In his new book, which he says will be his final statement on these issues, an-Na`im argues that Muslims need a secular state to live their religious lives. Alongside his immensely informative account of modern developments, he makes a sustained argument against state enforcement of Islam along two major lines. First, it makes no religious sense for a state to force Muslims to follow God’s will, because Muslims should act from conviction and choice. This argument of course was the key tenet in John Locke’s Letter on Toleration, and rests on the distinction between inner religious states and beliefs, on the one hand, and outer acts of compliance with the sovereign’s, or the state’s, demands, on the other. Why should the sovereign try to control his subjects’ beliefs when they are out of his control? It would be better, argued Locke, to focus on what matters: obedience and loyalty. Modern readers of Locke’s essay sometimes miss the caveats: religious belief of some sort is required for enforcing laws—for example, to ensure that a subject fears God sufficiently that he will tell the truth after taking an oath in court—and religion must not interfere with absolute obedience to the sovereign—for example, if one follows a Pope rather than a King. Locke’s Toleration is of inner conviction alone, and inner conviction of a Protestant sort.

An-Na`im makes a second argument that is parallel to the first: not only is it futile and religiously counter-productive to enforce Islamic piety, but doing so also distorts and impoverishes religion. Islam as a system of religious understanding depends on the possibility of open debate and legitimate disagreement, and always has contained variation and disagreement. Islam as a set of state laws flattens Islamic jurisprudence into a single code. The state selects one view among many, and then freezes it into a rule to be followed, rather than a set of judgments and interpretations to guide and inform future decisions. At that moment it becomes political will and not religious law.

Now, one might infer from these arguments that an-Na`im wishes for Islam to become a private and individualistic faith, and to be divorced from public life. Such is not his intent. Citizens are quite free to engage in what he called “civic reason” and democratic deliberation, and to decide that certain laws should indeed be inspired by the word of God, as long as those laws respect certain limits, in particular the constitutional foundation for laws and the equal rights of all citizens. Society may be deeply religious and, more crucially, so may the legal apparatus, but only as an outcome of democratic processes and not as the starting point imposed a priori on citizens.

An-Na’im combines a sophisticated normative argument, which includes historical evidence for his claims that these views can be seen as Islamic, and an examination of three countries that are secular in some sense and to some degree, but that have large, and in two cases majority, Muslim populations: India, Turkey, and Indonesia. In these country studies he explores, in a refreshingly open-ended way, the degree to which Muslims in each place accept something like his own version of secularism—not to be confused with locally dominant understandings of the word “secularism.”

“Secularism,” of course, has taken on many conflicting meanings, from the neutrality of the state vis-à-vis specific religions, to an avoidance of religious referents in political deliberation, to an avoidance of or hostility toward religion. To an-Na`im, “the secular state” refers to an ideal sequence of decisions, where the state begins outside of religion, on constitutional foundations that are not intrinsically dependent on religious norms, and the reasons citizens propose for subsequent laws do not invoke religion. In this respect, as he notes, an-Na`im restricts the sphere of legitimate public reasons more severely than did John Rawls, who allowed citizens to explain how religious (or other “comprehensive”) doctrine lies behind their advocacy of this or that legislation. In this respect, Rawls’ conception better describes the state of debate in the United States, for example, insofar as reasons for supporting a law may depend on a conception of human life, or stewardship of the environment, that itself is grounded in religion. But an-Na`im argues that for most societies with large Muslim populations, the better pathway to civic harmony and social peace would be to imagine the polity in non-religious terms.

An-Na`im’s analysis of the philosophical bases for his view and his fresh and well-informed observations on religion and pluralism in India, Turkey and Indonesia are intelligent and important. Let me pose two challenges to his view, however, in the spirit of opening debate. These challenges involve the two basic arguments I mentioned above, and turn on two polarities that subtend these arguments: for the first, the opposition of free choice to state compulsion, and for the second, a dichotomy between the long-standing processes of Islamic jurisprudence and the forms of modern, secular law.

