Dera Mr. Bose:
I have nicked the opportunity to pop into the two vital issues you had mentioned in your last letter. Pls allow me to give a comprehensive response to this issue in my next letter. I don't know but being a lawyer is probably sometimes an irony. Am I right in assuming that you have had done a bit of research on these issues yourself and have got pulled into a quagmire of confusions as Jizia, Hijab and other issues are concerned?
Sincerely,
Mufassil Islam
Human Rights Advocate
To: alochona@yahoogroups.com
From: swarnayogi@yahoo.co.in
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:57:01 +0000
Subject: [ALOCHONA] Re: A Quranic Argument for Secularism: Islam and the Secular State
thank you Mr. khondkar for sharing this article. It was indeed a
very good read. In the context of this article I would like to ask
one thing about islamic philosophy. How are people who subscribe to a
diferent faith or ideology contrary to islam considered in islamic
thought. what should be done to make non-muslims feel secure in an
islamic state and how can adequate security be guarunteed in
accordance with islamic sharia law. the second contencious issue is
that of women's liberation. We know that Islam was novel in giving
women property rights and right to divorce. However, this has become
a most debated issue in today's world probably because of the severe
oppression seen in countries like Afghanistan and Iran. The
happenings in these two countries have marred the otherwise good
track record of Islam and women's rights. Thus, Islam's greatest
challenge will be to overcome the stereotypes that have come to
plague it.
--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com , mufassil islam <mufassili@...> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Mr. Khundkar:
>
> Thank you for a great link.
>
> Sincerely,
> Mufassil Islam
>
>
>
> To: alochona@...: rkhundkar@...: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:25:34 -
0700Subject: [ALOCHONA] A Quranic Argument for Secularism: Islam and
the Secular State
>
>
>
>
>
> A Quranic Argument for Secularism: A Seminar
> The Immanent Frame has a series of interesting posts about
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im's Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating
the Future of Shari'a, all well worth reading. Daniel Philpott:
>
> Islam and the Secular State
> Negotiating the Future of Shari`a
> Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
> HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ANNISL.html
>
> What should be the place of Shari`a—Islamic religious law—in
predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and
topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a
positive and sustainable role for Shari`a, based on a profound
rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state
in all societies.
> An-Na`im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari`a by the
state betrays the Qur'an's insistence on voluntary acceptance of
Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of
religious authority, Shari`a should be freed from the control of the
state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons
accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the
history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-
Na`im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more
consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly
Islamic state to enforce Shari`a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea
of an "Islamic state" is based on European ideas of state and law,
and not Shari`a or the Islamic tradition.
> Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology,
Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of
Shari`a in Muslim societies.
> Islam and the Secular State:
> Arguing with An-Na`im
> posted by Daniel Philpott
> Immanent Frame
> http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/07/14/arguing-with-an-
naim/
>
> One raises critical questions about Abdullahi An-Na`im's work only
in the sense that one probes the work of any intellectual giant. An-
Na`im's gigantic lifelong task has been to develop an Islamic basis
for human rights and constitutional government, including religious
freedom and full equality of citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims
and for men and women. He offers his latest book, Islam and the
Secular State, as the culmination of this work. Here, he defends
a "secular state" that is based on these values and where sharia is
not the basis of constitutional law. He makes clear that he is not
arguing for the exclusion of religion from politics. Muslims remain
free to argue for policies based on their convictions about sharia,
but they ought to do so on the basis of secular "civic" reasons and
within the framework of a constitutional order based on human rights.
Secular, for him, does not mean hostile to religion but rather a
differentiation between religion and state. In fact, he seeks an
Islamic justification for the secular state. It is the high quality
of his pursuit of such a justification over the course of his career
that makes him a giant.
>
> His work has long followed the lead of his mentor and inspiration,
the Sudanese intellectual Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who sought to
reinterpret the Quran so as to ground human rights and equality. Like
Taha, An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed over
the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed sanctions
aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination of
women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This history cannot
be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the Quran, which
includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant, Mecca period of
Mohammed's life, as well as those from the later Medina portion,
marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina version that
had become orthodoxy by the 10th century. But it is the verses from
the earlier period that represent the true, universal message of
Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an adaptation to particular
historical circumstances in the life of the embryonic umma.
An "Islamic Reformation," to borrow from the title of An-Na`im's
previous prominent work, would retrieve the Meccan verses for
politics today, making them the ground for human rights, equality,
and the rule of law. In the spirit of Taha, whose teachings led to
his martyrdom at the hands of the Sudanese state in 1985, An-Na`im
has courageously taken his arguments for Islam and human rights all
over the Muslim world.
