—Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, TIF guest editors

The right to religious liberty is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies that guarantees the peaceful co-existence of religiously diverse populations. While all members of a polity are supposed to be protected by the right to religious liberty, religious minorities are understood to be its greatest beneficiaries in the protection it accords them to practice their beliefs freely without fear of state intervention or social discrimination. Conventional wisdom has it that religious liberty is a universally valid principle, enshrined in national constitutions and international charters and treaties, whose proper implementation continues to be thwarted by intransigent forces in society such as illiberal governments, religious fundamentalists, and traditional norms. Insomuch as the Middle East, and the Muslim world in general, are supposed to be afflicted with the ills of fundamentalism and illiberal governments, then the salvific promise of religious liberty looms large. In this brief post I would like to question this way of thinking through a consideration of the career of religious liberty in the modern Middle East (for a fuller development of the arguments here, see my forthcoming article, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History).

As I will show, far from being a universally valid, stable principle, the meaning and practice of religious liberty have shifted historically in the Middle East, often in response to geopolitical struggles, the expansion of modern state power, and local regimes of socio-religious inequality. Rather than treat the history of the Middle East as simply one of aberration from the norm of Western tolerance, in what follows I would like to consider how this history makes us rethink the normative claims enfolded in the current advocacy of the right to religious liberty and the universal good it is supposed to facilitate. In offering these reflections, my intent is neither to promote nor to reject the right to religious liberty but to force us to consider the contradictions and paradoxes that lie at the foundation of this much coveted right.

Let us consider briefly the historical trajectory of religious liberty in the late Ottoman Empire that offers an interesting contrast to its historical unfolding in Western Europe. The modern conception of religious liberty—with its attendant notion of individual conscience and belief as the proper locus of religion—was unknown in the Ottoman Empire until well into the mid-eighteenth century. As is well known, under the Ottoman millet system “the people of the book” (Christians and Jews) were granted limited collective autonomy over certain juridical affairs (including issues of marriage, family, and worship) but were otherwise treated as social and political unequals of Muslims. This juridical autonomy was one of the primary ways in which the Ottomans managed to rule over an immense diversity of religious faiths for over six centuries. Importantly, this “nonliberal model of pluralism” was different from the liberal model in that each religious community’s autonomy was justified not in terms of groups versus individual rights, but in terms of a political order in which difference was paramount. The Ottomans did not aim to politically transform difference into sameness as does the modern nation-state; instead various contiguous religious groups were integrated through a vertical system of hierarchy in which Muslims occupied the highest position. Importantly, the liberal individualist notion of civil and political equality that makes the modern conception of freedom of belief possible was not the paradigm in this pre-modern period.

Things of course started to slowly change with the birth of the modern state wherein the terms “majority” and “minority” came to serve as constitutional devices for resolving differences that the ideology of nationalism sought to eradicate, eliminate, or assimilate. The Ottoman Empire formally adopted the right to religious liberty in 1856 (under the famous Hatt-i Hümayun decree) largely under European pressure. This pressure was far from a benign attempt on the part of Europeans to promote religious tolerance in Ottoman lands: their own record toward “Christian dissidents” much less non-Christian minorities was hardly tolerant at the time. Notably, the European pressure was a product of long-standing geopolitical struggles between Christian European states and the Ottomans. Christian European rulers had made repeated attempts throughout the sixteenth century to assert their right to protect Christian minorities within Ottoman territories. As long as the Ottoman Empire was strong it was able to accommodate these pressures without compromising its sovereignty, but once Ottoman power started to decline it was unable to resist Western European incursions on behalf of Ottoman Christian groups. As early as the sixteenth century, Ottoman rulers had granted special privileges—known as “capitulations”—to Western European traders that ensured a considerable degree of self-government in matters of criminal and civil jurisdiction as well as freedom of religion and worship. Eventually, as Ottoman power declined, these privileges came to apply not only to Western traders but also to European missionaries and eventually indigenous Ottoman Christian communities (what were then called “Eastern Christians”). Notably, no parallel privileges existed for non-Christians residing in territories ruled by Christian empires at this time. Macolm Evans, in his magisterial history of the right to religious liberty, notes, “Within this framework, the role of Western European States as protectors of the religious freedom of their subjects within the Ottoman domains easily elided into a claim entitling them to champion the liberties, religious and otherwise, of all Christians in the Empire.”

When Ottoman rulers adopted the modern conception of the right to religious liberty in 1856, the fate of non-Muslim communities in the empire was only formally but not substantively transformed. As historians of the late Ottoman Empire point out, for the Ottoman rulers the right to religious liberty served as a dual means to fend off increasingly powerful Christian missionary movements on the one hand, and to shore up the Islamic character of the empire on the other. The empire had already lost large parts of its territory (one-third by 1878), and the Ottoman reformers were eager to bring Christians who had become protégés of foreign states (under the system of capitulations) back under the jurisdiction of the Ottoman state. For many Ottoman Christians, however, the right to religious liberty served as a means of claiming Western protection against systemic discrimination, in the process transforming their identity and self-understanding.

In contrast to the Ottoman rulers and Ottoman Christians, religious liberty meant something quite distinct to the European missionaries who had considerably expanded their activities in the Muslim world by the nineteenth century. For these missionaries, religious liberty was a crucial means for securing the right to proselytize freely among Muslims and Christians without constraint from existing laws and prohibitions against religious conversion. In Egypt, for example, Euro-American missionaries, who had failed to win converts among Muslims, concentrated their energies on Coptic Orthodox Christians whom they had long regarded with disdain and outright contempt as practitioners of a depraved form of Christianity. Importantly, American and European missionaries enjoyed the protection of British colonial authorities in Egypt, and the colonial period (1882–1918) was the apex of missionary activities in the region. The advantages accorded to Westerners under the Ottoman capitulations proved to be crucial for the missionaries in gaining access to Egyptian rural and urban populations. These missionaries made ubiquitous use of international diplomacy and colonial and foreign offices of Anglo-American governments in their cause, internationally advocating for the adoption of religious liberty in forums as diverse as the League of Nations, the Paris Peace Conference, the U.S. State Department, and the British Foreign Office. The recent passage of the International Religious Freedom Act by the U.S. Congress (1998) to promote the right of religious liberty (particularly Christians) in the Middle East must be placed within this long geopolitical history in which Western powers have often violated the principle of state sovereignty under the guise of promoting religious tolerance. No non-Western nation-state in modern history has been able to exert the same pressure to advocate the rights of religious, racial, or ethnic minorities living in the Western world.

Given the history I have tracked here, it is important to realize that the meaning of religious freedom has varied historically depending on the geopolitical position of the players in the Middle East. Furthermore, the career of the right of religious liberty has hardly been one of secular neutrality in the Middle East. Through much of its modern history, the right to religious liberty has served as a means to either promote campaigns of religious proselytization to win Christian converts, or to consolidate the majoritarian ethos of the emergent modern state. This history forces us to consider how religious liberty is not simply a juridical means of protecting the individual believer from state coercion. Rather, crucially, it is a technique of national and international governance whose proper exercise has always entailed realpolitik concerns.

One may ask at this point, how have the religious minorities of the Middle East been affected by these geopolitical struggles over religious liberty? The answer to this question of course varies depending on the history of each nation-state in the region. If we take the example of Coptic Orthodox Christians in Egypt, the largest Christian population in the Middle East, one would need to start with the history of the longstanding rivalry and struggle between Western and Oriental Orthodox Christianity (of which Coptic Christianity is a part). Throughout much of modern history, starting with the Roman Catholic Church, Western Christendom has continued to view Coptic Christianity as a primitive form of Christianity whose salvation could only come from the West. This view was further entrenched by the wave of Protestant missionaries, initially sent from Europe (Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Lutherans) and later the United States (Presbyterian Evangelicals), none of whom had success with Muslim converts and concentrated their energies on the Copts. In light of this rivalry, it is not surprising that Coptic Christians historically resisted European offers of patronage to “protect and represent” the Copts against Muslim rule. Thus, unlike, for example, the Maronite Christians of Lebanon who made strong alliances with French colonial powers, the Copts were at the forefront of the anti-colonial struggle against the British and were equal players in the shaping of the nationalist project in the 1940s and 1950s.

