Introduction: Muslim and Critical Consciousness

Why explore secularism? What is the purpose of such a course? There are two possible
approaches to studying secularism. The first, is to engage in a speculative academic pursuit, limited
to the ivory towers of academia. The second is to recognize that secularism has become, much
more than a subject of academia. It has become a lived reality. Thus, to understand our situation,
and our lived reality, it is imperative that we begin with a thorough examination of what it means
to live in a secular age. But even such a pursuit can be limited. The secular age is full of stories
about the triumph of reason and the emergence of secularism as a stage of maturity in man’s long
history. These are put forth, not only as stories about the Western man but as universal narratives
to which we must all conform, these stories come to represent that natural order of things, part of
our human nature. In other words, we live in a world whose meaning has already been created for
us. It is a world in which we lack a critical consciousness and by critical consciousness we mean
the capacity of man to unearth the contradictions that constitute an order, in our case, the secular
order. This amounts to a negation of what makes us human, and an imperative of what makes us
Muslim: a negation of consciousness.
In our contemporary age, in our age of crisis, this is the state of Coloniality which can be defined
as the sovereignty of “second-creators” or God-like centers of power that re-create the world in
their own image through regimes of knowledge that fabricate images of man, the world, and the
cosmos which in turn inaugurate and legitimate new metaphysical horizons that delimit through
and action delimit transcendence. Coloniality is an existential situation inasmuch as it epistemic,
political and economic. To be conscious, is not reducible to a superficial awareness of the world,
that such and such object exists. To be conscious, to be human, is the ability of consciousness to
negate the meanings that are imposed on us and the world, and to create new meanings. It is both
a negating and creative process. In the absence of a critical consciousness, we are left in a state
of colonizability which according to Malik bin Nabi is the capacity to be colonized, it is the
emergence of internal factors that make intellectual and political colonization – or coloniality –
possible in the first place. In the absence of a critical consciousness wherein the self is reduced to
an object (rather than a subject) that is “submerged” in a world that is imbued with meaning given
to the self by ‘the Other’ – in this case, the colonial centers of power.
Ali Shariati illustrates this sophistry as al-istihmar, a creative term combining the words himar (to
stupefy) and istimar (colonization. Why does this amount to an existential crisis? It is because the
word umma, “stems from Amm which as a verb means “to head for, to quest, to lead, to guide, or
to mean and intend” and as a noun, it means “destination, purpose, pursuit, aim, goal and end”1.
In other words, we cannot conceive nor shape our own futures in the absence of a critical
consciousness towards our secular age. The purpose of this course is to foster a critical
consciousness towards the secular age, to expose its contradictions as a step towards being able to
reclaim our capacity as an ummah and think and act towards alternative futures. This amounts to
nothing short of a revolt against the second-creators of our age.

1
Tamim al-Barghouti, The Umma and the Dawla: The Nation-State and the Arab Middle East (2018), 37

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What makes this course unique? First, I will be presenting key texts on secularism, and
summarizing them for the listeners. This will serve as an introduction and gateway for further
reading and exploration. Second, I will be bringing these critiques together in order to form a more
thorough metacritique of secularism. Third, the course will take a deep dive into neglected
dimensions of secularism and its critique: the metaphysical dimensions of secularity. Fourth, the
course will explore five key Islamic critiques of secularism. Lastly, throughout this course, I will
not only critique secularism as a doctrine but also ideas that make secularism possible in the first
place: reason, neutrality, the modern state, and liberalism.
What should you expect from this course? The outline is as follows:
In the first module, we will explore the question: what is secularism? The objective is to critique
the standard narrative of secularization and definitions of secularism. I will argue, drawing on
Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Eugene McCarraher and William Cavanaugh that secularism is not
that which is discovered by the rational mind once the mind transcends religion and superstition.
Rather, secularism is an invention that was created, not discovered, through a series of historical
circumstances. Moreover, that what constitutes as ‘secular’ and the category of “religion” is
arbitrarily created and perpetually recreated by the modern state.
In the second module, we will explore, in more depth, the ways in which the state arbitrarily invents
and defines a category called “religion” which it then holds to be universal. I will explain how
power operates in producing this category. Ultimately, I will argue that no matter how religion is
defined, the secular/religious binary collapses because most secular ideologies – even according
to the definitions of religion given by secular academics, become religions. Moreover, I will
explore the myth of religious violence.
In the third module, we will explore the concrete implications of these arbitrarily defined
categories – the secular and religion – on international relations to demonstrate the ways in which
these categories are invented and have real-world, policy consequences on our lived reality and
sensibilities. I will draw on the works of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, who asks “How do processes,
institutions, and states come to be understood as religious versus political, or religious versus
secular, and how might we ascertain the political effects of such a demarcation?” The core of her
argument is this: “to define the boundaries of the secular and the religious is itself a political
decision” (16). The exploration of how secularism manifests itself in international relations
reinforces the arguments of Taylor and Asad: secularism was created.
We will look at one such historical factor that produced the category of the ‘secular’ and ‘religion
– namely – through an exposition of how secularism and liberalism as modes of identity were
shaped in relation to a negative representation of Islam. In other words, secularism and liberalism
were not formed exclusively through the question of identity in the West was formed not only
through the question what are we but also and more importantly, what are we not? Islam served
as the ‘Other’ that represented what secular identity was not. This, in turn, reinforces our argument
in module s one and two that secularism is not discovered but created by historical factors.

In the module four, we will take another deep dive into the question of secularism as an invented
category, this time, in relation to Muslims. I will argue that secularism, as a doctrine that must
constantly create and recreate the categories of the secular and religion and which was formed in
opposition to Islam , has as its project the reformation, or re-creation of the Muslim subject. That
is to say, it is actively involved in the creation of a new “Moderate Muslim” created in the image
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of the secular state. This, again, shows how secularism is recreated by the state through a series
of historical factors, one of which is its opposition to a caricature of Islam.

In the sixth five, we will explore a central myth of secularism and liberalism: the notion that the
secular state is neutral. I will ask: is there such thing as a universal and neutral public reason? To
what extent can we speak of a neutral public space or even neutral public policy? In this module
we will draw on the works of thinkers like Stanley Fish and Alasdair MacIntyre to argue that argue
that the core tenant of secularism and liberalism – the idea of a neutral reason and neutral public
space – is a myth.

In module six, we will explore the relationship between secularism and liberalism. More
importantly, we will explore a possible counter claim: even if liberalism is not neutral, is it not the
best option amongst others? I will argue that it is not. Once again, drawing on the works of Alasdair
MacIntyre, I will argue that liberalism is an impoverished tradition, one that inhibits rather than
facilitate the flourishing that Taylor calls for in our secular age . The problem with liberalism is
that it has failed precisely because it has succeeded. The contradictions within liberalism have
become manifest because liberalism has met its intended aims. Thus, the solution to failed
liberalism is not more liberalism but moving beyond liberalism.

In module seven, I will return to the question of whether or not the secular is an invention or a
discovery. I will do so by demonstrating that the modern state, through which secularism operates,
is not a natural or inevitable discovery of reason but an invention, along with the idea of
sovereignty. Moreover, that the modern state is not a neutral apparatus which promotes the
common good or pluralism but rather it arbitrarily demarcates and limits more substantive ideas
of the common good and pluralism.

In module eight, I will present a five-part critique of Secularism from an Islamic perspective. I
will argue that secularism and liberalism do not liberate the self, its liberates the nafs, the self-
aggrandizing ego. I will also argue that secularism and liberalism are forms of tughyan,
transgression against a divinely-ordained order, the mizan. I will also argue that secularism and
liberalism are modes of oppression that inhibit the full flourishing of man, given that it reduces
man to a narrow singular world; the dunya, rather than allowing man to dwell in two worlds, both
of which constitute what the Qur’an calls ‘alam.

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Module One: What is Secularism?

[2] Charles Taylor on Secularism

I want to begin with a history of secularism. I will draw on Charles Taylor’s text, the
Secular Age. In doing so, I want to critique the standard narrative of secularization which holds
that the secular age is the product of natural and inevitable secular and rational processes that led
to the discovery of the ‘secular’ after having overcome “religion” and superstition. Charles Taylor
(Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best
known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history
of philosophy, and intellectual history) wants to provide us with a map of what it means to live in
a “Secular Age.” He is not interested in whether or not religious beliefs are on the rise. He is
interested in examining the ways in which the “conditions of belief” have been changed: the ways
in which ideas become believable or unbelievable. The ‘secular’ is more than just a doctrine. It not
only makes unbelief possible. Rather, it changes what it means to believe in the first place. For
Taylor, secularization theorists are missing the real question at hand. The question is not about the
expression of belief. Rather, it is about the conditions of belief. The conditions of belief refer to
the background through which we perceive reality – it is what we take for granted without a
“second thought.” It is not about how we theorize, but how we live and perceive things as given.
These new developments are not merely theoretical. Smith reminds us, “On Taylor’s account,
these aren’t just idle metaphysical speculations; these shifts in the social imaginary of the West
make an impact on how we imagine ourselves – how we imagine the “we.” (44).” To properly
situate his argument, Charles Taylor provides a three-fold taxonomy as to what exactly it means
when we speak of “the secular:” He wants to trace howe we went from “a society in which it was
virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer,
is one human possibility among others” (3). Taylor begins by distinguishing three meanings of
‘the secular:’
First, is what Taylor calls secular1. According to medieval and classical accounts, the “secular”
refers to the “temporal” or “worldly.” For example, the priest is said to pursue a “sacred” vocation
whereas the baker, or police officer, is engaged in a “secular” vocation. The second, is secular2,
the common idea of the “secular” held by secularists. This refers to being neutral, or areligious. It
is to hold no religious beliefs. The third, and this is where things become interesting, is secular3
which refers to the change in the conditions of belief, rather than expressions of belief. Here,
Taylor is interested in examining the ways in which we have reached an age where religious belief
becomes one among other possibilities, and as such, religious belief becomes contested in the
presence of new alternatives.
But the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also
of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to
individual and social life. This new placement is now the
occasion for recompositions of spiritual life in new forms
[emphasis added], and for new ways of existing both in and
out of relation to God2.

2
Charles Taylor, Secular Age (2018), 437

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Taylor wants to argue against the common narrative of secularization, the subtraction thesis, which
states that the ‘secular’ is what is left when the ‘religious’ is displaced. He wants to tell a different
story. He wants to answer this question: How is it, that in the 1500s, it was unthinkable to be, say,
an atheist, to an age (the 2000s) where not only atheism is an option among other options, but it
stands out as a plausible alternative to belief. This is not because atheism, backed by science, is
more convincing. Atheism is only an option, among others, because there was a radical change in
the conditions of belief. In telling us a new story about how we have come to inhabit a secular age,
Taylor argues that secularization, rather than being merely a subtraction of religion from life,
involves the creation of a new possibility, exclusive humanism, as a social imaginary which allows
one to create spaces of meaning and significance without reference to divinity or transcendence.
Let us elaborate on what we mean when we speak of a change in the conditions of belief. In the
centuries prior to the secular age, unbelief was unthinkable for a number of reasons: First, it was
held that the natural world and the cosmos was a sign, that pointed to the divine, the transcendent,
that is, something beyond itself. The world was not a closed secular space. It was an open and
creative space. Second, society was not reducible to a collective of individuals but was grounded
in a higher order, a higher reality such as the Christian idea of a heavenly kingdom. In short, people
inhabited an enchanted world that was not closed but charged with divinity and the presence of
God.
How did society shift from those conditions? This is the story that Charles Taylor wants to tell us.
There are numerous factors. Let’s begin with the first. There was a fundamental shift in the
understanding of the individual self. Prior to the Secular Age, meaning and significance were
outside of the individual, the individual was open and porous, an incubator, and vessel of meaning.
For example, relics and otherworldly entities had power and meanings that could penetrate the self,
much like demon possession and so forth. In the modern age, the individual becomes buffered,
meaning and significance are now inside the mind. Moreover, prior to the secular age, the self was
part and parcel of a lived social and organic whole, the community. That community, as we noted,
was grounded in a higher order and truth, such as the idea of a kingdom of God. Taylor will argue,
that the emergence of an exclusive humanism, and prior to it, the idea of a buffered self, had to
overcome the obstacle of sociality and communitarianism.
There was another important shift, in the ways in which we viewed “nature.” Prior to the secular
age, nature was part of an ordered and meaningful cosmos, that was governed by a higher order, a
divine governing principle. In the same way, that the self was porous, so too was the cosmos. In the
secular age, however, the universe was reconceived as its own order, governed, not by
transcendence or a higher order but by immanent natural laws. In other words, meaning could be
derived from an immanent universe, without recourse to the meaning found in divinity or
transcendence. This is the process of immanentization: meaning, significance, and fullness are
sought out within an enclosed, self-sufficient, and naturalistic universe.
Now, if the individual self is buffered from an enchanted world and sociality, where does it find
meaning? Here, Taylor argues that another development occurred: lowering the bar of what it
means to flourish. Prior to the secular age, there was a tension between eternity, that is, the drive
towards the beyond, and the mundane forms of life. This tension demanded a form of asceticism,
that for many, was unbearable. It was made possible only through a division of labor. The priest,
inhabited eternity, the transcendent life. The baker, police officer, and so forth, inhabited the
mundane world. The priest, in his religious vocation, takes up the social need for flourishing that
is located beyond the mundane world. Again, sociality is a key prior to the secular age

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There was another critical reform moment, that paved the way for the modern secular age:
nominalism. This movement did not emerge as a secular reformation but was deeply theological
and religious in its ends. It emerged as an affirmation of God’s ultimate sovereignty. The nominalist
rejected Aristotelean metaphysics, which had been dominant till that point. Aristotelean
metaphysics was based on the idea that the goodness of the human being was determined by an a
priori nature or telos. For the nominalist, this must be rejected because it meant that God’s act of
creation was constrained by a predefined idea of the “good” thus constraining the sovereignty of
God. Thus, in a world stripped of a telos, or predefined good, we are left with the mechanistic world
that the secular age would come to fully embody. There are no essences, but only efficient causality.
Thus far, we have seen how the secular age emerged as the removal of certain obstacles: the porous
self, sociality, and the cosmos. However, there is more to this story. The secular age, again, is not
merely a story of subtraction, and the removal of obstacles. It had to involve the creation of
something new: exclusive humanism. This new alternative, having emerged from and through the
change in the condition of beliefs, is what Taylor calls “exclusive humanism.” He states, “For the
first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean
by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to
anything beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true” (18). To fully understand
this, we must return to the ways in which the reformation made such a creation possible. These
include, not only so-called “secular” reformations but reformations within Christianity itself,
including the protestant reformation. These movements, among other reasons, emerged out
dissatisfaction with the division of labor that emerged out of the eternity/earthly tension. . Smith
states that:
“What changes in modernity is that, instead of inhabiting this
tension and trying to maintain an equilibrium between the
demands on creaturely life and the expectations for eternal
life, the modern age generates different strategies for
resolving (i.e., eliminating) the tension. There are a couple
of options: you can either effectively denounce creaturely
domestic life and the sort of demand monasticism for all (the
so-called puritanical option); or you can drop the
expectations of eternity that place the weight of virtue on our
domestic lives – that is, you can stop being burdened by what
eternity/salvation demands and simply frame ultimate
flourishing within this world.”3
This was one of the paradoxes of the reform movement. In its attempt to resolve the eternity/worldly
tension, it created an option (escaping this tension altogether) that would be unleashed in the
modern age. This strategy, of lowering the bar, would come to be known as exclusive humanism.
In short, man now lived within what Taylor calls an “immanent frame” – the construction of a social
space that precludes any notion of the supernatural or transcendence. Life is found entirely within
the natural, not supernatural, order. This gave way to what Taylor calls a “modern moral order” –
one in which a new understanding of morality organizes social relations on the basis of mutual
benefit rather than obligation to a higher, transcendent or eternal set of norms.

3
James K.A. Smith, How Not to be Secular (2014), 33

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This brings us to an important point: the story of the secular age, is not a linear line, but a zig-zag
story. The emergence of the secular age, and exclusive humanism, was not the product of secular
forces at play in history. Much of it emerged from religious reformers who enacted reforms for
theological reasons. In many ways, secularism was an unintended consequence of these reforms.
Thus, and again, we must dismiss the common subtraction narrative. Prior to the advent of
secularism, the secular did not refer to as that which exists without reference to God, The term
secular simply mean “in the world” and was used to distinguish between clergy that served in
monasteries, and those who had responsibilities to the parish. The priests with civil duties were
known as the secular clergy, because they performed tasks, as opposed to the monastic life, that
was of this world.
Thus, we arrive at a critical question: how did we come to these alternatives? How did the secular
age create that alternative, exclusive humanism? The important point here is that, we are not just
dealing with the removal of obstacles but the creation of something new – secularism had to be
produced, it was not distilled or discovered. To understand this, we must remember that human life
requires some sort of meaning and significance. This necessitated some sort of alternative to
Christianity. Here, Taylor points to new sources of meaning. The first, is what he calls
“immanentization:” the process wherein meaning and significance are sought within a self-enclosed
and naturalistic universe, without transcendence. Here, Taylor introduces a critical new element:
providential deism. God is reduced to a watchmaker with no direct function or involvement in the
universe.
Second, this led to the emergence of what Taylor calls, the “modern moral order” wherein society
is structuring around mutual benefit – primarily, the economic – without reference to a higher
power. For example, we see with Adam Smith and John Locke, flourishing is equated with
economic and mutual benefit, a meaning that is ascertained from this self-enclosed world. Here, we
can draw on John Milbank (to whom we will return later) who explains that the emergence of a
self-enclosed world gave way to a self-enclosed and seemingly autonomous political space. In other
words, the creation of the secular, and its exclusive humanism required a political shift as well
because a shift in ones view of the world, and God necessitates or is based on a shift in an
understanding of the political. Taylor states:
“We have moved from a world in which the place of fullness
was understood as unproblematically outside of or “beyond”
human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is
challenged by others who place it (in a wide range of
different ways “within” human life”4 (15)
There are a number of other causes for the emergence of an exclusive humanism. For example,
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, through which, the origins of man could be defined
independently of reference to the divine. God, was reduced to a watchmaker who was not personal,
incarnate or miracle performing. Moreover, this time period witnessed the emergence of biblical
criticism which demonstrated that much of the myths, in the Old Testament, drew on earlier stories,
myths, and legends. Other figures included Voltaire, Hume, who critiqued arguments for the
existence of God, Nietzsche who warned that God is dead and that man must forgo the slave

