Our appreciation of the more complex history of religious governance in the West does not necessarily refute the normative importance of religious freedom in contemporary debates about religion and democracy. Indeed, as I hope will be clear in the following remarks, I personally endorse such efforts, at least where—as is the case in significant portions of the global south today—they resonate with the aspirations and circumstances of local actors. To understand such resonances as well as the alterities and resistances that ideas of religious freedom may encounter, it behooves us to deepen our understanding of the genealogy of democracy and religious freedom in the West. I do so here by way of three brief points.

The first is that democratization in the modern West did not give rise to a stable and universally valid practice of religious liberty, but a variety of governance regimes that, in most countries, secured religious freedom for some faith communities while restricting rights and privileges for those outside the imagined national community. Second, the form religious freedom and governance took in each Western country bore the unmistakable imprint of path-dependent struggles among different religious and class coalitions, all attempting to project their influence into the structures of religious governance. Third, the resulting varieties of religious governance seen in the modern West remind us that the practice of religious freedom was never the result of some unitary principle or hegemonic discourse, liberal or otherwise. Inasmuch as this is the case, those interested today in promoting—or critiquing—efforts to develop a more inclusive practice of religious citizenship in the world would do well to direct their attention to not just abstract principles of individual autonomy, but also to the situated practices, coalitions, and balances-of-social-power that ultimately determine which among the several varieties of religious governance are likely to prevail.

Behind my comments is a general reservation with regard to current debates on religious freedom. There is a tendency among proponents and critics of liberal freedom alike to over-intellectualize and homogenize the genealogy of religious freedom in the modern West. This simplification results in part from a tendency to conflate philosophical genealogies of religious freedom with a more comprehensive sociology of the real-and-existing varieties of religious governance. Although philosophies of religious freedom offer insights into the ways in which human rights and subjectivity were imagined and rationalized by intellectual elites, the struggles that gave rise to different systems of religious governance involved a more varied assortment of actors, norms, and powers. More important yet, the individuals and groups involved in such contests came to subscribe to notions of religious freedom, where they did so at all, on grounds that had as much to do with group identities and interests, and social pacts through which both were advanced, as they did any ontological commitment to individual autonomy or the sanctity of personal belief.  All evidence suggests that there is a similar diversity of motivations and political ontologies operative among those in the global south today who have concluded that some variety of religious freedom is congruent with their own needs and aspirations, even where liberal-philosophical ideals of individual autonomy are not. In settings like these, it may be more sociologically realistic to speak of “civic pluralist” rather than just “liberal” religious freedom, so as to emphasize that individual rights here may be most effectively secured through social pacts and arrangements that recognize group identities and rights as well as philosophical liberalism’s emphasis on the autonomy of the individual.

As the sociologist David Martin pointed out more than a generation ago in his A General Theory of Secularization, and as historians of religion like Hugh McLeod or political scientists like Ahmet Kuru and Jonathan Fox have more recently underscored, there was no single pattern of confessional freedom in modern Western Europe during the long century in which electoral democracy took hold. No European democracy, including laicist France, adopted the American model of a constitutional wall of separation combined with a relatively competitive and religionized public sphere. The majority of Western European countries recognized a state religion or several state-approved religions; most still do today. Most regimes of religious governance countenanced religious education in public schools. With a few notable exceptions like France, the majority of European countries do still today, although the aims of the courses in some schools are shifting from indoctrination into a particular faith tradition to education about religions. Most European states also provided tax revenues for the maintenance of schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and religiously-based associations.

Although some European countries extended state support to several religious communities, no European country provided equal treatment for the entire array of religious communities resident within its borders. In this sense, full religious freedom for most of the modern period was not universal, but selective and circumscribed. As with Jewish communities in the late nineteenth century and Muslim communities in Europe today, the terms for admission to the ranks of state-recognized religions were usually not constitutionally specified; they were instead the contingent result of social struggles and political pacts among representatives of different religious and class coalitions.