Despite this distinguished history of Coptic resistance and the enshrinement of the right to religious liberty in the Egyptian constitution, Coptic Christians have continued to suffer from various forms of formal and informal discrimination in postcolonial Egypt. In recent years, the discourse of religious liberty has become a dominant idiom in the Coptic struggle against social and state policies that marginalize Copts on the basis of their religious identity. In this struggle, however, religious liberty once again is not a stable signifier but means very different things to different groups.

At the heart of the contested meaning of religious liberty in Egypt is a political system that has enshrined the Coptic Orthodox Church as the sole representative of the Coptic community and created a church-state entente that makes it difficult for secular-lay Copts to change the terms of debate. As a result, the Coptic Church tends to deploy a communitarian understanding of religious liberty that serves to consolidate its authority over the religious and social life of its followers. This conception sits in tension with an individualist notion advocated by secular human rights activists grounded in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), both of which privilege notions of personal conscience, belief, and choice. The Euro-American Coptic diaspora, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Christian evangelical global network, champions a third concept grounded in Article 27 of the ICCPR that foregrounds a collective conception of religious freedom as a right of minority groups. Finally, the Egyptian government promotes its own narrow conception of religious liberty aimed at securing the Islamic character of the Egyptian nation and national-security interests.

It would be wrong to assume that religious liberty consists of simply protecting certain groups or individuals from the exercise of state power (that is, drawing the separation between church and state firmly and resolutely). The people who are supposed to benefit most from the modern principle of religious liberty—namely, religious minorities—are not merely protected from abuses of state power but are also transformed by virtue of their subjection to the calculus of state and geopolitical power in unique and unpredictable ways. The shift, for example, from a group-based understanding of religious liberty to an individualist one in international legal discourse is more than a conceptual shift; it also affects the substantive meaning and practice of religious liberty as well as the kinds of subjects who can speak in its name.

In concluding this post, let me point out that these contrastive deployments of religious liberty are often read as the cynical instrumentalization of an otherwise noble principle in the service of realpolitik or corrupt ends. Seen in this way, the principle itself—its logic, its aim, and its substantive meaning—remains unsullied by the impious intentions of the empires, actors, and states that sought to promote or subvert it. Such an argument needs to be complicated for several reasons. As I have shown, far from being a measure of a culture’s intolerance, religious freedom has been tied from its very inception to the exercise of sovereign power, regional and national security, and the inequality of geopolitical power relations in the Middle East. These differential meanings must be understood, I want to suggest, not simply as opportunistic deployments of a single noble principle but as reflective of the contradictions and paradoxes internal to the conceptual architecture of the right to religious liberty itself and its global history. Insomuch as the right to religious liberty is enabled by conditions of geopolitical inequality and differential sovereignty between the First and Third Worlds, it behooves us to rethink the global good its advocates often promise to all peoples of the world. Indeed, if the universal promotion of religious liberty has been ridden with colonial and neocolonial agendas, then how does one grapple with the legitimate and important question of providing protections to religious minorities across the Western and non-Western divide? What other procedural, legal, and social mechanisms do modern polities make possible that can be separated from the exercise of geopolitical domination, interests, and power? Is such a separation possible not just conceptually but practically given the intractability of politics from all human rights struggles of our times?

A critical problem that all religious reformers of whatever faith face is the relationship between their reformist thought and what for many is the authority of tradition, the need to demonstrate some kind of continuity between tradition and change. The conservative or traditionalist bent of many religious scholars, madrasas and Muslim populations make this requirement even more necessary. The importance of the framing narrative and its repertoire, which will engage the context of its intended audience, is critical to the success and effectiveness of social movements. Daniel Philpott perceptively identifies the Achilles heel of An-Na’im’s argument:

What is interesting about these arguments is that they ground the case for the secular state not in the Quran, not in claims about the presence of the imago Dei in the person or in some other source of the person’s intrinsic dignity, not in natural law, some closely similar type of practical reason, or universal moral precepts, but rather in what might be called “second order” observations about the phenomenology of belief, the character of government, the lessons of history, and the like. To be sure, good reasons for the secular state lie therein. But are these arguments sufficient to ground an Islamic case for constitutionalism, human rights, and the secular state? I doubt it.

When one looks at the context in which An-Na’im speaks, hurdles become clearer, as does the need for a more Islamically grounded argument.

Many Islamists , along with many other Muslims, have cast secularism as a completely foreign doctrine imposed on the Islamic world by colonial powers; they hold up traditional Islamic society, particularly during the first century or so of Islam, as a model of how the early community was guided by religious principles in all areas of life, including politics. The prominent judge and Arab historian Tariq al-Bishri, for example, seeks to contradict the idea that modernization and secularization must be linked by arguing that Muhammad ‘Ali’s regime in Egypt was not secular; it took aspects of military science and technology from Europe to aid an essentially Islamic political entity. Western ideas did not become pervasive, according to al-Bishri, until the early 20th century due to the spread of missionary schools and pro-Western secularist print media. The non-sectarian Islamic movement started to grow parallel to geographically-based secular nationalist movements until it became clear that there was a split in society between an inherited and revitalized Islam and a newly-arrived secularism. This initial split, according to Al-Bishri, has amounted to a fully-entrenched “war of ideas” between the two sides that has continued up to the present.

An-Na‘im offers his own interpretative framework in the debate about Islam and secularism, knowing full well the associations between “secularism” and foreign colonial domination in the Islamic world. Like al-Bishri and others, An-Na‘im looks for evidence from pre-modern and modern Islamic history to support his views, but to a very different end. He argues that his vision of a secular state, meaning one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine, is “more consistent with Islamic history than is the so-called Islamic state model proposed by some Muslims since the second quarter of the twentieth century.” The old notion that secularism is “neutral” regarding religion is itself a contested issue. Although An-Na‘im insists that he is not claiming that the “pre-colonial state was secular in the modern sense of the term,” he does suggest without convincing proof that “the states under which Muslims lived in the past were never religious, regardless of occasional claims to the contrary.” The realities of Islamic history as well as a good deal of contemporary scholarship on Islamic history (Fred Donner, Ira Lapidus and many other scholars) would counter the notion of “occasional claims” and thus require that a convincing argument substantiate this claim.

An-Na‘im asserts in his analysis of Islamic history that religious and political authority stem from different sources and require different skills and, therefore, to conflate the two leads to dangerous confusion. This conflation was only possible, according to An-Na‘im, during the time of the Prophet, “because no other human being can enjoy the Prophet’s combination of religious and political authority.” Since such harmony is no longer possible, religious and political leaders should instead pursue their autonomy so that each side will be strengthened and not subject to subordination or coercion by the other.

An-Na‘im claims, furthermore, that a reading of Islamic history that highlights a differentiation between religious and political authorities can be traced back as early as the caliphate of Abu Bakr, whose Wars of Apostasy, he says, were not religiously motivated, despite the fact that they were justified by the caliph in religious terms. What An-Na‘im considers “confusing the political authority of the caliph with his religious authority” continued into the Umayyad dynasty, which An-Na‘im characterizes as a “total and complete monarchy in every way” that, nevertheless, “still sought to maintain the fiction that the authority of their caliphs was an extension of the authority of the Prophet.” In spite of ‘Abbasid claims of religious legitimacy, the proliferation of sects during this period as well as the upheaval of the Mihna provided further challenges to the “myth of Islamic unity” as well as the impracticality of applying the Prophet’s model of leadership after his death.