4
Charles Taylor, Secular Age (2018), 15

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morality of Christianity, and Marx who argued, drawing on Feuerbach, that God was a human
construction and that religion was merely a false comfort for the oppressed. Finally, we have figures
like Freud who argued for the psychological and scientific origins of religion, as a expression of
infancy. In short, science displaced Christianity as a means of producing meaningful explanations
for natural phenomenon. The only place that could be occupied by Christianity was ethics.
The emergence of an alternative to belief, exclusive humanism, was not without its problems. Man
still required a sense of fullness: a human desire to find meaning and significance. It is that which
“breaks through our ordinary sense of being in the world” (5). This creates a “cross-pressures” –
wherein man is caught between a desire for transcendent meaning and the pull of immanence, he
stands in between multiple and competing spiritual options. This led to a sense of loss and malaise,
resulting from the disenchantment of the world – it was led to a sense of emptiness and
dissatisfaction. The buffered self writes Smith, leads to “a sense that something may be occluded
in the very closure which guarantees safety – that is – “a sense of cosmic isolation.” (64). Taylor
refers to this as the “malaise of immanence.” Man is left to dwell in an “immanent frame” (92). I
will return to this dilemma in our final module on Islam and secularism, in particular, in our
discussion of Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman’s critique of secularism as a narrow world that limits meaning
and significance.
Now, the question is, what became of Christianity? Christianity was preserved, not as a doctrine
but as a form of ethics. It can be argued that the idea of human worth and dignity are premised on
Christian ideals. The debate in the public square, with respect to Christianity, was no longer
theologies debates about salvation, or Christology but ethical debates. This is evident in the recent
debates between liberals and the left on the one hand, and conservatives on another. To understand
this, we must say something about the nature of Christianity. The Dutch missiologist Anton
Wessel’s describes the transformations of Christianity as a process of ‘ongoing inculturation’ or we
can think of these transformations as paradigm shifts.
The idea is, simply, that Christianity was transformed through its appropriation of emergent and
exogenous cultures and worldviews. These included six fundamental paradigms shifts: the
apocalyptic paradigm of primitive Christianity; the Hellenistic paradigm of the patristic
period; the medieval Roman Catholic paradigm; the Protestant (Reformation) paradigm; the
modern Enlightenment paradigm. These shifts were so fundamental that we can speak of each
paradigm as a religion of its own. It is necessary, to delve deeper into how Christianity was
appropriated by the process of secularization. I will explore the concept of secularization in more
detail later on. It will suffice, for now, to define secularization as the idea that history evolves as
man matures from an infantile, premodern state, to a mature state, that is rational and secular. To
do so, The idea that the process of secularization has its roots in the Gospel, has no real substance.
It was, as we have already demonstrated in our discussion on the reformation and nominalism –
both of which were theological – it was based on an interpretation of biblical faith. In terms of the
last shift, its embrace and inculturation through the modern enlightenment, this began early on.
Attas explains,
“Of all the great religions of the world Christianity alone
shifted its center of origin from Jerusalem to Role,
symbolizing the beginnings of the westernization of
Christianity and its gradual and successful permeation of

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 Western elements that in subsequent periods of its history
produced and accelerated the momentum of secularization.”5
There are many Christian intellectuals who favor the view that secularization was borne out of
Christianity, that it is the fruits of the biblical tradition. The problem with this view, as we have
already noted, is that secularization was not an intended goal of the reformations. Furthermore, the
emergence of secularization required the emergence of an alternative, an exclusive humans. The
problem with the idea that secularization emerged from Christianity is that adopting such a view
would lead to a dilemma: why did God send his revelation to man in his infantile state? Does this
not discredit the reports, formulations, and conceptualizations of early Christian thinkers in respect
to the doctrine of the Trinity and Redemption? Moreover, Attas writes,
“even in his allegedly ‘mature’ in this secular age, Western
man is still inadequately informed about God and still
groping for a meaning in God. It seems that Western man
who believes in this version of Christianity must wither
admit that man is still ‘infantile,’ or that the revelation or
conceptualization of its meaning and purpose is from the
very beginning necessarily inadequate.”6
The secularization paradigm holds that religion is understood in terms of its historicity and faith.
That is to say, that religion is part of a culture, or tradition, reducible to a set of private beliefs. It
evolves and develops, just as man evolves and develops. This is true in respect to Christianity. Attas
explains that while Islam is a revealed religion, Christianity is based on revelation – albeit corrupted
revelation. As such, ideas such as the Trinity and Redemption are cultural creations. In the final
paradigm shift, Christianity was reduced to a set of ethics that would serve as the grounds for much
of the debate today, such as, the debate on abortion, same sex-marriage, and transgender rights.
However, later on, in our discussion on liberalism, we will find that even Christianity as ethics
informing public debates was displaced by a reductive form of individualism which is committed
to no higher principle than individual autonomy.
In concluding, let us return to Taylor. There are two major flaws in the account of secularism given
by Charles Taylor. The first, is that he does not consider the ways in which the relationship between
the West and Islam shaped secular identity. We will explore this in more length in a later session.
The second is that he accepts the secular story of disenchantment and does not fully identify the
role of capitalism in fostering the secular age. This is a major blind spot given that capitalism has
become the religion of modernity. To understand why Capitalism is a form of enchantment, we
must recognize that enchantment does not refer simply to the prevalence of magic or primitive
superstition such as the presence of demigods in nature. Enchantment “can take a variety of forms:
magic, animism; the myriad shapes of the occult; or its most elaborate, religion. Thus, according to
Taylor’s own definition of religion as man a sense of fullness.
In that sense, Capitalism par excellence is a new religion. The emergence of Capitalism tells us
more about what this “exclusive humanism” looked like – more importantly, it tell us how did man
come to acquire fullness and meaning in an immanent frame? How can we speak of alternative
forms of flourishing, meaning and fullness in a disenchanted world? Eugene McCarraher argues,

5
Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (1993), 20
6
Ibid. 24

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and quite convincingly, that Capitalism, which is the ultimate expression of exclusive humanism,
did not disenchant the world, it merely misenchanted the world. That is to say, it created its own
forms of enchantments and it had to do so because as individuals and societies, we have a
sacramental longing for some form of enchantment – which for Taylor is a sense of meaning,
fullness, and flourishing.
To what extent is the disenchantment narrative accurate? McCarraher writes, “To be genuine and
enduring, a “re-enchantment of the world” must begin in dissent from the prevailing wisdom about
disenchantment” He goes on to explain, in challenging Taylor, “Perhaps the story we’ve been told
about the evacuation of the sacred from everyday life has been a fable; perhaps the “immanent
frame” has always been permeable, while the “buffered selves” that ward of transcendence have
been more porous that we ever imagined.” In contrast to the prevailing narrative on disenchantment,
perhaps we cannot disenchant the world, perhaps, “The world can never be disenchanted, not
because our emotional or political or cultural needs compels us to find enchantments” – which
Taylor recognizes – “but because the world itself, as Hopkins realized, is charged with the grandeur
of God.”
The reality is that man cannot escape enchantment, or some notion of transcendence. That is why
advertising spoke to the “popular anxieties about an increasingly rationalized and impersonal world
dominated by large institutions” through a “reanimation of the world under the aegis of major
corporations.” Roland Marchand explains that “Responding to this crisis of moral legitimacy,
public relations departments conjured a “corporate soul” – “an image of the corporation as a friendly
neighborhood behemoth interested in community service.” This new religion, or cult, Capitalism
takes as its animating spirit money. Its theology, philosophy, and cosmology is economics. Its
sacraments are fetishized commodities and technologies. Its moral and liturgical codes are
management theory and business journalism. Its clerics are economists, executives, managers, and
business writers.”
It does not take much to be convinced of McCarraher’s thesis. For example, to what extent does the
modern business corporation, the new Leviathan, not construct for itself an aura of sacredness?
Naoimi Klein explains that capitalism has become the “contemporary religion of unfettered free
markets” and that branding and advertising give off an aura of “corporate transcendence.” Any
political order depends on some sort of allegiance to a “fiction” – Simon Critchley writes, for it
depends on “an act of creation that brings a subject into existence” through a new “original
covenant” as though that political order was a deity. This new covenant becomes sacred and
unquestionable “whereby a people is brought – or rather, brings itself – into existence.” For
Capitalism, that is the covenant of the “free market” and the creation of a new man, the homo
economicus. Capitalism does not do away with sacralization for what we actually witness is a
“series of metamorphoses of sacralization.” McCarraher writes, “Under Capitalism, money
occupies the ontological throne from which God has been evicted” – rather than doing away with
the idea of transcendence, the secular age created “surrogate forms of transcendence” – Capital.
The paradox is that this new God, the corporation, and this new religion or cult, capitalism, have
religious origins. Max Weber explained how protestant theology sanctioned the accumulation of
wealth through a rejection of the sacramental teachings of Catholicism and the church. The
Calvinists rejected such sacraments as being akin to magic. According to McCarraher, “The spirit
of capitalism was not, Weber argued, just another term for greed: it was rationalized accumulation
of wealth, undertaken, Calvinists convinced themselves, for the sake of God’s glory and majesty.

10
Capitalism as enchantment began in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was led by Puritan
improvers, and later, English protestants who “espoused a systematic theology of the divine right
of capitalist property.” In the 19th century, they gave way to evangelical successors who were more
widely read than Adam Smith or David Ricardo. ”The reality is that the world has never been
disenchanted, it was merely misenchanted. Transcendence was not done away with, it was merely
misplaced – we will return to this point later on when we demonstrate the secularism merely
misplaced transcendence and that secularism upheld the sovereignty of the world, al-dunya.
[3] Talal Asad on Secularism
Introduction to Talal Asad’s Argument
Talal Asad Talal Asad is (a cultural anthropologist who is currently a professor of anthropology at
the City University of New York Graduate Center. His prolific body of work mainly focuses on
religiosity, Middle Eastern studies, postcolonialism, and notions of power, law and discipline)
argues that to properly understand ‘secularism’ as a doctrine, we must first understand ‘the secular
– that is to say, in ways similar to Charles Taylor, we must approach the doctrine of secularism
indirectly. He wants to do so in order to understand, “what secularism means historically—how
certain practices, concepts, and sensibilities have helped to organize, in different places and at
different time, political arrangements called secularism” (Asad, 2006, p. 217). In other words, like
Taylor, Asad’s argument is essentially that secularism had to be created because its epistemic
category – the secular – is in itself an invention that emerged from certain practices, concepts, and
sensibilities. But Talal Asad’s critique takes us a step further: the secular is constantly being
recreated – as is the category of “religion” – the question becomes: created by whom?
Talal Asad approaches these questions by adopting a genealogical approach, which is ““a way of
working back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our
certainties”7. In contrast to Taylor, who defines religion in terms of a “sense of fullness” – Asad
argues that “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent
elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the
historical product of discursive processes”8.
To do so – to approach it indirectly – we can explore nationalism and the nation-state. Later on,
we will explore the idea of the ‘secular’ in relation to minorities and international relations and
how it reinforces Talal Asad’s argument. First, let us state the essence of Talal Asad’s argument.
It has been assumed, by secularists and even religious believers that the ‘secular’ and the
“religious” are two universal and mutually-exclusive categories. For these thinkers, the “secular”
is the rational successor to “religion.” For the secularist, the ‘secular’ is a space that is discovered,
not created, when the world is disenchanted, and when reason and the world are liberated from
religion or superstition. It claims to unveil the ‘Real’ from the ‘unreal.’ The problem, Asad will
argue, is that these two categories are not universal and mutually exclusive categories.
To counter this claim, Talal Asad makes a move that is similar to Charles Taylor. He argues that
we must approach the doctrine of secularism indirectly, by examining the category of the “secular”
which for Asad, is an epistemic category that is prior to the doctrine of secularism. In examining
the “secular” – Talal Asad engages in a genealogy of the category which exposes a glaring fact:

7
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (2003), 16
8
Ibid., 29

11
the “secular” is not a discovery of reason, nor is it the rational successor of “religion.” Moreover,
it is not mutually exclusive to the category we call “religion.” He argues that the “secular” is not a
universally and mutually exclusive category but rather the product of a multilayered history. For
Talal Asad, secularism is more than just a separation of church and State. It presupposes new
concepts of religion, ethics, and politics. Secularism is not neutral, nor is it discovered. It proffers
a new conception of the world and creates new categories – the “secular” and the “religious” – in
defining that new world. As Saba Mahmood (professor of anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley) argues, secularism, in particular secular liberalism, “cannot be addressed
simply as a doctrine of the state, or as a set of juridical conventions: in its vast implications, it
defines, in effect, something like a way of life.”9 These new conceptions are closely linked to the
emergence and universalization of the modern nation-state. The core argument of Talal Asad is
this: the secular and the religious are not two mutually exclusive categories but exist in a
relationship wherein the religious and the secular must perpetually be defined and re-defined.
There is no universal category of religion and secular – the boundaries between the two must be
constantly re-created. By whom? By the modern-nation state.
Talal Asad on Secularism and the Modern Nation-State
Let us now put this argument, the idea that the categories of “religion” and “secular” are
historically constructed rather than discovered, and that secularism is essentially a mode of world-
making into context by examining the modern nation-state. The most common, paradoxically
secular explanation of the relationship between religion and the nation-state is to argue that
nationalism can be understood as a form of religion. After all, does nationalism not have its own
ethics, icons, ceremonial activities, and so forth? For Talal Asad, these arguments miss the point.
There is more going on than just the replacement of one religion (e.g., Christianity) with another
(e.g., nationalism). He argues that these narratives presuppose a universal and essential definition
of religion which is subsequently imposed universally. The question to be asked is this: who
defined “religion” in the first place? Surely, it could not have come out of anything. Here, Talal
Asad makes his devastating argument: it is the modern nation-state that is perpetually in the act of
creating these categories and defining its boundaries. This, again, brings us to a critical point:
Secularism is more than just a separation of religious institutions from the so-called “political.” It
is a process of world-making and the creation, rather than discovery, of categories. As such, the
state must then engage in secularization, indoctrination of its citizens, and the need to transform
religions to render them compatible with secular doctrine. In doing so, the state engages in a
process that, Matthew Scherer (an assistant professor of Government and Politics at George
Mason University) calls a conversion: “a significant self-transformation (or transformation of the
self); a resituation of the individual in relation to a community or a community in relation to a
larger tradition or collective; and the production of a new self-narrative, which articulates and
consolidates the experience by retrospectively marking a moment of discontinuity, change, or
rebirth in the convert’s life course.” Religion-building is evident in three functions of the State:
• Its self-determined ability to define what constitutes a religion.
• Which beliefs and actions are deemed religious or alternatively secular
• Which of those religious beliefs and actions are acceptable to and tolerated by the State

9
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008), 13

12
An example of how the State intervenes in managing religions is apparent in the passage of the
International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) by the United States Congress, Saha Mahmood
argues:
“Illustrates how the exercise of sovereign power tends to
subsume the secular principle of religious freedom. The
IRFA was signed into law under President Clinton in 1998
and gives unprecedented powers to the U.S. federal
government to expand its regulation of religious life on an
international scale in the name of enforcing and protecting
religious freedoms.”10
This brings us to the idea of the so-called “public-space.” Talal Asad argues, contrary to Charles
Taylor, that the so-called “public sphere” in the modern nation-state is not a space of “persuasion
and negotiation.” It is not the elimination of violence but rather the regulation of violence
according to the identity structures that are produced by the modern nation-state. Thus, the modern
nation-state does not intervene in the public space for the sake of reform. Rather, it has already
redefined what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, what is legitimate and what is illegitimate,
in that public sphere. For example, when we think of free speech, the secularist will often argue
that all religions are given equal access to such a right. The problem with this argument is that it
overlooks the ways in which the nation-state defines what kind of religions are given such right.
Talal Asad notes, “Another way of putting it is this. The enjoyment of free speech presupposes not
merely the physical ability to speak but to be heard, a condition without which speaking to some
effect is not possible.”11
To dive deeper into the ways in which the secular state arbitrarily defines what constitutes religion,
and in turn, religious freedom Saba Mahmood draws our attention to two cases with the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The first, is the Lautsi v. Italy case in 2011 in which a Finnish
and Italian mother sued her children’s public school for the compulsory display of the crucifixes.
She argued that the public display of the crucifix violated her children’s freedom of thought and
religion, which is protected in Article 9(1) of the ECHR. The Supreme Administrative Court in
Italy ruled against Lautsi, arguing that the crucifix did not have any religious connotations in Italy,
but instead, represented Italy’s historical and cultural values. In November 2009, she appealed this
case to the ECHR which originally ruled in her favor. However, this caused an uproar within
Europe, and especially the Vatican. The Italian government appealed the decision to the Grand
Chamber of the ECtHR in 2010, supported by twenty – secular – European countries. The ECHR
reversed its decision, allowing for the public and compulsory display of the crucifix. The court
argued that the display of the crucifix was not an act of proselytization that could influence students
towards one religion over another. Moreover, the crucifix represented the “Italian civilization” and
its “value system: liberty, equality, human dignity and religious toleration, and accordingly also
the secular nature of the state.”
Let us now examine two other cases. First, the Dahlab vs. Switzerland in which a former Catholic
convert to Islam, Lucia Dahlab, was prohibited from wearing the headscarf while teaching at a
public elementary school. Dahlab appealed to the ECHR, using the same article, Article 9(1)

10
Saba Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire (2006), 327
11
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (2003), 184

13
arguing that this violated her freedom of religion. The court ruled against Dahlab, arguing that the
hijab was “a powerful external symbol” – in other words – it was, unlike the crucifix, a religious
symbol. This set the precedent for other cases, such as Sahin vs. Turkey in 2005. Leyla Sahin was
banned from medical school for wearing the hijab, which the Turkish state argued was a symbol
of political Islam, and as such, was a threat to the Turkish Republic’s values. Sahin appealed to
the ECHR which ruled in favor of the Turkish Republic, arguing that the hijab was a symbol of
political Islam, rather than a religious obligation. The court stated, “the regulations on the Islamic
headscarf were not directed against the applicant’s religious affiliation, but pursued, among other
things, the legitimate aim of protecting order and the rights and freedoms of others and were
manifestly intended to preserve the secular nature of educational institutions.” Lastly, the Dogru
v. France case, in which an eleven-year old, Belgin Dogru, was expelled for refusing to remove
the hijab during physical education class. Her parents appealed to the ECHR which ruled in favor
of the ban stating:
“In France, as in Turkey or Switzerland, secularism is a
constitutional principle, and a founding principle of the
Republic, to which the entire population adheres and the
protection of which appears to be of prime importance, in
particular in schools. The Court reiterates that an attitude
which fails to respect that principle will not necessarily be
accepted as being covered by the freedom to manifest one’s
religion and will not enjoy the protection of Article 9 of the
Convention. . . . Having regard to the margin of appreciation
which must be left to the member States with regard to the
establishment of the delicate relations between the Churches
and the State, religious freedom thus recognized and
restricted by the requirements of secularism appears
legitimate in light of the values underpinning the
Convention.”12
The ”margin of appreciation” is a doctrine used by the ECHR to consider which states that a
member state has a degree of discretion in determining what judicial and administrative actions
fall within the scope of a convention, such as Article 9(1). The ECHR, thus, ruled that the banning
of the veil was within the legitimate margin of discretion of the Turkish and French State. The
point here, is not to point out the hypocrisy or bias of the ECHR. That argument could most
certainly be made, especially if we consider, as we did, the antagonistic relationship between
Europe and Islam. The point is that the definition of what is considered religious as opposed to
secular, including symbols such as the crucifix is in itself an arbitrary and political decision that is
enacted, not prior to the state, but by the secular state itself as expressed in the “margin of
appreciation” doctrine.
Understanding French Secularism
Through modernity, the state became sovereign, which is to say, it became an abstracted and
transcendent power, independent of the rulers and the ruled, or any divine power. If “religion” –
as per defined by secularism – is concerned with otherworldly affairs, the state must define the

