“I made a video asking people not to be scared, asking how long will we live in fear, that we should go to the streets and that there are plenty of men in Egypt, and we can protect ourselves from Mubarak’s thugs. Now I’m getting many threatening calls from Mubarak’s people ordering me not to leave my home, and saying that if I do I will be killed along with my family.”
——Asma Mahfouz, to BBC Arabic Television

A young Egyptian woman willing to put her life on the line used Facebook to issue this clarion call to her compatriots. On February 25, they went out by the thousands. During the following days, their numbers swelled into the millions. The Revolution of 2011 had started. On February 11, the eighteenth day of the Revolution, President Mubarak was ousted and the stage of building a new Egypt began.

The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.

Over the course of eighteen days, Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the geographical center of Cairo and the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, became a swirling kaleidoscope of images of freedom, equality, and justice in the making, with the whole world looking on. Saturday, February 12, the first day Egypt woke up without its harsh dictator of thirty years at the helm of a repressive regime, was the first day in the in the new life of this ancient country. Young women and men who had gone out to sweep away the tyrannies, inequalities, and injustices could be seen on this day with brooms in hand, now literally sweeping the streets clean. With bottles of detergent and brushes in hand, they wiped the walls around the square. They even scoured the pedestals of the lion statues at the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, where the “Battle of the Bridge” erupted on the first Friday of the Revolution, and where the police hurled tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators making their way to Midan Tahrir to practice democracy their own way, feet—not boots—on the ground, when all other avenues were blocked.

Embedded feminism

In the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the youth were joined by citizens of all ages—workers, students, professionals, women and men, Muslims and Christians. It was a populist movement mobilized in cyberspace and through local networks, and acted out on national soil. The new feminism is a feminism embedded in revolution. It is so fused with the revolution that to use the term “feminism” seems redundant or superfluous, even anachronistic, and we have just observed that the revolutionary actors themselves do not use it. Yet feminism possesses conceptual and explanatory power, and so we employ it analytically. At the core of feminism is a call for the practice of equality and justice for women, who as a group have suffered historically from systemic inequality and injustice. Women in different parts of the world—Egypt among them—have on many occasions organized to take for themselves the rights that have been withheld from them. They have done so both in their own feminist movements and within broader social and political movements and configurations. Early in the last century, for instance, Egyptian women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, to fight for their rights as women while they worked simultaneously within the national liberation movement. In so doing, they set a precedent for multi-level activism. Egyptian feminists understood from the beginning that the equality and justice that they sought for women was of a piece with equality and justice for all.

Over the years, activists in Egypt seeking human rights, inclusive of women’s rights and social justice, pushed strenuously for reform. They tried to use classical methods—the vote, the press, television and radio, and public demonstrations—but elections were rigged, the media controlled, and public demonstrations met with violence, which for women often included sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. Reform movements typically involve campaigns focused on particular causes, including causes specific to women. In Egypt, as attempts to reform the existing political system were repeatedly thwarted—that is, brutally rendered impossible—by the state, revolution became the only way, and revolution demands a major overhaul of the political and social order, indeed, that the old system be swept away altogether.

In the twenty-first century, the tools of revolution have drastically changed, while the methods of state repression, as we have seen recently and vividly in Egypt, remain archaic and crude. The regime’s methods stemmed from the arrogant belief that an autocratic regime, with its vast power and violent means of repression, is unassailable. Autocrats take for granted that constitutions can be rewritten at will from on high to extend state power and impose their own rules for succession; that sham elections can produce compliant parliaments; and that the military, policy, intelligence, and security apparatuses possess limitless authority to muzzle citizens.

It is Egypt’s youth who have mastered the tools of the twenty-first century—information and communications technologies—and who are at home in cyberspace, a “country” in which they are free even while they remain shackled in their homeland. It is the youth who possess a belief in ideals, a vision, and a healthy impatience. Navigating the Internet, and with careful coordination on the ground, undaunted they mounted a peaceful assault upon the unmitigated, suffocating power of tyranny and oppression that had left no segment of society untouched.