>
> Not a scholar of Islam, I am unqualified to judge the exegetical
soundness of An-Na`im's Islamic Reformation. But what I find
promising about it is its reliance on what Muslims believe to be the
authoritative source of their claims, the Quran. These arguments, to
be sure, show up again in Islam and the Secular State. But here they
appear as an accompaniment to other arguments for the secular state
that An-Na`im now appears to make far more central. It is these other
arguments about which I wish to raise questions. They, too, according
to An-Na`im, are Islamic ones. But as we shall see, they are not
exactly Quranic or even based on the Islamic philosophical tradition,
nor do they make universal claims about the person, society, or
morality, but rather rest on observations about Islamic history and
about the general character of religious belief.
>
> Here are five such arguments that he makes for a secular state.
>
> 1) Religious belief by its very nature cannot be compelled. It must
be freely chosen if it is to be meaningful and consequential. The
state that compels it pursues an impossibility and stultifies and
represses vibrant religious life. "By protecting my freedom to
disbelieve, a secular state, as defined in this book, is necessary
for my freedom to believe, which is the only way belief has any
meaning and consequences," he argues.
>
> 2) The meaning and interpretation of Islam is a human process that
has always been in flux. An-Na`im is neither a relativist nor a
skeptic; he believes that the Quran is Allah's revelation. But
interpretations of its meaning have always evolved dynamically
through shifting consensus. Yesterday's heresy may well be today's
orthodoxy. To freeze any one interpretation into the laws of the
state is to make fast what ought to be left fluid. Rather,
interpretation always ought to be left to believers and communities.
It is just the freedom that the secular state provides that allows
the great historical flow of interpretation to continue.
>
> 3) Any attempt to freeze any one interpretation in a constitution
or the basic laws of a state leads to tyranny. Because interpretation
is a human process, human rulers who seek to enforce a particular
understanding of Islam will inevitably do so repressively and may
well use orthodoxy as a mere tool for rule. Although An-Na`im does
not say it, the history of his native Sudan over recent decades
offers ample grist for this argument.
>
> 4) The history of Islam, as An-Na`im shows in his brilliant and
rich Chapter Two, contains many examples of separation of religion
and state, even in the early centuries. This was not modern
constitutionalism, to be sure, but involved an independence of
religious authority and a limitation of state responsibilities to
typically temporal ones—raising armies and taxes, for instance. It
was in good part European colonial regimes that created today's
states that rigidly enforce sharia.
>
> 5) A constitutional regime is one where religious people may
advocate policies out of their religious convictions as long as they
do so through secular language and arguments. An-Na`im's explicitly
links his concept of "civil reason" to the arguments of John Rawls
and Jürgen Habermas, who have proposed similar, though not identical,
restrictions. He rejects the authoritarian secularism of modern
Turkey, which seeks to control Islam sharply in the name of
modernization, equality, and nation-building. Rather, he advocates
religious participation, but on the ground rules of secular language.
>
> What is interesting about these arguments is that they ground the
case for the secular state not in the Quran, not in claims about the
presence of the imago Dei in the person or in some other source of
the person's intrinsic dignity, not in natural law, some closely
similar type of practical reason, or universal moral precepts, but
rather in what might be called "second order" observations about the
phenomenology of belief, the character of government, the lessons of
history, and the like. To be sure, good reasons for the secular state
lie therein. But are these arguments sufficient to ground an Islamic
case for constitutionalism, human rights, and the secular state? I
doubt it.
>
> Take the argument about compulsion of religious belief. In
strictest terms, it is correct. It is incoherent to compel religious
choice. This conclusion surely helps to ground religious freedom. But
it hardly brings us to the secular state that An-Na`im advocates—one
where sharia is neither constitutionally enshrined nor explicitly
invoked in political debate. After all, there are many ways that a
state can foster an "ecology" of morality through legislation
advocated on religious grounds but without compelling religious
choice. It can regulate alcohol consumption, dress, pornography,
marriage and sexuality, the media, and, perhaps most importantly,
education, in order to foster certain ends that religions prescribe,
all while leaving people free to worship, practice, and express their
faith. The wisdom of any of these policies can be debated on its
merits, of course. But most western constitutional liberal
democracies, including the United States, have legislated these sorts
of measures through much of their histories, often on explicitly
religious grounds. Several western European democracies either have
established churches or privilege certain religions in their taxation
and education policies. In parallel, there is no inherent reason why
there could not be an Islamic constitutional liberal democracy that
explicitly and publicly promotes policies based on sharia and even
proclaims in its constitution that it is a sharia-based state, but
also guarantees the panoply of human rights found in international
law, including religious freedom. The impossibility of compelling
religious belief does not alone yield An-Na`im's secular state that
is not based on sharia.