First, free choice versus state compulsion. An-Na`im argues that a Muslim can only completely practice her or his religion in conditions of complete freedom, because the religious act-prayer, alms-giving, fasting-must follow from a sincere intention to serve and obey God. These states of mind cannot be compelled. The argument fits well a post-Lockean approach to religious freedom. But the domain of sharî`a can extend well beyond these individual acts. Muslims can, and often do, consider sharî`a to constitute a set of norms and values that appropriately shape the nature of social institutions, from banks and pious trusts to the operation of mosques and religious judges.

Many Muslims consider it to be the proper role of the state to provide and supervise some of these institutions. For example, in many countries with large Muslim populations, women’s groups and many others have fought to make divorce an act that must occur before a civil judge, who can dissolve a marriage on the request of the wife or the husband. In an-Na`im’s terms, this shift sometimes gives the state a greater role than before in “enforcing sharî`a.” But in the eyes of the groups who successfully lobbied for this change, it gave women greater protection from unilateral divorces and abandonment, and gave them a greater capacity to initiate a divorce proceeding. The state was essential to changing the effective nature of Islam in social life.

Secondly, Islamic jurisprudence versus state law. An-Na`im correctly points out that codification of law freezes it in some sense, eliminating some positions and privileging others. But he makes the further claim that once a state enforces what it says is an element of sharî`a, that element becomes “the political will of the state rather than the religious law of Muslims.” This claim might be true by definition, if we take law to be positive and thus represents the will of the state, and we take religious law to be divine in origin and historically derived through the methods of Islamic jurisprudence. For an-Na`im, religious law is to be found in the decisions of Islamic judges and the legal opinions of Islamic scholars, but only to the extent that these decisions and opinions do not become state law. For example, once the Indonesian state compiled a code of Islamic law to be applied by the courts, authority passed from revelation to the executive, and sharî`a was trivialized.

But was the authority only revelation before it became the monopoly of the executive? Traditional Islamic jurisprudence was not only an activity of scholars; it also was a way of developing a set of enforceable norms. Judges decided cases based on their sense of the matter at hand but also based on decisions taken elsewhere and on the legal opinions put forth by muftis. One might say: then was then and now is now, and all we have is the state. Well, prior to the 1992 Indonesian compilation of Islamic law, state judges decided cases based on various texts of jurisprudence, and their decisions were enforced by state courts. In the colonial and pre-colonial periods, where there were Islamic tribunals and judges, their decisions were backed by political power. The social life of Islamic norms, regarding, say, family matters, never was an unmediated translation of revelation through scholarship into free individual action, without compulsion, in a politics-free civil society. Authority is political, whether in the form of a modern state or a local prince standing behind the judge. Do rulings cease to be Islamic (or, more generally, religious), once they are enforced? To the extent that religious self-conceptions, from Augustine to Muhammad, include ideas of authority and restraint, the answer must be no.

The importance of an-Na`im’s book for me lies in its intelligence and humanity. An-Na`im’s commitment to pluralism, and to seeking ways to reduce the divisive effects of religious commitment, must be applauded. What we should continue to discuss is whether these commitments are incompatible with other conceptions of religion and state: whether, for example, reformulations of sharî`a around ideas of sharî`a’s objectives (the maqâsid ash-sharî`a) can produce similarly positive social outcomes. Many of an-Na`im’s interlocutors would urge him to consider this possibility alongside his own formulations, and I would join them in at least raising the question.

(I) Where is the Secular Age?

Charles Taylor’s remarkable account of developments within Latin Christendom situates contemporary religious or non-religious commitments within what he calls the “immanent frame,” the key to which is the secular condition (his third meaning of secularity), in which belief is an option, and religion a distinct domain. Early in his study, he remarks that such is not the case everywhere: in Muslim societies generally, and for people in religious moments in the West: pilgrims at Czestochowa or Guadalupe, for example. We could add: and for people growing up in believing Baptist communities in Nebraska or Mennonite ones in Manitoba or Hindu ones in Gujarat or Bali.

