A new book by my colleague Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Islam and the Secular State (Harvard 2008), has been attracting a great deal of attention. (Not at all surprisingly.) A post today at The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere is certainly worth your attention.
Secularism and the paradoxes of Muslim politics
posted by Robert Hefner
Few
books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely
debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im’s Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a.
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, An-Na`im
has for more than twenty years been a tireless proponent of a deeply
religious but liberal-modernist reformation of Islamic politics and
ethics. Published just five years after his flight from the Sudan in
April 1985 (after the Numeiri regime executed his Sufi teacher, Mahmoud
Mohamed Taha), An-Na`im’s Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law established him as one of our era’s most articulate exponents of the Islamic grounds for constitutionalism and human rights.
In a trademark gesture of democratic openness, in late 2003 An-Na`im circulated a draft of his new book to scholars and activists in Turkey, Egypt, the Sudan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria. From January 2004 to September 2006, he worked with local Islamic associations in all of these countries to organize workshops and focus groups to discuss and refine the book’s arguments. The English manuscript was also translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Bengali, French, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu; it was also made available on the Internet. Among the global Muslim intelligentsia, the draft quickly became a cultural event in its own right. The book version of the manuscript will both broaden the discussion and deepen the controversy.
Two things distinguish this new work from An-Na`im’s early writings. The first is his explicit endorsement of a secular state as the best form of government for Muslims and for the flourishing of Islam. In Toward an Islamic Reformation, An-Na`im had dedicated his energies to addressing believers’ understandings of Islam and Shari`a, and had less to say about the appropriate form of the state. As he put it, he hoped “to reconcile Muslim commitment to Islamic law with the achievement of the benefits of secularism within a religious framework.” In this new book, he sets his sights squarely on providing Islamic rationales for secular government.
The second quality that distinguishes this book from his earlier scholarship is its systematic effort to ground arguments in support of freedom, constitutionalism, and secularity on two bodies of research: historical studies of the development of Muslim politics and Shari`a from the early Islamic period to the rise of the Ottoman Empire; and case studies of Shari`a politics in modern India, Turkey, and Indonesia. An-Na`im plumbs the depths of these empirical materials to provide corroborating evidence in support of his larger argument.
The argument has three pillars ...
[To read the rest, click here.]
