of an inclusive secular democratic state paradigm which incorporates the sacred within the framework of secular democracy in the Muslim World.