While it is not surprising that An-Na‘im chooses to focus on the Mamluk and Fatimid eras in Islamic history, the Ayyubids rather than the Mamluks would be the more accurate example regarding dynasties in which the state bureaucracy had really come into its own and that therefore the dynamic between the religious scholars and the political authority had also reached a new level of complexity and contention. Religious institutions and scholars, for example, relied on state patronage for financial support while at the same time trying to maintain some level of independence and authority.

An-Na‘im argues that the Fatimid self-image as a Shi‘i imamate upholding the spiritual and political legacy of the Prophet was at odds with the “hypocrisy and corruption” of some state officials charged with both administrative and religious functions, such as the muhtasib who acted as both a tax collector and trade arbiter as well as an enforcer of public morality. Stemming the Shi‘i tide, the Mamluks came to power asserting their status as the defenders of Sunni Islam. As An-Na‘im points out: “Military campaigns against crusaders, the protection of Muslim lands, and the endowments of religious institutions were public symbols designed to emphasize the Mamluk service to Islam.” During this time, religious scholars (and judges in particular) felt pressure to legitimize and support state authority or risk imprisonment and punishment, the fate of Ibn Taymiyya, for instance.

An-Na‘im sees this tension as becoming potentially destructive when rulers start to abuse their power and the religious authority is not able to hold them accountable. Rather than arguing, like Tunisia’s Rachid al-Ghannouchi and others, that if Muslim rulers/leaders were truly pious such violence would be unnecessary, An-Na‘im advocates a secular state built on constitutionalism, human rights and citizenship – resources that he acknowledges “were totally lacking in all societies everywhere until the modern era.”

Perhaps the most controversial element of An-Na‘im’s interpretive framework is his understanding of the nature and role of Shari‘a in Islamic history, especially in the context of his proposed secular state solution. An-Na‘im suggests that the Shari‘a must be marginalized in order to save it. More precisely, he asserts that no state has the right to enforce religious law, even if it is the religion of a majority of its citizens: “By its nature and purpose, Shari‘a can only be freely observed by believers; its principles lose their religious authority and value when enforced by the state.” States do not enforce principles; they enforce laws. Like Fu‘ad Zakaria and contrary to much of the scholarship on the origins and development of Islamic law, An-Na‘im denies that Islamic law included both a divine, unchanging element (Shari‘a, principles and values rooted in sacred sources) and a human interpretation and application (fiqh). He writes: “both Shari‘a and fiqh are the products of human interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna of the Prophet in a particular historical context. Whether a given proposition is said to be based on Shari‘a or fiqh, it is subject to the same risks of human error, ideological or political bias, or influence by its proponents’ economic interests and social concerns.” While the human dimension in both cannot be denied, there are significant differences between sacred texts and human interpretation, laws that are based on clear texts and those based on analogy, as well as differences in the degree and extent of human interpretation in Shari‘a and fiqh.

An-Na‘im’s claim that no human institution, such as the state, can implement or enforce religious law would seem to contradict the example already noted from pre-modern Islamic history, in which state-appointed judges carried out a parallel system of rulings at times in agreement with, and at times in opposition to, state authority. Each side, the political and the religious, relied on the other for moral legitimacy and support. The noted Islamic legal historian Wael Hallaq describes the delicate balance of authority: “Our sources reveal that the caliphs and their subordinates generally did comply with the law, if for no other reason than in order to maintain their political legitimacy. Yet, it appears reasonable to assume that their compliance stemmed from their acceptance of religious law as the supreme regulatory force of society and empire.” Or, put differently: “On balance, if there was any pre-modern legal and political culture that maintained the principle of the rule of law so well, it was the culture of Islam.”

Finally, An-Na’im’s reformism faces two practical hurdles: broad-based Muslim public opinion that favors Shari‘a as “a” source of law and the continued centrality and authority of the classical tradition of Islamic law.

Data from the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done, based on tens of thousands of hour-long, face-to-face interviews with residents of more than 35 Muslim nations and representing more than ninety percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, indicates that majorities of Muslims want Shari‘a as “a” source of law but not “the” source of law. The data reveals a desire for a new model of government—one that is democratic yet embraces religious principles and values. Majorities in most countries, with the exception of a handful of nations, want Shari’a as at least “a” source of legislation. Of course, in practice this sentiment can mean many things: requiring that no law be contrary to Shari‘a, drafting laws that incorporate or are not antithetical to Islamic principles and values. Interestingly, we don’t have to look far from home to find a significant number of people who want religion as a source of law. In the United States, a 2006 Gallup Poll indicates that a majority of Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation. Forty-six percent of Americans say that the Bible should be “a” source, and nine percent believe it should be the “only” source of legislation.

The second issue/reality that An-Na’im does not adequately address is the hold of tradition. The manner in which he bypasses or ignores the classical tradition fails to come to grips with the reality on the ground and risks reducing the influence and impact of his substantial efforts to the bookshelf rather than becoming a catalyst for change in Muslim societies. In Sunni Islam, the classical tradition, legitimated by the consensus (ijma) of the community (in fact by its religious scholars), has been normative. While historically the Sunna of the Prophet has controlled the understanding of the Quran, the consensus of religious scholars (ijma) has ruled over the Sunna. In other words, for traditionalists in Sunni Islam, the consensus (ijma) of the past is authoritative and overrules everything. Thus, for example, even if the Quran doesn’t advocate hijab or prohibit women from leading mixed gender prayer, and some or many hadiths are false, the interpretations and practices sanctioned by the ijma of the past, the classical Islamic tradition, prevail. Not to do so is to depart from tradition, to fail to establish a necessary link or continuity between the authoritative ijma of the past and modern change. This outlook is epitomized in an Azhar saying: “Consensus is the stable pillar on which the religion rests.” The Indonesian reformer Nurcholish Madjid has referred to this as the “sacralization” of tradition in Islam and called for a “de-sacralization” of tradition. However, he does not reject the importance of tradition, but of the notion of a fixed, static tradition, arguing that tradition and consensus or ijma are ongoing and cumulative.

An-Na’im is not alone in re-examining the relationship of religion to the state and arguing that a Muslim country can also be secular. However, some like Indonesia’s Nurcholish Madjid (as well as Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina or Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan) recognize more clearly the need to acknowledge the force of tradition even as they proceed to engage in wide ranging reformist thinking. Although emphasizing the value/merit of classical Islam and its legacy, they do not regard it as an absolute reference point or religious authority but only a tool for solving modern problems. Madjid has spoken of the danger of the “sacralization” of tradition. While neo-traditionalist reformers, muftis with international followings like Ali Gomaa, the Mufti of Egypt and Qatar’s Yusuf Qaradawi, acknowledge the authority of the classical tradition but have methodologies to legitimate substantive reforms, modern reformers more freely bypass the classical tradition and go back to the Quran as the primary basis for fresh understandings and interpretations.

Although An-Na‘im’s interpretation of pre-modern Islamic history and law are problematic at times, the great strength of the book is the author’s analysis of political realities in the modern, post-colonial state and his projections and recommendations for a future secular state founded on principles of constitutionalism, human rights, and civic reason. Here, An-Na‘im’s choice of India, Turkey and Indonesia as examples of how secularism is contextualized in different societies is instructive. He eschews a single solution for all cases, a single formulation of secularism for all contexts, but wisely and realistically affirms the fact “that each society’s conception and experience of secularism has to be contested and deeply contextual.” An-Na’im’s methodology, and thus a more Islamically grounded methodology that would also enhance the Islamic legitimacy of his argument, would have benefited from the approach of Abdulaziz Sachedina’s The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism. Sachedina does what An-Na‘im does not; he examines the traditional sources (Qur’an, hadith, tafsir) in order to build up a case for democratic pluralism from an Islamic frame of reference.

Although An-Na‘im’s views on secularism and the role of Shari‘a in society are far from the mainstream amongst Muslim scholars, he does, as intended, provide a major new interpretative framework that has created a vital forum for future discussion and once again demonstrates the courage to put in writing what others might only think. His “interpretive framework” will be both a source for heated debate as well as a foundation for others to build on and flesh out.