We might also, in a pursuit which is not his, differentiate within a category such as “Muslim societies” and ask: what are the modes of relating to the transcendent that are possible within this tradition? For some, God is everywhere and the self porous, whether one is at work, at home, or in the mosque. “Muslim” is a self-identification rarely invoked in everyday life because Islam is the background condition for everyone, all the time. Such were the contours of life where I have lived in Sumatra, for example.

For other Muslims, in other places, “Islam” does become an object of study as a system of knowledge and practice rather than just a background condition, and it is for these people, in these places, that part of the “secular age,” with Taylor’s sense of embattlement, shapes life. As many scholars have noted, it is mass education, migration to cities (and a fortiori to Europe and North America), and global communications that develop this orientation to the world. This objectifying of the tradition and continual consciousness of religious pluralism may or may not, however, be accompanied by the other features of the package, such as the buffered self. Spirit possession lives on in urban Muslim environments.

If, then, we take this orientation to one’s tradition as one among many to be the key feature of the secular age, we then may ask about (a) the social features that develop or encourage it, and (b) the degree to which other features of Taylor’s secular package may or may not follow along. (I have mentioned the variability of notions of the self.)

But this approach threatens to reactivate the West/East divide that Taylor carefully acknowledges is not his intent. We then must ask: to what extent does Taylor’s package of elements of the secular condition apply to the pilgrims to Czestochowa or Guadalupe, or, to ensure that West/East is not fractally applied within Europe and the Americas, the pilgrims to Lourdes or the worshippers at a North American megachurch? Can, for example, the awareness that one’s faith is one among many, that one is embattled as a believer, not coexist with a temporary or even permanent sense of transcendence, a porous self, and a strong intra-community sense of religion-as-background? It may be that we need a stronger sense of scope, one that includes various types of communities, as more than the individual (Taylor’s quest seems to fall back on individual faith even as it acknowledges the power of “post Durkheimian” moments of enthusiasm for renewing that faith) and as less than the entire world.

(II) What is the post-religious dimension of secularity?

One of the more important insights in the book, I think, is the argument that you can only be post-religion if you continue to remember religion. This idea opens up analysis to specific forms of memory, but then requires that we think of secularity as an element in contemporary discourse as much as a label for a condition, and one that can be used to create new histories.

France is one of Taylor’s primary cases, and the French secularist sense of being post-religious highlights the memory of having pushed the Catholic Church out of its once-regnant role, and the need to remain vigilant lest that role be reassumed by it or by other, similarly noxious actors (read: Islamists). But part of that continued vigilance is a reading back into history a “victory of laïcité” story, wherein laïcité grows and develops and conquers over two centuries.

Of course there is no historical actor called “laïcité.” The word has only very recently been a key component of Republican rhetoric, even if one finds it in earlier dictionaries, whatever that tells us about rhetorical force. Nor has it ever had an agreed-on meaning: for some it is a legal framework (one that includes massive support for religious institutions, as when the state pays the salaries of the Catholic school teachers); for others it is a philosophy, a replacement for religion. But above all, it is an effective way of shutting down your opponent: being non-laïc is a bit like not supporting our troops or honoring the Queen—something no one would think of doing, so needlessly politically self-wounding it would be.

Secularity remains then, in W.B. Gallie’s phrase, an “essentially contested concept” that cannot easily become an analytical concept for investigating current political debates and arrangements. We cannot easily say that “the United States separated church and state” without taking into account the very different notions of what Thomas Jefferson intended to do, anymore than we can say that France “is a secular state” without charting the series of historically contingent interventions of the state into religious affairs. Studying the politics of secularism in the Secular Age thus needs to take “secularism,” “laïcité,” “separation” and so forth as objects of study rather than analytical tools.