Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam

Abstract

In Beyond the Realm of Religion: The Idea of the Secular in Premodern Islam, I embark on a genealogical excavation of the diverse and intricate ways in which the religious and secular interacted in the premodern Islamic world, as well as an historical analysis of the impact this dialectic had on major facets of Islamic life and thought. This investigation is set against the prevailing view in and outside the academy, which maintains that premodern Muslims did not know a distinction between matters religious and secular and that this conceptual separation only emerged with the invention of these categories in the modern West. My study challenges this assumption by conducting a critical and contextualized reading of hundreds of premodern Arabic (and some Persian) writings drawn from several distinct intellectual genres (e.g., legal theory, scriptural exegesis, mirror for princes, philosophical-theology) with the objective of demonstrating that numerous Muslim thinkers extending from South Asia to Islamic Spain and spanning the medieval and early modern periods (c. 900-1800) developed an indigenous vocabulary for a distinction between the religious and secular (taken here to mean a conceptual demarcation of the religious from the non-religious), which they employed in their analyses of subjects as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. What’s more, in line with this conceptual differentiation, these thinkers implicitly assumed and, on several occasions, explicitly constructed a decidedly nonreligious ontological and epistemological space within which humans could pursue a whole range of activities and explorations including, most remarkably, the ventures of science, politics, and economics. It is on the basis of this wide-ranging historical account that I elaborate a theory of secularity indigenous to the Islamic tradition, one which overlaps in many ways with the modern distinction between the religious and secular, but which also diverges significantly from the latter in many legal, intellectual, and institutional respects, thus presenting an alternative social and epistemic possibility for the construction and function of the secular in history.