- Mohammad Fadel (University of Toronto) offers a critical review of Sherman A. Jackson’s The Islamic Secular in a recent issue of the Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies. Fadel characterizes Jackson’s central concept as a modality of secularity internal to the Islamic tradition that, unlike its Western counterpart, does not devalue religion but instead sustains Islamically-inflected worldly flourishing. Summarizing the book’s two parts—an intellectual history of the secular and the ḥukm concept in Islamic jurisprudence, followed by Jackson’s critique of Wael Hallaq, Abdullahi An-Na’im, and Andrew March—Fadel appreciates the work’s conceptual richness while raising several objections: the unclear capacity of the Islamic secular to mediate pluralism under modern state conditions; Jackson’s underappreciation of fiqh‘s own disciplinary function toward religion (e.g., its aversion to bid’a); the difficulty of adapting a Western-derived category of “the secular” to Islamic thought; Jackson’s failure to draw on the ʿibādāt/muʿāmalāt distinction, which could have bolstered his thesis; an oscillation in Jackson’s treatment of siyāsa‘s relationship to sharīʿa; the historically contingent, rather than essential, nature of empire-state legal pluralism; and the possibility that modern legal monism is a functional requirement for collective action and equality of citizenship. Fadel closes by engaging Jackson’s critique of Andrew March and his skepticism toward Rawlsian public reason, suggesting that Jackson’s own position may be more Rawlsian than he acknowledges.
- Sherman A. Jackson‘s (University of Southern California) replies to Mohammad Fadel’s critical review of his book The Islamic Secular here (Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies). Jackson argues that Fadel’s review is shaped by a prior set of ideological commitments—centered on the normative status of the modern secular democratic state and legal monism, mediated through Rawlsian political liberalism—which causes the book’s actual thesis to be displaced by Fadel’s preferred narrative. Proceeding page by page, Jackson reaffirms that the “Islamic Secular” rests on the shar’ī/non-shar’ī distinction, a mode of differentiation rooted in classical and post-formative Islamic juristic tradition rather than an import from Western secularism, and that it does not seek to curtail religion’s scope but simply demarcates non-shar’ī domains as equally Islamic. The article addresses, in turn, Fadel’s objections concerning the relationship between siyāsa and sharī’ah, the historical viability of empire-state legal pluralism, the distinction between “formal equality” and “equality of respect,” the jurispathic tendencies of the modern state, and Jackson’s critique of Andrew March’s treatment of liberal democracy, contending that Fadel’s readings consistently import Rawlsian presuppositions that obscure rather than clarify the book’s central argument.