12
Quoted in Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age (2016), 172

14
proper place of the worldly well-being and affairs of its populace. The core feature of the
sovereign, transcendent secular nation-state is cultivation of a new sense of self, a new subjectivity
that conforms to the personality of the State, in this case, the Secular Republic, or Laicism. The
image of the Republic, as an “imagined community” required an internal enemy, a threat to the
personality of the Republic. In the 19th century, this was primarily the Church, Catholic
Christianity. The very identity of the secular republic was forged through an image of this internal
enemy. The new internal enemy is now “fundamentalist Islam”.
The image of the state, as (1) sovereign and possessing its own personality – (2) in the face of an
internal threat - means that it must create its own signs and deal with signs that potentially disrupt
its personality. This has two implications. First, the banning of the veil is part-and-parcel of a
historical conflict with so-called “fundamentalist Islam” but as Asad points out, it is also “integral
to the secular project attached to the Republic, which is to promote a certain kind of national
subject who is held to be essentially incompatible with an ‘‘Islamic subject’’—not merely in the
legal but also in the psychological sense.” Regis Debray, a politician and member of the Stasi
commission, argued that the social contract of the secular republic was a sacred principle,
“functionally equivalent” to divine revelation. Several members of the commission were also
members of the nation-wide “le Comite´ Laıcite´ Republique’” whose purpose was to preserve the
principles of French secularism. According to their website:
“The school is the sacred place of the Republic, where one
learns to become a citizen, where all children are taught to
become free women and men, equal in rights and
interdependent, regardless of their color, their origin, and
their religious, philosophical, or cultural belonging. It is
there that liberty, equality, and fraternity acquire their full,
concrete meaning. That is why the school must remain a
protected sanctuary, and with regard to it secularism should
never allow commercial, communitarian, or dogmatic
interests to intrude.”13
Here, we find a contradiction between the ideal that the citizen can cultivate their own identity and
define themselves and on the other hand, that the citizen is bound to an unconditional affinity to
the secular personality of the Republic and unconditional allegiance to the nation-state. How is
this tension resolved? Any sort of self-cultivation through religion is deemed to be fantasy and
should not be taken seriously. If the citizen is taught what is real and rational, they will naturally
mature out of their religious identities. Thus, the citizen can properly identify and define itself only
when it has been properly disciplined by the state. The committee states, “Today, secular
humanism alone can nourish and guide the march of all peoples toward knowledge, toward a better
existence and justice, toward peace and freedom.”
For a secular state, this means that the state is given the final authority to determine which signs
are religious, and which are not. This is not only in the public space because the whole public and
private space dichotomy is a construction of the modern state. This naturally led to a debate about
the hijab. To resolve this debate, the French President appointed a commission of inquiry to inquire
into the question of secularism in public schools. The commission was lead by ex-minister Bernard

13
Quoted in Talal Asad, Trying to Understand French Secularism (2006), 520

15
Stasi. In 2004, the commission published a report banning any “conspicuous religions signs” in
public schools. These “conspicuous” signs were distinguished from “discreet signs” that were
permitted, such as little crosses, stars of David, or miniature Qur’ans. There are two interesting
points to be made here. First, is that the commission presumes a certain definition of religion in its
designation of a sign to be a religious sign. The second, is the reduction of the hijab to a sign,
rather than an obligation of faith, that is not intended to communicate something but rather is part,
as Asad says, “part of an orientation” and “way of being.” In other words, the commission not only
arbitrarily determines what constitutes “religion” but also, in a theological move, determines the
essence and nature of religious acts and symbols such as the hijab. That is because, it had to
interpret the hijab as being a symbol that did not conform to the secular personality of the Republic.
This also meant that the commission had access to the very psychological processes behind
wearing the hijab, the will of those who wore it, apparently to symbolize something rather than
fulfill an obligation. In other words, the state has privileged access to the “wearer’s motive and
will – to her subjectivity.” Thus, the state is as pervasive as to access the very private subjectivity
of the citizen. In fact, the commission laments the fact that previous judges, with regards to their
ruling on hijab, ‘‘the judge did not think he had the power to pronounce on the interpretation of
the meaning of religious signs. Here was an inherent limit to the intervention of the judge. It
seemed to him impossible to enter into the interpretation given to one or another sign by a religion.”
For the commission, the veil had to be judged according to fix, and objective rules, or laws, dictated
by the personality of the secular state by which a sign was religious or not. The commission goes
as far as to say that the state “cannot be content with withdrawing from all religious and spiritual
matters.”

As Asad points out, this illustrates the power of the modern nation-state, “For what the commission
calls ‘‘a sign’’ is nothing in itself. ‘‘Religious signs’’ are part of the game that the secular Republic
plays. More precisely, it is in playing that game that the abstract being called the ‘‘modern state’’
is realized. As such, Asad also notes, “The banning of the veil as a sign can therefore be seen as
an exercise in sovereign power, an attempt by a centralized state to dominate public space as the
space of particular signs.” It may be argued that the ban of the veil was the preservation of
individual freedom, that is, to prevent families from imposing the veil on women. That is, to
prevent gender discrimination. However, even a cursory analysis of French media reveals the real
reason behind the ban and the popular support for the man; the idea of voluntary servitude. The
danger was in that it was voluntary, ‘Henceforth it is the idea of ‘voluntary servitude’ that prevails
in media analyses: that young French women should themselves choose to wear the headscarf is
precisely what makes them even more dangerous. This act is no longer to be seen as the
consequence of family pressure but as the sign of a personal—and therefore fanatical—
commitment.’’

Module Two: Inventing Religion

There are, in Western academia, two approaches to defining religion. The first is the
substantivist approach. The second, is the functionalist approach. The first refers to ideas and
practices oriented towards some notion of the transcendent. The second, refers to the function, that
is, how religion functions as a structure of meaning that gives significance to everyday life. In
what follows, we will demonstrate that both meanings are deficient because the idea of a

16
transhistorical and transcultural essence, or definition, of religion that is distinguished from the
secular is a modern myth. If there is no universal definition of religion, then who constructs and
defines it? Willian T. Cavanaugh states, “What counts as religion and what does not in any given
context is contestable and depends on who has the power and authority to define religion at any
given time and place”14. Moreover, that the idea of religion did not emerge as a discovery of
something that exists out there in the world but rather an invention that was, in itself, the product
of two new power-relations. First, the emergence of the modern and liberal nation-state. That is,
the idea of the state’s monopoly over violence. Second, to legitimate colonial relations between
the West and the non-West. That is, between a civilized Christian West and a non-Christian
primitive non-West. This idea of religion is not an accidental feature of the “West”. This idea of a
privatized religion is a central and defining characteristic of the West because
“it establishes a fundamental divide between religion and
nonreligion that has determined the Western view of reality
and the Western organization of the world. In the West,
religion is a distinct domain, separated from the rest of
life.”15

In premodern times, there was no category called “religion” that was separate from the “secular”
or the “political” and when it did emerge in the modern era, it was exclusively in the West. The
term religion, from the word religio, is not found in any of the Ancient civilizations, including the
Muslim world, India, China, and Japan. In Rome, the word religio meant to rebind or relink, and
meant a “serious obligation for a person” such as cultic observances but also civil oaths which are
considered to belong to the secular. Moreover, the term religio does not correspond to any concept
among the early biblical writers. In the Vulgate New Testament of St. Jerome, the word religio
appears only six times, and is used as a translation for different Greek terms, none of which
correspond to “religion” as we know it today. Similarly, in the King James translation of the New
Testament, it appears only five times, corresponding to three Greek words. In the Latin patristic
writings, it has different meanings which refer to everything from clerical office, worship, and
piety. For Saint Augustine, religio referred to worship, but this was not put in opposition to a
secular realm because such worship can include what we now called “secular activities” such as
wealth or honor. As worship, it was found in all realms of social activity, be it political or
economic. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith observes, “It is nowadays customary to think of this period
as the most ‘religious’ in the history of Christendom. Despite this or because of it, throughout the
whole Middle Ages no one, so far as I have been able to ascertain, ever wrote a book specifically
on ‘religion.”16
The term religio, in early Christianity, did not refer to a set of propositional beliefs, nor a set of
doctrines called Christianity that was put on par with Islam, or Judaism. Nor did it refer to an
interior subjectivity belonging exclusively to the human soul. It meant a virtue, a disposition of
ones actions towards moral excellence and bodily habits. There was no separation between so-
called “religious” virtues and “secular” virtues. Thomas Aquinas, in his Scommunity Theologiae
explains the interdependence between different virtues, stating “one virtue without the other is

14
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (2009), 59
15
Ibid., 99
16
Ibid., 64

17
either of no account whatever, or very imperfect.”17 It was, in fact, a minor virtue that exist
alongside nine subvirtues all of which were subordinated to the principal virtue of justice. Again,
the idea of justice could not exist independently of social practices. For example, Thomas Aquinas
believed that government is directed towards virtuous living and that the King must be a “very
righteous man” There was no concept of the secular, as distinct from the religious. The saeculum
referred to this world an age, translated in English as a “world without end.” It was enveloped, in
its totality, as a creation of God governed by a providential plan, in other words, it was not a sealed
off totality independent of divine will. How, then, did the concept of religion as a set of interiorized
and private doctrines come to fruition?
The emergence of such a definition of religion began with the invention of the secular. “The rise
of the concept of ‘religion’ is in some ways correlated with the decline in the practice of religion
itself” (70). It began with Renaissance thinkers like Nicolas of Cusa, a Christian Platonist thinker,
who argued that religio referred to the different ways in which God was worshipped, and as such,
we could think of Christianity as a religion on par with Islam, or Judaism. The second thinker was
Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato’s Dialogues. He argued that religio referred to piety and that
such piety was universal and inherent to all humans. This culminated in the works of John Locke
for whom religion was essentially a state of mind. He states, “All the life and power of true religion
consist in the inward and full persuasion of the mind”18.

“This very definition of the modern democratic state in fact

creates religion as its alter-ego: religion, as such, is the space
in which and by which any substantive collective goals
(salvation, righteousness, etc.) are individualized and made
into a question of personal commitment or morality.”19

He introduced a distinction between the inward and the exterior, which could not have existed in
the Medieval period because Christian theologians held that the exterior, bodily dispositions and
good governance, were inseparable from what Locke calls the interior. John Locke’s idea of
religion was used to legitimate a new power-configuration: the emergence of the liberal and
modern nation-state. Those who cannot make the distinction between the sacred and the secular,
such as the Roman Catholics, did not fall under the realm of tolerance.
“Transhistorical accounts of religion arose in the fifteenth
through the seventeenth centuries as part of a new
configuration of Christian societies in which many
legislative and jurisdictional powers and claims to power—
as well as claims to the devotion and allegiance of the
people—were passing from the church to the new sovereign
state. The new conception of religion would help to “purify”
the church of powers and claims that were not its proper
function”20

17
Ibid., 67
18
Ibid., 78
19
Ibid., 123
20
Ibid., 83

18
As we have already noted. The idea of religion as a privatized set of interior beliefs was dependent,
not only on the rise of the modern and liberal nation-state but also on colonization. That is why
the colonizing powers, in their interactions with the native people of the Americas, Africa, and the
Pacific Island claimed that these people had no religion. Later on, they would argue that they did
indeed have a religion, but the false one and as such needed to be civilized and brought into the
orbit of European imperialism. Religion was used as a “strategy of social control.”21 This also
required the invention of religions. For example, there was no religion called “Hinduism” until
1829. This, in turn, was used to describe the Indian population as backwards as found in the works
of James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mills. It was also used as a parallel to Christianity that
Christian missionaries could use to compare so-called “indigenous” religions with Christianity.
Let us now examine two possible ways of defining “religion.” The first, is the substantive approach
which examines the content of religion. The second, is the functionalist approach which is more
inclusive and examines the functions of religions. The substantive approach attempts to locate
shared content between world “religions.” It often did so in reference to a belief in God. However,
this was too restrictive because it could not take into its fold Buddhism, Confucianism, and
Daoism. Thus, the argument was made that religion is that which is concerned with the
transcendent. This, however, is equally problematic because the term transcendent is irrevocably
vague and arbitrary. For example, Confucianism does not uphold an idea of transcendence in the
classical sense, nor did the Greeks believe that their gods where transcendent but rather were
directly involved in natural and social processes, and fate. The most minimal definition of
transcendence would have to be that which refers to any perceive reality that exceeds and unifies
ordinary human experience of the material world”22. In that case, the religion-secular divide
collapses upon itself. If transcendence is the criterion, then religion would have to include
transcendent notions such as the Nation, the land, humanism, communism, and so forth.
Thus, the functionalist approach seems like a more fitting category for scholars. The functionalist
approach is not concerned with what our beliefs are but how it functions in society and how it
structures our social relations. The first problem is that in expanding the category of religion to
include all ideologies, the category of religion loses any substantial meaning as everything comes
to fall under its purview. The second problem with this inclusive approach, however, is that it must
encompass supposedly secular phenomena, such as nationalism. This means, once again, that the
religion-secular divine collapses upon itself. What is to say that secular phenomena such as
consumerism, nationalism, and Marxism do not function as religions? If so, does this not
delegitimate the idea of the separation between the sacred and secular, and religion and politics?
This is evident in Jean-Jacques Rosseau’s idea of “civil religion” in the eighteenth-century. He
distinguishes between Christianity as “the purely inward worship of Almighty God, and the eternal
obligations of morality and nothing more.” Civil religion, on the other hand, is defined through a
sovereign (the State and the community) wherein “the sovereign is entitled to fix the tenets of a
purely civil creed, or profession of faith.”23
Nowhere is this more evident than in what is held to be the most secular nation – France – during
the most secular era – the postrevolutionary period. The French revolutionaries created a new cult
of the French nation, and even had civic baptisms and civic funerals. The ideals of the Republic

21
Ibid., 86
22
Ibid., 103
23
Ibid., 114

19
were, and are still, sacred. The same applies to the United States, wherein Americanism becomes
the new religion. All students are required to recite the pledge of allegiance. The author of the
pledge, Francis Bellamy, said that the ritual repetition of the pledge was meant to be recited in the
same way one recited the biblical Lord’s prayer. William Herberg argues, “By every realistic
criterion, the American way of Life is the operative religion of the American people.”24
The point, to reiterate, is not that religion is purely a social construct. First, the point is that the
Eurocentric conception of religion is a historical construct, that is, the idea that the religious and
the political are two separate domains is not a universal ideal. The phenomenon of religion, as we
will explore later in our discussion of secularism and Islam, emanates from a primordial desire in
man towards the Absolute, towards transcendence. The ways in which this is expressed across
history and in different cultures, differs. Second, that any definition of religion, be in functionalist
or substantivist leads us to conclude that secular ideologies, as we have seen with capitalism, fall
within the purview of religion. And as such, the secular-religious, and sacred-secular dichotomy
collapses upon itself.
The Myth of Religious Violence
I will not explore this myth in-depth because it has been thoroughly debunked by scholars such as
William T. Cavanaugh and one needs to look no further than the horrors wrought by WWII and
American imperialism to realize that violence has been part-and-parcel of secularism and its
missionary zeal. It would suffice to mention Hitler’s National Socialism, Stalin’s and Mao’s
Communism, and Pol Pot’s mass slaughter in Cambodia, I want to make three points.
• First, the process of secularization, that is, the transfer of property and jurisdiction from
the church to the state was in and of itself a source of violence and not a response to
religious violence.
• Second, that what applies to “religion” as being violent characteristics, also applies to
secular religions.
• Third, I want to point to a critical paradox in secularism. The paradox is that the myth of
religious violence, in and of itself, has been used to perpetuate violence in the name of
secularism, and even liberalism.
First, the idea that the state was responding to religious violence through political means is false.
The very distinction between religion and politics was being formed through the emergence of
new political configurations, the emergence of the modern nation-state and secularization, or the
transfer of church property and sovereignty onto the state. The Wars of Religion were,
fundamentally, a battle was fought, as Cavanaugh points out, “by state-building elites for the
purpose of consolidating their power over the church and other rivals”25. This began well before
Martin Luther initiated the Reformation. It can even be argued that in large part, much of the
Reformation was in and of itself part of this bloody struggle. Cavanaugh draws on the Historian
Charles Tilly to show how the emergence of the modern nation-state depended on the ability to
make war and extract resources from the population, “As Tilly puts it, “War made the state, and
the state made war.”26 Cavanaugh goes on to explain that this does not mean that these wars were
24
Ibid., 117
25
Ibid., 162
26
Ibid., 162

20
about religion and not politics. The critical point is that the distinction between politics and religion
was made possible only through the rise of the modern state, which sought control over the Church
and its powers. As such, in the very process of secularization we find the root of the wars, and not
merely a response to them.
Second, Mark Juergensmeyer recognize that secular violence exists. However, he says it can be
distinguished from religious violence in several ways. First, religious violence is symbolic.
Second, religious violence is motivated by moral justifications and absolutes. Third, religious war
is considered to be cosmic and thus beyond historical control. Fourth, while secular violence seeks
out goals that can be achieved within a participant’s lifetime, religious violence sets goals that
stretch out longer, for a hundreds years, or even beyond the world. William T. Cavanaugh
thoroughly refutes Juergensmeyer using his own words. First, what makes the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, strategic more than symbolic? Second, the wars fought by the nation-
state are couched in moral language and justifications. In fact, the War on Afghanistan was called
Operation Infinite Justice. The US believes that it has a moral duty to spread liberal democracy
and free-market capitalism to the world. Third, there is no “limit” to the indefinite war on terror,
that is, within the lifetime of a sitting president of military campaign. Thus, what supposedly
distinguishes religious violence from secular violence fails, and applies just as equally to secular
violence.
Third, to return to the paradox: you would think, that the more secular a person is, the less prone
to violence they are. However, when we examine figures such as Sam Harris and Christopher
Hitchens, we find an explicit advocation of war against those whom they deem irrational, and it is
because they are irrational that violence and force must be used to suppress them. Harris states,
“Unless Muslims can reshape their religion into an ideology that is basically benign—or outgrow
it altogether—it is difficult to see how Islam and the West can avoid falling into a continual state
of war, and on innumerable fronts.”27 Why? Because “Islam and Western liberalism remain
irreconcilable.”28Christopher Hitchens, the author of God is Not Great, states, “Secularism is not
just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became
thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the
state.”29 But let us put them aside, given that they are self-declared militant atheists and might not
reflect most right-wing and left-wing pundits.
Paul Berman, who is not a right-wing pundit but a leftist and professor of journalism at the New
York University, is a prime example. He claims that he is both pro-war and pro-left. For Berman,
liberalism can only succeed if it suppresses religious passions. To see the blatant bias and
irrationality of his supposedly rational liberalism, we find that he includes totalitarian ideologies,
including the explicitly secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein under the rubric of “religion.”
He goes as far as to reprimand the “wishful” thinking of liberals who assume, because they are
rational, that there enemies are rational to. It follows, that if you cannot reason with the irrational
enemy, you must use force. Berman is a man of faith, a faith in liberalism. He argues that
“liberalism does not shun every absolute” because it requires an “absolute commitment to
solidarity and self-government” which of course is achieved only through a liberal democracy.

27
Quoted in Ibid., 214
28
Quoted in Ibid., 214
29
Quoted in Ibid., 219

21
Paul Berman is not an exception of secular liberalism. He is in line with a long tradition of
American foreign policy: the Wilsonian vision. President Woodrow Wilson believed that the peace
and prosperity of the world depended on the ability of the United States to liberal government and
“free-markets” (capitalism) to the rest of the world. For Wilson, liberal governments are more
peaceful because they separate religion from politics. Moreover, it cannot be argued that these
liberal ideals were influenced by Christian dispositions. As Cavanaugh points out, Christianity had
little influence on American foreign policy. The War on Iraq, and the War on Terrorism, for
example, was led by neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.
Module Three: Secularism and International Relations

Earlier, we explored the ways in which the categories of “religion” and the “secular” were
not mutually exclusive, nor is the idea nor is the “secular” something that is discovered once reason
has done away with “religion” or superstition. Talal Asad states, “there cannot be a universal
definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically
specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.”30 How
does these processes, the construction of categories, play out in international relations? In
examining the secular politics of international relations, we can explore concrete applications of
Asad’s argument. To do so, I will turn to the international studies theorist, Elizabeth Shakman
Hurd.
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd takes as her starting point, not the question: what religion is and how
does it relate to [international] politics? Rather, the question is, “How do processes, institutions,
and states come to be understood as religious versus political, or religious versus secular, and how
might we ascertain the political effects of such a demarcation?”31 The core of her argument is this:
“to define the boundaries of the secular and the religious is itself a political decision.”32 Hurd,
following Asad, argues that “religion” and the “secular” are not two essentialized categories. If the
definition of those categories is a political decision, then we must come to understand secularism
as a form of political authority rather than a mere separation of church and state. Secularism has
become the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of foreign policy, be it for Europe or the
United States. As a form of political authority, secularism in international relations not only defines
our material or national interests but our political predispositions: the attitudes and feelings that
we have towards political phenomena, such as the hijab in France or the entry of Turkey into the
European Union. As we saw with Charles Taylor, secularism is much more than just abstract
theorization. It is part and parcel, a social imaginary that brings with it new sensibilities,
knowledges, and behaviors, be it in domestic or international relations.
To properly situate secularism as a mode of political authority in international relations, Hurd
distinguishes between two narratives on secularism. The first, is the French narrative, laicism.
Laicism claims to create a neutral public space wherein religion has lost its political significance
and is pushed into the private sphere. That is simple enough. There is, however, a more complex
variant of secularity: the Judeo-Christian model.