>
> It is also hard to see how the "argument from flux" can ground An-
Na`im's secular state. A factual statement—a great plurality of
interpretations have characterized a religious tradition—alone says
nothing about whether one interpretation is truer than another. The
argument is even self-defeating. If one asserts the constant flux of
interpretation as a supporting girder for the secular state, then one
is in fact asserting this claim as being beyond flux. An-Na`im may
well reply that the secular state is not necessarily universally and
eternally valid and is itself the product of an evolution of
consensus. That does not change the fact that the kind of state he is
advocating is one that respects the flux of interpretation, but whose
basic rights and constitutional structure are not themselves subject
to change. That is, a state that keeps interpretation open is, for
him, non-negotiable—that is, not subject to interpretation.
>
> The problem is no mere logical conundrum. Imagine what is not
difficult to imagine: an advocate of even a moderate sharia state who
advocates, contra An-Na`im, laws that deny full religious freedom to
non-Muslims. Imagine, too, that he believes such laws to be are
mandated by the Quran and beyond reasonable interpretation. He
acknowledges that history contains disagreement over his
interpretation, but argues nevertheless that these dissents are
unreasonable and implausible. Against this view, it seems, An-Na`im
has no trump card to play. His argument that all is in flux cannot
itself answer the argument that yes, there is much flux, but that
some interpretations, here, illiberal ones, are truer than others and
should be incorporated into law. Only an argument that refutes this
person's view or that offers grounds for why, even if this view is
true, an environment of openness is superior to its legal
enshrinement—that is, only a substantive argument, not an assertion
of flux—can serve as a trump card.
>
> The need for substantive grounding is all the greater when it comes
to human rights, a centerpiece of An-Na`im's political proposals. The
very idea of human rights is that some sorts of human goods—the lives
of the innocent, for instance—always ought to be protected and that
some sorts of actions—like war crimes and torture — always ought to
be prohibited. This is true because of qualities that inhere in human
beings qua human beings, not as members of this of that community—
hence, human rights. But doesn't a defense of such rights require a
claim that some principles and interpretation are beyond flux? An-
Na`im advocates for a constitutional regime in part because he wants
to keep interpretation open. But what about the rights that undergird
this openness? Must not they be considered non-negotiable and
universally valid?
>
> The strongest advocates of human rights, in my view, rest their
arguments on just such a conclusion. An-Na`im's own colleague at
Emory University, Michael Perry, has argued that human rights
are "ineliminably religious," meaning that only the sort of
transcendent foundation that religions provide can support the
universal claims that a defense of human rights requires. Theologian
Max Stackhouse, philosopher John Finnis, and many others have argued
along similar lines, often with an accent on natural law. Pope
Benedict XVI made this argument in his recent speech to the UN.
>
> Again, the argument is hardly an abstract intellectual one. Over
the course of the twentieth century and well into this century, human
rights have come under attack from concepts and guns wielded by
ideologies and political programs that would deny or curtail them:
utilitarianism, cultural relativism, political realism, philosophical
skepticism, theocracy, fascism, communism, rightist arguments about
organic societal fabrics, leftist revolutionary programs, and simple
arguments from duress and necessity, arguments that this omelet
requires the breaking of that egg. It is these competitors and the
potential vulnerability of human rights before them, in addition to
the philosophical logic of defending something universal and
intrinsically human, that require that human rights be grounded in
what is immutable, not what is in flux.
>
> None of these arguments, of course, deny what An-Na`im wants to
argue for, namely that religious communities ought to be given
maximal freedom to debate and develop their doctrines. As he argues,
it can be true both that truth is fixed and that human understanding
of it is open to infinite progress and continual refinement. But the
political institutions that themselves ground the freedom for this
inquiry to occur arguably require claims about what is fixed.
>
> Neither do I wish to oversimplify arguments about scriptures or
natural law. Different religions and different philosophical
traditions have different ways of grounding claims about what is
human and about how the principles that justify human rights are to
be defended. The character of these arguments has shifted over time
as well. Certainly internal debate and evolution characterizes the
natural law tradition. Human rights itself is and has been debated
between and within traditions. An-Na`im is smart to point out
that "normative systems . . . are necessarily shaped by [people's]
own context and experiences, any universal concept cannot be simply
proclaimed or taken for granted." But I stake my claim here: Apart
from a rationale that makes strong universal claims about human
dignity and the validity of basic moral precepts, it is very
difficult if not impossible to make a robust argument for human
rights, the kind that can truly fend off competitors. Religious
traditions and the natural law that is embedded in several of them,
have, over the course of history, proven to be some of the strongest
providers of these rationales. Though An-Na`im acknowledges the need
for an "internal Islamic argument" and for "Islamic justification" in
Islam and the Secular State, he places far greater stress on the
fluidity, uncertainty, and flux in the Islamic tradition than he does
on positive arguments for human rights that are rooted in the Quran
or in the Islamic philosophical tradition.
>
> I would put forth a similar argument towards An-Na`im's claim that
enshrining a particular interpretation of sharia—always the product
of a human process—into the constitution of a state leads to tyranny
and the abuse of power. There are indeed lots of good reasons why the
claims of a particular religion ought not to be enshrined in the
constitution of a state, particularly one with a religiously plural
population. And there are plenty of examples, contemporary and
historical, of regimes that justify their tyranny on religious
grounds, sincerely or manipulatively. But what An-Na`im
underestimates, in my view, is the importance of substantive
religious and philosophical underpinnings for opposition to such
tyranny.
