The Islamic Secular (2017)*

Abstract

It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the substanceof the category “religion” and the category “secular.” Givenits putative rejection of the separation between the sacred andthe profane, this conflict is presumed to be all the more solid inIslam. But even assuming Islam’s rejection of the sacred/profanedichotomy, there may be other ways of defining the secular inIslam and of thinking about its relationship with the religion.This is what the present essay sets out to do. By taking Sharia asits point of departure, it looks at the latter’s self-imposed limitsas the boundary between a mode of assessing human acts thatis grounded in concrete revelational sources (and/or their extension)and modes of assessing human acts that are independent ofsuch 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 asthe 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 betweenthe shar`ī and the nonshar`ī has a long pedigree in the Islamiclegal (and theological) tradition. As such, the notion of the Islamicsecular is more of an excavation than an innovation. *This article was first published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 2 (2017): 1-31