http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:31:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/07/01/islamic-politics-and-human-rights/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/07/01/islamic-politics-and-human-rights/#comments Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:18:49 +0000 David Ludden http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=277 Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a is to convince Muslims on religious grounds that, in order for Islam to flourish, they need to establish secular states based on the protection of human rights. I would say in response that convincing Muslims of this would inflect Islamic politics progressively in a world where most of the forces that shape Islamic politics are not indigenously Islamic. [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/07/01/islamic-politics-and-human-rights/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/21/liberating-sharia/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/21/liberating-sharia/#comments Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:54:53 +0000 Jon W. Anderson http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=257 Sometimes, context is everything. For much of the twentieth century, at least since the 1920s in Egypt and the 1900s in Iran, activists advanced Islam as an alternative to existing government in Muslim-majority countries. Actually existing government was identified with secularism---first in the colonial and then in the independence period---and "Islam" specifically with its operationalization in Shari'a. As comprehensive guidance to right conduct from ritual to social and business relations, Shari'a is more than law, to which it is sometimes reduced when positioned as alternative to secular, civil codes and more ambitiously deployed to preclude legislation on such matters.[...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/21/liberating-sharia/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/20/a-secular-state-must-deliver/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/20/a-secular-state-must-deliver/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:17:11 +0000 Mohammed Bamyeh http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=260 It is hard to disagree with the main arguments of Abdullahi an-Na'im's impeccable book: a healthy religious life requires a secular state, even as political life may remain infused with the religious values of the population. And the historical examples provide added credence to the point. An Islamic state as such never existed historically, even though pre-modern states cannot be regarded as secular in the contemporary sense of the word. But there has never been a state in Islamic history that fused entirely religious and political authority after Muhammad, and it is far from obvious that Muhammad's own Medina community constituted a state or was meant as a model for any state. [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/20/a-secular-state-must-deliver/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/29/misrepresenting-islam/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/29/misrepresenting-islam/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 23:15:29 +0000 Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=249 Suggestions that Presidential candidate Barack Obama was a Muslim seemed to have subsided when his controversial pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, walked onto the stage. But even as Obama defended his Christian faith, and his choice of churches, speculation about his connection to Islam continued on-line as well as within the mainstream press, including an Op-Ed entitled “President Apostate” in The New York Times (May 12, 2008) by the military strategist and historian Edward Luttwak (and, exactly a week later, in a May 19 Christian Science Monitor Op-Ed entitled “Barack Obama–Muslim Apostate?“). Now, as if to flip the Muslim coin, Mr. Luttwak, Ms. Burki, and others speculate that Muslims will hold Mr. Obama to a higher religious standard because he does not embrace the religion of his father. [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/29/misrepresenting-islam/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/27/an-islamic-case-for-a-secular-state/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/27/an-islamic-case-for-a-secular-state/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 21:16:38 +0000 Charles Kurzman http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=247 If the state is going to enforce any principle from Islamic sources, according to Abdullahi An-Na‘im, then it should implement the principle that the state should not enforce Islamic principles. This is the crux of An-Na‘im's new book, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a. An-Na‘im, a renowned Islamic scholar and human rights activist, is a leading member of the generation of Muslim intellectuals that came to prominence in the 1980s as critics of both Islamist revolutionaries and post-colonial dictators. According to An-Na‘im, the secular state is not just a good thing on public-policy grounds; it is also justified on Islamic grounds. [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/27/an-islamic-case-for-a-secular-state/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/05/a-man-with-a-mission/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/05/a-man-with-a-mission/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 14:49:01 +0000 Mark Juergensmeyer http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=239 Abdullahi An-Na'im is a man with a mission. As the expatriate Sudanese law professor told The New Yorker writer George Packer in a recent article, his new book on Islam and the Secular State was written as "a work of advocacy more than of scholarship." But as an advocate to whom? [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/05/05/a-man-with-a-mission/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/28/islam-and-authority/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/28/islam-and-authority/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:49:20 +0000 John Bowen http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=238 In his new book, Abdullahi an-Na`im argues that Muslims need a secular state to live their religious lives. Alongside his immensely informative account of modern developments, he makes a sustained argument against state enforcement of Islam along two major lines. First, it makes no religious sense for a state to force Muslims to follow God’s will, because Muslims should act from conviction and choice. An-Na`im makes a second argument that is parallel to the first: not only is it futile and religiously counter-productive to enforce Islamic piety, but doing so also distorts and impoverishes religion.]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/28/islam-and-authority/feed/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/21/secularism-and-the-paradoxes-of-muslim-politics/ http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/21/secularism-and-the-paradoxes-of-muslim-politics/#comments Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:05:01 +0000 Robert Hefner http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=227 Few books in Islamic studies have been as eagerly awaited or intensely debated prior to publication as Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im's Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari`a. Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, An-Na`im has for more than twenty years been a tireless proponent of a deeply religious but liberal-modernist reformation of Islamic politics and ethics. [...]]]> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/21/secularism-and-the-paradoxes-of-muslim-politics/feed/