30
Quoted in Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008), 16
31
Ibid., 16
32
Ibid, 16

22
In this narrative, secularism is the supposedly wonderful fruit of Christian civilization –
exclusively so – and thus a distinctly Western achievement. For thinkers like Samuel Huntington,
this distinctly Western fruit is what makes the flourishing of democracy possible. It follows, that
non-Western civilizations, in lacking the public/private distinction, are destined to lag behind.
Earlier, we examined the ways in which the “secular” had to be constructed through historical
processes. Hurd draws our attention to one of these processes, a critical one: secularism as a
supposedly Western gift to the world was constructed as a self-image in opposition to a
“backward” and “hostile” Islam. Hurd states,
“More than any other single religious or political tradition,
Islam represents the “nonsecular” in European and
American political discourse. This is because secularist
traditions, and the European and American national
identities and practices with which they are affiliated and in
which they are embedded, have been constructed through
opposition to Islam.”33
For example, the question of Turkey’s accession to the European Union is not only a question of
Europe’s Christian identity. It is more than that. It throws into question the role of religion and
politics in European identity. To what extent can Turkey, whose heritage is not that of Judeo-
Christian origin, accommodate secularism as a way of life? The problem is not that Turkey is not
secular, but that Turkey does not conform to the supposedly “proper” modes of secularism: laicism
and the Judeo-Christian model. The very existence of such a debate, along with the attitudes and
anxieties surrounding Turkey’s accession to the European Union are indicators of how secularism
is a way of life that produces, not only policy, but sensibilities, attitudes, and behaviors. It suffices
to look at the ways in which Muslims are portrayed in Hollywood and European filmmaking in
order to see how secularism also operates at the level of our visceral, and gut predispositions. In
what follows, we will explore (1) the ways in which the secular was constructed in opposition to
an image of Islam and (2) the ways in which secularism in international relations has informed
debates about “Political Islam” and the ascension of Turkey into the European Union.
[2] Varieties of Secularism
To understand the two dominant modes of secularism. Earlier, we argued through Taylor
that meaning and significance were shifted to the “buffered individual” – the mind. This finds its
best expression in the works of Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant sought out a philosophy that
would overcome sectarian strife. To do so, he constructed a secular variant of Christianity. He
developed a so-called “rational religion” that is grounded, not in ecclesiastical faith but in a
universal law of morality. The problem with this philosophy, William Connolly explains is that it
shared similar qualities to the Christian religion he sought to displace: it privileges a singular
concept of reason above all others. Moreover, it has a bias for a distinctly protestant conception of
religion, a liberal conception of politics, and the nation-state as the sole and legitimate identity
marker. As we will see, this reason was not universal but was distinctly Eurocentric and is
expressed in two exclusionary models of secularism. For Kant, and his predecessors, Christianity
and only Christianity could serve as a generic template for a “universal rational religion.” This was
expressed in two dominant modes of secularism: the Judeo-Christian model, and the Laicism:

33
Ibid., 49

23
Laicism is the belief that all metaphysical doctrines are no longer legitimate ways to govern the
public sphere. It is, as Chatterjee puts it, “a coercive process in which the legal powers of the state,
the disciplinary powers of family and school, and the persuasive powers of government and media
have been used to produce the secular citizen who agrees to keep religion in the private domain.
This required the formulation of an “independent political ethic” that would serve as the common
denominator for all citizenry, independent of religion. Grotius states, “even if God didn’t exist,
these norms would be binding on us.” The problem with this model is that the form of
republicanism that it espouses was borne out of a distinctly Christian-influenced Westphalian
order. In fact, the religious toleration sought by the two treaties of the Peace of Westphalia was
limited to Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics. Moreover, the category of “religion” was
exclusively a Christian concept of religion that served, Richard King argues, as “the normative
paradigm for understanding what religion is.” Indeed, the idea of “religion as a transhistorical
phenomenon separate from ‘politics’ is a creation of Western modernity.” Moreover, laicism, is
not as it claims, non-metaphysical or nontheological. In defining what God is, and is not, what
religion is, and what religion is not, it is engaged in a theological, as well as political move. It
demarcates the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. This is par excellence, a
metaphysical decision.
Judeo-Christian secularism, on the other hand, is more explicitly Christian in its origins. It does
not seek to remove religion from the public space but connects Western secularism to a Judeo-
Christian legacy, a distinctly Western cultural value. For example, the leading utilitarian, John
Stuart Mills whom, “it is therefore Jewish and Christian culture above all that a territorial people
acquires the civilizational conditions of possibility for representative government” (41). Like
laicism, it was borne out of historical processes, the core of which was the Reformation. The
reformation led to the creation of two spheres: the city of god, which was the spiritual realm, and
the city of man, that was, the secular realm. Samuel Huntington, the ideologue who argued that
there is, inevitably, a “clash of civilizations” also argued that Catholicism and Protestantism
(because of the reformation) were the two most important characteristics of Western civilization
because they inaugurated a separation between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar. This, he
argues, allowed the West to lead the world toward modernization. The result, Keane argues, is:
“The principle of secularism, which “represents a realization
of crucial motifs of Christianity itself” (Bonhoffer), is
arguably founded upon a sublimated version of the Christian
belief that Christianity is “the religion of religions”
(Schleiermacher), and that Christianity is entitled to decide
for non-Christian others what they can think or say— or even
whether they are capable of thinking and saying anything at
all.”34

Thus, we find that secularism is exclusionary, not only in that it relegates religion to the private
sphere but that it privileges one kind of religion over another. In other words, it makes two
contradictory claims: (1) all religions ought to be secularized and (2) only Christianity provides
the theological grounds for secularization. That is why Bernard Lewis, for example, stated that
Muslims had caught a “Christian disease” that in turn required a “Christian remedy.”35 As we will
34
Quoted in Ibid., 43
35
Quoted in Ibid., 44

24
see later on, these two models of secularism also reject any form of secularity that does not conform
to its own precepts, this will be explored when we examine the relationship between Europe, the
United States, and the question of whether or not Turkey could join the European Union.

25
 Earlier, we argued that secularism was not discovered by reason, nor are the “sacred” and
the “secular” two pre-given categories. I argued that while they are assumed by the secular state,
the secular state must paradoxically continually construct them and redefine their boundaries. In
other words, the process of creating the “secular” is a historical process. In this module, I want to
examine one of those historical processes in application: a negative representation of Islam as the
non-secular other. This is a critical point that was missed by Charles Taylor.
First, it is important to understand that national identity is not a given self-enclosed identity.
National identity is not only determined by the “we” but by the “not-we” – it is always constituted
by the exclusionary discourse and identification of what the nation is not. Earlier, we saw that it
was the modern nation-state that arbitrarily creates the categories of the “sacred” and the “secular”
– but another function of the nation-state is to create subjectivities and representations that
constitute a national identity. This includes Euro-American national identities. Secularism was
bound by the formation of these identities. European identity was formed through a sharp
distinction between the civilized European man and the barbaric uncivilized Other, there was the
West, and there was the Rest.
Let us look at just one stark and clear example. In 1814, the Maryland Lawyer Francis Scott Key
wrote the words for the American national anthem following the war against Tripoli in the very
early years of postrevolutionary America. One of the lines read “And stain’d the blue waters with
infidel blood” – referring to Muslim blood. This is far before the events of 9/11 or the rise of so-
called “Islamic terrorism.” Early into the formation of Euro-American identity, and secularism,
Muslims were represented as obstacles to rationalization and democracy. Zachary Lockman states,
“it was in part of differentiation themselves from Islam . . . that European Christians, and later
their nominally secular descendants, defined their own identity.”36 In the eyes of Judeo-Christian
secularists, Islam threatened the very fabric of Western civilization and had to be “civilized” to
conform to the precepts of secularism and republicanism, the use of “soft power.”
In France, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was motivated by and consolidated the idea of “Oriental
Despotism” which portrayed Muslims as anti-modern and in need of civilization. This idea of
“Oriental Despotism” can be found in the works of Montesquieu (in The Spirit of the Laws and
Persian Letters), Max Weber, John Stuart Mills, and James Will, among others. Jules Ferry, the
major of Parris in 1870-71 and the Prime Minister in 1880-81, for example, declared that it was
the duty of republican France to civilize all barbarous nations, it was the destiny of France as a
secular beacon of enlightenment.
The use of US soft power did not begin after WW2, as is commonly assumed, nor was the
relationship between the US and Islam a post-9/11 phenomenon. Samir Khalaf explains that it
began as early as the Protestant missionaries’ missions to the Middle East in the early 19th century.
These included figures like Plink Fisk, Jonas King, and Levi Parsons, with Parsons describing
Islam as “this great empire of sin.” U.S. foreign policy, especially between 1820-1920 was
constituted in large part by the reports of these missionaries. Figures like Montesquieu played a
pivotal role in defining what exactly constituted American secular identity. He, “helped to form
early American views of Islamic government . . . as the oppositional model of the excesses to be
avoided in the new American system.” That is to say, in its very formative years, the idea of a
36
Ibid., 50

26
secular American republic was constituted by an image of what it is not, and what it ought to be
opposed to, the oriental and despotic Muslim other. Now, we will turn to the application of these
secular representations in relation to Euro-American attitudes and behaviors towards Turkey and
so-called “Political Islam”
[4] Elizabeth Shakman Hurd on Turkey and the European Union
The common assumption is that the hesitancy of the European Union to admit Turkey is a
preservation of Europe’s Christian past. However, the reality is that both secularists and Christian
exclusivist both opposite Turkey’s inclusion into the European Union. I will demonstrate in this
module that not only is the secular state exclusivist in relation to what religion is allowed to express
itself in the public space but moreover that the secular state excludes even other forms of
secularism that do not conform to the Judeo-Christian and Laicism model of secularism. The
inclusion of a secular Turkish state creates anxieties within Europe, because it stirs up a latent
debate about the place of religion, or what kind of religion, and its relationship to the public space.
The fundamental problem for the European Union, is not that Turkey is not secular but that, in the
recent years, it has moved away from Kemalist approach which is, par excellence, an expression
of the Laicism. In 2002, the former French president warned that Turkey was not a “European
country” and that admitting Turkey would amount to the “end of Europe.” The former West
German chancellor, warned that Turkey was an “unsuitable civilization” and as such would
threaten the very identity structure of European civilization if admitted into the European Union.
This comes as no surprise, for as we saw earlier, Euro-American secularism was constructed in
opposition to an image of Islam as an anti-modern and non-secular tyranny that threatened Europe
and America. The problem is not whether or not Turkey is secular, the problem is that it does not
conform to the type of secularism that was borne out of Christian, and thus Euro-American,
civilization. Oliver Roy observes:
“Turkey will be rejected from the European Union not
because the Turkish state fails to satisfy the EU’s demands
to democratize, which would be a good reason, but because
Turkish society is not [European], meaning that it does not
share the fund of Christianity that serves as the foundation
of laicism itself.”37
The question is not about human rights, but fundamentally about identity. Earlier, we saw how the
ECHR supported the ban on the Welfare Party on the grounds that it threatened the “democratic
society” of Turkey, in its shift away from the rigid form of secularism enacted by Kemalism. In
2004, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed that Article 9 of the European
Convent on Human Rights had not been violated when Turkish officials did not allow Leyla Sahin
to wear her hijab during her studies at the University of Istanbul. To reiterate, this goes back to
two points that we made earlier. The first is that the boundaries of the “secular” and the “sacred”
are arbitrarily defined and re-created in the image of the secular and modern nation-state. The
second, is that secularism, as a Euro-American phenomenon was constructed in opposition to an
image of Islam as the barbaric other, which threatens Euro-American identity and its commitments
to its own forms of secularism.

37
Quoted in Ibid., 91

27
To illustrate the ways in which secularism is essentially an exclusionary form of political authority,
we can turn towards Kemalism. Kemalism was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, one
year later, he abolished the Caliphate, replacing it with a Turkish republic that was modeled on the
French model of laicism. In 1926, he enacted the Turkish Civil Code which gave the Turkish state
the authority to regulate religious institutions and practices. These new “reforms” included:
• The banning of Sufi tarikats.
• Moving the capital from Istanbul to Ankara, to distance Turkey from its Ottoman past.
• Changing the g Islamic calendar into a Gregorian calendar.
• Purging the Turkish language of all Arabic roots.
• Discouraging women from wearing traditional Islamic clothing
The Turkish state actively suppressed any sort of political party of movement that sought a more
accommodationist approach to the negotiation of Islam and politics. This included the suppression
of the National Order Party (NOP), the National Salvation Party (NSP), the Welfare Party led by
Erbakan. In 1997, the National Security Council forced Erbakan to accept eighteen policy
recommendations that reaffirmed the secular nation of the state. That, however, was not enough.
In 1998, the Turkish Constitutional Court banned the Welfare Party and tried Erbakan for sedition.
The European Convention on Human Rights ruled that the banning of the Welfare Party did not
violate human rights because the Welfare party stood as a so-called “threat” to the democratic
society of Turkey, in other words, it was not sufficiently secular. The Turkish Constitutional
Courts’ reasoning was that laicism is not only a separation between religion and politics but also
a necessary division between religion and society. The RP was eventually succeeded by the Virtue
Party, which in turn was banned in 2001 for being a “center of antisecular activities” – that is
despite the fact that the Virtue Party had distanced itself from the Welfare Party.
Module Four: Secularism and the Creation of the “Moderate Muslim”

Thus far, we can now argue that secularism is not neutral. The demarcation of what is
political versus what is religious is in and of itself a political and theological decision. The state is
a theologian. Therefore, when we find states like the French republic banning the hijab, we are not
witnessing an aberration or anomaly of secularism. To think so would be to concede to the secular
definition of secularism: the neutrality of the secular state. In reality, the banning of the hijab is in
and of itself an expression of secularism, its logic and its application. I want to now turn to a point
we made earlier, namely, that secularism seeks to re-create man in its own image, to produce a
certain type of religious subjectivity and indorse a certain kind of religion in the public space – this
“totalizing project” as Saba Mahmood put it, seeks to reform religion to render it compliant with
secular political rule. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States State Department
effort to “transform Islam from within.”
Let us look at one example: the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by the U.S.
Congress. The IRFA grants the U.S. government the power to regulate religious life, not only
domestically, but on a global space. Another example if the Muslim World Outreach project
inaugurated by the White House National Security Council (NSC) the goal of which, quite
explicitly, was “transforming Islam from within” or what David Kaplan called in a title to an article

28
published in the U.S. News and World Report, “Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front
in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions … to Change the Very Face of Islam.”
For example, one of these programs, in conjunction with the Pakistan Ministry of Education, the
USAID (United States Agency for International Development) sought to establish new and
moderate madrasas in Pakistan, in an effort to combat the “fundamentalist” madrasas. The United
States also established and funded a radio station, Radio Sawa and a television station, Al-Hurra –
both of which promoted a more liberal Islam. There has been a proliferation of international and
multilateral initiatives led by the United States including the Global Counterterrorism Forum and
the Hedayah Center in Abu Dhabi established in 2011. An example of such initiatives is the annual
state-sponsored conference by the UAE called the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim
Societies. This forum was established in 2014 to counter the impact of the Arab Revolutions.
President Obama had praised this forum and Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah for leading the charge
against extremism.
In 2015, the bipartisan Countering Violent Extremism act (CVE) led to the establishment of the
CVE office at the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State’s Bureau of
Counterterrorism was renamed the Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent
Extremism. Contrary to official claims that these policies target groups or organizations with
violent intentions, they target all Muslims, regardless of any affiliation. Spearheading these
measures, the FBI produced a model for confronting what they ambiguously dubbed “jihadist”
ideology. Between 2012 and 2015 alone, the FBI and local law enforcement convened more than
2,500 engagement events that aimed to “foster trust, improve awareness, and educate communities
about violent risk factors in order to stop radicalization to violence before it starts.”
The United States State Department, has sought to develop relationships with what it deems to be
“Moderate Muslims.” The “moderate Muslim” is not defined in relation to his or her attitude to
U.S. foreign policy but rather their position on scriptural hermeneutics. It is those moderates who
want to reshape Islam as the Protestant Reformation reshaped Christianity. The National Security
Division of the Rand Corporation released a report entitled Civil Democratic Islam: Partners,
Resources, and Strategies. This report was published during the same year that the Muslim World
Outreach program was launched. The report essentially argued that what it dubbed to be
“traditionalist” posed a more long-term threat to so-called “fundamentalist” and “militants.” The
report states that the goal of these traditionalist was to “preserve orthodox norms and values and
conservative behaviors” and that these traditionalists held the Qur’an to be the literal word of God.
The report states, “Modern democracy rests on the values of the Enlightenment: traditionalism
opposes these values. . . . Traditionalism is antithetical to the basic requirements of a modern
democratic mind-set: critical thinking, creative problem solving, individual liberty, secularism.”
38
The only want to overcome traditionalism, the report states, is to historicize the Qur’an, “The
Old Testament is not different from the Quran in endorsing conduct and containing a number of
rules and values that are literally unthinkable . . . in today’s society. This does not pose a problem
because few people would today insist that we should all be living in the exact literal manner of
the Biblical patriarchs. Instead, we allow our vision of Judaism’s and Christianity’s true message
to dominate over the literal text, which we regard as history and legend.”39

38
Quoted in Quoted in Saba Mahmood, Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire (2006), 334
39
Quoted in Ibid., 336

29
This secularization extended to the field of economy and human rights. Massad explains “The
commitment to neoliberalism is not only linked to women’s emancipation but to the alleged
inclusion of Arabs and Muslims in the global market.”40 Massad also notes that in 2005, Queen
Rania, in Jordan, launched a campaign called “Culture of Hope: which led to the dismantlement
of Jordan’s welfare stated and the introduction of mass privatization. In Lebanon, the neoliberal
Rafic Hariri launched the “I love life” campaign, inaugurating a process of mass privatization in
Lebanon. In Egypt, an internationally sponsored conference launched a Pan-Arab “culture of
optimism” campaign. Mayssoun Sukarieh explains, “These campaigns became “the most visible
manifestations of a broader set of reform that have been launched throughout the Arab world since
9/11”41 This reformation process, extended heavily to the so-called emancipation of woman. The
liberal rights of woman become a trojan horse wherein liberal values are hidden behind the idea of
“rights.” In the the Arab Human Development Report, the writers call upon Muslim women to
engage in more “enlightened” Qur’anic hermeneutics and the reformation of Islam in line with
liberal value. and a new approach to Qur’anic hermeneutics. The report calls for a “Societal
Reform of the Rise of Women: which must “modernize religious interpretation and jurisprudence
through the widespread adoption of the enlightened reading of ijtihad. It is no surprise that one of
the reports authors, Rima Khalaf, a neoliberal economist, served as the pro-privatization minister
and deputy minister in Jordan.

