The Twilight of Muslim Agency?: A Response to Professor Rushain

Abstract

This essay responds to Rushain Abbasi's review of The Islamic Secular, which proposed replacing that term with "the Islamosecular." The author argues that Abbasi's critique largely bypasses the substantive claims of The Islamic Secular—such as the sharʿī/non-sharʿī divide and the notion of a "religious secular"—engaging instead with the broader conceptual status of "Islam" and "the secular" as categories. Challenging Abbasi's claim that "Islamic" was a modern, colonially-induced adjective, the author cites pre-modern usages by al-Ashʿarī, Ibn Taymiyya, and Ibn al-Qayyim to show the term's long pre-colonial pedigree. The essay further contends that the "reification" of Islam as a standing communal entity is not a purely modern phenomenon, drawing on al-ʿĀmirī's tenth-century writings as evidence, and questions the consistency of treating "colonial modernity" as simultaneously contaminating for Muslim self-understanding yet authoritative as an analytical framework in Abbasi's own critique. The author maintains that in the Islamic Secular, "the secular" is not inherently non-religious or state-driven, and that "Islamic" derives from the encompassing divine gaze rather than from elite or state reification of Islam as a thing.

Keywords

• Islamic Secular
• Islamosecular
• Reification
• Colonial modernity
• Muslim agency
• Secularization

References

1. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam: Studies in Ancient Arab Concepts, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972.