The book is avowedly didactic, aiming to persuade Muslims in public debate that constitutional rule of law, human rights and democratic citizenship in a secular state represent the only form of political regime consistent with Islam in the modern world. Despite lengthy and repetitious exposition of the notions of democratic constitutionalism, “civic reason,” citizenship and human rights, An-Na`im fails in his explicit purpose of justifying and legitimizing them in Islamic terms, which appear somewhat incidentally and do not carry the primary charge of justification. In this regard, his preaching can only have an effect on those already converted. An-Na`im does, however, have two compelling arguments for his position in terms of Islam, one substantive and the second historical. The substantive argument is that only with such a state can Muslims autonomously and without compulsion follow the law of God as interpreted by themselves. The historical argument is that his “proposal for a secular state is more consistent with Islamic history than is the so-called Islamic state model.” The problem is that few Muslims requiring specifically Islamic legitimization and justification will accept his premises regarding “the inherent nature of Shari`a” and find his substantive argument convincing. An-Na`im’s appeal to history is not intrinsically Islamic either; nor is it easy to sell rhetorically. But it is his more original and stronger argument. Furthermore, as we shall see, the historical argument is even much stronger than he is able to present.

Muslims, An-Na`im argues, need a secular state that is “neutral regarding all religious doctrines” but allows legislation and public policy to “reflect the beliefs and values of citizens, including religious values.” This requires dispelling “the illusion that the Islamic state is supposed to enforce Shari`a,” and “keeping a clear distinction between Islam and the state while regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics;” or again, it requires “the institutional separation of Islam and the state” and “the religious neutrality of the state.” This amounts to a more clear and careful definition than has been provided by the Iranian reformists such as Abdol-Karim Soroush and the former President, Mohammad Khatami, for what they have called “religious democracy.”

Clarity ceases, however, with his call for “regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics.” Returning to the notion of “regulating the political role of Islam,” An-Na`im ends with a reaffirmation that the separation of Islam and the state should be “accompanied by the nurture and regulation of the organic relationship between Islam and politics,” and calls for “an enabling discourse for promoting the role of Islam in public life.” Having convincingly argued against the French and Turkish variants of secularism as exclusions of religion from politics and the public sphere (incidentally, by appealing not to Islam but to democracy and human rights), it is not clear why any regulation of any kind beyond the generic rules of constitutional democracy, civic reason and human rights should be needed. What is the meaning of “regulation” other than the obvious non-exclusion? Does the call for “promoting the role of Islam in public life” point to a hidden agenda lurking behind the innocuous thesis that constitutionalism and human rights need to be justified in terms of Islam rather than Western liberalism to be understood by Muslims? I will come back to this at the end.

The most original aspect of the book is An-Na`im’s historical analysis of law and the state in medieval Islam and the Ottoman empire, as well as the contemporary patterns of the secular state in Turkey and in post-colonial India and Indonesia. Being a lawyer and not a historian, An-Na`im concedes far too much to the proponents of ideology of the Islamic state, whose alleged function is the execution of the Shari`a. He can show that such a state never existed. In fact, the evidence for separation of religion and the state in Islamic history is much stronger. An-Na`im certainly exaggerates the importance of the Shari`a relative to state law (qānun) and customary law in the administration of justice in medieval Egypt and the Ottoman empire, not to mention the Mughal empire and Indonesia. And the myth of the Islamic state he rejects still has enough hold over him to induce a serious, anachronistic misreading of the communal politics of Indian independence in which the Shari`a played no role, either positively or negatively. Nevertheless, the evidence he presents proves his historical argument for the differentiation between the state and religious law and authority more than adequately. This discussion of the separation of religion and the state in Islamic history, and the analysis of the strengths and limitations of the three very different contemporary secular states built on it, constitute the major achievement of this book.

In An-Na`im’s account of imperialism in India, which generalized to the other two cases of empires without substantiation, “colonial reason” is credited with the invention of legal codification. There is no denying the oddity of what developed as the “Anglo-Muhammadan law” under the British Raj, but the colonial motive for codification, beyond the requirements of efficiency in the administration of justice, is not entirely clear. The same claim that codification was the product of colonial reason is not explicitly made in the case of the Dutch empire in Indonesia. Legal codification in the non-colonial Ottoman empire is also seen by An-Na`im as an imperial imposition of a piece with the so called “capitulations”—extraterritorial imperialist rights to consular jurisdiction over their subjects and the compradors declared under their protection. (An-Na`im may be forgiven for passing over the fact that human rights, so dear to him, were introduced side by side with the capitulations and were more strongly pushed by the imperialists in favor of the religious minorities under their protection than codification, in which they had only a tangential interest.) He also conveniently ignores the arguments that legal reform in general and codification in particular may in fact have been a means of resistance to imperialism in Egypt, and the patent fact that codification was part of the autonomous Ottoman will to defensive modernization to withstand the imperialist pressure. An-Na`im shares this dim view of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement for codification of the law, whose proponents saw it as an effort to adopt modern civilization, with Noah Feldman, whose view I have criticized earlier in The Immanent Frame. The vilification of Muslim modern codes stems from the replacement of “democracy” for the “modernization” of the earlier generations of Muslim reformers in An-Na`im’s teleology. This shift exacts a heavy cost in terms of understanding the legal history of the last two centuries. The complex issues of procedural rationalization, separation of law and ethics, reform of the appellate system and systematic use of written documents, and the dilemma of majoritarianism versus judicial activism in protection of human rights—the nitty-gritty of the role of law in a modern constitutional order—are entirely set aside by this hard-nosed lawyer for the glib talk of democracy and civic reason. Here, I must be forgiven for being old-fashioned and thoroughly skeptical.

An-Na`im’s head is in the right place when he insists on Islam’s compatibility with the secular state, but at the very end, when he calls for “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a,” the former loses its control over the latter, revealing a starry-eyed utopia. An-Na`im had briefly alluded to his commitment to Islamic reform as advocated by his Sudanese master, Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, stating that “it also requires the reformulation of usul a-fiqh [principles of jurisprudence].” But why should we expect the new ijtihād and reformulation of the principles of jurisprudence to produce results this time that are different from the Wahhabi ijtihād from the eighteenth century to the present, Salafi ijtihād of the early twentieth century, or the current one of the Islamists? The implicit answer seems to be that Islamic reform would now take place within the framework of constitutional democracy and be subject to human rights. But I see little evidence for An-Na`im’s presumption that the form of Islam to be promoted by his project would legitimize the constitutional democracy and human rights to which it should be subject! In fact, his own evidence of the democratic enforcement of the penal code of the Shari`a in Aceh proves the contrary. He takes cold comfort in “lack of agreement between Achenese leaders about what the application of Shari`a means.” (This is An-Na`im’s variant of the hackneyed assertions one hears often, such as “not everyone agrees what the Shari`a is,” or, “there are different schools of Islamic jurisprudence.”) He thus misses the chance to discuss such judicial devices to protect human rights against democratic majoritarianism as constitutional courts. (Indonesia has an inactive one, but the activist constitutional court of Egypt is not discussed either.

An-Na`im wants to beat the Islamists at their own game by appropriating their rhetorical tools, but this is a very risky strategy. He has made an impressive effort to involve Muslims throughout the world through his website, and used an Indonesian Muslim institute to organize discussion groups. But the Iranian reformists lost badly in their attempt to appropriate the rhetoric of the hardliners despite the fact that they created and controlled, for a few years, the most vigorous press in the Muslim Middle East. The chances of the An-Na`ims and the Feldmans firing single shots from the hip at the same remote target from the far west are much smaller. Attempts at the rhetorical appropriation of Islamism by “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a” (An-Na`im), or the historical romance of the Shari`a as constitutionalism and modern rule of law (Feldman) are bound to fail. Like all religious law, the Shari`a has a restrictive, and never a liberating role, and the Muslims who wish to free themselves from its rigid restrictions historically did so through the liberating flexibility of man-made, secular law (qānun). For Muslims there certainly is a higher realm of freedom corresponding to the religio-mystical sense of the divine path. Yet if history is a guide, the Sufis through the centuries had good reasons for differentiating that realm from the law and for considering Shari`a the inevitably rigid husk to religion’s kernel, which they called Haqiqa (the truth).