Today some supporters of religious freedom might be tempted to dismiss these examples as illiberal and undemocratic, and leave the matter there. But my point is simpler: these and other examples demonstrate that the history of democratization is not the story of the progressive maximization of any single democratic value, whether the autonomy of the individual or some other, but an evolving balance among several, sometimes discordant, public ethical values, along with the social groupings who served as their carriers. The history of religious governance in modern Europe’s consociational democracies, like the Netherlands and Belgium, illustrates this point with particular clarity.

Until the 1960s, the Netherlands—a laboratory for many Western ideas on republican freedom and economic liberalism—had a political and religious system organized around guaranteed group representation by way of what were known as religious “pillars” (verzuilingen). This arrangement was the pacted framework within which democratization in the modern Netherlands emerged, and it was premised on a more communitarian notion of citizenship than acknowledged in Atlantic liberal models of democracy. The pillars were vertical social structures based on the Netherlands’ four major ethico-religious groupings: Roman Catholics, orthodox Protestants, Reformed Protestants, and secular humanists. Since the 1990s, efforts have been made, still not fully successful, to secure state recognition for a fifth pillar, the growing community of Dutch Muslims.

In their heyday, the pillars were social and not ecclesiastical organizations, governed by a non-clerical administrative board. Established in the aftermath of the nineteenth century’s struggles among Dutch religious communities and secular humanists, pillar administration provided state funds for religious education, hospitals, and other social services. Even labor unions were organized in a pillarized way. Although regarded as prerequisites for the democratic peace, the pillars were controlled by leaders in a way that was, as the Dutch sociologist Anton Zijderveld once put it, “rather authoritarian and elitist,” even if allowing a “remarkable social and political pacification.” Civic peace and religious freedom were thereby secured by way of mechanisms that were as much vertical and communitarian as they were liberal.

The point of this comparison is not to suggest that religious governance in Dutch society was somehow an exception to the Western liberal rule. On the contrary, the consociational example is interesting because it makes more salient processes and tensions endemic to democratization and religious governance across all of Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Even as electoral democracy was being established, the emerging system of religious governance had as much or even more to do with group rights and elite pacts as it did any foundational commitment to individual autonomy. The precise balance of religious rights and exclusions also showed the imprint of nationally-specific cultures, struggles, and compromises. One could say that the history of religious freedom in the modern West looks very different when seen from the perspective of mundane struggles over religious education and finance rather than, say, liberal philosophers’ political ontologies.

It is also useful to make comparisons like these because the situations they evoke are far closer in organization and political dynamic to the religious landscapes in much of today’s global south. In matters of religion and governance, of course, there is no single “global south” or “new majority.”  The religious and political heritage varies greatly in different countries and regions. What is similar between parts of the global south and modern Europe, however, is the way in which the heightened mobility and plurality of people, goods, and ideas have given rise to new religious and ethical movements and, with them, calls for regimes of religious governance capable of accommodating the new plurality. Just as was and is still the case in the West, the precise form of these appeals has varied. In countries where national identity has long been fused with a more-or-less established religious community whose borders are policed by well-entrenched elites, pluralism and religious freedom, even in a consociational form, may appear or be portrayed as intrusive and inauthentic.  Elsewhere, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa or East-Southeast Asia, the relative weakness of a hegemonic world religion may create a more open and competitive religious market. Even here, however, the task of scaling up from religious diversity to a public ethical and legal framework that explicitly embraces such plurality is anything but guaranteed, dependent as it is on the passions and interests of different religious and class groupings.

The implications of this analysis for proponents of religious freedom are by no means dire, but they are cautionary. They imply that progress toward a sustainable and inclusive religious freedom depends, not only on the constitutional affirmation of principles of individual freedom, but on the creation of a public ethical culture and alliances of interest across and within ethical communities. No less important, and, again, contrary to some philosophical representations of religious freedom, the social motivations for popular support of religious freedom may have as much to do with the recognition and defense of group identities and interests as it does any self-conscious commitment to the autonomy of the individual.