Cairo’s Midan Tahrir has been called the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, whose topography extends to Alexandria, Suez, and cities and towns throughout the country, including even the oasis city of Kharga, deep in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt. The choreography of shouting, gesticulating, dancing young men and women, joined by Egyptians of all ages, was caught on live feeds and transmitted instantaneously across the globe. It was captured on film and videos and recorded on cell phones and digital cameras by demonstrators and reporters. This rich visual and oral album displays a gender pastiche of women and men side by side—clusters upon clusters of women amid seas of men, women and men shoulder to shoulder, and families with small children. The demonstrators and their supporters all craved the same thing: an end to the tyranny of the dictator and his corrupt regime, and the emergence of a free society with equal opportunity for all. They called for an end to the inequities of gender, class, and connection that formed the tight and insidious web of patriarchal hierarchy.

The downfall of authoritarianism and the building of a new egalitarian and just order

With the dismantling of the three-decade-old autocracy of Mubarak—itself a continuation of the previous autocracy—and the hierarchies that spawned spirals of injustice as people’s basic rights were hijacked, the people of Egypt, led by its youth, grabbed for themselves the chance to rebuild.

The builders of the new Egypt want nothing less than full equality in law and practice, justice, and dignity for all. As we speak, a special committee is drafting a new constitution (to supplant the previous one that was arbitrarily altered by Mubarak). Laws that undermine the equality, justice, and dignity of the citizens of Egypt must either go or be drastically overhauled. The Muslim Personal Status Code (also referred to as family law) structures a model of the family based on a patriarchal understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This law, by formalizing male authority and power, shores up a system of gender inequality. The husband is cast as the head of family, with the attendant privileges and prerogatives, along with obligations of protection and support, while the wife, as subordinate, owes obedience to her husband and must render services in return for his support and protection, whether she wants it or not.

Feminists, as well as other reformers, have tried since the early twentieth century to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code. Over the years, they obtained only minor adjustments in the law, which did not disturb the patriarchal family model. A common excuse for this failure to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code is that it is religious law, part of the shar ‘iah, and therefore sacred and immutable. The confusion of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which is man-made, with the shar ‘iah, which is the path to a virtuous life, ascertained from the Qur’an, has been a potent deterrent of change. However, it is possible to enact an egalitarian family law based in Islamic jurisprudence, as Morocco did in 2004, with the overhaul of the Mudawanna that recast husband and wife as equal heads of the family. It is also theoretically possible, if politically difficult, to enact into law a secular egalitarian model of the family that would reflect the spirit of religion and its ideals of equality, justice, and dignity, the ulemah, or religious scholars, in Turkey say their country’s secular family law does.

With the overthrow of the authoritarian state in Egypt and the dismantling of the buttresses of its power, and with legal reform already underway with the creation of the committee tasked with drafting a new constitution, equality and justice in law and practice now have a renewed chance at realization. The harsh inequities that authoritarianism enforces were there for all to see, in their starkest, most extreme form, in the practices of the regime that the youth eventually took down. Will the youth now be willing to accept patriarchal authoritarianism sustained by the old family law, a law so out of sync with contemporary social realities—with their own realities? It is very hard to see by what logic they could do so. Freedom, equality, and justice cannot be reserved for some only. For the youth, female and male, who raised this revolution, freedom, equality, and justice are surely non-negotiable, and dignity, the order of the day. This is the essence of the new feminism, call it what you will.

An-Na‘im recognizes that this case may seem to be a hard sell for the Muslims who are his primary audience. He reports that a series of focus groups that he sponsored in Indonesia to discuss these ideas were almost uniformly hostile to the concept of a secular state, which participants associated with Western attempts to undermine Islam. In Indonesia and elsewhere, many devout Muslims associate the secular state with the promotion of irreligion.