>
> Instructive parallels can be found in the Christian tradition.
Here, too, political rulers have deployed religious arguments for
persecuting minorities and dissenters, slavery, and other practices
that are now regarded as heinous, particularly in the high Middle
Ages and the religious wars of early modern Europe, but at other
times and places, too. But over time, arguments for human rights and
equality of citizenship have proved more enduring. The key
breakthroughs were made by thinkers who appealed back to scripture
and to natural law to challenge existing practices. One thinks of de
las Casas's and Victoria's arguments for the rights of Indians, of
Protestant proponents of religious freedom in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, of evangelical abolitionists like William
Wilberforce in the nineteenth century, of Martin Luther King and the
American civil rights movement, of the Catholic theologians and
philosophers who argued for religious freedom in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and of the Second Vatican Council documents in
which these arguments triumphed.
>
> In following Taha, An-Na`im himself takes this foundational
approach—and aspires to join parallel ranks in the Islamic tradition.
But again, in Islam and the Secular State, his stress is far more on
uncertainty, flux, and potential abuses than on positive grounds. He
is right not to allow that not all Muslims need accept the particular
arguments of Taha in order to endorse the secular state. But he would
be more persuasive, in my view, were he to argue more strongly that a
certain class of rationales, containing certain kinds of features—a
class of which Taha is an instance—is needed to oppose tyranny.
Similarly, Christians can continue to argue whether Wilberforce or de
las Casas or Martin Luther King or Vatican II had it most right, but
all the while insist that natural law or that certain kinds of
scriptural arguments are needed to ground freedom and equality.
>
> Finally, it is strange to see An-Na`im, an advocate of religious
participation in democracy, endorsing arguments along the lines of
John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas that demand secular rationales in
political debate—"civic reason," as he calls it. Whereas he does
allow Muslims to reason politically on the basis of sharia, he argues
that appealing explicitly to religious rationales in public debate
violates the norms of citizenship in a secular state. Secular
arguments for public policy positions are "impartial"
and "accessible," ones that "most citizens can accept or reject," and
so should be pursued.
>
> Here, An-Na`im aligns himself with proposals that have appeared in
western political philosophy, and only recently. Even in the West
they are not at all an intrinsic, core feature of the liberal
tradition but rather an argument of one faction of it. John Rawls,
the most prominent proponent of "public reason," as he called it,
presented his arguments for it in the 1990s. It is also an argument
that has come under heavy fire from philosophers committed to both
liberal institutions and to religious participation in these
institutions: Christopher Eberle, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles
Taylor, and Jeffrey Stout. (See The Immanent Frame's discussion
of "Religion in the Public Sphere.") These philosophers have argued
that requiring "public reason" privileges certain epistemological
positions as normative for public debate, fails to provide criteria
that do not also rule out a whole host of reasons, both religious and
secular, that are necessary for meaningful democratic debate about
political problems, forces the religious to disguise their
convictions, argue disingenuously, and without transparency, and is
generally illiberal, not liberal. To be sure, these scholars, like
other religious people, allow that there are often good reasons for
the religious to use secular language in the political realm and to
find common ground with diverse others. They decry neither dialogue
nor deliberation. But they deny that dialogue and deliberation
ethically require secular language. It is curious that An-Na`im, who
is so keen to preserve religious participation in democracy and to
avoid Kemalist secularism, makes no effort at all to consider these
arguments against civic (or public) reason that come from people with
whom he has so much in common. While he does allow that his
conception of civic reason is "tentative and evolving," and while he
does distinguish his conception from certain features of Rawls's, he
fails to provide a robust defense for a principle that proves central
to his argument.
>
> In the end, my objection to Islam and the Secular State is not that
arguments about the phenomenology of belief, flux, the tyrannical
tendencies of religious rulers, the lessons of history, or even the
value of secular arguments in some circumstances cannot help to make
the case for the secular state. They can indeed serve as auxiliary
arguments. But in my view, constitutional law, human rights,
religious freedom, and legal quality for the sexes depend
indispensably on substantive claims about the dignity and nature of
the person, the nature of human society, and the validity of
universal precepts, grounded in the kinds of sources that can sustain
these claims. To some extent, An-Na`im incorporates these kinds of
arguments, based on his previous work following Taha, into Islam and
the Secular State. But I question whether he adequately stresses the
centrality of these arguments—or at least these kinds of arguments—
for the secular state that he advocates. Funny, in this book he ends
up arguing closer to contemporary western philosophers who advocate
liberal democracy on grounds of procedure, consensus, and stability
than to those philosophers, western and non-western alike, who argue
for it on the grounds of transcendent foundations, natural law, and
universal reason. It seems to me that Muslims would be far more
receptive to the latter sort of approach.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________
> Find the best and worst places on the planet
> http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/101719807/direct/01/
>
very good read. In the context of this article I would like to ask
one thing about islamic philosophy. How are people who subscribe to a
diferent faith or ideology contrary to islam considered in islamic
thought. what should be done to make non-muslims feel secure in an
islamic state and how can adequate security be guarunteed in
accordance with islamic sharia law. the second contencious issue is
that of women's liberation. We know that Islam was novel in giving
women property rights and right to divorce. However, this has become
a most debated issue in today's world probably because of the severe
oppression seen in countries like Afghanistan and Iran. The
happenings in these two countries have marred the otherwise good
track record of Islam and women's rights. Thus, Islam's greatest
challenge will be to overcome the stereotypes that have come to
plague it.