Rather than a counsel of pessimism, however, this prescription is, as I understand it, quietly encouraging. It suggests that religious or—as I prefer to call it, subsuming it within a more plural and contingent ideal—civic pluralist freedom is a condition to which people in diverse societies can and will aspire because it allows them to resolve certain problems of co-existence in conditions of deep religious and ethical difference. Inasmuch as this challenge is pervasive in contemporary societies, we should not be surprised to see that many non-Western moderns rally to some variety of civic pluralist freedom. Equally important, and as has always been the case in Western democracies, even where people in different societies embrace civic pluralist freedoms, their reasons for doing so may well be based on religious ontologies more varied than those highlighted in liberal philosophy’s imaginary of autonomous individuals.

In a trademark gesture of democratic openness, in late 2003 An-Na`im circulated a draft of his new book to scholars and activists in Turkey, Egypt, the Sudan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria. From January 2004 to September 2006, he worked with local Islamic associations in all of these countries to organize workshops and focus groups to discuss and refine the book’s arguments. The English manuscript was also translated into Arabic, Indonesian, Bengali, French, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu; it was also made available on the Internet. Among the global Muslim intelligentsia, the draft quickly became a cultural event in its own right. The book version of the manuscript will both broaden the discussion and deepen the controversy.

Two things distinguish this new work from An-Na`im’s early writings. The first is his explicit endorsement of a secular state as the best form of government for Muslims and for the flourishing of Islam. In Toward an Islamic Reformation, An-Na`im had dedicated his energies to addressing believers’ understandings of Islam and Shari`a, and had less to say about the appropriate form of the state. As he put it, he hoped “to reconcile Muslim commitment to Islamic law with the achievement of the benefits of secularism within a religious framework.” In this new book, he sets his sights squarely on providing Islamic rationales for secular government.

The second quality that distinguishes this book from his earlier scholarship is its systematic effort to ground arguments in support of freedom, constitutionalism, and secularity on two bodies of research: historical studies of the development of Muslim politics and Shari`a from the early Islamic period to the rise of the Ottoman Empire; and case studies of Shari`a politics in modern India, Turkey, and Indonesia. An-Na`im plumbs the depths of these empirical materials to provide corroborating evidence in support of his larger argument.

The argument has three pillars: first, and contrary to the claims of some Western scholars and Islamist intellectuals like Hassan al-Turabi, religious and state institutions in Muslim societies have been effectively separated since the death of the Prophet Muhammad; second, modern Islamists’ demands for the establishment of an Islamic state based on a fusion of religion and state reflect, not enduring Islamic precedents, but a “postcolonial discourse that relies on European notions of the state and positive law”; and, third, Muslims can best realize Shari`a ideals in a secular state neutral on matters of religion but otherwise responsive to citizen values, as long as these are expressed through a “civic reason” accessible to all citizens.

In short, An-Na`im’s book presents an “Islamic argument for a secular state,” premised on constitutional governance and universal human rights. The appeal to civic reason has parallels with the recent statements by Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas on religion and the public sphere. However, An-Na`im’s commitment to secular government is distinctive in that the appeal is oriented toward not only concepts of popular welfare, but “the survival and development of Islam itself.”

On this latter point, An-Na`im’s approach bears a striking resemblance to that of two other modern Muslim pluralists, the late Nurcholish Madjid of Indonesia and Abdulkarim Soroush of Iran. Like both of these authors, An-Na`im argues that the most compelling grounds for a separation of religion and state have to do with, not liberalism, but efforts to safeguard Islam from abuse at the hands of the powerful. Also like these authors, An-Na`im’s secularism is of a sort that, while mandating a formal separation of religious and state institutions, allows and even requires religious actors and values to play a role in legislation, subject to the restriction that the values are recast in a non-sectarian form. Indeed, An-Na`im argues, secularism—”defined to mean only the separation of religion and state”—makes such “minimal moral claims” that it is “incapable of meeting the collective requirements of public policy.” The weakness is especially serious with regard to vexing moral issues like abortion and capital punishment. Inasmuch as this is so, the secular state must allow citizens of religious conviction to publicly express their views and influence legislation, with the proviso that that such legislation must be cast in terms “acceptable and convincing to the generality of citizens regardless of their religious or other beliefs.” The balance struck here between formal separation and allowing for the public role of religion “is difficult to establish and maintain, but there is no alternative to striving to achieve it.”