An-Na‘im proposes that the opposite is more likely. Through a variety of Islamic arguments, he makes the case that a secular state is actually good for religion. From the standpoint of Islamic ethics (‘ilm al-akhlaq), he argues that state enforcement of shari‘a vitiates Muslims’ ability to carry out their religious duties through the exercise of human will. From the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), An-Na‘im remarks that Islamic sacred sources say little about the form of government that Muslims should adopt, citing work by other major scholars such ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq (Egypt, 1888-1966) and Nurcholish Madjid (Indonesia, 1939-2005). He argues that the existence of multiple interpretations of Islam undermines the claim that there is a single, timeless set of shari‘a regulations for the state to enforce.

From the biographies of the earliest generations of Muslims (siyar al-salaf), An-Na‘im argues that the first four successors to Muhammad in the 7th century offered a precedent for the modern secular state. These leaders, known in the Islamic heritage as the “Rightly Guided Caliphs,” were particularly devout and religiously knowledgeable, An-Na‘im notes (to note otherwise would place him outside of the Sunni mainstream). Their legitimacy as rulers of the Muslim community was based not on their religious authority, he argues, but rather on their political authority as heads of state. Other companions of the Prophet, who are also revered for their piety and Islamic learning, did not necessarily agree with the policies of these first caliphs, but they accepted caliphal authority in order to protect the new polity.

And from the standpoint of contemporary Islamic welfare (maslaha), An-Na‘im argues that state enforcement of shari‘a — as it has been traditionally understood — undermines democracy and human rights, including the rights of women, non-Muslims, and the freedom to choose one’s religion. In each of these areas, An-Na‘im suggests that Muslims need to engage their religious traditions in a spirit of self-criticism, rather than perpetuate misguided aspects of Islamic heritage out of understandable defensiveness about Western colonial and post-colonial influences.

An-Na‘im weaves these Islamic discourses together with case studies of three secular states — Turkey, India, and Indonesia — where Islamic faith is, if anything, on the rise. An-Na‘im notes some of the drawbacks of these secular regimes. In Turkey, the Kemalist version of secularism inhibits the free expression of religiosity (most famously women’s desire to wear headscarves in public institutions). In India, the post-colonial state has largely endorsed the colonial-era Anglo-Mohammedan system of personal and family law, to the detriment of Islamic reformist movements. In Indonesia, the government forces citizens to register as members of one of the five official religions. Still, these secular governments have not undermined religion, as some devout Muslims fear. If anything, Muslims’ religious freedom may be greater under these regimes than under so-called Islamic regimes, which favor certain sects and interpretations and impose barriers on others.

An-Na‘im does not engage in statistical analysis, but one could add to his argument the findings of the World Values Survey: among Muslims in India, Indonesia, and Turkey, regular attendance at religious services (weekly or more often) is higher than under the decidedly pro-shari‘a regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia. In fact, religious attendance in Iran and Saudi Arabia is among the lowest quartile of 20 countries with significant Muslim populations surveyed by the World Values Survey over the past decade. These figures — and An-Na‘im’s case for secularism — seem to be consistent with competition theories in the sociology of Christianity: the less monopolistic the religious scene, the greater the incentives for religious denominations to market themselves to potential adherents, with the result that more people are drawn into religious participation.

The World Values Survey also asked Muslims in eight countries whether the state should enforce only shari‘a law, and 68 percent agreed. Yet a majority of these pro-shari‘a respondents also agreed with the statement that “Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government.” Similarly in the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a majority of Muslims in 10 countries who said that they wanted Islam to play “a very large role” in political life also said that “democracy is not just for the West and can work well here.” The Gallup World Poll appears to found a similar overlap between pro-shari‘a and pro-democracy attitudes in many Muslim-majority countries, though the detailed findings are beyond my budget (the WVS and Pew data are free).