His work has long followed the lead of his mentor and inspiration, the Sudanese intellectual Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who sought to reinterpret the Quran so as to ground human rights and equality. Like Taha, An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed over the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed sanctions aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination of women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This history cannot be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the Quran, which includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant, Mecca period of Mohammed’s life, as well as those from the later Medina portion, marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina version that had become orthodoxy by the 10<sup>th</sup> century. But it is the verses from the earlier period that represent the true, universal message of Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an adaptation to particular historical circumstances in the life of the embryonic umma. An “Islamic Reformation,” to borrow from the title of An-Na`im’s previous prominent work, would retrieve the Meccan verses for politics today, making them the ground for human rights, equality, and the rule of law. In the spirit of Taha, whose teachings led to his martyrdom at the hands of the Sudanese state in 1985, An-Na`im has courageously taken his arguments for Islam and human rights all over the Muslim world.

Not a scholar of Islam, I am unqualified to judge the exegetical soundness of An-Na`im’s Islamic Reformation. But what I find promising about it is its reliance on what Muslims believe to be the authoritative source of their claims, the Quran. These arguments, to be sure, show up again in Islam and the Secular State. But here they appear as an accompaniment to other arguments for the secular state that An-Na`im now appears to make far more central. It is these other arguments about which I wish to raise questions. They, too, according to An-Na`im, are Islamic ones. But as we shall see, they are not exactly Quranic or even based on the Islamic philosophical tradition, nor do they make universal claims about the person, society, or morality, but rather rest on observations about Islamic history and about the general character of religious belief.

Here are five such arguments that he makes for a secular state.

1) Religious belief by its very nature cannot be compelled. It must be freely chosen if it is to be meaningful and consequential. The state that compels it pursues an impossibility and stultifies and represses vibrant religious life. “By protecting my freedom to disbelieve, a secular state, as defined in this book, is necessary for my freedom to believe, which is the only way belief has any meaning and consequences,” he argues.

2) The meaning and interpretation of Islam is a human process that has always been in flux. An-Na`im is neither a relativist nor a skeptic; he believes that the Quran is Allah’s revelation. But interpretations of its meaning have always evolved dynamically through shifting consensus. Yesterday’s heresy may well be today’s orthodoxy. To freeze any one interpretation into the laws of the state is to make fast what ought to be left fluid. Rather, interpretation always ought to be left to believers and communities. It is just the freedom that the secular state provides that allows the great historical flow of interpretation to continue.

3) Any attempt to freeze any one interpretation in a constitution or the basic laws of a state leads to tyranny. Because interpretation is a human process, human rulers who seek to enforce a particular understanding of Islam will inevitably do so repressively and may well use orthodoxy as a mere tool for rule. Although An-Na`im does not say it, the history of his native Sudan over recent decades offers ample grist for this argument.

4) The history of Islam, as An-Na`im shows in his brilliant and rich Chapter Two, contains many examples of separation of religion and state, even in the early centuries. This was not modern constitutionalism, to be sure, but involved an independence of religious authority and a limitation of state responsibilities to typically temporal ones—raising armies and taxes, for instance. It was in good part European colonial regimes that created today’s states that rigidly enforce sharia.

5) A constitutional regime is one where religious people may advocate policies out of their religious convictions as long as they do so through secular language and arguments. An-Na`im’s explicitly links his concept of “civil reason” to the arguments of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, who have proposed similar, though not identical, restrictions. He rejects the authoritarian secularism of modern Turkey, which seeks to control Islam sharply in the name of modernization, equality, and nation-building. Rather, he advocates religious participation, but on the ground rules of secular language.

What is interesting about these arguments is that they ground the case for the secular state not in the Quran, not in claims about the presence of the imago Dei in the person or in some other source of the person’s intrinsic dignity, not in natural law, some closely similar type of practical reason, or universal moral precepts, but rather in what might be called “second order” observations about the phenomenology of belief, the character of government, the lessons of history, and the like. To be sure, good reasons for the secular state lie therein. But are these arguments sufficient to ground an Islamic case for constitutionalism, human rights, and the secular state? I doubt it.

Take the argument about compulsion of religious belief. In strictest terms, it is correct. It is incoherent to compel religious choice. This conclusion surely helps to ground religious freedom. But it hardly brings us to the secular state that An-Na`im advocates—one where sharia is neither constitutionally enshrined nor explicitly invoked in political debate. After all, there are many ways that a state can foster an “ecology” of morality through legislation advocated on religious grounds but without compelling religious choice. It can regulate alcohol consumption, dress, pornography, marriage and sexuality, the media, and, perhaps most importantly, education, in order to foster certain ends that religions prescribe, all while leaving people free to worship, practice, and express their faith. The wisdom of any of these policies can be debated on its merits, of course. But most western constitutional liberal democracies, including the United States, have legislated these sorts of measures through much of their histories, often on explicitly religious grounds. Several western European democracies either have established churches or privilege certain religions in their taxation and education policies. In parallel, there is no inherent reason why there could not be an Islamic constitutional liberal democracy that explicitly and publicly promotes policies based on sharia and even proclaims in its constitution that it is a sharia-based state, but also guarantees the panoply of human rights found in international law, including religious freedom. The impossibility of compelling religious belief does not alone yield An-Na`im’s secular state that is not based on sharia.

It is also hard to see how the “argument from flux” can ground An-Na`im’s secular state. A factual statement—a great plurality of interpretations have characterized a religious tradition—alone says nothing about whether one interpretation is truer than another. The argument is even self-defeating. If one asserts the constant flux of interpretation as a supporting girder for the secular state, then one is in fact asserting this claim as being beyond flux. An-Na`im may well reply that the secular state is not necessarily universally and eternally valid and is itself the product of an evolution of consensus. That does not change the fact that the kind of state he is advocating is one that respects the flux of interpretation, but whose basic rights and constitutional structure are not themselves subject to change. That is, a state that keeps interpretation open is, for him, non-negotiable—that is, not subject to interpretation.

The problem is no mere logical conundrum. Imagine what is not difficult to imagine: an advocate of even a moderate sharia state who advocates, contra An-Na`im, laws that deny full religious freedom to non-Muslims. Imagine, too, that he believes such laws to be are mandated by the Quran and beyond reasonable interpretation. He acknowledges that history contains disagreement over his interpretation, but argues nevertheless that these dissents are unreasonable and implausible. Against this view, it seems, An-Na`im has no trump card to play. His argument that all is in flux cannot itself answer the argument that yes, there is much flux, but that some interpretations, here, illiberal ones, are truer than others and should be incorporated into law. Only an argument that refutes this person’s view or that offers grounds for why, even if this view is true, an environment of openness is superior to its legal enshrinement—that is, only a substantive argument, not an assertion of flux—can serve as a trump card.

The need for substantive grounding is all the greater when it comes to human rights, a centerpiece of An-Na`im’s political proposals. The very idea of human rights is that some sorts of human goods—the lives of the innocent, for instance—always ought to be protected and that some sorts of actions—like war crimes and torture — always ought to be prohibited. This is true because of qualities that inhere in human beings qua human beings, not as members of this of that community—hence, human rights. But doesn’t a defense of such rights require a claim that some principles and interpretation are beyond flux? An-Na`im advocates for a constitutional regime in part because he wants to keep interpretation open. But what about the rights that undergird this openness? Must not they be considered non-negotiable and universally valid?