An-Na`im observes that one of the greatest threats to Islamic piety and observance today comes, not from outside the Muslim community, but from Muslims who would abolish the separation of religion and state in the name of an ostensibly Islamic government. He argues that all such étatizing projects are not only politically dangerous but religiously mistaken. Their religious error lies in their failure to recognize that the Qur’an places ultimate responsibility for observance of God’s commands, not on the state, but on individuals and the community of believers. “Shari`a principles by their nature and function defy any possibility of enforcement by the state.” By surrendering responsibility for the Shari`a to state authorities, proponents of the Islamic state create a “totalitarian” entity that is “incoherent and unworkable,” and thus doomed to foster hypocrisy, corruption, and cynicism among believers.

Although at first some of this may sound like a familiar critique of Islamist programs, An-Na`im’s ideas differ from Western liberal commentaries in that, while advocating a religiously-neutral state, they do not promote a religiously-neutral society. An-Na`im repeatedly emphasizes that for all observant Muslims the Shari`a is an unavoidable and hallowed obligation. Moreover, he explains, because its ethical discipline is socially encompassing, the Shari`a cannot be transformed into a system of purely personal ethics, as both liberal and authoritarian secularists have long recommended. Inasmuch as the Shari`a has such scope, the challenge for An-Na`im becomes to identify just what the Shari`a prescribes, and, having answered this question, to determine the sociopolitical arrangements that can most effectively realize its aims.

On the first of these two questions, concerning the Shari`a’s ethical prescriptions, An-Na`im takes what is from the perspective of Islamic scholarship (especially jurisprudence) a thoughtful but controversial tack. Rather than deducing the Shari`a’s stipulations from exegeses of Islamic sources, An-Na`im explains that his first order of business must be to develop an “interpretative framework” for understanding how believers come to understand Shari`a meanings. The argument here is that believers “always understand Islamic sources (or any other text, for that matter) as who we are, in our specific location and context.” Inasmuch as understanding is situationally contingent in this way, believers must take care to distinguish Shari`a as the “totality of the duty of Muslims” from “any particular perception of it through a specific human methodology of interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna.”

Readers familiar with late-nineteenth century German Biblical scholarship will not be surprised to learn that An-Na`im uses this constructionist model of religious knowledge to relativize the claim that the Shari`a provides clear and immutable guidelines for politics and ethics. Although some modernist Muslim scholars have advocated a partial heremeneuticization of believers’ understanding of divine law—by, for example, insisting that jurisprudence (fiqh) is changeable but the Shari`a is not—An-Na`im insists scholars must go further. He rejects the latter distinction as temporizing, insisting that, though God’s revelation is absolute, human judgment is not; “human interpretation of relevant texts… is unavoidable in both aspects of this issue.”

This emphasis on the situatedness and fallibility of human judgment provides the bridge between An-Na`im’s religious epistemology and his more general arguments concerning freedom, democracy, and constitutionalism. Just as an awareness of human agency as situated and fallible is “integral to any approach to the Qur’an and the Sunna,” so too “the whole process of formulating and implementing public policy and legislation is subject to human error and fallibility.” Institutional safeguards must be implemented in both realms, so as to guard against corrupting powers and policies that cloak temporal human judgments in the garb of divine commands.

