Once in a while a new book in religious studies comes out with a bold thesis, challenging old assumptions and raising some eyebrows. The Islamic Secular, a thick, dense, and elaborate monograph by Sherman A. Jackson, Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California, is one such book that deserves attention—by both Muslims and others who are interested in the destiny of Islam.
The book is notable first because of its author: Prof. Jackson, an African American who converted to Islam at a young age only to become one of the most prominent Muslim scholars in the Western world. He has also been named several times, most recently in 2023, as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center in Amman, Jordan. His earlier books, including Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering and On the Boundaries of Theological Tolerance in Islam: Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī’s Faysal al Tafriqa, were widely read and rightly praised.
The Islamic Secular, perhaps Jackson’s magnum opus, at least so far, is notable also for the provocative thesis that is apparent right in its title. For many people, including Muslims themselves, the very terms “Islamic” and “secular” appear contradictory, and their amalgamation would coin only an oxymoron. But Jackson carefully makes sense of what he means by “the Islamic Secular”: that Islamic law, namely the Shari’ah, does not cover all the vast areas of human experience and knowledge, leaving many spaces that are “secular,” where Muslims can still act and think with a religious ethos. It means, in his words,
While everything remain[s] within the purview of the divine gaze of the God of Islam, not everything [can] be determined by Shari’ah or on the basis of its revelatory sources. Various aspects of state-policy, the economy, science, and the like [are] “differentiated,” from Shari’ah and its revelatory sources, without becoming non-religious or un-Islamic.
One may wonder why this is not obvious. It is not because there is also a “totalizing” view of the Shari’ah, which assumes that Islamic law should define anything and everything—from personal practices to politics, from economics to all sciences. Jackson finds this “totalizing” view in the narrative of the political Islamist movements, which typically insist that “Islam is the solution” to any worldly problem that one can imagine. They also insist, in Jackson’s words, “that the Islamic State must apply the shar’, the whole shar’, and nothing but the shar’.” (Shar’ is a cognate of Shari’ah.)
Bounded vs. Unbounded Shari’ah
Jackson ties the resurgence of this “totalizing” view of Islamic law to “fears about the encroachments of Western secularism.” But, as he notes, it was also present in the premodern Islamic tradition. It goes all the way back to Imam Al-Shafi’i (d. 820), who is widely recognized as the founder of not only one of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence but also the very architect of the legal methodology that other Sunnis largely followed. In his seminal book Al-Risala, Al-Shafi’i attacked the more rationalist jurists of his time (the “ahl al-ray,” or “people of reason”), who besides revelation used their intuitive ethical judgements (called “istihsan”), reflecting an Islamic strain of natural-law-based thinking. According to Al-Shafi’i, however, reason without revelation was always untrustworthy, and hence revelation had to be all-encompassing. “No situation befalls anyone who adheres to the religion of God,” he famously wrote, “but that there is in the Book of God an indication regarding the correct action therein.” This resulted in a concept of “unbounded Shari’ah,” which dominated the formative centuries of Sunni jurisprudence.
This was not the only view, however, as Jackson painstakingly shows in the book. Instead, he argues, Islamic jurists gradually realized the limits of Islamic law, and by the 11th century, it was rather the “bounded” view of the Shari’ah that became more pronounced. He points to examples such as the great Imam al-Ghazali (d. 1111), who defined “mathematics, geometry, astronomy” as aqli, or “rational” areas of human knowledge, as opposed to naqli, or “transmitted” religious knowledge. Another one is Ibn Aqil (d. 1119), who also saw the pursuits of “grammar, medicine, lexicography” as outside the purview of Islamic law—in other words, as “secular.”
Throughout The Islamic Secular, Jackson both resurrects this “bounded” view of Islamic law and applies it to modern circumstances. He builds the ground for a conceptual shift, which indeed would be an important contribution to contemporary Islamic thought. “The Islamic secular” can indeed help invalidate the “totalizing” ambitions of political Islamists, who theorize a simple “Islamic” solution to any complex problem, often with unfortunate results in practice. It can also help ease the intuitive suspicion many conservative Muslims have against modern sciences, philosophies, laws, and institutions. It can help Muslims walk the world more confidently, by keeping one leg in the religious texts but the other one in universality, without collapsing into existential crisis.
What About the Shari’ah Itself?
However, laying the boundaries of the Shari’ah still does not resolve the issues within the Shari’ah—and that is the part of the book where Jackson’s approach may begin to look inadequate.