The strongest advocates of human rights, in my view, rest their arguments on just such a conclusion. An-Na`im’s own colleague at Emory University, Michael Perry, has argued that human rights are “ineliminably religious,” meaning that only the sort of transcendent foundation that religions provide can support the universal claims that a defense of human rights requires. Theologian Max Stackhouse, philosopher John Finnis, and many others have argued along similar lines, often with an accent on natural law. Pope Benedict XVI made this argument in his recent speech to the UN.

Again, the argument is hardly an abstract intellectual one. Over the course of the twentieth century and well into this century, human rights have come under attack from concepts and guns wielded by ideologies and political programs that would deny or curtail them: utilitarianism, cultural relativism, political realism, philosophical skepticism, theocracy, fascism, communism, rightist arguments about organic societal fabrics, leftist revolutionary programs, and simple arguments from duress and necessity, arguments that this omelet requires the breaking of that egg. It is these competitors and the potential vulnerability of human rights before them, in addition to the philosophical logic of defending something universal and intrinsically human, that require that human rights be grounded in what is immutable, not what is in flux.

None of these arguments, of course, deny what An-Na`im wants to argue for, namely that religious communities ought to be given maximal freedom to debate and develop their doctrines. As he argues, it can be true both that truth is fixed and that human understanding of it is open to infinite progress and continual refinement. But the political institutions that themselves ground the freedom for this inquiry to occur arguably require claims about what is fixed.

Neither do I wish to oversimplify arguments about scriptures or natural law. Different religions and different philosophical traditions have different ways of grounding claims about what is human and about how the principles that justify human rights are to be defended. The character of these arguments has shifted over time as well. Certainly internal debate and evolution characterizes the natural law tradition. Human rights itself is and has been debated between and within traditions. An-Na`im is smart to point out that “normative systems . . . are necessarily shaped by [people's] own context and experiences, any universal concept cannot be simply proclaimed or taken for granted.” But I stake my claim here: Apart from a rationale that makes strong universal claims about human dignity and the validity of basic moral precepts, it is very difficult if not impossible to make a robust argument for human rights, the kind that can truly fend off competitors. Religious traditions and the natural law that is embedded in several of them, have, over the course of history, proven to be some of the strongest providers of these rationales. Though An-Na`im acknowledges the need for an “internal Islamic argument” and for “Islamic justification” in Islam and the Secular State, he places far greater stress on the fluidity, uncertainty, and flux in the Islamic tradition than he does on positive arguments for human rights that are rooted in the Quran or in the Islamic philosophical tradition.

I would put forth a similar argument towards An-Na`im’s claim that enshrining a particular interpretation of sharia—always the product of a human process—into the constitution of a state leads to tyranny and the abuse of power. There are indeed lots of good reasons why the claims of a particular religion ought not to be enshrined in the constitution of a state, particularly one with a religiously plural population. And there are plenty of examples, contemporary and historical, of regimes that justify their tyranny on religious grounds, sincerely or manipulatively. But what An-Na`im underestimates, in my view, is the importance of substantive religious and philosophical underpinnings for opposition to such tyranny.

Instructive parallels can be found in the Christian tradition. Here, too, political rulers have deployed religious arguments for persecuting minorities and dissenters, slavery, and other practices that are now regarded as heinous, particularly in the high Middle Ages and the religious wars of early modern Europe, but at other times and places, too. But over time, arguments for human rights and equality of citizenship have proved more enduring. The key breakthroughs were made by thinkers who appealed back to scripture and to natural law to challenge existing practices. One thinks of de las Casas’s and Victoria’s arguments for the rights of Indians, of Protestant proponents of religious freedom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of evangelical abolitionists like William Wilberforce in the nineteenth century, of Martin Luther King and the American civil rights movement, of the Catholic theologians and philosophers who argued for religious freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the Second Vatican Council documents in which these arguments triumphed.

In following Taha, An-Na`im himself takes this foundational approach—and aspires to join parallel ranks in the Islamic tradition. But again, in Islam and the Secular State, his stress is far more on uncertainty, flux, and potential abuses than on positive grounds. He is right not to allow that not all Muslims need accept the particular arguments of Taha in order to endorse the secular state. But he would be more persuasive, in my view, were he to argue more strongly that a certain class of rationales, containing certain kinds of features—a class of which Taha is an instance—is needed to oppose tyranny. Similarly, Christians can continue to argue whether Wilberforce or de las Casas or Martin Luther King or Vatican II had it most right, but all the while insist that natural law or that certain kinds of scriptural arguments are needed to ground freedom and equality.

Finally, it is strange to see An-Na`im, an advocate of religious participation in democracy, endorsing arguments along the lines of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas that demand secular rationales in political debate—”civic reason,” as he calls it. Whereas he does allow Muslims to reason politically on the basis of sharia, he argues that appealing explicitly to religious rationales in public debate violates the norms of citizenship in a secular state. Secular arguments for public policy positions are “impartial” and “accessible,” ones that “most citizens can accept or reject,” and so should be pursued.

Here, An-Na`im aligns himself with proposals that have appeared in western political philosophy, and only recently. Even in the West they are not at all an intrinsic, core feature of the liberal tradition but rather an argument of one faction of it. John Rawls, the most prominent proponent of “public reason,” as he called it, presented his arguments for it in the 1990s. It is also an argument that has come under heavy fire from philosophers committed to both liberal institutions and to religious participation in these institutions: Christopher Eberle, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles Taylor, and Jeffrey Stout. (See The Immanent Frame’s discussion of “Religion in the Public Sphere.”) These philosophers have argued that requiring “public reason” privileges certain epistemological positions as normative for public debate, fails to provide criteria that do not also rule out a whole host of reasons, both religious and secular, that are necessary for meaningful democratic debate about political problems, forces the religious to disguise their convictions, argue disingenuously, and without transparency, and is generally illiberal, not liberal. To be sure, these scholars, like other religious people, allow that there are often good reasons for the religious to use secular language in the political realm and to find common ground with diverse others. They decry neither dialogue nor deliberation. But they deny that dialogue and deliberation ethically require secular language. It is curious that An-Na`im, who is so keen to preserve religious participation in democracy and to avoid Kemalist secularism, makes no effort at all to consider these arguments against civic (or public) reason that come from people with whom he has so much in common. While he does allow that his conception of civic reason is “tentative and evolving,” and while he does distinguish his conception from certain features of Rawls’s, he fails to provide a robust defense for a principle that proves central to his argument.

In the end, my objection to Islam and the Secular State is not that arguments about the phenomenology of belief, flux, the tyrannical tendencies of religious rulers, the lessons of history, or even the value of secular arguments in some circumstances cannot help to make the case for the secular state. They can indeed serve as auxiliary arguments. But in my view, constitutional law, human rights, religious freedom, and legal quality for the sexes depend indispensably on substantive claims about the dignity and nature of the person, the nature of human society, and the validity of universal precepts, grounded in the kinds of sources that can sustain these claims. To some extent, An-Na`im incorporates these kinds of arguments, based on his previous work following Taha, into Islam and the Secular State. But I question whether he adequately stresses the centrality of these arguments—or at least these kinds of arguments—for the secular state that he advocates. Funny, in this book he ends up arguing closer to contemporary western philosophers who advocate liberal democracy on grounds of procedure, consensus, and stability than to those philosophers, western and non-western alike, who argue for it on the grounds of transcendent foundations, natural law, and universal reason. It seems to me that Muslims would be far more receptive to the latter sort of approach.

What I enjoyed most about Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im’s provocative book, Islam and the Secular State, was its attempt to imagine a complex configuration that would benefit both the secular state and Islam. It is not only, as An-Na`im puts it at the outset, that “Muslims need a secular state.” Equally, the state gains from the tie between the two, in his formulation, as the debates leading to its policies and legislation come to be informed by its citizens’ Islamic beliefs and sentiments.