40
Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism (2015), 167
41
Quoted in Ibid., 167

30
Module Five: Secularism and Neutrality

Is Secularization Inevitable?
The most common argument for the neutrality of secularism is in the idea of secularization
which holds that the triumph of secularism is a natural and inevitable process wherein reason
breaks through the shackles of religion and superstition and arrives at reason personified through
secularism. The argument, simply put, is that secularism is natural. Secularization meant more than
a separation of church and state, it was the separation of religion from consciousness and the
totality of cultural life. Secularization theory emerged out of the skeptical Enlightenment which
perceived religion to be a sort of evil. In other words, secularization was not merely descriptive
but also seen as a good thing, it was as ideological as it was scientific. For example, we have
figures like Diderot who rejoiced at the thought of “strangling the last priest with the guts of the
last king.” This is also evident in the works of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. For Durkheim,
religion was a social glue of sorts, that personifies its shared values through a “god” and that such
a god was an illusion. The theory became prominent in the 1960’s in sociology. I will not dwell
much on this theory as it is no longer acceptable in Western academia itself.
It is sufficient to point out that, today, the secularization thesis is dead as it does not conform to
empirical evidence. Peter Berger, one of the most prominent advocates of the secularization
theory, now believes that the secularization theory is quite simply false. Jose Casanova, writes
that religion has become de-privatized, as early as the 1970’s when American’s in both the domains
of entertainment and politics spoke of being “born again” – including President Jimmy Carter.
Casanova points to four other developments in the 1970’s to the 1980’s that also render the
secularization thesis false: (1) the Iranian revolution, (2) the emergence of the Catholic Solidarity
Union against the Soviet Union in Poland (3) the reemergence of Protestant fundamentalist in the
United States and (4) the rebirth of Catholicism in Latin America.
Now, if we explore the origins of secularism in the modern world, we find that it was not the
product of a natural evolution but through human efforts. Hunter Baker gives us some clear
examples.
“In 1905, Henry Smith Pritchett administered a Carnegie
grant of ten million dollars for professor’s pensions. Pritchett
was himself a secularizer with a personal “faith in science.”
Pritchett refused to include schools with religious ties in the
program. Within the first four years of the new Carnegie
fund plan’s existence, twenty colleges ended their
relationship with sponsoring religious denominations. 42
Secularization as Conversion
I want to now explore, in more particular terms, what secularization really means. We
have already explained that secularism amounts to a transformation of the religious and the
secular through a theological determination of what counts as religion, and what counts as
secular, or political. In other words, the categories of the religious and the secular are constantly

42
Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism (2009), 124-125

31
being transformed. Matthew Scherer, an Assistant Professor at George Mason University,
explains:
“The points at which secularism mediates the relation
between religion and other spheres of social life are myriad:
Secularism shapes the development of law by determining
which authorities will decide which questions in accordance
with which canons of reason based on the interpretation of
which texts (disputes are particularly acute, for example, in
the case of laws regulating marriage in places such as Israel
and Egypt but also in the United States). Secularism shapes
education by determining which institutions will receive
state funding, and which texts and traditions will be taught,
by whom and in which manner. Secularism shapes social
policy by determining what will count as legitimate factors
in decision making, and which areas of society will be open
for or closed to intervention. Secularism shapes religion
itself by determining which of its practices and claims will
be entitled to public respect and protection, which of its
denominations will be recognized as legitimate and
permissible, and which of its functions will be assimilated
within the larger apparatus of governance.”43
I want to now focus on secularization in relation to the individual and community. The relationship
between secularization and the individual is best encapsulated in the term; conversion. Conversion
marks both a break between the present and the past, as well as being a ”process that unfolds
slowly through continuous amendments of habits, dispositions, and communal attachments. This
conversion, according to Scherer, has three primary dimensions: a significant self-transformation
(or transformation of the self); a resituation of the individual in relation to a community or a
community in relation to a larger tradition or collective; and the production of a new self-narrative,
which articulates and consolidates the experience by retrospectively marking a moment of
discontinuity, change, or rebirth in the convert’s life course. In other words, we have a conversion
of the individual, the community, the relationship between the individual and community, and a
new narrative, or story, that binds the individual and the community together.
Secularization Versus Secularism
Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas explains that the term secular, comes from the Latin term
saeculum which means both time, and locate. It refers to the ‘now’ – and in terms of location, it
refers to this world, the worldly. It is concerned, and this is important, exclusively with the events
of this world Secularization, is a historical process in an ever-changing world. Harvey Cox writes,
“It is the loosing of the world from religious and quasi-
religious understandings of itself, the dispelling of all closed
worldview, the breaking of all supernature myths and sacred
symbols, the ‘defatalization of history,’ the discovery by
man that he has been left with the world on his hands, that
43
Matthew Scherer, Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion (2013), 10

32
 he can no longer blame fortune or the furies for what he does
with it …[it is] man turning his attention away from the
worlds beyond and toward this world and this time”44
It involves three processes, a critical one of which is the deconsecration of values, which means
that all values are rendered transient and relative as cultural creations. The problem, is that
secularism is, as we have noted, an ideology. It espouses its own values as being immutable and
representing the natural order of things. In this sense, there is a tension between secularization and
secularism. . It is more than just a process of separating church a state, it is a condition of the world.
The idea of the secular is created, as a metaphysical and epistemological concept, that signifies
what is Real, and what is unreal. Thus, both secularization and secularism are not non-metaphysical
ideas but are committed to their own metaphysical assumptions about man, the world, God, and
history.
Is Secularism Neutral?
In this section I want to draw n the works of Hunter Baker and Stanly Fish to argue that secularism
is not neutral, nor is it a successful strategy for pluralism. The problem is that the question of
secularism versus religion, in the public space, is prefigured and represented as a contestation
between reason and superstition, between tolerance and intolerance. The reality is far from that.
Hunter Baker puts it aptly:
“Instead of freeing up the public space for common access
by all and ensuring public debate and deliberation as
productive as possible, secularism emerges as a power
player that “arrogates itself the right to define the role of
religion in politics” and thus “shuts down important debates
about the moral bases for public order.” . . . “Rather than
acknowledging the “contingency of its own assumptions” –
its non-neutrality, its being an ideology – secularism simply
assumes it is the default position of rational persons of
goodwill, utterly failing to recognize that t does not stand
outside the interaction of religion and politics. Indeed,
secularism proposes to eliminate the problem of “theological
politics” when it actually occupies a position on that very
spectrum.”45
Thus, in our postmodern age, and if we are to secularize secularism, we find that secularism is just
one of many orthodoxies vying for power in the so-called public space, which as we have noted,
is never neutral and open as it is purported to be. If secularism is to thrive, as Peter Berger, once a
major proponent of secularism explains, it must create its own plausibility structures in the same
way that religions do. Stanly Fish makes a similar argument. He argues that there can be no
neutrality because the there is no neutral principle of unimpeachable authority. In other words, the
idea of a neutral and common reason, or a neutral arbiter, quite simply, do not exist. To
demonstrate his argument, as Baker writes, Stanly Fish draws on John Locke who states,

44
Quoted in Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (1993), 17
45
Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism (2009), 106

33
 “I esteem it above all this necessary to distinguish exactly
the business of civil government from that of religion and to
settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.
If this is not done, there can be no end put to the
controversies that will be always arising.46
How do we define tolerance? Fish argues that it is always arbitrary because someone has to draw
the lines. Thus, the act of institutional tolerance is always, already an act of exclusion. This
“exclusionary gesture” is concealed “so that it appears not to have been performed by anyone” and
seems to follow “from the nature of things.” Fish further states that the doctrine of toleration, “is
always a question of who is tolerating whom, for it is from the perspective of the tolerator that the
limits of toleration will be set.”47 Thus, Baker notes, “Bracketing off religion does not solve the
problem of toleration. It just disadvantages one set of orthodoxies from interacting with the many
secular orthodoxies roaming free in liberal society.”
Now, how does Locke justify his argument for the principle of neutrality and tolerance? He states
that there is an inevitable disagreement between the religious sects, and churches, in regard to
issues pertaining to the public. There is no capacity for agreement. This, however, is problematic
because – as Fish demonstrates – in framing the problem in that way,
“The strategy of finding common ground assumes a capacity
that has already been denied by the framing of the problem.
Indeed, if that capacity (to identify uncontroversial what is
and is not essential) were available to our or me or to anyone,
that would be no problem and the lawful configurations of
the state would arrange themselves.” In other words, if
public norms, based on reason truly did exist then
“tolerance’s limits would be self-establishing, and no
coercion would be required since everyone would readily
agree to what they already agreement about.”48
What Fish is saying, is that there is no common ground, no neutral reasons through which we can
adjudicate matters of public concern because secularism, in claiming that religions create disputes,
has already denied the capacity for neutral reasoning in the very way that it frames the problem of
reason. Let us look at one example of a public value, fairness, and so-called neutral public reason.
How do we even define fairness. Fish gives the following example. For Person A, fairness might
be the distribution of goods and privileges equally, irrespective of the accomplishments of those
who receive them. While Person B holds that it is only fair to reward each according to their efforts.
The first approach is egalitarian, the second is meritocratic. Now, we cannot resolve this dispute
simply be the invocation of fairness because, “what dives us are our differing views of what
fairness really is.” This example can apply to other values such as quality, justice, autonomy, and
so forth. Even if one were to make the argument, that we can appeal to a constitution or body of
common law, is problematic because as a document, any constitution of body of law must be
interpreted according to a partisan agenda. This is evident in the recent debates in the U.S. Supreme

46
Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism (2009), 109
47
Quoted in Ibid., 110
48
Quoted in Ibid., 109-110

34
Court about matters such as abortion, or as we saw with the French State, about the issue of hijab
in relation to how secular values are to be interpreted.
John Rawls, is another liberal proponent of secularism. His argument is more nuanced. He argues
that political liberalism is a way of life that emerges from the wars of religion. It is not
metaphysical. He states that there exists such a thing as “overlapping consensus” wherein we put
away of “comprehensive doctrines” (such as religion or any set of metaphysical assumptions) and
agree to a set of political values. The problem, as we have already noted, is that secularism is in
and of itself determined by a set of metaphysical assumptions. Let us put that issue aside for now.
He argues that all “comprehensive doctrines” ought to be privatized and that people are “to conduct
their public political discussions of constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice with the
fragment of what each sincerely regards as a reasonable political concept of justice.” These
conceptions of justice are “political values that others, as free and equal, also might reasonably be
expected to endorse. There are two major problems with this argument. First, who determines what
constitutes public reason? As Fish has already noted, there is no neutral conception as to what
constitutes justice. Second, on what grounds is one expected to privatize my religion, or
metaphysics, only because Rawls labels it as a “comprehensive doctrine.” Rawls assumes that the
problem of reason in the public square is uniquely a “religious” problem. In a Muslim or Christian
state, religion would arbitrarily imposed its values on its citizenry. Religion, the claim contends,
is that religion is uniquely harmful. The problem with this is that secularism, as we noted, relies
on coercion itself, through law. Baker explains,
“The essence of the problem is that law involves coercion
and being coerced is unpleasant and possibly even tortuous.
Whether that coercion is religious, philosophical, or even
based on a radically different reading of the available facts,
the harm is the harm is the harm. Secularism and secular
rationales do not solve the problem. Coercion is the
problem.”49
Nowhere is this more evident then in the French and Turkish examples we cited earlier. What
constitutes a greater harm, the forced removal of the veil, or having to attend a voluntary prayer in
a public school? Or, is it more harmful to subjugate children to transgender agendas, or to include
“one nation under God” in the American public allegiance?
Earlier, we examined how secularism, according to substantive and functionalist approaches, are
religious in nature. Why aren’t they labelled as comprehensive doctrines? Moreover, what if I
could establish rational proofs for my comprehensive doctrines that would also appeal to those
free and equal citizens? Let us return to the essential problem: the idea of public reason, in relation
to justice, is indeterminate. For example, Rawls argues for abortion through the following
argument:
“Now, I believe any reasonable balance of these three values
(respect for human life, reproduction of political society and
women’s equality) will give a woman a duly qualified right
to decide whether or not to end her pregnancy during the first
trimester. The reason for this is that at this early stage of
49
Ibid., 132

35
 pregnancy the political value of equality is overriding, and
this right is required to give it substance and force.”50
Now, consider this argument put forth by Paul Camps: “The reason why abortion must be
prohibited is that at very state of the pregnancy the political value of the due respect for
human life is overriding, and this prohibition is required to give that value substance and
force.” Both of these arguments draw on reasons, but which of the two would constitute
“public reason.” This brings us back to the point: public reason and justice and
indeterminate.
To summarize, the indeterminacy of reason and justice have allowed Stanly Fish to go as
far as to say that liberalism does not exist. Fish states that liberalism has faith – this is the
key word – in “reason that operates independently of any particular worldview.” It allows
religion into the public space insofar as that religion conforms to the “primacy of reason.”
It relies on a hierarchy between reason and belief. However, liberalism’s idea of a neutral
public reason is in and of itself a belief for there is no such neutral public reasons. In the
absence of a public reason, liberalism loses its integrity and becomes one of many
ideologies. Liberalism is a belief. Fish asks, where do reasons come from?
“The liberal answer must be that reasons come from
nowhere, that they reflect the structure of the universe or at
least of the human brain; but in fact reasons always come
from somewhere, and they somewhere they come from is
precisely the realm to which they are (rhetorically) opposed,
the realm of particular (angled, partisan, biased) assumptions
and agendas.”51
The most decisive critique of liberalism’s claim to neutrality comes from Alasdair MacIntyre in
his seminal work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality. He argues that there are no self-evident facts
or political neutrality. Political claims are grounded in a tradition, and liberalism is merely one of
those traditions. Alasdair MacIntyre summarizes this nicely: “there are, so it will turn out,
rationalities rather than rationality, just as it will also turn out that there are justices rather than
justice.” Rationality, according to MacIntyre, is “inseparable from the intellectual and social
tradition in which it is embodied.”52 In other words, reasoning is not universal but particular, that
is, in relation to some sort of standard and tradition. But as we will see, not only is liberalism one
of many competing traditions, its conception of justice is highly problematic and impoverished
tradition. In the absence of some sort of standard, members of a community are left without an
overall shared standard as to what constitutes the ‘good.’ What is needed is a communal, shared
conception of the good, possible only through community – which liberalism negates- wherein
members find a shared standard through which they can rank the diverse range of goods in a society
through communal deliberation, but just as importantly, through an overarching and shared
conception of the communal good. In the absence of such a consensus as to what constitutes the
communal good, different practices are rendered incommensurable. For MacIntyre, communal

50
Ibid., 116-117
51
Ibid., 117
52
Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (1988), 8

36
deliberation is “characterized with reference to the hierarchy of goods which provide the ends of
human action” – that is – towards human flourishing.
There are two types of goods, and accordingly, two types of justice. The first and are external
goods such as money, prestige, and so forth. In this type of good, justice has no real content. It is
left to the elite, it is left to bureaucratic expertise. In this sense, cooperation is necessary onto the
extent in which individuals can obtain individual, internal goods. This form of rationality holds
that the objective of cooperation and human activity at large is preference satisfaction, individuals
are left in a relationship of bargaining. “The overriding good of liberalism is no more and no less
than the continued sustenance of the liberal society and political order.”53 The second type of good,
relates to external goods such as virtue. These types of goods are grounded in a political consensus
and an ordering of goods according to the common good and a shared notion of the good life. It
holds that human activity and communal deliberation is teleological – directed towards an ends
beyond individual goods – and defines politics as a communal effort to realize flourishing through
a notion of a communal good. In what sense if liberalism an impoverished tradition? In After
Virtue, MacIntyre defines liberalism as follows:
“On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral
as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact
what liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order
that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the
types of communal relationship required for the best kind
of human life.”54
The individual is reduced to an atomic entity, ontologically distinct from the community and is
complete autonomous in his or her moral agency, that is, divorced from the communal good. The
liberal commitment to individual autonomy means that no political body can guide individuals
towards some sort of communal good, beyond individual interests. The reality, however, is that
individuals, rather than being moral and autonomous agents, are left to a liberal political apparatus
that is grounded in “effectiveness” and “bureaucratic expertise through which political rhetoric
manipulates citizens. “the whole concept of effectiveness is… inseparable from… the
manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behavior.” Through liberalism, the
market exploits individual’s infantile desires and creates new dictators: the individual and the
market. It is not freedom, in the substantive sense, but a subordination to the market and our
infantile desires. To reiterate, not only is liberalism not neutral and is one of many tradition, it is
an impoverished tradition.

53
Ibid., 345
54
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981), XV

37
Module Six: Secularism and Liberalism

Now, we have demonstrated that secularism and liberalism are not neutral but rather one
of many competing ideologies, or even religions, in the so-called public square. However, one
could argue that yes, liberalism is not neutral and yes it is one of many competing ideologies but
it is the best of those competing ideologies. In this section, we will examine this case by looking
at the ways in which liberalism has utterly failed. The problem with liberalism is that it has failed
precisely because it has succeeded. The contradictions within liberalism have become manifest
because liberalism has met its intended aims. Thus, the solution to failed liberalism is not more
liberalism but moving beyond liberalism.
Liberalism is a political project, with its own metaphysics, that seeks to re-create all aspects of life
in its own image. It acts as an ideology but conceals its ideological nature through claims to
neutrality and representing the “natural order of things.” Patrick Deneen explains that an ideology
fails for two reasons. First, when it does not conform to human nature, that is, it holds beliefs that
are false. Second, those falsehoods become evident in the gap that grows between what an ideology
claims and its lived experience among human beings. In both instances, contradictions come to the
surface. It is, thus, no wonder, that an increasing majority – 70 percent- of Americans, for example,
are dissatisfied with their government and believe that their country is moving in the wrong
direction.
“What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into
creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our “consent.” This transformation did
not happen naturally, Deneen notes, but required, “the massive apparatus of the modern state,
economy, education system, and science and technology.” The result of this transformation is a
depersonalized and abstract self that is created through two entities: the state and the market.
“Having successfully disembedded us from our relationships
that once made claims upon us but also informed our
conception of selfhood, our sense of ourselves as citizens
sharing a common fate and as economic actors sharing a
common world, liberalism has left the individual exposed to
the tools of liberation – leaving us in a weakened state in
which the domains of life that were supposed to liberate us
are completely beyond our control or governance.”55
The emergence of liberalism coalesced around three revolutions. The first was the so-called
emancipation of man from established authority. The second is the emancipation of the individual
from arbitrary culture. Third, the expansion of power and dominion over nature through scientific
discovery and economic prosperity. Liberalism is governed by two fundamental assumptions about
man. First, individualism. Second, the separation of the individual from nature – both of which
gave birth to a radically new understanding of liberty. This is not so much a description of of man
as it is a normative project on its own. In other words, liberalism is not describing what man is but
what man ought-to be. That is to say, the individual ought to be autonomous and ought to be self-
interested. The idea of liberty, it should be emphasized, is not exclusive to liberalism. Aristotle,

55
Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2019), 17-18

38
held that man was part of a comprehensive natural order and that man had a telos, and ends, given
by nature. MacIntyre writes, “to be the kind of rational agent envisioned by [Aristotelians] is to
live under certain constraints, that it involves a disciplining of one’s desires and one’s will.” This
sort of cultivation, is radically different than that of liberalism, What they make possible is
participation in those social relationships through which she has learned how to transform her
dispositions, to improve her capacity for practical judgement, and to pursue common goods” rather
than individual, self-interested goods.
“Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the
learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish
pursuit of desires” . . . “A central preoccupation of such
societies becomes the comprehensive formation and
education of individuals and citizens in the art and virtue of
self-rule.” 56
Liberalism replaced this ideal, being part and in harmony with nature, with the idea of mastery
over nature and the idea that we ought-to cultivate virtue and discipline our desires with the idea
of an autonomous and self-interested rationality. In contrast to this conception of the rational a free
agent, the first assumption holds that in making decisions, be it about institutions or public norms,
the individual ought-to take into account their self-interest, independently of the communal good,
or even God. The second assumptions breaks away with premodern thought. The separation of
man from nature even extended to the idea of human nature. Early-modern liberal thinkers held
that human nature was unchangeable in the sense that human beings are self-interested creatures.
Later thinkers argued that there was not fixed human nature. For example, “transhumanist” reject
the idea that human nature is fixed and argue instead that it is fluid, and susceptible to change.
Moreover, it replaced the idea of a fixed human nature with the idea of human “plasticity.” The
first camp is widely known as conservatism. The second camp represents the more progressive
trend within liberalism. Both, however, and two-sides of the same coin, both are liberal.
Liberalism, paradoxically, replaces the authority of culture, tradition, and religion with the
authority of the state and its massive apparatuses. “The loosening of social bonds, in nearly every
aspect of life – familial, neighborly, communal, religious and even national – reflects the
advancing logic of liberalism and is the source of its deepest instability.” The ancient idea of virtue
is replaced with self-interest and the individual once embedded within a community is now
polarized, driven by private and material concerns, and in the absence of culture as a norm,
liberalism relies on expanded surveillance, police force, and legal redress. “Ironically, the more
completely the sphere of autonomy is secured, the more comprehensive the state must become”57
. . . “At the same time, as the authority of social norms dissipates, they are increasingly felt to be
residual, arbitrary, and oppressive, motivating calls for the state to actively work towards their
eradication.”58
The dissolution of boundaries extends to nature. This is evident in the sexual revolution, the
elimination of sexual difference through “increasingly aggressive efforts to secular state-funded
birth control, abortion, and artificial forms of fertilization.” It is ironic, as Deneen points out, that

56
Ibid., 37
57
Ibid., 37
58
Ibid., 38

39
those most committed to preserving the environment and nature are also the most fervent advocates
of eliminating natural differences between men and women. The sought-out domination of nature
through technology and economic might have brought about unsustainable ecological disasters.
Moreover, “The global market displaces a variety of economic subcultures, enforcing a relentless
logic of impersonal transactions that have led to a crisis of capitalism and the specter of its own
unraveling.”
Module Seven: Inventing the Secular State

Thus far we can conclude that there can be no secularism without the nation-state, nor can
we conceive of secularization without the state. To understand the ways in which the modern state
operates, it is important to understand the theological origins of the God-like state. Carl Schmitt
explains that all modern concepts are secularized theological concepts, that is to say, covert
theological concepts that masquerade as secular. The idea of the nation-state compels us to image
the state as a unitary common space that promotes a common good. It is said to define identity and
belonging In what follows I want to demonstrate that the emergence of the modern state, that
secularism is dependent upon, is not an organic or natural, inevitable phenomenon but rather a
contingent and historical product. Moreover, the modern state does not promote the common good
nor does it stand above society.