Of course, one may not see any “issues within the Shari’ah,” especially if his or her only guide is the Shari’ah itself. But for most outsiders, as well as for many Muslims who think outside the box, there are issues: The Shari’ah, as articulated by the traditional schools of jurisprudence, has verdicts that conflict with modern standards of human rights, in areas such as religious freedom, freedom of expression, and equality under the law regardless of religion and gender.
Jackson frankly notes that “the Islamic Secular alone… has no direct response to this problem.” But he has another response to the problem, with which I would not agree: to argue that religiously coercive elements of the Shari’ah may be just fine.
This is evident in one of the most interesting chapters of the book, “The Islamic Secular and the Secular State,” where Jackson critically engages with another American Muslim academic, Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im. (In other chapters, Jackson also engages with the perspectives of Wael Hallaq and Andrew March, all insightful and interesting discussions.)
An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Emeritus Professor at Emory Law School (who has spoken at Acton), deserves a little introduction here. He is originally from Sudan, where he saw what religious coercion can do: His own teacher Mahmoud Mohammed Taha was cruelly executed for “apostasy” for merely interpreting the Qur’an differently. An-Na’im’s 2008 book, Islam and the Secular State, called for ending all such abuses by placing Islam in its rightful place—the individual conscience—and through a political shift: separation of the Shari’ah and the state, making the observance of the former a voluntary choice, not a dictate of the latter. (On all these points I fully agree with An-Na’im, as I have argued elsewhere: “All religious aspects of sharia—such as prayer and fasting, as well as dress codes and sexual mores—should not be enforced by state power, but practiced by faith, like the Jewish halakha.”)
Is Coercion Good for Religion?
But Jackson disagrees with An-Na’im. First, he objects to An-Na’im’s reading of Islamic history—on whether the separation of the Shari’ah and the state is really “the normative relationship”—and he may have a point there. But he also criticizes An-Na’im for “seeing no positive role at all for coercion” owing to “the liberal view of heteronomy as archenemy.” Jackson then explains why religious coercion may actually have a “positive role”:
My point here is that certain practices are likely to produce certain enduring effects, regardless of their practitioners’ sincerity or intentions. … Something similar can be said about Islamic law as practice: observing its dictates breeds or at least contributes to the instantiation of a particular subjectivity, a mode of being in the world, and even the instantiation of virtues, all independent of intention. … Even forced prayer can ignite a spiritual spark, or at least reinforce the normativity of prayer as a value.
No wonder that, with this line of reasoning, medieval Islamic scholars imposed harsh punishments on Muslims who “gave up prayer.” Even today, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan dictate such practices as strict dress codes for women. (This is not to say that Jackson justifies the policies of Iran and the Taliban, but if religious coercion is good for “reinforcing normativity,” then why would those policies not be justified?)
This is perhaps the most interesting discussion in Jackson’s multifaceted book, and if I had a chance, I would add a counterpoint: The “liberal view” he deprecates also has a religious justification. It is that religious coercion, far from helping religion, can corrode it by generating hypocrisy and resentment among those who are coerced. This was one of the key objections John Locke raised against religious coercion in A Letter Concerning Toleration. It is also painfully obvious in Iran today, where decades of “reinforcing normativity” by the Islamic Republic have made millions of people not more religious but only more secular, if not fiercely anti-religious. (There is also a lesson here for Christian post-liberals, as I have argued elsewhere.)
To his credit, Jackson also notes that “An-Na’im logic,” meaning noncoercion in religion, “is not entirely alien to the Islamic juristic tradition.” He reminds us of the prominent Sunni scholar Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. 1285), who barred the state “from intervening in ‘religious observances and the like,’” and with a notably Lockean concern: “The sole purpose of [religious observance] is to extol and worship God, which cannot be realized in the absence of the worshipper’s proper intention.” But al-Qarafi was not “entirely consistent,” Jackson adds, as he also accepted “punishment for abandoning prayer.” Hence I would see the former point by al-Qarafi as a “seed of freedom” in the Islamic tradition, among others that Daniel Philpott identified, which wasn’t cultivated enough in the past but that can be cherished today.
In fact, “the Islamic secular” itself can be a seed of freedom that can be taken further than Jackson does in his book. For if there are rational areas of human knowledge and practice, not necessarily defined by religion but in which the religious can act ethically, why can’t we add governance and legislation to them? Why can’t we even see the Shari’ah’s interventions in these areas not as enduring enactments but as contextual applications of universal principles—as various “Islamic modernists” have been arguing since the late 19th century?
I am not sure whether Jackson himself would go that far, but his thought-provoking book is full of facts and insights that could spark many rich conversations about the place of Islam in the modern world. For anyone interested in that big question, it is a must-read.
