Paradigm Shift or Dead End? A Critical Appraisal of Sherman Jackson’s Islamic Secular

Abstract

This essay offers a critical appraisal of Sherman Jackson's The Islamic Secular, situating the book within broader debates on secularity beyond the West. While appreciating the book's contribution to expanding conceptions of the secular, the author argues that its central terminological innovation—locating "the secular" within religion itself via the shar'ī/non-shar'ī distinction—is less novel than it appears, resembling earlier distinctions made by Islamic reformists (e.g., sharī'ah/fiqh, dīn wa-dunyā) and paralleling work from the Leipzig-based "Multiple Secularities" research program that the book largely bypasses. The essay questions whether "religion" and "the secular" can coherently be conceived as one contained within the other, given their conceptual interdependence, and raises concerns about the book's shifting usage of terms like "law" and "Islam." Turning to the political implications of Jackson's argument, the author contends that despite its stated aim of validating ordinary Muslims' secular contributions, the book ultimately reinforces the authority of the fuqahā' and reflects a communitarian ethos whose "bonds of love" logic, while understandable given Jackson's Black American Muslim positionality, carries risks paralleling those of exclusionary nationalist movements elsewhere. The essay concludes by advocating a shift from particularist civilizational narratives toward attention to shared conditions and values across traditions in modernity.

Keywords

• Islamic Secular
• Secularity
• Multiple secularities
• Sharīʿa and fiqh
• Islamic reformism
• Communitarianism

References

1. Abbasi, Rushain. “Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular? The Dīn-Dunyā Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought”. Journal of Islamic Studies 31, 2 (2020): 185–225.