As these statements hint, the social ontology underlying An-Na`im’s approach is egalitarian and, in a strictly delimited sense, liberal. The framework is liberal in that it aims to maximize religious freedom – albeit, for Muslims, within the compass of a divine law that must be observed even as it can never be known with absolute certainty. “Knowing and upholding Shari`a is the permanent and inescapable responsibility of every Muslim,” An-Na`im writes, echoing a near-universal opinion among Muslim scholars. But An-Na`im quickly adds an observation that tradition-minded scholars will find less familiar: Because upholding the Shari`a is the foundation for all Muslim ethics, “no human being or institution should control this process,” not least of all by prescribing just who is and who is not “qualified to exercise ijtihad” (independent religious judgment). Although the emphasis on opening the process of ijtihad to a broader public has been a leitmotif of Islamic modernism since the nineteenth century, statements like these make clear that An-Na`im aims to extend and equalize the right to a far greater degree than most reform-minded modernists. Conservative critics view proposals like these as an invitation to intellectual license, as well as an attempt to dynamite the hierarchical edifice of scholarship and learning on which their own religious authority depends.

There’s a deeper, albeit no less controversial, religious premise to An-Na`im’s argument. It is his conviction that the Shari`a is primarily concerned not with matters of state or criminal codes, but with “regulating the relationship between God and human believers” in a direct and unmediated manner. An-Na`im uses this characterization as the grounds for another boldly egalitarian prescription, one central to the book’s political argument. “Believers can neither abdicate nor delegate their responsibility” for abiding by the Shari`a; they alone must fulfill the obligation. Inasmuch as this responsibility allows no delegation, the idea of creating a religious or Islamic state is both logically and ethically impossible. It is in this sense that An-Na`im asserts that the state is “by definition secular and not religious,” and those who think otherwise act contrary to the spirit of God’s law.

As the historical discussion in the middle chapters of this book demonstrates, An-Na`im is well aware that since the first centuries of the Muslim era, believers have tended to see the relation of religion and state in a manner other than the separationist model he is proposing. When they wrote about it at all, most Muslim scholars described the state as neither secular nor religious, but as an entity whose legitimacy depended on the rulers’ ability to create conditions in which Muslims and the Shari`a could flourish.

In the book’s second chapter, An-Na`im provides a careful overview of the relationship of the ulama to the state from the time of the “rightly guided caliphs” to the modern Ottoman empire. Drawing on both Muslim and Western sources, he demonstrates that the separation of religious and state institutions was not the result of Western colonialism (as Turabi and other Islamist intellectuals have suggested), but developed as the early Muslim community evolved from a small Arabian movement into a vast empire. Even where rulers attempted to impose a “fusion model” of religion and state, as did the Fatimid dynasty in tenth and eleventh century Egypt, religious scholars still enjoyed significant practical autonomy.

An-Na`im emphasizes that, although institutionally differentiated, rulers and scholars in most countries developed a “mutually sustaining relationship.” This insight leads An-Na`im to emphasize what he describes as the central paradox of politics and religion in Muslim societies. Rulers “could not function without the consent of their subjects, which rested upon an unyielding demand that they implement and uphold Islamic orthodoxy.” At the same time, “the ulama and their institutions could not function without the support of the state apparatus, which not only protected the borders of the Islamic lands … but also endowed religious institution and enforced the regulations of the awqaf” (religious endowments on which mosques and madrasas depended for funding).

After reading comments like these on the interdependency of religious and state institutions, some Muslim readers may be tempted to draw conclusions different from those of An-Na`im concerning the proper relation of religion to state today. Rather than a secular state, some might feel that it makes more sense for Muslim societies to move toward a modernized and “massified” variant of the long-established relationship of mutual sustenance between rulers and ulama. As many modern analysts have pointed out, mass education, urbanization, and religious resurgence have created new Muslim publics in which the ulama’s monopoly over religious knowledge has been diminished. But some ulama have responded deftly to the challenge and developed methods for winning followers in the new mass market. In the face of Islamic resurgences and ulama re-assertions in countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia, once-secular rulers have concluded that it is in their interest to court favor with segments of the scholarly establishment, especially where state power is being challenged by populist protest (political dynamics nicely illustrated, for Pakistan, in Muhammad Qasim Zaman’s The Ulama in Modern Society, and, for Egypt, in Carrie Rosefsky Wickham’s Mobilizing Islam).