The myth of the modern state presents itself as a different form of other political bodies, the polis
for Aristotle or the regimen principum for Aquinas. It also posits the idea that there is something
called “society” that is ontologically prior to the state and that the state emerges from that society.
I want to deconstruct both of those myths. The first point is this: the state is not natural but artificial.
Bruce Porters writes, “The state as we know it is a relatively new invention, originating in Europe
between 1450 and 1650.” It emerged in Europe in the late Renaissance and Reformation. The idea
that would give way to the modern state, was a new idea, a new invention: the concept of
sovereignty which held that the state can claim legitimate authority an supreme authority over a
geographical border.

Prior to this, there was no idea of an “abstract state”. The status referred to the ruler himself (status
regalis) or the current condition of the realm (status regni). It was only in the 16th century that the
idea of an abstract state existing independently of the ruler and ruled emerged. It was Machiavelli
who referred to the stato as both the prince’s power and an abstract apparatus standing above the
prince and the people. As of the mid-16th century, the idea of an abstract state . Moreover, prior
to the advent of the modern state, there was no idea of a single “society” – as Anthony Giddens
notes, “traditional systems are composed not of one society but of many societies; the modern
unitary society that originated in Europe is highly exceptional. This led to the idea of a “nation”
that is united by ethnicity, language, or history. Upon observation, it becomes apparent that these
were not natural bonds but were contingent and historical constructions of the state itself. “It is
only after the state and its claims to territorial sovereignty are established that nationalism arises
to unify culturally what had been gathered inside state borders.” The idea of a unitary nation is
relatively new, it appeared first in the 18th century and gained popularity in the 19th century.

As Charles Tilly points out, the modern state, or in particular the nation-state, did not emerge out
of the procurement of a common good. It emerged out of an elite’s ability to extract resources

40
from a local population. Tilly writes, “War made the state, and the state made war.” The state did
not offer protection against violence but constructed threats and in turn “charged its citizens for
reducing it” through the extraction of resources and demanding loyalty. Thomas Ertman state, “It
is now generally accepted that the territorial state triumphed over other possible political forms
(empire, city-state, lordship) because of the superior fighting ability which it derived from access
to both urban capital and coercive authority over peasant taxpayers and army recruits.”

Another critical point is that the state is not the product of society, but as Cavanaugh demonstrates,
it creates society. Prior to the advent of the modern state, Europe was characterized by premodern
and personal loyalties. The state constructed a unitary space, called society, that would become the
subject of the states legitimate authority and monopoly over violence within a geographical border.
Cavanaugh writes,

“To say that the state “creates society is not to deny that
families, builds, claims, and other social groups existed
before the state. Rather, the state “creates” society by
replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval
societates with one society, bound by borders and ruled by
one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that
trumps all other allegiances.”

This new idea of sovereignty found its expression in the works of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.
For Jean Bodin, sovereignty means that the sovereign is absolute alone, giving law but not being
subject to law. According to Bodin, the law of the sovereign, “although they be grounded on good
and lively reasons, depend nevertheless upon nothing but his mere and frank good will.”
Cavanaugh writes, “The unity of the republic depends on the absolute singularity of the sovereign
who creates a simple space through his power.” Thomas Hobbes, similarly derives the idea of
sovereignty from an absolute will, the will of the state. For Hobbes, the only way out of the
“perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” was for each
individual to “surrender his or her will to the sovereign who gathers up the many into one.”
Cavanaugh goes on to point out that “Despites Hobbes’s derivation of legitimacy from
representation, therefore, it is the state that first gathers people into society with one another.”
This inevitably included absorbing the state into that unitary space, and hence we have secularism.
John Locke also constructed such a unitary space through the idea of a common market, as a
common space through the fiction of a social contract. The necessity of a single and unitary space
called society was considered essential for John Locke, that is why the Native American’s had to
be excluded. Cavanaugh writes, “The untranslatability of American Indians into American law and
their consequent destruction is not simply the result of judicial malice but is inscribed in the very
nature of state sovereignty. Simple space cannot accommodate the tribal structure.”

Lastly, Cavanaugh explains that the state is not a limited part of society but it absorbs society into
itself. Prior to the emergence of the modern state, central authority was weak. Cavanaugh draws
on empirical evidence to suggest that “Rights, honors, immunities and responsibilities were
attached to communities” rather than abstract sovereign individuals who owed allegiance to an
abstract central authority called the state. The most significant law, he writes, “was not positive
law given by a legislator but the customs and rules that provided the inner order of associations”

41
that existed independently of the state. Robert Nisbet explains that, if we move beyond the
mythical idea of a pluralist society standing prior to the state, we find that the state appropriated
and absorbed those communities, “the rise of aggrandizement of the political States took place in
circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities.”

Now, before concluding, I want us to think of the implications that a unitary space called “society”
or the “nation” constructed by elites, has on the idea of pluralism. Cavanaugh sums this up by
stating:

“Where there is a unitary simple space, pluralism of ends

will always be a threat. To solve this threat, the demand will
always be to absorb the many into the one. In the absence of
shared ends, devotion to the state itself a the end in itself
becomes ever more urgent. The result is not true pluralism
but an ever-increasing directness of the relationship between
the individual and the stat as foundation of social
interaction.”

E. J. Hobsbawm writes, “Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.”
Cavanaugh explains this phenomenon, writing “Most scholars agree that nations are only possible
once states have been invented and nations, even seemingly “ancient” ones, are the product of the
last two centuries. Let us look, for example, at the use of language. In drawing on empirical
evidence, Cavanaugh explains that as of 1789, only 50 percent of the citizens of France spoke
French. In Italy, invented in 1860, only 2.5 percent of the population used Italian for everyday
purposes. As one Italian patriot put it, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” The
creation of the nation was made possible by 19th century elites in many ways, one of which was
the states increasingly control over education through which the myths of origin and history were
cultivated. The second critical factor was war: the creation of a common enemy. For example, we
find that nationalism took what Cavanaugh calls a “quantum leap” after the mobilization of society
for Word War I. The question I want you to think about is this: can we speak of plurality when the
borders of identity, the common good, and our origins are already defined by a national elite? To
what extent can we embrace pluralism when many societies are absorbed into a single unitary
society whose very subjectivity is defined by a sovereign state?

42
Module Eight: Secularism, Liberalism and the Islamic Critique (1)

Thus far, we have established the relationship between the sovereign state and secularism.
The state is sovereign, not only in its production of law but in its ability to create new subjectivities,
and in doing so, arbitrarily define what is political and what is “religious.” Moreover, that it can
intervene in re-shaping religion according to its own image. Now, we must turn to the question:
what is the origin of the sovereign state, or even the very idea of secular sovereignty? To do so,
we must turn to metaphysics. our critique is as follows: the idea of sovereignty, a purely secular
idea, was not discovered once religion was removed as an obstacle but rather, it was invented

Too often, however, we dismiss metaphysics as an academic discipline, a vapid branch of

philosophy best left to philosophers. On the contrary, metaphysics is the basic and fundamental
set of assumptions that lay beneath any political, economic, and social order. Metaphysics, as a set
of fundamental assumptions, has two roles. First, it tells us what is man (human nature) and what
is the nature of the state (and thus the political space). Second, it tells us what the state, and political
space, ought-to be. Carl Schmitt reminds us that, “The metaphysical image that a definite epoch
forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be
appropriate as a form of political organization.” In other words, our image of reality (i.e., our
metaphysics) defines our image of our political organizations. The secular state, despite
contestations to the contrary, is based on a series of fundamental and basic metaphysical
assumptions. The core narrative upheld by secular thinkers like Hans Blumenberg in Legitimacy
of the Modern Age, is that the metaphysics of modernity, and secularism essentially represent the
ability of the overcome transcendence through immanent human self-assertion. The reality is,
however, that secularism did not do away with transcendence.” In this section, we will argue that
modernity, and with it, secularity, reoccupied the sovereignty and transcendence of God with the
sovereignty and transcendence of the world.

At this point, it is necessary that we explore alternative concepts of the self, that is, what it means
to be human in relation to the political. Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman explains that the spirit (ruh) is
distinct from the self (the nafs). The ruh is that which can connect to the unseen world (al-alam al-
ghaybi) whereas the self is constituted by its disposition to attribute things to itself (e.g., power
and sovereignty – more will be said about this as we proceed). In short, man is characterized by a
dual-existence. He is made of clay and thus has a disposition to that which is lowly, or earthly, and
he is constituted by a ruh which has a disposition to what is sublime. The self is thus lodged
between these two modes of existence, in an ever-lasting conflict between the two. In particular,
the ruh is disposed to transcendence, by which we mean, not something that is exclusively external
to the self but inheres in man insofar as the ruh transcends the egotistical self. This is a critical
point. It means that man is not that being that can be reduced exclusively to a “religious” or
“political animal” – man is a vertical being (insan ‘amudi). He can exist in both the seen world
and the unseen world. This is encapsulated in the term fitra which refers to the primordial, original
state of man. Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman writes, “The spirit of the human being possesses a special
force (quwwa khassa), mostly resembling an archetypal memory, and existing prior to his in-this-
world memory.”59 Eric Voegelin writes, "By spirit we understand the openness of man to the divine

59
Quoted in Wael B. Hallaq, Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of
AbdurrahmanTaha (210), 209-210

43
ground of his existence: by estrangement from the spirit, the closure and the revolt against the
ground. Through spirit, man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine.”
The secular project of self-assertion was borne out of an ontological insecurity, an alienation of
man from God. This ontological insecurity emerged from several factors, a significant aspect of
which was the emergence of nominalism. The nominalist God was an alien God, unreachable
and whose will unfathomable. The idea was that a God so radically differentiated from an
alienated world that God was “pragmatically as good as dead.”60 As such, the modern project
is not natural nor is it the inevitable project of reason but a historical response to a sense of
alienation and ontological insecurity that beset the modern mind. In the face of this glaring
contingency and alienation, man was forced to construct a “counter-world” on two levels: first,
at the level of the material world now perceived as a space of pure power, and second, at the
level of the political world now perceived as a lawless state of nature. The sovereign state, as
its own counter-world, would emerge, via secularity, as the primary means for countering the
contingency and chaos of the state of nature. In its project of self-affirmation, however, secularity
as a project had to contend with the inevitable question of transcendence.
Does this mean that man completely does away with any notion of transcendence? No. It merely
deforms transcendence and misplaces it. The sovereign self, that attributes to itself absolute power
and autonomy. Hallaq writes, that the self: “Transfers the meaning of worship from the spiritual
world to her own mind of the self. . . . through this transfer she seeks to realize not worship but her
lordship and domination over the attestable world. This transference permits, indeed enables, her
to substitute herself for that which she was supposed to worship, this amounting to an operation
which she transforms the attestable (seen world) into an unseen world.” Eric Voegelin explains,
“What has happened to the transcendent ground in [this] connection? It has become, let us say,
immanentized. We still have, of course, the quest of the ground, we want to know where things
come from. But since God (in revelatory language) or transcendent divine being (in philosophical
language) is prohibited for agnostics, they must put their ground elsewhere.”61 The result, as we
saw earlier, is attributing sovereignty and transcendence to the world, the dunya.
What are the origins of this political counter-world and what are its philosophical justifications?
The answer is in the relationship between the two counter-worlds: the world that is a space of
pure power and the political and economic space that is part of that world as a sealed off totality,
the frontier of possibilities and power. This, however, is not the story that dominant narratives
of modernity tell us and that is precisely why they need to be interrogated. As Milbank points
out, “Grotius, Hobbes and Spinoza can be confident that the self-preserving conatus provides the
universal hermeneutical key for both nature and society.”62 Millbank goes on to explain,
automization “could not be achieved in the sphere of knowledge alone; it was only possible
because the new science of politics and economics both constructed for itself a new autonomous
object—the political—defined as a field of pure power.”63 The critical point to make here is that
the ‘political’ was not a space—out there—already autonomous, only waiting to be occupied. Its

60
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 346.
61
Quoted in Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity
(2003), 55
62
John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006,
10.
63
Ibid., 10.

44
autonomy had to be imagined before it could be occupied and closed onto itself. The result was
the “absolutization of immanence (nontranscendent reality).64 The creation of the secular did not
amount to an abandonment of sacralisation but rather the absolutisation and sacralisation of the
world itself.
The pervasive consciousness of insecurity that animated a response to a world alienated
from God created a political space wherein the political space becomes as manipulable as the
material world. It was from this field of pure power and the need to secure order over and
against the “pre-political” world that the concept of sovereignty emerged, creating the
impression that it is inextricable from any symbolic order, rather than recognizing it to be a
distinctly Eurocentric concept. The politics of sovereignty is inextricable from the metaphysics
of secularity. Sovereignty as a political principle emerges from a need for a symbolic order that
mirrors what it deems to be permanent. In the act of mirroring God, man had to resemble God,
who as a sovereign, is one who “transcends the political whole just as God transcends the
cosmos” and that such power is “separate and transcendent—not at the peak but above . . .
ruling the entire body political from above.”65
The secular project is essentially a reduction of man to the nafs, the Ego. It narrows the realm of
existence, from dwelling in two worlds to being entrapped in one world, the seen world, the
material world stripped of signs of divinity. If man is stripped of his capacity to dwell in two
worlds, he engages in self-attribution, namely, attributing to himself the divine attribute of majesty
(jalala) in the name of ‘sovereignty.’ If politics is stripped of its relationship to transcendence and
the fitra, the key attribute of man becomes self-attribution. Hallaq writes, it is “Exponential in its
command of self-attribution, the self is an incremental phenomenon that is hinged on its ability to
put to service and subjugate that which surrounds it.” This is done in the pursuit of autonomy and
self-governance. The term “sovereignty” is used to mask its transcendental origins. Hallaq write,
“A central concept in modernity’s way of living in the world, sovereignty is thus the attribution of
human acts to transcendentalism, whether these acts pertain to the domination of the modern state
or to violence and oppression.
The metaphysical horizons that legitimated ‘the political’ as an autonomous and political space of
pure power, have as their legitimating logic, the metaphysical horizons of the sovereignty of the
world. The sovereignty of the world – which now can represent the totality of possibilities -
provides the legitimating logic for secularity as a purely self-referential project with no exteriority.
The metaphysical horizons that are forged of man, the cosmos, and the world is an image of self-
sufficiency, totalization, and self-enclosure. How was such a closure even imagined, let alone
justified, on philosophical grounds? Millbank writes, “once, there was no secular.” The secular
was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human’66 when the pressure
of the sacred was relaxed.” That is to say, the secular was not discovered from beneath the rubbles
of a pre-secular world but, rather, it had to be created. Through this process of creation, it had to
introduce three ‘autonomous’ objects. The first is the ‘natural’ that is governed by natural laws
and, as such, is a “sealed off totality.”67 The second, is the ostensibly autonomous political space,
as a space of pure power.

64
Hughes, Transcendence and History, 19.
65
Jacques Maritain, Man and the State. London, UK: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 34.
66
Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, 23.
67
Ibid., 10.

45
Earth becomes a “restless inventory” and an “inexhaustible source of material.”68 Not even man is
spared from the categories of possibility and impossibility. It inaugurates possibilities via the
distribution of raw power that create and perpetuate hierarchical orders. Sovereignty, or the logic
of totalization, is the projection of an image of the world as a space of pure power onto the
political space needing, like the material world, manipulability. Those without possibility (e.g.,
the blacks or indigenous) must “catch-up” to those who possess and actualize possibility. “To
master possibility, to get ahead in this race, is to occupy a position of power – over the external
world, over other subjects and over those who, within this framework are not considered subjects.
As in the case of the enslaved.”69 In lacking possibility, they cannot partake in the processes of
actualization, or becoming

The result is that instead of “reconstruct[ing] an order given in nature”, it “reduce[s] nature forcibly
to an order imputed to it by man.”70 The imputing, or projection of an order onto the world amounts
to fetishization as, “The process by which a totality is made absolute, closed, divinized.”71 This
results in two things. First, the emergence of second-creators who re-create man, God, and the
cosmos in their own image. Second, the creation of what Voegelin calls a “second reality”: world
imagined as true by a person using it to mask and thereby `eclipse' genuine reality." Stripped of its
relationship to true reality, "Consciousness will inevitably form images and representations of
reality as of something other than itself, but can and occasionally will form images that miss reality
and sometimes even substitute an ersatz-reality (made or used as a substitute, typically an inferior
one, for something else.), or, as Musil has called it, a 'Second Reality.'”
This misplacement of transcendence, the emergence of second-creators, and the forging of a
second reality stems from a misunderstanding (jahl) of the nature of man-God relations. The
secular man views religion, and divine will, as external impositions. That is why Immanuel Kant
tried to formulate his categorical imperative, as an autonomous, self-legislating source of morality
and law. He neglects the fact that divine will is not exterior in time and space, as Taha ‘Abd ar-
Rahman explains, but flows through the ruh, the spirit. In fact, in order to come closer to man’s
real constitution, the primordial fitrah, man must go through the divine will first. In Islam, this is
exemplified through the notion of ikhtīyar, which as Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas explains,
stems from the root word khayr and as such choice is the capacity of man to choose that which is
good, namely, that which conforms with his true nature.
It is from closure that the fetishized system can claim self-referentiality in power, knowledge, and
being. It is no coincidence then, that the Qur’ān equivocates the “transgression of a bound” with
the encroachment upon the rights of others. That is because the ‘Other’ is put into an ‘improper’
place by displacing the ‘Other from the cosmos and absorbing it into the naive or hegemonic
totality. The Qur’ān, in illustrating the condition of takabbur, presents the archetypal example of
Iblis who upon being told to prostrate to Adam retorts, “I am better than him” because “you created
me from fire and created him from clay.” “In negating the other, in negating God, sinners are left
to themselves. They totalize themselves, asserting themselves as God, fetishizing and divinizing
themselves. The second archetypal example, Fir’awn, rejects the Prophethood of Musa stating that

68
Joseph Albernaz & Kirill Chepurin, The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of
Modernity (2020), 101
69
Ibid., 90.
70
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Frankfurt, Germany: MIT Press, 1985), 154.
71
Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, 95.