--- In alochona@yahoogroup
>
>
> Dear Mr. Khundkar:
>
> Thank you for a great link.
>
> Sincerely,
> Mufassil Islam
>
>
>
> To: alochona@...
0700Subject: [ALOCHONA] A Quranic Argument for Secularism: Islam and
the Secular State
>
>
>
>
>
> A Quranic Argument for Secularism: A Seminar
> The Immanent Frame has a series of interesting posts about
Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im's Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating
the Future of Shari'a, all well worth reading. Daniel Philpott:
>
> Islam and the Secular State
> Negotiating the Future of Shari`a
> Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na`im
> HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
http://www.hup.
>
> What should be the place of Shari`a—Islamic religious law—in
predominantly Muslim societies of the world? In this ambitious and
topical book, a Muslim scholar and human rights activist envisions a
positive and sustainable role for Shari`a, based on a profound
rethinking of the relationship between religion and the secular state
in all societies.
> An-Na`im argues that the coercive enforcement of Shari`a by the
state betrays the Qur'an's insistence on voluntary acceptance of
Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of
religious authority, Shari`a should be freed from the control of the
state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons
accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the
history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-
Na`im maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more
consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly
Islamic state to enforce Shari`a. In fact, he suggests, the very idea
of an "Islamic state" is based on European ideas of state and law,
and not Shari`a or the Islamic tradition.
> Bold, pragmatic, and deeply rooted in Islamic history and theology,
Islam and the Secular State offers a workable future for the place of
Shari`a in Muslim societies.
> Islam and the Secular State:
> Arguing with An-Na`im
> posted by Daniel Philpott
> Immanent Frame
> http://www.ssrc.
naim/
>
> One raises critical questions about Abdullahi An-Na`im's work only
in the sense that one probes the work of any intellectual giant. An-
Na`im's gigantic lifelong task has been to develop an Islamic basis
for human rights and constitutional government, including religious
freedom and full equality of citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims
and for men and women. He offers his latest book, Islam and the
Secular State, as the culmination of this work. Here, he defends
a "secular state" that is based on these values and where sharia is
not the basis of constitutional law. He makes clear that he is not
arguing for the exclusion of religion from politics. Muslims remain
free to argue for policies based on their convictions about sharia,
but they ought to do so on the basis of secular "civic" reasons and
within the framework of a constitutional order based on human rights.
Secular, for him, does not mean hostile to religion but rather a
differentiation between religion and state. In fact, he seeks an
Islamic justification for the secular state. It is the high quality
of his pursuit of such a justification over the course of his career
that makes him a giant.
>
> His work has long followed the lead of his mentor and inspiration,
the Sudanese intellectual Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, who sought to
reinterpret the Quran so as to ground human rights and equality. Like
Taha, An-Na`im holds that traditional sharia, as it developed over
the centuries following the revelation of the Quran, indeed sanctions
aggressive jihad, the killing of apostates, the subordination of
women, and dhimmitude or worse for non-Muslims. This history cannot
be interpreted away. What can be reinterpreted is the Quran, which
includes verses both from the earlier, more tolerant, Mecca period of
Mohammed's life, as well as those from the later Medina portion,
marked by conquest and subordination. It was the Medina version that
had become orthodoxy by the 10th century. But it is the verses from
the earlier period that represent the true, universal message of
Islam; the Medina verses were in fact an adaptation to particular
historical circumstances in the life of the embryonic umma.
An "Islamic Reformation,
previous prominent work, would retrieve the Meccan verses for
politics today, making them the ground for human rights, equality,
and the rule of law. In the spirit of Taha, whose teachings led to
his martyrdom at the hands of the Sudanese state in 1985, An-Na`im
has courageously taken his arguments for Islam and human rights all
over the Muslim world.
