The Islamosecular: A Spatiotemporal Exploration

Abstract

This review essay engages with Sherman Jackson's concept of "the Islamic secular" by proposing an alternative: collapsing the dual construct into a single term, "the Islamosecular." Rather than treating "Islamic" and "secular" as a noun modified by an adjective, the essay argues for attending to the spatiotemporal dimensions that underlie both concepts. Drawing on Wilfred Cantwell Smith's account of the reification of "Islam" as a stand-alone category under colonial conditions, the essay traces how a formerly verbal, territorialized notion of al-islām was transformed into an abstracted, textualized "religion" analogous to Western categories. It further examines the etymological and political genealogy of "the secular"—from Roman ludi saeculares through ecclesiastical property transfer to modern state regulation of religion (citing the Diyanet and al-Azhar as examples)—to show that secularization is fundamentally a spatial and temporal project of sovereignty. The essay concludes that the "Islamosecular" better captures Islam's inherently territorialized, embodied, and non-reified character, positioning Islam as a persistent challenge to the secularization thesis.

Keywords

• Islamosecular
• Secularization
• Spatiotemporality
• Reification
• Colonialism
• Sovereignty

References

1. Abbasi, Rushain, “Seeing the Secular in the Islamic: A Brief Engagement with The Islamic Secular,” in “Symposium: The Islamic Secular,” ed. Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande and Joseph Leonardo Vignone, special issue, Religious Studies Review 52, 1 (forthcoming).