Whose Secular, Whose Metrics: A Reply to Professor Florian Zemmin

Abstract

This essay responds to Florian Zemmin's critical review of The Islamic Secular , arguing that Zemmin's analysis is shaped by an interpretive framework drawn from the Leipzig-based "Multiple Secularities" research program that is fundamentally at odds with the book's own methodology and aims. The author contends that Zemmin imposes a fixed, non-religious definition of "the secular" as an evaluative touchstone, thereby foreclosing the book's central claim to a "religious secular" grounded in Islamic juristic tradition (uṣūl al-fiqh) rather than in sociological debates about secularity beyond the West. Defending his methodological starting point in sharīʿah and the shar'ī/non-shar'ī distinction, the author disputes Zemmin's characterization of the book's aims as seeking "novelty" or as attempting to "locate" the secular in Islam, clarifying instead that the project seeks to render the term "secular" capacious enough to accommodate Islamic conceptual differentiation without denying the ubiquity of divine oversight. The essay further addresses disputes over al-Messīrī's partial/comprehensive secularism distinction, the translation of "Islamic Secular" into Arabic, the authority of the fuqahā', and questions of communitarian identity, closing with reflections on positionality, race, and the global politics of theory-production.