>
> Not a scholar of Islam, I am unqualified to judge the exegetical
soundness of An-Na`im's Islamic Reformation. But what I find
promising about it is its reliance on what Muslims believe to be the
authoritative source of their claims, the Quran. These arguments, to
be sure, show up again in Islam and the Secular State. But here they
appear as an accompaniment to other arguments for the secular state
that An-Na`im now appears to make far more central. It is these other
arguments about which I wish to raise questions. They, too, according
to An-Na`im, are Islamic ones. But as we shall see, they are not
exactly Quranic or even based on the Islamic philosophical tradition,
nor do they make universal claims about the person, society, or
morality, but rather rest on observations about Islamic history and
about the general character of religious belief.
>
> Here are five such arguments that he makes for a secular state.
>
> 1) Religious belief by its very nature cannot be compelled. It must
be freely chosen if it is to be meaningful and consequential. The
state that compels it pursues an impossibility and stultifies and
represses vibrant religious life. "By protecting my freedom to
disbelieve, a secular state, as defined in this book, is necessary
for my freedom to believe, which is the only way belief has any
meaning and consequences,
>
> 2) The meaning and interpretation of Islam is a human process that
has always been in flux. An-Na`im is neither a relativist nor a
skeptic; he believes that the Quran is Allah's revelation. But
interpretations of its meaning have always evolved dynamically
through shifting consensus. Yesterday's heresy may well be today's
orthodoxy. To freeze any one interpretation into the laws of the
state is to make fast what ought to be left fluid. Rather,
interpretation always ought to be left to believers and communities.
It is just the freedom that the secular state provides that allows
the great historical flow of interpretation to continue.
>
> 3) Any attempt to freeze any one interpretation in a constitution
or the basic laws of a state leads to tyranny. Because interpretation
is a human process, human rulers who seek to enforce a particular
understanding of Islam will inevitably do so repressively and may
well use orthodoxy as a mere tool for rule. Although An-Na`im does
not say it, the history of his native Sudan over recent decades
offers ample grist for this argument.
>
> 4) The history of Islam, as An-Na`im shows in his brilliant and
rich Chapter Two, contains many examples of separation of religion
and state, even in the early centuries. This was not modern
constitutionalism, to be sure, but involved an independence of
religious authority and a limitation of state responsibilities to
typically temporal ones—raising armies and taxes, for instance. It
was in good part European colonial regimes that created today's
states that rigidly enforce sharia.
>
> 5) A constitutional regime is one where religious people may
advocate policies out of their religious convictions as long as they
do so through secular language and arguments. An-Na`im's explicitly
links his concept of "civil reason" to the arguments of John Rawls
and Jürgen Habermas, who have proposed similar, though not identical,
restrictions. He rejects the authoritarian secularism of modern
Turkey, which seeks to control Islam sharply in the name of
modernization, equality, and nation-building. Rather, he advocates
religious participation, but on the ground rules of secular language.
>
> What is interesting about these arguments is that they ground the
case for the secular state not in the Quran, not in claims about the
presence of the imago Dei in the person or in some other source of
the person's intrinsic dignity, not in natural law, some closely
similar type of practical reason, or universal moral precepts, but
rather in what might be called "second order" observations about the
phenomenology of belief, the character of government, the lessons of
history, and the like. To be sure, good reasons for the secular state
lie therein. But are these arguments sufficient to ground an Islamic
case for constitutionalism, human rights, and the secular state? I
doubt it.
>
> Take the argument about compulsion of religious belief. In
strictest terms, it is correct. It is incoherent to compel religious
choice. This conclusion surely helps to ground religious freedom. But
it hardly brings us to the secular state that An-Na`im advocates—one
where sharia is neither constitutionally enshrined nor explicitly
invoked in political debate. After all, there are many ways that a
state can foster an "ecology" of morality through legislation
advocated on religious grounds but without compelling religious
choice. It can regulate alcohol consumption, dress, pornography,
marriage and sexuality, the media, and, perhaps most importantly,
education, in order to foster certain ends that religions prescribe,
all while leaving people free to worship, practice, and express their
faith. The wisdom of any of these policies can be debated on its
merits, of course. But most western constitutional liberal
democracies, including the United States, have legislated these sorts
of measures through much of their histories, often on explicitly
religious grounds. Several western European democracies either have
established churches or privilege certain religions in their taxation
and education policies. In parallel, there is no inherent reason why
there could not be an Islamic constitutional liberal democracy that
explicitly and publicly promotes policies based on sharia and even
proclaims in its constitution that it is a sharia-based state, but
also guarantees the panoply of human rights found in international
law, including religious freedom. The impossibility of compelling
religious belief does not alone yield An-Na`im's secular state that
is not based on sharia.
