Sherman A. Jackson, The Islamic Secular

Abstract

This article offers a critical review of Sherman A. Jackson's The Islamic Secular . Fadel characterizes Jackson's central concept as a modality of secularity internal to the Islamic tradition that, unlike its Western counterpart, does not devalue religion but instead sustains Islamically-inflected worldly flourishing. Summarizing the book's two parts—an intellectual history of the secular and the ḥukm concept in Islamic jurisprudence, followed by Jackson's critique of Wael Hallaq, Abdullahi An-Na'im, and Andrew March—Fadel appreciates the work's conceptual richness while raising several objections: the unclear capacity of the Islamic secular to mediate pluralism under modern state conditions; Jackson's underappreciation of fiqh's own disciplinary function toward religion (e.g., its aversion to bid'a); the difficulty of adapting a Western-derived category of "the secular" to Islamic thought; Jackson's failure to draw on the ʿibādāt/muʿāmalāt distinction, which could have bolstered his thesis; an oscillation in Jackson's treatment of siyāsa's relationship to sharīʿa; the historically contingent, rather than essential, nature of empire-state legal pluralism; and the possibility that modern legal monism is a functional requirement for collective action and equality of citizenship. Fadel closes by engaging Jackson's critique of Andrew March and his skepticism toward Rawlsian public reason, suggesting that Jackson's own position may be more Rawlsian than he acknowledges.