Democratic procedures are only one of An-Nai’m's criteria for a truly secular state. At other points in this book, An-Na‘im also suggests that all modern states count as “secular”: “the state is by definition a secular political institution, especially in the present context of Islamic societies,” since some or all of the personnel in charge of the state are lay rulers whose selection and policies depend on factors external to religious interpretation — even the Saudi monarchy (which came to power through force) or the Iranian president (who came to power through popular, if limited, election). The very idea of the nation-state, which has become entrenched in post-colonial societies, is a secular notion. (Though some governments have tried to Islamicize the concept — in Uzbekistan, for example, the Communist-era bosses who run the post-Soviet state posted billboards quoting a statement of the Prophet Muhammad, “Feeling for one’s homeland (vatan) is greater than all things.”)

Elsewhere, An-Na‘im offers a more restrictive definition of the secular state that involves the substance of state policies: states that attempt to enforce traditional shari‘a norms are not secular, by these lights. To count as secular, a state must protect human rights, even when these run counter to the will of the majority or to traditional understandings of Islamic piety. In an earlier project, Islamic Family Law in a Changing World, An-Na‘im documented many of these legal limitations on a country-by-country basis, and his current work encourages Muslims to face up to these human rights failings.

An-Na‘im also offers an even more restrictive definition of the secular state that focuses not just on the substance of policy but also on the form of political discourse used to make policy. To invoke religious authority as the basis for policy, he argues, is a breach of secularism, regardless of the content of the policy. In this vision of the secular state, policy must be grounded in civic reason: “For example, if all I can say in support of the prohibition of interest on loans is that it is prohibited for me as a Muslim (haram), then there is nothing to discuss with other citizens, who must either reject or accept my proposal only on the strength of my religious belief. … It is also better for my own faith as a Muslim to reflect on the social rationale for the dictates of Shari‘a and try to persuade others of the general good of those commandments.”

This approach overlaps considerably with John Rawls’s concept of “public reason,” An-Na‘im notes, but the authors also differ in significant ways. For Rawls, religion was a side issue and only permissible in political debate under exceptional circumstances, such as the social divides that confronted the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement in the United States. Rawls’s position was firmly allied with the secularization thesis in the sociology of religion, whereby religion inevitably recedes from the public sphere as a country modernizes. For An-Na‘im, by contrast, religion is a permanent and worthwhile feature of human life that informs many citizens’ political priorities, just as other aspects of social position and ideology do — a position that is consistent with the work of Christian Smith and others in the sociology of religion who have contested the secularization thesis. An-Na‘im favors a secular state, but he also favors a robust role for faith in public life.

Rawls and An-Na‘im also differ in the focus of their normative judgments. An-Na‘im is writing primarily for Muslims, and he urges non-Muslims to let Muslims take the lead in gaining their freedoms. By contrast, Rawls wrote primarily for the United States and other North Atlantic democracies — these countries provide the bulk of his examples and the institutional framework for his ideals of justice. His main consideration of the rest of the world, a late book entitled The Law of Peoples, focuses primarily on the threat that illiberal regimes pose to the North Atlantic democracies. These other regions must be contained or reformed, by military intervention if necessary — the same “civilizing mission” reasoning propagated by imperialists. An-Na‘im considers such interventions to be hypocritical and ineffective — hypocritical since altruistic discourses are almost always combined with exploitative practices, and ineffective because the aftermath of the intervention is rarely liberal or democratic.

At the same time, Rawls also considers the possibility of “decent” non-liberal peoples, whose polities may not be fully democratic but at least enforce the rule of law and respect human rights. These “decent” nations pose no threat to the international order and should be left alone to live their own way, so long as they do not become indecent. Rawls’s example of a “decent” non-liberal people, tellingly, is a fictional Muslim country, “Kazanistan” — presumably a play on the capital of Tatarstan, Kazan. An-Na‘im, writing for the citizens of the “Kazanistans” of the world, is not prepared to give non-liberal Islamic states a free pass. He does not call for Western intervention, but rather for internal reform. Muslims themselves have a duty to bring about constitutionalism, human rights, and democratic citizenship, An-Na‘im argues. He proposes that the best path toward these ideals — and the best path toward Islamic fulfillment — is a secular state.

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.