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ISLAM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE LIMITS OF SECULAR CONCEPTUALITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2014

Sherali K. Tareen
Sherali K. Tareen*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College
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Extract

Recent years have seen a proliferation of academic and popular writings on the relationship among Islam, secularism, and democracy. Often, this topic is approached through the question of compatibility: Is Islam compatible or incompatible with secular democracy? Regardless of whether one answers this question with a yes or with a no, such an approach does little to help one in achieving a more nuanced understanding of Islam or secular democracy as discursive traditions. The two works under review here do not follow this pattern. Though distinct in their disciplinary persuasions and in their questions and objects of research, both works offer critical insights into the interaction between Islam and the conditions and structures of secular modernity.

Keywords

democracysecularlawmoderate Islamjustice
Type
REVIEW ESSAYS
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 206 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2014 

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References

1 Abeysekara, Ananda, “The Im-possibility of Secular Critique: The Future of Religion's Memory,” Culture and Religion 11, no. 3 (2010): 213–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Ibid., 214.

3 Ibid., 217–18.

4 Ibid., 218.

5 Agrama, Hussein Ali, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 10–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Abeysekara, Ananda, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 With a dash of Indian exceptionalism, Ahmad proceeds to argue that it is India's secular democratic traditions that explain the contrast between the moderation of Islamists in that country and the lack of such moderation among Islamists in Muslim majority countries like Egypt and Algeria that are not democratic (227–31). This is a baffling claim that does not consider the conditions and structures of modern secular power that generate the desire, anxiety, and pressure to embrace “moderation” as a normative ideal in the first place.

8 Abeysekara, Politics of Postsecular Religion, 43.

9 Mahmood, Saba, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?,” in “The Fate of the Disciplines,” eds. Chandler, James and Davidson, Arnold I., special issue, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 857CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 See Agrama, Questioning Secularism.

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15 Ibid., 119 (emphasis added).

16 Gilmartin, David, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 217–21Google Scholar.

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22 Abeysekara, Politics of Postsecular Religion, 199.

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24 Moosa, Ebrahim, Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.