Dr. An-Na’im’s major failing, at least in the American environment, is his use of the term “secular” in the sense of neutrality toward “religion.” In American parlance, though not in most of the rest of the English-speaking world, secularism means hostility toward all religion. This is basic to the modernist elevation of political corporatism, known as the “sovereign state,” to the level of an ultimate authority or false god. This substitute for transcendent authority and transcendent natural law denies the very existence of communities at any level, ranging from the nuclear human family to entire nations and even to the community of humankind or of sentient beings throughout the universe.

The profound approach of Dr. An-Na’im is the subject of a whole series of books that have been and are being translated at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Virginia, to rescue from six centuries of obscurity the normative law paradigm of the maqasid al shari’ah. This major effort includes books recently written and under preparation, including my own, “The Natural Law of Compassionate Justice” and one under preparation, “The Natural Law of Faith-Based Reconciliation.” Both of these may serve as introductions to a monumental Faith-Based Encyclopedia of Natural Law, which is designed to provide a framework functionally equivalent to Professor An-Na’im’s but with more culturally sensitive terminology for an era in which ontological, epistemological, and politico-economic relativism has almost eliminated even the concept of justice.

For greatest receptivity in America, Dr. An-Na’im, might want to refer to the Preamble of the American Constitution, which lists the purposes of founding The Great American Experiment. These start with justice and end with freedom, because order, prosperity, and freedom are the product, not the source, of justice.