Can his ideal be realized in practice, or can we at least imagine a future that moves in the direction of An-Na`im’s plan? Of course, there is no easy answer to the question of whether his words will simply be lost in the wind of academic discourse or could actually have some practical effect, but it is well worth thinking about the practicality of his argument. Here, I want to explore several difficulties that An-Na`im’s blueprint will confront as it tries to disentangle and displace existing configurations of state and Islam. My thoughts draw from three outstanding dissertations written in the University of Washington’s Political Science Department in the last few years. Indeed, two of them won the American Political Science Association’s prestigious Aaron Wildavsky Award for the best dissertation on religion and politics: Ahmet Kuru’s “Dynamics of Secularism: State-Religion Relations in the United States, France, and Turkey,” in 2007,” and Yuksel Sezgin’s “The State’s Response to Legal Pluralism: The Case of Religious Law and Courts in Israel, Egypt and India,” in 2008. The third dissertation is Iza Hussin’s, “The Making of Islamic Law: Local Elites and Colonial Authority in Malaya, India and Egypt,” which I plan to nominate for the 2009 award.

Both Hussin and Sezgin pay close attention to the effects of the colonial period (both deal exclusively with British rule) in the shaping of the relations between Islam and contemporary states. The impact of colonialism is a topic with which An-Na`im deals, as well. He begins, for example, “with the reality that European colonialism and its aftermath have drastically transformed the basis and nature of political and social organization within and among territorial states where all Muslims live today.” And he acknowledges the adaptation of Islam as it encountered the powerful forces of the West.

But I wonder if he did not pass off the impact of the confrontation with colonialism too lightly, particularly in terms of the effect of colonialism on Islam itself. Hussin demonstrates how the drastic transformation initiated by colonial rule encompassed not just the states where Muslims have lived, as An-Na`im stresses, but Islam itself. The Shari`a moved, she notes, from an instance-based, judge-centered and uncodified legal system, which set out to legislate all areas of Muslim life, to become a codified, state-centered, family and personal law—a wholly different enterprise. This point is elaborated in Mohammed Bamyeh’s blog entry, as well. Islam, in short, was turned upside-down by its encounter with British colonial rulers.

The new Islam was not simply a British dictate, though. Hussin demonstrates how in Malaya, for example, the transformation came through a complicated set of negotiations between powerful local sultans and the colonialists. Key Islamic figures, then, had a strong stake in the new configuration, which cemented their power and made them staunch supporters of the new Islam. An-Na`im’s account, perhaps, pays too little attention to the changes in Islam (as opposed to the “political and social organization”) in the colonial period and to the stakeholders who now maintained the ramparts of that new configuration.

Beyond the refashioning of Shari`a itself, institutionally this system of family and personal law came to be embedded within the very structure of the state, as Sezgin describes. Each country built its own unique arrangement for the administration of religious law, involving state civil courts and/or a polyglot of state religious courts, serving the various religious communities. But, in most cases, the complex institutional arrangements involving state salaries for religious judges (or civil judges administering religious law, as in India), bureaucratic lines of command, and more all served to make the disentanglement of state and religion institutionally, as An-Na`im proposes, a formidable, if not impossible, challenge. Even in India, where there was a strong state commitment to the creation of a secular civil code, such a code was never adopted, the efforts foundering largely on issues involving the Muslim community, Sezgin shows.

Like An-Na`im, Kuru values, above all else, the kind of secular state that provides a safe public arena in which religion can be practiced. A French-style secularism, aiming to drive religion out of the public sphere and into the home and mosque (or church), is spurned by both of them. They favor, instead, a U.S.-style secularism, which lacks some of the deep French antagonism to religion, at least as a set of public practices, rules, and institutions.

What Kuru demonstrates, though, is the importance of each country’s historical trajectory in fashioning its brand of secularism and the state’s relationship to religion. His analysis shows how recurring struggles historically created victories, compromises, and failures that hardened the emerging configuration, making change a very difficult enterprise, indeed. Kuru does not despair about the possibility of change; indeed, his central normative concern is how to move Turkey away from French secularism and toward American secularism. But his analysis points to the need to imagine, not only the final ideal, but also how to get from here to there.

Finally, one can ask how ready Muslims are for An-Na`im’s “future of Shari`a.” His discussion rings with a particular understanding of politics and the state: what we might call normal or distributive politics. The famous questions here involve who gets what, when, and how; An-Na`im homes in on “legislation and policies,” the state’s means of answering these questions. What is not acknowledged in Islam and the Secular State is another dimension entirely, what I call the politics of redemption. Here, politics entails the sorts of questions raised years ago by Michael Walzer in his classic book, The Revolution of the Saints. These are not distributive questions at all; they do not fit into liberal processes. Instead, here the questions are driven by a communal journey, which is born out of group frustration. It is a politics of deliverance. For many Muslims in post-colonial states, the collective sense of having been brought low by the West impels just such a politics, geared toward redemption, toward gaining their rightful place in the world. Whether this sort of politics is compatible with An-Na`im’s vision is very doubtful, indeed.

This book uses case studies of Turkey, India, and Indonesia to describe the failure of modern states to provide fulsome protection of human rights. Though the United States does approximate his secular ideal, it also fails: citing the invasion of Iraq, he says, “When two permanent members of the Security Council violate the charter of the United Nations with impunity, it is difficult to hold other states accountable for their violations of human rights treaties.” Moreover, he sees “a gradual erosion of the importance of human rights in politics … legitimized through electoral processes, as illustrated … by the re-election of President George W. Bush ….”

He argues specifically—on religious grounds—against the popular idea that shari’a should provide a basis for state legislation. In Who Speaks for Islam? John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed use survey data to show this idea represents a majority opinion in Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, and a significant minority view elsewhere.

Why do so many Muslims hold this view? This question provides context for An-Na’im’s book, but is never addressed in its pages. For their part, Esposito and Mogahed jump to the conclusion that the political popularity of shari’a in Muslim countries resembles that of the Bible in the United States. This is a weak and very partial analogy. For the U.S. is an odd Christian country and most have more secular societies and politics, while the ideological embrace of Islam is popular among people of many religious sensibilities and political persuasions in most if not all Muslim countries.

This popularity does not emerge endogenously from Islam. Muslims do not live in a world of their own making, and Islam is only one among many aspects of any particular Muslim culture. What is going on ideologically among Muslims is part of the world history that Muslims inhabit. Islam is not hermetically sealed: it is a dynamic, adaptive, aspect of culture, mingled with many other aspects, including politics.

Modern world history has imposed political meanings on Islam, and on a global scale, Christians are most influential among elites who inflect state building projects with religious meanings. In the 1840s, Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx identified this process with “the Jewish question” in “Christian states” of Europe, and within a few decades, Christian imperialists ruled peoples of all religions around the world. “The Jewish question” became global as Christian discourse suffused religious classifications and stereotypes in Western empires that ruled variously almost all the world’s Muslims, shaping Muslim identities and the modern meanings of Islam.

In 1871, W.W. Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans addressed a question—”Are Muslims bound by their religion to rebel against the Queen?”— which dramatized British imperial anxiety about the threat posed to empire by Islam. Today, imperial fear of Muslims remains a media staple, and Islam remains the most threatening “other” for the Christian West, as reflected by the cover illustration of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, which puts a star-and-crescent green flag against the U.S. stars and stripes.

As Mahmood Mamdani shows in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, solutions to the Muslim problem also remain the same as in Hunter’s day: Muslims must be educated to be more secular, to be integrated into the cosmopolitan global culture, led by the West. Also as in Hunter’s day, the “war on terror” has in practice been largely a war on Muslims.

Western empires constructed Islam as the animating spirit of Muslim enmity. This imagery remained in place, ready for redeployment, as empires became national states and imperialism took new forms, and as the imperial identification of Islam with opposition to the Christian West inflected the political mobilization of Islam.