46
he is superior in that he possesses/mulk the riches of the lands. The will, or irāda, becomes an
established image, as in the case with Iblis, or an image and temporal order as in the case with
Fir’awn. To fully appreciate the concept of oppression, or zulm, in the Qur’ān, we now turn to
another related term. The Qur’ān signifies act of takabbur as at-tughyan and the dominating will
as tāghūt.
The word tāghūt comes from the Arabic verb taghā which means to transgress the limits. The
tāghūt is the dominating will that transgresses its proper place in an order (which in the Qur’ān is
referred to as al-mizan, the balance) and subsequently oppresses, or displaces the Other by
absorbing it into a newly emerging [fabricated] order that is centered on the transgressing will.72
The tāghūt is the most manifest form of the nafs al-ʾammārah, in that it commands not only the
self but self-referentially creates “its own law, its own morality, its own goodness” that are then
transposed onto the ‘Other.’ Isutzu describes the tāghūt as having “lost this sense of
creatureliness”73 and as such is bound to transgress its proper place in the divine order. The
emergent order, in turn, perpetuates and legitimates the dominating wills disposition towards
transgression as with Fir’awn who declared, “And Pharaoh called out among his people; he said,
"O my people, does not the kingdom of Egypt belong to me, and these rivers flowing beneath me;
then do you not see?” (Q 43:51). the relationship between takabbur and tughyan: in sublimating,
the self, the dominating will and in doing so transgress its proper place and the place of the Other
and God in the balanced cosmos. This form of transgression then extends to epistemic violence,
as when Fir’awn claimed, "…I show you only that which I see (correct)…” (Q 40:29). through the
creation of new regimes of knowledge that legitimate the project of domination. The liberal and
secular desire, for example, to impose depersonalized modern markets, becomes “the main driver
of liberal imperialism, an imperative justified among others by John Stuart Mill in his treatise
Considerations on Representative Government, where he calls for compulsion over “uncivilized”
peoples in order that they might lead productive, economic lives, even if they must be, “for a while
compelled to it,” including through the institution of “personal slavery.” He states, “despotism is
a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provide the end is their improvement
and the means justified by actually effecting that end”
The ‘other’ that is beset by these fabricated images and/or sacralized orders becomes an
instrument. Fetishization is not only idolatrous domination but also, as Dussel reminds us, the
ideological concealment of reality. The Other becomes an instrument because the ‘Other’ is
reduced to an object within the established order, stripped of its alterity. The Qur’ān speaks of
Fir’awn as, "Indeed, Pharaoh arrogantly elevated himself in the land and divided its people into
subservient groups, one of which he persecuted, slaughtering". He was truly one of the corruptors.”
The internalization of these images - or “Reality” - is par excellence, the epitome of oppression.
The relationship between the internalization of such images and oppression is indicated in the very
etymology of the word. To surmise, the 'Other' is oppressed in the sense that the ‘Other’ is molded
to conform to the fabricated images underlying the totality More so, that the 'Other' is immobilized
and subordinated in the sense that the ‘Other’ is stripped of their alterity and subsequently the
capacity to transcend the totalities fabricated images. This act of molding and immobilization
become acts of self-subordination when the oppressed accept the prevailing situation as an
insurmountable “Reality - the “way things are” - or worse yet, to accept the situation as being

73
Isutzu, God and Man in the Qur’an, 122.

47
favorable. That is to say, the oppressed internalize these fabricated images as though they were
natural and normal representations of the 'Real'.. This creates a state of fitnah, which literally
means tribulation, and wherein our subversion to a normalized and seemingly insurmountable state
of totalizing domination.74 The concealment of reality amounts to an invisibilization of a systems
man-made origin, and its contingency and thus appears to be a necessary and transhistorical
absolute.

74
Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, 178.

48
Module Eight: Secularism, Liberalism and the Islamic Critique (2)

Fabricating a Second Nature

The result, is self-creation, and the creation of the individual in the image of the state.
“…man can understand himself only by creating himself. The idea of man’s self-creation
characterizes the so-called Promethean ambition of modern man, who wants to be the offspring of
his own works” In other words, the self becomes both its own master and its own slave. The self
is reduced to a self-interested self, concerned with the mundane. The image of the self projected
by the liberal self and the state required the forging of new images of man, and these images distort
man beyond his true nature. Moreover, it had to create a new image of the world. Millbank writes,
“once, there was no secular.” The secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam
of the ‘purely human’ when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed.” That is to say, the secular
was not discovered from beneath the rubbles of a pre-secular world but, rather, it had to be created.
Through this process of creation, it had to introduce three ‘autonomous’ objects. The first is the
‘natural’ that is governed by natural laws and, as such, is a “sealed off totality.” The second, is
the ostensibly autonomous political space, as a space of pure power. In its autonomous, self-
enclosed state, the world that the self inhabits becomes the world-as-dunyā. The sacralization of a
hegemonic totality and the acts of projection are always predicated on the self-enclosing perception
of the world as dunyā which becomes the ultimate grounds for the project of the self and defines
the totality of its possibilities. As such, a project that is grounded in the dunyā is groundless. The
Qur’ān encapsulates this groundlessness with the term bāṭil, which denotes a lack, or what is
ephemeral in its duration in contradistinction to the stability of haqq, or truth. Bāṭil is characterized
by hāwa which connotates falling or emptiness as in the case of the noun hāwiyyah, which literally
means an abyss.75 The dunyā, as the Qur’ān describes, is the ever-ephemeral world of illusions,
beset by desire. It is groundless in that it lacks permanent grounds i.e., exteriority, referring only
onto itself, the “I” and its ephemeral nafs. Thus, we can identify ghafla and its totalizing as a way-
of-being – the consciousness that informs its project (the how of existence) - in the world-as-dunyā,
as the state of being groundless.

Thus far, we spoke about the image of the world that the liberal state forges Let us now look at its
image of the self, the individual. As we have already pointed out, through the idea of a fixed human
nature based on self-interest or the idea that there is no fixed human nature. In both instances, the
“increasingly dislocated and disassociated selves to derive their basic identity from the state” . . .
“A population seeking to fill the void left by the weaking of more local memberships and
associations was susceptible to a fanatic willingness to identify completely with a distant and
abstract state.” The individual is a self-interested consumer, belonging to the state and global
market.
Marcel explains, is the foundational ontological exigence that distinguishes man. The person takes
up a new concern, beyond the naïve everyday concerns: an ontological exigence: “who am I? The
capacity – and desire - to ask, “whom am I - I who asks questions about Being.” This, in turn,
raises the question of project to an existential dimension. The question of transcendence and its
relationship to one’s project is inevitable because the self always desires to participate in this being,

75
Balil Abd al-Karim, Qur’anic Terminology: A Linguistic and Semantic Analysis. London, UK: The
International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2017, 70-71.

49
in this reality—and perhaps this aspiration is already a degree of participation, however
rudimentary.”76 Moreover, because the question of transcendence, and ultimacy, is a question of
Truth, par excellence. This ontological exigence is “not reducible to some psychological state,
mood, or attitude a person has; it is rather a movement of the human spirit that is inseparable from
being human.”77 Freedom and decision, or choice, are thus inextricable from the question of
transcendence or Truth. To recall, this inheres in the concept of ikhtīyar which for the
aforementioned reasons, is a more suitable term than the neutral world “choice.”
Liberating the Nafs, not the Self
In Islam, we have the distinction between al-nafs al-natiqah, the high, rational soul, and
the nafs al-hayawaniyyah, the lower, animal, and carnal soul. Islam, through revelation, address
the rational, higher soul. Liberalism addresses nafs al-hayawaniyyah, the lower, animal, and carnal
soul. Islam liberates the higher, rational soul while liberalism exploits and liberates the lower,
animal, and carnal soul. Freedom, in Islam, is the “subjugation of one’s self by one’s real self,
“one’s animal soul by one’s rational soul” In Islam, choice is not self-interest, nor is choice an
unrestricted virtue. Decision, or choice corresponds closely to the Arabic word ikhtīyar which also
corresponds to the word freedom. Ikhtīyar is rooted in the word khayr, which means ‘good’ –
meaning that it is a choice wherein the ‘good’ is actualized78. As such, it is not a neutral term but
signifies a choice wherein the good that signifies a return to ones self. Fitrah, according to the
Qur’ān, is man defined in relation to God and not in self-referential terms as per connotated by the
term “human” or the Ego, the nafs. This return to being an ‘Abd of God is that state wherein man
is not defined in relation to a “social contract”, man is not an instrument of a dominating nafs but
as an instrument of the divine will. Thus, the alterity of man resides not only in the capacity for
reflection on totality but in that man originates in alterity through a divine and primordial covenant
that precedes any temporal formation. In other words, man, prior to entering a political, or
economic covenant with fellow man, is not in a “state of nature” but in a state of covenant with
God. “Am I not your Lord” . . . “Yes, we bear witness.” Islam holds that man his attained freedom
when he has return to his true nature. His being a ‘Abd, a slave of Allah. In this sense, freedom
begins through a proper awareness of man’s place in the proper order. From this, we also find the
concept of justice. Islam makes man aware that he exists within an order.
“We have several times alluded to the concept that justice
means a harmonious condition or state of affairs whereby
every thing is in its right and proper place – such as the
cosmos; or similarly a state of equilibrium, whether it refers
to things or living beings. With respect to man, we say that
justice means basically a condition and situation whereby he
is in his right and proper place. ‘Place’ here refers not only
to his total situation in relation to others, but also in his
condition in relation to his self.”

76
Treanor, Brian and Brendan Sweetman, "Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.

78
Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview
of Islam (1995), 33

50
. Stephen Gardner explains, “Eros must be raised to the level of religious cult in modern
society . . . it is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’79
The “Ego” which in the Qur’ān is signified as an-nafs al-ʾammārah (lit. the commanding self): a
non-reflective and acritical "I." The Qur’ān contrasts an-nafs al-ʾammārah from an-nafs al-
muṭma’ina, which means the tranquil self, and an-nafs al-lawwāma which means the self-critical
self. In Qur’ānic terms, the nafs is the “self” or the unrefined “ego.” It is commanding in the sense
that, “The "flesh" is idolatrized in the "kingdom of this world," and promulgates its own law, its
own morality, its own goodness.”80 This amounts to a state of injustice,
“Injustice, being the opposite of justice, is putting a thing in
a place not if its own it is to misplace a thing; it is to misuse
it or to wring; it is to exceed or fall short of the mean or limit;
it is to suffer loss; it is deviation from the right course.” . . .
“Thus, when man does an action of injustice it means that he
has wrong his own soul, for he has put his soul in a place not
of its own; he has misused it; he has made it to exceed or fall
short of its real nature; he has caused it to deviate from what
is right and to repudiate the truth and suffer loss.”
The contrast between the self-accounting self and the commanding self is in that that the latter is
a nafs falls into a state of istigna which means “to feel oneself completely free and independent
(i.e., owing nothing to anybody, not even to God).” and having no recourse towards any grounds
of accountability. It refers to the state wherein “the ultimate frame of reference is the ontological
reality of the Ego” which, by its very nature, is disposed to “put to service and subjugate that which
surrounds it.”81 It is disposed towards what the Tunisian philosopher, Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman calls
self-attribution which culminates in self-divination through claims to sovereignty and lordship.82
The Ego descend into a state of ghafla, which literally means “absence of a thing from the
mind” forgetfulness and, “intentional neglect,” indicates a submersion and diversion of
consciousness from God and/or the signs of God.83 The Qur’ān notes that this was the very first
tribulation of the Adamic man (Q 20:115). The word ghafla correlates directly to the Qur’ānic
term of ‘man’ which is insaan. The Arabic word for man is insaan, one of the roots of which is
nisyan which means to forget. Ghafla is that state wherein an-nisyan becomes a ruling principle,
that is, it becomes a condition, or state of being. An-nisyan, is not a momentary lapse of judgement
or consciousness but a universal determinant of the human condition, which like its finitude and
anxiety, inheres in the very ontology of the self. Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman goes as far as to define
man as that “being which forgets that he is forgetful.”84 As such, in the state of ghafla, man loses

79
Quoted in Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2019), 83
80
Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Community (New York, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 30.
81
Wael B. Hallaq, Reforming Modernity: Ethics and the New Human in the Philosophy of Taha
Abdurrahman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 211.
82
Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman, Rūḥ al-Dīn: Min Ḍīq al-ʿAlmāniyya ilā Siʿat al-I’timāniyya (Beirut, Lebanon:
Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi, 2012), 25.
83
Williams & Norgate (1863).
84
Ibid., 13.

51
his ontological exigence, and takes up mundane exigencies that divert man from the possibility of
participating in transcendence.
Ghafla is the absence of reflection, and as such, the subordination of the self to naïve and
hegemonic totalities. The essential feature of ghafla is the neglect of God, or the absence of God-
consciousness in mediating the relationship between the self and the world and cosmos. Through
ghafla, the self surrenders its individual and collective awareness. It descends into a state of
alienation (b’ud) and estrangement, and oppression. The Qur’ān describes this state (totalization
through the nafs) as being zulm, in two senses: (1) it is the oppression of oneself and (1) it is
oppression against the ‘Other.’ The Qur’ān warns, “These are the bounds of God, and whoso
transgresses the bounds of God has wronged himself” It is oppressive against the self because nafs
displaces the intellect that has the capacity for reflection (Q 6:67-68). “Egoism denotes a double
slavery of man – slavery to himself, his own hardened selfhood and slavery to the world, which is
transformed exclusively into an object with exercises constraint from without.”85

85
Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom (London: The Centenary Press, 1944), 43.

52
Module Eight: Secularism, Liberalism and the Islamic Critique (3)

Earlier, we noted that secularization is a condition of the world, it is concerned with events
of this world. As such, it is a closed world, a sovereign, that is closed off to the divine. It is, in the
words of Milbank, a “sealed off totality.” In critiquing the claim to sovereignty of the world, we
can first, draw on the Qur’anic distinction between the dunyā and âlam. Second, To do so, we will
examine two events, illustrated in the Qur’an, that depict the reality of the world as being in a
condition, not closed off from God. These two events are: the creation of the world, and the
annihilation of the world.
Qur’an distinguishes between the world as ‘âlam which lit. translates into ‘sign’ and the world as
dunyā, which literally translates into that which is ‘near.’ The world as ‘âlam is imbued with the
divine signs of God and as such is a space of meaning. The world as dunyā, when divorced from
the world as ‘âlam is meaningless. It is a space of diversion. Dunyā is the world that is estranged
from God. It is a space of alienation and estrangement. The Qur’ān states, "whereas the life of this
world is no more than the delusion of enjoyment." Thus, there are two modes of being-in-the-
world. The world bound by what the Qur’ān signifies as sunnan, or divine laws. Secularism
demands the sovereignty of the dunyā whereas in the Muslim consciousness, the dunyā is
subsumed into âlam. These sunnan are imbued in reality, transcending the temporal laws that
constitute any temporal order. Thus, the world is not in a condition of being secular nor is it
sovereign, it is in its totality a sign of God. Thus, every existent is not a mere ‘thing’ that appears
in a mundane, secular world. Rather, every existent is perceived as it is “a condition or an
instrument for the divine activity (shart ala il-fa’iliyya al-ilahiyya). Moreover, all existents are,
not only ayat (signs) but also instruments of divine activity, as we will see because the process of
creation is not singular but perpetual.
“He said, "Our Lord is He who gave each thing its form and then guided [it]." The first event
constituting the ultimate situation for the Muslim subject is the creation of the world. It is in God’s
creation of the world from ex nihilo that Muslims differentiate God from all that is non-God, the
Creator-Absolute and the Created-Relative. To state that God is the creator is to make, ipso facto,
a statement about the ontological finitude of all that is not-God and this includes time and history.
The affirmation of the God as al-Khaliq (the Creator) amounts to an affirmation that the Absolute
is exterior to any temporal formation and as such, no order can claim to be divine or absolute,
including the world itself. The concept of creation in Islam cannot be reduced to mere creation as
per understood in the English language. As Muhammad Iqbal points out, there is only one word
for creation in the English language whereas in Arabic there are two: khalq and amr which can be
translated concurrently as ‘creation’ and ‘direction’. This is a recurrent theme throughout the
Qur’ān, “to Him belong the creation and direction alone. Blessed is Allah - Lord of the Worlds.”
The soul, for example, writes Iqbal: “the essential nature of the soul is directive, as it proceeds
from the directive energy of God.”86 the relationship between man and God and man and cosmos
is not reduced to a singular creation event after which man is left to the throes of secular time. It
is, rather, that all existents are endowed with both creation and form, or direction. These forms, it
can be argued, provide time and history with a flow rather than being the products of time and

86
Sevcan Ozturk, Becoming a Genuine Muslim: Kierkegaard and Muhammad Iqbal (2018), 70

53
history. Time is structured according to the divine teleos that is ordained by God in the very act of
creation, “He said, "Our Lord is He who gave each thing its form and then guided [it]."
Furthermore, God’s creation from ex nihilo is not reducible to a singular event. Rather, in affirming
the Creatorship of God, we affirm the perpetual renewal of the world. The recognition of God’s
perpetual divine actions, which have a mediatory status between God and the world. For Ibn
Taymiyyah, God possesses temporal priority over the world through divine actions (af’al Allah) -
a mediatory status between the Creator (al-fail) and the Created (al-maful) without those two
beings becoming One. God is not the Watchmaker God who resigns and rests of the Sabbath, He
is a God attributed with a continuous state of agency (fa’aliyya). Thus, every existent is not a mere
‘thing’ that appears on my worldly horizon with an instrumental function. Rather, every existent
is perceived as it is “a condition or an instrument for the divine activity (shart aw ala il-fa’iliyya
al-ilahiyya). Thus, the world is not a closed space independent of God but rather a space for the
perpetual creative acts of God. The Qur’ānic word for history is waqt which signifies “a spatial"
and "unalterable where of an event” in contrast to the word zaman which signifies a regulatory and
progressive series of events. Falaturi explains, “In waqt, as in a spatial where-time rather than a
linear or cyclical where-time, that is, an ever-present area of events created by God, all events are
independent of of one another, yet have a direct relation to their omnipotent, omnipresent Creator.”
(Falaturi 1979, 69) The Qur’ān draws attention, not to the when but to the where such an event
takes place: the here-and-now world.
“Everyone upon it [i.e., the earth] will perish.”
The second event constituting the ultimate situation for the Muslim subject is the end of the world
or, what the Qur’ān refers to as al-waqia’, or the happening. For the Muslim subject, all actions
taking place in historical time are in relation to this event. The occurrence of this event is not the
product of an autonomous history or immutable linear progression. It is linked to the supra-
temporal, the enactment by God: “And to Allah belongs the unseen [aspects] of the heavens and
the earth. And the command for the Hour is not but as a glance of the eye or even nearer. Indeed,
Allah is over all things competent.” Abdoljavid Falaturi explains:
“The arrival of the hour of Judgement is connected to the
supra-temporal, divine knowledge and is understood as
something which can be perceived in the present. It is not
something that occurs in the future, only after a specific
period of time. According to Muhammad’s notion of the
hour of Judgement, it is the autonomous action of God
himself which is to the fore.”87
The final annihilation, the waqia' is a promised event (ajal musama) that renders the very fabric of
historical time contingent on an impending rupture. The enactment of the Hour is the ultimate
irruption of the Absolute into the temporal world. It is the ultimate [divine] act, after creation, from
absolute exteriority. The exteriority of God in relation to the order of time means that the world is
not a sovereign space. The divine act, furthermore, means that the world is not a space that is
closed and self-referential, independent of God. Thus, if the very order of time in-itself is

87
Abdoldjavid Falaturi, “Experience of Time and History in Islam,” in We Believe in One God: The
Experience of God in Christianity and Islam, ed. Annemarie Schimmel and Abdoldjavad Falaturi (London:
Burns & Oates, 1979), 68.