>
> It is also hard to see how the "argument from flux" can ground An-
Na`im's secular state. A factual statement—a great plurality of
interpretations have characterized a religious tradition—alone says
nothing about whether one interpretation is truer than another. The
argument is even self-defeating. If one asserts the constant flux of
interpretation as a supporting girder for the secular state, then one
is in fact asserting this claim as being beyond flux. An-Na`im may
well reply that the secular state is not necessarily universally and
eternally valid and is itself the product of an evolution of
consensus. That does not change the fact that the kind of state he is
advocating is one that respects the flux of interpretation, but whose
basic rights and constitutional structure are not themselves subject
to change. That is, a state that keeps interpretation open is, for
him, non-negotiable—
>
> The problem is no mere logical conundrum. Imagine what is not
difficult to imagine: an advocate of even a moderate sharia state who
advocates, contra An-Na`im, laws that deny full religious freedom to
non-Muslims. Imagine, too, that he believes such laws to be are
mandated by the Quran and beyond reasonable interpretation. He
acknowledges that history contains disagreement over his
interpretation, but argues nevertheless that these dissents are
unreasonable and implausible. Against this view, it seems, An-Na`im
has no trump card to play. His argument that all is in flux cannot
itself answer the argument that yes, there is much flux, but that
some interpretations, here, illiberal ones, are truer than others and
should be incorporated into law. Only an argument that refutes this
person's view or that offers grounds for why, even if this view is
true, an environment of openness is superior to its legal
enshrinement—
of flux—can serve as a trump card.
>
> The need for substantive grounding is all the greater when it comes
to human rights, a centerpiece of An-Na`im's political proposals. The
very idea of human rights is that some sorts of human goods—the lives
of the innocent, for instance—always ought to be protected and that
some sorts of actions—like war crimes and torture — always ought to
be prohibited. This is true because of qualities that inhere in human
beings qua human beings, not as members of this of that community—
hence, human rights. But doesn't a defense of such rights require a
claim that some principles and interpretation are beyond flux? An-
Na`im advocates for a constitutional regime in part because he wants
to keep interpretation open. But what about the rights that undergird
this openness? Must not they be considered non-negotiable and
universally valid?
>
> The strongest advocates of human rights, in my view, rest their
arguments on just such a conclusion. An-Na`im's own colleague at
Emory University, Michael Perry, has argued that human rights
are "ineliminably religious," meaning that only the sort of
transcendent foundation that religions provide can support the
universal claims that a defense of human rights requires. Theologian
Max Stackhouse, philosopher John Finnis, and many others have argued
along similar lines, often with an accent on natural law. Pope
Benedict XVI made this argument in his recent speech to the UN.
>
> Again, the argument is hardly an abstract intellectual one. Over
the course of the twentieth century and well into this century, human
rights have come under attack from concepts and guns wielded by
ideologies and political programs that would deny or curtail them:
utilitarianism, cultural relativism, political realism, philosophical
skepticism, theocracy, fascism, communism, rightist arguments about
organic societal fabrics, leftist revolutionary programs, and simple
arguments from duress and necessity, arguments that this omelet
requires the breaking of that egg. It is these competitors and the
potential vulnerability of human rights before them, in addition to
the philosophical logic of defending something universal and
intrinsically human, that require that human rights be grounded in
what is immutable, not what is in flux.
>
> None of these arguments, of course, deny what An-Na`im wants to
argue for, namely that religious communities ought to be given
maximal freedom to debate and develop their doctrines. As he argues,
it can be true both that truth is fixed and that human understanding
of it is open to infinite progress and continual refinement. But the
political institutions that themselves ground the freedom for this
inquiry to occur arguably require claims about what is fixed.
>
> Neither do I wish to oversimplify arguments about scriptures or
natural law. Different religions and different philosophical
traditions have different ways of grounding claims about what is
human and about how the principles that justify human rights are to
be defended. The character of these arguments has shifted over time
as well. Certainly internal debate and evolution characterizes the
natural law tradition. Human rights itself is and has been debated
between and within traditions. An-Na`im is smart to point out
that "normative systems . . . are necessarily shaped by [people's]
own context and experiences, any universal concept cannot be simply
proclaimed or taken for granted." But I stake my claim here: Apart
from a rationale that makes strong universal claims about human
dignity and the validity of basic moral precepts, it is very
difficult if not impossible to make a robust argument for human
rights, the kind that can truly fend off competitors. Religious
traditions and the natural law that is embedded in several of them,
have, over the course of history, proven to be some of the strongest
providers of these rationales. Though An-Na`im acknowledges the need
for an "internal Islamic argument" and for "Islamic justification" in
Islam and the Secular State, he places far greater stress on the
fluidity, uncertainty, and flux in the Islamic tradition than he does
on positive arguments for human rights that are rooted in the Quran
or in the Islamic philosophical tradition.
>
> I would put forth a similar argument towards An-Na`im's claim that
enshrining a particular interpretation of sharia—always the product
of a human process—into the constitution of a state leads to tyranny
and the abuse of power. There are indeed lots of good reasons why the
claims of a particular religion ought not to be enshrined in the
constitution of a state, particularly one with a religiously plural
population. And there are plenty of examples, contemporary and
historical, of regimes that justify their tyranny on religious
grounds, sincerely or manipulatively. But what An-Na`im
underestimates, in my view, is the importance of substantive
religious and philosophical underpinnings for opposition to such
tyranny.