Today, most Muslims live in national states that emerged from empires ruled not long ago by Christians for whom Islam was a threat to order, progress, and civilization. Rulers of independent Turkey adopted this same idea as they became more European. A durable discursive opposition—setting Islam against rationality and secularism—emerged inside Western empires and now thrives under neo-liberal globalization.

Partitioning Ottoman, British, and Russian imperial territories also produced modern states where people classified in imperial census traditions as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu became national majorities. Islam thus became a defining cultural feature of nations where most Muslims live. National sovereignty and dreams of a better future attached themselves to national “imagined communities” defined as Muslim and also as Turkish, Arab, Malay, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and such. Being Muslim became a national trait and Islam acquired national identities.

Islamic modernity emerged as religious idioms acquired political meanings embedded in particular state environs. In this context, answering an opinion poll question so as to argue implicitly that shari’a should be a basis for state law might express a dream or demand for moral justice, a call for resistance to oppression, a cry for unity, or a hope for peace in the face of social conflict and division. Calling for the induction of shari’a into law may broadly indicate disillusionment with so-called secular nation-state rulers.

Such ideas, expressed in religious idioms, are scary for ruling elites, and in modern times, the public expression of Islamic piety has acquired the scary implications in many contexts. In British India, one raja of Kashmir even banned Friday jumma prayers, fearing rebellion. At U.S. airports, wearing Muslim garb today invites “random” security checks. Religious gatherings and architecture attract bombers.

Symbols of Islam are political and the politics of Islam are symbolic, forcing politics to include public piety and imbuing virtually every pious act with political potential. It is therefore unsurprising that shari’a is implicated in the religious mobilization of symbolic authority.

But because wanting shari’a inducted into law can mean many things, the critical question for Islamic politics is how people think about the range of available options. Bible-quoting preachers run the gamut from Quakers, Liberation Theologians, Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson on one end of the political spectrum; to George Wallace, George Bush, and the Ku Klux Klan—with its “message of hope and deliverance to white Christian America, a message of love, not hate”—on the other. So it is with Islam.

Instead of valorizing liberal idealism and trying to purge the state of religion, it seems more realistic to work to make religion a progressive political force. This is what I believe Professor An-Nai’m is actually working on, in his own engagement with what Partha Chatterjee calls “political society,” striving to persuade and motivate Muslims “to accept and implement human rights,” in the name of Islam.

Even though some of these arguments have been stated in one way or another by various Muslim intellectuals and scholars of Islam over the past century, here we find them organized into a coherent and forceful exposition that highlights, given the expertise of the author, the shari’a dimension of Islamic teachings. As such, this exposition constitutes an extremely valuable contribution to the Muslim public sphere. But I am left wondering whether it speaks to the reasons as to why religion remains (or has become) an important source for justifying or contesting the state in our time. I will try to say something about that shortly, but before doing so I would like to offer three rejoinders regarding the meaning of shari’a, and specifically to what extent we can understand it as Islamic “law.”

First, shari’a had historically referred to the sum-total of practical ways of being a Muslim in the world—i.e., it was meant more as a guide to everyday pious life rather than as a set of rules to be deposited unto a uniform state law. Hence, the historical diversity of the shari’a (even within territories and among populations ruled by a single state). This historical rootedness of the shari’a in everyday life appears to be responsible for why Muslims came to see it as organically fitting into their varied ways of life, without a need for force or coercion. Only in modern times does shari’a come to be understood as “law” in a more strict sense of the word, and only in this way did it become a problem.

Second, even when it is asserted as a guide for modern law, one could still maintain the old flexibility of the shari’a by highlighting not the formal rules of the shari’a itself but its “intentions,” maqasid al-shari’a. This kind of discussion is less attuned to what the rules should be, and more to how to make sense of the rules in terms of our values, interconnections, and sense of sociability or purpose in life. Thus whereas pure formalistic discussions of shari’a tend to posit it as external to human agency, discussions of the intentions of the shari’a are geared toward humanizing it and making it, again, into an organic outgrowth of a reflexive process or interactive reasoning.

Third—and this point has to be argued forcefully—no religion can survive if approached strictly or primarily as a set of “laws” that are external to the human interpreter. Indeed, as an-Na’im clearly argues, this is how religious reason itself develops, and in the final analysis it is the believer who is making sense of what their religion is. The problem arises when religion begins to appear entirely external to the individual psyche—that is, as a set of rules that requires obedience for no reason other than that it is the “law,” enforced by an authority (which might be the state), and requiring no personal spiritual investment. A proper religious life, then, is less about obeying the law and more about social and spiritual orientations. As such, religious life that is voluntarily chosen informs ethical conduct in society and spiritual experience vis-à-vis the self.

Many Muslims know that already, yet they highlight the need for shari’a-based life when asked, and often tie its application to state policies. The question then becomes why they do that. The basic problem seems to me to be that the virtues of the alternatives are not yet obvious enough. Secular states in much of the Muslim world were products of the colonial experience rather than of indigenous political development, and as an-Na’im knows well, a substantial part of the modern secular experience is tied to extreme authoritarian systems. Of course, all states, including those formed by arbitrary decisions of European powers, may over time appear natural and become accepted as such by their populations, but not at any price. Such states have to succeed in what modern states the world over are expected to succeed in: namely, they must demonstrate effective sovereignty; deliver public goods; establish universal meritocratic systems; be responsive to grievances; make “citizens” feel that they have an effective voice in their own national affairs (whether through formal democracy or other means); resolve remaining grave historical injustices of colonialism (the case of Palestinians being the most glaring example); and generally not appear to be arbitrary or beholden to foreign interests.

The “return” to Islam as a “total way of life” (including politics and law) is therefore not accidental, and can indeed be timed very specifically to a convergence of failures in the diverse missions of the modern state mentioned above. The modern, secular state failed to become modern enough. Muslims waited quite patiently—from the end of the colonial era until roughly the late 1970s—before returning to Islam. There was nothing natural or eternal about the appeal of Islam as a total way of life, and Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Mawdudi alone could not have changed many minds if the conditions were not suitable for that. Indeed, during their own lifetimes, both had little effect on the political systems of their national societies. The fact that so much political energy is credited to their legacy now belies the fact that, given a different set of conditions (see above for a short list of tasks), history could have taken a different turn, and Islam, while remaining important as a reference point for most Muslims, would not have required being “tamed.” What an-Na’im advocates now would in all likelihood have been accepted without needing a book to be written about it.

The arguments of the book are of course very sound. Yet, as tremendously learned, wide ranging and probing as they are, I am afraid they do not address the real problem. The problem, for me, has less to do with arguments about how we should understand Islam, and more with the nature of social and political developments befuddling Muslim societies. A liberal interpretation of Islam, or at least an interpretation that accommodates (or, as in this case, demands) a secular state, can indeed be based on the Islamic heritage itself. So can an authoritarian, dogmatic and intolerant interpretation mandating a state that applies the shari’a as law, and then really only one version of such shari’a.

The question therefore is not which Islam is “true,” or even what kind of arguments are needed in order to prove one approach to Islam to be more valid than another. If we are speaking of a living, interactive human enterprise, then sociologically speaking, Islam is what Muslims make of it. And in making it fit various needs—political, social, cultural, economic, spiritual—Muslims assert the status of Islam as a living and rich repertoire of ideas. If they continue to see the political, even state-oriented, aspects of it to be virtuous, it is perhaps less so because anyone has persuaded them of the point. It is just that the comparative virtues of the alternative are less obvious than its corruption and subservience to unaccountable foreign patrons. I am speaking of course of the secular state, which ruled most of the Muslim world in the 20^th century. Obviously that state was far from the ideal that an-Na’im has in mind. Still, that is what many Muslims have experienced as secular rule. As such, it remains for the secular state to prove its virtues before its “citizens,” whether committed Muslims or not, may finally recognize it as theirs.

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.