54
contingent on divine enactment, what is to be said of historical systems that unfold only within the
confines of the order of time? This point is instantiated in the Qur’ān’s narrative on the punishment
inflicted on previous nations. The point that the Qur’ān is making in drawing our attention to these
events is the temporality and finitude of order on the one hand and the Absolute omnipotence of
God in His capacity to act upon history and its historical systems on the other. This, in turn, means
that man-made systems cannot claim ultimacy in their origins nor in their ends. Moreover, The
Islamic conception of time is coupled with the concept of fana’, or annihilation. The Qur’ān states,
with regards to the world and its existents, “Everyone upon it [i.e., the earth] will perish” In the
same way that creation is not reducible to a singular event, fana’ does not refer to a singular
happening but an unfolding reality. The concept of fana’ signifies a state of being. Fana’ is a
perennial characteristic of all that is not God. That is to say, it is a condition (e.g., in the sense that
we might say sickness or good-health is a condition) rather than merely a happening or event (e.g.
death). The concept of fana,’ as being a condition, directly challenges the Hegelian concept of
progress wherein the Absolute Spirit moves towards completion and perfection.

55
Module Eight: Secularism, Liberalism and the Islamic Critique (4)

There is a fundamental problem at the heart of secularism and the secular state, that is, to what
extend can the secular state be stable without the commitment of religious believers? The
problem, state differently, is what motives do religious believers have for obeying the laws of the
secular state when religious laws represent, or make claim, to a higher good and eternal life? The
problem, states Lars Vinx can be stated as follows (1) obedience to divine law is a necessary
condition for salvation, of the attainment of eternal life (2) that eternal life is a greater good than
the longest possible extension of earthly life (3) the rational agent out to prefer a greater good to
a lesser and (3) one ought to obey God more than man. Furthermore: to what extent is it rational
to domesticate the will of a God, who by definition, is omniscient – all-knowing? James Rachels,
states, “if we recognize any being as God, then we are committed, in virtue of that recognition, to
obeying him.”
The state for Thomas Hobbes is thoroughly secular in that it seeks to fulfill our temporal desire for
self-preservation and a materially contented life. Moreover, the laws of nature dictate that man
show absolute obedience to the sovereign state, this is his key point.. The first to develop a secular
theory for the legitimacy of the secular state was Thomas Hobbes who, despite being one of the
godfathers of secularity, recognizes and concedes to this problem. Thomas Hobbes recognizes this
dilemma. He state, “it is manifest enough, that when man recieveth two contrary Commands, and
know that one of them is Gods, he ought to obey that, and not the other, through it be the command
even of his lawful Sovereign”88. This is what we will refer to as the problem of dual obedience.
How, then, does the godfather or secularity overcome this problem?
This purpose, however, does not provide a stable foundation for the preservation and legitimation
of the secular state. A religious believer can recognize the instrumental and positive in preserving
our biological survival but also believe that the state ought to conform to divine law. To justify
the sovereignty of the secular and sovereign state, it was inevitable that Hobbes had to enter the
field of political theology. This is ironic, given the secular nature of the state, but as we have seen
earlier, the secular state is committed to theological interventions. This political theological
defense of the sovereign secular state is part of the ideological basis for secularism. This political
theology is grounded in a particular mode of religion, namely, a form of Protestantism. For
Hobbes, the answer to the question about the potential clash between divine and secular law is
solved through a simple assertion: these two laws cannot and do not conflict with one another.
There are multiple reasons as to why this, for Hobbes, is the case. First, Christ did not establish a
political community with its own laws, which in turn could conflict with the laws of the state.
Furthermore, if a law is to be binding, be in divine or secular, it must be known. John Austin, a
leading exponent of secular law, deals with this problematic in his engagement with Sir William
Blackstone :
“… that all human laws ought to conform to the Divine law.
If this be his meaning, I assent to it without hesitation

88
Quoted in The Political Theology of the Secular State in Hobbes and Bockenforde (2018), 3

56
 [because] the obligations they impose are consequently
paramount to those imposed by any other laws, and if human
commands conflict with the Divine law, we ought to disobey
the command which is enforced by the less powerful
sanction; this is implied in the term ought; the proposition is
identical, and therefore perfectly indisputable— it is our
interest to choose the smaller and more uncertain evil, in
preference to the greater and surer. If this be Blackstone’s
meaning, I assent to his proposition, and have only to object
to it, that it tells us just nothing.”89
In other words, if the law is not authentic (accessible to reason and grounded in a revealed text)
cannot be binding. Hobbes distinguishes between natural law, which is a set of rules that God make
accessible to all persons, having endowed man with natural reason. The second, is divine laws,
which are rules of conduct that are revealed only to some persons. In other words, he is challenging
the epistemic reliability of divine revelation. He goes on to distinguish between direct revelation
and indirect revelation. The former is revealed to man directly. The second is revealed by someone
else, who in turn informs man of its content. Hobbes then argues that direct revelation may be,
not revelation but hallucinations, or dreams. As for indirect revelation, the problem, again, is one
of epistemic reliability. Vinx state, Hobbes holds that it is exceedingly difficult for us “to obtain
compelling evidence that someone else’s claim to have received direct revelation is true, and thus
to distinguish between true and false prophets, especially in cases where the revelations in question
contradict established doctrine or sovereign law.” Given that there is no external standard through
which we can verify the veracity of revealed religion and prophecy, the public is not bound to it.
Hobbes goes on to distinguish between true religions and false religions – again – because his
argument is the God’s law cannot conflict with secular law. False religion is one in which religious
laws, enjoys supremacy over the positive laws of the state, and that consequently implies that the
law of the state could come to conflict with divine law. On the other hand, true religion is one
which denies the possibility, of such a conflict, it “supports the idea of supremacy of the law of
the secular state.”
The problem with Hobbes, from an Islamic perspective is two-fold. First, law for Hobbes is entirely
self-referential, with no recourse to an authority or standard independently of itself. This results in
tughyan, transgression, takkabur, self-sublimation, and istigna, the fictive belief in independence
of a higher authority. God. Self-referentiality and self-sublimation of the the dominating will and
transgress its proper place and the place of the Other and God in the balanced cosmos. Harold J.
Laski defines the sovereign as “the person in the State who can get his will accepted, who
dominates over his fellows as to blend their will with his.” I have already addressed this problem
in the second critique. Therefore, there the pre-political state that constitutes the cosmos is not
based on the illusion of a brutish “state of nature” but rather a state of equilibrium defining both
the cosmos and the nature of man therein.

89
Quoted in Wael B. Hallaq, Groundwork of the Moral Law: A New Look at the Qurʾān and the Genesis of
Sharīʿa (2009), 251

57
The second problem of Hobbes is that in Islam, we have divine revelation that is confirmed by
rationality and in which contains divinely revealed laws that are indeed known to reason. Hallaq
explains, “the Qur’ān not only was aware of legal disputes and day-to-day adjudication (and that
it saw itself exclusively authorized to regulate them), but also that it was directly responsible
for the for the origination of constitutive epistemic and political structure of the Shari’a” He goes
on to state, “the effects of the Qur’an were causal in nature, themselves precipitating and and
directing behavior that in fact defined what Islam and its legal and political systems were to
become.” Furthermore, political society is a microcosm of the macrocosm: the cosmos. The latter
being “laws of nature” that are in harmony with the laws that define the microcosm, the political
society. In Islam, the telos of both is justice.

58
Module Eight: Secularism, Liberalism and the Islamic Critique (5)

Who is sovereign? This is not a purely speculative or theoretical question. It has concrete
implications on questions of governance and state. It is, in an age of the fetishization of the state,
a subversive question. How are we to engage with a modern state that appears divine and absolute?
How are we to imagine alternative conceptions of state and governance? Is the fetishization of the
state a fait accompli? As Enrique Dussel explains, the fetish “is something made by the human
hand but made to appear divine, absolute, worthy of worship, fascinating, tremendous, that before
which one trembles in fear, terror, or admiration. Every system tends to fetishize, totalize,
absolutize itself.” 90. How does the fetishized state achieve such divinity. It is through the negation
of exteriority. Exteriority refers to that which originates beyond the hegemonic order and as such
represents as threat to that order. To overcome such a threat, the hegemonic order appropriates any
such sources of exteriority into its orbit by recreating them in its own image. The most foundational
of such appropriations is the fabrication of images of God, negating God’s temporal priority and
the creation of a God that legitimates the hegemonic order’s legitimacy. What is distinctive of the
modern state, however, is its philosophical and legal legitimation of such fetishization through the
invention of state sovereignty91. The sovereign state is “conceived as the efficient agency of its
own construction . . . comparable to the divine Creation ex nihilo. It holds that its “social contract”
is a seemingly divine “original covenant” which becomes “a sacred, unquestionable tale whereby
a people is brought – or rather brings itself – into existence.”92
The doctrine of tawhid is the liberatory recognition the divine creative will of God (irāda
khalqiyya) which is to affirm that God, as uniquely transcendent, is beyond any temporal and
historical formation, having created the world from ex nihilo. This, as Enrique Dussel rightly points
out, is to adopt an attitude of atheism towards any temporal order, the world, and the cosmos at
large for no existent, but God, can claim divinity in its origins. This affirmation alone, however,
does not amount to a liberatory politics. History attests to the ways in which the image of God has
been domesticated and recreated in the image of regimes. The essence of such fabrications is the
negation of God’s temporal priority over such orders, the world, and the cosmos. Tawḥīd, the
unicity of God’s attributes, is to recognize that both God’s irāda khalqiyya as well as God’s divine
legislative will (al- irāda ash-shari’yyah). The recognition of God as being uniquely transcendent
does not translate into the absence of earthly gods as we say with the verse It is He Who is the only
God in the heavens (fi samaa) and the only God on the earth (f’il ard).” The Qur’ān states that the
oppressed, are the al-mustad’afun fi’l ard wherein fi’l ard means on the earth - emphasizes the
awareness the temporal origins of oppression. There is another dimension of God’s temporal
priority; the attributes of mulk and rububiyyah, which means God’s kingship and lordship in
relation to the temporal world.
To understand why, it is imperative that we say something about the (1) the nature of the political
space as a space traversed by the will of political actors and (2) the act of fetishization as an act of

90
Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. 96
91
On the question of sovereignty, see author’s essay entitled ‘The Invention of Sovereignty’, Genealogies of
Modernity.
92
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019 10

59
fabricating images of God. The political field, as Dussel points out is “traversed by forces, by
singular subjects in possession of will and a certain degree of power, and these wills in turn
structured within specific universes.”93 The hegemonic claims to ultimacy is not always that of
Lordship but is, through and through, political ultimacy. That is what Dussel calls “the originary
corruption of the political” because it is self-referential, closed, and results in fetishization94. The
corruption of the political begins when the state, and the will of its political actors, act as self-
referential agents rather than delegated agents. That is, self-referentiality to the occlusion of the
community that is the source of political power and the occlusion of God as the divine authorizer
of action, īstkhlāf. The self-referential act of power corrupts both the political actors and the
political community. It stands in direct opposition to obediential power amount to a fetishization
of the political actor. “They cease to be representatives who act through delegation and instead
become despots who demand that the people pay homage to their authority.” This results in the
absolutization of the will of the political actor. The will of the political actor becomes a “will-to-
power” as an existential orientation and ends.
Through its will-to-power, the tāghūt creates new fictive covenants that re-create the individual
and collective self, as through from ex nihilo for as we saw earlier, the self-enclosure of the
hegemonic totality (its divination) necessitates a negation of exteriority and the recreation of man,
God, and the cosmos in its own image. This, in turn, amounts to modes-of-alienation. First, it is
because the political space is the creative space wherein the collective will can actualize and
concretizes its existential project. Second, it is an alienation for the collective capacity to engage
in politics, which as we saw with Ali Shariati is a capacity that inheres in the very ontology of the
self as a political being95. As such, it is an alienation from the (1) self as a self and an alienation of
the self (2) from its existential project, which for the Muslim self, is tashhīd, īstkhlāf and the
creative acts of ijtihad and shura towards the enactment of justice, ‘adl. Ali Shariati refers to this
as the al-istihmar, to stupefy, the essence of which is the act of diversion, that is, the diversion of
the individual and collective from its political, and concomitantly, its existential ends and project96.
Third, it circumvents the break from the second-creation to the first-creation, the return to the
primordial self. Fourth, it is the alienation of man from the original covenant with God, through
which, the self maintains an alterity vis-à-vis all temporal formations.
These modes of alienation, find their contemporary expression, in secularity replaces the
sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of the world, the dunyā. This new form of transcendence,
in turn, reduces the ‘political’ space to an autonomous manipulable space of ‘pure power’ and with
it, a logic of domination. Politics is stripped of any relation to the Transcendent, as an autonomous
space of pure power, it is closed onto itself, divinized and presents itself as a transhistorical
absolute rather than a dynamic and open history receptive to the creative act of politics. This, in
turn, amounts to a negation of spiritual self-affirmation because there can be no drive towards the
Sublime who is now domesticated through the negation of absolute Exteriority. The tāghūt

93
Enrique Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham, UK: Duke University Press, 2008, 5
94
Ibid., 3
95
Ali Shariati, Bina al-Dhat al-Thawri (Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Amir lil-Thaqafah wal-Nashr, 2007,75.
96
Ali Shariati, An-Nabaha wal-Istihmar. Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Amir lil-Thaqafah wal-Nashr, 2007,

60
descends into what the Qur’ān describes as a state of istigna to think as though the self is free and
independent from anything that is beyond itself and who, as second-creators, create new socio-
political and economic realities without recourse to the collective or God. The Qur’an warns,
“Surely man will transgress, if he sees himself to be self-sufficient” (Q 96: 6-7). The horizon of
possibility – that is, existential prospects and their projects – are reduced to the immanent political
and metaphysical horizons forged by the secularity with no possibility of upward movement.
In negating the negation of absolute Exteriority, we can now speak of a neglected dimension of
tawḥīd, namely, the recognition not only of God’s creative and divine will (irāda khalqiyya) but
God’s divine legislative will (irāda shar’iyya) and the authority of the community in discerning
and establishing that divine will through the sharī’ah. That is to say tawḥīd affirms both the
ontological and temporal priority of God. To return to the verses mentioned earlier: It is He Who
is ˹the only˺ God in the heavens (fi samaa) and the only God on the earth (f’il ard).” . . . “The
creation and the command belong to Him alone. For He is the All-Wise, All-Knowing.” The
negation of fetishization, in other words, demands of the Muslim a recognition and testimony to
both God’s creative will and God’s legislative will that is revealed in the Qur’ān “if we recognize
any being as God, then we are committed, in virtue of that recognition, to obeying him.” The need
for this dual recognition stems from the fact that the creative will and legislative will emanate from
the same telos in the same way they both emanate from the same origin: God (Q 45:22). The
purpose of God’s legislative will, is, similarly, to enact and uphold justice: “Indeed, We sent Our
messengers with clear proofs, and with them, We sent down the Scripture and the balance ˹of
justice˺ so that people may administer justice” (Q 57:25).
The revelation of a divine and legislative will requiring human embodiment brings us to a critical
point with regards to the justice in relation to the preservation of the balance: Man is not left to his
own devices in determining what order is given in nature. To do so, would result in the perennial
risk imputing a political form onto a distorted perception of nature and future fetishization. The
just order that is constructed is not an arbitrary order that mirrors a distorted perception of the
permanent nor is it an order that is imputed onto nature. It is an order that is given in nature (the
creative will) and made manifest through the Qur’ān (the legislative will). As such, the Sharī’ah
mirrors the creative will of God. Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas observes that Islam: “...emulates
the pattern or form according to which God governs His Kingdom; it is an imitation of the cosmic
order manifested in this worldly life as well as political order.” The sharī’ah, more than just being
legislative, reorients the relationship between man, the cosmos, and God wherein man and the
cosmos are oriented towards a shared telos: justice. Tawḥīd is the means towards such a
reorientation because tawḥīd more than just a metaphysical theory of creation. It is an order in and
of itself. As such, institutionalized power (potesta) is obediential (that is, other-referential rather
than self-referential) in two senses:
The first sense in which power is contingent is in its being bound to the will of the infinite Other,
God as the sovereign, expressed in the sharī’ah. Thus, while the Qur’anic notion of jāhiliyyah
decenters hegemonic regimes of knowledge, its corollary, hakimiyyah decenters fetishized and
self-enclosed political centers of power. The Prophet states, “No obedience is due in sinful matters:
behold, obedience is due only in the way of righteousness [fil ma’rūf] and “No obedience is due

61
to him who does not obey God.” The establishment of the sharī’ah is not an imposition onto reality
but a fulfilment of reality given that sovereignty is attribute of the most Real. Ibn Taymiyah states,
“Ruling by what God has revealed unto Muhammad, upon him be peace, is but justice in a
particular form – indeed it is the most perfect and best type of justice and ruling by it an obligation
of the Prophet himself as well as upon those who follow him.”97 Thus, the Qur’ān states, in both
epistemic and political terms states that without recourse to revelation “surely man will transgress
if he sees himself to be self-sufficient” The tāghūt is not exclusively the dominating will that claims
Godship but whomever exercises self-referential power, transgressing the sharī’ah and the
authority of the community.
The second sense in which power is contingent is in its being bound by the authority of community
in a dual sense through ijtihād and shūrā. The discernment of the sharī’ah falls within the
communal practice of ijtihād whereas the political authority of the community is embodied in the
act of shūrā. That is to say, the authority of the community is both epistemic and political. Ijtihād
in the communal discernment and establishment of the sharī’ah, as such, represents a dynamic and
creative communal movement that eschews the presence of an ecclesiastical order or theocratic
governance. the community is the source of authority because as the Prophetic narration states, the
community is protected from error. This protection does not stem from an infallibility but rather a
“dynamic process of mutual advice and correction, revival and reform, and commanding the good
and forbidding the evil.”98 The communal act of ijtihad is not limited to discerning the ordinances
of the sharī’ah but includes the discernment of what the community deems to be just and unjust.
Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 1350) states: “Just politics (al-siyasa al- ‘adila) is not limited to the details of
the Shar’ and is amenable to change based on changing times and places. Except that its general
objective is the establishment of justice, and its standard and criterion are the attainment of the
welfare of the community.”99 Ibn al-Qayyim also states that “By whatever means justice is
established, that is part of the religion.”100
Through ijtihād, the discernment of the sharī’ah becomes a communal act and through shūrā,
political authority is vested with the community, amruhum shūrā baynahun, “Their communal
business (amr) is to be [transacted] in consultation among themselves” (Q 42: 38). The Prophet is
reported to have said, “Follow the largest group”101 and “It is your duty to stand by the united
community and the majority [al-āmmah].”102 The twin imperatives of ijtihad and shūrā demand a
radically different concept of governance. Moreover, the Qur’ān describes the proper place of
those in authority as “from you” in Arabic, minkum. As Syed Mustafa Ali points out, this points
to the contingent and conditional nature of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, a
relationship that is horizonal rather than vertical wherein the ruler has “the same ontological and
political status as the ruled and cannot ‘Lord’ over the people.” Justice, in relation to the horizontal
relations between mankind, refers to the negation of any claim to temporal sovereignty and their
97
Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 241
98
Ibid.,, 242
99
Ibid., 243
100
Ibid., 242.
101
Ibn Mājah, on the authority of ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Umar.
102
Ahmad bin Hanbal, on the authority of Mu’adh ibn Jabal.

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concomitant hierarchies. The terms used to signify justice in the Qur’ān (‘adl and al-qisṭ) signifies
the state of equalizing and levelling, as opposed to zulm which as we have seen, is a transgression
of limits.

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