>
> Instructive parallels can be found in the Christian tradition.
Here, too, political rulers have deployed religious arguments for
persecuting minorities and dissenters, slavery, and other practices
that are now regarded as heinous, particularly in the high Middle
Ages and the religious wars of early modern Europe, but at other
times and places, too. But over time, arguments for human rights and
equality of citizenship have proved more enduring. The key
breakthroughs were made by thinkers who appealed back to scripture
and to natural law to challenge existing practices. One thinks of de
las Casas's and Victoria's arguments for the rights of Indians, of
Protestant proponents of religious freedom in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, of evangelical abolitionists like William
Wilberforce in the nineteenth century, of Martin Luther King and the
American civil rights movement, of the Catholic theologians and
philosophers who argued for religious freedom in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and of the Second Vatican Council documents in
which these arguments triumphed.
>
> In following Taha, An-Na`im himself takes this foundational
approach—and aspires to join parallel ranks in the Islamic tradition.
But again, in Islam and the Secular State, his stress is far more on
uncertainty, flux, and potential abuses than on positive grounds. He
is right not to allow that not all Muslims need accept the particular
arguments of Taha in order to endorse the secular state. But he would
be more persuasive, in my view, were he to argue more strongly that a
certain class of rationales, containing certain kinds of features—a
class of which Taha is an instance—is needed to oppose tyranny.
Similarly, Christians can continue to argue whether Wilberforce or de
las Casas or Martin Luther King or Vatican II had it most right, but
all the while insist that natural law or that certain kinds of
scriptural arguments are needed to ground freedom and equality.
>
> Finally, it is strange to see An-Na`im, an advocate of religious
participation in democracy, endorsing arguments along the lines of
John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas that demand secular rationales in
political debate—"civic reason," as he calls it. Whereas he does
allow Muslims to reason politically on the basis of sharia, he argues
that appealing explicitly to religious rationales in public debate
violates the norms of citizenship in a secular state. Secular
arguments for public policy positions are "impartial"
and "accessible,
so should be pursued.
>
> Here, An-Na`im aligns himself with proposals that have appeared in
western political philosophy, and only recently. Even in the West
they are not at all an intrinsic, core feature of the liberal
tradition but rather an argument of one faction of it. John Rawls,
the most prominent proponent of "public reason," as he called it,
presented his arguments for it in the 1990s. It is also an argument
that has come under heavy fire from philosophers committed to both
liberal institutions and to religious participation in these
institutions: Christopher Eberle, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Charles
Taylor, and Jeffrey Stout. (See The Immanent Frame's discussion
of "Religion in the Public Sphere.") These philosophers have argued
that requiring "public reason" privileges certain epistemological
positions as normative for public debate, fails to provide criteria
that do not also rule out a whole host of reasons, both religious and
secular, that are necessary for meaningful democratic debate about
political problems, forces the religious to disguise their
convictions, argue disingenuously, and without transparency, and is
generally illiberal, not liberal. To be sure, these scholars, like
other religious people, allow that there are often good reasons for
the religious to use secular language in the political realm and to
find common ground with diverse others. They decry neither dialogue
nor deliberation. But they deny that dialogue and deliberation
ethically require secular language. It is curious that An-Na`im, who
is so keen to preserve religious participation in democracy and to
avoid Kemalist secularism, makes no effort at all to consider these
arguments against civic (or public) reason that come from people with
whom he has so much in common. While he does allow that his
conception of civic reason is "tentative and evolving," and while he
does distinguish his conception from certain features of Rawls's, he
fails to provide a robust defense for a principle that proves central
to his argument.
>
> In the end, my objection to Islam and the Secular State is not that
arguments about the phenomenology of belief, flux, the tyrannical
tendencies of religious rulers, the lessons of history, or even the
value of secular arguments in some circumstances cannot help to make
the case for the secular state. They can indeed serve as auxiliary
arguments. But in my view, constitutional law, human rights,
religious freedom, and legal quality for the sexes depend
indispensably on substantive claims about the dignity and nature of
the person, the nature of human society, and the validity of
universal precepts, grounded in the kinds of sources that can sustain
these claims. To some extent, An-Na`im incorporates these kinds of
arguments, based on his previous work following Taha, into Islam and
the Secular State. But I question whether he adequately stresses the
centrality of these arguments—or at least these kinds of arguments—
for the secular state that he advocates. Funny, in this book he ends
up arguing closer to contemporary western philosophers who advocate
liberal democracy on grounds of procedure, consensus, and stability
than to those philosophers, western and non-western alike, who argue
for it on the grounds of transcendent foundations, natural law, and
universal reason. It seems to me that Muslims would be far more
receptive to the latter sort of approach.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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