An-Na`im is familiar with this trend toward a neo-conservative accommodation of ulama and state. However, in keeping with his egalitarian and democratic vision of Shari`a, and in light of the abuses he has witnessed in Sudan and elsewhere, he holds firmly to the conviction that collaborations like these are intrinsically corrupting. “[I]f religious belief and piety are declining in any society, they cannot be restored through coercion or inducement through state institutions. To the contrary, state intervention in matters of religious belief and practice is deeply corrupting, by breeding hypocrisy (nifaq), which is repeatedly and categorically condemned in the Qur’an.” As scholars like David Martin and Hugh McLeod have shown, the evidence from Western Europe and the United States points to a similar conclusion: that popular piety and religious conviction are likely to remain socially vibrant where responsibility for religious matters is dispersed into the meeting houses and prayer groups of civil society rather than concentrated in the hands of state bureaucrats.

An-Na`im concludes his book with an observation that again underscores the depths of his commitment to a deeply pious but egalitarian profession of Islam. “I say that no human being should have the power to control what others may wish to believe or disbelieve.” No doubt the memories of his beloved teacher, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, hover over this assertion. But the argument is also informed by An-Na`im’s first principle of religious conviction: “Religious compliance must be completely voluntary according to personal pious intention (niyah), which is necessarily invalidated by coercive enforcement of those obligations.” Although this conviction resonates with modern ideals of freedom and equality, it is not derivative of Western discourses, but builds on long-established traditions of piety and mysticism in Islam.

This individualized vision of piety is not one to which all Muslims or even believing non-Muslims will subscribe. Even Muslims who agree with An-Na`im in rejecting the fiction of the Islamic state may see his pietistic politics as idealistic but unworkable in light of the political dynamics of modern Muslim societies. Like their Western Christian counterparts in the early modern age, many mainstream Muslim leaders seem comfortable with the idea that, however much it may be at variance with liberal notions, the state has a positive role to play in promoting Islamic learning and piety. Religious education in public schools, the call to prayers on radio and television, state-coordinated alms-collection—these and other collaborations across the state-society divide have become the norm, rather than the exception, in the late-modern Muslim world. As with the development of democracy in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, these collaborations—though still far short of anything like an “Islamic” state—may not be good for full religious freedom. However, as also in the late nineteenth century West, some Muslim societies may work from such compromised circumstances to strike an ever-evolving balance between limited state support for religion and a functioning if not-fully-liberal democracy. Although far from the liberal ideal, compromise arrangements like these may well be the path-dependent way through which democratization proceeds in many parts of the Muslim world.

Although political developments in Muslim societies may as yet be inhospitable to a full realization of An-Na`im’s egalitarian pietism, recent developments have created circumstances and public opinion quite favorable to his critique of the Islamic state. “The fundamental defect of the idea of the Islamic state is that the logic of the invocation of religious or moral authority can very easily be inverted, so that instead of regulating political power by religious authority, religion itself becomes subordinated to power.” This message resonates powerfully with the experience of many modern Muslims, who find themselves living under authoritarian regimes claiming to govern in the name of Islam. As with An-Na`im, opposition to these regimes, and support for a qualified separation of religion and state, is likely to be grounded as much on religious as political rationales.

In its preface, An-Na`im describes his new book as “the culmination of my life’s work, the final statement I wish to make on issues I have been struggling with since I was a student at the University of Khartoum, Sudan, in the late 1960s.” Islam and the Secular State testifies to the richness of that life work, and to the courage of an author who deserves to be recognized as one of the most important religious thinkers of our age.