- In “The Moroccan Mellāḥ: Governing Jewish Spaces and the Islamic Secular” (Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies), Rachel M. Scott (Virginia Tech University) “examines the Moroccan institution of the mellāḥ—the walled Jewish quarters established in Fez, Marrakesh, Meknes, and Tetouan from 1438 onward—as a case study for testing Sherman Jackson’s distinction between the sharʿī and non-sharʿī (“Islamic Secular”) realms in Islamic governance. Tracing the mellāḥ’s historical development through themes of protection, surveillance and control, communal autonomy, and spatial separation, the article argues that while the mellāḥ’s establishment reflected pragmatic, non-sharʿī governmental decisions rather than explicit sharʿīa mandates, its underlying logic remained inseparable from sharʿī concepts of dhimma, jizya, and the power differential embedded in the protection-for-submission arrangement. The article contends that this entanglement complicates Jackson’s claim that a clear boundary can be drawn between sharʿī and non-sharʿī domains, since institutions like the mellāḥ emerge from the interaction of both.”
- Sherman A. Jackson (University of Southern California) responds in “The Islamic Secular: A ‘Realm’ of Assessments, Not Topics: A Reply to Professor Rachel Scott.”
- In “Paradigm Shift or Dead End? A Critical Appraisal of Sherman Jackson’s Islamic Secular” (Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies), Florian Zemmin (Freie Universität Berlin) “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.'”
- Sherman A. Jackson (University of Southern California) responds in “Whose Secular, Whose Metrics: A Reply to Professor Florian Zemmin.”
- In “The Islamosecular: A Spatiotemporal Exploration” (Turkish Journal of Islamic Studies), Rushain Abbasi (Stanford University) “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.”
- Sherman A. Jackson (University of Southern California) responds in “The Twilight of Muslim Agency?: A Response to Professor Rushain Abbasi.”